An End to War?

I posted the following on I Look Forward To:

Fighting is certainly hard-wired into human beings. We know that chimps from different bands will kill each other, even engage in systematic killing of members of the other band if their band has superior strength. Chimp genocide does indeed occur. This means that when our distant ancestors were much more closely related to the chimps, they likely engaged in similar activity.

But warfare, organized warfare, is a much more recent cultural innovation. This shouldn’t surprise us, since it takes a certain bare minimum of people, well equipped and supported by a larger group of people, trained and led by experienced commanders, to engage in genuine warfare, as opposed to the small skirmishes that their hunter-gatherer ancestors engaged in, skirmishes that were deadly, but very limited in scope.

I believe that organized warfare is an adaptation made by human beings in response to events taking place in the great central Eurasian plains. I was really impressed by John Keegan’s description of how tribes in those plains gradually bred horses for the hunt, the style of hunting on the plains is very well described here, techniques those people used against their enemies. Hunting and warfare became almost identical. These horses gradually became the war horses we are familiar with in cavalry charges.

With these fearsome beasts, the nomadic peoples raided settled areas in the east and west, terrorizing those peoples into organizing much stiffer resistance and fortifications, and thus, unintentionally but very powerfully, triggering the development of genuine civilizations, complete with warrior castes and classes.

In short, warfare became a habit, a habit borne of desperation. Do or die. Defense transformed into potent offense.

Every war until the modern era was a war for resources, treasure, slaves, and territory, including women. Remember, every tribe was utterly dependent upon securing a certain number of fertile women, lest the tribe die out. More recently, warfare has also been caused by deep-seated religious and indeological differences between peoples.

Considering the nature of this history, I would presume that a genuine society of plenty, based on accelerating technology, will further the recent trend of fewer wars. When you can trade for whatever you want, or even “grow it yourself,” you are much less likely to court loss of life and limb to get want you want through war.

Also, abundance may very well lessen the strains of human conflict that aggravate life, making religious and ideological wars much less likely. The hard-core True Believers may want to make war, but may also have a tougher time attracting/coercing followers into doing their bidding.

Organized sports, especially full-contact sports, have sopped up a lot of young men’s fighting energy and spirit. So, sports may well continue to bleed off any excess of our biologically inherited propensity to fight, while abundance handles the historical propensity to fight in highly organized ways.

Human conflict may never end, but we may be able to evolve new cultural practices that will make it much less likely or necessary for people to turn to violent methods to settle conflicts, in addition to those practices we have adopted long ago.

Here’s a link to a lengthy review of Keegan’s book:

http://brionmcclanahan.com/?p=56