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by John Horgan
Neither doomed to violence nor peaceful by nature, we
are shaped by the civilizations we create. Modern society spends a good
deal of time, effort, and scientific resource on finding better ways to
wage war. What if we directed just a fraction of that energy toward
finding a better way to wage peace?
As a science writer, I am sometimes asked what I
consider to be the most important unsolved scientific problem. I used to
rattle off pure science’s major mysteries: Why did the big bang bang? How
did life begin on Earth, and does it exist anywhere else in the cosmos?
How does a brain make a mind? Sometime after 9/11, however, I started
replying that by far the biggest problem facing scientists—and all of
humanity—is the persistence of warfare, or the threat thereof, as a means
for resolving disputes between people.
Skeptics might object that war is not a scientific
issue. Certainly, it is a dauntingly complex phenomenon, with political,
economic, and social ramifications. But the same could be said of problems
such as global warming, population growth, and AIDS, all of which are
being rigorously addressed by scientists. Moreover, I believe that the
problem of warfare— unlike mysteries such as the origin of the universe or
life or consciousness, which may prove to be intractable—can and will be
solved.
Research has already revealed enough about warfare to
dispel two persistent, contradictory myths. One is the idea of the noble
savage, which blames warfare on civilization and holds that humans in
their primordial state were peaceful and loving. This is the implicit
theme of Margaret Mead’s classic bestseller Coming of Age in Samoa.
Mead describes the Polynesian island as a blissful utopia, whose
inhabitants make love, not war. Actually, as critics of Mead have pointed
out, Samoa has historically been wracked by warfare.
Indeed, as far back as anthropologists have peered into
human history and prehistory, they have found evidence of group bloodshed.
In War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley, an anthropologist at
the University of Illinois, estimates that up to ninety-five percent of
primitive societies engaged in at least occasional warfare, and many
fought constantly. Tribal combat usually involved skirmishes and ambushes
rather than pitched battles. But over time, the chronic fighting could
produce mortality rates as high as fifty percent.
Unfortunately, these revelations about the ubiquity of
warfare have led some scholars to perpetuate a much more insidious myth:
Warfare is a constant of the human condition that can at best be
controlled, but never eradicated. Fatalists who take this position often
describe war in Darwinian terms—as an inevitable consequence of innate
male ambition and aggression. “Males have evolved to possess strong
appetites for power,” Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham
contends in Demonic Males, “because with extraordinary power
comes extraordinary reproductive success.”
As evidence for this hypothesis, Wrangham cites studies
of societies such as the Yanomamo, a tribe scattered across the Amazonian
region of Brazil and Venezuela. Yanomamo men from different villages often
engage in protracted feuds, marked by lethal raids and counterraids. Like
most tribal societies, the Yanomamo are polygamous. Anthropologist
Napoleon Chagnon, who has observed the Yanomamo for decades, found that
killers had, on average, twice as many wives and three times as many
children as nonkillers.
But Chagnon, significantly, has rejected the notion that
aggressive instincts compel Yanomamo warriors to fight. Truly compulsive,
out-of-control killers, Chagnon explains, are quickly killed themselves,
and don’t live long enough to have many wives and children. Successful
warriors are usually quite controlled and calculating; they fight because
that is how a male advances in their society. Moreover, many Yanomamo men
have confessed to Chagnon that they loathe war and wish it could be
abolished from their culture—and, in fact, rates of violence have recently
dropped dramatically, as Yanomamo villages have accepted the laws and
mores of the outside world. History offers many other examples of warlike
societies that rapidly became peaceful. Vikings were the scourge of Europe
during the Middle Ages, but their Scandinavian descendants are among the
most peaceful people on Earth. Similarly, early twentieth-century Japan
was extremely belligerent; even Zen Buddhist leaders such as D.T. Suzuki,
who later helped to popularize Buddhism in the West, encouraged attacks on
China and other countries. But since its traumatic defeat in World War II,
Japan has embraced pacifism.
In fact, hard as it may be to believe, humanity as a
whole has become much less violent than it used to be. Despite the massive
slaughter that resulted from World Wars I and II, the rate of violent
death for males in North America and Europe during the twentieth century
was one percent. Worldwide, about 100 million men, women, and children
died from warrelated causes, including disease and famine, in the last
century. The total would have been 2 billion if our rates of violence had
been as high as in the average primitive society.
These statistics contradict the myth that war is a
constant of the human condition. But they also suggest, contrary to the
myth of the noble savage, that civilization has not created the problem of
warfare; it is helping us solve it. We need more civilization, not less,
if we wish to eradicate war. Civilization has given us legal institutions
that resolve disputes by establishing laws, negotiating agreements, and
enforcing them. These institutions, which range from local courts to the
United Nations, have vastly reduced the risk of violence both within and
between nations. They are what keep us from succumbing to the chronic
violence that afflicts societies like the Yanomamo.
Obviously, our institutions are far from perfect.
Nations around the world still maintain huge arsenals, including weapons
of mass destruction, and war keeps breaking out. So what should we do?
Maybe we need more drastic measures to abolish war once and for all. One
possibility would be to tinker with our physiologies to make ourselves
less aggressive. Scientists have linked various genes and neurochemicals
to violent tendencies. For example, many violent criminals have low levels
of serotonin. Should we try to curb our aggressive instincts by altering
our neurochemistry or genes?
Or maybe we should all have electrodes implanted in our
brains, zapping us when we act or even think aggressively. This idea was
actually proposed back in 1969 in Physical Control of the
Mind, a book by Yale University neuroscientist Jose Delgado. To show
his scheme’s feasibility, Delgado implanted electrodes in the brains of
psychiatric patients and manipulated their limbs and emotions with a
remote-controlled device. He also carried out a demonstration—reported on
the front page of The New York Times—with a bull that
had electrodes embedded in its brain. When the bull charged, Delgado
pushed a button on a remote control, and the bull stopped in its tracks.
The question is: Who gets the electrodes in the brain, and who gets the
remote control?
In his classic book On Aggression, biologist
Konrad Lorenz acknowledges that it might be possible to “breed out the
aggressive drive by eugenic planning.” But that would be a huge mistake,
Lorenz argues, because aggression is a vital part of our humanity. It
plays a role in almost all human endeavors, including science, the arts,
business, politics, and sports. In my hometown in upstate New York, a
bunch of friends and I enjoy venting our aggression every winter by
playing pond hockey. Aggression can even serve the cause of peace. I’ve
known some extremely aggressive peace activists.
Moreover, one of the most positive findings to emerge
from recent studies of warfare is that few men relish lethal combat— and
not just because they fear being wounded or killed. In On Killing,
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a psychologist, military science
expert, and former U.S. Army ranger, asserts that most men abhor killing,
even when it is sanctioned by their society. As evidence, Grossman cites
military surveys, which reveal that during the American Civil War and both
World Wars, as many as eighty percent of men in combat deliberately
avoided firing at the enemy.
After World War II, Grossman notes, the armed services
revamped its training to make soldiers less reluctant to kill. As a
result, most American soldiers who saw combat in Vietnam fired at the
enemy. But Grossman contends that U.S. soldiers in Vietnam paid a heavy
price for being transformed into more effective killers; a majority of
combat veterans are thought to have suffered some symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder, including nightmares, flashbacks, panic,
depression, and guilt. Mental health experts are already predicting that
American soldiers fighting in Iraq will experience similar rates of
posttraumatic stress disorder.
Even if warfare is at least in part biologically
based—and what human behavior isn’t?—we cannot end it by altering our
biology. Modern war is primarily a social and political phenomenon, and we
need social and political solutions to end it. Many such solutions have
been proposed, but all are problematic.
One perennial plan is for all nations to yield power to
a global institution that can enforce peace. This was the vision that
inspired the League of Nations and the United Nations. But neither the
United States nor any other major power is likely to entrust its national
security to an international entity anytime soon. And even if they did,
how would they ensure that a global military force does not become
repressive? One encouraging finding to emerge from political science is
that democracies rarely, if ever, fight each other. But does that mean
democracies such as the United States should use military means to force
countries with no democratic tradition to accept this form of governance?
If history teaches us anything, it is that war often begets more war.
Religion has been prescribed as a solution to war and aggression. After
all, most religions preach love and forgiveness and prohibit killing, at
least in principle. But, in practice, religion has often inspired, rather
than inhibited, bloodshed.
Many feminists have predicted that as women gain more
political power, we will evolve toward a more peaceful world. Females in
all societies engage in violence much less than males do. In his book
War and Gender, political scientist Joshua Goldstein estimates that
females have accounted for fewer than one percent of all those who have
fought in wars throughout history. But he notes that women have also
helped to perpetuate war throughout history by favoring warriors as mates
and shunning cowards. During World War I, for example, women in Britain
and the United States organized a campaign to hand out white feathers to
men not wearing a uniform, shaming them for avoiding military service.
Moreover, those few women who have risen to positions of
great power in the modern era—notably Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and
Indira Gandhi—demonstrated that they could be just as aggressive as their
male counterparts in leading their countries into war. Goldstein concludes
that women “do not appear to be more peaceful, more oriented to nonviolent
resolution of international conflicts, or less committed to state
sovereignty and territorial integrity than are male leaders.”
In his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond argues that many wars, both
ancient and modern, spring from mismanagement of environmental resources.
He notes, for example, that ethnic conflicts are only the proximate causes
of the hostilities that have ravaged Rwanda, Somalia, and other African
nations in the last decade. The ultimate cause is that overpopulation has
led to deforestation, overgrazing, and soil depletion, and, hence, a
Hobbesian struggle over dwindling resources. But resource scarcity has not
played a significant role in other modern conflicts, such as the civil war
that raged in the Balkans during the 1990s.
War, it seems fair to say, is overdetermined—that is, it
can spring from many different causes. Peace, if it is to be permanent,
must be overdetermined too. Given the enormous complexity of the problem
of war, I would like to see the United States establish a kind of
Manhattan Project aimed at solving it once and for all. The project could
be administered by the United States Institute of Peace, a low-profile
federal institution that Congress quietly created in 1984. Just as a
percentage of the budget for the Human Genome Project is allocated to
ethical issues, so too should part of the Department of Defense’s budget
be allocated to peace studies. One tenth of one percent— or $500 million,
roughly twenty times the institute’s current budget—should be sufficient.
The institute could support and coordinate the efforts
of other research programs. The Correlates of War project, founded at the
University of Michigan by political scientist J. David Singer, has
stockpiled statistical information about more than 1,000 conflicts—ranging
from small-scale civil wars up to the World Wars—that have occurred since
1815. Even broader in its scope is the Human Relations Area Files, based
at Yale University, which has compiled ethnographic reports on more than
1,000 different societies around the world, from the Navajo to the African
!Kung. These databases can help researchers formulate and test hypotheses
linking war to, say, child-rearing practices, women’s rights, criminal
punishment, education, freedom of the press, environmental management,
economic policies, and religious beliefs.
Through grants and publications, a generously resourced
Institute of Peace would encourage ambitious young scientists to see peace
as a challenge at least as worthy of pursuit as a cure for AIDS or a
cheap, clean, renewable source of energy. War research would be the
ultimate multidisciplinary enterprise, drawing upon such diverse fields as
game theory, neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, theology, ecology,
political science, and economics. The short-term goal of peace researchers
would be to find ways to reduce conflict in the world today, wherever it
might occur. The long-term goal would be to explore how nations can make
the transition toward permanent disarmament: the elimination of armies,
arms, and arms industries.
In his recent book The Blank Slate, Harvard
University psychologist Steven Pinker argues for what he calls a “tragic”
view of human nature, which accepts that we are limited by our biological
heritage. Pinker uses the term “utopian” to describe the belief that we
can transcend human nature and create a perfect world. By utopian, Pinker
means hopelessly naive. Many scientists no doubt dismiss the goal of
global disarmament as utopian in this sense. These skeptics will argue
that we will always need some military force to protect us from our own
aggressive instincts; at the very least, some transnational organization
should always retain a military force, perhaps equipped with nuclear
weapons, to deter or suppress attacks from outlaw states or organizations,
such as North Korea and al-Qaida.
Certainly, total disarmament seems a remote possibility
now. But can we really accept armies and armaments, including weapons of
mass destruction, as permanent features of civilization? As recently as
the late 1980s, global nuclear war still seemed like a distinct
possibility. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War
ended peacefully. Apartheid also ended in South Africa without significant
violence, and human rights have advanced elsewhere around the world.
Just in the last century, we humans have split the atom,
landed spacecraft on the moon and Mars, and cracked the genetic code. Deep
down—perhaps because I have two young children—I have faith that we will
solve the problem of war. If the capacity for war is in our genes, as many
seem to fear these days, so is the capacity—and the desire—for peace. Even
our most hawkish leaders claim that peace is their ultimate goal. As an
agnostic, I have a hard time believing in God, but I believe in humanity’s
common sense, moral decency, and instinct for self-preservation. We will
abolish war someday. The only question is how, and how soon.
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