The first recorded war involved the Sumerians in Mesopotamia almost 5,000 years ago. Prehistoric war is thought to be far older. Can we ever get rid of it?
Margaret Mead said war is older than the jury system but no less an invention to address conflict, and so it can be removed. As the anthropologist Douglas Fry more recently wrote: “War like slavery before it can be abolished.”
Whether peace or war is the more natural human state is disputed and complicated.
That’s from the 2024 book Why War?, which recasts an old question that previous literature has addressed, this time from British historian Richard Overy. The book is largely a review of the literature on war. All the disciplines in these chapters build on each other, starting in evolution, biologically evolved to demonstrated aggression.
“Warfare,” Overy wrote “ is not in our genes, but for our genes.” There is still a role for historians (and therefore journalists) to interpret the specific human actions of “why THIS war” but there is also a broad universal answer to the question Why War: It’s been an effective means to resolve dispute, despite considerable cost, so war emerged from our systems by hijacking our instincts.
Or as the author himself concludes: “The co-evolution of culture and biology for most of the long human past created conditions within which nature and nurture together, not either one or the other, reinforced the resort to violence when regarded as necessary or advantageous.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Several books have used the “Why War” title, including the Einstein-Freud letter exchange after WWI
- Two big categories of explanation: human sciences (like biology and psychology as “evolutionarily adaptive or culturally determined” and so essentially reactive), and then the proactive explanations come from historians and social sciences around man creating culture and then making war for one or more of four reasons: resources, belief, power and security
- Rather than Manislowski’s “peaceful pacifism” we mostly argue now that warfare goes back since before Homo sapiens dominated the world
- Warfare is “lethal, coalitional conflict between distinct groups of human beings”
- UNESCO’s 1989 Seville statement: war is not determined by human evolutionary biology
- In 1978, Wilson’s On Human Nature won the Pulitzer Prize, even while at an academic conference a progressive activist poured a pitcher of cold water on his head (his nature/nurture argument has been exonerated over time)
- Jane Goodall in Tanzania overturned many scientific assumptions about chimpanzees (they wanted her to use “it” not her/him)
- Why would war develop to kill so many humans? “Inclusive fitness” by William Hamilton (1964) on stronger genes and pseudospeciation saw competing tribes as separate species to legitimatize killing them
- Males developed “parochial altruism” to do more for their kin group (like risk life) to avoid ostracizing and engage in war
- “Coalitional violence” were often raids of smaller groups to limit casualties
- Conflict had an “adaptive value” for men who could translate aggression into the best mates — though archeological sites do show times when women may have fought too (Norris Farm Cemetery in central Illinois)
- Nazi and Japanese soldiers carried family photos just like Allied soldiers: all motivated by small kin groups not big national message
- Called “biobabble” by one anthropologist there has been criticism of biological underpinnings of war but it’s true we go back very long to violence against groups
- Freud’s Oedipus concept: infants start with love for mother and aggression toward father which they must overcome was then extrapolated as explanation for wa
- Joyce Benson: boys are obsessed with battle: revolutionary physiology created “males who are efficient cooperative fighters”
- 1932 Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political: the world is divided into friend and foe (psychology chapter)
- Margaret Mead: war is “older and more widespread than the jury system but none the less an invention” (anthropology chapter)
- Anthropologists argue about whether war involves scale: Raymond Kelly “warless societies” argue pre-historic people were small bands without true war and so it is modern result of organized states
- In 1924, William Perry wrote war was ”an accidental excrescence,” tied to Egypt and not inevitable
- Conflict Ecology: In 2007, US generals warn climate change should be included in threat models by adding instability
- In 1897, Friedrich Ratzel introduced the word Lebensraum (“living space”) as a political goal, later hijacked by the Nazis
- North American pre-European ecological pressure resulted in narrow cannibalism and territory expansion. Chaco civilization in Mesa Verde being an example
- “Nutritional cannibalism” vs ritual
- Mongol and Manchu invasions of China coincided with periods of climactic crisis
- Hubert Lamb climactic research institute tied climate to history
- Ecological pressures are different than striving for others resources (so he makes this two different chapters)
- Marxists argue capitalism drives war-making to pursues resources and territory
- Michael Klare’s 2001 book Resource Wars;
- Argues the Bolivia-Paraguay war was not orchestrated by Standard Oil, for example
- In WW2, the allies had most oil and gas: Germany and Japan both made expansions for resources
- Historian Christopher Hill argues that “religion was not a self sufficient motivating factor” for the English Civil War and others argued “beliefs,” including religion are more often a tool of elites rather than true cause of conflict. (For example, in 1095 Pope Urban II launched the Crusades)
- Saint Augustine was one in a long line of early Christian writers defending violence: he wrote that the biblical commandment that forbid killing “was not broken by those who have waged war on the authority of God”
- Not with me is against me: religious in origins
- Bruce Lincoln calls the Indo-European origin story of Trito perhaps the most historically important narratives in world history
- “Belief has never universally resulted in violence, but it points where belief is thought to be under threat or has to be reinforced by conquest or sacrifice, they can be a primary driver that cannot buy any measure be rationalized away.”
- Robert Dahl’s classic definition of power: A can get B to do something they would not otherwise do
- Robert Carneiro’s origin of the state is one tribe holding dominion over another: “village autonomy to supervillage integration “
- Power hungry men like Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler
- Napoleon controlled narrative: in 1789, France had 130 journals; only 4 remained by 1811 (Look at these notes on the origin of the news)
- Paul Kennedy 1987 book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” (hegemonic powers)
- Correlates of War Project Series at University of Michigan : CINC power index (Thucydides Trap)
- Correlates of war: 80% of interstate wars since 1815 have been between states that share a border
- The long walls that became known as the Great Wall are like Roman defensive efforts supplemented by offense
- The frontier of Chinese and Roman Empires and American colonies were always a military strategy impetus
- “Security dilemma”: how nations can remain secure while avoiding conflict
- Henry Kissinger was part of young scholars who pursued “security studies” as a realism strategy to use power to pursue state security
- If nuclear war is mutually assured destruction, why have India, Pakistan, North Korea and (probably) Israel added them?
- What does war in Ukraine say about nuclear deterrence?
- Hobbes posture of war: “war of every man against every man”
- Kenneth Walz: “Theorist explain what historians know: War is normal.”
- “There is no singular straightforward, cause to explain the persistence of warfare throughout the human past: the effort to construct a Monocle explanation for war is futile”
- Douglas Fry: “War like slavery before it can be abolished” — though whether peace is more normal than war remains disputed
- “Human beings, principally the males, are the only animal species that overlong evolutionary time have killed their own kind and large numbers, often inflicting violence with calculated cruelty, irrespective of sex or age. This is true for human beings, thousands of years ago and it’s true in the savage conflicts that I’ve already marked the first quarter of the 21st century”
- “The co-evolution of culture and biology for most of the long human past created conditions within which nature and nurture together, not either one or the other, reinforced the resort to violence when regarded as necessary or advantageous”