Douglas Fry’s edited volume is by far the most comprehensive and wide-ranging single work on the anthropology of war and peace. It takes us from monkeys to apes, from apes to the full range of human societies. It dives into archaeology, ethnography, history, and military studies. The 32 authors range from those who emphasize war in human and ape nature to those who see largely peace.
The data are slowly coming together, however, making many earlier views obsolete. It is clear that humans are not, and never were, even remotely like Thomas Hobbes’ isolated “savages” in a state of “constant warre,” whose lives were “poore, solitary, nasty, brutish and short” (from Leviathan). Actually, nothing is less like the state of “warre of each against all” than an actual war, when people die without a second thought for their comrades.
Stephen Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), greatly overestimated the extent of violence in traditional small-scale societies, and probably underestimated the extent of violence in modern ones. His point that violence has diminished in recent centuries still apppears accurate, but the extreme difference he alleges does not stand up under scrutiny.
Many authors have recourse to evidence from our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. This is equivocal at best: chimps are among the most savage, brutal and murderous of animals, bonobos among the most peaceful. So those who see humans as innately warlike see us as only-slightly-transformed chimps, conveniently forgetting about bonobos. Those who see peace remember the bonobos. The primate record shows that we primates are a variable lot: individually, troop-to-troop, and species to species. Not much help there on decoding basic human nature.
In fact, the fossil record—completely neglected in this book—makes it clear that we evolved from something very different. As far as we can trace pre-Homo hominins, they were tiny, frail things. The famous Lucy was about the size of a modern four-year-old girl. These early hominins had tiny, weak canine and incisor teeth, also. They lacked claws. No australopithecine could have killed bare-handed as easily as chimps do. The same appears to be true of all the ancestors of the human line. Humans started to get big about 2 million years ago, as Homo erectus emerged. Only then could they have done much in the way of homicide.
It is also clear that truly peaceful societies are rare, and all or almost all the ethnographic ones have been impacted by much bigger and fiercer neighbors. The famously peaceful societies in Malaysia generally say they took to the hills, and flee from enemies, because of chronic slave-raiding in the past. Conversely, the extremely aggressive societies often have histories of being impacted by bigger, fiercer groups, the difference being that the aggressive societies had no place to run or had a good refuge where they could continue fighting.
When our students Clayton and Carole Robarchek (see their book Waorani) did research on a society where violence was virtually unknown—the Semai of Malaysia—and one where murder and war were endemic—the Waorani of the Upper Amazon—they found almost no difference: both were simple shifting cultivators who also hunted, both had loose kinship-organized societies, both had similar permissive child-rearing, and so on. The only relevant difference the Robarcheks could find was that the Semai had a long history of fleeing from slavers and had learned to interpret stress and threat as frightening; the Waorani had a long history of fighting larger neighbor groups and interpreted any stress as potential or actual grounds for killing. It was all in the interpretation.
So, are humans innately aggressive? Genetics gives us a range of ways of reacting to threat. Common sense, which of course is genetically grounded, gives us the ability to assess the threat and figure out the best way to react to it. Culture—socially learned behavior patterns—gives us ideas and models to use, and alternative strategies for coping. These patterns derive from individuals learning over the generations and teaching each other. So we can expect behavior to vary, depending on which of the countless possible ways of coping with threat have worked in the past in the particular group we are observing.
Then, individual personality intervenes, and it too is partly genetically guided, partly learned. Clearly, controlling one’s violent responses is the normal, human thing to do, and we are wired to do it. We are not innate aggressors that have to learn, from religion or morality, not to do it. Soldiers learn to kill, and playground bullies frequently later learn to be peaceful.
Fry’s book does not look at the direct roots of violence. That would take another volume, probably an even longer one. The major root, I think, is hate. This is not much addressed, even in Staub’s comprehensive work. It requires much further analysis. I do not think humans would kill each other if it were not for the mobilization of hate. I do not think humans would engage in mass murder—war, genocide—unless their hatreds were whipped up by leaders and organized by exclusionary ideologies (extremist religion, communism, fascism, and the like). I think studies of hate are what we need next. Hate does seem an innate capacity of humans, but, like violence, it can be invoked or not invoked, depending on the wider strategy or mix of strategies that people invoke to cope with threat and stress.
Hate or anger appear to be necessary for serious deploying of violence on any scale. The cold-blooded explanations in the books—violence is simply a strategy for getting mates, land, loot, and such—do not check out with experience. Nobody except psychopaths and very well-trained soldiers kills coldly for material reasons. Even when there is an ultimate motive, which in the case of war is normally the case, people kill only when aroused by anger, vengeance, battle frenzy, hatred, sadism, and other intense feeling-states.
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