Is War Inevitable?

Human evolution has been defined by conflict, says E. O. Wilson, one of the world’s leading biologists. War is embedded in our very nature.

E. O. Wilson

“History is a bath of blood,” wrote William James, whose 1906 antiwar essay is arguably the best ever written on the subject. “Modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.”

Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group competition was a principal driving force that made us what we are. In prehistory, group selection (that is, the competition between tribes instead of between individuals) lifted the hominids that became territorial carnivores to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise -- and to fear. Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled. Throughout history, the escalation of a large part of technology has had combat as its central purpose. Today the calendars of nations are punctuated by holidays to celebrate wars won and to perform memorial services for those who died waging them. Public support is best fired up by appeal to the emotions of deadly combat, over which the amygdala -- a center for primary emotion in the brain -- is grandmaster. We find ourselves in the “battle” to stem an oil spill, the “fight” to tame inflation, the “war” against cancer. Wherever there is an enemy, animate or inanimate, there must be a victory. You must prevail at the front, no matter how high the cost at home.

Any excuse for a real war will do, so long as it is seen as necessary to protect the tribe. The remembrance of past horrors has no effect. From April to June in 1994, killers from the Hutu majority in Rwanda set out to exterminate the Tutsi minority, which at that time ruled the country. In a hundred days of unrestrained slaughter by knife and gun, 800,000 people died, mostly Tutsi. The total Rwandan population was reduced by 10 percent. When a halt was finally called, 2 million Hutu fled the country, fearing retribution. The immediate causes for the bloodbath were political and social grievances, but they all stemmed from one root cause: Rwanda was the most overcrowded country in Africa. For a relentlessly growing population, the per capita arable land was shrinking toward its limit. The deadly argument was over which tribe would own and control the whole of it.

Universal conflict


Once a group has been split off from other groups and sufficiently dehumanized, any brutality can be justified, at any level, and at any size of the victimized group up to and including race and nation. And so it has ever been. A familiar fable is told to symbolize this pitiless dark angel of human nature. A scorpion asks a frog to ferry it across a stream. The frog at first refuses, saying that it fears the scorpion will sting it. The scorpion assures the frog it will do no such thing. After all, it says, we will both perish if I sting you. The frog consents, and halfway across the stream the scorpion stings it. Why did you do that, the frog asks as they both sink beneath the surface. It is my nature, the scorpion explains.

War, often accompanied by genocide, is not a cultural artifact of just a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture. Archaeological sites are strewn with the evidence of mass conflicts and burials of massacred people. Tools from the earliest Neolithic period, about 10,000 years ago, include instruments clearly designed for fighting. One might think that the influence of pacific Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, has been consistent in opposing violence. Such is not the case. Whenever Buddhism dominated and became the official ideology, war was tolerated and even pressed as part of faith-based state policy. The rationale is simple, and has its mirror image in Christianity: Peace, nonviolence, and brotherly love are core values, but a threat to Buddhist law and civilization is an evil that must be defeated.

Since the end of World War II, violent conflict between states has declined drastically, owing in part to the nuclear standoff of the major powers (two scorpions in a bottle writ large). But civil wars, insurgencies, and state-sponsored terrorism continue unabated. Overall, big wars have been replaced around the world by small wars of the kind and magnitude more typical of hunter-gatherer and primitively agricultural societies. Civilized societies have tried to eliminate torture, execution, and the murder of civilians, but those fighting little wars do not comply.

Archaeologists have determined that after populations of Homo sapiens began to spread out of Africa approximately 60,000 years ago, the first wave reached as far as New Guinea and Australia. The descendants of the pioneers remained as hunter-gatherers or at most primitive agriculturalists, until reached by Europeans. Living populations of similar early provenance and archaic cultures are the aboriginals of Little Andaman Island off the east coast of India, the Mbuti Pygmies of Central Africa, and the !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa. All today, or at least within historical memory, have exhibited aggressive territorial behavior.

Lethal legacy

Tribal aggressiveness goes back well beyond Neolithic times, but no one as yet can say exactly how far. It could have begun at the time of Homo habilis, the earliest known species of the genus Homo, which arose between 3 million and 2 million years ago in Africa. Along with a larger brain, those first members of our genus developed a heavy dependence on scavenging or hunting for meat. And there is a good chance that it could be a much older heritage, dating beyond the split 6 million years ago between the lines leading to modern chimpanzees and to humans.

A series of researchers, starting with Jane Goodall, have documented the murders within chimpanzee groups and lethal raids conducted between groups. It turns out that chimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers have about the same rates of death due to violent attacks within and between groups. But nonlethal violence is far higher in the chimps, occurring between a hundred and possibly a thousand times more often than in humans.

The patterns of collective violence in which young chimp males engage are remarkably similar to those of young human males. Aside from constantly vying for status, both for themselves and for their gangs, they tend to avoid open mass confrontations with rival troops, instead relying on surprise attacks. The purpose of raids made by the male gangs on neighboring communities is evidently to kill or drive out their members and acquire new territory. There is no certain way to decide on the basis of existing knowledge whether chimpanzees and humans inherited their pattern of territorial aggression from a common ancestor or whether they evolved it independently in response to parallel pressures of natural selection and opportunities encountered in the African homeland. From the remarkable similarity in behavioral detail between the two species, however, and if we use the fewest assumptions required to explain it, a common ancestry seems the more likely choice.

The principles of population ecology allow us to explore more deeply the roots of mankind’s tribal instinct. Population growth is exponential. When each individual in a population is replaced in every succeeding generation by more than one -- even by a very slight fraction more, say 1.01 -- the population grows faster and faster, in the manner of a savings account or debt. A population of chimpanzees or humans is always prone to grow exponentially when resources are abundant, but after a few generations even in the best of times it is forced to slow down. Something begins to intervene, and in time the population reaches its peak, then remains steady, or else oscillates up and down. Occasionally it crashes, and the species becomes locally extinct.

What is the “something”? It can be anything in nature that moves up or down in effectiveness with the size of the population. Wolves, for example, are the limiting factor for the population of elk and moose they kill and eat. As the wolves multiply, the populations of elk and moose stop growing or decline. In parallel manner, the quantity of elk and moose are the limiting factor for the wolves: When the predator population runs low on food, in this case elk and moose, its population falls. In other instances, the same relation holds for disease organisms and the hosts they infect. As the host population increases, and the populations grow larger and denser, the parasite population increases with it. In history diseases have often swept through the land until the host populations decline enough or a sufficient percentage of its members acquire immunity.

There is another principle at work: Limiting factors work in hierarchies. Suppose that the primary limiting factor is removed for elk by humans’ killing the wolves. As a result the elk and moose grow more numerous, until the next factor kicks in. The factor may be that herbivores overgraze their range and run short of food. Another limiting factor is emigration, where individuals have a better chance to survive if they leave and go someplace else. Emigration due to population pressure is a highly developed instinct in lemmings, plague locusts, monarch butterflies, and wolves. If such populations are prevented from emigrating, the populations might again increase in size, but then some other limiting factor manifests itself. For many kinds of animals, the factor is the defense of territory, which protects the food supply for the territory owner. Lions roar, wolves howl, and birds sing in order to announce that they are in their territories and desire competing members of the same species to stay away.

Wars past, present, future


Humans and chimpanzees are intensely territorial. That is the apparent population control hardwired into their social systems. What the events were that occurred in the origin of the chimpanzee and human lines -- before the chimpanzee-human split of 6 million years ago -- can only be speculated. I believe that the evidence best fits the following sequence. The original limiting factor, which intensified with the introduction of group hunting for animal protein, was food. Territorial behavior evolved as a device to sequester the food supply. Expansive wars and annexation resulted in enlarged territories and favored genes that prescribe group cohesion, networking, and the formation of alliances.

For hundreds of millennia, the territorial imperative gave stability to the small, scattered communities of Homo sapiens, just as they do today in the small, scattered populations of surviving hunter-gatherers. During this long period, randomly spaced extremes in the environment alternately increased and decreased the population size so that it could be contained within territories. These demographic shocks led to forced emigration or aggressive expansion of territory size by conquest, or both together. They also raised the value of forming alliances outside of kin-based networks in order to subdue other neighboring groups.

Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic era, the agricultural revolution began to yield vastly larger amounts of food from cultivated crops and livestock, allowing rapid growth in human populations. But that advance did not change human nature. People simply increased their numbers as fast as the rich new resources allowed. As food again inevitably became the limiting factor, they obeyed the territorial imperative. Their descendants have never changed. At the present time, we are still fundamentally the same as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but with more food and larger territories. Region by region, recent studies show, the populations have approached a limit set by the supply of food and water. And so it has always been for every tribe, except for the brief periods after new lands were discovered and their indigenous inhabitants displaced or killed.

The struggle to control vital resources continues globally, and it is growing worse. The problem arose because humanity failed to seize the great opportunity given it at the dawn of the Neolithic era. It might then have halted population growth below the constraining minimum limit. As a species we did the opposite, however. There was no way for us to foresee the consequences of our initial success. We simply took what was given us and continued to multiply and consume in blind obedience to instincts inherited from our humbler, more brutally constrained Paleolithic ancestors.

Also see John Horgan's response to this piece, “No, War Is Not Inevitable.”

Excerpted from The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson, published in April by Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright © 2012.

Fatality rate due to conflict

The last century has been called the Century of Total War: World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts took an estimated 187 million human lives. But after analyzing archaeological and ethnographic data, social scientist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has reported even worse fatalities in hunter-gatherer societies stretching back at least 10,000 years and continuing to the present. War appeared to serve a purpose, culling population whenever numbers rose too high. Counterintuitively, war might have also fostered altruism: Since winning battles required cooperation, wartime mortality might have aided the evolution of an altruistic human nature through the process of natural selection.

7% Southern Sweden
Remains by an ancient lagoon called Skateholm indicate a 7% adult mortality rate due to warfare 6,100 years ago.

21% Southern Ukraine
Analysis of Vasiliv’ka III, an 11,000-year-old burial site, shows that 21% of adults died as a result of warfare. Another site, Volos’ke, shows evidence of a 22% adult mortality rate due to warfare.

30% Northern India
At Sarai Nahar Rai, a site inhabited by hunter-gatherers between 3,140 and 2,860 years ago, war caused 30% of adult deaths.

46% Northern Sudan
14,000 to 12,000 years ago, 46% of Nubian adults died in war.

21% Northeastern Australia
Among the Murngin, a group of maritime foragers, war accounted for about 21% of adult deaths between 1910 and 1930.

23% British Columbia
Across 30 sites dating to between 5,500 and 340 years ago, 23% of all adults died in war.

6% Southern California
Across 28 hunter-gatherer sites, warfare led to 6% of adult deaths between 5,500 and 630 years ago.

17% Venezuela-Colombia border
Before first contact in 1960, warfare caused 17% of adult deaths among the Hiwi, who were foragers.

30% Eastern Paraguay
Ethnographic evidence implies that war caused 30% of the deaths among hunter-gatherers here prior to Western contact in 1970.

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jun/07-is-war-inevitable-by-e-o-wilson

From the Discover, June 2012 issue; published online June 12, 2012

為什麼某些人成為睜眼瞎子或喜歡公然說謊？

Professor French的評論把美國非洲政策的宣示及其執行兩者間的不一致，或言行不一，分析得很透徹。當然這篇評論也把「叢林法則」在國際事務的應用描述得清清楚楚。

開欄文作者李鐵先生或者有某種偏見或偏執，造成他形同一個睜眼瞎子，看不見強權(包括當前的中國)在國際舞台上的表演；或者他相當明白國際事務的運作方式，但為了這個或那個「立場」，不惜公然說謊。不但說謊時臉不紅，氣不喘，還屌得跟二、五、八萬一樣的公然說謊。看他的標題，就可想像他一付自以為是「高級中國人」的嘴臉。

如果是前者，此人可憐；如果是後者，此人可惡、可恥。

The Dilemma at the Heart of America's Approach to Africa

If Washington really wants to promote African democracy, why is it partnering with the continent's autocrats to create military spy programs?

Howard W. French, 06/15/12

JUBA, South Sudan -- In an extraordinary pair of articles published this week, The Washington Post has filled in the picture of how the U.S. military and intelligence establishment have worked to create a network of a dozen or so air bases for spying purposes across Africa. What is most remarkable about the articles are not the details themselves, which involve small, specially equipped turboprop aircraft flying surveillance missions out of remote airfields in the Sahel and in equatorial East Africa.

What stands out most about the articles, instead, is the way that this news has cast the African continent as a place where serious American interests are at play. Such things are all too rare for the mainstream media, which typically chronicles African political upheaval, violence and suffering as distant and almost random incidents or miscellany with little connection to life outside of the continent.

The Africa of our day-to-day coverage is dominated, in other words, by vivid splashes of color, by scene and emotion, and it is largely bereft of form or of pattern, and of politics and ideas that could help connect one development to another or connect the whole to the rest of the world. Some of this may be changing slowly with the recent sharp rise of China's profile throughout the continent, which has drawn a belated response from a United States suddenly eager to avoid seeing the continent be snatched away from the West, as some fear.

The Post pieces were ultimately as remarkable for what they didn't say as what they did, though. And in this regard, they highlight the need for the media to hold the actions of the Unites States up against its rhetoric, much as it is wont to do with regard to China, whose rote-like discourse on Africa emphasizes terms like "win-win," and "non-interference," etc.

By helpful coincidence, the Post's stories, which detail the ongoing militarization of Washington's policies toward Africa, were published at the very same time that the Obama Administration was unveiling its purportedly new strategy toward the continent.

The leading messenger for this was Hillary Clinton, whose talk yesterday about economic opportunity for American businesses in Africa was as welcome as it was overdue. As a spate of recent articles has made clear, she spoke of the Africa as a place of strong economic growth and the continent with the highest returns on investment. It is precisely Chinese firms' awareness of this that has been driving them, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants, to Africa in recent years in search of opportunity.

In policy briefings for the press, however, and in Clinton's own statements, the promotion of democracy was given pride of place in a new American agenda for Africa, and this is where the rub comes between rhetoric and reality.

The Post piece reveals that the key American allies in Washington's military and intelligence push are the leaders of Burkina Faso in West Africa and Uganda in East Africa. These two men, Blaise Compaoré in Burkina Faso and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, have been in office respectively for 25 and 26 years. Both took power by force. Both have resisted real democratization in their countries. And both have been prolific and mischievous meddlers in neighboring countries, where their adventures have sown death and havoc, routinely employed child soldiers, and have involved lucrative arms trafficking as well as the organized pillage of natural resources either for their own benefit or for allies within their regimes.

Another American ally, this one emerging, as described by the Washington Post, is the year-old state of South Sudan, a country that Clinton described as a "success." That will come as a surprise to many of the people here, whose own president has recently acknowledged the looting of $4 billion by his own associates from state coffers.

If Washington wishes to be taken seriously by Africans it has as much work to do as China in squaring words and deeds. Yesterday, the White House said its new policy commits the United States to advance democracy by "strengthening institutions at every level, supporting and building upon the aspirations throughout the continent for more open and accountable governance, promoting human rights and the rule of law, and challenging leaders whose actions threaten the credibility of democratic processes."

One of the biggest impediments to the continent's emergence, however, is the very existence of leaders like Compaoré and Museveni, who come to see themselves as irreplaceable, confusing their own persons with the state and seeking to remain in power indefinitely.

If Washington genuinely wishes to prioritize democracy in Africa, it might wish to privilege relations with the already substantial and growing number of states that are governed more democratically than places like these. For old friends like Museveni and newer ones like Compaoré, meanwhile, it is time to reexamine the question of what friendship is for and to ask whom does it really benefit?

If, on the other hand, American policy is really about fighting an endless succession of enemies, which is what seems to drive the security agenda that the Post has so usefully lifted the veil on, then candor should require admitting that building democracy is really important only when it is convenient.

Howard W. French teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is a former senior writer and foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/the-dilemma-at-the-heart-of-americas-approach-to-africa/258541/

從20世紀50年代我懂事以後，在報上看到的新聞報導：

伊朗莫沙德、智利阿言德、越南吳廷琰等都是CIA主導下被殺；中、南美洲的薩爾瓦多、尼加拉瓜、智利(1)等國的獨裁政府，都是美國政府支持，這些政權在國內殺人無數(內戰和政府指揮的暗殺團)；格內納達和巴拿馬的政府則是美國出兵推翻；美國遠赴越南、阿富汗、和伊拉克作戰(侵略？)，但被打敗，不得不夾著尾巴逃之夭夭。

這些事件 -- 還有其他我不記得或沒有注意到的(2) -- 都是美國在維護「普世價值」？另一方面，敘利亞阿薩德政府去年一年內鎮壓老百姓死傷了近一萬人，過去非洲種族屠殺層出不窮，美國都只在一旁放屁。

如果李鐵先生提不出一個說得通的論述來解釋(美化？合理化？)這些行動和不行動，我想相對而言，「叢林法則」能夠說明何以這些事件會發生，以及解釋美國領導人幹這些事的動機。這是我為什麼用叢林法則來看國際關係的根據。

李先生顯然不是從世界史的角度看「國際關係」，也不能根據血淋淋的事實就「國際關係」做判斷。我不知道他是不看報，不食人間煙火，還是大腦少了根筋、多了個瘤，才在那裏自以為理直氣壯的胡說八道，或煞有介事的喃喃自語。

附註：

1.     阿言德被殺後由美國扶植的皮諾契軍政府。後來皮諾契被西班亞政府抓起來送回智利受審並被判刑。

2.     請參考：傷膝利比亞： A CENTURY OF US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS： A partial list of US military interventions from 1890 to 2011 (一個世紀的美國軍事干預：從1890年到2011年美國軍事干預他國的部分清單)：Dr. Zoltan Grossman (佐爾坦·格羅斯曼博士)。

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=zh-TW&langpair=en%7Czh-TW&u=http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html。

至於英國、法國、和蘇聯(以及蘇聯解體後的俄國)等等在過去50 - 100年的出兵記錄，請自行在網上搜尋。