Chapter 10.               Part C 

        

         So, is war inevitable? The evidence of history seems to answer with a firm "Yes". Wars are fought over these very differences. Following this line of argument, we see what Hitler thought of as his great insight: he accepted that war was an inevitable, periodic test of the cultural and (he said) “racial” vitality of a people. He held to, and ranted over, his worldview to his last hour. To geneticists, his racial theories are meaningless silliness. Humans are all one species. But when his world view is extended to an analysis of cultural groupings of humans(tribes/nations) and the conflicts which arise among them, it becomes more disturbing.

                                 bodies awaiting cremation (Dresden, Germany, 1945)

         The ancient Greeks had two words for humans: “Hellenes” (themselves) and “barbarians” (everyone else). Similar in view and vocabulary were, and are, the Chinese. To many Chinese in China, I would still be "gwai lo", an "evil alien”. The word “Masai” – a famous African tribe’s name for themselves – means “people”, as do the words “Innu”, in Innu, and “Cheyenne”, in Cheyenne. For Europeans, for hundreds of years, the members of the species homo sapiens were divided most basically into Christians and heathens. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. In Japanese, for centuries, all humans were either Japanese or gaijin. Jews are not Gentiles. Tutsis are not Hutus. In other words, people in all of these cultures and nearly all others that have ever existed have believed that they are - or were, in the cases of those now vanished into History - the only fully human humans. Thus war.

                  

 The evidence mounts on all sides against the hopes of those who love peace. People find it easy, even “moral”, to attack, subdue, assimilate, sometimes even exterminate, other humans whom they regard as members of an inferior sub-species. By this reasoning, Hitler was only exhorting the Germans to accept the inevitability of war and get to work at being winners. 

 Under this reasoning, war is the way by which we have, through the sociocultural mode of evolution, become our own predators. We cut out the ineffective parts of our species' total concepts-values-behaviors pool (its meme pool, rather than its gene pool) by war. Wars kill mainly the young and fit, the prime breeding stock, first. And modern wars kill much of the healthiest, smartest, best breeding stock on both sides. Wars don't serve a genetic mode of evolution anymore, if they ever did. They haven't, arguably, since the first technological war, i.e. the U.S. Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die. Prime breeding stock lost. But wars do still serve a cultural mode of evolution.

  For thousands of years, we have evolved – culturally – by this ugly means. For centuries, no other species and no change in our environment has been able to seriously shake us. We even save individuals who are born with genetically transmitted defects that in any other species in any raw natural environment would be fatal every time, and these individuals go on to reproduce. We aren't evolving genetically anymore; if anything, we’re likely devolving. But we are evolving culturally-behaviorally.

 We prey on ourselves, not eating corpses, but killing followers of other cultures in order to cut out parts of our species' total values/memes pool whose usefulness is fading. This system has worked brutally, but efficiently, for a long time. Evidence that it works lies in the way that, for example, within a generation of being conquered, most of the people subjugated under the Romans were effectively "Romanized". Rome was a more vigorous and efficient culture than were any of the cultures that it conquered. A vigorous, efficient, aggressive culture swallowed up its neighbors, their territories, peoples, and ways of life. Parallel cases abound in the history books. For centuries, war worked.