Why War?

It is a common for one to look around and wonder just how things came to be the way they are; it is the curse of the historian to not be able to shrug and go on to other things. So it is, then, that we will consider war, its’ roots, and why it plays such a large part in our lives today.

The roots of war predate civilization; they can be found in the division of labor of pre-civilization hunter-gatherer societies, and the effect of this division on the development of early civilization. While there are certainly exceptions, this division was along gender lines; females largely specialized in gathering, while males similarly specialized in hunting. These tasks almost certainly led to the invention by women of the first basis for civilization, agriculture: it may have been something as simple as the realization that concentrating a preferred vegetable in a close-by area would reduce the need to walk, though it is also likely that being able to stay close to camp to care for children and allow pregnant women to work more are factors, along with others; the issue is still being studied and debated.

What is not debatable is that by concentrating valuable plants into a specific area, the value of that piece of land was greatly increased. It became precious-and thus made a tempting target for those gatherers or raiders of another group or tribe. It became necessary to defend this piece of land, and thus was born the second basis for early civilization: warfare. Warfare was almost certainly the invention of men, who brought the tools and weapons of hunting and killing animals to bear against other humans. The first battles probably consisted of no more than a few dozen combatants, and it is likely that the first massacres of humans by humans followed shortly thereafter. The foundations of modern civilization, then, are simple: adequate population; the ability to produce a surplus of food-organized agriculture-and the ability to defend one’s resources and take the resources of others-organized warfare.

An important point to note here is that as civilization has spread across the globe, and population-human capital-mining, trade, natural resources, and manufacturing have also created methods of making land valuable, they-along with agriculture-have also created foundations of civilizations, in addition to warfare. The one constant has been war.

This early militarization of human society paid dividends: attackers succeeded often and profitably enough to spur a major reaction-the walled city. Walled cities appear as early as Jericho, 7000 BCE, and the presence of this fortification implies much: the ability to mobilize a huge population into non-food-producing labor, and thus highly developed agriculture, as well as a competent army that could both defend the agricultural areas and prevent the sack of the city while the wall was being built. Likewise, no ruler diverts wealth-producing laborers into non-productive wall-building without some pressing need, which further implies the existence of other similarly-capable societies (and armies). The walled city, of course, became the city-state.

It is not too early to begin to develop some conclusions, the largest being the strong implication that warfare is socially, not biologically, determined. The almost complete absence of large-scale slaughter of people in pre-civilization societies is a strong indicator of this-most “warfare” in pre-civilized societies were status displays or small skirmishes by young males seeking status, which, while dangerous, were not often lethal, and almost never led to mass slaughter. We fight wars because our civilization-our system of working together in a complementary way to enable large numbers of humans to live together and better is founded on war. War is a feature of our culture, not our DNA. It is in our cultural operating system-which can be reprogrammed.

It is easy to draw a thread between the complementary evolution of war and the State-more effective methods of warfare sped the evolution of the state, which continually developed more effective methods of warfare. They are conjoined concepts and institutions-the state and war. Indeed, until recently, they were completely indivisible; for most of the history of civilization, most of a ruler’s time was spent preparing for and fighting wars, often with the ruler himself leading at the front. The idea of the state and the army as separate entities is a novel concept, and while in theory the army is subordinate to the state, this is obviously often untrue, as a million military coup d’états demonstrate: for the state, the military is the most treacherous of weapons, that weapon with a mind and interests of its own. Yet the state and the military continue their relationship of necessity, as only the state can provide the resources that modern war fighting demands, and only sufficient military power can provide the state the security it demands. In other words, the dynamics of the relationships between large groups of people, whether tribes or nations, have not changed, since those hunter-gatherers fought off that raiding party trying to strip their field.

So, then, is the problem insoluble? Are we doomed to a short, brutal future of heavily-armed nation-states fighting endless wars, until the big one finally brings the curtain down? All organisms must adapt or die, and adaptation is often violent, even deadly, but a law of systems is that there are no static conditions- all systems are evolving or devolving, rising or falling (although entropy is always maximized in the end-all systems break down). If one applies this to the evolution of states, one sees a steady progression from city, to city-state, to nation-state, to superstate, to….world state. This must be the ultimate goal if the threat of war, and especially total nuclear war, is to be functionally eliminated, but the birth of an evolving world state would require the willful diminution of the sovereignty of individual nation states along with the effective elimination of individual national control over the arsenals of power projection-those weapon systems that can be used to attack other lands. The world is even now busily forming superstates, such as the EU, and similar efforts are underway in both Americas and Asia. Simultaneously, all nations vociferously defend their sovereign right to use military force, even as the trends strongly favor cooperative alliance, in which military force, especially nuclear, has no role. Nations resist this, seeking to maintain the status quo-this can be seen in the relentless attempt to undermine and discredit even a faltering step like the UN. Both institutions-the nation and the military-are expressing the will to survive, in accordance with the idea that sufficiently complex systems, even intangible, will mimic the behavior of living organisms, and if cornered, will certainly fight-and the cycle will continue, at least temporarily. There will be a world state-or there will be a catastrophic crash of the nation state as an entity. The role of the corporate state in the resulting vacuum is unclear…

To say war is uncivilized could not be more wrong-war is a fundamental feature of civilization, as it has developed so far.

(The author would like to acknowledge the work of, and thank, Dr. Gwynne Dyer, whose excellent study War was publlished in 1985, and re-edited and re-issued in 2005.)

Crossposted at The Seminal