So, I’ve lived to see my fiftieth Thanksgiving. And I suppose that I should be thankful for that. Thanksgiving is obviously meant to be a day for giving thanks. Ironically, it comes during the later part of the autumn season here in North America, a melancholy time when another cold, dark winter is setting in. If you really wanted to feel thankful on Thanksgiving, late April or early May would probably have been a better time for it.

I agree that there is need for thankfulness, given that people don’t fully appreciate the gifts and possibilities of human life, i.e. of love, beauty, art, accomplishment, intelligence, collaboration, understanding and wisdom. On the other side of the coin, being human is not an unmixed blessing. There’s still a lot of pain attached to each and every life, lots of disappointment, lots of sickness, lots of stupidity, lots of misunderstanding, lots of fear, lots of weakness, lots of loneliness, lots of anger and lots of hate. We have the brains to define an ideal of human civilization, but we aren’t able to live up to it. So, there are a lot of things about living that are NOT to be thankful for.

In sum, being a human in the year 2003 is a mixed bag. Maybe it’s getting better over the years, and maybe it’s not. There were two articles in the NY Times that recently explored both sides of the issue. On the pessimistic side, there was an article on Nov. 25th in the Science section about our genetic similarities with chimpanzees, who have made warfare a natural part of life. Male chimps have the inbred urge to band together, mark off territory, defend it, and try to expand it by raiding other male gangs who have similarly marked off their own boundaries. Scientific observations have proven that these chimps are not playing; if one chimp “army” is stronger than the other, it will kill as many enemy chimps as possible, and even wipe out a neighboring colony if possible. It seems to be a genetic thing.

The big question is, do humans have a similar genetic set-up? As the Rolling Stones song goes, are we all “Monkey Men”? Another Times article, on Nov. 11, seemed to argue that we aren’t. Sure, there are a lot of similarities between our propensity to war and that of the chimp, and we do share 98% of a chimp’s genetics. But there is a chance that we are just victims of misunderstandings and circumstances, and that we can yet learn not to be such animals when faced with frustrating circumstances.

I’m on the fence about this. I’d like to think that aggression and war is just a big mistake and that people can be taught the value of tolerance, cooperation and peace. On the other side of the coin, just when are we going to start seeing some evidence of such a learning process? There seems to have been war ever since humans gained the language tools and other means to organize on a large scale. Everyone seems to know that war ultimately makes things worse for the overall lot of humankind; even if it benefits a group in the immediate future, it obviously sets a precedent that will eventually harm that group’s children and grandchildren. And yet, the urge to war is very strong, almost as mysterious and intractable as the urge to sex. People just naturally agree to war as the preferred option to resolve their unhappiness, even when they know there will be hell to pay for using it (recall the high approval ratings for the war in Iraq back in March; interestingly, they are down quite a bit since then, from around 80% to around 55%). War really does seem as strongly grounded in our genes as the sexual drive is. That’s just my two cents, you can find people who know a whole lot more about genetics and anthropology than me who argue that this is not true.

But then again, I don’t think that the urge to aggression and war, even if genetically based, is unstoppable. We also have a genetic ability and propensity to think. Flexibility is the calling card of the human species. Chimpanzees can live in warm climates with lots of fruit trees, but not in deserts or mountains or arctic regions. Humans can live in such areas, because they can think out new responses to environmental challenges. So I haven’t given up hope that someday, our species will think up ways to avoid the stupidity and destruction of warfare. For that I’m thankful. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to live to see that day. For that, I’m quite sad. An appropriate paradox for a holiday of thankfulness set in the melancholy month of November.