Conflict Resolution. By Douglas P. Fry. Edward Elgar. 2026. 121pp.
‘Nomadic foragers, as we all used to live, were socialist, prosocial, egalitarian societies’ (Douglas P. Fry).
In this distillation of long years of fieldwork and scholarship, the world-leading anthropologist Douglas Fry draws upon his knowledge and experience to propose means of resolving conflicts between individuals or groups as they might arise in contemporary contexts. Its analysis and recommendations are underpinned by the author’s accumulated understanding of how human beings have related to one another throughout the 300,000 years of our species’ existence. And it is precisely this that makes it of particular interest and relevance to socialists.
To be specific, a central plank of his arguments is how entirely fallacious are the oft-repeated claims that war, aggression and greed are rooted in the human psyche. All the evidence, he insists, is that such forms of behaviour, far from being somehow embedded in our nature, are, when they occur, an outcome of social conditioning and that our evolutionary history shows that we have just as much potential for, and indeed a much more natural bent, towards attachment, caring partnership and cooperation.
Drawing on decades of his own research and with evidence from various different fields of study, he demonstrates how over the approximately 290,000 years of prehistory (the Palaeolithic era), the overwhelming principle of existence among human groups was (and still is today among indigenous populations he has investigated across the world) non-violence, cooperation and egalitarianism, characterised by sharing food, caring for the vulnerable and maintaining social bonds. This the author sums up as ‘community solidarity and harmony’, reinforced by ‘socialization and social control mechanism geared toward promoting prosocial values and behaviors’. Not that violence, greed or attempts to monopolise necessities would never have occurred in Palaeolithic societies or never occur in modern indigenous cultures, but in such circumstances ways are usually found to resolve the conflicts caused via ‘restorative’ methods or by reconciliation, eschewing violence and seeking to practice ‘fairness’ in the eyes of the individuals most directly affected and of the collectivity. But in the rare cases where this is not possible, it may be necessary to apply sanctions to ‘wrongdoers’, probably via some form of social ostracism or banishment. As for large-scale organised killing, the author echoes the now widely accepted view that this has been largely a feature of the last approximately 10,000 years. Starting then, hunter-gatherer life (referred to in this book as ‘nomadic foraging’) gave way to settled agriculture with social hierarchies and control and domination of wealth by small groups of people developing and eventually becoming the norm. Later, of course, the industrial production of capitalism took over from agricultural society, but that society continued to manifest, as it still does, those same basic features: power and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, leaders and led, and a willingness of the many, via social conditioning, to sacrifice themselves in the interests of the privileged few.
This book is one of many in the field of anthropology, archaeology and a gamut of other disciplines which have contributed to exploding the enduring myth that violence, competition and selfishness are somehow ‘locked into’ human interaction, that there exists inevitably some kind of ‘war of all against all’. Douglas Fry’s stark opposition to that idea is summed up in his statement that ‘on the basis of cross-cultural data … humans have a universal inclination to resolve conflicts and restore normal patterns of harmonious social interaction’ and that ‘the normal state of social affairs is to exchange good deeds, to feel gratitude, to be generous and appreciate the generosity of others. Overall, people strive to maintain positive interpersonal relations with others through mutually beneficial exchanges’.
All this is serious grist to the mill for socialists, providing as it does a powerful response to those who argue that the cooperative society of voluntary endeavour and free access to all goods and services which we call socialism is impossible because it is against what is usually referred to as ‘human nature’. We cannot but agree with the author’s plea that ‘the human potential for resolving conflicts without violence should be fully acknowledged, nurtured, and further elaborated by the people sharing one small planet in the vastness of space’. At the same time, however, though this plea is expressed, as all else in this book, in truly engaging fashion, it is difficult to see how its substance can be realised within the framework of the current social system of class division and production for profit. Rather, the environment for it to come to fruition has to be a society of economic equality and production for need.
Howard Moss
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