Reviewed by Susan Price
Warning: This blog is much longer than usual, but it reviews a fascinating book.
Why does the human race - supposedly intelligent - keep fighting wars,
despite all that has been said against the habit?
Why do empires, such as the Roman and the British, periodically rise and then fall or fade away?
Why do leaders such as Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler
periodically arise to lead their people into war - and why do the people
willingly, even eagerly, follow them?
Why has Europe been, for centuries, a 'cockpit of war' and revolution?
Can the EU prevent such 'Wars of Civilisation' in the future?
Why is the continent of Africa riven with war?
Why are so many vicious, murderous political gangs - I could
say 'IRA' or 'Baader Meinhof' or 'Daesh' - drawn from the nicely
brought up and spoken boys and girls of the middle-classes, who, on the
face of it, have comfortable lives and little need to fight for
'freedom'?
And why, in every part of the world and at
all times, have the poor always had many more children than the rich,
despite being able to afford them less? Why does contraception and
education make little difference to this trend?
All these many questions, and more, can be answered very simply. Niche-Space and Breeding Strategy.
This theory is argued by
Paul Colinvaux in his
'The Fates of Nations.' He was an ecologist, and
The Fates of Nations
answers all these questions by applying the rules of ecology, not to
salmon or brown bears or wildebeeste, but to that other animal, the
Naked Ape.
Colinvaux defines 'niche-space' as
'a specific set of capabilities for extracting resources, for surviving
hazards and for competing; coupled with a corresponding set of needs.'
It describes not only the amount of physical space an animal requires to
live naturally and healthily, but also the animals' requirements in
terms of climate, type and amount of food, type and size of home or lair
and so on.
Some niche-spaces are
larger than others. An acre of land can support many hundreds of deer,
if there is enough water and vegetation. It gives them all they need.
However, that same lush, well-watered acre would not support a single
tiger. As a dedicated carnivore, a tiger needs access to many, many deer
to feed itself. Deer run away from tigers and many are too fast to be
caught. Also, all deer become skittish when there's a predator about. In
Yellowstone, after the reintroduction of wolves, deer stopped standing
about, grazing like cows. Even when the wolf-pack was in an different,
distant part of the park, the deer continued to move on frequently,
snatching a few mouthfuls here and there, but never staying in one place
for very long.
So a tiger needs to be able to shift
ground frequently, to find more unsuspecting prey. Every single tiger
needs a large territory, which it will defend from others.
As Colinvaux put in in the memorable title of another of his books, this is
Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.
Long before humans became a plague on the earth, before tigers' habitat
was remotely threatened, long before they could be efficiently
slaughtered for the supposed medicinal value of their bones, even then,
tigers were still rare compared to deer or mice or strawberry plants.
They were rare because they had a comparatively wide niche-space. Making
a living as a tiger demands a lot of resources in terms of space and
prey animals.
Colinvaux calculates that when humans were
living their natural, Ice-Age life, as hunter-gatherers, they were
about as common as bears. That is, more common than tigers, because
bears and humans are omnivorous and will stoop to eating fruit,
vegetables and grubs, but a lot rarer than deer or mice.
That's Niche-Space. Then there's Breeding Strategy.
Every species that has ever lived has always had the same breeding
strategy: to have as many off-spring as it's possible to raise to
adulthood.
For most animals, this is more or less fixed,
so much so that naturalists can write of the 'typical' litter or clutch
size for a particular species. This is because an animal's niche-space
is usually fixed. As Colinvaux puts it, a squirrel, or any other kind of
animal, is 'highly tuned to a very specialized profession.' A squirrel
cannot decide that, hey, it would rather be a tiger - any more than a
tiger can decide that it would like to try out life as a dolphin.
Evolution has therefore roughly fixed the optimum number of off-spring
an animal can have. A very good year may result in birds producing a
second clutch of eggs or other animals having a second litter, but
that's an exception. In a bad year, when the land can't support the
numbers, the animals starve and the population falls. The population of
predators is linked to that of their prey. A good year for mice and deer
means a good year for wolves and foxes - and vice versa.
Evolution
has also fixed the approach most species take to child-rearing:
low-investment or high-investment. Low investment species, such as
salmon, spawn and fertilise hundreds of eggs at a time. Almost all of
them will be eaten, either as eggs or fry. One or two might survive and
that's all that matters. The salmon might have made an almighty effort
to reach its spawning place but once the eggs are laid, it troubles
itself no further about its off-spring.
High-investment
species, such as bears, cats and naked apes have one or two off-spring
at a time, and they invest a lot of time and effort in feeding and
training them. It's a high-risk strategy because, in a bad year, the
off-spring might die - or be killed to ensure the survival of older
off-spring or the parents. Some animals are known to kill and eat their
young if faced with a threat to their own survival. Colinvaux argues
that early humans almost certainly regulated their population not only
by leaving granny on the ice-flow, but by leaving junior with her.
Historically, we know that people frequently abandoned children they did
not think they could afford to raise.
Changing Niche Space
Animals can't change their niche-space - not
by themselves, anyway. Some have become domesticated, some, such as urban foxes, have adapted
to living alongside humans, but that came about as a result of human
actions
The Naked Ape, however, learned to change its niche-space, and has done so repeatedly.
 |
| The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris |
First, they were nomadic hunter-gatherers,
as common as bears. But they learned to hunt and gather in almost every
part of the world - in the Europe of the Ice Ages, in the rain forest
and deserts of Australia, in Africa, on Siberian tundra, in the far
North of Alaska. In doing so, they increased the niche-space of their
species. Instead of being limited to a local population in the tropics,
or the temperate regions, naked apes spread to every part of the world
except the extreme poles.
But this spreading population was still limited by the resources available to hunter-gatherers. They
followed the high-investment breeding strategy of having one or two
children at a time, and spending much time rearing them. As with all
other animal species, their population increased during good times, when
more children were born and survived - but might crash during bad times
when fewer mothers were in condition to give birth and more children
died. So the world-wide population increased somewhat, but remained relatively stable.
But
then, astonishingly, these animals learned to stop hunting and to herd
the animals they needed - whether reindeer, or goats or cattle. They
maintained the population of their prey-animals by protecting them from
other predators and helping them to find food. This meant that the naked
apes themselves could confidently expect to raise more children to
adulthood because there was a more certain food supply. Their
population increased - and increased again, because it was much less affected
by bad years.
Moving from hunter-gatherers to herders
meant an increase in niche-space: more resources were available. But, as
ever, the increase in resources was soon absorbed by the increased
population brought about by the unchanged breeding strategy.
Not to worry, though, because herding led
on to settled farming, another huge increase in niche-space. Now, not
only were the prey animals kept in one place, protected and provided
with food, but the neccessary plant foods were too. Food could be
produced more efficiently, and also stored more efficiently when it
didn't have to be carried with a nomadic group, or hidden in caches.
These were huge changes in life-style for the naked ape - but
the breeding strategy remained the same. A great many more naked apes
were born to take advantage of the niche-space - but more niche-space
was also being created by the emergence of city-states and a whole new
way of life.
For one,
if you could produce more wealth than your neighbour, you could persuade
your neighbour to do most of your work for you, in return for a share
of your produce. So different classes came into existence.
Why make your own clothes, shoes and pots when it was more efficient to
pay someone else to do it, and pay them in money or kind? Some people
found that they were good enough at singing or story-telling to make a
living at it.
New technologies - the smelting of metals,
stone-masonry, ship-building - produced other niche-spaces, absorbing
the growing population and allowing them to make a living. A governing
class. A priest class. A warrior class. They were all sub-niche-spaces,
all provided livings.
Niche Space Runs Out
But eventually, as the population grows,
there comes pressure on resources. So long as there's enough space in
the world to enable more land to be cleared or mined, this isn't a
problem. But if there's another growing city-state over there - and another one
over there - then the solution is more difficult.
One
way of avoiding the problem of shrinking niche-space is to impose a very
strict caste or class system. Most societies of Naked Ape have tried
this, in some form, at many different times over the centuries. For
instance, only males are allowed to do certain jobs, usually high-status
jobs, while females have to find a male to support them. Or
restrictions may be applied to certain ethnic or religious groups, or
simply to 'a lower class' who are deemed 'untouchables' or 'serfs.' This tactic buys time,
for a while, but the breeding strategy ensures that the population
continues to grow - and, ironically, it's usually among the higher
classes where the squeeze of narrowing niche-space is felt first and
most painfully, by those children born to affluence who suddenly realise
there is no space left for them in the wider, freer niche-space their
parents enjoyed.
Another way out of the problem is to
trade. You go to those states who are crowding your own, and you offer
to exchange surplus goods with them. You can even build ships and cross
the seas to trade with foreigners. This, for a while, solves the
problem. It creates a source of fresh produce and creates prosperous
jobs for many.
But every increase in niche-space means an
increase in population - because the breeding strategy rolls on
unaltered. Every single person in these growing cities produces as many
off-spring as they think they can raise. Up and up goes the population,
particuarly among the poorest.
The Poor and Their Children
Why do the poor have
more children, even when their more prosperous countrymen crush them
into a smaller and smaller niche-space?
Because if you live, say, on a sheet of cloth
spread on a pavement, and your biggest aspiration for your children is
that they eat once a day, then children are cheap. They aren't going to
cost you much - indeed, it will possibly cost you more, in all sorts of ways, to prevent their
birth. Children will also start earning for you in infancy, so
where is the incentive to limit their number?
If, however,
you are rather better off - if your plans for your children include a nursery, then
room of their own in a comfortable house, a crib, a nanny, a bed, good clothes and shoes, three or more meals a
day, a good education, toys, books, music-lessons, dance-classes,
training in a trade, a car (or horse) on their 18th, a good marriage
(with a dowry or big wedding) a house of their own, prosperity and
children of their own - well, then each child is going to cost you
thousands, even tens of thousands. One way or another, you make sure you have fewer. (In ancient Greece and Rome, the well-off exposed children they didn't want to raise.) It's the
well-off who sit down with pencil and paper (or Excel) and work out if
they can afford a child. The poor, in this as in almost every other
life-situation, just get on with it.
Again, it's about niche-space. The niche inhabited by the poor is
narrow. It affords them few choices and, as a result, they have few aspirations. But
this narrow niche is cheap. It requires few resources. The people
crammed into it are satisfied with little. My aunt, who grew up in a
slum, has often told me that, until she won a scholarship to
grammar-school and discovered that her classmates had electricity and fridges at home, she'd no idea her family were poor, since everyone else she'd known had been equally poor.
The niche-space
occupied by the better-off is wider, and increases with wealth. Indeed,
Colinvaux remarks that the richer a naked ape is, the more their life
includes aspects of the old hunter-gatherer life: - acres of beautiful
countryside as their 'territory', travel, hunting as a pastime, dogs and horses.
But although this niche is broad, offering many choices and freedoms,
it is very expensive in terms of resources. It can, therefore, be
occupied by far fewer than the narrow niches of the poor. The poor are
like deer - hundreds to the acre. The rich become more tigerish as they
grow richer. They defend their territory too.
Revolutions and the Middle-Class
Herein also lies the answer to the questions: Why are revolutions always led, not by the oppressed, but by the
middle-classes? and Why are so many vicious, murderous political gangs
drawn from the nicely brought up and
spoken boys and girls of those middle-classes?
The aspiring and prosperous - from the middle
to the upper classes - have always had fewer children than the poor and
higher aspirations for the few they have. But the more freedom and
choice a niche offers, the more resources it uses and therefore, the fewer people it can support. One child will inherit, and you can give younger sons to the military and the church to find them livings. You can marry some daughters off - but still, if you want your children to remain in your social niche, there's a limit to how many you can find space for. So it's these affluent niches - wide in their choices and freedoms, but narrow in terms of numbers they can contain - which feel the pinch first and
most keenly when the pressure on
resources mounts.
The very wealthy are insulated by their extreme wealth -
and they also have the most resources to use, tigerishly, in defence of
what they have. The Military, the Church, the Judiciary, Communications,
the Means of Production - almost all of it is in their control.
Threaten their position and they will close rank - hence the strong
swing to the Right we are experiencing in politics now.
The poorest are used to hardship and never expected much anyway. They're
grateful to 'have a roof over their head and a loaf on the table.'
But those caught in the middle, those who grew up expecting that
their life would include a comfortable house with a big garden, an
interesting, rewarding job, the wherewithal to travel and follow
interests, whether it be rock-climbing or pottery - what happens when
they find that they are going to have to settle for much less than their
parents had? When they find that they can't get a job, can't afford a house, or a car
or a holiday - or a child?
It understandably comes as a
humiliating, painful shock. And why shouldn't it? After all, nothing
about the situation is their fault. They didn't choose the time they
were born in, or the way they were raised. Most of them have never even heard of
niche-space and breeding strategy and, even if they had, couldn't do
anything about it.
When Trade Is Not Enough
So we've seen that you can
increase niche-space by trade and by technological advance - because a
new technology, whether it's ship-building or smelting metal, or
programming computers, creates jobs.
But, in some
periods there comes a point when no new technology is coming to rescue
the naked apes from their breeding strategy and trade is no longer
supplying enough resources or enough
profit to support the growing population. What then?
Then it inevitably occurs to the naked ape that if, instead of trading with a particular country, if they just
took the country instead, that would be more profitable.
At any given time, there are always several ambitious apes seeking
to be top ape, as apes will. If one of these ambitious apes happens to coincide with a squeeze
on niche-space - well, then you have an Alexander, an Augustus, a Clive
of India, a Napolean, a Hitler, all of them whole-heartedly supported
by their tightly-squeezed countrymen, longing for more niche-space -
which answers all those questions about war. Hitler even spoke about
'living-room.'
Being a pacifist feels much more
comfortable when your niche-space isn't too tight. (And is much more
courageous when it
is tight and all around you are in jingo-istic, empire-building mood.)
These 'wars of civilisation,' Colinvaux points out, are
always
a stronger, more technologically advanced state grabbing a weaker (if
not geographically smaller), less advanced, less organised country.
Whatever high-flown reason is given, whatever excuse is put forward, it
is always a straight-forward bullying snatch of land and resources by
the stronger state. There has never been an example of, say, a tribe of
Bushmen invading and conquering France or Britain. Barbarians took down
Rome, yes - but they were, in fact, highly organised and well-equipped
barbarians, quite wealthy in their own opinion - just as Genghis Khan's
'barbarians' were at a later period. In each case the 'barbarians' faced
large states exhausted by their efforts to find new niche-space; states
that had run out of options.
The option of war and colonisation
creates niche-space not only by gaining access to resources such as food
and materials at less cost - it also creates interesting and generally
well-rewarded jobs for the young of the better-off. They become viceroys
and governors of the colonies, merchant-traders, spice-growers,
tea-planters, even missionaries. The armies needed to enforce colonisation also provide
niche-space for 'the sweepings of the gutter.'
But
breeding strategy continues to do its stuff and the new niche-space
gained at the cost of war is filled up by the increasing population.
Sometimes, it takes a while. The colonisation of Australia and
the Americas (and the genocide of the native civilisation,) siphoned
off surplus population and relieved pressure for several centuries.
'Go West, young man.' There will never, Colinvaux remarks, be such a pressure-release valve again.
Why
was Europe the 'cockpit of war?'
Because there were too many nations crammed into one land
mass, their populations increasing and aspiring. Every time the
pressure of falling resources was felt, another revolution or war was
triggered as the prosperous classes felt the pinch and grew angry.
To win big, final victories and establish an Empire lasting
hundreds of years, as the Romans did, you have to go against less
well-armed and organised opponents with a tactic they cannot withstand.
Alexander won his victories with the phalanx. The Romans had the legion
and the tortoise.
But in Europe was developed a piece of
technology that not only created a lot of niche-space, but meant that no
war-like state was going to be able to win crushing, final victories
in Europe ever again:- the printing-press. Once the printing-press was invented,
any new tactic was, within a few years, available to
everyone else. Hence the endless round of revolutions and wars in
Europe, which had no direction, not north, west, south or east, to send
its restless and disappointed young and no way of winning new
niche-space by winning a lasting victory over another European state.
This is also why Africa is riven with so many wars now - and why Europe probably will be again.
Oh,
but the European Common Market was created, in part, to prevent war in
Europe ever happening again. I had little faith in this argument before I
read
The Fates of Nations. I have none now. All over Europe are
nations seething with people whose niche-space has just crashed in on
them, crushing them into a place where they don't want to be. Revolution
and war will follow.
In the last couple of months, the
IRA have started attacks again. Daesh commit atrocities while journalists
confess themselves puzzled that the boys and girls who run away to join
Daesh are not only 'middle-class' but appear to know little about Islam.
Nor, often, it seems, do the people who recruit them.
That's because it's not, at bottom, about religion or politics. It never
was. It is, and always was, about niche-space made tight by breeding strategy.
Left-wingers in the UK at the moment are puzzled and despairing at the
political swing to the right - by the fact that the 'Nasty Party' keeps
being re-elected, despite their proving, again and again, just how nasty
they are. Good-hearted people are dismayed by the increasing
xenophobia, the increasing tendency to stigmatise and isolate the poor.
They are distressed by the push to turn schools into academies which can
refuse admission to pupils who, to be blunt, they consider not good
enough and by the push to privatise the NHS, which would take us back to
my great-grandparents' age, when one of their children died because
sending for a doctor would have cost twelve and a half pence. Which they
didn't have to spare.
Colinvaux isn't puzzled. The
shift to the right, the hardening of class-barriers, is shrinking
niche-space in action. As niche-space shrinks those with the widest
niche-space move, like tigers, to protect their territory. They harden
their attitude, become more callous, more
prejudiced and xenophobic, less open to argument or new ideas. They vote to protect their niche-space.
As the niche-space of others contracts, that of the very
wealthy becomes ever wider and more comfortable. We'll soon be back to
those good old Victorian Values so beloved of the Tories - when servants
were plentiful and cheap, when the lower-classes knew their place and Labour was the lowest cost of production.
Humans
have changed their niche-space again and again but, like all other
animals, they have never changed their breeding strategy. They
stubbornly continue - as they have throughout history - to have as many
children as they think they can raise to adulthood within the
niche-space they occupy at the time. It's ruinous, to human society and
the planet.
We now not only have as many children as we
think we can raise, massively increasing demand on resources year on
year on year - but we are now occupied in trying to escape death for
longer and longer, in trying to ensure that infertile couples can have
children too, and in preserving the lives of those who would have
naturally died young. The science that enables us to do these things is a niche-space: it provides an interesting living for many. Its researches enable us to increase the population even faster, and to produce more food to feed that growing population. Which ensures that the population will grow even faster still - because breeding-strategy always ensures that niche-space is filled.
I first read Colinvaux's
The Fates of
Nations over 20 years ago. It lit up my head then, and it does now. I
look around, I watch the news, and see the theories of niche-space and
breeding-strategy at work everywhere. Indeed, my family are becoming
fed-up with hearing me mutter, "Niche-space," at regular intervals.
The book is fascinating. Not cheerful - in fact, rather depressing - but clarifying. Clarity is often depressing.
It's
particuarly uncheering for a left-winger like me; but it's hard to deny
the truth behind it. The theory doesn't justify war, cruelty,
infanticide and so forth. It simply makes clear the pattern that
is expressed through them.
In short, a great book if you want to think. But not if you want to sleep easy.
Find Colinvaux's books here.
Postscript. I wrote and scheduled this post before Britain went to the polling-booths to vote on remaining in or leaving the EU. As I write, I don't know what the result will be. But an MP has already been murdered by a man shouting, 'Britons First!' (Niche-space.)
In The Fates of
Nations, Colinvaux tries to predict which nation will start the next big war. It won't be any of the usual suspects, he says. It will be a small, crowded island state which 'lives on other nations' territory.' In other words, imports most of its goods. It will happen because the people of this small island state, especially the 'middling-sort' feel thwarted and angry as their niche-space shrinks and as they grow more bitter and disappointed by the failure of their politicians' solutions. It will be begun, he predicts, either by Japan or Great Britain.
Cheers!
