Gandhi (South Africa, 1906) (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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 would be fatal, yet these individuals go on to reproduce. We aren’t evolving genetically anymore; if anything, we’re devolving. But we are evolving in a cultural-behavioral 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 had a more vigorous and efficient culture than did any of the lands it conquered—a vigorous, efficient culture that swallowed up its neighbors, their territories, peoples, and ways of life. Similar cases fill History. For centuries, war worked.

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 images of our once beautiful, blue planet, burned almost bare and wrapped in drifting clouds of smoke and ash.

On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we give up war, will we devolve culturally, 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. Some people can stick to the ways of Reason even when they're attacked personally, physically. 

                            

                      Nelson Mandela (1937) (credit: author unknown, via Wikimedia Commons)

They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe any single worldview or set of values (even the ones they learned as children) necessarily leads to the only viable, “right” way of life. From a social sciences viewpoint, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members of society assign a higher value to the lives of other humans than to reducing the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that seem strange to them. 

                   

                     Martin Luther King, Jr. (credit: Dick DeMarsico, via Wikimedia Commons)