Pope barking up wrong tree with scolding on war

evolutionary biology. The world has always been pretty full up, and when a given region’s food sources grow scarcer – a drought, a flood, a change in animal migration routes – some of the local inhabitants are going to starve.

If you’re a territorial animal that lives in groups, then it pays off in the long run to whittle way at the population of the neighbouring groups. When a crunch time arrives, your more numerous group will be able to drive away or kill off the neighbouring band and use its resources as well as your own.

Chimps did not think this strategy up, or choose it. Neither did human beings. Many other group-living predators have the same strategy: lions, hyenas, wolves. Traits like aggressiveness will vary between individuals, but if aggression brings advantages evolution will work in favour of it.

So here we are, a very long time later, stuck with a deeply embedded traditional behaviour that no longer serves our purposes well. In fact, it might even wipe us out. What can we do about it?

There’s no point in yearning for some universal Gandhi who will change the human heart. He doesn’t exist, and anyway it’s not hearts that need to change. It’s human institutions.

The reason war is always with us is not an endless supply of evil potentates with child-like whims. It is an endless supply of human beings, most of whom don’t even have evil in their hearts . . . There’s no point in yearning for some universal Gandhi who will change the human heart. He doesn’t exist . . .

Actually, almost all the military and diplomatic professionals already know that. Even a lot of the politicians understand it, and in the past century – say, since about the middle of the First World War – a great deal of effort has gone into taming war and building institutions that can replace it.

That was what the League of Nations was about. It’s what the United Nations is about, and arms control measures, and international criminal courts to try people who start an aggressive war, starting with the Nuremberg trials in 1945. It’s a work in progress, but there has been a steep and steady decline in the scale and frequency of wars in the last 50 years.

The work is far from finished, and the return of great-power war – with nuclear weapons this time – is an ever-present risk. But nuclear war is not just a threat. It’s also a huge incentive to bring this ancient institution under control, and ultimately to abolish it.

And a little prayer along the way probably wouldn’t do any harm, either.