01 March 2009

Will War Ever End?

Anthropologists find correlations between war and environmental stresses such as drought.

By John Horgan

Warfare is not part of the natural condition of man. Civilization promotes less violent ways of effecting change.

John Horgan is a science journalist and director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New York. His books include The End of Science, The Undiscovered Mind, and Rational Mysticism.

This article appears in the March 2009 issue of eJournal USA, Nonviolent Paths to Social Change (PDF, 783 KB).

Of all the forms that human violence takes, war — organized, lethal violence between two or more groups — is the most profoundly destructive. Throughout human history, visionaries as diverse as Immanuel Kant and Martin Luther King Jr. have prophesied the end of war or the threat thereof as a means of resolving disputes between nations.

Today, however, most people have come to accept war and militarism as inevitable, according to surveys I have conducted over the past few years. When asked “will humans ever stop fighting wars?” more than 90 percent of the students at my university answered “no.” Asked to justify this view, many students responded that war is “in our genes.”

Recent research on warfare and aggression seems, at first glance, to support this fatalistic conclusion. The anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois estimates that more than 90 percent of pre-state, tribal societies engaged in at least occasional warfare, and many fought constantly. Tribal combat usually involved skirmishes and ambushes rather than pitched battles, but over time the fighting could produce mortality rates as high as 50 percent. These findings, Keeley contends, demolish the claim of the 18th-century French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau that, prior to civilization, humans were “noble savages” living in harmony with each other and with nature.

Some scientists trace warfare all the way back to the common ancestor we shared with chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives. Beginning in the mid-1970s, researchers in Africa have observed male chimpanzees from the same troop banding together to patrol their territory; if they encounter a chimp from a different troop, the raiders beat him, often to death.

Mortality rates from intergroup violence among chimpanzees, the Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham reports, are roughly comparable to rates observed among human hunter-gatherers. “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war,” Wrangham asserts, “making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.”

Wrangham contends that natural selection has favored male primates, including humans, predisposed to violent aggression. As evidence, he cites studies of the Yanomamo, a polygamous tribe that dwells in the Amazonian rain forest. Yanomamo men from different villages often engage in lethal raids and counterraids. The University of California anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who has observed the Yanomamo for decades, found that male killers on average had twice as many wives and three times as many children as males who never killed.

But Chagnon vehemently rejects the notion that Yanomamo warriors are compelled to fight by their aggressive instincts. Truly compulsive killers, Chagnon explains, quickly get killed themselves rather than living long enough to have many wives and children.

Successful Yanomamo warriors, Chagnon says, are usually quite controlled and calculating; they fight because that is how a male advances in their society. Moreover, many Yanomamo men have confessed to Chagnon that they loathe war and wish it could be abolished from their culture — and, in fact, rates of violence have dropped dramatically in recent decades as Yanomamo villages have accepted the laws and mores of the outside world.

Not Human Nature

Indeed, the on-again, off-again pattern of warfare leads many researchers to reject the notion that war is an inevitable consequence of human nature. “If war is deeply rooted in our biology, then it’s going to be there all the time,” the anthropologist Jonathan Haas at the Field Museum in Chicago argues. “And it’s just not.” War, Haas adds, is certainly not innate in the same sense as language, which has been exhibited by all known human societies at all times.

The anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember also assert that biological theories cannot explain patterns of warfare among either pre-state or state societies. The Embers oversee Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files, a database of information on some 360 cultures past and present. Although more than 90 percent of these societies have engaged in warfare at least once, some societies fight constantly and others rarely. The Embers have found correlations between rates of warfare and environmental factors, notably droughts, floods, and other natural disasters that provoke fears of scarcity.

Educating girls is believed to lead to population stability and less social unrest.

The root cause of warfare, the Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc concurs, is the Malthusian struggle for food and other resources. “Since the beginning of time,” he says, “humans have been unable to live in ecological balance. No matter where we happen to live on Earth, we eventually outstrip the environment. This has always led to competition as a means of survival, and warfare has been the inevitable consequence of our ecological-demographic propensities.” Two keys to avoiding conflict in the future, he believes, are controlling population growth and finding cheap alternatives to fossil fuels.

Studies of nonhuman primates have also revealed the importance of environmental and cultural factors. Frans de Waal, professor of primate behavior at Emory University, has shown that rhesus monkeys, which ordinarily seem intractably aggressive, are much less belligerent when raised by mild-mannered stump-tail monkeys. De Waal has also reduced conflicts among monkeys and apes by increasing their interdependence — by forcing them to cooperate to obtain food, for example — and ensuring their equal access to food.

Applying these lessons to humans, de Waal sees promise in alliances such as the European Union, which promote trade and travel and hence interdependence. “Foster economic ties, and the reason for warfare, which is usually resources, will probably dissipate,” he says.

Perhaps the most hopeful and surprising statistic to emerge from modern war research is that humanity as a whole has become much less warlike than it used to be. World Wars I and II and all the other horrific conflicts of the 20th century resulted in the deaths of less than 3 percent of the global population. That is an order of magnitude less than the rate of violent death for males in the average primitive society, whose weapons consisted only of clubs and spears rather than machine guns and bombs.

If war is defined as an armed conflict leading to at least 1,000 deaths per year, there have been relatively few international wars over the past half-century, and civil wars have declined sharply since peaking in the early 1990s.

Most conflicts now consist of guerilla wars, insurgencies, and terrorism — or what the political scientist John Mueller of Ohio State University calls the “remnants of war.” Mueller rejects biological explanations for the trend, since “testosterone levels seem to be as high as ever.” Noting that democracies rarely if ever wage war against each other, Mueller attributes the decline of warfare since World War II at least in part to a surge in the number of democracies around the world.

More Civilization

The Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker identifies several other possible reasons for the recent decline of warfare and other forms of violence. First, the creation of stable states with effective legal systems and police forces has eliminated the Hobbesian anarchy of all against all. Second, our increased life expectancies make us less willing to risk our lives by engaging in violence. Third, as a result of globalization and communications, we have become increasingly interdependent on — and empathetic toward — others outside of our immediate tribes. Although humanity can “easily backslide into war,” Pinker concludes, “the forces of modernity are making things better and better.”

In short, many lines of research contradict the myth that war is a constant of the human condition. These studies also suggest that — contrary to the myth of the peaceful, noble savage — civilization has not created the problem of warfare; it is helping us solve it. We need more civilization, not less, if we wish to eradicate war.

Civilization has given us legal institutions that resolve disputes by establishing laws and negotiating agreements and enforcing them. These institutions, which range from local courts to the United Nations, have vastly reduced the risk of violence both within and between nations. Obviously, our institutions are far from perfect. Nations around the world still maintain huge arsenals, including weapons of mass destruction, and armed conflicts still ravage many regions. So what should we do to promote peace, in addition to the proposals mentioned above?

The anthropologist Melvin Konner of Emory University proposes female education as another key to reducing conflict. Many studies, he notes, have demonstrated that an increase in the education of females leads to a decrease in birth rates. The result is a stabilized population, which decreases demands on governmental and medical services and depletion of natural resources, and hence the likelihood of social unrest.

A lower birth rate also reduces what some demographers call “bare branches” — unmarried, unemployed young men, who are associated with higher rates of violent conflict both within and between nations. “Education of girls is by far the best investment you can make in a developing country,” Konner says.

Accepting Peace

Obviously, ending war will not be easy. War, it seems fair to say, is overdetermined; that is, it can spring from many different causes. Peace, if it is to be permanent, must be overdetermined too.

Scientists can help promote peace in two ways: first, by publicly rejecting the notion that warfare is inevitable; and second, by doing more intensive research on the causes of war and peace. The short-term goal of this research would be finding ways to reduce conflict in the world today, wherever it might occur. The long-term goal would be to identify ways for humanity to achieve permanent disarmament: the elimination of armies, arms, and arms industries.

Global disarmament seems a remote possibility now. But can we really accept armies and armaments, including weapons of mass destruction, as permanent features of civilization? As recently as the late 1980s, global nuclear war still seemed like a distinct possibility. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended peacefully. Apartheid also ended in South Africa without significant violence, and human rights have advanced elsewhere around the world. If the capacity for war is in our genes, as many seem to fear these days, so are the capacity — and the desire — for peace.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.