Human Nature and the History of War
All citation, unless otherwise noted, attributed to MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us, 2020.
About a year ago, I created curriculum for a class aiming to cover the history of war. Ironically, this Herculean labor was greatly aided by a small book. Margaret MacMillan’s impressive study War: How Conflict Shaped Us opens by asking, Does society make us more peaceful or more warlike? With this premise, the book plunges readers into their own battle, torn between the virtue and the vile of humanity.
War seems to be — as MacMillan lays out — an opportunity both for atrocities and greatness. Determining which is more prevalent is not an easy task. Through little-known historical vignettes, MacMillan provides the cannon fodder for our judgement of war. She illustrates that war is an integral part of humanity, evidenced by the surviving literature of the Mayan Civilization which is mostly regarding war and the dispassionate voices which narrate the bloody battles of Ancient Greece, as if war was simply another part of life as mundane as sitting down for dinner.
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
So Thucydides begins the story of human civilizations and MacMillan her descent into our battle for survival. The chronology of this story is spread out across the book, organized thematically. MacMillan begins with early agricultural societies, lifestyles which caused humans to be tied to one place and able to devote more time and resources to successful cultivation — they created more worth defending, and, consequently, stealing. Global trade phenomena such as the Silk Road offered societies the chance to interact with one another, gaining valuable access to resources and knowledge. However, such interconnection also allowed conflict to spread quicker along these paths of network.
It became easy to find reasons for war in the Middle Ages, as most of Europe’s rulers were linked through family connections, making it easy to dispute successions to power. In the explosion of the Enlightenment, Europeans believed that humans were finally becoming more peaceable and, as a result, war was becoming more “civilized,” fought by professionals who respected the rules of warfare (evident in the American Revolution in which many commentators noted the commendable British style of fighting in contrast to the chaotic and unruly guerrilla warfare pursued by the colonists).
Later on, Europeans would view the American Civil War as an indictment of their less civilized cousins, unable to control their passions and rise to the higher realm of being ushered in by the Enlightenment. However, less than half a century later, Europe would plunge into two world wars. The chief of the Austrian general staff described the first as “a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued, because so old a monarchy and so glorious an army cannot go down ingloriously.” With such numerous moments of conflict as evidence, MacMillan proves that war has been a constant in human history.
Kay Nielsen (illustrator). East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North. New York: G.H. Doran, 1922.
Laced among this chronology are spectacular observations about the many faces of warfare. MacMillan explains how in religious wars, the enemy becomes the enemy of humanity itself and must be completely destroyed, not merely defeated. Blasphemous ideas are not permitted to exist for fear of corrupting the rest of the population. Infamously, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain instituted the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, calling for the expulsion of Spanish Jews. Their Alhambra Decree announced that the Jews “seek always and by whatever means and ways they can to subvert and to steal faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and to separate them from it, and to draw them to themselves and subvert them to their own wicked belief and conviction.” Such decrees prove that motivations for war could be far more numerous than the mere acquirement of resources; abstract ideology could be just as powerful an incentive.
Groundbreaking cultural observations ring out among the chapters. For example, the revolutionary nature of the First World War with the majority of the combatants able to read and write, leaving us with thousands of pages of firsthand accounts (perhaps the most notable being All Quiet on the Western Front, recently made into a Netflix movie). Or the study of American soldiers in World War II which concluded that only 15-25% of combatants were prepared to aim and fire at the enemy — the rest either did not shoot at all or aimed wide.
Finally, in what is perhaps her most engaging argument, MacMillan acknowledges the immense role that cultural practices play in the conduct of warfare. China, while it developed gunpowder, did not utilize the resource in the same military capacity as Europe, focusing instead on horseback and archery. How technology is used depends on the values and organization of the society in question. While some societies prioritize military technology, others, such as medieval China, chose not to emphasize militarism in their cultural values. Additionally, some societies may reject military technology for what it perceives to be negative consequences, whether practical or cultural. When a Spartan leader witnessed a stone hurled by a catapult, he exclaimed in horror, “O, Hercules, the valor of man is at an end!”, mourning what appeared the be the end of hand-to-hand combat and thus an important value in Spartan society. Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci designed a submarine which he purposefully revealed only in part due to “the evil nature of men who would practice assassination at the bottom of the seas.” Just as economics presents consumers and businesses with resources they must choose how to use, when conducting warfare, individuals and governments have the choice of how to utilize new technological resources. Thomas Sowell summarizes this at the beginning of Conquest and Cultures, his remarkable trilogy: “Cultures are not museum pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives.”
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
As MacMillan approaches the end of her odyssey, she presents this quote by General Lee, a Confederate general in the American Civil War. Lee suggests that man is naturally inclined towards war, and given this natural inclination, we should be more in awe that we have peace at all. War — even with its horrors — seems to be a constant companion to the human condition. Moreover, peace, as MacMillan suggests, emerges as less of practical possibility and rather an idea confined to our wistful philosophies. For better or worse, war has and will continue to shape humanity, suggesting that a deeper inquiry into human nature and our proclivity for conflict might be the key to a true and realistic peace.
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Do great powers wage war or prevent war?
What motives incite war? Which motives are acceptable and to whom?
How should we handle civilians in war? Are they considered combatants?
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Below are recommended books that are mentioned in the post or provide great additional insight into the topic.
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