‘War – what is it good for?’ asked Edwin Starr on his 1970 single of the same name, before answering his rhetorical question: ‘Absolutely nothing.’ In this, Starr was not only excoriating America’s contemporary folly in Vietnam. He was implicitly endorsing the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s recommendation that humanity could and should trade up from endless war to perpetual peace, and the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s suggestion that war was not natural to our species. In 1940 she wrote:
War is just an invention known to the majority of human societies, by which they permit their young men either to accumulate prestige or avenge their honour or acquire loot or wives or sago lands or cattle or appease the blood lust of their gods or the restless souls of the recently dead.
Mead’s account, cited in the military historian Richard Overy’s timely and engaging book, may not very precisely map on to what Hitler was doing to Europe in that year, nor what is currently happening in Ukraine or Gaza, but the point remains: war is not just often morally wrong but catastrophic for humanity.
For 400,000 of the 600,000 years of human development, argued Mead’s fellow anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, there was intra-species unpleasantness but no martial conflict. Other anthropologists suggested that 98 per cent of human history was warless. Only when our ancestors started farming in Mesopotamia 400 generations ago and hubristically carving up the biosphere did war become our degraded species’ boon companion. Weaponry used for the hunt could be repurposed to target our own species in ways scarcely conceivable to other social animals, chimpanzees settling differences by hurling faeces included.
Such perspectives are nonsense, though, if one accepts that war is imperative to the evolution of our species. ‘Nature keeps her human orchard healthy by pruning,’ wrote the neo-Darwinian anatomist Sir Arthur Keith in 1931. ‘War is her pruning hook.’ Darwin himself had stressed human co-operation and sociality as necessary for evolution, but for Keith and contemporary German race scientists war was biologically useful because it elevated the strong and eliminated the weak. Hitler endorsed this perspective and gave it a normative twist. ‘Who wants to live must also fight,’ he wrote in Mein Kampf. ‘And who does not wish for conflicts in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to live.’
All that, as Overy argues, is to understate Hitler’s narcissistic hubris, exemplified by the madness of attempting to realise dreams of converting millions of Russians to a captive labour force and capturing Soviet oil fields to feed the Nazi war machine’s thirst. Nor does it explain the industrial slaughter of six million Jews.
Something like the virility of races survives in such post-war indicators of national potency as the Composite Indicator of National Capability devised in 1963 by the American political scientist J. David Singer. According to this metric, there are six factors that decide a country’s relative power: total population, total urban population, iron and steel manufacture, primary energy consumption, military personnel and military expenditure. How can Britain be a great power when deficient in steel production and with a regular army of around only 80,000?
Overy coolly analyses biological, psychological, anthropological and ecological accounts that attempt to answer his question, finding each independently unconvincing. He doubts, too, Freud’s idea that war can be explained by an innate death drive. Nor does he find convincing other reasons for war. Security, religious belief and the pursuit of power or resources are each insufficient to explain a phenomenon he defines as ‘collective, purposive, lethal intergroup violence’.
His reflections, encompassing Thermopylae and thermonuclear war, take us to unexpected places. In 2007, submariners planted the Russian flag 4,000 metres below the North Pole, where large deposits of natural gas and oil lie in an underwater mountain which, the Kremlin claims, is actually part of its territory.
One lucrative sideline of the military- industrial complex is the literature on war. Overy’s book, he tells us, is the fifth he knows of to be called Why War? One of its predecessors, Ellen Wilkinson and Edward Conze’s 1934 socialist account, proposed that ‘capitalist imperialism produces war as an explosion of oxygen and hydrogen produces water’. Overy demurs about this and other Marxist-inspired accounts, according to which war is essentially driven by capitalism. He argues there was more to the Boer war than Britain’s desire to seize Transvaal gold, and more at stake in the Gulf wars than oil. Not that he wants to rule out the idea that war is often catalysed by unequal wealth distributions. With the world’s population estimated to reach nine billion by 2050, he writes grimly: ‘Eventual conflict over resources might seem unavoidable.’
In the meantime, we should worry about the Thucydides Trap, named after the historian of the war between Athens and Sparta. According to it, two rivals for hegemonic power are destined to fight. True, some (such as the British strategic thinker Lawrence Freedman) suggest the stakes are too high between today’s hegemons, China and the US, to engage in mutually assured destruction. But that thought doesn’t eliminate the possibility of countless proxy wars making human life more miserable.
Towards the end of the book, Overy reflects on the prospect of wars in space, as China and America vie for mastery of the heavens. War has a very long history, he concludes, but it also has a future.
Comments