Only the dead have seen the end of war. ~ Plato

Introduction

When we raise the question: “Do human beings have a killer instinct that they are homicidal and war mongers, or why only men are addicted to war, we are prompted by another question; why it did not evolve to be woman’s concern?” In other words, when we discuss human beings as killers and war-mongers, we mean only males leaving females out of the killer-game. One assumption is that males, as compared to females have bigger body and greater physical strength which has helped men to have evolved more aggressive than women. Thus, from the outset, their greater aggressive pattern led them to a male-dominated war-game. But our study of evolutionary science also suggests that male competition over mates and resources—an aspect the biologists call ‘sexual selection’—might have helped human males to evolve to be more aggressive than the females, which appears to be another reason that from the earliest phase of our evolution fighting and killing is a male activity.    

Though food in the earlier stage of evolution was based on foraging and vegetable gathering, but hunting by men was taken to be an early development in hominid-evolution. Once a tremendous leap to the big hunting-game was made, meat-eating became a potential food source. Females, immobilized by their offspring care-taking, relatively depended on the males for their meat supply. Whenever a male-the-hunter would bring meat for a female, he had to fight and compete with his fellow male to mate with the female. Emerging out of his biological evolution and stepping into his “societal evolution” man’s aggressive behavior took a dangerous form of hostility of fighting, killing, and group battles which gradually became an everlasting learned behavior of fierce fighting. With the emergence of a greater society and then a civilization, this behavior developed into a culture of organized war.

The Myth of War and Conflict 

War, as the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed, is a god and its worship demands human sacrifice. They would urge young men to go to war, making the slaughter they are asked to carry out as a ritual. Later on religions and in modern age “patriotism” sanctified and immortalized this ritual as “martyrdom.” Young men in every corner of the world are schooled in the notion that war is an ultimate definition of manhood. They are instigated to believe, their chivalry and bravery will be tested and proven in the heat of a war. 

In every page of our history, nothing reveals man the way war does, and in the same way nothing reveals peace the way war does by justifying that war is for the sake of permanent peace. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) mentions in his autobiography: War should be treated as murder is treated. It should be regarded with equal horror and with equal aversion. But by the use of naked force, the prospect of war is portrayed as a sacred and exciting venture creating a heroic myth out of murder. We speak of those we fight with only in the abstract and thus strip them off their human qualities. In war, we demonize the enemy to the extant that the opponent is no longer human, while those fighting against their enemy are portrayed as embodiments of noble souls. 

Our history from the earliest time to present age is almost a chronicle of conflicts and wars. War, a predatory phenomenon reveals that, since ancient time, men have been continuously waging war somewhere on this planet. According to the American historian William James Durant (1885-1981) there have been only 29 years in all of mankind’s history during which war was not underway somewhere. Another survey revealed that United States of America since 1776 when the country became free, has been at war 223 years out of past 246 years of its history. In the Ramparts Magazine (Vol. II, Part II) Bertrand Russell’s America: The Entire American People Are On Trial, Russell has very boldly proclaimed:

Violence is not new to America. White men of European stock seized the lands of indigenous Indians with a ferocity which endured until our own times. The institution of slavery shaped the character of the nation and leaves its mark everywhere. Countless “local” wars were mounted throughout the twentieth century to protect commercial interests abroad. Finally, the United States emerged at Hiroshima as the arbiter of world affairs and self-appointed policeman of the globe.¹

Every time American public opinion is misled by propagating, “We must fight against evil in all its form to promote democracy and preserve the Western way of life.” In a nutshell, the U.S. military is destroying the lives of its own young men ignoring words of Greek historian Herodotus, “In peace sons bury their father, but in war fathers bury their sons.” But, according Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), “What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder another in cold blood,” which means war is a license to kill and murder only to satisfy man’s aggressive urge. 

Sigmund Freud (1856-1838) was not surprised as he knew that war has always been there. In 1915 he published an article Thought for the Times on War and Death arguing that war, though very dangerous, is an irresistible and dangerous temptation hidden in the unconscious of human beings. He was of the view that humans need war when the burden of civilization becomes intolerable. In his opinion the alternative to war is neurosis, both for an individual and a group, which by itself can become intolerably destructive. People cannot go on indefinitely acting as if they are civilized; they must be allowed an outlet for their unconscious murderous deeper desires to kill. This means killing is not an instinctive and conscious urge, rather it is unconsciously desired by the humans. 

The classic Just-War Theory has its origins in Christian theology. Saint Augustine is usually identified as the first individual to offer a theory on war and justice. The Saint referred to the Bible and regarded some wars as necessary to amend an evil. Saint Thomas Aquinas revised Augustine’s version, creating three criteria for a just war: the war needed to be waged by a legitimate authority, have a just cause, and have the right intentions. The moral justifications for a war are expressed in jus ad bellum (right to go to war); whereas, the moral conduct of the war is expressed in jus in bello (right conduct in war). The Just-War Theory is a set of rules for military combat based on the idea that war, though always wrong, is sometimes necessary.

Gen Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) whose world was the “world of men under arms” after Aristotle’s saying, “Man is a political animal” presented his own explanation, “Man is a waring animal.” Thus, he in his book On War presented his famous insight, “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” But four centuries before Clausewitz, the Arab philosopher ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) in the Prolegomena (Introduction) to his Universal History, had remarked, “Conflict may stop if every person is clearly aware, by the light of his reason, that he has no right to oppress his neighbor. … Oppression and strife might therefore cease, if men undertook to restrain themselves,” which means that war embraces much more than politics. 

Is Man Instinctively a Killer?

When we try to seek an answer to the big question why we have war, we first of all ask ourselves, “Is man instinctively a killer that he kills even his own fellow human beings and commits acts of homicidal or is that just a manly fancy?” Since man is also an animal we are intrigued to know why he is homicidal while it is very rare that other animals and even most of the fierce beasts do not kill their own species. Animals do not make war; they kill other animals to eat. Regarding man, according to some anthropologists and psychologists, war is pre-civilizational phenomenon, which needs to be investigated: Is war embedded in man’s nature or it is a learned behavior which can be unlearned? Do humans have a killer instinct which cannot be unlearned or is war just a “manly fancy.” By declaring that war is evil—even when it is considered justified—or it is a greater evil, can human unlearn their behavior of going to war?

Though the anthropologists tell and the archeologists discover that man’s uncivilized ancestors could be red in tooth and claw. But sociologists and proponents of conventional wisdom in the light of truism in human nature believe that aggression is not inborn but results from imitation and suggestion. About man being an aggressive animal, psychological and neuroscientific theories, relying on the science of evolution profess that aggression as an instinct was a legacy of our ancestral past and an inbuilt tendency. But novelty of this assertion is that human aggression was not wholly destructive, it had a positive, even constructive side which made possible ‘survival of the fittest.’                 

Regarding man’s being violent by nature or his tendency for violence is by the operation of material factors, studies of individual and group behavior shows different directions. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) arguing in his work Leviathan is of the opinion that human beings are instinctively ruthless and selfish, with everyone struggling for his own sustenance and preservation. He believed;

In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First competition; secondly difference; thirdly glory. The first makes men invade for gain; the second for safety; and third for reputation. They first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second to defend them, the third for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign, either direct in their persons of by reflection in their kindred, the friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.²

Here we can see a possibility that since Hobbes from the age of four was educated at Westport receiving religious grooming he could not have resisted the Biblical murder of Abel by his brother Cain and saw human beings children of the surviving murderer Cain. When we view biblical narrative of first man Adam and his two sons as a metaphoric way of presenting certain deep truths about man and notice the murder of a brother by his brother, it throws light on man’s homicidal instinct. Though Cain killed his brother out of jealousy, the issue of his sacrifice unaccepted by God might have hurt his “self-esteem,” or he lost his Hobbesian view of “glory.” Self-esteem is confidence in oneself which makes one experience a positive-sense of one’s self-worth and self-respect. When one loses self-esteem, a severe reaction to one’s positive-sense can create a negative effect. 

Humans are the only species naturally born with distinctive “id,” “self-esteem or self-respect,” “ego,” and “superego,” which makes them responsible for their independent decisions. Human being’s “id” or his “ego-instinct” begins with the notion “I” which very much remains an important part of his self-conscious being and distinctive personality. Thus, using “I” a verbal symbol of his ego—defined by Descartes as man who thinks and proclaims, ‘cogito ergo sum’ or I think, therefore I am, or centuries before him expressed by al-Ghazali, ‘I will, therefore I am’ which later on was also promoted by Henri Bergson, William James, and John Dewy—man is the only creature who wills and thinks. 

Here we can hypothesize that since man’s “I” allows him to express himself with his notion of ‘I will, therefore I am’ or ‘I think, therefore I am,’ it can drive him to will or think to be a killer or homicidal when any one of the three parts of his personality—the id, the ego, the super ego—is hurt or challenged he gets perverted to think and act negatively. In other words, when any part of his personality is not disturbed and his “ego” is neither challenged nor hurt, he thinks and acts positively, and emerges as a compassionate and altruistic-being displaying a dumbfounding kindness. 

In response to the big question of how do we gain credibility that we sacrifice ourselves for doing well for others, when we see malice, greed, conflict and war abound around us, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1754) is of the view;

Man in a state of nature was a “noble savage” who was naturally born good and by civilization or institutions is made bad. He renounced Hobbes’ view of “innate wicked human nature,” and defined the natural man as a greedless noble savage, a good husband and affectionate father who followed a faith of natural kindness. He professed that the natural man was a creature of good instincts and simple tastes who has been corrupted by civilization, particularly by urban life.³

Rousseau’s concept of “noble savage” reflects in a new born child’s natural bond of love and peace with its mother and a mammalian mother’s love for her baby and even grown up children is instinctively like nothing else in the world. This bonding of love and peace in human beings know no law or instruction and does all things crushing down remorselessly all that stands in its way. But does this mean that, since human babies are immature at birth and are helpless to will and think independently as “I” they become pure-altruistic? When they are grown up, they, learning first by reflection, then by imitation and later on by experience. 

Regarding women, half of the human race have never been potential warriors and murder, and killing, and fighting in warfare has always been a male activity, though there are some examples such as Hazrat Ayesha in Islam, Razia Sultan in India, Joan of Arc in France and few more commanding an army, the combatants have always been men. However, in modern age, when war is more based on technology than direct frontline combat, some women by their own choice are taking part in war-game. But the evolution of man as the more aggressive of the sexes has already set a pattern of male-dominated warfare which is unlikely to be altered even by technological changes or ecological forces.  

The Origins of War

Regarding the origin of war, we, first of all have to ask ourselves why we have war. It is a double edged question? Naturalists find conflict and war is embedded in human nature, while those who believe that war is a learnt behavior which originates from some external causes and that war is always determinant and expression of cultural forms. But it is an established fact that war is a predatory affair when the hunter-gatherers started stealing the domesticated animals and food reserves of the pastoralists as an easy access to meat and food. The pastoralists would join together into groups to defend their cattle and property. Thus, starting from group conflicts a culture of attackers and defenders appeared which evolved into battles. By the passage of time families with common lineage bonded together as a tribe or a race. For the tribes and races, the need for more resources invented the institution of planned wars which developed into world-wide wars of modern age. 

On May 16, 1986 the Spanish National Commission convened a meeting of international scientists at Seville, modeled on UNESCO’s Statement on Race and drafted a Seville Statement on Violence. It was subsequently adopted by UNESCO at the twenty-fifth session of the General Conference on November 16, 1989. The statement, which contains five core ideas mentioned here, was designed to refute the notion that organized human violence is biologically determined.

• It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.
• It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature.
• It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior.
• It is scientifically incorrect to say humans have ‘violent brain.’
• “It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by ‘instinct’ or any single motivation.”

But, John Kegan, in his book, War and Our World, writes, “There is much to be admired about the Seville Statement, since it seeks to liberate the human race from the deadening conviction that war is its natural lot. Unfortunately there is little that is scientific about it.”⁴ He further argues;

Animals do not make war. They kill to eat, even if occasionally in a wasteful ‘feeding frenzy.’ War is too complex an activity for step-by-step genetic mutation to ‘program’ organisms for it; and geneticists lack the evidence to strike a balance between selection for this behavior or that within the vast human behavioral range. The Seville Statement, in short, is one step of hope, not objective truth. Objectively, all that science has been able to establish about human nature and war is the whereabouts in the human brain of what scientists call ‘the seat of aggression’ and how it may be stimulated or physically altered to produce aggressive behavior.⁴

We know that friendship’s opposite is enmity and that an organized enmity takes a form of war. Whereas a friendship reflects goodness, war is taken as an evil. Just as wars begin in the minds of men, peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us. Edward O. Wilson, in his book On Human Nature, argues;

Virtually all societies have invented elaborate sanctions against rape, extortion, and murder, while regulating their daily commerce through complex customs and laws designed to minimize the subtler but inevitable forms of conflicts. Most significantly of all, the human forms of aggressive behavior are species-specific: although basically primate in forms, they contain features that distinguish them from aggression in all other species. Only by redefining the words “innateness” and “aggression” to the point of uselessness might we correctly say that human aggressiveness is not innate. … Innateness refers to the measurable probability that a trait will develop in a specified set of environments, not to the certainty that the trait will develop in all environments. By this criterion human beings have a marked hereditary predisposition to aggressive behavior.⁵ 

Human aggressive behavior as a structured pattern of interaction between human genes and environments is consistent with the theory of evolution. Whereas it is also true that man’s aggressive behavior in war, conflict and criminal assault is learned, he also readily enters into an irrational and dangerous hostility. Regarding those who are the exponents of man being naturally war monger, John Kegan, in the War and Our World, writes;

If hard science will not show us the origins of war, we must look elsewhere, to the softer world of social science, particularly to anthropology. One of the earliest general explanations of group aggression was proposed by Sigmund Freud in 1913, who considered the patriarchal family was the most significant unit of the society. He suggested that sons resented father’s sexual monopoly over the family’s women and that this led to conflict, and eventually to the father’s murder. The son’s consequent guilt created revulsion against incest, and drove men first to take sexual partners only from beyond the family group and then to primitive warfare of wife-stealing.⁶

In spite of the fact that woman is not war-monger, she is the one who pays the price. Wife-stealing was and is still a common cause of fighting. In wars from ancient time to present day, women were raped, abducted and taken as sex-slaves. 

Why do Wars Happen?

Throughout history, warfare representing an organized technique of human aggression is found in every society from the earliest bands of hunter-gatherers to the modern civilized societies. According to Pythagoras (271-496 BCE), as long as men continue to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, they will never know peace, and as long as they massacre animals, they will kill each other. His statement leads us towards the hunter-gatherers who were all males, had invented tools and used many new techniques to kill animals bigger and stronger than themselves to satisfy their hunger for meat. This tendency of the male-hunter-gathers is evident even today that all males are warriors. 

Man as a power monger throughout his history whether he evolved by aggressively fighting for his ‘survival as a fittest creature,’ or is created by God in his own image, has ever been emboldened to assert his God-like desire for power in this universe. Supported by his aggressive instinct man developed his desire for power as an ability to affect the outcome he wants by the use of force. Our desire for power is so intense that most of us, irrespective of the fact that one believes or does not believe in God, would like to be as powerful as a god. For some it is difficult to admit the impossibility of being god-like powerful. When each one of us would like to be an epitome of the pattern of god and his worshippers, with ourselves in the place of the omnipotent God, social co-operation becomes difficult. This desire and practice of god-like power creates an impulse to overpower other fellow beings, to down them and finish them, as God Himself would have done to punish the disobedient ones.⁷ 

Entangled in the cobweb of limitless desires and blinded by power those who are sent to fight and kill, fall prey to a ruthless and inhuman struggle, transgressing all moral and ethical limits. Bob Dylan (b.1941), American singer-songwriter in his poem Masters of War said:

You fasten the triggers for others to fire,

Then you sit back and watch, 

When the death count gets higher. 

You hide in your mansion 

As young people’s blood 

Flows out of their bodies 

And is buried in mud.⁸ 

The more intelligent and manipulative ones transgress towards assorted mental aberrations. Their minds become arena of strife and conflicts. Their desires lead them to intense conflicts and frustrations, and consequently they are transformed into infernos. Inner disruptions manifested, both inwardly and outwardly, give rise not only to a ruthless and inhuman struggle for existence, but also to vile competition, unfair means in business and trade, greed and caprice, and false ostentation in knowledge. The impulse and a craving for unbound power becomes one of the major factors of tyrannical oppression, war and conflict. To harness such unbound and unlimited desires, ethics and morality based on reason needs to be an integral part of the social and cultural fabric of our life. 

In modern time, a nuclear war machinery with unlimited power capable of inflicting limitless destruction and countless loss of human life is produced by spending trillions of dollars. It is estimated that three trillion thirty-one billion and six hundred million dollars were spent on 1st world war, an amount which could have been spent to build a furnished home for every family in England, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, USA, Canada and Australia; for every 200,000 population a big library and a full-fledged university would have been erected; a capital which would have been for a good pay of 150,000 doctors and 150,000 nurses for unlimited period. Still money could be saved to buy all the properties in Belgium and France on market price. 

According to an April 25, 2022 report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military spending in the year 2021 was estimated $ 2.1 Trillion, including $ 801 billion by the U.S. and $ 65.9 billion by Russia. This means, as argued by Bertrand Russell in his work, Sceptical Essays (1928) in the essay on Freedom in Society, “In everything, power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.”⁹ In spite of our so much knowledge that war is a huge loss of life and property, the whole mankind is under the threat of a horrible nuclear war, which can be averted only if a way could be found to tame man’s lust for power and nurture a peaceful behavior through education.

Danger of Cyber War

We are without noticing fighting the Cyber-warin which every minute peoples are “preparing the battlefield.” Cheap to develop, and easy to hide, Cyber-weapons are proving irresistible. Today, every one, living in peace, is holding this weapon in the form of a “smart phone” in his hand. Everyone is being hacked and at the same time is freely hacking into other’s networks. Some hackers are stealing private information, while some stealing money from bank accounts. But the most dangerous weapons are developed by a state’s war and defense organization, and are being used against the enemy states, Cyber-weapons, as David E. Sanger has written in his book, The Perfect Weapon; “It would fry power grids, stop trains, silence phones, and overwhelm the Internet. In the worst case scenario, food and water would begin to run out; hospitals would turn people away. Separated from their electronics, and thus their connections, people would panic, or turn against each other.”¹⁰ Just as the nuclear technology which was initially invented for peaceful use, but later it developed the most horrible atom-bomb, Cyber-technology has developed “Cyber-weapons” which are more dangerous than the atom-bomb. Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake, in their work Cyber War have explained that there are five “take-aways” from cyber-incidents:  

Cyber war is real. What we have seen sofar is far from indicative of what can be done. Most of the well-known skirmishes in cyberspace used only primitive weapons. It is a reasonable guess that the attackers did not want to reveal their more sophisticated capabilities yet.

Cyber war happens at the speed of light: As the photons of the attack packets stream down fiber-optic cable, the time between the launch of an attack and its effect is barely measureable, thus creating risks for crisis decision makers.

Cyber war is global: In any conflict, cyberattacks rapidly go global, as covertly acquired or hacked and servers throughout the world are kicked into service. Many nations are quickly drawn in.

Cyber war skips the battlefield: Systems that people rely upon, from banks to air defense radars, are accessible from cyberspace and can be quickly taken over or knocked out without first defeating a country’s traditional defenses.

Cyber war has begun. In anticipation of hostilities, nations are already “preparing the battlefield.” They are hacking into each other’s networks and infrastructure, laying in trap-doors and logic bombs, now, in peacetime. This ongoing nature of cyber war, the blurring of peace and war, adds a dangerous new dimension or instability.¹¹ 

So far we have not experienced a full-scale Cyber-war, but sophisticated Cyber-weapons like unmanned drones have already been employed by the airpower, while laser-guided weapons in the infantry and navies are in action in the wars happening today. 

Copyright © 2022, Mirza Iqbal Ashraf

Notes:

1.  Russell’s America: Ramparts Magazine, Volume II 1945–1970, Part II, p. 474. 

2.  Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 13, p. 91.

3.  Rousseau, 1974.

4.  Keegan, 1998 and 2001, p. 20. 

5.  Wilson, 1978, pp. 99-100.

6.  Kegan, 1998, p. 22.

7.  Russell, 1967, p. 8.

8.  Dylan, 1941.

9. Russell, 1928, p. 153.

10.  Sanger, 2018, p. ix.

11. Clarke and Knake, 2010, p. 30-31.