Why We War – The Human Investment in Slaughter and the Possibilities of Peace
PREFACE – After 9/11/01
War is a crime. Make no mistake; war and terrorism differ in the degree of “official” sanction by politically recognized government, but killing is killing – and the dead don’t come back. They all had baby pictures. All had families that loved them. All the dead loved. Some may have patriotically volunteered to die, or were otherwise coerced by their nation, while far too many were “collateral damage” – innocent dead. All are alike in death. None care whether they were victims of committed terrorists motivated to make political statement through murder. Neither do the dead care whether or not they were made dead as a result of “official policy.” This book is not about “a war,” or “the war,” it is about all war. I take the position that war and the forces which perpetuate war are the central crime against humanity.
War has been said to be the “extension of diplomacy by other means’” and the “health of the state.” Personally, I like the Ernest Hemingway observation: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” War simply legitimizes crime.
Crime, we are told, is a matter of a combination of means, motive, and opportunity. Civilization as we practice it has given humanity the means, and the opportunities. This book is mostly about motive. Historically, this book was written as the result of a lecture series I presented as part of California Community College
Interdisciplinary Studies program in the 1990s. As such, what former Assistant
Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney calls the Fourth World War on terrorism had not yet begun. Even before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and Washington I, like many social scientists, had been intensely concerned about the increasing frequency of war. And, perhaps more importantly, I was concerned about why humanity continues to resort to warfare at all. What is it that keeps us at it? Why and how is humanity continually motivated not to peace, but to war? What’s the excuse? Where are the excuses? They got us, so we get them. “We” are preserving the peace. “They” are the evil foes of freedom. You are either with us, or against us. All of these and more are excuses we use. Finally, what does war do to us? We treat war as a necessity, as an inevitability of human nature. Because of this, the sheer social investment in conflict appears to outweigh any investment in peace and human rights. War is more “true” to the human experience since the middle of the Nineteenth Century than ever. As if in graphic correction to the myth of human progress, we have become more warlike as we have become more complex and civilized.
And now we war. Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been the sole global superpower. Yet with the threat of Soviet domination abated, the U.S. government has continued to pursue provocative unilateral foreign policies that have produced not peace, but a series of asymmetrical conflicts that we call a War on Terrorism. It is (as always) “us” against “them.” The “us” – the U.S. – has the power to annihilate life on a scale unheard of in human history. Or, the power to actually begin to change to what could also be unheard of in human history (certainly in U.S. history) – a global power whose government is committed to a policy of genuine peace. Being the sole superpower, and the self-styled global police should make peace obtainable. Yet peace has continued to elude “us.”
Imagine a superpower committed to making peace an institution, instead of continuing to institutionalize war. Being a “superpower” means having incredible influence, and resources. And, it means being able to project those resources anywhere in the world. How has the U.S. used this “superpower?” The Presidents of the United States had declared war on Iraq because of the ongoing Saddam Hussein regime. Because I am a citizen of the United States, I was able to record the declarations on videotape, and was able to watch the war on television in the comfort of my office. I mention this because of the unnatural realities of life in the United States. Do not overlook the irony of your relatively protected position. There was war – despite massive lack of support from the governments of the world. There was war – despite the huge popular outcry against war from citizens of the world – citizens of the U.S included. There was war because just as many governments wanted war, and because just as many citizens of the world are convinced that war is the only way. There will be more war. There will be more terrorist attacks on the U.S. – despite the fact that any conventional war will most likely be quickly won (as it was in Iraq) by the United States and its dwindling list of often anemic allies. There will be innocent people killed. And, as I write, the television commercials continue. This is because war has become a product that has been packaged for your consumption.
We are at war right now, and – if history shows anything – we will be at war again, soon. When speaking out against war at the Community College where I teach history, I once had someone yell: "support our troops!" My retort was "who said anything about the troops? I am against war! The troops didn't start it," I continued, "The troops on both sides and the Iraqi citizens die in it." We have to get over this war or that war if we intend to end all war. Of necessity we have to deal with the current situation and the current players. But that must not mean that we lose sight of the big picture – that humanity needs reasonable strategies for sustained peace.
This is the nature of the beast. And there is a lot to it. At the time of this writing, George Bush, Karl Rove, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others of that ilk were at the head of a vast and powerfully structured apparatus. Saddam Hussein was, likewise, in control of a huge and deadly mass weapon organized to create death and destruction. These and other power brokers throughout history used their authority – spent human lives – for their continuing profit, power, and social control. Other than power, influence, and wealth, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld risked little personal safety. And if the U.S. would have lost, they would still be safe and in control. Saddam Hussein would have risked little, if he had not challenged the power of the Bush clique. Either way, both used countless lives to shield their positions of power and wealth. I particularly like Michael Moore's critique (received in March, 2003). “How many pro-war congressional members risked lives intimate to them? One, that's right, one.”
"Saddam could have become another Hitler," you nervously and passionately chide. “Perhaps,” begins my retort. Saddam Hussein, like Adolph Hitler, was a product of history. Each had a background that gave them reality. Those backgrounds certainly included organized violence and more. Their stories and ours contain the cultural and social organization that makes these men the inevitable products of history. I am not so worried about Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot, or Adolph Hitler. The stories of individual wars, or aggressors are mostly important for what they tell about the next war. It is this history of organized murder that this book addresses.
Without the social organization of violence, without the cultural evolution of conflict, Adolph Hitler would have just been an incompetent artist, and would have remained a minor player on the political fringe in post-World War One Germany. But, Hitler had the example of WWI to help propel him to the forefront of pre-existing institutions of organized violence. He had the perception of the denial of human rights, and the reality of the lack of economic justice as a result of the Treaty of Versailles to motivate followers in Germany. Hitler also had a global backdrop of colonial imperialism that would cause his war to be our war. And, he had a vast human history of conflict to use as a basis for constructing new and more efficient institutions of destruction. Without these, Hitler may have become a petty local gangster – as Saddam would have remained – had it not been for a human history of acquiring and maintaining both wealth and power through the social organization of violence. I believe in evil. I have seen it in many forms. Hitler and Saddam Hussein were evil. They may have become grand thugs regardless, but the pre-existing institution of war made them mass murderers.
Which, then, is the greater evil?
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the others had no genuine anointed moral status. War is war. And it is the killing of other human beings on a massive scale. Both of the major political parties share in this indictment. Democrats like Joseph Biden were just as much to blame – and were just as immune to personal threat of war – as any of the Republicans. What they all had to gain at the expense of so many lives was continued power, wealth, and influence. It is leadership that starts wars. Leadership benefits…people die. That is the nature of civilized warfare. We have become socially organized as human beings to make many things possible. War does not have to be so regular a result of social organization. "We have a responsibility," one of my students said, "to prevent another holocaust." I agree. We do have a responsibility. Our leaders have a responsibility to us to promote institutions of lasting peace. They have failed due to the very nature of their power. We have a responsibility not to let them continue.
This war is history. And, like all war, this war is the result of history. The book below presents a viewpoint on the history that has led to war. Our task is to understand how this has all come about. This is not armchair history. History has come home. It is time to increase organized activism for peace. Not for a second do I mean to dismiss or to discount vital organized peace efforts like those of Ramsey Clark and the International Action Center/A.N.S.W.E.R., and other NGO’s. But, if anti-war activists are seen as “leftists” outside of the political mainstream, then it tells us some things about peace activism and the war system. One obvious conclusion is that war is more central to the system than peace. It also means that the values supporting war are still the core values of most people in society. And, finally, what it all means is that more peace activism is better. This brief history is meant as a brick in the foundation for supporting more antiwar activism and a change in the core cultural values that support war. The understandings of the history that has led to this war – and to war in general – are crucial to your future, and to the future of the people of the world. My motivations are sincere and utterly selfish. I have two children. Two sons. Men fight war. I worry that as I have been steeped in conflict, so will they be. I don’t want my sons to be caught up in war – any war. And so, I advocate peace. But, it is not as simple as that, is it?
I am the center of a paradox that a former companion called hypocrisy. I own guns – not unlike many Americans. Not an arsenal, like some Americans, but still, more than one. I have computer games that involve significant amounts of violent mayhem. I like “action” movies. I was a kick-boxer. I have three black belts. I still go to a boxing gym to work out. I was also a Sixties California Bay area kid. Raised on civil rights, peace and freedom – anti-Vietnam all the way. I have remained anti-war. I advocate and organize against violence in the streets and against war in the world. Yet, part of my identity – a key part – is that of the warrior. My former companion and I once argued over this book. She saw this book as doomed to hypocrisy. The power of patriarchy is too strong. To her, I am a victim of my own male dominant arrogance and thus cannot possibly be aware of genuine potentials for peace. After all, it is fairly indisputable that (mostly) men make war. And it may be that masculinity (the social construction of maleness) is violent. It is certain that to “be a man” in most societies means to be involved with assertion, aggression, power, and dominance. Why don’t I give up my guns? My companion said that it is impossible to be a pacifist, as she is, if I come from such male-ness, and that peace advocacy is for me at best uncommitted, and at worst hypocritical. For my part (short of giving up the argument entirely), I understand her position, and I feel the paradox. She suggested that the most important potential contribution of this book may be to look at myself. Not a biography, but maybe a pathology. I’m not sure I’ll see what she wants me to see, but I’m committed to looking at what I can. This is why it is especially important for me to continue my hypocrisy. I loved her. I love her still. And, women along with children are among the most regular victims of war.
I am a flower child become martial artist – a warrior advocating peace. I am the same age as Osama bin Laden. I am just common enough a sort to be arrogant, and just arrogant enough to think that how I got to be this way may be important to understanding war and how to stop it. What motivated me? How did I go from peace to war, and how can I be who I have become – a gun owner advocating peace? I think that if peace ever becomes a reality, it will be because warriors truly learn to make genuine peace. Peace that is not a noun, but a verb.
- Al Smith, Fall 2004
INTRODUCTION
WHY WE WAR
War makes no sense. There may be just causes rationalized. Heroes and villains may be identified. There may be winners and losers who are often distinguishable only by the differing levels of pain, anguish and death. There is evil in the world - to be sure - however, as former United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in The Fog of War: “How much evil do you have to do in the name of good?” War blurs the distinctions of good and evil into a gray continuum of carnage. Strip war of its pathos and politics. What you get are human beings organized around the purpose of the efficient systematic slaughter of other humans. Ask combat veterans. They may have reasoned that war was necessary, but no one liked being there. War makes no sense. Yet, humankind invests more energy and time on war than on peace. At the individual subjective level, peace is infinitely more desirable. War is not normal, yet seems to have become normalized as the regular state of collected human affairs. Maybe it’s the way we look at it. Maybe it’s the questions we ask ourselves. Aggression may be normal biological human behavior (especially among men), but war is different from aggression. Violence, especially war, is both socially structured and culturally conditioned. There is a kind of script. It is politics and pathos.
War is an institution.
In spite of the social construction of masculinity that already favors aggression and violence, war is still not an individual’s first choice. An expert at killing and training others to kill, Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, notes (132) that men have an “…instinctive resistance to killing…” and that “…killing the foe…is not a natural act; it is a repellent one.” It is only through intensive training that most men become efficient and reliable killers of other men.
War is the product of social organization, and culture, not biology. Apart from aggression, humans are also empathetic. Biologically, people are quite empathetic. We would all rather just get along. It suits the human ability to organize socially and develop culturally. However, it is through social organization that individual aggression is heightened and channeled into group behavior. I question authority and I question social organization. Through them, empathy is dismissed - inherent human empathy that struggles with social mandates and cultural conditioning. More than fear, or its political cognate cowardice, people realize themselves in their (potential) victims. But, social and cultural conditioning can and does override empathy. And, still we make war. We have not yet decided to un-make war. By the clear proportion of sheer physical investment and political priority, we seem to be unwilling to make peace.
This book is not an exhaustive recollection of humanity and war. It is a reorganization of thought on the issues that surround why we war. The central purpose is to challenge the way we think of war and social organization. The unfortunate idea is that war is still conceived of by many (if not most) of humanity to be a regrettable necessity. If we accept that lasting peace is too impossibly complex a task, then this is one root of the cause of war. There are many complex problems that humanity has solved cooperatively. Warfare is as important a problem as humankind will ever face, so the complexity of war is an unacceptable excuse for not ending it. But, more than that, there is in complexity a thread of truth to why we war. There is an ever-present connection between wealth, power, and organized violence.
There is a consistent denial of human rights and social justice that enshrouds war. These connections between concentrated wealth, power, and the systematic denial of human rights are not just part of Western society and culture, but (like war) are part of all human civilization. War is a corruption of human social organization – an organization that is otherwise aimed at guaranteeing survival of the species through cooperative behavior. War serves only to concentrate wealth and power and deny human rights that social organization was meant to provide. If civilization has led the human race to thrive on this planet, then war has also made us our own worst enemy. Civilization and war must become disentangled. The social organization of peace must eclipse that for war. To do this, the social and cultural evolution for war must be reexamined, and new questions asked about why we war.
Social organization has produced many things for humanity. Agriculture may be first and foremost of the positive products of social organization. And a philharmonic symphony is a crowning achievement in social organization. And, just the other day while walking with my boys, I was marveling at how well crosswalks and crossing lights work. Many other positive advantages have developed out of the human ability to organize into groups and to divide necessary jobs. We have a collective sense of human rights that addresses satisfying human needs through collective social organization. So why war? Why the recurring destructive phenomenon that seems so contradictory to human need and human rights? Of all the products of civilization, war seems to be one of the most consistent. Ehrlich, in Human Natures (210) observes that:
“The fact that such violence is virtually universal within human societies has given rise to a school of thought in which human beings are seen as having an innate drive or “military instinct” that leads to aggression and is the root cause of warfare.”
While aggression may well be human, the product of war is “virtually universal within human societies” because of human society, not human biology. War fits social organizations that are structured around hierarchies of wealth, and power. War occurs because it is productive, perhaps second only to agriculture. But where agriculture makes prosperity and plenty possible, war makes the concentration of wealth and the consolidation of social power possible. War is productive and profitable because it has been made to be so. The point of this book is to understand how war – and not human rights – is reinforced. It is not always just the money. There is always the power. But, war can be disentangled from social organization. Understanding why we war will help to generate activism against war – a movement toward cultural evolution. We can build a different type of social organization - one that need not rely on war to reinforce it. The late Issac Asimov once wrote:
"...violence is the last refuge of the incompetent..."
So far, war is the ultimate in violence. Humanity makes war. Is humanity ultimately incompetent? Let’s get a bit more personal. Let’s own our actions. We pride ourselves as a species that is social. We – all of us – view ourselves as organized, progressive, and peace loving at heart. Life is sacred. And then, we make war. Are we a species of hypocrites? Are we a race of incompetents? Will we be a species whose absurd challenge to itself will be our final undoing? We make war. It does not seem to appear on its own – it’s a human thing. We create it out of what was once peace. In peacetime, governments invest in warfare. We convince ourselves of the prudence of defense. We must be right, after all, because they are armed. Regardless of the often relatively peaceful tensions that precede a war, at one point we regularly decide on a course of combat.
Then, we glory in war. Our calculated capacity for the organized and systematic destruction of human life is evident at even the most basic social level. Of all creatures, only we humans have crafted special tools, to be used in ritual ways, simply for the purpose of fighting. And make no mistake – the purpose is killing. For (mostly) male humanity, aggressive and combative activity is a rule. And we have specially organized labor unions of death. The military in all its historic branches and forms is civilization’s social institution of murder. Called “soldier” or “warrior,” the social specialization is killing. Individuals as well as economic, political, cultural, and social institutions organize around the principles of war. Modern businessmen read Go Rin No Sho (A Book of Five Rings) – applying the ancient samurai combat strategy to commerce. Corporate “officers” engage in hostile takeovers as part of “trade wars.” Political parties use “war chests” of money to “wage campaigns” against each other. The United States government has a “war on drugs,” or a “war on crime” (often a war on the poor in reality), and of course, a “war on terrorism.” We speak of “strategic initiatives,” our national budgets dominated by “defense” spending. War – as a word and concept – represents the ultimate to which social energy can be put.
But, even that is not quite enough. We make war gods. Examine the earliest semi-mythic legends. Then, review the modern spiritual and philosophic religions of humankind. All are concerned with war. Some religions are completely obsessed with war. Judeo-Christian-Islamic texts depict not only human conflict, but a cosmic struggle between bellicose evil and equally belligerent good. The Old Testament god is a “God of Hosts” bent on retribution, who exhorts his followers to raze cities, putting whole populations to the sword. Siddartha Gautama (Buddha) was a warrior prince, and the Rig Vedas chronicle war. Holy war. Not that there is no good or evil. When any people use any god as an excuse for murder or genocide, then there is real, genuine evil. This book is concerned with the evil that men do in any god’s name.
We make war stories. The most ancient recorded traditions of humanity embrace war as either the central theme of history or as the essential punctuation. The ancient Greek Thucydides is often considered a patriarch of history in western (European) civilization. His initial contribution to human thought is a chronicle of war between his people and their Spartan neighbors. His, his, his – you will read a lot of male pronouns in this work. Gender is significant. Since early times, war and history have both been largely male pursuits. The history of Western Civilization has often been military history ever since Thucydides. Written in our own blood -- seemingly chaotic -- the record of the race is war.
We make war machines. Many of the earliest tools recovered by archaeologists are evidence of technologies that allowed humans to dominate aspects of their environments. Hunting and gathering activities permitted, if not promoted, early human proliferation. As numbers of people grew or resources became otherwise scarce, competition set in. Tools and technology could insure survival. Even more that survival, technology could produce surplus, prosperity, and wealth. Larger groups of people could get together. Choices were made. Soon these tools were used not solely on other animals, but on the human animal. Wealth needed protecting, and tools could be of use here too. Spears overcame clubs. Bows and arrows outdistanced spears. Weapons became specialized for the killing of people. Weapons were decorated and glorified as social status symbols. Eventually, a science or “art” of war developed. Guns allowed anyone lethal power. War became more political. Death became democratic. Eventually, the power of the atom became part of the machinery of war. Finally, chemistry and our own biology became weapons of mass human destruction. Technology never advances so fast as when the object is the more efficient murder of our own kind.
In the ancient or modern record, one is hard put to find a generation without skirmish, battle, or war. Somewhere a war just ended. Elsewhere a war is about to begin. North Korea and the U.S. rattle nuclear sabers. There is a war going on now. No, there are many wars going on now. Israeli fights Palestinian, Irish Catholic fights Irish Protestant, America fights a “war on drugs,” and most recently George W. Bush declared a World War on terrorism, then on Iraq. Many are unclear how we all got to this point, but revenge is always a motivator. Our revenge, their revenge in return - then our revenge again. Forget that Osama Bin Ladin was a religious fundamentalist and that Saddam Hussein was a secular fascist. And, that they would normally oppose one another were it not for the unifying influence of U.S. intervention.
But, where has war taken us? Where will war lead? Certainly not to peace, if history serves. Death and destruction – and, of course, more war – appear to be the real results of war. There must be an alternative - one that realizes who we all are, what we all are, how we got here, and where we can go from here. It is not a nation that is at stake. Nor is it a people, or even a civilization at stake – as George W. Bush puts it. It is humanity. In this era of sudden mass death – of indiscriminate nuclear and biological war – humanity itself is at stake. And we may be doomed. For all that we pat ourselves on the back for – all of our cultures, and social institutions – we may be a killer species. Many still think that the human race is genetically predisposed to mayhem and murder. More likely it is culture and social organization. It could be that the main tool of humanity, namely culture, may only be a useful adaptation to mitigate our homicidal tendencies. We might be the “Killer Ape” after all. But it may only be so because we conceive of it as so. Like has been said of god, if war did not exist, we would create it.
We could cooperate with each other and the environment. However, the objective view of the world humanity assumed long ago brings with it a paradigm of struggle. Seeing the world and others in it as full of things – objects to be manipulated – has meant that human culture(s) manipulate the environment. People become objects or less than that. Private property takes on a social value. Property can be transferred, bought, sold, or destroyed. People as objects – as numbers – can and are disposed of as property. The enemy becomes a thing. Soldiers are “spent” like currency. Culture and reason has also meant conflict and strife. If our belief systems endorse war, we rationalize that people are less valuable than property.
Historically, when humanity is at peace with the environment, we war with one another. In times of plenty, “we” must defend ourselves from “them.” If times are hard, and resources are few, “we” must take what “they” have. If honor or security is in question, then every patriotic militancy is in order. If there is no perceived “them,” we will create one. All things being equal, “we” will fight among ourselves. Racist, sexist, and class-ist struggles erupt within a society. Even in recreation, conflict and entertainment go hand in hand. Our games are rough and violent even when we are at play. “No pain, no gain.” “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” Did you really think he “made a killing in the stock market?” How is it that humankind espouses peace, yet makes unceasing war? How do we talk to ourselves? There are many lies, and a few truths about war.
What, first, are the eternal truths to the absurd cycle of war? Take gender, for instance. Patriarchy – male dominance in a society – does appear from all accounts to promote war and violence as a solution to social problems. War may be a male thing. If it is a “mans world,” is war his fault? Is war part of the unequal power of men in society? What about her? Are women uninvolved by nature? Or is this, too, social conditioning? Are women only victims? If hers is the hand that rocks the cradle, then why does her son grow up to be a potential killer? Blame genes or society? Who is it that supports a war effort when the men are away at the killing? It was not necessary to wait until “Rosie the Riveter.” Society has been molding (all) gender in support of war for quite some time. It was a Spartan woman – a mother – who told her son to come home “bearing your shield or on it.” And women are also victims of the social organization of war. In a pretentiously peaceful society like the United States, women are currently more than half of the population. Women are more than half of the votes in any election. And there is always the undervalued and under-recorded labor factor. Of what value to the war system is the un-waged labor of women? By keeping “the home fires burning,” women’s acceptance of patriarchy allows the economic benefits of “women’s work” to support the war system. Remember Lysistrata? If women united in political strikes against war, would it end? If women wanted to end war, could they? In American societies, women hold less wealth and power than men. This is not a biological disparity, but a socially contrived phenomenon. Women were not “asking for it.” In war, men rape. There is a tangible relationship between war, rape, and male dominance in societies that feature war as policy. Race, gender, class, and religion are all components in the human tragedy of war. Do we really want peace? It may well be that peace is the anomaly, and warfare the norm. Have we turned blind eyes to these and other truths?
Speaking of money, war always seems to generate wealth – at least for the powerful political and corporate figures that create wars, but don’t fight in them. I have never known a rich soldier. On the other hand, officers often go into military service rich, and then capitalize (literally) on the military experience with political power afterwards. Political economy is an analysis of the relationships between power and wealth that has some value in understanding the unnatural frequency of organized human conflict. It has been an axiom that “war is the health of the state.” Follow where authority and money intersect in a society, and things clarify. The consistent development in industrial and post-industrial societies of a military-industrial complex points to a fairly inescapable conclusion. Those with political and/or economic power work in social systems to maintain and expand their power. In this scenario, anything is rationalized. Add the intoxication of nationalism to the economic imperatives in a capitalist society. War becomes the “extension of politics, by other means” that Clauswitz spoke of. Preparation for war or engaging in war adds new vigor to industrial and post-industrial economies. Corporations can push for the highest levels of production, patriotically demanding supreme efforts from workers. Propaganda drenched labor “forces” are swept up in an undertow of nationalistic fervor often overcoming union tendencies to preserve hard-won class achievements. Many workers set aside rights just as governments relax or remove protective labor regulations. Strikes become a matter of national security. Unions are curbed, and dissidents are prosecuted. Congress (and other corporate-lobbied legislative bodies) increases “defense,” military and police budgets even as they grant corporations liberal freedoms – economic freedoms that are suspended for workers. The ultimate result is corporate profits, a vigorous economy, and a body count. All too typically, it is the bodies of poor, working class poor, and middle classes that fill the graves. The history of every generation is one of lethal and potentially lethal group-togroup confrontation. Even the great pacifist movements and religions are documents to the tenacity of institutionalized warfare. Why is this so? Why the persistent impression that war is built into the human genome? It may be that the ability to wage war is an inevitability of cultural evolution and diversity. Such an important question - why we war - demands that all investigative avenues be examined. A central truth to the human experience seems to be that we are ever at war. No matter the religion, governmental system, or philosophic movement humankind has either perpetuated or felt compelled to unavoidably respond to the reality of all-pervasive organized human-to-human aggression. In other words ...We War. Why we war is as ancient a riddle as we humans know. Thus far, our search for solutions to this most lethal conundrum has faltered. Our search for answers has been in vain because it rested on fallacies. But really, fallacy is a word for improper logic, when what we have actually done is lied to ourselves about war.
Lie #1; we really want peace. Ah, now – there you may have had a gut response - a kind of Frankenstein-ian “war BAD, peace GOOD!” visceral response. “Of course we want peace,” you say. Or do we? Humankind’s collective research into war has been overloaded with such emotion. But, is the emotion sincere? It is not nearly enough to assume that pacifism has lost to aggression because of the relative natures of the positions. It does not absolve us of responsibility because aggressive warlike types simply tend to dominate over passive ones. If people and their governments truly demanded peace, then all they must do is quit the killing. If enough people really became pacifists, the killing would stop. It has not stopped. We lie. We want peace unless it hurts. We want peace – unless we are pissed-off. Lie #2; war is dysfunctional. Either from having witnessed the horrific realities of war or from dramatic fantasies of glory, our assumption has been that war is futile. We cling to the notion that base animal instincts toward violence can be overcome through learning. Civilization is the savior of humanity. Unfortunately, it is the truly “civilized” cultures that seem to have institutionalized war. We have been smug to think peace the sole functional expression of human culture. War and peace both exist for reasons -- scientific reasons beyond viscera. Certainly, for war to have its near-organic vitality and frequency, it must have willing participants. Thus, war has some social value and cultural basis. War must also have physical consequence. Sooner or later, social and cultural behaviors acted out over thousands of years must somehow impact biology. If war has absolutely no value in a biological sense, then it would be vestigial, not vital – atrophied, not active. Civilization - first occurring in what has been called the Neolithic Age as a result of advances in plant and animal domestication. Civilization is defined as complex social organization with divisions and specialization of labor. Social institutions and cultural practices developed to stabilize the most ideal conditions for human beings to thrive in a capricious natural environment. As a species, we have not biologically changed much since the Neolithic period. Why? Organized warfare and the Neolithic agricultural revolution – same time – a coincidence? Not very likely. Social organization has affected our biology. And, one of the most regularly recurring features of social organization – of civilization – is war. If war was not originally part of the biology of humankind, it has become so through repetition. We make war, but war made us. We are products of evolution. We have evolved as a species. War has evolved. We evolved a social and cultural strategy for dealing with the environment. Soon it was not just the natural environment that we could collectively effect, but we had created social environments to deal with – new landscapes. We had cultural complexes that dynamically influenced human beings to the degree that together; culture and society have challenged natural biologic evolution (and the environment). Social scientists have made this popular as the “nature versus nurture” problem. Are humans and their behavior products of biologically determined “hard wiring,” or are they the products of social and cultural conditioning? In reality, there is no controversy – we are both. Nature and nurture operate together to produce what and who we are. The scientific controversy is to what degree nature versus to what percentage nurture. Who and what we are and why we war is to be found in the balance, not in an either-or approach. So to figure out why we make war and what can be done about it, we need to look at society, and cultural evolution.
Men make war so violence is male, so men make war, etc., etc. - chicken and egg, again and again. War is a masculine expression, true. But, it is a human expression – also true. Human social organization makes war possible, and apparently often desirable. We cannot end it by simply dismissing war as a gender expression, or as male conditioning. The social construction of the role of the male is one thing, but institutionalized male power is another thing entirely. Masculinity and patriarchy differ in that masculinity is a role individuals play out in society, while patriarchy is the system that confers power and privilege on the male playing the proper role. Patriarchy is also a system that punishes those who do not play the proper role. They are linked, of course. One is a social behavior of dominance, the other is a social system of dominance. War happens because of male dominance, but male dominance happens because of war. Just as all civilization is not due to men, so too war is not solely due to men. Yet, patriarchy is different. It moves beyond the social construction of male-ness, into the control of society by men. When our social systems are structured around a type of male leadership and masculinity that is constructed as aggressive and violent, then civilization follows a violent lead. Patriarchy is at the center of human civilization, and cannot be discounted as a source of war. Patriarchy may lay the foundations of conflict, however a whole society supports a war. Civilization is war. But, it is because it is the way that civilization is constructed. It takes the truly civilized – groups of people organized and specialized – to make war. Indeed, currently civilization demands war, promotes conflict, intensifies violence.
We are at war – again. We are a cult of war and warriors. How do you join?
How did I? Is war, with its warriors and soldiers all part of manliness and masculinity? Is it part of humanity, biology, psychology, philosophy, history? Choices…do you choose? Do you actually choose war or peace? Did I? Is there “free-choice?” Some social scientists (Martin Heidigger and others) have said no. What we call “free choice” is really selecting from a limited set of circumstances. These circumstances are limited in part by our awareness. How can one choose from what one knows nothing about? Choice is further limited in part by what those who came before us leave us, and partly by what is in our immediate environment. If human history is punctuated by power struggles and war, and all around us are indications that violence is acceptable – even rewarded under the right circumstances – then what will become of choice? No, our biological and cultural background, as well as our current environment made us. Nature and nurture, so to speak, is why we are what we are – and choice is an illusion. The principles of cultural evolution suggest that each generation modifies the (genotype and phenotype) last generation’s behavior. We say we want peace, even though the leadership of this United States demands war. What have we done to make peace? Most people given the “choice” choose peace. Why, then, does war persist? Not just this war, or that war, or a war, but all of them.
If the cultural evolutionary approach to history is acceptable as a theory explaining humanity, then biology responds to culture and cultural practice. Humanity evolves culturally, as well as socially. The genes for aggression and war are advanced each generation by each aspect of culture and society that supports war. But war also advances when we do nothing to actively oppose it. Our social institutions are organized around war, not peace. War will perpetuate itself. It is a system. The identity of warrior or soldier is a social construct that is networked into advantages and penalties. The social advantages and penalties are conferred or levied on the soldier by those who profit from leading us into war. This means we war because we mean to war. Or, at least, that we do not really mean to make peace. To make peace, and to fashion peace as a craft of human organization seems somehow beyond us. There is so much war in history, and so much at stake because of it, that the evolution of war and the cult of conflict seem a central feature of humanity. I argue that war is so intimate a part of human civilization as be more influential than money. And, that the organization of conflict that we call war is the central disease of society.
Authors such as Barbara Ehrenreich (in Blood Rites) have written that the nature of the construction of masculinity in a social system may be the deciding factor promoting the frequency of warfare. Spurred and lashed continuously by private property and its merciless offspring capitalism and materialism, patriarchy (male dominance) has a history of destructive acquisitiveness. Add the rest of the features of social organization and the resulting power and status of male dominance create the conditions fostering more organized violence. These conditions are aggression, organization, and concentrations of wealth. But male dominance exists within a social system, not independent of it. The system of human social organization is superior to its parts.
The case is also made by Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich and others that the system of social organization (we call civilization) has an evolutionary history. If so, it has been a cultural evolution that centers on war, the threat of war, and the “preservation” of peace. Both war and social organization are intimately bound in co-evolution. But, this does not have to continue. War is dependent on social organization – and more importantly – on the nature of social organization. But social organization is not dependent on war. Society can function without patriarchy. Male dominance is an afterthought by cultural evolutionary standards. Maleness and the social construction of masculinity are primetime tickets into the cult of the warrior, but not the exclusive tickets. And, maleness need not mean violence. All males are not warriors, just potential warriors. Without this patriarchic social organization, dominance has no meaning – no structure of distinctions, no gender based divisions of labor, wealth and status – no dominance. Patriarchy would be a meaningless term. Some think that, likewise, without masculinity war could not occur. While I am convinced by the data that a change in the social meaning of masculinity is essential to reducing war, I am not ready to go that far. War does not exist simply because of masculinity, but because of male dominance and the social nature of patriarchy. Men may often be brutish, short-sighted, and aggressive, but war only occurs if you get a group of us together under a leader who can rally the rest of society to support conflict. No matter who is dominant – a society based on dominance, private ownership, and concentrated wealth will generate the organized violence of war.
How has the rest of human society come to be organized around war? A book of particular interest that will be discussed at length later, is the fictional Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. Regardless of being at root a political satire, this book revealed how tightly integrated war has become with the rest of society. If we (as some still do) are to accept this once nearly anonymous yet wholly believable 1967 publication, then war is the aim of the state. The state supports war because war supports the status quo of the state. Allegedly the result of a secret U.S. government “special study group” think tank, the Report clearly outlines a viewpoint on the functional necessity of war. That this was a work of fiction and that it was (is) widely accepted as fact reveals how deeply seated our acceptance of war is. In the account given, war is essential to civilization as we know it, and peace is the “de-stabilizing” element. It is interesting and more than a little frightening, how the specific strategies outlined in this Vietnam era Report reflect the types of government and institutional policies enacted since that time. George W. Bush, and Karl Rove – for example – could be using the Report as a manual. Extremists on the Right and the Left have supported the Report since the 1960’s. The conclusion of the Report is that American Institutions will fail without regular war (Lewin/Navasky).
But this is not about the U.S. Humanity has institutionalized war. War is a uniquely human institution that has no cultural boundary, and no social one. All recorded histories expose the sutures binding social organization to war. Each social system confers privileges, rights, and (evolutionary) advantages on the warrior and his support network. It is the support network (from families, to farmers, to workers, to corporations, and yes the media) that makes the specialization of soldier possible. It is social organization that makes war possible. Biology may give us the ability to have aggression, culture may have given us the tools, but society has evolved war into an institution.
How then to solve the riddle of why we war? Pose new questions based on the fundamental assumption that to be so widespread and deep a part of the human experience, war must be a culturally adaptive strategy with social and biological value. We must face an unsettling fact. In some bizarre way, war works. But for whom? War is both social/cultural and biologically adaptive, and the riddle Why We War cannot be solved unless we accept this as the nucleus of our paradigm – especially now, when war has become far too destructive and potentially catastrophic for the human race. Humanity – or huge amounts of humanity – can be obliterated within seconds. Something must be done. The only salient questions are: What is war, why have we done it, and Why do we do it?, which are Historic queries; and, What can we (or should we) do about it?, a question that underlies the perennial anthropological controversy - nature versus nurture. In summary, we are looking at two things: the historic background of organized conflict, and the anthropological aspects of humanity and war. Therefore, each discipline – history and anthropology – figures into this study. The optimum result must be to move legitimately toward an end to war.
Can we learn, or is it that we cannot help ourselves? Is war always the result of economics, or of nationality or ethnicity? Can we change these things? If too many people are too close does conflict inevitably arise? For Cold War baby-boomers who dared believe in peace and love, can there be an end to war? And, for those who accept -- or even advocate -- war as a price of the human condition, should we stop?
But, can we stop? Humans are the only terrestrial fauna known to prey upon its own kind in complex ritualized ways, and often for considerably abstract reasons. Our own empirical sciences have shown us that we are the sole species that kills masses of its own kind for such things as doctrinal differences within a religion, or for that ultimate abstract creation of human society and culture – money.
There has scarcely been a generation without war. Yet, when no war is going, or when there are those who cannot (could not! would not!) engage in actual war, we nonetheless revel in our symbolic warfare. I don’t mean just the obvious examples such as video games or professional football, but the more subtle and pervasive varieties of ritual and symbolic war. We have a competitive streak. Everything from chess and pinochle all the way to the telling fact that even our appreciation of so called "classical literature" usually relies on the "central conflict", often between protagonist and antagonist.
Why are all known cultures of all known history so inevitably engaged with the potential for - if not the actual act of - organized physical conflict? To be so insidiously pervasive, so omnipresent, it seems that war must be relatively fundamental to some aspect of being human. Is that aspect biologic, historic, psycho-social, technological?
Knowing the answer may allow us to outgrow mass murder.
Or, from another point of view, is it possible that the perception of the human obsession with war could just simply be an artifact of historiography, Western culture(s), and modern media? All of them deal heavily with war and socially acceptable violence. Undeniably such influences play out their roles on the stage of this greatest of human tragedies. Clearly, however, the active human preoccupation with homicide, fratricide, and genocide substantially predate the development of the aforementioned influences.
Do movies make us violent, or do we make violent movies? Both are probably true. There was war before movies. There were stories about war told around many a fire in our preliterate past. Epic poems such as the Iliad were the movies of their times. Perhaps our “modern” progressive egocentrism fused with our modern technologic facility has simply bombarded us in film after book after film with the glorified vulgarity represented by war. Causation is an issue. But, we cannot escape that easily. We cannot simply blame the movies. No matter which came first, the chicken and the egg do exist. They are interdependent. We must consider that they exist for specific reasons. Ultimately, it really does not matter which is first. Chicken and egg will be followed by chicken and egg and chicken and egg. So it was, so it is, and so it has ever been with war. No, we cannot escape with a simple cause and effect statement. What must be clear is not just causation, but also purpose. What are the benefits, and who are the beneficiaries of war?
“All Gaul is divided into (three) parts,” wrote infamous warrior General Julius Caesar, and basically so is this work. Why we war is the central subject of an odyssey that will weave its way through disciplines of modern empiricism and ancient wisdoms (did you know that most grammar programs will not let you write “wisdoms” as a plural? The word and concept is considered as singular). The subject of war needs to be examined both anthropologically and historically. Anthropology will show the broadest possible range of the cross-cultural human experience of war. There are common aspects underlying cultural belief systems that motivate organized conflict. What is a
“culture of conflict?” Anthropology also offers glimpses of prehistoric cultural predispositions for war embedded in the archaeological record. History will show roots and social development of war. Comparative study of world history is testimonial to a consistent pattern of the development of social institutions that support war. The entrenchment of war in human social systems is an historical development. What is the “war system?” War is only possible as a collective response - a “group thing” that relies on re-channeling (limited) collective resources. The re-channeling is in fact a maldistribution of wealth. But groups are made of differing individuals. The mal-distribution by definition favors some individuals and groups at the expense of others. Culture and society - the individual and the group - interact to reinforce a cycle of organized violence. And what is the cost? This assessment will be based on a concept of universal human rights. The concept of human rights is a historically recurrent idea of the relative responsibilities and obligations that should exist (ideally) between the individual and society. What does the war system do to the individual’s ability to enjoy what human rights a society may offer? This is how we will judge war (UDHR). This interdisciplinary effort serves to illuminate unifying threads in the bloody and baleful tapestry of organized human conflict. Far from a trite recitation of serial slaughter, what is hoped for is a methodology of social change. We have little time for idle speculation. War demands a certain intellectual and social activism. Success in making a change will rely on adopting a new perspective. That is what this book is about.
In the first section there will be an anthropological interpretation of war that is both cultural and physical. Is war solely a learned behavior – a by-product of all human social and cultural orientation? Can we thus unlearn war? Some ugly facts about human societies and cultures will emerge from questioning whether war is waged solely for social status, or economic exchange. War will be assessed as expansionist necessity and as ideological inevitability. We may be a species organized to aggressively challenge the environment. Unlike other species that reach equilibrium, culture and society may have allowed humans to continually exceed environmental – natural – restrictions. When social systems become our main environment, is war anthropologically inevitable? Or is it the nature of systems and relationships within human societies? War will also be discussed as a biologic mechanism of natural selection played out through culturally developed patterns. Patterns which - if we are to accept some sociobiological theories - may be unavoidable results of our genetic predisposition.
Also often evident will be the difference between ideal and real, or perhaps more precisely, between the intentions and the actual results faced by warfare’s many participants. How does the soldier see war, and how does that view differ for others in society? What conditions do these beliefs produce? In this sense, this portion of the data presentation will take at least two forms - structure and function(s). Across time and space, war has a common structural development and purposeful function. No matter what, war exists and persists for some very good reasons. If our predilection for genocide is not to reign supreme, then the investigation of war must be far less cluttered with the rampant egoistic species-centricity that has thus far carried the day. We have to find a way to stop. We have to understand how to work against all war, not just the last one…or the next one… or, the final one.
Following anthropology, we will proceed to survey war in its various social historical manifestations. What is war, really? Investigating first an acceptable definition of what war actually means is essential to any reasoned discussion. Can it be defined in a way that all can accept? Are corporations waging economic war against the poor and working classes, for instance? Is rape gender war? And what about terrorism? According to the United Nations, there is little definitive difference between war and terrorism beyond the concept that war is state sponsored destruction, while terrorism is killing without the benefit of national sanction. Hmmm? What, for instance, is the earliest or most simple form of organized violence? What socially validates and justifies killing another human? How and why has conflict become more complex through time? This broad but brief historic survey explores the rationale behind traditions involving personal combat, through raiding societies, territorial skirmishes, and activities of feudal elite, all the way up to modern geo-political econo-nationalistic world war. Modern forms of terrorism (that post-colonial warfare of identity politics waged by the otherwise powerless) cannot be overlooked. Terrorism has created the conditions that are used to justify war, but war produces the conditions that justify terrorism. It is The Beast that consumes itself, and gives birth to itself. Already, youth gangs are being classified as urban terrorists. SWAT teams are training in urban warfare.
There are many guilty of war. Easy to define war crime as what they did. Leaders both current and historic regularly validate themselves through war. It is easy to list villains and heroes. Not so easy to see them as their foes saw them. For every hero, someone else saw villain. Every corpse – rich or poor – was a family member. Citizens become soldiers because it is in their cultural character. Soldiers fight because the leaders of society tell them to. Armies meet in war because society supports them.
Both sides in war commit atrocities because culture allows it. And, civilization has reached so high only because we stand on a mountain of war dead. It is a horrific analogy. We will pick the bones of war, much as a forensic scientist dissects a corpse for the clues left by the murderer - a smooth criminal, a seductive slayer, a serial killer, a mass murderer. With each revelation we will realize that the original homicidal maniacs... are us.
PREFACE – After 9/11/01
War is a crime. Make no mistake; war and terrorism differ in the degree of “official” sanction by politically recognized government, but killing is killing – and the dead don’t come back. They all had baby pictures. All had families that loved them. All the dead loved. Some may have patriotically volunteered to die, or were otherwise coerced by their nation, while far too many were “collateral damage” – innocent dead. All are alike in death. None care whether they were victims of committed terrorists motivated to make political statement through murder. Neither do the dead care whether or not they were made dead as a result of “official policy.” This book is not about “a war,” or “the war,” it is about all war. I take the position that war and the forces which perpetuate war are the central crime against humanity.
War has been said to be the “extension of diplomacy by other means’” and the “health of the state.” Personally, I like the Ernest Hemingway observation: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” War simply legitimizes crime.
Crime, we are told, is a matter of a combination of means, motive, and opportunity. Civilization as we practice it has given humanity the means, and the opportunities. This book is mostly about motive. Historically, this book was written as the result of a lecture series I presented as part of California Community College
Interdisciplinary Studies program in the 1990s. As such, what former Assistant
Secretary of Defense Frank Gaffney calls the Fourth World War on terrorism had not yet begun. Even before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, the Pentagon, and Washington I, like many social scientists, had been intensely concerned about the increasing frequency of war. And, perhaps more importantly, I was concerned about why humanity continues to resort to warfare at all. What is it that keeps us at it? Why and how is humanity continually motivated not to peace, but to war? What’s the excuse? Where are the excuses? They got us, so we get them. “We” are preserving the peace. “They” are the evil foes of freedom. You are either with us, or against us. All of these and more are excuses we use. Finally, what does war do to us? We treat war as a necessity, as an inevitability of human nature. Because of this, the sheer social investment in conflict appears to outweigh any investment in peace and human rights. War is more “true” to the human experience since the middle of the Nineteenth Century than ever. As if in graphic correction to the myth of human progress, we have become more warlike as we have become more complex and civilized.
And now we war. Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been the sole global superpower. Yet with the threat of Soviet domination abated, the U.S. government has continued to pursue provocative unilateral foreign policies that have produced not peace, but a series of asymmetrical conflicts that we call a War on Terrorism. It is (as always) “us” against “them.” The “us” – the U.S. – has the power to annihilate life on a scale unheard of in human history. Or, the power to actually begin to change to what could also be unheard of in human history (certainly in U.S. history) – a global power whose government is committed to a policy of genuine peace. Being the sole superpower, and the self-styled global police should make peace obtainable. Yet peace has continued to elude “us.”
Imagine a superpower committed to making peace an institution, instead of continuing to institutionalize war. Being a “superpower” means having incredible influence, and resources. And, it means being able to project those resources anywhere in the world. How has the U.S. used this “superpower?” The Presidents of the United States had declared war on Iraq because of the ongoing Saddam Hussein regime. Because I am a citizen of the United States, I was able to record the declarations on videotape, and was able to watch the war on television in the comfort of my office. I mention this because of the unnatural realities of life in the United States. Do not overlook the irony of your relatively protected position. There was war – despite massive lack of support from the governments of the world. There was war – despite the huge popular outcry against war from citizens of the world – citizens of the U.S included. There was war because just as many governments wanted war, and because just as many citizens of the world are convinced that war is the only way. There will be more war. There will be more terrorist attacks on the U.S. – despite the fact that any conventional war will most likely be quickly won (as it was in Iraq) by the United States and its dwindling list of often anemic allies. There will be innocent people killed. And, as I write, the television commercials continue. This is because war has become a product that has been packaged for your consumption.
We are at war right now, and – if history shows anything – we will be at war again, soon. When speaking out against war at the Community College where I teach history, I once had someone yell: "support our troops!" My retort was "who said anything about the troops? I am against war! The troops didn't start it," I continued, "The troops on both sides and the Iraqi citizens die in it." We have to get over this war or that war if we intend to end all war. Of necessity we have to deal with the current situation and the current players. But that must not mean that we lose sight of the big picture – that humanity needs reasonable strategies for sustained peace.
This is the nature of the beast. And there is a lot to it. At the time of this writing, George Bush, Karl Rove, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others of that ilk were at the head of a vast and powerfully structured apparatus. Saddam Hussein was, likewise, in control of a huge and deadly mass weapon organized to create death and destruction. These and other power brokers throughout history used their authority – spent human lives – for their continuing profit, power, and social control. Other than power, influence, and wealth, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld risked little personal safety. And if the U.S. would have lost, they would still be safe and in control. Saddam Hussein would have risked little, if he had not challenged the power of the Bush clique. Either way, both used countless lives to shield their positions of power and wealth. I particularly like Michael Moore's critique (received in March, 2003). “How many pro-war congressional members risked lives intimate to them? One, that's right, one.”
"Saddam could have become another Hitler," you nervously and passionately chide. “Perhaps,” begins my retort. Saddam Hussein, like Adolph Hitler, was a product of history. Each had a background that gave them reality. Those backgrounds certainly included organized violence and more. Their stories and ours contain the cultural and social organization that makes these men the inevitable products of history. I am not so worried about Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot, or Adolph Hitler. The stories of individual wars, or aggressors are mostly important for what they tell about the next war. It is this history of organized murder that this book addresses.
Without the social organization of violence, without the cultural evolution of conflict, Adolph Hitler would have just been an incompetent artist, and would have remained a minor player on the political fringe in post-World War One Germany. But, Hitler had the example of WWI to help propel him to the forefront of pre-existing institutions of organized violence. He had the perception of the denial of human rights, and the reality of the lack of economic justice as a result of the Treaty of Versailles to motivate followers in Germany. Hitler also had a global backdrop of colonial imperialism that would cause his war to be our war. And, he had a vast human history of conflict to use as a basis for constructing new and more efficient institutions of destruction. Without these, Hitler may have become a petty local gangster – as Saddam would have remained – had it not been for a human history of acquiring and maintaining both wealth and power through the social organization of violence. I believe in evil. I have seen it in many forms. Hitler and Saddam Hussein were evil. They may have become grand thugs regardless, but the pre-existing institution of war made them mass murderers.
Which, then, is the greater evil?
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the others had no genuine anointed moral status. War is war. And it is the killing of other human beings on a massive scale. Both of the major political parties share in this indictment. Democrats like Joseph Biden were just as much to blame – and were just as immune to personal threat of war – as any of the Republicans. What they all had to gain at the expense of so many lives was continued power, wealth, and influence. It is leadership that starts wars. Leadership benefits…people die. That is the nature of civilized warfare. We have become socially organized as human beings to make many things possible. War does not have to be so regular a result of social organization. "We have a responsibility," one of my students said, "to prevent another holocaust." I agree. We do have a responsibility. Our leaders have a responsibility to us to promote institutions of lasting peace. They have failed due to the very nature of their power. We have a responsibility not to let them continue.
This war is history. And, like all war, this war is the result of history. The book below presents a viewpoint on the history that has led to war. Our task is to understand how this has all come about. This is not armchair history. History has come home. It is time to increase organized activism for peace. Not for a second do I mean to dismiss or to discount vital organized peace efforts like those of Ramsey Clark and the International Action Center/A.N.S.W.E.R., and other NGO’s. But, if anti-war activists are seen as “leftists” outside of the political mainstream, then it tells us some things about peace activism and the war system. One obvious conclusion is that war is more central to the system than peace. It also means that the values supporting war are still the core values of most people in society. And, finally, what it all means is that more peace activism is better. This brief history is meant as a brick in the foundation for supporting more antiwar activism and a change in the core cultural values that support war. The understandings of the history that has led to this war – and to war in general – are crucial to your future, and to the future of the people of the world. My motivations are sincere and utterly selfish. I have two children. Two sons. Men fight war. I worry that as I have been steeped in conflict, so will they be. I don’t want my sons to be caught up in war – any war. And so, I advocate peace. But, it is not as simple as that, is it?
I am the center of a paradox that a former companion called hypocrisy. I own guns – not unlike many Americans. Not an arsenal, like some Americans, but still, more than one. I have computer games that involve significant amounts of violent mayhem. I like “action” movies. I was a kick-boxer. I have three black belts. I still go to a boxing gym to work out. I was also a Sixties California Bay area kid. Raised on civil rights, peace and freedom – anti-Vietnam all the way. I have remained anti-war. I advocate and organize against violence in the streets and against war in the world. Yet, part of my identity – a key part – is that of the warrior. My former companion and I once argued over this book. She saw this book as doomed to hypocrisy. The power of patriarchy is too strong. To her, I am a victim of my own male dominant arrogance and thus cannot possibly be aware of genuine potentials for peace. After all, it is fairly indisputable that (mostly) men make war. And it may be that masculinity (the social construction of maleness) is violent. It is certain that to “be a man” in most societies means to be involved with assertion, aggression, power, and dominance. Why don’t I give up my guns? My companion said that it is impossible to be a pacifist, as she is, if I come from such male-ness, and that peace advocacy is for me at best uncommitted, and at worst hypocritical. For my part (short of giving up the argument entirely), I understand her position, and I feel the paradox. She suggested that the most important potential contribution of this book may be to look at myself. Not a biography, but maybe a pathology. I’m not sure I’ll see what she wants me to see, but I’m committed to looking at what I can. This is why it is especially important for me to continue my hypocrisy. I loved her. I love her still. And, women along with children are among the most regular victims of war.
I am a flower child become martial artist – a warrior advocating peace. I am the same age as Osama bin Laden. I am just common enough a sort to be arrogant, and just arrogant enough to think that how I got to be this way may be important to understanding war and how to stop it. What motivated me? How did I go from peace to war, and how can I be who I have become – a gun owner advocating peace? I think that if peace ever becomes a reality, it will be because warriors truly learn to make genuine peace. Peace that is not a noun, but a verb.
- Al Smith, Fall 2004
INTRODUCTION
WHY WE WAR
War makes no sense. There may be just causes rationalized. Heroes and villains may be identified. There may be winners and losers who are often distinguishable only by the differing levels of pain, anguish and death. There is evil in the world - to be sure - however, as former United States Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in The Fog of War: “How much evil do you have to do in the name of good?” War blurs the distinctions of good and evil into a gray continuum of carnage. Strip war of its pathos and politics. What you get are human beings organized around the purpose of the efficient systematic slaughter of other humans. Ask combat veterans. They may have reasoned that war was necessary, but no one liked being there. War makes no sense. Yet, humankind invests more energy and time on war than on peace. At the individual subjective level, peace is infinitely more desirable. War is not normal, yet seems to have become normalized as the regular state of collected human affairs. Maybe it’s the way we look at it. Maybe it’s the questions we ask ourselves. Aggression may be normal biological human behavior (especially among men), but war is different from aggression. Violence, especially war, is both socially structured and culturally conditioned. There is a kind of script. It is politics and pathos.
War is an institution.
In spite of the social construction of masculinity that already favors aggression and violence, war is still not an individual’s first choice. An expert at killing and training others to kill, Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, notes (132) that men have an “…instinctive resistance to killing…” and that “…killing the foe…is not a natural act; it is a repellent one.” It is only through intensive training that most men become efficient and reliable killers of other men.
War is the product of social organization, and culture, not biology. Apart from aggression, humans are also empathetic. Biologically, people are quite empathetic. We would all rather just get along. It suits the human ability to organize socially and develop culturally. However, it is through social organization that individual aggression is heightened and channeled into group behavior. I question authority and I question social organization. Through them, empathy is dismissed - inherent human empathy that struggles with social mandates and cultural conditioning. More than fear, or its political cognate cowardice, people realize themselves in their (potential) victims. But, social and cultural conditioning can and does override empathy. And, still we make war. We have not yet decided to un-make war. By the clear proportion of sheer physical investment and political priority, we seem to be unwilling to make peace.
This book is not an exhaustive recollection of humanity and war. It is a reorganization of thought on the issues that surround why we war. The central purpose is to challenge the way we think of war and social organization. The unfortunate idea is that war is still conceived of by many (if not most) of humanity to be a regrettable necessity. If we accept that lasting peace is too impossibly complex a task, then this is one root of the cause of war. There are many complex problems that humanity has solved cooperatively. Warfare is as important a problem as humankind will ever face, so the complexity of war is an unacceptable excuse for not ending it. But, more than that, there is in complexity a thread of truth to why we war. There is an ever-present connection between wealth, power, and organized violence.
There is a consistent denial of human rights and social justice that enshrouds war. These connections between concentrated wealth, power, and the systematic denial of human rights are not just part of Western society and culture, but (like war) are part of all human civilization. War is a corruption of human social organization – an organization that is otherwise aimed at guaranteeing survival of the species through cooperative behavior. War serves only to concentrate wealth and power and deny human rights that social organization was meant to provide. If civilization has led the human race to thrive on this planet, then war has also made us our own worst enemy. Civilization and war must become disentangled. The social organization of peace must eclipse that for war. To do this, the social and cultural evolution for war must be reexamined, and new questions asked about why we war.
Social organization has produced many things for humanity. Agriculture may be first and foremost of the positive products of social organization. And a philharmonic symphony is a crowning achievement in social organization. And, just the other day while walking with my boys, I was marveling at how well crosswalks and crossing lights work. Many other positive advantages have developed out of the human ability to organize into groups and to divide necessary jobs. We have a collective sense of human rights that addresses satisfying human needs through collective social organization. So why war? Why the recurring destructive phenomenon that seems so contradictory to human need and human rights? Of all the products of civilization, war seems to be one of the most consistent. Ehrlich, in Human Natures (210) observes that:
“The fact that such violence is virtually universal within human societies has given rise to a school of thought in which human beings are seen as having an innate drive or “military instinct” that leads to aggression and is the root cause of warfare.”
While aggression may well be human, the product of war is “virtually universal within human societies” because of human society, not human biology. War fits social organizations that are structured around hierarchies of wealth, and power. War occurs because it is productive, perhaps second only to agriculture. But where agriculture makes prosperity and plenty possible, war makes the concentration of wealth and the consolidation of social power possible. War is productive and profitable because it has been made to be so. The point of this book is to understand how war – and not human rights – is reinforced. It is not always just the money. There is always the power. But, war can be disentangled from social organization. Understanding why we war will help to generate activism against war – a movement toward cultural evolution. We can build a different type of social organization - one that need not rely on war to reinforce it. The late Issac Asimov once wrote:
"...violence is the last refuge of the incompetent..."
So far, war is the ultimate in violence. Humanity makes war. Is humanity ultimately incompetent? Let’s get a bit more personal. Let’s own our actions. We pride ourselves as a species that is social. We – all of us – view ourselves as organized, progressive, and peace loving at heart. Life is sacred. And then, we make war. Are we a species of hypocrites? Are we a race of incompetents? Will we be a species whose absurd challenge to itself will be our final undoing? We make war. It does not seem to appear on its own – it’s a human thing. We create it out of what was once peace. In peacetime, governments invest in warfare. We convince ourselves of the prudence of defense. We must be right, after all, because they are armed. Regardless of the often relatively peaceful tensions that precede a war, at one point we regularly decide on a course of combat.
Then, we glory in war. Our calculated capacity for the organized and systematic destruction of human life is evident at even the most basic social level. Of all creatures, only we humans have crafted special tools, to be used in ritual ways, simply for the purpose of fighting. And make no mistake – the purpose is killing. For (mostly) male humanity, aggressive and combative activity is a rule. And we have specially organized labor unions of death. The military in all its historic branches and forms is civilization’s social institution of murder. Called “soldier” or “warrior,” the social specialization is killing. Individuals as well as economic, political, cultural, and social institutions organize around the principles of war. Modern businessmen read Go Rin No Sho (A Book of Five Rings) – applying the ancient samurai combat strategy to commerce. Corporate “officers” engage in hostile takeovers as part of “trade wars.” Political parties use “war chests” of money to “wage campaigns” against each other. The United States government has a “war on drugs,” or a “war on crime” (often a war on the poor in reality), and of course, a “war on terrorism.” We speak of “strategic initiatives,” our national budgets dominated by “defense” spending. War – as a word and concept – represents the ultimate to which social energy can be put.
But, even that is not quite enough. We make war gods. Examine the earliest semi-mythic legends. Then, review the modern spiritual and philosophic religions of humankind. All are concerned with war. Some religions are completely obsessed with war. Judeo-Christian-Islamic texts depict not only human conflict, but a cosmic struggle between bellicose evil and equally belligerent good. The Old Testament god is a “God of Hosts” bent on retribution, who exhorts his followers to raze cities, putting whole populations to the sword. Siddartha Gautama (Buddha) was a warrior prince, and the Rig Vedas chronicle war. Holy war. Not that there is no good or evil. When any people use any god as an excuse for murder or genocide, then there is real, genuine evil. This book is concerned with the evil that men do in any god’s name.
We make war stories. The most ancient recorded traditions of humanity embrace war as either the central theme of history or as the essential punctuation. The ancient Greek Thucydides is often considered a patriarch of history in western (European) civilization. His initial contribution to human thought is a chronicle of war between his people and their Spartan neighbors. His, his, his – you will read a lot of male pronouns in this work. Gender is significant. Since early times, war and history have both been largely male pursuits. The history of Western Civilization has often been military history ever since Thucydides. Written in our own blood -- seemingly chaotic -- the record of the race is war.
We make war machines. Many of the earliest tools recovered by archaeologists are evidence of technologies that allowed humans to dominate aspects of their environments. Hunting and gathering activities permitted, if not promoted, early human proliferation. As numbers of people grew or resources became otherwise scarce, competition set in. Tools and technology could insure survival. Even more that survival, technology could produce surplus, prosperity, and wealth. Larger groups of people could get together. Choices were made. Soon these tools were used not solely on other animals, but on the human animal. Wealth needed protecting, and tools could be of use here too. Spears overcame clubs. Bows and arrows outdistanced spears. Weapons became specialized for the killing of people. Weapons were decorated and glorified as social status symbols. Eventually, a science or “art” of war developed. Guns allowed anyone lethal power. War became more political. Death became democratic. Eventually, the power of the atom became part of the machinery of war. Finally, chemistry and our own biology became weapons of mass human destruction. Technology never advances so fast as when the object is the more efficient murder of our own kind.
In the ancient or modern record, one is hard put to find a generation without skirmish, battle, or war. Somewhere a war just ended. Elsewhere a war is about to begin. North Korea and the U.S. rattle nuclear sabers. There is a war going on now. No, there are many wars going on now. Israeli fights Palestinian, Irish Catholic fights Irish Protestant, America fights a “war on drugs,” and most recently George W. Bush declared a World War on terrorism, then on Iraq. Many are unclear how we all got to this point, but revenge is always a motivator. Our revenge, their revenge in return - then our revenge again. Forget that Osama Bin Ladin was a religious fundamentalist and that Saddam Hussein was a secular fascist. And, that they would normally oppose one another were it not for the unifying influence of U.S. intervention.
But, where has war taken us? Where will war lead? Certainly not to peace, if history serves. Death and destruction – and, of course, more war – appear to be the real results of war. There must be an alternative - one that realizes who we all are, what we all are, how we got here, and where we can go from here. It is not a nation that is at stake. Nor is it a people, or even a civilization at stake – as George W. Bush puts it. It is humanity. In this era of sudden mass death – of indiscriminate nuclear and biological war – humanity itself is at stake. And we may be doomed. For all that we pat ourselves on the back for – all of our cultures, and social institutions – we may be a killer species. Many still think that the human race is genetically predisposed to mayhem and murder. More likely it is culture and social organization. It could be that the main tool of humanity, namely culture, may only be a useful adaptation to mitigate our homicidal tendencies. We might be the “Killer Ape” after all. But it may only be so because we conceive of it as so. Like has been said of god, if war did not exist, we would create it.
We could cooperate with each other and the environment. However, the objective view of the world humanity assumed long ago brings with it a paradigm of struggle. Seeing the world and others in it as full of things – objects to be manipulated – has meant that human culture(s) manipulate the environment. People become objects or less than that. Private property takes on a social value. Property can be transferred, bought, sold, or destroyed. People as objects – as numbers – can and are disposed of as property. The enemy becomes a thing. Soldiers are “spent” like currency. Culture and reason has also meant conflict and strife. If our belief systems endorse war, we rationalize that people are less valuable than property.
Historically, when humanity is at peace with the environment, we war with one another. In times of plenty, “we” must defend ourselves from “them.” If times are hard, and resources are few, “we” must take what “they” have. If honor or security is in question, then every patriotic militancy is in order. If there is no perceived “them,” we will create one. All things being equal, “we” will fight among ourselves. Racist, sexist, and class-ist struggles erupt within a society. Even in recreation, conflict and entertainment go hand in hand. Our games are rough and violent even when we are at play. “No pain, no gain.” “He who dies with the most toys, wins.” Did you really think he “made a killing in the stock market?” How is it that humankind espouses peace, yet makes unceasing war? How do we talk to ourselves? There are many lies, and a few truths about war.
What, first, are the eternal truths to the absurd cycle of war? Take gender, for instance. Patriarchy – male dominance in a society – does appear from all accounts to promote war and violence as a solution to social problems. War may be a male thing. If it is a “mans world,” is war his fault? Is war part of the unequal power of men in society? What about her? Are women uninvolved by nature? Or is this, too, social conditioning? Are women only victims? If hers is the hand that rocks the cradle, then why does her son grow up to be a potential killer? Blame genes or society? Who is it that supports a war effort when the men are away at the killing? It was not necessary to wait until “Rosie the Riveter.” Society has been molding (all) gender in support of war for quite some time. It was a Spartan woman – a mother – who told her son to come home “bearing your shield or on it.” And women are also victims of the social organization of war. In a pretentiously peaceful society like the United States, women are currently more than half of the population. Women are more than half of the votes in any election. And there is always the undervalued and under-recorded labor factor. Of what value to the war system is the un-waged labor of women? By keeping “the home fires burning,” women’s acceptance of patriarchy allows the economic benefits of “women’s work” to support the war system. Remember Lysistrata? If women united in political strikes against war, would it end? If women wanted to end war, could they? In American societies, women hold less wealth and power than men. This is not a biological disparity, but a socially contrived phenomenon. Women were not “asking for it.” In war, men rape. There is a tangible relationship between war, rape, and male dominance in societies that feature war as policy. Race, gender, class, and religion are all components in the human tragedy of war. Do we really want peace? It may well be that peace is the anomaly, and warfare the norm. Have we turned blind eyes to these and other truths?
Speaking of money, war always seems to generate wealth – at least for the powerful political and corporate figures that create wars, but don’t fight in them. I have never known a rich soldier. On the other hand, officers often go into military service rich, and then capitalize (literally) on the military experience with political power afterwards. Political economy is an analysis of the relationships between power and wealth that has some value in understanding the unnatural frequency of organized human conflict. It has been an axiom that “war is the health of the state.” Follow where authority and money intersect in a society, and things clarify. The consistent development in industrial and post-industrial societies of a military-industrial complex points to a fairly inescapable conclusion. Those with political and/or economic power work in social systems to maintain and expand their power. In this scenario, anything is rationalized. Add the intoxication of nationalism to the economic imperatives in a capitalist society. War becomes the “extension of politics, by other means” that Clauswitz spoke of. Preparation for war or engaging in war adds new vigor to industrial and post-industrial economies. Corporations can push for the highest levels of production, patriotically demanding supreme efforts from workers. Propaganda drenched labor “forces” are swept up in an undertow of nationalistic fervor often overcoming union tendencies to preserve hard-won class achievements. Many workers set aside rights just as governments relax or remove protective labor regulations. Strikes become a matter of national security. Unions are curbed, and dissidents are prosecuted. Congress (and other corporate-lobbied legislative bodies) increases “defense,” military and police budgets even as they grant corporations liberal freedoms – economic freedoms that are suspended for workers. The ultimate result is corporate profits, a vigorous economy, and a body count. All too typically, it is the bodies of poor, working class poor, and middle classes that fill the graves. The history of every generation is one of lethal and potentially lethal group-togroup confrontation. Even the great pacifist movements and religions are documents to the tenacity of institutionalized warfare. Why is this so? Why the persistent impression that war is built into the human genome? It may be that the ability to wage war is an inevitability of cultural evolution and diversity. Such an important question - why we war - demands that all investigative avenues be examined. A central truth to the human experience seems to be that we are ever at war. No matter the religion, governmental system, or philosophic movement humankind has either perpetuated or felt compelled to unavoidably respond to the reality of all-pervasive organized human-to-human aggression. In other words ...We War. Why we war is as ancient a riddle as we humans know. Thus far, our search for solutions to this most lethal conundrum has faltered. Our search for answers has been in vain because it rested on fallacies. But really, fallacy is a word for improper logic, when what we have actually done is lied to ourselves about war.
Lie #1; we really want peace. Ah, now – there you may have had a gut response - a kind of Frankenstein-ian “war BAD, peace GOOD!” visceral response. “Of course we want peace,” you say. Or do we? Humankind’s collective research into war has been overloaded with such emotion. But, is the emotion sincere? It is not nearly enough to assume that pacifism has lost to aggression because of the relative natures of the positions. It does not absolve us of responsibility because aggressive warlike types simply tend to dominate over passive ones. If people and their governments truly demanded peace, then all they must do is quit the killing. If enough people really became pacifists, the killing would stop. It has not stopped. We lie. We want peace unless it hurts. We want peace – unless we are pissed-off. Lie #2; war is dysfunctional. Either from having witnessed the horrific realities of war or from dramatic fantasies of glory, our assumption has been that war is futile. We cling to the notion that base animal instincts toward violence can be overcome through learning. Civilization is the savior of humanity. Unfortunately, it is the truly “civilized” cultures that seem to have institutionalized war. We have been smug to think peace the sole functional expression of human culture. War and peace both exist for reasons -- scientific reasons beyond viscera. Certainly, for war to have its near-organic vitality and frequency, it must have willing participants. Thus, war has some social value and cultural basis. War must also have physical consequence. Sooner or later, social and cultural behaviors acted out over thousands of years must somehow impact biology. If war has absolutely no value in a biological sense, then it would be vestigial, not vital – atrophied, not active. Civilization - first occurring in what has been called the Neolithic Age as a result of advances in plant and animal domestication. Civilization is defined as complex social organization with divisions and specialization of labor. Social institutions and cultural practices developed to stabilize the most ideal conditions for human beings to thrive in a capricious natural environment. As a species, we have not biologically changed much since the Neolithic period. Why? Organized warfare and the Neolithic agricultural revolution – same time – a coincidence? Not very likely. Social organization has affected our biology. And, one of the most regularly recurring features of social organization – of civilization – is war. If war was not originally part of the biology of humankind, it has become so through repetition. We make war, but war made us. We are products of evolution. We have evolved as a species. War has evolved. We evolved a social and cultural strategy for dealing with the environment. Soon it was not just the natural environment that we could collectively effect, but we had created social environments to deal with – new landscapes. We had cultural complexes that dynamically influenced human beings to the degree that together; culture and society have challenged natural biologic evolution (and the environment). Social scientists have made this popular as the “nature versus nurture” problem. Are humans and their behavior products of biologically determined “hard wiring,” or are they the products of social and cultural conditioning? In reality, there is no controversy – we are both. Nature and nurture operate together to produce what and who we are. The scientific controversy is to what degree nature versus to what percentage nurture. Who and what we are and why we war is to be found in the balance, not in an either-or approach. So to figure out why we make war and what can be done about it, we need to look at society, and cultural evolution.
Men make war so violence is male, so men make war, etc., etc. - chicken and egg, again and again. War is a masculine expression, true. But, it is a human expression – also true. Human social organization makes war possible, and apparently often desirable. We cannot end it by simply dismissing war as a gender expression, or as male conditioning. The social construction of the role of the male is one thing, but institutionalized male power is another thing entirely. Masculinity and patriarchy differ in that masculinity is a role individuals play out in society, while patriarchy is the system that confers power and privilege on the male playing the proper role. Patriarchy is also a system that punishes those who do not play the proper role. They are linked, of course. One is a social behavior of dominance, the other is a social system of dominance. War happens because of male dominance, but male dominance happens because of war. Just as all civilization is not due to men, so too war is not solely due to men. Yet, patriarchy is different. It moves beyond the social construction of male-ness, into the control of society by men. When our social systems are structured around a type of male leadership and masculinity that is constructed as aggressive and violent, then civilization follows a violent lead. Patriarchy is at the center of human civilization, and cannot be discounted as a source of war. Patriarchy may lay the foundations of conflict, however a whole society supports a war. Civilization is war. But, it is because it is the way that civilization is constructed. It takes the truly civilized – groups of people organized and specialized – to make war. Indeed, currently civilization demands war, promotes conflict, intensifies violence.
We are at war – again. We are a cult of war and warriors. How do you join?
How did I? Is war, with its warriors and soldiers all part of manliness and masculinity? Is it part of humanity, biology, psychology, philosophy, history? Choices…do you choose? Do you actually choose war or peace? Did I? Is there “free-choice?” Some social scientists (Martin Heidigger and others) have said no. What we call “free choice” is really selecting from a limited set of circumstances. These circumstances are limited in part by our awareness. How can one choose from what one knows nothing about? Choice is further limited in part by what those who came before us leave us, and partly by what is in our immediate environment. If human history is punctuated by power struggles and war, and all around us are indications that violence is acceptable – even rewarded under the right circumstances – then what will become of choice? No, our biological and cultural background, as well as our current environment made us. Nature and nurture, so to speak, is why we are what we are – and choice is an illusion. The principles of cultural evolution suggest that each generation modifies the (genotype and phenotype) last generation’s behavior. We say we want peace, even though the leadership of this United States demands war. What have we done to make peace? Most people given the “choice” choose peace. Why, then, does war persist? Not just this war, or that war, or a war, but all of them.
If the cultural evolutionary approach to history is acceptable as a theory explaining humanity, then biology responds to culture and cultural practice. Humanity evolves culturally, as well as socially. The genes for aggression and war are advanced each generation by each aspect of culture and society that supports war. But war also advances when we do nothing to actively oppose it. Our social institutions are organized around war, not peace. War will perpetuate itself. It is a system. The identity of warrior or soldier is a social construct that is networked into advantages and penalties. The social advantages and penalties are conferred or levied on the soldier by those who profit from leading us into war. This means we war because we mean to war. Or, at least, that we do not really mean to make peace. To make peace, and to fashion peace as a craft of human organization seems somehow beyond us. There is so much war in history, and so much at stake because of it, that the evolution of war and the cult of conflict seem a central feature of humanity. I argue that war is so intimate a part of human civilization as be more influential than money. And, that the organization of conflict that we call war is the central disease of society.
Authors such as Barbara Ehrenreich (in Blood Rites) have written that the nature of the construction of masculinity in a social system may be the deciding factor promoting the frequency of warfare. Spurred and lashed continuously by private property and its merciless offspring capitalism and materialism, patriarchy (male dominance) has a history of destructive acquisitiveness. Add the rest of the features of social organization and the resulting power and status of male dominance create the conditions fostering more organized violence. These conditions are aggression, organization, and concentrations of wealth. But male dominance exists within a social system, not independent of it. The system of human social organization is superior to its parts.
The case is also made by Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich and others that the system of social organization (we call civilization) has an evolutionary history. If so, it has been a cultural evolution that centers on war, the threat of war, and the “preservation” of peace. Both war and social organization are intimately bound in co-evolution. But, this does not have to continue. War is dependent on social organization – and more importantly – on the nature of social organization. But social organization is not dependent on war. Society can function without patriarchy. Male dominance is an afterthought by cultural evolutionary standards. Maleness and the social construction of masculinity are primetime tickets into the cult of the warrior, but not the exclusive tickets. And, maleness need not mean violence. All males are not warriors, just potential warriors. Without this patriarchic social organization, dominance has no meaning – no structure of distinctions, no gender based divisions of labor, wealth and status – no dominance. Patriarchy would be a meaningless term. Some think that, likewise, without masculinity war could not occur. While I am convinced by the data that a change in the social meaning of masculinity is essential to reducing war, I am not ready to go that far. War does not exist simply because of masculinity, but because of male dominance and the social nature of patriarchy. Men may often be brutish, short-sighted, and aggressive, but war only occurs if you get a group of us together under a leader who can rally the rest of society to support conflict. No matter who is dominant – a society based on dominance, private ownership, and concentrated wealth will generate the organized violence of war.
How has the rest of human society come to be organized around war? A book of particular interest that will be discussed at length later, is the fictional Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. Regardless of being at root a political satire, this book revealed how tightly integrated war has become with the rest of society. If we (as some still do) are to accept this once nearly anonymous yet wholly believable 1967 publication, then war is the aim of the state. The state supports war because war supports the status quo of the state. Allegedly the result of a secret U.S. government “special study group” think tank, the Report clearly outlines a viewpoint on the functional necessity of war. That this was a work of fiction and that it was (is) widely accepted as fact reveals how deeply seated our acceptance of war is. In the account given, war is essential to civilization as we know it, and peace is the “de-stabilizing” element. It is interesting and more than a little frightening, how the specific strategies outlined in this Vietnam era Report reflect the types of government and institutional policies enacted since that time. George W. Bush, and Karl Rove – for example – could be using the Report as a manual. Extremists on the Right and the Left have supported the Report since the 1960’s. The conclusion of the Report is that American Institutions will fail without regular war (Lewin/Navasky).
But this is not about the U.S. Humanity has institutionalized war. War is a uniquely human institution that has no cultural boundary, and no social one. All recorded histories expose the sutures binding social organization to war. Each social system confers privileges, rights, and (evolutionary) advantages on the warrior and his support network. It is the support network (from families, to farmers, to workers, to corporations, and yes the media) that makes the specialization of soldier possible. It is social organization that makes war possible. Biology may give us the ability to have aggression, culture may have given us the tools, but society has evolved war into an institution.
How then to solve the riddle of why we war? Pose new questions based on the fundamental assumption that to be so widespread and deep a part of the human experience, war must be a culturally adaptive strategy with social and biological value. We must face an unsettling fact. In some bizarre way, war works. But for whom? War is both social/cultural and biologically adaptive, and the riddle Why We War cannot be solved unless we accept this as the nucleus of our paradigm – especially now, when war has become far too destructive and potentially catastrophic for the human race. Humanity – or huge amounts of humanity – can be obliterated within seconds. Something must be done. The only salient questions are: What is war, why have we done it, and Why do we do it?, which are Historic queries; and, What can we (or should we) do about it?, a question that underlies the perennial anthropological controversy - nature versus nurture. In summary, we are looking at two things: the historic background of organized conflict, and the anthropological aspects of humanity and war. Therefore, each discipline – history and anthropology – figures into this study. The optimum result must be to move legitimately toward an end to war.
Can we learn, or is it that we cannot help ourselves? Is war always the result of economics, or of nationality or ethnicity? Can we change these things? If too many people are too close does conflict inevitably arise? For Cold War baby-boomers who dared believe in peace and love, can there be an end to war? And, for those who accept -- or even advocate -- war as a price of the human condition, should we stop?
But, can we stop? Humans are the only terrestrial fauna known to prey upon its own kind in complex ritualized ways, and often for considerably abstract reasons. Our own empirical sciences have shown us that we are the sole species that kills masses of its own kind for such things as doctrinal differences within a religion, or for that ultimate abstract creation of human society and culture – money.
There has scarcely been a generation without war. Yet, when no war is going, or when there are those who cannot (could not! would not!) engage in actual war, we nonetheless revel in our symbolic warfare. I don’t mean just the obvious examples such as video games or professional football, but the more subtle and pervasive varieties of ritual and symbolic war. We have a competitive streak. Everything from chess and pinochle all the way to the telling fact that even our appreciation of so called "classical literature" usually relies on the "central conflict", often between protagonist and antagonist.
Why are all known cultures of all known history so inevitably engaged with the potential for - if not the actual act of - organized physical conflict? To be so insidiously pervasive, so omnipresent, it seems that war must be relatively fundamental to some aspect of being human. Is that aspect biologic, historic, psycho-social, technological?
Knowing the answer may allow us to outgrow mass murder.
Or, from another point of view, is it possible that the perception of the human obsession with war could just simply be an artifact of historiography, Western culture(s), and modern media? All of them deal heavily with war and socially acceptable violence. Undeniably such influences play out their roles on the stage of this greatest of human tragedies. Clearly, however, the active human preoccupation with homicide, fratricide, and genocide substantially predate the development of the aforementioned influences.
Do movies make us violent, or do we make violent movies? Both are probably true. There was war before movies. There were stories about war told around many a fire in our preliterate past. Epic poems such as the Iliad were the movies of their times. Perhaps our “modern” progressive egocentrism fused with our modern technologic facility has simply bombarded us in film after book after film with the glorified vulgarity represented by war. Causation is an issue. But, we cannot escape that easily. We cannot simply blame the movies. No matter which came first, the chicken and the egg do exist. They are interdependent. We must consider that they exist for specific reasons. Ultimately, it really does not matter which is first. Chicken and egg will be followed by chicken and egg and chicken and egg. So it was, so it is, and so it has ever been with war. No, we cannot escape with a simple cause and effect statement. What must be clear is not just causation, but also purpose. What are the benefits, and who are the beneficiaries of war?
“All Gaul is divided into (three) parts,” wrote infamous warrior General Julius Caesar, and basically so is this work. Why we war is the central subject of an odyssey that will weave its way through disciplines of modern empiricism and ancient wisdoms (did you know that most grammar programs will not let you write “wisdoms” as a plural? The word and concept is considered as singular). The subject of war needs to be examined both anthropologically and historically. Anthropology will show the broadest possible range of the cross-cultural human experience of war. There are common aspects underlying cultural belief systems that motivate organized conflict. What is a
“culture of conflict?” Anthropology also offers glimpses of prehistoric cultural predispositions for war embedded in the archaeological record. History will show roots and social development of war. Comparative study of world history is testimonial to a consistent pattern of the development of social institutions that support war. The entrenchment of war in human social systems is an historical development. What is the “war system?” War is only possible as a collective response - a “group thing” that relies on re-channeling (limited) collective resources. The re-channeling is in fact a maldistribution of wealth. But groups are made of differing individuals. The mal-distribution by definition favors some individuals and groups at the expense of others. Culture and society - the individual and the group - interact to reinforce a cycle of organized violence. And what is the cost? This assessment will be based on a concept of universal human rights. The concept of human rights is a historically recurrent idea of the relative responsibilities and obligations that should exist (ideally) between the individual and society. What does the war system do to the individual’s ability to enjoy what human rights a society may offer? This is how we will judge war (UDHR). This interdisciplinary effort serves to illuminate unifying threads in the bloody and baleful tapestry of organized human conflict. Far from a trite recitation of serial slaughter, what is hoped for is a methodology of social change. We have little time for idle speculation. War demands a certain intellectual and social activism. Success in making a change will rely on adopting a new perspective. That is what this book is about.
In the first section there will be an anthropological interpretation of war that is both cultural and physical. Is war solely a learned behavior – a by-product of all human social and cultural orientation? Can we thus unlearn war? Some ugly facts about human societies and cultures will emerge from questioning whether war is waged solely for social status, or economic exchange. War will be assessed as expansionist necessity and as ideological inevitability. We may be a species organized to aggressively challenge the environment. Unlike other species that reach equilibrium, culture and society may have allowed humans to continually exceed environmental – natural – restrictions. When social systems become our main environment, is war anthropologically inevitable? Or is it the nature of systems and relationships within human societies? War will also be discussed as a biologic mechanism of natural selection played out through culturally developed patterns. Patterns which - if we are to accept some sociobiological theories - may be unavoidable results of our genetic predisposition.
Also often evident will be the difference between ideal and real, or perhaps more precisely, between the intentions and the actual results faced by warfare’s many participants. How does the soldier see war, and how does that view differ for others in society? What conditions do these beliefs produce? In this sense, this portion of the data presentation will take at least two forms - structure and function(s). Across time and space, war has a common structural development and purposeful function. No matter what, war exists and persists for some very good reasons. If our predilection for genocide is not to reign supreme, then the investigation of war must be far less cluttered with the rampant egoistic species-centricity that has thus far carried the day. We have to find a way to stop. We have to understand how to work against all war, not just the last one…or the next one… or, the final one.
Following anthropology, we will proceed to survey war in its various social historical manifestations. What is war, really? Investigating first an acceptable definition of what war actually means is essential to any reasoned discussion. Can it be defined in a way that all can accept? Are corporations waging economic war against the poor and working classes, for instance? Is rape gender war? And what about terrorism? According to the United Nations, there is little definitive difference between war and terrorism beyond the concept that war is state sponsored destruction, while terrorism is killing without the benefit of national sanction. Hmmm? What, for instance, is the earliest or most simple form of organized violence? What socially validates and justifies killing another human? How and why has conflict become more complex through time? This broad but brief historic survey explores the rationale behind traditions involving personal combat, through raiding societies, territorial skirmishes, and activities of feudal elite, all the way up to modern geo-political econo-nationalistic world war. Modern forms of terrorism (that post-colonial warfare of identity politics waged by the otherwise powerless) cannot be overlooked. Terrorism has created the conditions that are used to justify war, but war produces the conditions that justify terrorism. It is The Beast that consumes itself, and gives birth to itself. Already, youth gangs are being classified as urban terrorists. SWAT teams are training in urban warfare.
There are many guilty of war. Easy to define war crime as what they did. Leaders both current and historic regularly validate themselves through war. It is easy to list villains and heroes. Not so easy to see them as their foes saw them. For every hero, someone else saw villain. Every corpse – rich or poor – was a family member. Citizens become soldiers because it is in their cultural character. Soldiers fight because the leaders of society tell them to. Armies meet in war because society supports them.
Both sides in war commit atrocities because culture allows it. And, civilization has reached so high only because we stand on a mountain of war dead. It is a horrific analogy. We will pick the bones of war, much as a forensic scientist dissects a corpse for the clues left by the murderer - a smooth criminal, a seductive slayer, a serial killer, a mass murderer. With each revelation we will realize that the original homicidal maniacs... are us.