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Is War Between Humans Always Inevitable?
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Joshua S. Goldstein |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 From long before Homer wrote the Iliad right into the twenty-first century, war appears to have been an ever-present feature of the human landscape. Some have theorized that the natural human instinct leans towards peaceful coexistence, and that the prevailing state of affairs is the byproduct of male aggression. In this extract from his book War and Gender, Joshua Goldstein holds that there is no empirical evidence to support the idea that war is a latter day phenomenon. |
 arxist (and other) scholarship has long portrayed both sexism and war as products of a certain stage in human history--that of private property and the state system following the invention of agriculture over 10,000 years ago. Originally, it is claimed, humans lived in matriarchal societies (women held political power) which did not have war. Evidence comes from the supposedly peaceful and gender-equal character of modern-day gathering-hunting societies. Thus, both patriarchy and war are products of economic class relations which changed with the rise of the state, in this view. |
Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels links the beginning of war to the rise of the state--and thus the end of war to the anticipated post-state era of communism. Engels argues that societies before the invention of agriculture were matriarchies and that when, with agriculture, private property came into being, gender relations were transformed and men seized power. The rise of the state and the beginning of war were products of that same transformation. Gender and war are here linked, but only indirectly, both being effects of the transformation of economic class relations after property came into being. The solution to war, therefore, is to move beyond private property to a classless society, by means of a revolution against the current phase of private property, namely capitalism. |
Several decades ago, the evidence seemed to imply that early humans were peaceful and egalitarian. Modern gatherer-hunters were reputedly peaceful, and the fossil record contained no compelling evidence of war. Thus, war appeared to be characteristic of a phase in human history, a mere 1 percent of the time we have been around as a species (and thus decoupled from any biological basis). In the event of a future transformation of the state system, or of the class divisions first sparked by agriculture (which made surplus possible), war itself might end as abruptly as it began. The end of war would be natural since we would need only to fall back on our deep human nature--3 million years of peaceful prehistory--to rediscover ourselves as creatures of peace. The idea that human beings are naturally peaceful and war is an aberration makes this story appealing. (A related myth held that humans are the only animal that kills its own species, again showing social violence as a deviation from nature. In fact, however, over a hundred other species kill their own kind.) |
Thus, this perspective urges us to fall back on our true selves, go back to nature, change oppressive class relations, and/or do away with the state system, in order to achieve real peace. Incidentally, gender relations are not very important in this story. (Many Marxists see class relations as more important than gender relations.) |
Present-day gathering-hunting societies
The story does not hold up, however. The evidence from modern-day gathering-hunting societies, whose supposed peaceful nature was assumed to reflect peaceful human origins, in fact shows the opposite: modern gathering-hunting societies are not generally peaceful. Of 31 gathering-hunting societies surveyed in one study, 20 typically had warfare more than once every two years, and only three had "no or rare warfare." I will get to those "rare" cases, but the point for now is that if typical gathering-hunting societies found today represent the typical societies found before the rise of the state--as advocates of peaceful origins have claimed--then those original societies were warlike. |
In theory, the absence of war altogether among gatherer-hunters is not essential for the idea of peaceful human origins. As a fall-back position, one could argue that gathering-hunting societies were relatively more peaceful than the chiefdom and state societies which followed. Even that argument, however, fails in light of empirical evidence. According to cross-cultural anthropological studies, nonstate societies have as much warfare as states do. Furthermore, overall per capita levels of violence (i.e., among individuals) may actually be higher in simpler gathering-hunting societies than in complex agrarian or industrialized societies, although this is hard to measure. |
Clearly, cross-cultural anthropological data do not support the idea that humans started out more peaceful in simple societies and became more warlike in complex societies, culminating in modern states. Admittedly, the evidence is not conclusive regarding human origins, because generalizations about today's gathering-hunting societies--most of which have been altered in both subtle and obvious ways by contact with the industrialized world--may not tell us much about the gathering-hunting societies that existed before the invention of agriculture. Usually, by the time the first anthropologists arrived on a scene the culture was far from "pristine." Even if the society itself had no regular contact with European colonizers, the process of colonization had often pushed it into a fraction of its former territory and severely reduced its population, as appears to have happened with some Canadian Eskimo peoples. In the case of Australian desert Aborigines, metal knives and tools had filtered in from surrounding areas that had contact with Europeans long before any white person arrived to meet or observe the Aborigines. In these contexts, it is quite plausible that depopulation and territorial contraction could have caused an upswing in conflict and war due to resource scarcity. Alternatively, the encroachments of Western colonizers could have caused a warlike society to cut off warring, and band together for survival. Furthermore, as colonizers actually overran and took control of local cultures, they often engaged in "pacification" of local conflicts. |
The point is that a society in the midst of such a radical transformation may not reflect the nature of early human societies. Consider one prominent example of this problem. The extremely warlike Yanomami Indians of Brazil and Venezuela were studied intensively by anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who wrote them up as "the Fierce People." Among the Yanomami, all female babies are killed until the first son is born. This creates a shortage of women for wives, and competition for this scarce resource is a major object of wars. The Yanomami say their wars have the purpose of capturing women, although some anthropologists propose other underlying reasons. Non-anthropologists often refer to the Yanomami when discussing gathering-hunting societies, or even call them "pristine." In fact, however, decades before anthropologists first arrived, the Yanomami had already acquired steel tools (machetes, metal cooking pots, and axes) from the outside, allowing more efficient production of bananas and plantains, as well as axe fights. Thus, "pristine is passe." Overall, however, colonial effects mainly suppress war and thus do not explain the presence of war in simple societies. |
Hundreds of cultures, both preagricultural and agrarian, are documented in the Human Resources Area Files (HRAF)--"the only worldwide, systematic collection of information concerning societies." Anthropologists Melvin and Carol Ember, who run HRAF, analyze a sample of 90 societies. They note that "we cannot compare societies with and without war" because "the vast majority... had at least occasional wars when they were first described, unless they had been pacified." The Embers find only eight societies where wars occur less frequently than once in ten years on average. Over half of the 90 societies were in a constant state of war or readiness for war, and half of the remaining cases fought every year during a particular season. They conclude that "war is almost ubiquitous in the ethnographic record, in the absence of external powers that imposed pacification, and the frequency distribution is skewed sharply toward the high end" (M. Ember and C.R. Ember, "Cross-cultural studies of war and peace," in S.P Reyna and R.E. Downes (eds), Studying War, 1994). |
Prehistoric evidence
In theory, the best evidence about whether humans were peaceful before the invention of agriculture would be the direct record of those times as studied by archaeologists and paleontologists. This record is very spotty, however, and not compelling for either war or peace. To summarize, the evidence is consistent with (but not proof of) the presence of warfare at least sporadically throughout all periods of prehistory. It is doubtful that war followed along after (and hence possibly as a result of) the Neolithic Revolution (the beginning of agriculture, herding, and proto-urban settlements about 10,000 years ago), since strong evidence points to war's presence early in the Neolithic era. It is even possible that war played a central role in creating the Neolithic Revolution. A new and growing, though still limited, body of tangible evidence--ranging from discernible fortifications around settlements to remnants of weapons and the residue of injuries on bodies--suggests the presence of war before agriculture. One paleontologist writes that only after many years of excavating "skeletons with embedded projectile points" did he question his "acceptance of the traditional view that the native peoples of California had been exceptionally peaceful." |
The rise of states
No one disputes that war played a central role in the rise of states and civilizations after the Neolithic Revolution. In 12,000 to 8000 BC "there was a revolution in weapons technology... Four staggeringly powerful new weapons make their first appearance...: the bow, the sling, the dagger... and the mace, [and]...produced true warfare." The bow and arrow were inexpensive and reached 100 yards versus 50 for spears, and an individual could carry more arrows than spears. It "spread rapidly around the Mediterranean. Neolithic cave paintings clearly reveal their use against men as well as animals." The sling had double the range of the bow and arrow (200 yards), and was also extensively used in Neolithic times. Along with the new weapons came the invention of military tactics, especially the organization of soldiers in columns and lines. With these changes in the offensive power of armies, the fortification of settlements began, which then spread around the eastern Mediterranean from 8000 to 4000 BC. Jericho--one of the earliest fortified sites with 13-foot-high stone walls and a tower--may have started as a hunting site (around an oasis), with the walls coming next as defense against armed enemies (thereby committing the inhabitants to a sedentary life), and agriculture following. Evidence from the earliest historical societies shows warfare well ensconced. War played a central role in the rise of the early Middle Eastern civilizations, and was already strongly gendered. |
To summarize in reverse chronological order, war played a central role in the rise of the first states and civilizations (and thereafter). It may have driven rather than resulted from the Neolithic Revolution. Evidence indicates war in the period just before the start of recorded history. Although the earlier prehistoric period does not provide adequate evidence for or against the presence of war, we do know that those societies had both the social organization and the weapons necessary for organized intergroup violence. War may plausibly have played a role in the rapid expansion of modern humans starting 150,000 years ago, which led to the extinction of other early humans including the Neanderthals--although we have no hard evidence of this. We cannot say whether early humans, dating back several million years, engaged in lethal intergroup violence, but at least one other primate species (chimpanzees) does so in its natural habitats. Finally, present-day gathering-hunting societies worldwide virtually all have war, and violence in these simple societies appears to be at least as prevalent as in agrarian and industrialized societies. |
Thus, the myth of peaceful origins finds no empirical support. Again, this does not mean that any group of people at a particular time and place are forced to have war. It does mean that war, like gender, has deep roots. It is not overlaid on our "true" selves, but runs deep in us. |
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