(smooth music)
- What's up guys?
Michael here to talk about "South Park", wait what was that?
Sure.
Sorry, we're actually talking about war.
The past few weeks, the media's been saturated
with the latest upsetting updates
about Russia's attack on Ukraine.
And because we have beating hearts,
the whole situation has had us pretty disturbed.
It's not that we're strangers
to hearing about armed conflict in the news.
Between civil wars, long-term violent unrest over territory,
and the occasional undeclared American war
that lasts a goddamn lifetime,
it can start to feel like state sanctioned violence
is perpetual, contractable, and somewhat ubiquitous.
But as we watch the most surprising
and depressing events of 2022 play out
we've been wondering, what is the point of war?
Why do human beings always seem to be waging it?
Is it natural?
And yes of course, what is it good for?
("War" by Edwin Star plays) ♪ Absolutely nothin' ♪
So join us on this very lighthearted journey
into the deeply violent depths of mankind
in this Wisecrack Edition on war.
Why?
The answer to the question why war
might at first seem pretty obvious.
The way most people explain humanities propensity for war
is that it's inevitable, it's natural, it just kind of is.
In fact if we had the production budget
to man on the street to question is war natural,
we're pretty sure that one we'd overwhelmingly hear yes,
and two I'd probably get beaten up on Hollywood Boulevard.
Anyway that gut reaction has some
scientific and philosophical credence.
Most obviously there's the classic philosophical screen
from one Thomas Hobbes
who argued that life is nasty, brutish, and short,
and he didn't mean nasty in a good way.
Or as the poet Nas once said.
("Life's a Bitch" by Nas playing)
♪ Life's a (beep) and then you die ♪
Other proponents of this view
that violence amongst mankind just kinda happens
would include the likes of William James
and Sigmund Freud.
And plenty of anthropological scholarship
bolsters this belief, with fossilized human bodies
showing evidence of man on man violence.
Since the 1960's anthropologists
have used the savanna savanna
as a surrogate for early humans and found that they appear
to really like hitting each other.
Famously a study of the Yanomamö people,
one of the last few remaining truly hunter-gatherer tribes
conducted by controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon,
found that men who committed multiple murders
had more reproductive success,
I-E acquired more wives than those who didn't.
He used these findings to argue that violence
is a desirable evolutionary trait in male humans,
which yeah that tracks
with every James Bond movie I've seen.
However many scholars push back on this idea altogether.
Take the Yanomamö example.
For starters, it's been alleged
that much of the violence Chagnon observed
amongst the Yanomamö was actually caused by Chagnon
who handed out machetes and axes
to encourage the tribe members to participate in his study.
What's more, anthropologist Douglas Fry's analysis
of Chagnon's data finds that the men who committed murders
were on average 10 full years older than the peaceful ones,
giving them way more opportunity to land a few wives.
This is obviously an isolated example,
but it speaks to a much bigger epistemological problem,
that is a problem with the way we acquire knowledge.
According to Fry,
western scholars studying ancient hunter-gatherer cultures
tend to suffer from a sort of confirmation bias.
Because we live in a world torn up by war
where violence is just part of the landscape,
it's easy for folks studying ancient humans
to find evidence of war everywhere.
Skeletons of cavemen
that show damage to the skull for instance
were typically interpreted to be evidence
that one guy clubbed the other guy to death,
thus humans are naturally violent.
But Fry argues that upon closer inspection
some cases like these have been found to merely indicate
that the ancient human was attacked by animals,
or that their skeleton had gone through
run of the mill archeological decay.
Or take the 9,000 year old walls of Jericho,
commonly thought of as the first
archeological evidence of war,
which have also caused some serious scholarly disagreement.
Some experts now believe that the walls were built
to protect the city against flooding
rather than against hostile neighbors.
In his book "Beyond War" Fry makes a compelling case
that for the majority of our existence
war has actually been extremely rare.
He notes that although the violence of homicide,
feud, and war grab our attention,
an examination of cross-cultural data
reveals that people usually deal with conflicts
without using any violence at all.
While violence between individuals, usually male,
seems to have always been around,
Fry argues that the unmitigated killing
between two or more groups
that is necessary to constitute capital W war
is remarkably absent from most of human history.
Scholar John Gowdy adds
that judging from historical accounts of hunter-gatherers
for most of the time humans have been on the planet
we have lived in relative harmony
with the natural world and with each other.
Our minds and cultures evolved under these conditions.
Evidence suggests that war emerged
only when human social order became more complex,
adopting among other things hierarchy's and horses.
What's more, large scale war appears to have only existed
for less than 2,000 years.
A mere drop in the bucket for homosapiens.
Fry even argues that human beings have successfully evolved
precisely because evolution favors restraint
and limited interpersonal aggression.
In fact, it's one of our strengths.
Human beings are creative and adaptive enough
to find non-violent solutions to problems,
such as soliciting a friendly mediator, talking things out,
or my favorite tactic, simply running the (beep) away
from the angry guy holding the club.
Now the idea that human beings
are naturally prone towards peace is of course contested.
But at the very least,
fry's account throws a serious shade of doubt
on the assumption that cavemen were prone to group violence,
and that human beings are basically chimpanzees
with less facial hair.
And many scholars agree with Fry's contention
that most human societies existed
largely in a state of peace and abundance.
You may be wondering why we're talking
about ancient hunter-gatherers
in our purported attempt to understand modern war,
but it's really important
that we not take the reality of warfare for granted.
That's because assuming that humanity
is naturally war happy
necessarily changes the way we react to and think about war.
As Fry explains,
naturalizing war creates an unfortunate
self fulfilling prophecy.
If war is natural,
then there is little point in trying to prevent,
reduce, or abolish it.
It's like the macro version of the depressing statistic
that people with a gun in their house
are more likely to die of homicide.
And we'd argue that the assumption
that war amongst humans is natural
underpins a lot of the narratives
we tell ourselves about ourselves.
These days it's easy to feel like war is inevitable.
Scholar James Hillman writes,
during the 5,600 years of written history
14,600 wars have been recorded,
two or three wars each year of human history.
That's pretty (beep) staggering.
But if you, like us,
have a strong distaste for organized human violence,
it's worth looking to peaceful societies
no matter how differently they might be structured
from our own.
What makes indiscriminate violence
between two or more groups of people so rare
until relatively recently?
Arguably the lack of fixed group identity
plays a pretty big role.
See in ancient hunter-gatherer societies
if you belonged to one band of people
and got in a big fight with your bunk mate,
you would often simply leave that band
and join a different one.
And because lineage was frequently tracked
both matrilineally and patriarch-ally
you would have kin in multiple tribes,
so you had friendly options.
What's more, the overlapping flux
of the state of group membership
made violence between groups less likely overall.
As Fry explains about the Aboriginal people of Australia,
band membership was neither closed nor static.
Individuals and families shifted band residence
over both the short-term and the long-term.
Virtually every person had relatives and contacts
in other groups.
These overlapping social and kinship networks
that spanned the flexible bands
served to damp inter group hostility.
The idea of floating between a network of groups
at first blush might be hard for us to relate to.
Most of us forge our identity
largely based on the groups we permanently belong to,
like bald dudes with hearts of gold
and slightly raised cholesterol.
And often we identify primarily by our country of origin.
As scholar Benedict Anderson wrote back in 1873,
nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value
in the political life of our time.
But it's important to note
that the idea of national identity is a relatively new one
if you take the grand span of human history into account.
Some scholars note that medieval elites
may have had a national consciousness
thanks in part to the influence of the church,
this didn't really reach the masses
and become modern nationalism until the eighteenth century
when thanks to enlightenment and romantic thinking,
nationalism became what scholar John Hutchinson calls
a surrogate religion.
Whereas previously borders have been porous,
the concept of a unified nation
carried a greater sense of solidarity
when it emerged in Europe around this time.
Anderson attributes the rise of European nationalism
in the late 1700's to three things.
First the fall of Latin
as Europe's universal religious language,
accompanied by the rise of national dialects.
Second the death of the divine monarch
in the cultural imagination,
which (woman screams) required now
precariously positioned rulers
to seek out other forms of legitimacy.
And lastly the emergence of the mass produced newspaper,
which united countrymen in a shared experience in worldview.
These factors coalesce
to start building more robust national identities.
Now of course there was war
before there were modern nations.
Ancient empires didn't form
out of pure fondness for their leaders.
And there were outliers of large scale long-term warfare
long before the eighteenth century,
such as the hundred years war which ended in 1453.
See England and France used it to figure out
who gets to own and be France.
Obviously a young Chicago woman named Emily Cooper
who is in Paris,
'cause we're talking about "Emily in Paris".
But if anything, this was a precursor of things to come.
The people involved were starting to be attuned
to large collective identities
that would solidify and strengthen in future centuries.
Anderson refers to a nation
as an imagined political community,
because a person in any given country
could never possibly know
all of their fellow community members.
Creating a nation Anderson explains,
also forges a deep horizontal comrade-ship
that is shared amongst its people.
But according to him, this sense of camaraderie
is not without potential consequence.
He contends that ultimately
it is this fraternity that makes it possible
over the past two centuries,
for so many millions of people, not so much to kill,
as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.
That is perhaps to say
that without our deep national allegiances
it wouldn't be possible
to convince so many people to go to war in the first place.
To be clear, Anderson's views are not unopposed.
And some scholars think the connection
between nationalism and war can be overstated.
But interestingly enough
others argue that there's also a reciprocal relationship
between war and nationalism.
Scholar John Hutchinson argues that wars and their aftermath
only further bolster national identities.
That is to say, our nations might bring us to war
but war also brings us closer to our nations.
Or as scholar Charles Tilly says,
war made the state and the state made war.
Now obviously there's nothing wrong
with being proud of your country of origin
or with having your identity deeply tied to it.
But Fry's research does substantiate Anderson's argument.
He found pretty conclusively that as society trended away
from loose hierarchy free collectives
and towards governed organized nation states,
war became far more likely across the board.
That's not exactly surprising.
You can't assemble an army
out of a small band of loosely connected people,
but you can destroy the one ring to rule them all.
Militarism necessarily relies
on butt loads of folks willing to risk their lives
for something bigger,
and that something is very often a nation.
And that deeply ingrained sense of national pride
facilitates the kinds of wars our ancient ancestors
never would've thought to wage in the first place.
Of course you need more than just a complex society
to wage a war, and not all complex societies do.
Fry determined back in 2006
that 20 countries in recent history
have gone at least 100 years without a war.
You need one more all important thing
and it's not a literal enemy.
As Hillman writes in his book, "A Terrible Love of War",
all along we are speaking of the idea of an enemy,
a phantom enemy.
It is not the enemy that is essential to war
and that forces war upon us, but the imagination.
Imagination is the driving force.
The way we imagine our enemies then
rather than any reality based rage or hatred,
is often the true instigator of war.
We don't talk a lot about the nature of war today,
which shows the organized battle fields
of say the Civil War
where reporters could safely observe from the sidelines,
but targeted air strikes
that typically dig into civilian territory.
And specifically we don't often discuss
how war is actually more dangerous for regular folks
than ever before.
As reporter Caroline Nordstrom notes,
approximately 90 percent of casualties
in modern warfare are civilians.
The enemy is no longer enlisted soldiers
fulfilling duties in the trenches
as we've seen all too glaringly in the coverage of Ukraine,
as well as in decades of American air strikes
in the middle East, just to name a few.
Today it's hard to imagine a war
that doesn't involve civilian casualties.
And this can feel pretty depressing when you're someone
with functionally no control over geopolitics.
Fry is ever the optimist.
He notes that humans have survived for so long
precisely because we're highly inventive and adaptive.
After all, we largely went from living
in tiny bands of foragers to industrialized cities
in the evolutionary blink of an eye.
And he argues that with enough political will
we could use that adaptiveness
to construct a world without wars.
And while that may sound a bit sentimental
we thought we owed you at least one uplifting thought.
So what do you guys think?
Is war just the inevitable result of modern civilization?
Would we be better off if society had never come up
with alternatives to hunting and gathering?
Let us know in the comments.
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Later.
(upbeat music)