Why do children bully other children?
Notice I said "children," not referring to people in general. And note that by "children" I mean human beings up to 24 years old, which is how long it takes the human brain to fully mature (which is why many marriages begun when the partners were very young go on the rocks -- they just weren't yet ready for that sort of commitment). (In some cases, individuals never do really grow up, and even at 40, 50, 60, or even higher ages are still not completely able to meet the tests of true maturity.)
Though this in no way excuses bullying, I think that part of the drive in children to bully other children is the need to practice the skills that their evolutionary history says they are likely to need as adults. That is, for most of our evolutionary history, we were thin on the ground in a very hostile world, meat-eaters who were all too likely, if we dropped our guard for any length of time, to become other carnivores' luncheon specials, and we had to know how to defend ourselves from likely threats in that hostile world. So children growing up then had to learn how hunt, how to defend themselves from creatures with big sharp teeth and bigger attitudes, and do all the other things necessary to survival in their world.
Back then, prior to the advent of the Neolithic Age, when human beings were able to gather in large settlements, practice agriculture, and unite in large numbers to drive off threats, what children had to practice those all-important skills on were plenty of nonhuman creatures, both predators on and prey of human beings. Their family groups, tribes, and clans had to work together well in order to have the best possible chance of survival, so bullying of any kind was discouraged, and people from other tribes were probably usually welcomed as potential sources of new knowledge, new stories, and new genotypes which could infuse the group with new possibilities and resources.
With the Neolithic Age, however, while it was necessary for large groups to work together plow, sow, and reap the harvest and do certain other communal tasks together, there was more flex when it came to tolerance of behaviors that would have been strictly forbidden among their ancestors. Whereas battles among their Paleolithic ancestors would have been almost entirely limited to two or a small group of contestants, during the Neolithic Age the first examples of siege warfare and genocide occurred, the former in cases in which one group would attempt to capture the entire city and surrounding territory of another group, the latter in cases in which a Neolithic people, their soils exhausted and their territory too small for them, waged wars of extermination against Paleolithic groups in order to gain the latter's fertile land as well as their nubile girls and grown women to use as slaves and concubines. The skills desperately needed by Neolithic humanity now came to include the ready murder of opponents in battle as well as those involved in vicious political infighting necessary for individuals to reach higher and higher levels of power, influence, and wealth.
Today we in the West live in relative affluence. Even our very poor have available to them resources our ancestors could only have dreamed of, from food given away at Food Banks and soup kitchens, clothing made available from United Way, and similar sources of goods to the free use of the Internet on public library computers available in most cities to anyone with a library card. Even our worst health-care systems are treasures that the kings of old could only dream of, dispensing antibiotics and other miracle drugs even to the very poor which, once upon a time, didn't exist at all, routinely and successfully performing surgeries which, only a century ago, would have been thought impossible. Instead of undertaking armed battles between the followers of various political parties, today we have televised campaigns and the vote. The skills so necessary to human survival several thousand years ago aren't much valued in today's world, save in our foreign wars and among our police and fire departments. But the evolutionarily selected-for drive to practice those skills beginning at a young age, is still there, still operating. And children, by definition, have not yet matured to the point that they apprehend the moral world the same way adults do, or understand the real reasons behind this law and that custom and the other religious belief. In short, many children simply don't see anything wrong with attacking other children -- or even adults -- as long as they can get away with it. They won't do so until they grow up, a time that seems far away when you're that young. The only check they have on such behavior is the actions of adults -- and when adults don't carefully monitor what those children are doing and act to stop it when something really wrong is happening, there will be tragedies and crimes.
That's what we're seeing today: tragedies and crimes perpetrated by human beings who are still emotionally and spiritually children, because the adults who should have acted to prevent those tragedies and crimes didn't do so. Yes, what such children do is dead wrong, and there has to be punishment to make that fact sink in. But the punishment should also fall on the adults who didn't act like adults, who, in fact, were effectively the blind leading the blind -- or rather, the emotionally immature and hormonally hypercharged leading the same. Until that fact changes, the crimes and tragedies will be commonplace matters, becoming boring to the general public, rather than the shocking and rare events that they should be.
Though this in no way excuses bullying, I think that part of the drive in children to bully other children is the need to practice the skills that their evolutionary history says they are likely to need as adults. That is, for most of our evolutionary history, we were thin on the ground in a very hostile world, meat-eaters who were all too likely, if we dropped our guard for any length of time, to become other carnivores' luncheon specials, and we had to know how to defend ourselves from likely threats in that hostile world. So children growing up then had to learn how hunt, how to defend themselves from creatures with big sharp teeth and bigger attitudes, and do all the other things necessary to survival in their world.
Back then, prior to the advent of the Neolithic Age, when human beings were able to gather in large settlements, practice agriculture, and unite in large numbers to drive off threats, what children had to practice those all-important skills on were plenty of nonhuman creatures, both predators on and prey of human beings. Their family groups, tribes, and clans had to work together well in order to have the best possible chance of survival, so bullying of any kind was discouraged, and people from other tribes were probably usually welcomed as potential sources of new knowledge, new stories, and new genotypes which could infuse the group with new possibilities and resources.
With the Neolithic Age, however, while it was necessary for large groups to work together plow, sow, and reap the harvest and do certain other communal tasks together, there was more flex when it came to tolerance of behaviors that would have been strictly forbidden among their ancestors. Whereas battles among their Paleolithic ancestors would have been almost entirely limited to two or a small group of contestants, during the Neolithic Age the first examples of siege warfare and genocide occurred, the former in cases in which one group would attempt to capture the entire city and surrounding territory of another group, the latter in cases in which a Neolithic people, their soils exhausted and their territory too small for them, waged wars of extermination against Paleolithic groups in order to gain the latter's fertile land as well as their nubile girls and grown women to use as slaves and concubines. The skills desperately needed by Neolithic humanity now came to include the ready murder of opponents in battle as well as those involved in vicious political infighting necessary for individuals to reach higher and higher levels of power, influence, and wealth.
Today we in the West live in relative affluence. Even our very poor have available to them resources our ancestors could only have dreamed of, from food given away at Food Banks and soup kitchens, clothing made available from United Way, and similar sources of goods to the free use of the Internet on public library computers available in most cities to anyone with a library card. Even our worst health-care systems are treasures that the kings of old could only dream of, dispensing antibiotics and other miracle drugs even to the very poor which, once upon a time, didn't exist at all, routinely and successfully performing surgeries which, only a century ago, would have been thought impossible. Instead of undertaking armed battles between the followers of various political parties, today we have televised campaigns and the vote. The skills so necessary to human survival several thousand years ago aren't much valued in today's world, save in our foreign wars and among our police and fire departments. But the evolutionarily selected-for drive to practice those skills beginning at a young age, is still there, still operating. And children, by definition, have not yet matured to the point that they apprehend the moral world the same way adults do, or understand the real reasons behind this law and that custom and the other religious belief. In short, many children simply don't see anything wrong with attacking other children -- or even adults -- as long as they can get away with it. They won't do so until they grow up, a time that seems far away when you're that young. The only check they have on such behavior is the actions of adults -- and when adults don't carefully monitor what those children are doing and act to stop it when something really wrong is happening, there will be tragedies and crimes.
That's what we're seeing today: tragedies and crimes perpetrated by human beings who are still emotionally and spiritually children, because the adults who should have acted to prevent those tragedies and crimes didn't do so. Yes, what such children do is dead wrong, and there has to be punishment to make that fact sink in. But the punishment should also fall on the adults who didn't act like adults, who, in fact, were effectively the blind leading the blind -- or rather, the emotionally immature and hormonally hypercharged leading the same. Until that fact changes, the crimes and tragedies will be commonplace matters, becoming boring to the general public, rather than the shocking and rare events that they should be.