It’s Francis’s job to say things like that, and he does it with
sincerity and grace. He condemned the “childlike” whims of “a few
potentates” to make war, and everybody thought that sounded fine,
although nobody mentioned any names. (Hint: the name of the chief
offending ‘potentate’ of the moment starts with ‘P’.)
But here’s the question. Are you a child? Well, do you at least think
like a child? Are you ignorant and powerless? Three times ‘no’?
Well, then, if you are a responsible adult, what did you do the last
time your country went to war? (If you belong to the minority whose
country hasn’t gone to war since you have been alive, you may skip this
question – or just use your imagination.)
The Pope means well, but he is barking up the wrong tree. The reason
war is always with us is not an endless supply of evil potentates with
childlike whims. It is an endless supply of human beings, most of whom
don’t even have evil in their hearts.
What they do have in full measure is a basic culture, older than our
species itself, that sees war as natural and necessary (at least when
our side does it). There are sometimes clear aggressors and defenders,
of course, but the roles swap around regularly and the game never stops.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wouldn’t agree with me, but he only knew the most
recent three thousand years of human history. We know about our distant
pre-history, and we also know about our primates relatives (especially
the chimpanzees), and that has taught us something very important. Human
beings didn’t invent war. They inherited it.
In the mid-20th century, the belief that human beings lived in peace
before the advent of civilisation began to crumble before the
anthropologists’ evidence that warfare was chronic and almost universal
among hunter-gatherers. We are all descended from hunter-gatherers.
Then in the 1970s primatologist Jane Goodall, studying chimpanzees in
Tanzania, discovered that neighbouring chimp bands fought wars with each
other. It was low-level war, conducted entirely by many-on-one
ambushes, but later research revealed that the male death toll from war
averaged 30% per generation, and sometimes entire bands were wiped out.
The reason for this may lie in evolutionary biology. The world has
always been pretty full up, and when a given region’s food sources grow
scarcer – a drought, a flood, a change in animal migration routes – some
of the local inhabitants are going to starve.
If you’re a territorial animal that lives in groups, then it pays off
in the long run to whittle way at the population of the neighbouring
groups. When a crunch time arrives, your more numerous group will be
able to drive away or kill off the neighbouring band and use its
resources as well as your own.
Chimps did not think this strategy up, or choose it. Neither did human
beings. Many other group-living predators have the same strategy: lions,
hyenas, wolves. Traits like aggressiveness will vary between
individuals, but if aggression brings advantages evolution will work in
favour of it.
So here we are, a very long time later, stuck with a deeply embedded
traditional behaviour that no longer serves our purposes well. In fact,
it might even wipe us out. What can we do about it?
There’s no point in yearning for some universal Gandhi who will change
the human heart. He doesn’t exist, and anyway it’s not hearts that need
to change. It’s human institutions.
Actually, almost all the military and diplomatic professionals already
know that. Even a lot of the politicians understand it, and in the past
century – say, since about the middle of the First World War – a great
deal of effort has gone into taming war and building institutions that
can replace it.
That was what the League of Nations was about. It’s what the United
Nations is about, and arms control measures, and international criminal
courts to try people who start an aggressive war, starting with the
Nuremberg trials in 1945. It’s a work in progress, but there has been a
steep and steady decline in the scale and frequency of wars in the last
fifty years.
The work is far from finished, and the return of great-power war – with
nuclear weapons this time – is an ever-present risk. But nuclear war is
not just a threat. It’s also a huge incentive to bring this ancient
institution under control, and ultimately to abolish it.
And a little prayer along the way probably wouldn’t do any harm.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
I enjoyed your take on our pre-historic war tendencies in order to give us (greater) perspective. However, you lost me at “(…) and anyway it’s not hearts that need to change. It’s human institutions.” This reminds me of people who say things such “It´s no one´s fault; it´s the System.” Because “the System” is such a bigger thing compared to an ant/individual-and there´s your slippery slope. Institutions are driven by groups of individuals, and it sounds disingenuous-to apply different rules when it suits you. (It´s also a great way to proselytise; this way no one is ever accountable for 1´s individual actions, -unless you´re P., of course, in which case all the scrutiny and guilt apply.) There´re great contradiction there.
By guida from Lisbon on 10 Nov 2022, 08:01