"According to a provocative new book by Ian Morris war is not merely a necessary evil, it is actively good for us. Mankind, he argues, is incapable of resolving conflicts peacefully: we have only evolved complex civilisations thanks to organised violence, and we only live in harmony because of the threat of a big stick.
To prove this thesis, he has called on an impressive variety of sources from military history, archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary biology to map out how war has affected us at every stage of our development. Man has always been a selfish, brutal species. Stone Age skeletons invariably show massive injuries. Ten thousand years ago as many as one in five humans met a violent end – statistics borne out by studies of tribal societies today.
What put a stop to this perpetual state of “all against all”, paradoxically, was war. The tribe that could muster the most men, and the highest degree of cooperation, could defeat its neighbours and impose stability. Furthermore, agriculture made ransacking neighbouring territories counterproductive: true power lay in assimilating other peoples and their territories intact. This is what Morris calls “productive war”: tribal societies merged and grew into sophisticated empires capable of stamping out low-level violence, to bring peace and prosperity.
The Roman Empire might have raped, burnt and crucified its way across the world, but by the first century AD the percentage of people dying violently had dropped from 20 to just three or four per cent. Not much consolation for the Sabine women or Masada’s Jews, perhaps, but pretty impressive. Despite sickening atrocities, the British Empire and its American heir have created more peace and prosperity than they ever did bloodshed. Furthermore, he says, the United States must continue to threaten those who rock the boat, and even attack them when necessary, for the greater good: the alternative would be a return of widespread low-level war that would end up killing far more people.
Needless to say, Morris’s argument is fraught with controversy. First, there are his statistics. One in five cavemen might have died violently compared with only one in 50 people today, but it is easier to kill a fifth of a tiny population than it is with one numbered in billions. Perhaps we are better at reproducing than we are at massacring one another. The archaeological record Morris appeals to is sketchy at best, and even the Roman Empire did not produce records we can trust. What makes Morris’s argument so compelling, however, is the thoughtful way he negotiates each of these pitfalls. On a timescale this wide, his argument indeed seems very plausible.
So where is all this heading? After describing the patterns that have emerged out of 10,000 years of military history, Morris puts them in the context of millions of years of evolution. All life, he argues, is competition, and those who combine together to form bigger, more sophisticated organisms tend to win. Thus molecules form chains, chains combine into cells, cells create organisms and organisms evolve into higher beings. Similarly, humans have gathered together into tribes, tribes into societies and societies now form one global community dominated by a single superpower. The logical conclusion is for all human beings to merge into one giant super-being – the stuff of science fiction, perhaps even of totalitarian nightmare, but something that Morris argues is already happening.
In the next 50 years, he predicts, humans will merge with machines, and we will be capable of uploading our minds on to the internet. When this happens war will no longer be necessary, because we will all be part of the same single global being." The Daily Telegraph.
(Ian Morris, a professor of classics at Stanford University, is the author of “War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots.)
To prove this thesis, he has called on an impressive variety of sources from military history, archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary biology to map out how war has affected us at every stage of our development. Man has always been a selfish, brutal species. Stone Age skeletons invariably show massive injuries. Ten thousand years ago as many as one in five humans met a violent end – statistics borne out by studies of tribal societies today.
What put a stop to this perpetual state of “all against all”, paradoxically, was war. The tribe that could muster the most men, and the highest degree of cooperation, could defeat its neighbours and impose stability. Furthermore, agriculture made ransacking neighbouring territories counterproductive: true power lay in assimilating other peoples and their territories intact. This is what Morris calls “productive war”: tribal societies merged and grew into sophisticated empires capable of stamping out low-level violence, to bring peace and prosperity.
The Roman Empire might have raped, burnt and crucified its way across the world, but by the first century AD the percentage of people dying violently had dropped from 20 to just three or four per cent. Not much consolation for the Sabine women or Masada’s Jews, perhaps, but pretty impressive. Despite sickening atrocities, the British Empire and its American heir have created more peace and prosperity than they ever did bloodshed. Furthermore, he says, the United States must continue to threaten those who rock the boat, and even attack them when necessary, for the greater good: the alternative would be a return of widespread low-level war that would end up killing far more people.
Needless to say, Morris’s argument is fraught with controversy. First, there are his statistics. One in five cavemen might have died violently compared with only one in 50 people today, but it is easier to kill a fifth of a tiny population than it is with one numbered in billions. Perhaps we are better at reproducing than we are at massacring one another. The archaeological record Morris appeals to is sketchy at best, and even the Roman Empire did not produce records we can trust. What makes Morris’s argument so compelling, however, is the thoughtful way he negotiates each of these pitfalls. On a timescale this wide, his argument indeed seems very plausible.
So where is all this heading? After describing the patterns that have emerged out of 10,000 years of military history, Morris puts them in the context of millions of years of evolution. All life, he argues, is competition, and those who combine together to form bigger, more sophisticated organisms tend to win. Thus molecules form chains, chains combine into cells, cells create organisms and organisms evolve into higher beings. Similarly, humans have gathered together into tribes, tribes into societies and societies now form one global community dominated by a single superpower. The logical conclusion is for all human beings to merge into one giant super-being – the stuff of science fiction, perhaps even of totalitarian nightmare, but something that Morris argues is already happening.
In the next 50 years, he predicts, humans will merge with machines, and we will be capable of uploading our minds on to the internet. When this happens war will no longer be necessary, because we will all be part of the same single global being." The Daily Telegraph.
(Ian Morris, a professor of classics at Stanford University, is the author of “War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots.)
