(credit: Wikimedia Commons) 


War always seems to be lurking in the wings in this world. Maybe it's because today we have such terrible weapons that all even moderately-educated adults everywhere know we could end civilization on this planet in an afternoon and probably all human life in the next few months. The cockroaches would not miss us. 

But war isn't just a modern human dysfunction. It's been around since shortly after anything like a homo sapiens evolved here. Anthropologists are near certain that the Australopithecine tribes attacked one another as whole tribes. Nothing new here.   

Why is war so deeply embedded in us? 

It is my belief that attacking neighboring tribes, killing most of the adult males, driving off the others, then taking over everything that the losers had - females, kids, food stocks, weapons and tools, etc. - was just one variation of anthropoid group behavior a couple of million years ago. But it proved to be a useful variation in evolutionary terms. Fighting is advantageous for the winners. Stealing is more efficient than working. Tribes that were more inventive with weapons technologies and more aggressive in their memes and behaviors multiplied. The others faded.  

Apes are mostly content to settle into constant, balanced birth-death rates and hegemony in a clear bit of territory and leave it at that. Then came this warlike species, and its war memes and patterns of behavior caused it to rapidly move into a meme variation-driven cultural mode of evolution and so to leave the gene variation-driven way of the rest of the earth's species behind. In short order, as evolution goes, we took over the Earth. No species threatens us now other than ourselves.   

Hitler himself thought that his great insight was this one: "In eternal warfare, mankind has become great; in eternal peace, mankind would be ruined." (Mein Kampf, p. 149) How fully did he believe that? Once he saw that the Germans were going to lose - and in his eyes, they were losing to the Slavs - he ceased to care what happened to Germany. He gave orders to destroy everything. Every bridge, factory, rail line, etc. It was only what losers deserved. (Luckily, in the last months of WWII, Speer was able to largely stymie those orders and Germany was rebuilt in under a decade. But it was Hitler's wish that the German nation die out. His vision was insane, but he did stick to it. That much is clear.) 

Hitler's theories of race are nonsense. Humans are all one species. But if we extend his theories to culture, then they become much more disturbing; they appear to fit reality so closely. 

We humans in our tribes have been competing by war for a long time, and nations who are good at it have risen to dominate the others and to spread the winners' colonies and culture. 

There is hope for our species in evidence which seems to show that pluralistic countries - i.e. ones that can take in and harmonize a lot of different kinds of people - tend to be winners. Rome. Persia. Britain. Russia. The U.S. There are others.   

But the hope embedded in this evidence sounds shaky in these times. Two pluralistic nations confronting each other, escalating through a series of aggressions, and moving to full nuclear strikes would leave the world just as scorched as two more homogeneous superpowers would. There will be little comfort or security in a pluralistic worldview until one such worldview takes in all of us. 

The much older evidence suggests that all of our tribes have acquired a predilection for hate. We are naturally xenophobic. Everywhere people like dividing all the humans there are into "us" and "them". 

There are no naturally tolerant, hospitable tribes. Those values are add-ons acquired in the last less than three thousand years. Not much out of two million years of cultural evolution. 

War kept us strong. But now it is obsolete. 

So? What do we do? 

We begin to teach peace to the kids all over this world as a way of life. Overtly. Everywhere. No more vague, mimsy half-measures. Learn to manage your anger, control your temper, mediate others' disputes, strive to get along, kids. And that is not a suggestion. It's is a required part of your education. Period.  

They can still compete and push themselves to achieve excellence, in their studies, in sports - combative sports in particular - and so on. There is a rational plan for our species that goes on into the future instead of ending in a bloom of mushroom clouds. But it isn't going to be easy to realize. It will take intelligence, will, skills, and cooperation if we're going to get through. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a decent day.  




                                                        (credit: Wikimedia Commons)