The Wild World of Threats

You’re confronting a spider, up close, womano-a-womano. The tiny creature rears back on its hindmost legs and assumes a threatening posture, ridiculous given that you could easily squash it with your shoe. Yet everyone understands the gesture, even though to locate the most recent common ancestor shared by the two of you, you’d have to go back roughly half a billion years. The basic language of threat is nearly as old as that other basic language, DNA. Threats between living things have long been grist for the evolutionary mill. And human beings aren’t immune.

As I write this, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is threatening to invade Ukraine. He sees Ukraine as a threat to his power and country were it to join NATO. Ukraine, NATO, and the United States are responding with counterthreats. For all we know, the threats are real; certainly, none is ridiculous. The consequences are immense, with war in the balance.

A threat, as I consider it here, involves an effort at deterrence, communicating that if someone does something that the threatener seeks to prevent, the consequences—typically some form of retaliation—will be sufficiently aversive to prevent the potential perpetrator from perpetrating in the first place. Living things are typically equipped with a range of intimidating options, not just baring teeth and claws, but also displaying horns, antlers, poison fangs, bony shields, uttering scary hisses and formidable roars, puffing body up, flattening ears down, rattling, hissing, spitting, screaming, flapping wings, staring unwaveringly, even sometimes becoming weirdly quiet.