Why do human beings keep fighting wars? steve taylor

[Kim byoungil]

Since it is 100 years ago this week that Britain entered the first world war – and at the moment the world seems to be especially ridden with conflict – it’s an opportune moment to reflect on why human beings seem to be unable to stop fighting wars.

In most cases wars are initiated by governments, not by populations. And, most of the time, they are the result of disputes over resources and land, or of a government’s desire to increase its influence and power. However, looking back over the history of warfare, what is most striking is how willing most people have been to fight in wars, or at least to support them.

When Great Britain joined the first world war, in August 1914, massive crowds celebrated outside Buckingham Palace. This celebratory mood was widespread throughout Europe. Writing of the German people’s response to the war, the historian Alan Bullock described “an unparalleled sense of national unity, which those who experienced it never forgot, an exalted sense of patriotism”.

The early American psychologist William James once suggested that war is so preval‎ent because of its positive psychological effects. It creates a sense of unity in the face of a collective threat. It binds people together – not just the army engaged in battle, but the whole community. It brings a sense of cohesion, with communal goals, and inspires individual citizens (not just soldiers) to behave honourably and unselfishly, in the service of a greater good. It supplies meaning and purpose, transcending the monotony of everyday life. Warfare also enables the expression‎ of higher human qualities that often lie dormant in ordinary life, such as courage and self-sacrifice.

This seems tantamount to suggesting that human beings fight wars because we enjoy doing so. It’s easy to see how James’s ideas could apply to the large numbers of young British men volunteering to fight in Syria in recent months. These young men see themselves as fighting a just cause with fellow Muslims, but they’re surely also seeking the sense of being more alive that James describes: a sense of cohesion and honour, which they – perhaps romantically – feel is more attainable in war than at home in the UK.

James’s argument is that human beings need to find activities that provide the same positive effects of warfare but which don’t involve the same devastation, or as he calls it, “the moral equivalent of war”. In other words, we have to find alternative activities to give us that sense of feeling alive, of belonging and purpose.

In stable, peaceful and more economically developed countries, such as the UK and the US, life is so rich and varied that there are many ways of satisfying these needs – through sport, our careers, entertainment and hobbies. However, in other parts of the world where life is especially hard – when people live in poverty and are oppressed, and where there is little hope for the future, such as in Gaza, Palestine and many parts of Africa – it’s harder to satisfy those impulses.

Warfare may serve as a lowest common denominator to provide a semblance of psychological positivity, an attempt to live on a “higher plane of power”, in James’s words, with a sense of cohesion and purpose. If these needs are unsatisfied, and if there is an obvious enemy or oppressor to direct them towards, then warfare is almost inevitable.

This isn’t to say that a warring party may not have a just cause, and this argument doesn’t explore other important social and psychological factors involved in war, such as social identity and moral exclusion. However, it does show that any stable, lasting peace depends on creating societies with a richness of opportunity and variety that can meet human needs. The fact that so many societies throughout the world fail to do this makes our future prospects of peace look very bleak.

 2. Why Humans Wage War

War is purposeful and calculating. The more organized we are, the better we get at fighting.

• BY STEVE PAULSON
• January 6, 2021
• i

  n 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a mummified body buried in the ice. The Iceman, it turned out, died more than 5,000 years ago. At first, archeologists assumed he’d fallen in a snowstorm and frozen to death. Then they discovered various cuts and bruises on his body and an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder. They also found traces of blood on the stone knife he was carrying. Most likely, he died fighting.

  Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan regards the Iceman story as emblematic of our violent tendencies. Humans are a quarrelsome lot with a special talent for waging war. In her book War: How Conflict Shaped Us, she argues that warfare is so deeply embedded in human history that we barely recognize its ripple effects. Some are obvious, like the rise and fall of nations, but others can be surprising. For all that we cherish peace, war has also galvanized social and political change, sometimes for the better. It’s also sparked scientific advances. 

MacMillan is the author of several highly regarded histories of war and peace. She also has a personal interest in this subject. Her father and both her grandfathers served in wars, and her great grandfather was David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister during World War I. But she says her family history isn’t that unusual. “I’m in my 70s and most of us have had family members who were in the First World War or the Second World War or knew someone who was in either war,” she told me. 

MacMillan synthesizes a vast body of literature about war, from battlefield accounts to theories of war, and she shows how new technologies and weaponry have repeatedly changed the course of history. As I discovered during our conversation, she’s especially interested in the question she poses at the beginning of her book: “Does war bring out the bestial side of human nature or the best?”

Do you think human beings are inherently violent?

I come down on the side that we’re not inherently violent but we may have violent tendencies that evolution has left us. When we’re afraid, we have a tendency to lash out, but I don’t think that means we are necessarily violent. We often see examples of altruism and people living together. What is more important is why people fight—and I’m thinking of war, not just random one-on-one fighting. People fight wars because of organization, ideas, and cultural values. The more organized we are, unfortunately, the better we seem to get at fighting. War is very organized. It’s not the brawl you get outside a bar or the random violence you might get when someone feels frightened.

Steven Pinker says human beings are getting less violent, especially since the Enlightenment. What do you think of his argument?

It’s a very interesting argument, which he makes with great evidence and subtlety. We no longer have prizefights where people batter each other to death. We no longer have public executions. And in most developed societies and many less developed societies, the homicide rates are way down. Your own country, the United States, is something of an outlier there. I think his argument that we are becoming more peaceful in domestic societies is right. But I don’t think that’s war. War is something different.

There’s a very interesting counterargument by Richard Wrangham called “the goodness paradox.” He argues that we have, in fact, become nicer and less violent as individuals. We may have domesticated ourselves by our choice of mates and by breeding out those who are most violent, or killing those who are most violent among us, like the way wolves have been domesticated into friendly dogs who sit on your lap. We may have become nicer as individuals, but we’ve also become better at organizing and using purposive violence. That’s the paradox. We’ve gotten better at making war even as we’ve become nicer people.

Isn’t waging war actually uncommon in the animal kingdom?

Well, our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees, do seem to wage war. Chimpanzees will stake out their own territory and male chimpanzees will go out in bands to patrol that territory. If an unfortunate chimpanzee from another band stumbles into that territory, the chimpanzees will gang up and kill the intruder. But our other close cousins in the animal kingdom, the bonobo, do live in harmony and peace and don’t react with violence to outside bonobos coming in. It may be because chimpanzees have natural predators and bonobos, for geographical reasons, don’t.

It’s worth pointing out that bonobos are matriarchal, whereas chimpanzees are dominated by the big males.

And that leads to a very interesting speculation. Are men more likely to fight? Are they naturally more belligerent and are women natural peacemakers? I think not. Certainly the great majority of societies through history have been patriarchal. But when you get women in charge, they don’t seem to be any less warlike than men. Think of Catherine the Great or Maria Theresa or Margaret Thatcher. All these women were quite capable of taking their countries to war.

If waging war is a natural tendency, perhaps in our DNA, what does that reveal about human nature?

I’m not sure war is in our DNA. Our propensity for violence may be in our DNA, but war comes with social organization. War is purposive and often calculating. People don’t just rush helter-skelter into war. They think about it, plan and train for it, and it often takes a great deal of effort. The military knows this. They do a great deal of training to turn people who may not want to kill others or risk their lives into those who will fight. So our propensity to wage war goes along with our developing social organization. If you’re nomadic, you can pick up and move into unoccupied space and get away from those who threaten you. But once you’ve settled down and become agriculturalists, it’s much harder to move because you have something to defend. Plus, you have much more that someone else might want to take. Unfortunately, the better organized we get, the better we get at fighting each other.

Even in protecting people, you may have to wage war. A really important factor in wars is greed for what others have. And along with that goes fear that someone is going to try to take what you have or in fact destroy your society altogether. It’s often very hard to establish trust among different societies. Our tendency is more to be suspicious of each other. We’ve seen parts of the world where neighbors have lived with each other in harmony, but there is always the danger that this will break down.

Is this ultimately about tribalism? You’re either in the in-group or the out-group, so we have this inherent mistrust and fear of the “other.”

It does seem to run through a lot of human society, though I think it’s something we can overcome. You can build institutions and values that make us more likely to trust each other. Religions are capable of bringing people into a larger grouping and insisting that we treat them as fellow human beings. And I think the European Union is in fact a very good example of how nations that formerly mistrusted and went to war with each other have learned to work together. But it’s a painful process, and we’ve seen how easily societies can be turned against each other.

You said war has become a much bigger problem once people settled down and organized into large groups. But there does seem to be quite a lot of anthropological evidence that early hunter-gatherers and foraging societies were also warlike.

We always want to think there might be a kinder and gentler world. And we’ve often had this picture of people in the distant past living with each other in harmony, getting what they needed, enjoying their leisure, not fighting violently with each other. But the evidence really seems to be that fighting and violence goes back a very long way. The remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the world which have been studied often show very high rates of organized violence and death.

We want to think there might be a kinder and gentler world. Evidence says no.

Wasn’t this the old debate between Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes?

Rousseau said the trouble came when social organization led us into becoming more confrontational with each other, whereas Hobbes said if you were to go back to the ancient world, the primitive world, you would find it very nasty indeed because there would be no central government and no way of controlling the impulses of people to fight with each other. For Hobbes, this was a good thing. The development of a big state, the Leviathan, had a monopoly of force which could maintain order in its own territories and defend its people against those who would try to destroy it.