War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease - the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.
- U.S. President Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
In this diary I wish to focus on the absolute falseness of this assertion, in light of recent (and not-so-recent) developments in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology.
The key to understanding the assertion made in the above quotation is the lingering dominance of the Hobbesian view that primitive human existence was, "nasty, brutish and short." This notion, although it continues to be widely held by lay-people, has been wholly refuted by the results of contemporary study of pre-historic and primitive humans.
First of all, the 'first man' (the essential meaning of the non-pejorative term 'primitive') was not organized into tribes or 'civilizations' (states); the earliest humans organized, quite organically, through kinship, and much later, into bands (groups of extended kinship). Tribalism developed with the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry, practices which did not exist for 99% of human pre-history.
Examination of early human settlements, extant primitive societies, and our closest animal relatives, the bonobo primates, has revealed that hunter-gatherer societies were (and are) not only egalitarian in social structure, but also rarely, if ever, engaged in organized acts of violence. The remains of food and tools found in early human settlements are evenly distributed among dwellings, providing ample evidence of the egalitarian and communalistic nature of early human beings. In addition, hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed a high level of leisure time, higher not only than that of agricultural societies, but also than that of our current industrialized society with all of its 'labor-saving devices'. All of this combined smashes to pieces the prevailing Hobbesian view of primitive life, and the consequent necessity of the state via social contract theory.
Think about the images that come to mind when you mention the labels, 'cave man,' or 'Neanderthal.' Those images are implanted and then invoked to remind us where we would be without religion, government, and toil, and are probably the biggest ideological justifications for the whole van of civilization - armies, religion, law, and the state - without which we would all live the brutal cliches of Hobbes.
The problem with those images, of course, is that they are entirely wrong. There has been a potent revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past 20 years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication - in which by domesticating others we domesticated ourselves - was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health.
- John Zerzan, Interview in The Sun, 1998
The argument that war has always existed in some form or another appears valid due to the very elastic usage of the word war. By definition, war is armed conflict between nations. This notion of war has been stretched to include not only any conflict between any groups of people, but also conflict between people and ideas, objects, and states of being (war on drugs, war on poverty). While it may be argued that competition (agon), in one form or another, has always existed, war, by definition and as practiced by nation-states (which were initially structured along the same lines as armies) is a relatively recent invention.
In one form or another, violent conflict can be said to have developed among primitive man as it exists today. But crucial to understanding primitive man is that violence was deeply personal. Modern warfare has impersonalized violence to an extreme: it is no longer an event, and therefore no longer consequential in the minds of its perpetrators.
[T]he sanguine and terrifying aspects of primitive life, which civilized individuals could hardly sustain, precisely because of the immediate personal contexts in which they occur, do not begin to compete with the mass, impersonal, rationalized slaughter that increases in scope as civilization spreads and deepens.
[H]ow can I ever forget the shock and horror expressed by an Anaguta informant of mine, whom I had persuaded to attend an American (war) movie in a nearby town. This man spent several hours acting out, in my presence, the indiscriminate, casual, unceremonious killing which he had witnessed on the screen. It was almost impossible for him to believe that human beings could behave in this way toward each other, and he decided that it must be a special attribute of white men - superhuman, and at the same time, subhuman. He finally sublimated the experience to the character of legend. It was his first movie.
The point is that the wars and rituals of primitive society (and the former usually had the style of the latter), are quantitatively an qualitatively distinct from the mechanized wars of civilization. The contrast is not merely in the exponential factor of technology multiplying a constant, homicidal human impulse; in primitive society, taking a life was an occasion; in our phase of civilization it has become an abstract, ideological compulsion. The character of this contrast is implicit in the worlds of George Bird Grinnell:
Among the plains tribes with which I am well acquainted - and the same is true of all the others of which I know anything at all - coming in actual personal contact with the enemy by touching him with something held in the hand or with a part of the person was the bravest act that could be performed... the bravest act that could be performed was to count coup on - to touch or strike - a living unhurt man and to leave him alive, and this was frequently done... it was regarded as an evidence of bravery for a a man to go into battle carrying no weapon that would do any harm at a distance. It was more creditable to carry a lance than a bow and arrows; more creditable to carry a hatchet or war club than a lance; and the bravest thing of all was to go into a fight with nothing more than a whip, or a long twig - sometimes called a coup stick. I have never heard a stone-headed war club called coup sticks.
Such a war is a kind of play. No matter what the occasion for hostility, it is particularized, personalized, ritualized. Conversely, civilization represses hostility in the particular, fails to use or structure it, even denies it.
In that uncanny movie Dr. Strangelove, for example, the commanding general of the Air Force and the Soviet Ambassador, who have clumsily managed to attack each other, are admonished by the President: "Gentlemen, no fighting in the (computerized) war-room." The point is that in civilization "hostility" explodes with a redoubled, formless bestiality, while we, so to speak, look the other way, refined and not responsible. One is reminded of the character of Dr. Strangelove, whose repressed, crippled, gloved hand struggled constantly to choke him to death; this schizoid tension is not exorcized until the bombs fall, until the indescribable energies are released, and the paralyzed professor rises with joy from his wheelchair, finding his personal apotheosis at the moment of the extinction of the species.
- Stanley Diamond, The Search for the Primitive (All italics are emphases of the author; all bolded segments are my own added emphases)
Conflict resolution among kinship groups and bands is rarely achieved through violence, but rather through ritual and custom. Such methods of resolution have their parallels in even our complex and disjointed civilization, an example being the use of breakdancing and DJ competitions to settle 'beefs' in the Bronx of the late 70s and early 80s. For primitive man, the enemy was a very personal concept, whereas our civilization has depersonalized the enemy to an extreme (the Vietnamese were not people, they were 'Gooks'; Iraqis and the people of Afghanistan are 'Hajis' or 'Ragheads').
The notion that human existence without the modern-nation state and all its attendant atrocities is the cure for thousands of years of human misery is patently false. It is only perpetuated for the purposes of justifying the continuing predation of the nation-state.
As an afterthought, I would also like to examine Just War Theory. The concept of the 'just war' was originally developed by the Constantine Christian Church - the Christian attitude of abstention from involvement in war was difficult to maintain when Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire, and thinkers such as Augustine invented the neat idea that waging war was the legitimate exercise of authority of rulers. It is therefore anti-democratic in extremis.
Just War theory can be divided into jus ad bellum - the justifications for going to war, and jus in bello - what is right to do in war. The original conditions of jus ad bellum were that war may be undertaken only for a just cause, as a last resort, and that there must be a reasonable hope of success. The two primary conditions for jus in bello are that the means employed be proportional to the end that is aimed at (i.e. war should not be fought in such a way as to constitute a greater evil than the evil it intends to remedy), and that the killing of innocents is not permissible.
Given the indiscriminately destructive nature of modern warfare, and the virtual impossibility of of attacking military installations without causing 'collateral damage', it is fair to conclude that no war today can be considered just.
Upate:
First off, I'd like to thank everyone for engaging in such a lively yet civil, respectful discussion.
Secondly, I guess 'the point' of this diary is that it is not necessary to wage war. We can stop. All we have to do is stop.
1 20,000,000 Second World War 1937-45
2 8,500,000 First World War 1914-18
3 1,200,000 Korean War 1950-53
4 1,200,000 Chinese Civil War 1945-49
5 1,200,000 Vietnam War 1965-73
6 850,000 Iran-Iraq War 1980-88
7 800,000 Russian Civil War 1918-21
8 400,000 Chinese Civil War 1927-37
9 385,000 French Indochina 1945-54
10 200,000 Mexican Revolution 1911-20
10 200,000 Spanish Civil War 1936-39
12 160,000 French-Algerian War 1954-62
13 150,000 Afghanistan 1980-89
14 130,000 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
15 100,000 Riffian War 1921-26
15 100,000 First Sudanese Civil War 1956-72
15 100,000 Russo-Polish War 1919-20
15 100,000 Biafran War 1967-70
19 90,000 Chaco War 1932-35
20 75,000 Abyssinian War 1935-36
These numbers tell a story that I am afraid we as Americans, despite 9-11, cannot truly fathom. Bombed out cities and landscapes, populations decimated, women violated, a conflagration of cultural and scientific treasures, degradation to our environment, and depravation of the human psyche. Thousands died in World War I per kilometer of frontier.
20% of the population of Hiroshima was killed in the blink of an eye at the end of World War II.
We can stop this. We must stop this.
And so I quote again:
And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, "We break the sword", and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling - that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one's neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared - this must someday become the maxim for every commonwealth too... The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud - and from up high.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow ca. 1880