David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D.

In the summer of 1932 the League of Nations invited Albert Einstein to initiate a public dialogue on a subject of his own choosing. The dialogue, they said, would be published in English, French and German, and circulated widely throughout Europe. Einstein accepted, and turned to the elderly Sigmund Freud, asking him to address “the most insistent of all the problems civilization has to face”.

This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we know it; nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown.

Freud was in his seventies when he received Einstein’s invitation. He had spent the bulk of his long career searching for the forces that drive human behavior, first as a pioneering neuroscientist and later as an explorer of the dark byways of the unconscious mind. Although his body was ravaged by cancer, Freud’s intellectual fire still burned brightly. However, he responded hesitantly. “All my life I have had to tell people truths that were difficult to swallow,” Freud remarked to a League of Nations official who called on him in Vienna, “Now that I am old, I certainly do not want to fool them.” Freud did not have an optimistic message to impart.

The exchange between the two Jewish savants was published under the title Why War in 1933, the year that Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Fresh from the presses, it was among the zersetzend (“rotten”) writings hurled into German bonfires by supporters of the Third Reich. When news of the book burnings reached Freud in Vienna, he commented dryly ‘What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.’ He could not have foreseen that within a few years three of his four sisters would be incinerated in the ovens of Treblinka, and that the world would plunge into an orgy of destruction that would rob over fifty million people of their lives.

Freud’s response to Einstein turned on the idea that we, like other animals, are disposed to resolve conflicts of interest through the use of force, and that both individual and collective violence have deep instinctual roots. But what could be done to manage this savage biological legacy? Freud was painfully aware of the mismatch between urgency of Einstein’s question and the plodding pace of scientific progress. “An unpleasant picture comes to mind,” he wrote, “of mills that grind so slowly that people may starve before they get their flour.”

Einstein’s question remains at least as pressing today as it was in 1932, and Freud’s conviction that we must turn to biology for answers remains every bit as pertinent. In 1932, it was impossible to make much headway answering Einstein’s question; human evolution was barely understood, behavioral genetics and cognitive neuroscience were nonexistent, and experimental psychology was extremely crude. Today, the prospects are much more promising. We have a wealth of empirical data, sophistical mathematical models, brain imaging technology and a range of powerful scientific theories at our disposal. It behooves us, now, to pick up where Freud left off and bring contemporary scientific knowledge to bear on the problem of where war lives in human nature.

To do this, we must look to evolution. Nature brings forth a dazzling panoply of organisms, makes each one of them run the gauntlet of life, discards the failures, and retains the successful models for further tinkering. These kaleidoscopic variations – the countless varieties of color, form, strength, speed, and so on – are like guesses about which design will outperform its alternatives in the contest of life, where the winners are rewarded with opportunities to reproduce, and the losers are consigned to oblivion. Natural selection is endless trial and error. There is no perfect design, no final answer to the question of how best to live, because the shifting demands of existence relentlessly confront living things with unanticipated challenges. Evolution never rests.

Competition for limited resources is the engine of evolutionary change. Any population that reproduces without inhibition will eventually outstrip the resources upon which it depends and, as numbers swell, individuals will have no alternative but to compete more and more desperately for dwindling resources. Those who can secure them will flourish, and those who cannot will die. Some creatures, the predators, are flesh-and-blood terminators built to track, capture and butcher others with chilling efficiency. Others, the parasites, are specialists in the covert operations of invading and exploiting the bodies of their unsuspecting hosts. Still others, like the gentle herbivores, are mere predator-fodder. Looked at in this way, the cycle of life and death seems heartbreakingly futile. The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expressed this grim truth with characteristic bluntness. Nature is, he wrote, a “scene of tormented and agonized beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths.”

There is much to be learned about ourselves by looking at our reflection in the mirror held up by other species. The common chimpanzee and the bonobo are our two closest non-human relatives. Although there is some controversy around this point, there is evidence to suggest that chimpanzees resemble us more closely than bonobos do. Like Homo sapiens, chimpanzees live in closely-knit communities, and they have found ways to suppress, if not entirely eradicate, lethal in-group violence. However, like many other social animals, chimpanzees are fiercely xenophobic. This sinister side of chimpanzee nature was discovered in 1974; when a senior field assistant at Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research center in Gombe, Tanzania, witnessed a gang of eight males attack a lone male from a neighboring community. Although he tried desperately to flee, the attackers soon caught up with him. They held him down and tore at his body, eventually leaving him bleeding and in great pain. Within a few days, he was dead. This episode marked the beginning of a conflict between the two chimpanzee communities, during which one group slowly and systematically drove the other to extinction in a bloody war of attrition. Writing about these events, veteran primatologist Richard Wrangham and science writer Dale Peterson point out that:

Based on chimpanzees’ alert, enthusiastic behavior, these raids are exciting events for them. And the mayhem visited on their victims looks a world apart from the occasional violence that erupts during a squabble between members of the same community. During these raids on other communities, the attackers do as they do while hunting…except that the target ‘prey’ is a member of their own species. And their assaults…are marked by a gratuitous cruelty—tearing off pieces of skin, for example, twisting limbs until they break, or drinking a victim’s blood – reminiscent of acts that among humans are unspeakable crimes during peacetime and atrocities during war.

What is most striking about this is the chimpanzees’ deliberate use of group violence against strangers. Does this sound familiar? It is likely that both chimps and humans inherited their warlike character from a common ancestor who knuckle-walked the earth some six million years ago. The archeological record suggests that prehistoric humans followed a similar pattern. They formed warrior bands to kill their neighbors and acquire their resources, just like chimpanzees do today. Like the chimps, our remote ancestors found that by forging many into one, by organizing themselves as killing units, they could acquire abundant resources – food, territory and mates that would otherwise be unavailable to them. And so, the killers flourished, while ancestral pacifists withered on the evolutionary vine. This penchant for war enhanced men’s reproductive success, which, in the harsh logic of evolution, was all that it took for it be selected into our ancestors’ genetic repertoire, and to be passed down the generations into ours.

Like human warriors, chimpanzee commandos are overwhelmingly male. So, where do women fit in to this testosterone-sodden picture? The key to this conundrum is captured in a comment by the early 20th century pacifist and feminist Helen Mana Lucy Swanwick who, as Joanna Bourke recounts in An Intimate History of Killing, “ruefully admitted that, although men made war, they could not have done so had women not been so adoring of their efforts.” Swanwick’s remark suggests that the masculine warrior mentality is a sexually selected trait that was bred into ancestral men by women who lusted after warrior mates. Like an inversion of the plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Stone Age women may have rewarded killers with sex, and this may have caused the genes responsible for martial prowess to proliferate through the population. This idea is beautifully if unwittingly illustrated by a cartoon that appeared on the front page of the Women’s Journal during World War I showing a suffragette holding a baby standing next to a fully armed soldier. The soldier says “Women can’t bear arms” to which the suffragette replies “No! Women bear armies.”

So far, I have painted a picture of bloodthirsty males that is reminiscent of Raymond Dart’s discredited “killer ape” hypothesis. But there is more to the story of war. If men were simply natural born killers, lethal violence would be far more prevalent than it actually is. Thanks to our intensely social nature, our potential for violence is tempered by a finely tuned capacity for empathy, cooperation and guilt. It is the tension between these two sides of human nature, and the solution that we have adopted to resolve the conflict between them, that makes war possible.

Bertrand Russell once sharply observed that we are quick to say that ‘our boys’ give their lives for their country, but avoid mentioning that they take lives for their country. If killing is what war is about, why are we so squeamish about confronting its reality? A large part of the answer lies in our deeply ingrained horror of shedding human blood. Killing another person is very difficult for normal human beings to do. It is nothing like the misleading, glamorized portrayals found in the popular media. To get a small taste of the reality of killing, consider the following vignette from William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness. Manchester describes cornering a Japanese soldier who was trapped in his own sniper’s harness, and was therefore unable to defend himself. Manchester killed him, and continued pumping bullets into the corpse (”wasting government property” as he put it.) The young man fell to the ground, his eyes glazed over, and flies, which are ubiquitous on the battlefield, began to gather on his eyeballs. “I don’t know how long I stood there staring’ Manchester wrote, ‘A feeling of disgust and self-hatred clotted darkly in my throat, gagging me.”

Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new fully loaded magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble, and next to shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: “I’m sorry.” Then I threw up all over myself. I recognized the half-digested C-ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the cordite. At the same time I noticed another odor; I had urinated in my skivvies…I knew I had become a thing of tears and twitchings and dirtied pants. I remember wondering dumbly: “Is that what they mean by conspicuous gallantry”?

Although we never see it in the movies, incontinence is a normal battlefield phenomenon. This is nothing new. As long ago as the 7th century BC, the Assyrian King Sennacherib boasted that his Chaldean enemies “passed scalding urine and voided their excrement in their chariots.” Vomiting is also common during combat, as is getting “the shakes” (sometimes developing into convulsions). Soldiers dissociate, develop tunnel vision, lose sensitivity to pain, and sometimes go berserk or hallucinate. These symptoms are partly due the sheer terror of warfare, but as Manchester’s vignette illustrates, they are also sequelae of the trauma of killing.

For those of us who are not sociopaths, taking the life of another person is agonizingly difficult. In recent times, this was first brought to public attention by the picaresque army historian S.L.A. “SLAM” Marshall, who wrote in his classic Men Against Fire that:

“The average and healthy individual…still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance towards killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.”

Marshall’s insights resulted in a reform in US military training. Men had to be taught to override their inhibitions, and, putting their human feelings aside, to kill instinctively, automatically, mechanically. As vets returning from Vietnam with PTSD showed us (and traumatized veterans of the war Iraq are showing us today) there are severe psychological penalties for attempting to override human nature. Kill now: pay later.

Our problem killing others is not a consequence of moral education or religious indoctrination. After all, most of the Ten Commandments are all too easy to break. It flows from a far deeper source. We Homo sapiens are social primates, and as such we have an instinctive resistance to killing members of our community. This is a biological imperative, inscribed in us by millions of years of natural selection. In this respect, we are very much like chimpanzees. But there are also some crucial differences. Chimpanzee intelligence has remained relatively static for millions of years while the hominid brain has expanded at an astonishing rate. And as its size increased, so did its cognitive horsepower. At some point in their evolutionary trajectory — perhaps at the time that language emerged — our ancestors became capable of an unprecedented intellectual feat: they acquired the ability to form concepts. Once they could form concepts, human beings were able to grasp the notion of a human being, and begin to see individuals outside of their local communities as members of the broader community of humankind. This was a fateful moment in our social evolution. The ancient xenophobia was still there; the strivings to wipe out others lost none of their intensity, but these dark urges now encountered a formidable inner obstacle: the dawning recognition that all of us are people. Looking into the eyes of the terrified creature whose skull you are poised crush with a boulder, and recognizing that he, too, is a human being, arouses emotions that make it difficult to carry out the deed.

Caught between conflicting dispositions, we dealt with this dilemma by making use of another gift of cognitive evolution: our amazing knack for self-deception. Human beings are a hypersocial species, and, as such, we are virtuosos in the art of social gamesmanship, wheeling and dealing, deception, impression-management, and strategic alliances. Thanks to what primatologists Richard Byrne and Eric Whiten have aptly called our “Machiavellian intelligence” we constantly guard against being manipulated and deceived at the hands of others, while remaining alert for opportunities to hoodwink others when it is to our advantage to do so. Of course — virtuous primates that we are — we rarely admit these raw truths, either to others or (most pertinently) to ourselves. Hiding from ourselves reduces much of the stress of social life and allows the complex choreography of human interaction to proceed smoothly, unencumbered by anxiety and guilt. Like it or not, self-deception makes the social world go round.

Our talent for self-deception allows us to escape from the stalemate between the desire to kill and the horror of killing. Through self-deception we can obliterate our inconvenient awareness of the Other’s humanity. We owe this insight to the great Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1740 that:

When our own nation is at war with any other, we detest them under the character of cruel, perfidious, unjust and violent: but always esteem ourselves and allies equitable, moderate and merciful. If the general of our enemies be successful, ‘tis with difficulty we allow him the figure and character of a man.

Read Hume closely: “’tis with difficulty that we allow him the figure and character of a man.’ There are no heroes on the other side, no brave young patriots making the ultimate sacrifice for their country. The enemy is ruthless and diabolical; he is a terrifying, cold-blooded killer, an inhuman monster. Hume’s insight is extraordinarily important, for it supplies a crucial missing piece to the puzzle of war. Dehumanizing the enemy offers an elegant solution to the adaptive problem posed by our natural aversion to taking human life. It empowers us to kill other people as casually as we would swat a mosquito, poison a rat or impale a writhing earthworm on a fishhook — at least for as long as the illusion lasts.

Looking more deeply, the process of dehumanization owes much of its power to another distinctively human cognitive adaptation. Human beings everywhere make a distinction between what things seem to be and what they really are, between mere appearance and true essence. This isn’t surprising. In a world chock-full of rampant deception, being able to tell the difference between real sheep and wolves concealed in sheep’s clothing pays off handsomely. It is precisely the distinction between appearance and reality that is put to work when we dehumanize our enemies. We imagine that, although they seem outwardly human, our enemies possess a non-human essence. This is sufficient to release the brake on lethal aggression, but an added dose of self-deception is needed to press down on the accelerator. Men kill most readily when the enemy is thought of as an embodiment of something that nature has fashioned us to kill. This tendency can be traced in military literature from the dawn of civilization to the present day. Letters, memoirs, epics, histories and propaganda pieces confront us with the same endlessly repetitive pattern: when we dehumanize our enemies, we imagine them as predators, as prey or as parasites.

Until recently, large predators — wolves, crocodiles, hyenas, big cats, and even birds of prey — posed an ongoing threat to most human beings. The man-eating predator became the prototype of the monster, and the traditional enemy of mankind. As a result, over time, the human mind developed inferential systems — modules, if you like — dedicated to dealing with the creatures that feed on human flesh. When these ancient systems are awakened in the heat of conflict, the enemy is perceived as a ravenous beast in human form. This is why Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was described in the British press a “wild animal”, “the beast of Berlin” and the “mad dog of Europe”. Hitler, too, was given the moniker “Beast of Berlin” and Saddam Hussein, of course, was the “Beast of Baghdad”. Ronald Reagan called Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi “that mad dog of the Middle East” and Israeli premier Menachem Begin characterized his Palestinian enemies as “beasts walking on two legs”. Nazi propagandists depicted Jews as predators that the German people must destroy in self-defense. According to one SS pamphlet the Jew “looks human…but his spirit is lower than that of an animal. A terrible chaos runs rampant in this creature, an awful urge for destruction, primitive desires, unparalleled evil, a monster, subhuman.” How often have we heard it said that mosques and madrasas are “breeding grounds” for terrorists, who must be “smoked out” of their caves (caves!) and “hunted down”? Examples of this pattern, as well as the phenomena described below, could be repeated indefinitely.

Human beings are also predators, and have been so at least since the beginning of the hominid line. We hunt other creatures for food and for sport, and when this hunting instinct is aroused in war, combat becomes a thrilling chase. During World War I, for example, Australian servicemen compared shooting enemy combatants with “potting kangaroos in the bush”, while Americans and Brits spoke of shooting “human rabbits”. Infantrymen were compared to poachers, and aristocratic British soldiers likened the pursuit of Japanese soldiers to fox hunting. Attacking huge, lumbering tanks was “boar hunting”, as imagination magically transformed cold metal and rivets into living flesh and blood. The American media often represented war in the Pacific as a pleasant hunting excursion. Military historian John Dower writes in his brilliant book War Without Mercy that:

Very frequently…the hunt was pastoral, almost lazy, and the quarry small and easy. A cover story in Life, showing GIs walking through the jungle with rifles ready, looking for Japanese snipers, explained that “like many of their comrades they were hunting for Japs, just as they used to go after small game in the woods back home.” A 1943 book giving a first hand account of the combat explained that “every time you hit a Jap [with rifle fire] he jumps like a rabbit.” The Battle of the Philippine Sea…became immortalized as ‘the great turkey shoot.’ “Duck hunting’ was another popular figure of speech…. Killing Japanese reminded others of shooting quail. “Tanks were used to flush the Japanese out of the grass,” a journalist reported from Guadalcanal, “and when they are flushed, they are shot down like running quail.”

Finally, Homo sapiens have been honed by evolution to battle against deadly miniature enemies, the parasitic sources of infection and disease. Our attitude towards parasites and the creatures that carry them is very different from our stance towards predators and prey. Predators are feared, but they are also respected and even sometimes venerated. Game animals are valued by those who kill them. Hunters do not hate their quarry; they see themselves as stewards of the environment. But in the case of parasites, and the vermin that carry them, extermination is the name of the game. This is why the activation of our innate dread of infection is an especially sinister harbinger of mass violence. When the enemy is conceived as a source of disease, war becomes hygiene, and it is a short step from there to genocide. As Hitler said:

The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew.

Similar imagery occurs in the medieval crusades, in 19th century calls for the extermination of Native Americans, in the “purification” of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, and in the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo. It even turns up in American attitudes towards the Japanese during WWII. Japanese troops were compared to rats and lice, and US marines went into battle with the words “Rodent Exterminator” emblazoned on their helmets.

Returning now to Einstein’s question, how can these considerations help us to deal in a practical way with the problem of war? It is unlikely that war will ever lose its macabre allure. Its roots stretch too deeply into the soil of human nature, and its passions are too primal to be educated away by well-meaning pacifists. Philosopher J. Glenn Grey remarks in his intensely moving World War II memoir The Warriors that “Happiness is doubtless the wrong word for the satisfaction that men experience when they are possessed by the lust to destroy and kill their kind….”

Most men would never admit that they enjoy killing, and there are a great many who do not. On the other hand thousands of youths who never suspected the presence of such an impulse in themselves have learned in military life the mad excitement of destroying…the delight in destruction slumbering in most of us…. When soldiers step over the line that separates self-defense from fighting for its own sake, as it is so easy for them to do, they experience something that stirs deep chords in their being.

War is both unimaginably horrible and exquisitely pleasurable. It is horrible because of the suffering and destruction that it visits upon combatants and noncombatants alike. It is pleasurable because — like all pleasures — it is something that benefited our ancestors. The joy of war is the joy of the hunt, of ridding the world of a man-eating monster or obliterating a plague. Robert E. Lee was spot on when he stated that “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Our relationship with killing is ambivalent, a cocktail of delight and aversion. Both are rooted in human nature, and neither can be extirpated. We will never stop men from enjoying war. The best that we can hope for is that men will come to detest war more than they enjoy it, and the only way to accomplish this is by relentlessly exposing the self-deception that makes war bearable. If we can do this, we will have accomplished something heroic indeed.

© 2007 David Livingstone Smith