Hand symbol for peace 

                                                    (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Choosing Peace

Some serious insights that suggest strategies for avoiding war are contained in a text that I found online a few days ago. It’s called The Origin of War, and it was written by a socio-biologist named Johan van der Dennen.

In this book, the author proposes that war developed and became a widespread pattern of behavior among tribes of our earliest ancestors because it works. Or at least it did for them. Males in some troops of early hominids (our ancestors of 7 million years ago) first acquired some precursor traits that proved useful in the survival game: language (for quick communication); group cooperation (so several males could move smoothly as a coordinated team); an easy way of identifying group members (so there would be no confusion in battle as to which combatants were “your guys”); and weapons. Then, a few smart males in a troop of hominids put this combination together. Their beginning to practice lethal raiding on other troops in their area then became pretty much inevitable.

Why? Because the aggressive males, by conducting successful raids on other troops, got more females. Then, the warmongers did more breeding, produced more offspring, and taught this pattern of behavior to their sons. War was a vigorously self-perpetuating trait. It made greater numbers of troop members in a few generations for troops that contained lots of war-loving males.

There are interesting corollaries to the main thesis in the book too; I'll omit them. I think that far more important is the fact that van der Dennen’s main thesis misses a big point: humans can reason.

He and many of the researchers he quotes acknowledge the power of conceptual thinking in our survival struggle. For example, hominids capable of conceptual thinking were better at anticipating the movements of an enemy, better at improving weapons, and more likely to come out on top in their clashes than were their duller adversaries. But van der Dennen does not go into detail about how much of a warlike set of behaviors is programmed into its carriers via their genes and how much depends on their social imprinting. Do we today come into the world already programmed to do the dirty deed of large scale murder or do we learn from our elders to attack and kill “enemies”?

It seems to me that either way, by genetic engineering or by education, we ought to be trying to reprogram our species to be less aggressive than our forebears were. But the second view – of war as a learned behavior – offers so much more hope for our species. If war is learned behavior, not factory-installed, then we can unlearn it. Change our deep responses to “others”. In us and in the kids.

And let’s just remind ourselves why we want to make our kids less violent and aggressive: we have the weapons now to kill three quarters of the humans on earth in an afternoon, with almost all the rest likely dying of radiation poisoning, famine, and disease in the next few months. We must not do this.

                                                       Trident submarine 

             (capable of fighting WW3 by itself; about three football fields long) 

Getting people to go along with government-run, controlled breeding would be impossible. Too many people all over see their child-nurturing roles as sacred. We could never get meaningful numbers of people to accept such a program.

But if war is more learned during childhood than it is hard-wired into us from birth, then we could re-educate the kids via our schools and the media to favor peace-building as a way of life: peaceful resolution to disputes of all kinds as their way of life. War could become like picking one’s nose while speaking at a formal gathering: a thing to be avoided; a thing just “not done”.  

We could learn alternate behaviors to express aggressive drives. For example, sport is a substitute for war. A kind of ritualized form of aggression. Sport could become a keenly enjoyed activity for large numbers all over the world. As it is becoming now. And everyone – fans, player, officials – goes home safe.

Van der Dennen admits many species have evolved into ritualized aggression. Males in many species have evolved to engage in “songs” and “dances” to prove their fitness to females. The quick conclusion we can draw here is that species which learn mating “rituals” that redirect aggression do so because they are caught in environmental circumstances that make males killing males counter-productive for the species. Sometimes, war does not favor greater odds of long term survival of the species. Perhaps predators are all about. The group needs its males. Or a pandemic makes cooperation from every group member vital for survival. Or for any of hundreds of arrays of other possible reasons.

                                                          Sarus crane duet 

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                             Tango dancers 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Such species, over generations, evolve into ways of competing that exhibit male fitness, but avoid violence; males in these species “dance” or “sing” to prove they’re fit to breed. Females, most often, watch and listen. If in humans, the evidence shows that we can reprogram ourselves consciously and deliberately to change behaviors we consciously don’t want to see expressed in our societies, we could do so. We could learn to ritualize our aggression into non-destructive behavior patterns. Sport. Dance competitions. Writing contests.

But really? Yes, really. War is at least in part tough to educate out of us because it is so easy to do. And it can appear to justify itself. “We can’t give up. If we do, that will mean that Jim died for nothing!” No. I can love Jim’s memory and still decide that the war is, and always was, stupid.  

The evidence says that we can change. With other behaviors, we already have.

We can learn as adults to eat with chopsticks or cutlery and engage in one behavior in some situations and the other in different situations. Learn to wear both saris and jeans, then wear whichever we choose for the situation in which we find ourselves. Speak English, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu and use the language that fits current circumstances. Play piano and rugby both in the same afternoon. Leave a stressful job in business and become a welder. Confer in Tokyo, Berlin, and London.

We are programmable. We aren’t apes. We don’t need generations to change behavior as genetically-driven species do. We don’t have that kind of time. But we can learn.

We are humans. We can choose to change. Education and re-education. We just need to come to global consensus on the undesirability of war and choose something saner and more strategic for our own survival. 

We can teach the kids peace.

(Here's a link to the book "The Origin of War") 

http://rint.rechten.rug.nl/rth/dennen/dennen6.htm