When is war unavoidable

Brian Ferguson, this doesn't mean we have good reason to think large scale social conflict is in our genes. For as long as humans have recorded their achievements in paint and stone, war has been a familiar story. So we could almost be forgiven for thinking it's a fundamental part of being human.

Just how ingrained is large scale social violence, though? To borrow a metaphor , are humans innately war-mongering hawks looking for a fight, or peace-loving doves driven to take up arms? Sure, we have a constant tide of media reporting the latest causalities of bombs and bullets. Not to mention historical accounts of our thirst for battle, and even cave paintings seeming to show figures running one another through with spears.

But it's hard to know how much of our storytelling demonstrates a fundamental violent streak, and how much is a reflection of our fear and desire to record it. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. A continuing problem is the expenditure of GNP on weapons and military. This allows large countries to overrun smaller countries rather easily.

Add the nuclear development worldwide, it gets very ugly. The corporate media owned by a few corporations at least in the USA control the news that they want put out there. Government in turn works with these same corporate news entities to present what issues they want and do not want in the news. It is a symbiotic relationship that limits the news that we see. The result is the death of what we in democracies remember as what used to be the 'free press'. First, it's big business.

Just as the first rule of commerce is to make your own market, the first rule for weapons manufacturers is to make, or be involved in the process of making wars occur. President Eisenhower made it clear in his last speech as president that we should fear the 'military industrial complex'.

The reasons are obvious: they have an agenda, and it's to make money. Secondly, human nature will always create wars. Conflict is as much part of human nature as it is any animal's: we know and like peace, but humans inevitably fight over land, resources, food, and the chance to reproduce, just as any animal does in nature.

Essentially, the root of all human conflict is fear: fear that there won't be enough to go around. And that fear manifests as a desire to be in control. When a sense that "the other party" has control, then the desire to wrestle control from that other party comes about. All conflict occurs across a spectrum. At the immediate level it's between two people, such as a fight over a parking space, mate, piece of property or sum of money. On a global level it's still a fight between two, or a small number of people — the leaders — but large numbers of people are involved to fight them.

On a more esoteric or philosophical level, I look upon war as social flux. It's an inevitable consequence of human beings existing and surviving together on a planet with limited resources and limited space. War is the social and political equivalent of an extreme weather condition, such as a tornado, hurricane or cyclone.

Of course war is a choice. John Horgan is right that war is not biologically driven. No average American would say, 'Yes, please produce more nuclear warheads! I love nuclear warheads! There is no reason for war. What reason would rationalize the killing of children, whether the child be a year-old boy dressed in the military uniform of his nation-state blown to bits by an IED or whether the child be an 8-year-old boy picking fruit in a field who becomes 'collateral damage' from an airstrike on 'rebels hiding' near his field?

Why not have a sporting event to vet disagreements? Let the nation-state get its anger and frustration out by non-lethal means: a soccer competition where thousands of people are not killed. Rousseau was right on this point after all: War is not natural among individuals. When there is a war, it is governed by states, not civilians.

In the end, all the rules of war such as the Geneva Conventions which aim to reduce suffering and civilian casualties are in many ways hypocritical because soldiers are civilians. Thus, if taken seriously, the Geneva Conventions would prevent war. The boy dressed in army fatigues, the boy dressed in rebel fatigues are civilians underneath the wardrobe of the state. These individuals are not fighting each other out of personal dislikes and deciding on their own to use metal death pills against each other shot from a gun that forever silence the other's future.

Rather, these individuals are being used to fight the wants of a sovereign power. Soldiers are civilians and their rights as civilians do not evaporate once they don the cloak of military power.

Following this logic: War is therefore illegal and in violation of the Geneva Conventions which aim to protect civilians.

As long as war is seen as a tool to 'solve' problems, we will use it. We must change our mindset and it begins with each individual at a time. This article is more than 9 years old.