So, is war inevitable? Again, 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 worldview is extended to an analysis of cultural groupings of humans (e.g., tribes and nations) and the conflicts that arise among them, it becomes more disturbing.

  

                                                Ruins of Nuremberg, Germany, 1945

The ancient Greeks had two words for humans: Hellenes (themselves) and barbarians (everyone else). Similar in view and vocabulary are the Chinese. To many Chinese in China, I would 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 hundreds of years, Europeans divided the members of the species homo sapiens into Christians and heathens. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. In Japan, for centuries, all humans were either Japanese or gaijin. Jews were not Gentiles. Tutsis were not Hutus. In other words, people in all these cultures and most 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 has always occurred with alarming frequency.

The evidence mounts on all sides against the hopes of those who love peace. People find it easy, even moral, to attack, subdue, assimilate, and sometimes even exterminate other humans whom they regard as members of an inferior subspecies. 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-behaviours pool (its meme pool, rather than its gene pool) by war. Wars primarily kill the young and fit, the prime breeding stock. 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—that is, the US Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die and prime breeding stock is 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 shake us. Paradoxically, we save individuals born with genetically transmitted defects that in any other species’ 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 in a cultural-behavioural way.

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, for example, in the way that 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 those it conquered—a vigorous, efficient, aggressive culture that swallowed up its neighbours, their territories, peoples, and ways of life. Parallel cases abound in the history books. For centuries, war worked.

 

                                Artist’s conception of post-nuclear war Moscow

Today, however, war has made itself obsolete. Our species very likely would not survive another world war. Combining what we know of human history and of our war habit with what we know of our present levels of technology leads us to envision a worldwide bloom of huge mushroom clouds, followed within a decade by an image of our once beautiful, blue-green planet, burned almost bare and covered with drifting clouds of ash.

On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we give up war, will we grow weak and sickly, then die out, like deer that have no predators because they’re isolated on an island? Experts have flat-out said so. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They’re ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it.²

However, there is evidence that supports the belief that humans may learn to live, multiply, and spread—that is, to remain vigorous—without constantly fighting one another. The strongest evidence may lie in how, in every society, there are some people who show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiation rather than by violence. They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe that any single worldview or set of values (even the ones they learned as children) necessarily leads to the only appropriate, viable, “right” way of life. From a social sciences viewpoint, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members a society assign a higher priority to the lives of other humans than to reducing the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that are alien to them.

 

                                                      Modern British school children