War Is the Norm

By Brian Stewart

Thursday, December 26, 2024

 

‘Is there a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” That is the question that Albert Einstein put to Sigmund Freud in 1932 in the hopes that the psychologist could shed some light on “the dark places of human will and feeling.” The answer came in the form of a terse pamphlet with the title of Why War? Freud concluded that warlike violence was characteristic of the entire animal kingdom and that mankind was no exception. He located the causes of war in human nature, rendering the intellectual project of abolishing war—a commonplace in that time as much as in ours—a fool’s errand. The idea of perpetual peace, derived from the thinking of Immanuel Kant, relied on an overly simplistic view of human nature. Such wishful thinking failed to account for the deep wellsprings of human action. In Freud’s mind, it specifically neglected the urge to fight and destroy, which derived from what he called the “death drive,” a psychological impulse to destruction in every living being.

 

Nearly a century later, Freud’s grim theory of what is immovable and bent in human beings still looks sound. In his enthralling new book, Why War?, the British historian Richard Overy explores the ubiquity of war throughout human history and its persistence in the modern era. A preeminent military historian, Overy addresses “the most typical, most cruel and extravagant form of conflict between man and man.” The result is a brilliant overview of the knotted motivations for war embedded in human biology and psychology, anthropology, and history. 

 

Overy delivers a subtle rebuke to complacency and an equally subtle defense of constructive pessimism regarding the discrete factors that predispose the human race to war-fare. It is the ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human species. “Polemos pater panton,” said Heraclitus; war is the father of all things.

 

The conventional wisdom tends to dismiss war as unnatural and unnecessary, framing it as an abstract phenomenon about which one can make sweeping generalizations. Following the example of the Enlightenment philosophies, liberal-minded people believe that peace is the natural order of things. They assume that wars arise chiefly because of international misunderstandings and are rooted in the vested interests of the ruling classes. A persistent habit of liberal thinking is to imagine the obsolescence of war while declaring opposition to current wars, since the bloody means are hard to justify even for the most apparently laudable of ends.

 

None of this liberal thinking withstands the scrutiny Overy brings to his examination of war. He expends considerable ink disproving fashionable notions about the pacific record of archaic peoples widely believed to have resorted to lethal confrontations seldom if at all. Against the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who in 1940 juxtaposed the “primeval pacifism” of primitive man with the brutish nihilistic violence of modernity, Overy marshals copious evidence to show that war is not an aberration in the human story. Indeed, he shows it was typical even before the first large-scale sedentary communities or the first states.

 

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The author begins by reaffirming the compelling empirical data unearthed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in his seminal work The Better Angels of Our Nature, which shows that the number of those who have died violent premature deaths, as a percentage of the population, has declined throughout history—and especially since the Enlightenment. However, absolute numbers of war-related deaths are on the rise; in other words, the world has been growing more peaceful. Consider: The nations of Western Europe, having been responsible for two new wars a year for 600 years, have not started a single one since 1945.

 

Without proposing to rebut Pinker’s critical findings, Overy relates that “the past century witnessed wars on an exceptional scale and of an exceptional aggregate lethality.” Contrary to the impression given by Pinker’s triumphalist argument, this “Long Peace” owes not to any moral evolution in our species but to contingent factors enabled by the rise of American hegemony. The world has unquestionably prospered and become more peaceful under the shadow of Pax Americana, though the bloody consequences of its erosion are already visible from Europe to the Near East.

 

Why War? suggests that although violent conflict has waned in modern times, it is far from being obsolete. Overy outlines the variety of reasons that incline tribes, chiefdoms, nations, or empires to fight, to acquire land and resources, or to defend or promote beliefs, or in pursuit of glory and esteem. Power is not pursued as an end in itself; it is sought for some deeply held value. The Romans, for their part, believed that war was willed by the gods and conducted to bring honor to those who took up arms. Over time, Rome looked to its Mediterranean imperium as proof of its “right to command.”

 

Excavating the passions of belief and the drive for power in leaders and nations, Overy maintains that organized violence can pursue survival or conquest, but that it can also involve less tangible motives such as fear, interest, or honor. In classical Greece, these aspects of human nature were regarded by Thucydides as spurs to violent competition, accounting for the anarchic “human condition.”

 

In England on the eve of the Glorious Revolution, Thomas Hobbes posited that because human beings are rapacious by nature, they were locked in an eternal struggle for survival. Freedom becomes a luxury only after order has been established. Overy is heavily influenced by the grim philosopher, who defined life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Without a common source of power—what Hobbes called the “Leviathan”—to defend people, security would ever be in short supply. “The sum of virtue,” Hobbes writes, “is to be sociable with them who will be sociable, and formidable to them that will not.”

 

It was these Hobbesian insights into human existence that have long found their expression in practical efforts to defend the tribe or the nation from external or internal threats. Overy emphasizes the continual need throughout history to protect porous borders from hostile incursions. He elucidates the “crisis of security” on the margins of the Chinese Empire that spurred the creation of the Ming long wall—origin of the modern conception of the “Great Wall”—to keep the Mongols at bay. The Chinese acted in a manner that the British viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, would surely have approved. In 1907, he defined frontiers as “the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace.” The persistent attacks against Israel today underscore the vital importance of this point.

 

Overy occasionally overstates his case, as when he discusses the role of the materialist, or economic, basis for warfare. There is no doubt that material ambition and the lust for resources have been a “direct object” of different forms of warfare throughout history. The Viking raiding in northern Europe, to invoke a cherished example, was nothing if not a series of predatory campaigns to secure commodities, from slaves and concubines to salt and gold. But Overy places undue stress on “resource wars,” especially in his assessment of recent wars fought by liberal democracies. For instance, he deems the 2003 Iraq War to have been an enterprise to sustain the oil supply from the world’s largest area of petroleum reserves. “The ostensible claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction,” he notes, “was regarded at the time, and demonstrated subsequently, to be without foundation.” Overy fails to substantiate this claim, which contradicts the antebellum record of numerous national intelligence agencies and governing authorities that believed the Baathist regime possessed a lethal arsenal of unconventional weapons until after it was removed from power. On the whole, however, Overy does not fall prey to this reductive conceit.

 

Why War? draws to a close by insisting that, far from being a historical aberration, conflict is “an integral part” of the human story. Even in an age of escalating conflict, this has not stopped progressives from indulging Einstein’s deep-seated wish to escape the “menace of war.” Indeed, many prominent voices today announce its imminent abolition. No doubt such assertions would still be heard with the outbreak of World War III. As Donald Kagan noted in his own inquiry into the origins of war, “The only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself.” 

 

Whether the renunciation of war in the modern age has had any real value is a matter for legitimate doubt. The contemporary insistence on entering into war only after considerable forethought and solemnity, and conducting it according to the most civilized conventions, has done little to make the resort to armed force less frequent and certainly any less brutal. It remains what it has always been: the last argument of kings—and presidents.

 

Tough-minded readers of Why War? will nod along vigorously with its reluctant but firm conclusion that if war has such a long past, it also has a future.