Why war will always be part of the human world
• The 110 conflicts around the globe suggest that we will not be rid of war any time soon
At the time of writing, there are more than 110 armed and violent conflicts, wars, big and small, under way across the world. Making this observation with the prescript “at the time of writing” is not simple frippery. We are in an age when war can break out at any time and anywhere. When have we not been on the edge of war?
Among the 110 armed conflicts recorded by the Geneva Academy’s Rule of Law in Armed Conflict Online Portal, there are 45 wars in the Middle East and North Africa; 35 in Africa; 21 in Asia; seven in Europe; and six in Latin America. Two of these conflicts, in Ukraine and in Palestine, have drawn in at least one of the “great” powers, the US, which is unsurprising. Washington was always going to side with anyone who opposes or is in conflict with Russia, and Israel has always enjoyed the safety guarantees, and the political, military and moral support of the US. The US has, also, tried to pull China into the war on Palestinians, if China “wants to be taken seriously”.
If we look back to history of, say, the past 500 years, there has rarely been an extended period when there was peace — the complete absence of violence — across the globe. And there seems to be no end nor a decline in wars. There are of course Panglossian views, represented by Steven Pinker and Yuval Harari, among others, which would insist that the seven decades after World War 2 have been an era of peace, and that this was sufficient proof that war was in decline. This argument rests on the idea that there was no war between big powers. In his Panglossian best, Pinker selected the right data to support his contention that far from humans becoming more violent, “something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler”.
Pinker famously also said that because of science and technology, it was now much easier to identify pathogens and invent vaccines, and that pandemics had probably disappeared from history. Then the Covid-19 pandemic arrived.
The Cold War peace, or Long Peace, trope is risible. It rests, all too conveniently, on the fact that during that period the US and the Soviet Union outsourced their wars to Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, among other places. In a review of Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, British philosopher John Gray emphasised the point.
“In much the same way that rich societies exported their pollution to developing countries, the societies of the highly developed world exported their conflicts,” Gray wrote.
One contention, which is easy to agree with, is that Pinker and many fellow travellers are simply trying to put themselves, and liberal internationalism, on the right side of history. Gray makes the connection astutely. He explained that Pinker’s contentions about the long peace (Cold War peace) “is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or freemarket economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.”
THE CAUSES OF PARTICULAR WARS
Amuch more textured, and more appreciable, set of arguments has been put forward in The Rise of Organised Brutality; A Historical Sociology of Violence, in which Sinisa Malesevic provides a studied account of how organisational capacity, ideological penetration and contrived micro-solidarities have caused a rise in organised violence. To get a sense of the way micro-solidarities are made up, consider the way one side in a conflict may posit a moral argument that “not supporting us” is a sign of hatred (of “us”), and by extension a licence to the other side to kill “us”.
All of this begs questions about why we go to war and whether war is, as the wise historian Thucydides said (sometime in the 5th century BCE), “a human thing”.
We could add, here, Tolstoy’s bafflement about organised brutality, when he asked: “What does it all mean? Why did it happen? What made these people burn down houses and kill their own kind?”
There is necessarily no single cause of any particular war, and the best we can do about war, in general, is run through some of the things that make us warlike. Tolstoy’s bafflement is the bewilderment of us all. Thus declared Martin van Creveld, the Dutch military theorist and historian: “So elemental is the human need to endow the shedding of blood with some great and even sublime significance that it renders the intellect almost entirely helpless.”
Reflecting on the creation of micro-solidarities discussed briefly above, Van Creveld, the Dutchman who is now “at home” in Israel, also said: “War always produces a tsunami of kitsch. The kind that seeks to show how utterly wicked, utterly cruel and utterly depraved, the enemy is. The kind that claims to weep for, and commiserate with, the losses on one’s own side. The kind that contrasts our heroes’ indomitable courage and commitment to the sacred cause with the dastardly cowardice and treachery so characteristic of, so inherent in, the other side.”
WAR AS A HUMAN THING
Anyway, as difficult as it may be, and as open to manipulation of morality and sentiments, war may be, let us consider, first, some of the causes of particular wars. The start of World War 1 is as good a place to start as any, since it is remembered for being
especially brutal because of a combination of mass armies and modern weaponry, which killed faster and more efficiently than in any previous war.
By one account, almost 20million people were killed in that conflict.
The headline story is that World War 1 started with the assassination of presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by the Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip on June 28 1914.
A RANGE OF COMPULSIONS
That explanation is fine, if we want to be selective and politically parsimonious. However, the events of any particular day are almost always a child of earlier shifts or states of affairs. Among the causes of World War 1 were German millenarianism, that “Spirit of 1914” inspired by a belief that a major transformation was imminent, after which everything would change. Other causes were Serbian nationalism and rivalries among European empires, notably the British and the French. The assassination of Ferdinand simply lit the touch paper in a cauldron of competing passions.
On the surface, then, and looking (only) at World War 1, wars can be started by competing nationalisms (Serbian nationalism), competition for resources (expanding empires) or competition for power (German, French, British). We may continue, then, and ask more questions and probe deeper.
There has to be a range of compulsions beyond extant political, economic, territorial or imperial passions and conditions that justify organised brutality against our fellow human beings. A second consideration would be war in itself. We can accept, without much difficulty, that war has been one of the significant drivers, though not the only one, of human progress, and social change and transformation. Because of the organised brutality, the way war sucks in non-combatants and destroys the spaces where humans live, grow and prosper, it is important to try to understand just what it is that makes humans warlike, and if it is just humans being human.
Conflict among humans has been resilient.
In her excellent study of all of the above and more, Barbara Ehrenreich explained in Bloodrites: Origins and History of the Passions of War that Sigmund Freud was convulsed by “the unprecedented harvest of dead bodies” of World War 1, which led him to conclude that there was “some dark flaw in the human psyche, a perverse desire to destroy, countering Eros and the will to live”.
With this in mind, and considering the “national interests” of nationalism, territorial gains and imperial reach and power, Ehrenreich led us to acknowledge that we can simultaneously hold both views “avowing that war is a gainful enterprise, intended to meet the material needs of the groups engaged in it, and, (at the same time, believe) that it fulfils deep and ‘irrational’ psychological needs such as those which so disturbed Freud”.
Ehrenreich added that war was “too complex and collective an activity to be accounted for by a single warlike instinct lurking within the individual
psyche”.
What then explains our penchant for war? The late Christopher Coker of the London School of Economics applied a method for explaining animal behaviour developed by the Nobel prize-winning Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen. While I have personal/ intellectual objections against transplanting methods from the natural world to the social world, Coker worked on the precept that war was unique to humans, and suggested that the Tinbergen method could help us better understand why we go to war as regularly as we do. So as not to traduce the significance of Tinbergen’s achievements, nor misrepresent his method, he defined four major categories for explanations of animal behaviour: mechanism; adaptive value; ontogeny; and phylogeny. There is nothing to gain from opening that trapdoor and the long tangent we may be led ...
Put differently, and expanded slightly, the Tinbergen method directs inquiry to biological makeup and origins and human NDA; cultures and traditions; religious beliefs; why war (and warfare) evolved as it has; and what our penchant for war means for the survival of our species? All of these involve human agency, intent and wilfulness.
Looking at future wars and future efforts at collaboration and co-operation, Coker concluded that human intelligence “is specific to one species — it’s different from that of other animals and it will be different again from the machine intelligence we are about to create”.
If we imagine a “post-human future”, and how far scientific advances in gene-editing, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) will decentre human agency, there is little
reason to expect that war, and decisions to go to war, will be transferred to machines. War will remain a human thing as that 5th century historian, Thucydides, once said.
The causes of war may, then, be found in nationalist urges, identity politics, extension of territorial influence and control, and in pursuit of pecuniary gain. Moral appeals play a significant role in these areas; they typically proceed from one side professing its exceptionalism and numinousness, and casting opponents as “evil” or “cruel” or children of a lesser god.
HAVE-NOTS
One cause of war that is especially appealing is an age-old conflict between the haves and the have-nots. In this case, people who have power and influence (and resources) want to have more and/or at least protect what they have. Those who do not may want to have it all.
Earlier this year, Britain, still hankering after its time of unchallenged greatness, warned that it would go to war to protect what it had, described as “interests”. Britain’s secretary of defence, Grant Shapps, told an audience in London that the post-Cold War “peace dividend” was over, and that western countries needed to prepare for further conflicts involving China, Russia, North Korea and Iran over the next five years.
“Looking at today’s conflicts across the world, is it more likely that the number grows or reduces? I suspect we all know the answer — it’s likely to grow,” he said.
We are back, then, to power, interests and the drive for those who have power to fight to keep it, or prevent it from being taken away. Ultimately, it is hard to see an end to war. For as long as there are notions of exceptionalism and imbalances in power, all the likely causes referred to above, may lead back to wars. What is difficult to accept is that humans have become less violent. At any rate, there is nothing in current trends, amid the 110 conflicts around the world, to suggest that the world will be rid of war any time soon. It is, after all a human thing.
IT IS IMPORTANT TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND JUST WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES HUMANS WARLIKE, AND IF IT IS JUST HUMANS BEING HUMAN