8 What is war and why do we fight?

What is war and why do we fight?

Dear Lily,

Many people have wondered whether human beings are naturally aggressive. If they are, does this explain why warfare has played such a large part in human history? For anyone looking at the whole history of human beings would conclude that after eating, sex and playing games, killing or maiming other humans is the most common of our pastimes.

Like other animals, humans have an instinct to survive. If this suggests to them that fighting and killing will help, then they will usually do so. Many also fight for pleasure, a rough game of excitement and competition which appeals to most of us. You know this, well enough, Lily, if you remember the fighting games we played when you were young, and pretended to be a tiger, raptor or other sharp toothed beast.

Some very peaceful hunter-gatherer societies have been found in south America, Malaysia and elsewhere. They do not know of war and are peaceful within the group. Periodically mighty civilizations such as China and Japan have experienced several hundred years of almost complete peace.

Yet, if we survey the whole of human history, we find that the use of physical force against other animals (including other humans) is a practically universal feature. Now that women have begun to be recruited into the front-line of armies, you might find that you yourself are killing people in a war.

Yet simple aggression, or love of fighting, or desire to survive, cannot be seen as the main reason why most individuals have been caught up in warfare in the past. Most wars for many centuries have involved unwilling combatants. The politicians and generals decide, the troops, through fear, need, loyalty or hope for booty, apply themselves to capturing or killing the enemy.

Individual aggression has little to do with it. The pilot who released the atom bomb over Hiroshima was not, in all probability, feeling aggressive. He was just doing his job, no more ‘aggressive’ than the driver of a car changing gear or a farmer planting seed. Clearly wars would not happen if humans were actively programmed against the use of all physical violence. On the other hand, no animal would survive for long in this competitive world if they were so programmed.

What is war?

We need to distinguish between active and passive war. Active war is a period of armed conflict, with acts of direct physical violence, ‘hot war’ as we might call it. Passive, or as we call it ‘cold’ war is the use of threat and counter-threat, with little actual fighting. This is a period of constant anxiety, fear, threat, something the world witnessed between 1945 and 1989 and which it has re-invented for itself with the ‘War against Terrorism’.

A second major distinction is between permanent and limited war. Another name for permanent war is ‘feud’. In feuds, every act of violence automatically generates the conditions for counter-violence, an ‘eye for an eye’ as the Bible puts it. It is like a see-saw. Every killing alters the balance, which has to be re-dressed, but when violence is answered with violence, the situation is again unbalanced. This kind of unceasing warfare or feud is the characteristic form in tribal societies. It is from one such society, the Highland Scots, that the word ‘feud’ or ‘deadly feud’ was taken.

Such feuding is to be found among the Bedouin, the tribes of Afghanistan and central Asia, or famously in Albania and the Balkans. Mountains, deserts, rough country where people keep animals and there is little central political control are the classic areas for feud.

The other form is that found among forest-dwelling tribesmen, whether the head-hunters of the Assam-Burma border, of the Philippines, of Amazonia or elsewhere. Here there is a pattern of constant raiding and inter-village war, often accompanied by head-hunting. ‘Blood for blood’ and the taking of human heads as powerful trophies are the signs of this perpetual warfare.

Why is there this ceaseless fighting? In trying to understand it, it is important to distinguish between the ‘functions’ of such warfare on the one hand, for example that it may keep the population density down to an appropriate level for the resources, and the reasons given for the warfare by the people themselves.

These reasons nearly always involve concepts of honour and shame, the lust for glory, manliness, the need to defend one’s own group and its status, the need to avenge insults. This is a world of constant, intermittent but irresolvable feuds because there is no mechanism for concluding the quarrels, no central authority accepted by all, just a shifting world of alliances and distrust.

People engaged in most of these feuds have limited aims. Usually they are not concerned to conquer territory or eliminate the enemy, but rather are content to burn down some houses, steal some food or heads or women or whatever is valuable. It is an elaborate, violent, game, often with its own intricate rules and forms of honour. Many see analogies with the kind of activity in places like Israel and Palestine today.

Why do countries fight?

Another major type of war is the pitched battle, winners and losers, a beginning, a middle, an end. While they are limited in time, they are often far less limited in the destruction they cause. These are the wars of what we half-ironically call ‘civilized’ societies. That is to say they emerged some five thousand or so years ago with the rise of territorial states.

These are the wars of the Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, Mongols, French, British, Americans and so on. They have starting and ending dates such as 1914-1918, 1939-1945. They begin on one day and end on another. Within the war period the fighting is often far more ‘total’ than in the tribal wars. They are fought to defeat or conquer another bounded state, and this often involves huge-scale slaughter and destruction. It is not uncommon for millions to die in such a war, both from the fighting and from the famine and disease which they bring with them.

These wars are fought for rather different reasons than the feuding ones. There may be symbolic reasons of hurt pride, jealousy, revenge as in feuds. Yet the two main reasons are fear and greed.

Fear is indeed a powerful force. The enemy is a threat, so one should attack before they do. This was a widespread motive and justification for almost all ‘civilizational’ wars until recently. During the second half of the twentieth century, a new principle of international law was established which banned pre-emptive strikes on sovereign nations. Recently some powerful western leaders have revised the oldest justification for war by declaring that if it is in a country’s self-interest to attack another which it feels might one day become a threat, this is justified. It is a move which takes us back to a world based on fear, arms races and pre-emptive strikes.

The second main motive is greed, that is to say the almost universal fact that while there are many losers, there are always some winners. These are the arms manufacturers, some bankers, the successful warriors, some politicians. There is greed for power; a good war bolsters political power and deflects one’s critics. There is greed for land and other resources through conquest.

The constant wars of aggression of Empires, from the ancient Babylonians or Chinese, through the Romans and Habsburgs, British, up to the current Americans, are well known. This tendency of States to engage in almost constant warfare is strengthened by what one might call the ‘reverse domino’ effect.

In the normal ‘domino effect’, as in the ‘war against communism’, it was argued that to lose one country, for example Vietnam, could cause all the dominoes standing in a row nearby (e.g. Cambodia, Laos, Thailand), to ‘collapse’ into communism. In the reverse effect, as soon as one territory has been annexed, it puts great pressure on the successful conqueror to consider taking over the next.

One example comes from the history of the Roman Empire which, in order to protect its ever widening territories, was drawn into annexing ever more. The British Empire was the same. In order to ‘protect’ India, the British felt they had to take control directly or indirectly of its borders, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Nepal, Assam, Burma. Soon British eyes were upon China and even Japan.

There is no standing still with Empires. Either they push outwards or sink beneath the onset of the ‘barbarians’ on the frontiers. America has increasingly been caught in this trap. Past failures can be overlooked, as in the case of Vietnam, and the people aroused again to further attempts to wipe out the threatening hordes.

How do weapons change warfare?

Another difference between ‘unlimited’ or feuding warfare and limited but total war is technological and organizational. Feuding wars are fought seasonally, part time, by an amateur sub-set of the male population. Civilizational wars tend to be fought all the year round (except when the climate prevents this), often by professional (conscript or mercenary) armies. The amount of training, the nature of the discipline and the internal hierarchies differ.

Furthermore, over time the weapons began to change. Most wars in history have been fought with simple weapons, bows spears, swords. Yet in due course the evolution of state systems led to the development of a new order of weapons. Then the scene changed.

Gunpowder weapons transformed warfare in western Europe from the fourteenth century. Through a strange quirk, in the country which had invented them many centuries earlier, namely China, they were in effect soon banned or not used. Indeed, four-fifths of the great civilizations on the earth up to the eighteenth century, the Islamic States, China and Japan, all banned the use of gunpowder weapons. Only in western Europe did cannon and small-arms using gunpowder develop. It was partly this divergence which finally gave Europe the destructive advantage with which it colonized almost all of the planet between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Can war be good?

War has been almost universal in human history over the last fifty thousand years. The constant feuding wars probably inhibited the growth of civilizations in various ways. Minor gains were destroyed, populations remained relatively sparse and spread out, the ecology was protected but few major innovations could occur. As soon as a group became prosperous and relaxed its war-like discipline it was destroyed by the warriors from poorer but more war-like neighbouring groups.

For many thousands of years the world saw the warlike, feuding, societies on the margins fight the settled, agrarian, civilizations at the centre. The greatest contest of all was between the pastoral nomads of central Asia, the Mongols, and the settled agrarian peoples whom they overran in China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

In this vast, thousand-year, clash of two forms of human organization, the Mongols destroyed vast civilizations and ruled three quarters of the Asian land mass up to the eighteenth century. Their technologies of destruction, principally the horse and Mongolian bow, were superior to the war technologies of settled States until about 1700. It was only the development of more sophisticated gunpowder weapons which gave the west the final advantage.

So, for a very long period, apart from honing male physique, encouraging heroic poetry, adding some footnotes to the art of war, improving horse breeding, and giving certain peoples a sense of purpose and heroic glory, war probably did little for human development. In the balance, the losses far outweighed the gains.

In one area of the world, however, war led to technical progress. The small kingdoms of western Europe were constantly at war from the middle ages on, and a rapid form of political ‘survival of the fittest’ developed. Very rapid developments in architecture, boat construction, navigation, metal working and some branches of physics and geometry emerged out of this desperate competition.

If Europe between about 1400 and 1800 had been as peaceful as China or Japan it is likely that much of the rapid increase in reliable knowledge and technical efficiency would not have occurred.

Without the advances in cannon boring made through these centuries, the steam engine cylinder could not have been made and no industrial revolution based on steam could have occurred. If we measure human progress by man’s capacity to control the physical world, then war of the west European kind did lead to a sort of progress. Yet this has to be placed against the horrors and miseries.

What are the disasters of war?

War is the first of the three great checks to population. It was not mainly the slaughter on the battlefield that inhibited growth, but the almost inevitable side effects. As foreign armies marched to and fro across northern Europe during the Thirty Years War, about a third of the population died, mainly from starvation and disease. Armies needed to live off the land and soldiers seized the stored grain and seed-corn, destroyed the ripening crops, killed the livestock, burned the tools.

It is also in such times that disease multiplied. With body resistance reduced by under-nourishment, and with large hordes of soldiers and camp followers coming in from outside carrying new germs, the peasants died in their thousands or sometimes millions. Epidemic diseases, in particular typhoid, cholera, plague and typhus, spread. Endemic diseases such as dysentery and malaria increased hugely. The most vulnerable, the old, women, children, will usually be the first to die, but almost everyone is vulnerable.

Tribal groups that have previously had no contact with the outside world are most at risk. Nineteen out of twenty million of the native population died when the Spanish conquered what is now Mexico. Most did not die at the end of a sword, but through famine and disease. Likewise hundreds of thousands died in North and South America and the Pacific of smallpox, influenza, measles and other diseases against which they had no immunity.

It is very doubtful whether the wars of ‘civilization’ have done anything to improve either human intelligence or physique in a selective way over the last five thousand years. They have caused horror piled on horror, a catalogue of atrocities and inhumanities which make any sensitive and informed person despair.

Does war enslave us?

Nowadays those who start wars are even more remote and isolated from its horrors than they were in the past. So they may feel that they do not share in the personal cost. Yet this is not true. For war has invisible costs, hidden injuries, less manifest than the rapes, mutilations, deaths, sickness and starvation, yet as deadly to the civilizations which engage in war as the physical scars.

The feuding wars of tribal societies tend to create equality by keeping groups in balance. If one group gains a temporary advantage, it attracts predatory attacks from neighbours, and is returned to the average position. On the other hand, the wars of civilization have a strong tendency towards creating inequality, both between the contending groups, and within them. The immediate effect of war is to make the conquered into slaves, prisoners, permanently in thrall to the conquering power.

Another effect was that after the emergence of states, a caste of warriors, often armed knights who could afford expensive weapons, arose and dominated the rest. As a result a weak, unarmed, mass of the population was crushed by the warriors with their superior weapons and castles. War both justifies their privilege and made any questioning of their right to bear arms into an act of treason.

Furthermore the movement towards a centralized state is made much more likely by war. War against outsiders justifies higher taxes and the maintenance of a standing army. It encourages the development of a large bureaucracy to administer the state’s taxation, the suspension or elimination of civil liberties and the destruction of all those who criticize the government.

The effects of war in turning Rome from a vibrant Republic into an autocratic Empire has often been noted. Victory was as disastrous as defeat. All opposition or questioning of the State and its motives was banned. What was demanded was unquestioning loyalty, unthinking patriotism, ‘my country right or wrong’. Thus the core of liberty and equality are quickly undermined by war.

Are there exceptions?

This anti-democratic tendency applies most strongly in continental Empires and States where a constant fear of invasion by one’s neighbours is ever present. The fact that England, Japan, and for several centuries the U.S.A., could be conceived of as separate ‘islands’, not threatened by neighbours, gave them a respite from this fear.

In the case of England, the country was very often at war. Yet much of the fighting was an optional activity, taking place on other people’s territory (for a long time in France). When extra taxes were needed for such activity, it gave the moderately powerful subjects a chance to bargain for more rights and freedom from their rulers (who had no standing army). Hence wars tended to increase liberty. This is part of a wider pressure; warfare from the time of Napoleon onwards has been a powerful instrument in widening the franchise because of the state’s dependence on mass armies and conscription.

The U.S.A. in the nineteenth century did not need to be afraid, so its inhabitants could not be blackmailed into suspending their liberties. September 11th 2001 symbolized the start of an era when the United States became virtually joined to the continent of Eur-Asia. Or so it feels to many Americans. So America, used to peace, is now perpetually at war, even if that war is against a nebulous enemy.

In this new war, democracy is felt to be constantly under threat. America now has a huge and expanding standing army and navy. It feels it must make pre-emptive strikes against threatening neighbours, even if they are thousands of miles away. There is a temptation to dismantle the sets of checks and balances, the rights to freedom of speech and thought, the jury system and other processes that protect the rights of individuals. We are almost all the losers in this new perpetual war.