Before precision-guided cruise missiles, before artillery, before swords and spears, probably even before the first caveman's bright idea of chipping flint into a sharp point, there was war. This is the conclusion of a growing number of anthropologists and biologists: that war is not a product of civilization, of nations and economies and boundary lines, but has somehow been hardwired into the brain, humanity's most potent weapon for good and evil.
"The idea that war begins with the city-state, or with civilization, or with the emergence of Europe, is palpably false,"says Lawrence H. Keeley, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "War goes back at least to the beginning of the human species." The fact that war is such a fundamental human phenomenon means that it is going to be incredibly hard to get rid of, but nothing is more important to think about than that goal.
The debate of the nature of war has its roots in conflicting views of human nature, often symbolized by the clash of the 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the 18th century French writer Jean Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes famously pressed the view that the state of nature is a "state of war," that men are driven to fight one another by competition, fear and pride. Rousseau, by contrast, considered human beings in their natural state to be peaceful "noble savages" and blamed war on the emergency of states and the invention of politics. But more recently, Hobbes seems to have gained ground. Studies of privitive tribesmen have now found that warfare was almost universal before outsiders first made contact. And wildlife biologists have made disturbing discoveries about the closest of human relatives. The bellicose behavior of chimps, for example, underscores a paradox of war: it requires intelligence. In fact, some biologists believe the huge human forebrain developed partly because it conveyed an advantage in scheming and fighting war. War, therefore, might well be more a result of humanintelligence than human irrationality.
If the competitive calculations and emotions of fear and revenge that drive warfare have changed little over thousands of years, the size of warring groups and sophistication of weapons have increased exponentially. Those developments made possible catastrophic world wars, but they may not be all bad news. Strong, large nations supress violence on their territories: more than one billion Chinese are not fighting one another, and Vermont seems unlikely to invade New Hampshire. And despite its horrific lethal power, modern weaponry is moving away from indiscriminate mass killing toward more precise targeting. Indeed,primitive tribal wars may have cost even greater casualties per capita than modern warfare. A decade of fairly sophisticated fighting in the former Yugoslavia cost far fewer lives than the 200,000 people killed in Rwanda with machetes over a period of less than two weeks.
Can humans change? Perhaps. There are precedents. As of 1000 A.D., the most warlike and terrible people in Europe were the Vikings. Their own stories about themselves drip with blood. But now there are some of the most peaceful people in the world. When was the last time Scandinavians started a war?
