http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.500-winning-the-ultimate-battle-how-humans-could-end-war.html
Winning the ultimate battle: How humans could end war
* 07 July 2009 by John Horgan
* Magazine issue 2715. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* For similar stories, visit the Genetics and Human Evolution Topic
OPTIMISTS called the first world war "the war to end all wars".
Philosopher George Santayana demurred. In its aftermath he declared:
"Only the dead have seen the end of war". History has proved him right,
of course. What's more, today virtually nobody believes that humankind
will ever transcend the violence and bloodshed of warfare. I know this
because for years I have conducted numerous surveys asking people if
they think war is inevitable. Whether male or female, liberal or
conservative, old or young, most people believe it is. For example, when
I asked students at my university "Will humans ever stop fighting wars?"
more than 90 per cent answered "No". Many justified their assertion by
adding that war is "part of human nature" or "in our genes". But is it
really?
Such views certainly seem to chime with recent research on the roots of
warfare. Just a few decades ago, many scholars believed that prior to
civilisation, humans were "noble savages" living in harmony with each
other and with nature. Not any more. Ethnographic studies, together with
some archaeological evidence, suggest that tribal societies engaged in
lethal group conflict, at least occasionally, long before the emergence
of states with professional armies (see our timeline of weapons
technology). Meanwhile, the discovery that male chimpanzees from one
troop sometimes beat to death those from another has encouraged popular
perceptions that warfare is part of our biological heritage.
These findings about violence among our ancestors and primate cousins
(see "When apes attack") have perpetuated what anthropologist Robert
Sussman from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, calls the "5
o'clock news" view of human nature. Just as evening news shows follow
the dictum "if it bleeds, it leads", so many accounts of human behaviour
emphasise conflict. However, Sussman believes the popular focus on
violence and warfare is disproportionate. "Statistically, it is more
common for humans to be cooperative and to attempt to get along than it
is for them to be uncooperative and aggressive towards one another," he
says. And he is not alone in this view. 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.
Among the revisionists are anthropologists Carolyn and Melvin Ember from
Yale University, who argue that biology alone cannot explain documented
patterns of warfare. They oversee the Human Relations Area Files, a
database of information on some 360 cultures, past and present. More
than nine-tenths of these societies have engaged in warfare, but some
fight constantly, others rarely, and a few have never been observed
fighting. "There is variation in the frequency of warfare when you look
around the world at any given time," says Melvin Ember. "That suggests
to me that we are not dealing with genes or a biological propensity."
Anthropologist Douglas Fry of Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland,
agrees. In his book, Beyond War, he identified 74 "non-warring cultures"
that contradict the idea that war is universal. His list includes
nomadic hunter-gatherers such as the !Kung of Africa, Australian
Aborigines and Inuit. These examples are crucial, Fry says, because our
ancestors are thought to have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers from the
emergence of the Homo lineage around 2 million years ago until the
appearance of permanent settlements and agriculture less than 20,000
years ago. That time span constitutes more than 99 per cent of the
evolutionary history of Homo.
Fry does not deny that lethal violence probably occurred among our
nomadic hunter-gatherers' forebears, but he asserts that
hunter-gatherers in the modern era show little or no genuine warfare -
organised fighting between rival groups. Instead, he says, most violence
consists of individual aggression, often between two men fighting over a
woman. These fights might occasionally precipitate feuds between groups
of friends and relatives of the antagonists, but such rivalry is costly
and so rarely lasts long. Humans "have a substantial capacity for
dealing with conflicts non-violently", he says. One group might simply
"vote with its feet" and walk away from the other. Alternatively, a
third party might mediate a resolution. Or in rare cases, a man might be
so compulsively aggressive and violent that others in the band would
banish or even kill him. "In band society, no one likes a bully," says Fry.
When battle begins
Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, also
believes that there is nothing in the fossil or archaeological record
supporting the claim that our ancestors have been waging war against
each other for hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of years. The
first clear-cut evidence of violence against groups as opposed to
individuals appears about 14,000 years ago, he says. The evidence takes
the form of mass graves of skeletons with crushed skulls, hack marks and
projectile points embedded in them; rock art in Australia, Europe and
elsewhere depicting battles with spears, clubs and bows and arrows; and
settlements clearly fortified for protection against attacks (see "The
birth of war").
War emerged when humans shifted from a nomadic existence to a settled
one and was commonly tied to agriculture, Ferguson says. "With a vested
interest in their lands, food stores and especially rich fishing sites,
people could no longer walk away from trouble." What's more, with
settlement came the production of surplus crops and the acquisition of
precious and symbolic objects through trade. All of a sudden, people had
far more to lose, and to fight over, than their hunter-gatherer
forebears (see our timeline of weapons technology).
So rather than being a product of our genes, it looks as if warfare
emerged in response to a changing lifestyle. Even then it was far from
inevitable, as the variability in warmongering between cultures and
across time attests. The Embers have found links between rates of
warfare and environmental factors, notably droughts, floods and other
natural disasters that impact upon resources and provoke fears of
famine. Likewise, Patricia Lambert of Utah State University in Logan
found a connection between drought and warfare among the Chumash, who
inhabited the coast of southern California for millennia before the
arrival of Europeans (Antiquity, vol 65, p 963).
Archaeologist Steven LeBlanc of Harvard University says that war is not
a biological compulsion but a rational response to environmental
conditions such as swelling populations and dwindling food supplies. He
points out that some North American tribes fought savagely over land and
other resources before the arrival of Europeans. But warfare also "stops
on a dime", he says, as a result of ecological or cultural changes. In
his book Constant Battles: Why we fight, LeBlanc describes how warlike
Native American tribes such as the Hopi embraced peace when it was
imposed on them by outsiders. "We are definitely malleable and
susceptible to cultural influence," he says. Warfare is "not so
hard-wired that it can't stop".
Warfare on the wane
Indeed, perhaps the best and most surprising news to emerge from
research on warfare is that humanity as a whole is much less violent
than it used to be (see our timeline of weapons technology). People in
modern societies are far less likely to die in battle than those in
traditional cultures. For example, the first and second world wars and
all the other horrific conflicts of the 20th century resulted in the
deaths of fewer than 3 per cent of the global population. According to
Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois in Chicago, that is an
order of magnitude less than the proportion of violent death for males
in typical pre-state societies, whose weapons consist only of clubs,
spears and arrows rather than machine guns and bombs.
There have been relatively few international wars since the second world
war, and no wars between developed nations. Most conflicts now consist
of guerilla wars, insurgencies and terrorism - or what the political
scientist John Mueller of Ohio State University in Columbus calls the
"remnants of war". He notes that democracies rarely, if ever, vote to
wage war against each other, and attributes the decline of warfare over
the past 50 years, at least in part, to a surge in the number of
democracies around the world - from 20 to almost 100. "A continuing
decline in war seems to be an entirely reasonable prospect," he says.
Most conflicts now consist of guerilla wars, insurgencies and terrorism
- the remnants of war
"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history," agrees
psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard University. Homicide rates in
modern Europe, for example, are more than 10 times lower than they were
in the Middle Ages. Decreases in the rate of warfare and homicide,
Pinker notes, cannot be explained by changes in human nature over such a
relatively short period. Cultural changes and changes in attitude must
be responsible, he says.
Pinker gives several reasons for the modern decline of violence in
general. First, the creation of stable nations with effective legal
systems and police forces. Second, increased life expectancies that make
us less willing to risk our lives through violence. Third, increasing
globalisation and improvements in communications technology, which have
increased our interdependence with, and empathy towards, those outside
of our immediate "tribes". "The forces of modernity are making things
better and better," he says.
However, while war might not be inevitable, neither is peace. Nations
around the world still maintain huge arsenals, including weapons of mass
destruction, and armed conflicts still ravage many regions (see our
timeline of weapons technology). Major obstacles to peace include the
lack of tolerance inherent in religious fundamentalism, which not only
triggers conflicts but often contributes to the suppression of women;
global warming, which will produce ecological crises that may spark
social unrest and violence; overpopulation, particularly when it
produces a surplus of unmarried, unemployed young men, and the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. "Humans can easily
backslide into war," Pinker warns.
Fortunately, understanding the environmental conditions that promote war
also suggests ways to limit it. LeBlanc points out that the modern focus
of human competition - and the warfare that can accompany it - has
shifted somewhat from food, water and land to energy. Two keys to peace,
he suggests, are population control and cheap, clean, reliable
alternatives to fossil fuels. Promoting the spread of participatory
democracy clearly wouldn't hurt, either.
Richard Wrangham of Harvard University takes another line, and makes a
case for the empowerment of women. It is well known that as female
education and economic opportunities rise, birth rates fall. A
stabilised population decreases demands on governmental and medical
services and on natural resources and, by extension, lessens the
likelihood of social unrest and conflict. Since women are less prone to
violence then men, Wrangham hopes that these educational and economic
trends will propel more women into government.
Is this all just idealistic pie-in-the-sky? Well, there is no doubt that
any announcement of the end of warfare would be premature. At the very
least, though, we can confidently reject the fatalistic belief that it
is innate. That assumes "we're some kind of automata where aggressive
genes force us to pick up knives and guns like zombies and attack each
other without any thoughts going through our heads", says Pinker. War is
not in our DNA. And if warfare is not innate then, surely, neither is it
inevitable.
Many people think the discovery of warlike behaviour among chimps
supports the view that war among humans is inevitable. In fact, the work
of some primatologists suggests ways to reduce human conflict.
"We and all the primates have a tendency to be hostile to non-group
members," says Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
But the level of aggression displayed by individuals depends on their
environment. He found, for example, that rhesus monkeys, which are
ordinarily incorrigibly aggressive, grow up to become kinder and gentler
when raised by mild-mannered stump-tail monkeys.
De Waal has also reduced conflicts among monkeys and apes by increasing
their interdependence - making them cooperate to obtain food, for
example - and ensuring they had equal access to food (PLoS Biology, vol
5, e 190). He points to the myriad interdependencies between nations and
groups of people, and believes that by fostering ever more economic
cooperation through alliances such as the European Union we can promote
peace.
Primate violence is not blind and compulsive but calculating and
responsive to circumstance, says Richard Wrangham from Harvard
University. Chimps only fight when they think they can get away with it.
"That's the lesson that I draw for humans." Wrangham says that although
we are much less risk-averse than chimps, human societies - from
hunter-gatherers to modern nations - also behave much more aggressively
toward rival groups if they are confident they can prevail. He reckons
that reducing imbalances of power between nations should reduce the risk
of war (Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, vol 42, p 1).
John Horgan is director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens
Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey
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