This means war!
What war can teach us about the human condition
Gwynne Dyer’s magnum opus War: The Lethal Custom chronicles organized human aggression from its inception in ancient history to the present day; along the way he provides insight into the different facets of this anthropological phenomenon. The most fascinating thought he provides is the surprising fact that most soldiers must be conditioned into capable ‘killing machines’. Until recently that process was ineffective. Prior to a soldier’s indoctrination by his respective millitary he is diametrically opposed to the act of killing on an instinctual level. However, this view poses a problem: what can explain human barbarity, and the massive death tolls during wars, historical and contemporary?
Human cruelty is a viscerally engaging subject. Hegel points out, “The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of History”. Instead of interpreting this as damning evidence of our collective malevolence, our proclivity to remember and focus our attention on suffering may point to our propriety. But a quick scan of the Wikipedia page on torture methods reveals the creative sadism we have employed against our own; from the relatively humane, though humiliating, practice of flogging to the grisly process of being drawn and quartered; from the historically pivotal crucifixion to current day electric shock torture — there seems to be no limit to human ingenuity. Torture is now almost universally condemned, but are we any the wiser now? Will our progenitors look back at the massively successful Saw film series and scorn our thinly veiled schadenfreude as we have looked down upon crowds in antiquity who gathered around to watch the guillotine or noose claim another victim? Future historians would not have to delve so far into our motion picture industry. They would only need peruse the records of Amnesty International
War isn’t documented well, if it is documented at all. Following the infamous leak of some pictures of the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal the United States faced international condemnation. They had no excuse. The methods employed were completely antithetical to ones conceived in a cliché ticking time-bomb scenario. More shockingly, Robert Fisk revealed that “Obama changed his mind about releasing the photographs which GWB refused to make public … the pictures we saw — of the humiliation of men — were outrageous enough. But the ones we haven’t seen show Americans [gang]raping Iraqi women.” It doesn’t stop at Iraq, as the U.S regularly utilizes ‘extroardinary rendition’, more accurately ‘torture by proxy’. It’s frightening to know that the Central Intelligence Agency commits around 100,000 ‘highly illegal’ black operations a year. Those include assassination, torture,and kidnapping. That leaves us to wonder how many they will commit in the seemingly indefinite ‘global war on terror’. This from what is considered the paragon of human rights. There is really no need to go into the horrific acts of other nations who are held to even lower standards.
Putting too much scrutiny on these moral transgressions belies the larger more salient issue of casualties caused by war. World War II tops the list at an astounding 60 million deaths. According to Dyer, from a fundamentally biological viewpoint fighting to death is risky. Only chimpanzees and human beings enact lethal violence on their own kind. But practices like infanticide and eventually, war, may be explained by giving a family, or a genetically homogenous group,an evolutionary advantage. ‘The Ax Fight’, an ethnographic film by anthropologist Tim Asch and Napoleon Chagnon demonstrates the reality that in primitive tribes kinship is the dividing line between factions. But the claim that this is based on our genetic predisposition to help close relatives has been called into question. Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization would argue that Homo Sapien Sapien’s have, by virtue of our biological makeup, a sort of hardwired affability. “Discoveries of mirror-neurons — the so called empathy neurons— allow human beings… to experience another’s situation as if it were one’s own…” spurring scientists to examine human history from an empathic lens. Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal would point to human civilization today as proof that natural selection favors the amicable. How else would we have created and sustained an 8 billion strong population on such an inhospitable planet?
Let’s not lie to ourselves, Dyer implores, and hold onto Rousseau’s 16th century enlightment ideal of the “noble savage” - a naive fantasy. If one were of such an opinion then why not patch together a primitive raft out of sticks and vine to float to the de facto autonomous Sentinelese to make peace. Having been uncontacted for thousands of years they likely have a homicide as high as their hunter-gatherer ancestors -around 15% of males in these communities meet an untimely end. Steven Pinker thoroughly debunks the myth of the “nobel savage” with a vast treasure trove of data, but, in his tome The Better Angels of Our Nature argues that we have come a long way from extricating ourselves from the primordial goo of savagery. That still hasn’t stopped us from razing Babylon to the ground, salting Carthage, eliminating the Aztects, bombing Dresden or nuking Hiroshima however. Not to sound panglossian but, perhaps that was the least we could do.
War may not only be inevitable, it may be necessitous. Robert Wright argues in Non-Zero that war has served well in “pulling” and “pushing” people together; it’s strategically advantageous for nations to form alliances, cohesive states, and built infrastructure to prepare for these. Europe’s wars have prompted the unification of Germany and Italy, the French Revolutionary Wars inspired the formation of Metternich’s Congress of Vienna, World War I did the same for the League of Nations that World War II did for the United Nations. With these institutions and networks war and the many atrocities that are commited in its vein are kept in check, at least for the most part. War is slaughter. But its occurance has motivated us to attempt to prevent useless deaths, it has spurred us to unimagined degrees of collaboration, and it may have provided us, in the end, with some form of salvation.
