Response to Comments of James Davies and Alexander Gralnick

Abstract

It comes as something of a surprise that this article (Mack, 1986a), itself a response to Stanley Hoffmann's presidential address, should have called forth such rich and interesting reactions from James Davies and Alexander Gralnick. At same time, I am pleased to have opportunity to comment, clarify several points and extend a little what I have been trying to say about dark side of human collective feeling and behavior. Both Davies and Gralnick attribute to me a view of human aggression and violence as something genetic or innate and therefore immutable. As a result Davies describes me as ignoring importance of historical hurt, frustration, destruction of dignity and pain of powerlessness in producing human violence, and even implies I believe political hostility occurs because of the sheer love of killing. Yet in my article (especially 225-227) I refer repeatedly to cycles of a people's individual and group humiliation, pride and of in creating ethnonational violence. But I also emphasize ways that leaders exploit a people's hurt to justify revenge and killing; for example, many leaders know well how to play on hurt pride, and experiences of frustration and humiliation among members of a society, in arousing public opinion (226). The role of power is more complex. A beginning discussion of power and power relationships occurs in another article published at about same time as this one (see Mack, 1986b, 115-118). There I ask whether gratifications of power apparently a fundamental psychological need of human beings functioning individually or in groups can be experienced in a nonnationalistic context (117). One cannot make every point in every article. Similarly, Gralnick would have me overlooking socio-cultural situation while I travel between belief in an uncontrollable aggressive drive on one hand and healing world's problems through mass psychoanalysis on other. I have always intended how successfully I cannot tell that my work avoid psychoanalytic reductionism. Gralnick sets up a qcues-