Once there was a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. On a lark, Chaplin himself entered. He came in third.
I haven’t been able to locate a photo of the winner, but he probably was littler than the Little Tramp, with a more pronounced black mustache, a smaller hat, his pants baggier, his shoes larger. I daresay he also walked even more like a duck. We often create images—especially of other people—that are exaggerated stereotypes of the real thing. And in no respect is that more true than when it comes to the enemy.
It is especially agonizing when we have been attacked but don’t know the perpetrator. Or why. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, in addition to the horror, the anger, and the sense of renewed vulnerability, many Americans felt frustrated and helpless precisely because the identity of the attackers wasn’t known. For all the rage at Osama bin Laden, he was a villain worthy of central casting, with long beard and exotic garb, which was paradoxically comforting, if only because the devil you know can—at least in theory—be destroyed or defended against. We don’t crave only safety; we also crave to know our foes.
Basic evolutionary biology tells us that any living thing—person, penguin, persimmon—is liable to have enemies insofar as pretty much every creature is faced with others that are threats to its ultimate biological success. Chimpanzees make a kind of war against neighboring troops; male birds often sing aggressive territorial songs; even plants have evolved spines, toxins, and often a tendency to outshade their opponents.
But, as in so many respects, Homo sapiens is special, not in having enemies, or even in responding to them in a variety of ways (not all of them ultimately helpful), but in conceptualizing our inimical relationships and therefore being especially prone to exaggerating them. In the process, we make no end of trouble for ourselves.
One of the long-lasting debates among evolutionary biologists concerns whether we are biologically predisposed to be cooperative and to provide mutual aid, or to be competitive and so prompted to promote enmity. Unfortunately for those seeking either/or answers, evolution’s bequest to the human species is Janus-faced.
Although it is likely that competition—especially among males—was selected for in our evolutionary past, so was cooperation. Regrettably, much of that cooperation may well have expressed itself in competition at a different scale: against other social groups. Even though our ancestors doubtless had clear-cut “enemies” in the form of predators, the likelihood is that most of our prehistoric enmity was directed at other bands of early humans, both defensively (protecting our reproductively relevant resources) and aggressively (attempting to obtain those not ours).
Only rarely, however, are our enemies of the easy-to-recognize, mustache-twirling variety. Often—to our great frustration—they are subtle and diffuse, prone to transformation, even difficult to name.
More often than we care to admit, we feel their absence as strongly as their presence. I mean that in two ways: For one, we want to finger our opponents, know them not just for what they are but literally for who they are, as the deep sense of dismay following the Boston bombing has italicized. In Goya’s great painting “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” we see how, when our reason and our vision are turned off, when we don’t have conscious knowledge of who or what lurks in the shadows, our unconscious (which might well include echoes of our evolutionary history) brings forth all sorts of monsters.
The other way in which we are oddly discombobulated by the absence of an enemy is more subtle and, frankly, more debatable. It may turn out that we need enemies. Indeed, it has been proposed that much of the rapid increase in brain size that characterized human evolution was driven by the payoff of successful identification of, and responses to, our same-species enemies. Insofar as we have been made human by our ability to identify and respond to enemies no less than our ability to identify and respond to friends, it seems likely that we have been mentally contracted to test ourselves when surrounded not only by those who wish us well but also by those who wish us ill.
The greatest tragedy in life, noted George Bernard Shaw, is to be denied the thing one most wants. The second-greatest tragedy? To get it. Getting rid of our enemies may present us with more trouble than meets the eye, not so much because of the difficulty of achieving that goal, but because of the difficulty of living with success.
An important question then arises: How can we protect ourselves against an overblown sense of enemies, given that we (as individuals and as a country) need to navigate between the Scylla of ignoring those who threaten our well being and the Charybdis of mistaking mere difference for enmity, thereby running the risk of creating enemies by our own actions? I cannot answer that question definitively, but I can point toward a tendency that, once acknowledged, might at least be guarded against.
“Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy,” wrote Nietzsche, “has an interest in the enemy’s staying alive.” It is reported that at the end of the Third Punic War, after Carthage had finally been destroyed and pillaged, her people killed or enslaved, her land sown with salt, a kind of sadness came over the victorious citizens of Rome, an awareness that with their defining struggle behind them, they would never be the same.
All too often, nationhood, or even selfhood, is defined by one’s opponents. Imagine: Ahab without Moby Dick, the Hatfields without the McCoys. As each has been defined by the other, enmity has subtly been transformed into dependence. If Moby Dick had died of old age, or in the sweet embrace of a giant squid, or by someone else’s harpoon, Ahab would probably have mourned rather than celebrated. But Ahab was a fictional character, while the rest of us—and our enemies—are very real. Equally real is the fact that sometimes these enemies go away, leaving us frustrated, empty, and strangely alone.
What then becomes of us?
One possibility is that we latch on to a new batch of enemies. Most modern-day Americans eagerly assert that they feel no sadness at being deprived of the cold war, for example. Yet just as armchair cold warriors reluctantly began to admit that it was over, in their next breath they started trying to resuscitate it. They pointed with alarm to a resurgent Russian nationalism, which, deprived of the Soviet Union’s restless ethnic republics, might be even worse than its predecessor’s.
The Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington had labored long, hard, and influentially in the vineyards of anti-Communist ideology. With the cold war defunct, he reissued the same old wine in a new bottle: a 1993 article on “The Clash of Civilizations?"—which became a book, without the question mark. Religion and culture would provide us new enemies, he predicted. Even now, 20 years later, it remains to be seen whether Huntington’s “clash” was a case of wishful thinking, not to mention a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At about the same time that the Berlin Wall crumbled, another political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, wrote his much-noticed article “The End of History?” (also expanded into a ballyhooed book, and again confidently proclaimed without the equivocating question mark), which celebrated the triumph of capitalism. Many critics felt that the author had overstated his case. Since then, time and, especially, the “global war on terror,” as well as numerous other struggles such as between modernism and fundamentalism within Islam, have made it seem even more dubious.
What is important for us, however, is the implication that enemies make history, not in the simple sense of producing important and noteworthy events, but in the deeper sense of creating history itself. These days, having enemies seems to be what drives events in Washington, which has been awash in inimical tensions.
Let’s face it: The Boston Marathon bombing, awful for so many, will likely also prove a godsend for a not-so-few, those predisposed not only to lash out at enemies real and imagined, but also to find and if need be, create them. Sadly, it seems likely that such people won’t have to look very hard to meet their needs.
It was notable (albeit insufficiently noted) that when the administration of George W. Bush announced a worldwide war on terrorists, it was specifying a future of literally unending strife. However widespread and persistent terrorism might be—and it will very likely be both, since in one form or another, it dates back at least as far as the anti-Roman Jewish Zealots, in biblical Palestine—terror is inscribed in everyone’s psyche: nocturnal terrors, terror of the dark, of the bogeyman, of dragons, ad infinitum. Although these terrors are filtered through the lens of local cultural traditions as well as of individual experience, the likelihood is that underlying them is a deep-seated biological fear of things that go bump in the night. Consequently, this particular war will never end.
On the other hand, Al Qaeda is real and still wishes us ill, although it appears to have been substantially weakened. In its baser goals, however, and regardless of why those bombs were detonated in Boston, Al Qaeda and its fellow propagators of terrorism, whether individuals or groups, continue to succeed: Their very existence appeals to our own baser tendencies, providing us with a look-alike contest, in which the benign Mr. Chaplin is replaced by the Devil himself.