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                                                                                      (credit: Keystone/Second Roberts, via Wikimedia Commons)

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. All humans for centuries in Japan were either Japanese or gaijin. Jews were proud that they 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 discouraging regularity.

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-behaviors 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 breeding stock on both sides. Wars don’t serve a genetic mode of evolution anymore, if they ever did. They clearly haven’t since the first technological war—that is, the US Civil War. In modern wars, too many young men die and too much prime breeding stock is lost. But wars do still serve a cultural mode of evolution.