Hiranmay Karlekar

Urban violence and crime have been matters of continuing global concern. While the quality and adequacy of policing, and some social and economic factors, have been discussed in this context, the basic, underlying cause has escaped sufficient attention. It is the conflict between the very character of urban life and the orientation of the human ethos as it has evolved.

The matter has been dwelt upon comprehensively by Desmond Morris in The Human Zoo. His focus has not been on crime but on the wider consequences of the conflict in terms of the future of human beings. His observations, however, have implications which no serious researcher in urban violence and crime can ignore.

The primary cause of conflict between urban life and human ethos, according to Morris, is overcrowding caused by population growth. He describes two vastly different scenarios at the very beginning of the book. In the first, people are members of a tribe, comprising a “compact group” of 60, living in a piece of land 20 miles long and 20 miles wide, which is forested and inhabited by “animals, small and large.” 

In the second, they live in an area of the same dimensions but which is “civilized, inhabited by machines and buildings,” and where there are a “compact group of six million human beings,” a “hundred thousand individuals for everyone in the first scene.”

The change has taken place in the course of the past few thousand years, which, says Morris, is “almost instantaneous” in evolutionary terms. Human beings have adapted themselves so brilliantly to their new environment that they have come to believe this to have been a gradual process, and they are biologically fully equipped to deal with it.

This is not the case. Biologically, humans remain the simple, rural animals described in scene one above.  According to Morris, they “lived like that, not for a few centuries,” but “for a million hard years.” They “changed biologically” and “evolved spectacularly” during this period when the pressures of survival, which were great, moulded them.

The problem, according to Morris, is that humans had evolved as tribal animals and “the basic characteristic of the tribe is that it operates on a localized, inter-personal basis. To abandon this fundamental social pattern, so typical of the ancient human condition, was going to be against his grain.” This, however, is precisely what humans had to do with the emergence of towns.

Inter-city coordination developed with the growth of agriculture and trade. The human being “became a citizen, a super tribes man, and the key difference was that as a super tribes man he no longer knew personally each member of his community.” It was this change from the personal to the impersonal society, “that was going to cause the human animal the greatest agonies in the millennia ahead.

As a species we were not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members of our tribe. It was something we had to learn to do, but it was not easy we are still fighting against it in all kinds of hidden and ways—and some that are not so hidden.”

People have tried to satisfy their desire for cooperative personal relationships by forming tribe-sized “sub-groups or pseudo-tribes within the main body of super-tribes” with social or professional companions.

This, however, has also meant viewing other sub-groups as being beyond the pale and enabling their members—even those personally known to one—to be treated as badly as members of an impersonal mob.

This writer feels that criminal gangs constitute a form of such sub-groups or pseudo-tribes. These are small groups whose members can be compared to tribal hunters searching for prey, which, instead of animals, are the human victims of their crime.

This is particularly so in instances of armed robberies or targeted mob violence. Gang leaders, like leaders of the earlier hunters, guide and protect gang members but also demand unquestioning obedience and treat mercilessly anyone who, they feel, have deserted or betrayed them.

Mobs have been a part of urban life since the very beginning,  and a proneness to violence and criminal activity is inherent in their dynamics. The anonymity it lends to members, hinders detection in cases of collective violence.

Also, tussles for leadership lead to attempts to garner support by resorting to competitive encouragement of violence. Equally, individual members of mobs can try to stand out in a crowd by perpetrating or calling for singularly violent acts.

Even without mobs and gangs, trivial causes spark violence when overcrowding grates on one’s nerves. Instances of “road rage” are examples of this. Things are going to get worse as rising temperatures, cloudbursts, flash floods, cyclones, tornados and massive tidal waves, become increasingly frequent as a result of climate change–thereby severely affecting cities and towns.

There has to be a serious global discourse on all aspects of urban life including law and order. There can doubtless be no question of reversing the course of history and returning to tribal life. One can, however, think of devising patterns of community existence which consciously addresses this problem, encouraging inter-personal contacts and diminishing the scope for sub-group conflicts. Unfortunately, no such effort is under way.

(The author is Consulting Editor, The Pioneer. The views expressed are personal)