I have ceased to count the number of times I’ve heard
self-proclaimed experts say the 20th century, with its
multitudinous (yes, they like words like multitudinous)
genocides, holocausts and world wars, was the bloodiest, most
violent century ever.
Those who have bothered to study the subject know fewer than 3
percent of last century’s global population succumbed to war, far
fewer than in centuries past when man battled with catapults and
clubs, rather than incendiary bombs and tanks. Lawrence Keeley,
author of War Before Civilization, notes that had the
wars of the 20th century killed the same proportion of the
population that died in typical tribal wars, there would have
been two billion deaths, not 100 million. Meanwhile experimental
psychologist Steve Pinker has observed that violence in general
is on the
decline,
noting that today’s homicide rates in Europe are more than 10
times lower than in the Middle Ages. “[W]e are probably living in
the most peaceful moment of our species time on earth,” he
writes. A cause to celebrate, unless you are a hippie
intellectual whose only purpose in life is to demonize
civilization, the West and the scary Military Industrial Complex.
Says Pinker: “No one ever attracted followers and donations by
announcing that things keep getting better.”
It is generally the latter who continue to maintain that before
civilized society there were no warriors and thus few tribal
wars, just happy-go-lucky, vegan flower children traipsing
through the meadows after sacrificing virgins. It wasn’t until
some evil conservative came up with the idea to create culture
and civilization and poetry and music and art that everything
went to hell.
Not to fear. We may soon return to our pre-societal folkways,
according to
story in the
new New Scientist. “A growing number of experts are now
arguing that the urge to wage war is not innate, and that
humanity is already moving in a direction that could make war a
thing of the past.”
Douglas Fry is another end-of-war theorist. In his book
Beyond
War, the anthropologist claims to have documented
74 “non-warring” tribes, many with minimal contact with
civilization. This, he says, is proof that war is not only not
hardwired into our genes, but that civilized societies actually
promote war.
Brian Ferguson, of Rutgers, says the fossil record indicates that
man didn’t commence making war big time until about 14,000 years
ago. Prior to that man lived in small nomadic tribes as
hunter-gatherers. When trouble was a-brewing he and his fellow
tribesmen would simply hop on their camels and ride off for
greener pastures, so to speak. The portrait that emerges is of an
era where half the population was nomadic bullies and the other
half nomadic wimps. This, naturally, runs counter to Ferguson and
Fry’s theories, since the more belligerent nomadic tribes would
have prospered and, thus, passed on their genes. The peaceable
tribes that preferred flight to fight would have grown weak and
gradually died out.
ALL THIS CHANGED, Fry says, when the hunter-gatherers learned
agriculture and animal husbandry, which resulted in settlements,
farms, granaries, temples, all of which gave peaceable man a
reason to organize militias and fight for the common defense.
But a second problem with this theory is that not every
pre-societal tribe was nomadic. Nomadic people existed largely on
continents where there were vast plains and scattered resources.
Islanders, whether in the Pacific, or in England, didn’t have the
luxury to just walk away from a fight. From the beginning they
had to fight to keep what was theirs. Since early man trekked out
of Africa he has been drawn to coastal areas and rivers and
lakes, and it is unlikely these people allowed themselves to be
shooed away without a fight.
In their final flight from reality, Fry and Pinker suggest that
since war is not hardwired into our genes, if it is but an
adaptation from nomadic to settled, man can re-adapt, and
therefore he can become peaceable again. All we need do is
eradicate those factors that caused tribal warfare in the past.
And here’s the real problem: to completely eliminate war we would
have to eliminate the causes of war, i.e., most of man’s
excessive desires, and by that I mean his avarice, pride,
vengeance, lust for power, and just plain lust (remember the
Trojan War?). Wars are also fought over independence, scarce but
valuable resources, ancient religious feuds, and political
ideology, and I doubt any of these factors are going away any
time soon.
While their may be fewer wars, it is puerile and utopian to think
man can eliminate war completely. If there are fewer wars today
it because the world has more democracies (about 100, up from 20
a half century ago), and democracies seldom go to war with other
democracies. What’s more, nations are increasingly linked
economically, so the destruction of one nation may mean economic
disaster for all. Or to put it another way, “other people become
more valuable alive than dead” (Robert Wright). Then there is the
deterrence of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction.
Pinker credits the creation of more stable nations with effective
legal systems and police forces. And increased empathy and
diversity means we no longer react as violently and suspiciously
to those outside our “tribe.”
Barring some devastating natural disaster or the rise of another
utopian political ideology, war will likely become even more
rare, more localized, more tribal. But it will never go away
completely. I suspect we can live with that.
