War: Are we born killers?

The view that wars have their roots in the innate aggressiveness of people - or at least men - is widespread. We say war “breaks out,” just as we say “a volcano erupts” or “a disease breaks out.” So is war a force of nature?

Sigmund Freud attributed human aggression to an innate death instinct. He said this, among other things, in his famous letter to Albert Einstein: “Why war?“explained. He wrote: “Conflicts of interest among people are, in principle, resolved through the use of force. This is how it is throughout the animal kingdom, from which man should not exclude himself;' the cultural attitude and the justified fear of the effects of a future war, which will put an end to warfare in the foreseeable future.

The Austrian Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz put forward a similar thesis in “The So-Called Evil”1, only he based it on the theory of evolution: According to his “psychohydraulic energy model”, if the aggressive instinct is not satisfied, it builds up more and more, until a violent outbreak occurs. After this outbreak, the drive is temporarily satisfied, but begins to build up again until a new outbreak occurs. At the same time, humans also have an innate drive to defend their territory. Lorenz recommended mass sporting events as a means of avoiding wars. This could reduce aggression in a socially meaningful way.

Jane Goodall, who spent 15 years studying chimpanzees in their natural environment on the Gombe River in Tanzania, saw “her” group split after the death of their leader in the 1970s. Within four years, men from the “Northern Group” killed all the men from the “Southern Group.” The shocked Jane Goodall called this war.(2) This gave new fuel to the view of innate killer instinct and innate territoriality.

In 1963, the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published the bestseller: “Yanomamö, the fierce people”(3) about his field work among this people in the Amazon rainforest. “Fierce” can be translated as “violent”, “warlike” or “wild”. His main thesis was that men who killed many enemies had more wives and therefore more offspring than the others, i.e. an evolutionary advantage.

Incomplete explanations

All theories about people's innate propensity for war are flawed. They cannot explain why a specific group of people attack another group at a specific time and why they do not at other times. For example, today most people who grew up in Austria have never experienced a war.

This is exactly the question the anthropologist has to deal with Richard Brian Ferguson from Rutgers University has spent his entire academic life. As a college student during the Vietnam War, he became interested in the roots of the war.

Among other things, he analyzed Chagnon's highly influential report and demonstrated, based on Chagnon's own statistics, that men who had killed enemies were, on average, ten years older and had simply had more time to produce offspring. Historically, he was able to show that the Yanomamö wars were related to the different access of different groups to Western goods, especially machetes as means of production and rifles as weapons. On the one hand, this led to the development of trade in them, but also led to attacks on groups that owned these sought-after goods. In the historical analysis of specific battles, Ferguson found that wars, regardless of the values ​​or beliefs that justified them, were fought when the decision-makers expected personal benefit from them.(4)

For the past 20 years, he has compiled material on all reported cases of lethal aggression among chimpanzees. Among other things, he also analyzed Jane Goodall's field notes. This became the book: “Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill?”, which was published this year. (5) In it he shows that the cases of fatal fights between different groups are linked to the intrusion of humans into the chimpanzees' habitat, while killings within groups are due to status conflicts. 

War is the product of man-made systems, not human nature

In the final chapter he refers to his article published in 2008 “Ten Points on War“.(6) This summarizes his twenty years of research on wars of tribal societies, wars of early states and the Iraq War. Here are the most important theses:

Our species is not biologically designed to wage war

However, humans have the ability to learn and even enjoy martial behavior.

War is not an inescapable part of our social existence

It is not true that humans have always waged war. Archaeological findings from many millennia show at what point in time war appears on the scene in an area: fortified villages or cities, weapons specially suited for war, an accumulation of skeletal remains that indicate a violent death, traces of arson. In many regions of the world there is data that shows centuries or millennia without war. The traces of war appear together with sedentary lifestyles, with increasing population density (you can't just avoid each other), with trade in valuable goods, with segregated social groups and with severe ecological upheavals. In the area of ​​today's Israel and Syria, there were 15.000 years ago, towards the end of the Paleolithic, the “Natufians” settled down. But the first signs of war only appeared there 5.000 years ago, in the early Bronze Age.

The decision to start a war is made when the decision-makers expect personal benefit from it

War is a continuation of domestic politics by other means. Whether the decision to go to war is made or not depends on the outcome of domestic political rivalries between groups that benefit from war - or believe that they will benefit from it - and others who expect war to be disadvantageous. The rhetoric used to justify the necessity of war almost never appeals to material interests but to higher moral values: ideas about what constitutes humanity, religious duties, invocations of heroism, and so on. Practical wishes and needs are thus transformed into moral rights and obligations. This is necessary to motivate warriors, soldiers or members of militias to kill. And it is necessary to get the population to accept the war. But often invoking higher values ​​is not enough. Military scientists have shown that getting soldiers to kill is more difficult than is usually assumed (7). Then the soldiers have to be trained through brutal drills to become fighting machines, or else it will happen Drying used to cause soldiers to run into machine gun fire with “Hurrah”.

War shapes society

War adapts society to its needs. War leads to the development of standing armies, it shapes educational systems - from Sparta to the Hitler Youth -, it shapes popular culture - films in which the "good guys" destroy the "bad guys", computer games that have titles like: "Call to Arms" , “World of Tanks” or simply: “Total War” – war solidifies borders, changes the landscape through defensive structures, promotes the development of new technologies, and influences the state budget and the tax system. When a society is internally adapted to the needs of war, warfare becomes easier. Yes, it becomes a necessity if existing institutions are to retain their justification. What is an army, a war ministry, a tank factory without an enemy?

In conflict, opposites and opponents are constructed

In war there must be a clear dividing line between an “us” and a “them,” otherwise you wouldn't know who to kill. It is rare for a war to involve only two pre-existing groups. Alliances are made, alliances are forged. The “we” in the Iraq War was not identical to the “we” in the Afghanistan War. Alliances fall apart and new ones form. Yesterday's enemy can be today's ally. Ferguson coined the term “Identerest” to describe the interplay of identities and interests. Religious, ethnic, national identities are formed in conflict over interests: “Whoever is not with us is against us!”

Leaders favor war because war favors leaders

War makes it easier for leaders to rally “their” people behind them and thus be able to control them better. This also applies to terrorists. Terrorist groups are usually highly hierarchically organized and decisions are made at the top. The leaders don't blow themselves up and massacre themselves. They gain power and the benefits that power brings.

Peace is more than the absence of war

So are we born killers? No. By nature we are just as capable of peacefulness as we are of brute force. The 300.000 years that Homo Sapiens lived on this planet without wars bear witness to this. The archaeological evidence shows that wars have become a permanent fixture since the first states emerged. Humanity has, without meaning to, created systems based on competition and pushing for expansion. The company that doesn't grow will go under sooner or later. The great power that does not expand its markets does not remain a great power for long.

Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace has its own dynamics. Peace requires different patterns of behavior and other social and political institutions. Peace requires value systems that promote equality and reject violence as a means to an end. Peace needs systems at all levels of society that are not based on competition. Then it will also be possible for us humans to live out our peaceful nature instead of our warlike one. (Martin Auer, November 10.11.2023, XNUMX)

Footnotes

1 Lorenz, Konrad (1983): The so-called evil, Munich, German paperback publisher

2 Goodall, Jane (1986): The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Boston, Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press.

3 Chagnon, Napoleon (1968): Yanomamö: The Fierce People (Case Studies in cultural anthropology). New York, : Holt.

4 Ferguson, Brian R. (1995): Yanomami Warfare: A Political History. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press,.

5 Ferguson, Brian R. (2023): Chimpanzees, War and History. Are Men Born to Kill? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6 Ferguson, Brian R. (2008): Ten Points on War. In: Social Analysis 52 (2). DOI: 10.3167/sa.2008.520203.

7 Fry, Douglas P, (2012): Life without War. In: Science 336, 6083: 879-884.