The resulting Thirty Years War cannot be reduced to a dichotomous struggle between Catholics and Protestants—but this essential division did define much of the temper and zealotry of the controversy (for we seem able to kill “apostates” far more easily than merely errant compatriots). Much of central Europe lay in ruins, as the mercenary armies of various potentates
ravaged their way through the countryside, burning, raping, and pillaging as they went. Nor did the battles of Protestants against Catholics end with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The ruined castle of Heidelberg, beautifully lit at night, turns the entire city into a romantic stage set for
The Student Prince.
But Heidelberg retains no medieval buildings, and the castle lies in ruins, as the
consequence of yet another disastrous internecine war among Christians—when the Protestant Elector of the Rhineland Palatinate (with Heidelberg as a center) died without heir, and Catholic France claimed the territory because the Elector’s sister had married Philip of Orléans, brother of Louis XIV.
A somewhat cynical, but sadly accurate, principle of human history states that when things look
bad, they can still get far worse. If Christians could slaughter each other with such gusto and ferocity, what could true outsiders expect—for non-Christians could be defined even more easily as beyond human worth and therefore ripe for elimination. For this final chapter in man’s inhumanity, we turn to the obvious test: the fate of Jewish communities in medieval and Renaissance Europe at the time
of diets and defenestrations.
Jewish settlements persisted for one thousand years in the Rhineland. Every city that I visited—Worms, Speyer, Rothenburg—maintains memorials to the persecution and elimination of these communities, while tourist outlets sell long and informative pamphlets on their history, lest we forget. One almost feels a concerted and commendable attempt to expiate what cannot
be undone—a tale of prolonged intolerance capped by such recent memory of the brutally and entirely effective last curtain (at least locally) of the “final solution.”
Gershom ben Judah, known as the “light of the exile,” headed the rabbinic academy of Mainz at the end of the tenth century, before the first millennium of our era’s common time had passed. His most celebrated disciple, the great
Talmudist Rashi, studied in Worms around 1060. Rashi’s most noted follower, Meir Ben Baruch (known to pious Jews by his acronym as the Maharam), headed the Jewish community in Rothenburg, now the most perfectly preserved, entirely walled, and touristically flooded of all medieval towns. In 1286, the Emperor Rudolph I abrogated the political freedom of Jews and imposed special taxes to make these
despised people
servi camerae
(or serfs of the treasury). Rabbi Meir tried to lead a group of Jews to Palestine, but he was arrested and confined in an Alsatian fortress. His people raised an enormous ransom, but Meir refused (and died in prison) because he knew that a purchased freedom would only encourage the emperor to capture other rabbis for revenue. Fourteen years later, a Jewish merchant
in Worms ransomed the great rabbi’s body. His tomb, and that of the merchant, occupy adjacent places in the Jewish cemetery of Worms. Following an ancient custom, Jewish visitors and residents (mostly Russian emigres) still write their prayers and requests on scraps of paper and place them, weighted down by small stones, atop the Maharam’s tomb.
After Meir’s exile, the Jews of Rothenburg were
expelled to a ghetto beyond the city walls, and then, in 1520, banished entirely and forevermore. Only the small dance hall remains (because it became a poorhouse for Christians), with a few tombstones in Hebrew, mounted on the garden wall.
The larger Jewish community of Luther’s Worms survived longer, but just as precariously. In 1096, soldiers of the First Crusade passed through Worms and ravaged
the Jewish quarter. In 1349, nearly all the Jews of Worms were murdered on the false accusation that they had brought the plague by poisoning the wells. In 1938, on the infamous
Kristallnacht
, the Jewish synagogue burned to the ground. More than one thousand Jews of Worms perished in the Holocaust. The reconstructed synagogue now serves as the centerpiece of a Jewish museum and memorial, but not
as a place of worship, for no active Jewish community now exists in Worms.
Two plaques on the synagogue wall tell a tale of hope and despair. The first, mounted shortly after the end of World War II, contains the names of Jewish citizens presumed dead in the Holocaust. Happily, some of these people had survived (in refugee camps, unknown to makers of the plaque). Their raised bronze names have
been filed off, leaving blank spaces of victory. But further records of the Holocaust then documented more deaths, and these names adorn the second plaque—greatly exceeding in number the names happily erased from the first memorial.
Ironically, only the Jewish cemetery survived intact, thanks to a ruse (according to local tradition) of the town archivist, a sincere Christian with great respect
for Jewish traditions. Himmler had expressed a passing interest in the cemetery during a prewar visit. When local Nazis later ordered the destruction of the cemetery (located on the other side of town, beyond the walls), the archivist exaggerated Himmler’s casual comment into an explicit order for preservation. Cautious local authorities never checked with Berlin—and a place of death remains as
the only unscathed survivor of a millennium’s existence for one of Europe’s most illustrious Jewish communities.
If you have been wondering why I recount these tales from the dark side of human history in an essay on evolutionary biology, I do intend to segue toward an ending on both a positive and a Darwinian note. Humans are capable of such glory—and such horror: the pogroms of Worms, and Luther’s
stirring speech at the Diet of Worms; the numerous defenestrations of Prague, and the magnificent baroque architecture of Prague. We bask in the glory with simple pleasure; but we contemplate the horror with anguish and puzzlement—and with a burning urge to explain how creatures capable of such decency can promote such iniquity of their own free will (and with apparent moral calm and intensity
of supposed purpose).
But do we perpetrate the darkness “of our own free will”? Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source—and as an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility. Perhaps we evolved these capacities as active adaptations now gone awry in the modern world. Current genocide may be a sad legacy of
behaviors that originated for Darwinian benefit during our ancestral construction as small bands of hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa. Darwin’s mechanism, after all, encourages only the reproductive success of individuals, not the moral dream of human fellowship across an entire species. Perhaps the traits that lead to modern genocide—xenophobia, tribalism, anathematization of outsiders
as subhuman and therefore subject to annihilation—rose to prominence during our early evolution because they enhanced survival in tiny, nontechnological societies based on kinship and living in a world of limited resources under a law of kill-or-be-killed.
A group devoid of xenophobia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others replete with genes to encode a propensity for such
categorization and destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are programmed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged (and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances
may now spell our undoing (or at least propagate our tragedies)—but we cannot be blamed for these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the night.
This superficially attractive balm to our collective conscience is nothing but a cop-out based on deep fallacies of reasoning. (Perhaps the tendency to think by such fallacies represents our real evolutionary legacy—but this
is another speculation for another time.) I am quite happy to acknowledge that we have a biologically based capacity to categorize humans as insiders or outsiders, and then to view outsiders as beyond fellowship and ripe for slaughter. But where can such an argument take us in terms of modern moral discourse, or even social observation? For this claim is entirely empty and devoid of explanatory power.
We gain nothing by speculating that a capacity for genocide lies within our evolutionary heritage. We already know that we have such a capacity because human history provides so many examples of actualization.
An evolutionary speculation, to be useful, must suggest something we don’t know already—if, for example, we learned that genocide has been biologically enjoined by certain genes, or even
that a positive propensity, rather than a mere capacity, regulated our murderous potentiality. But the observational facts of human history speak against determination, and only for potentiality. Each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social benevolence; each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan. Genocide gains greater prominence only for superior “news value”—and
for devastating effectiveness (as the pacific clan disappears and murderers control the resulting media). But if both darkness and light lie within our capacities, and if both tendencies operate at high frequency in human history, then we learn nothing by speculating that either (or probably both) lie within our evolutionary, adaptive, Darwinian heritage. At the very most, biology might help
us to delimit the environmental circumstances that tend to elicit one behavior rather than the other.
To cite the example most under current discussion in the “pop science” press, numerous books and articles preach to us that a new science of evolutionary psychology has discovered the biological basis of behavioral differences between sexes. Women produce only a few large eggs and must spend
years of their lives growing embryos within their bodies and then nurturing the resulting babies. Men, on the other hand, produce millions of tiny sperm each time, and need invest nothing more in a potential offspring than the effort of an ejaculation. Therefore, the argument continues, in the great Darwinian quest for passing more genes to future generations, women will behave in ways that encourage
male investment after impregnation (protection, feeding, economic wealth, and subsequent child care), whereas men would rather wander right off in search of other mates in a never-ending quest for maximal genetic spread. From this basic dichotomy of evolutionary purpose, all else in the lexicon of pop psychology follows. We now know why men rape, lust for power, dominate politics, have affairs,
and abandon families with young children—and why women act coy, love to nurture children, and preferentially enter the caring professions.
Perhaps I have caricatured this position—but I don’t think so, having read so many articles of support. In fact, I don’t even think that the basic argument is wrong. Such differences in behavioral strategy do make Darwinian sense in the light of structural
disparity between male and female reproduction. But the attributions could not be more deeply erroneous for the same reasons noted above in discussing the fallacy of biological explanations for genocide. Men are not programmed by genes to maximize matings, or women devoted to monogamy on the same basis. We can only speak of capacities, not of requirements or even determining propensities. Therefore,
our biology does not make us do it. Moreover, what we share in common genetics can easily overwhelm what men and women might tend to do differently. Any man who has fiercely loved his little child—including most fathers, I trust (and I happen to be writing this essay on Father’s Day)—knows that no siren song from distinctive genes or hormones can overcome this drive for nurturing behavior shared
with the child’s mother.
Finally, when we note the crucial differences in fundamental pattern and causation between biological evolution and cultural change—and when we recognize that everything distinctive about the cultural style enjoins flexibility rather than determination—we can understand even more generally why a cultural phenomenon like genocide (despite any underlying biological capacity
for such action) cannot be explained in evolutionary terms. As the fundamental difference in pattern, biological evolution is a topological tree—a process of separation and divergence. A new species, arising as an independent lineage, acquires genetic distinction from all other lineages forever, and must evolve on its own path. Cultural change, on the other hand, is virtually defined by possibilities
of amalgamation among different traditions—as Marco Polo brings pasta from China and I speak English as a “native” tongue. Our distinctive flexibilities arise from this constant interweaving.
As the fundamental difference in causation, biological evolution is Mendelian. Organisms can only pass their genes, not the heritage of their efforts, as physical contributions to future generations. But
cultural change is Lamarckian, as we transmit the fruits of our acquired wisdom and inventiveness directly to future generations in the form of books, instruction manuals, tools, and buildings. Again, this Lamarckian style grants to cultural change a speed, a lability, and a flexibility that Darwinian evolution cannot muster.
In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered (with Luther’s
approbation), and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel. In 1618, the upper windows of Prague disgorged a few men, and Rubens painted some mighty canvases. The Cathedral of Canterbury is both the site of Becket’s murder and the finest Gothic building in England. Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity; which, ultimately, shall we choose? As for the potential path
of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise.
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