There are three common explanations: first, that all conflicts arise from disputes over territory and resources; second, that they spring from our inherent aggressive tendencies; third, that masculinity and the patriarchy are to blame. But are any of these hypotheses entirely plausible?
The celebrated historian Arnold J. Toynbee affirmed that militarism was generally the downfall of many civilizations during the last four or five millennia. Circa 2350 BCE, various conquests by Lugalzagesi from the Sumerian city-state of Umma resulted in the first political system of an imperial nature. Back then, events were already unfolding according to a pattern that would subsequently recur throughout human history. Conquering and controlling more territory requires immense, irreversible energy expenditure. Sooner or later, the way of expansion and violence will lead to self-destruction.
Once a permanent army has been assembled, there is a temptation to quash internal unrest and rebellion with threats or actual violence. Lugalzagesi was defeated by Sargon the Great. After Sargon’s death, insurgencies broke out in Sumerian cities, and Sargon’s successor, Rimush, was assassinated. Imperial militarism erodes a country’s culture and economy, resulting in a vicious circle: levying the taxes needed to maintain constant combat readiness angers the populace; controlling an irate populace requires a larger army; and a larger army requires even higher taxes. Attacks by “barbaric” nomads often led to the demise of ancient political entities, weakened by this type of internal contradiction.
Land of Discord
This brings us to an interesting point that might explain some of humanity’s oldest-known armed conflicts. Presumably, from the time of the Neolithic Revolution, wars and massacres were often the outcome of disagreements over land and property. Settled villagers who made a living from farming plants and animals would treat the land as their own; it was enough that they had tilled it and toiled on it. Nomadic hunters and shepherds, meanwhile, probably disagreed with this notion of property (e.g., we know that the Ojibwe people of North America saw the earth as their mother and considered it absurd for anyone to claim exclusive ownership). Nomads regarded farmers as impostors, while farmers saw nomads as predatory, parasitical idlers. Human historiography, written from a settled perspective, is full of examples of such predators—the Scythians, the Huns, the Tatars—all of whom were branded demonic. (Note, there was actually precious little difference between “civilized” feudal knights and the “barbaric” warriors of the East. The latter lived off making armed attacks on foreign nations, while the former, thanks to their weapons, lived off the labor of the nation that depended on them).
However, battles for territory and the conquest of countries, cities, and villages only appeared once the sedentary lifestyle became widespread. But humanity is significantly older, and archaeological evidence suggests that armed conflicts predated the Neolithic Revolution, so any theories explaining wars away as territorial disputes are usually unfounded.
Prehistoric Crimes
Upper Paleolithic cave paintings (such as in the Cougnac Caves, France) depicting arrow-pierced figures, and arrow damage discovered in prehistoric bones both attest to Homo sapiens killing other Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years ago. Later cave art (from Morella la Vella, Spain) clearly shows battles between archers, as well as execution scenes. archaeologists have unearthed the prehistoric remains of people killed by arrows and projectiles in Europe, Egypt (those from the Wadi Kubbaniya dig site are twenty thousand years old), and India. In Sweden and Denmark, 387 tombs dating from 3900–1700 BCE were examined, and 17% of the skulls in Denmark and 9% in Sweden appeared to have been bludgeoned, mainly in the victims’ facial area.
Skeptics might say that remains uncovered by archaeologists are no proof of war, only of murder. So further examples are required. In the 1960s, a twelve-to-fourteen-thousand-year-old cemetery was discovered near Jebel Sahaba in Sudan. It held the remains of sixty-one people, of whom twenty-five—not only men, but also women and children—had been killed with weapons. Most of the dead bore signs of multiple wounds. Here, skeptics could claim their deaths might have been due to a punishment administered by their own society, not an attack from the outside. However, an expert in the field, the cultural anthropologist Raymond C. Kelly, deemed this scenario rather unlikely. The mass graves of men imply that they were killed outside their encampment, and their bodies brought back there. The graves of the women and children seem to suggest a surprise attack on the camp. That they were killed at all probably implies revenge and some principle of collective responsibility.
In 2016, Nature published a much-discussed report on the Nataruk archaeological dig near Lake Turkana in Kenya. The well-preserved remains of twenty-seven people—men, women, and children—were discovered there, dating from ten thousand years ago. At least twelve of them died violently due to wounds inflicted by blunt and bladed weapons (e.g., arrows and spears). Some of the attacks were carried out directly, and some from a distance, suggesting a premeditated, planned assault. Unlike the remains found near Jebel Sahaba, there were no traces of burials in Nataruk, thus confirming the theory of a sudden massacre with no survivors. Two of the skeletons contained traces of obsidian—of which one type of weapon used must have been made. Since that rock rarely occurred in the region, it implies that the attackers came from afar. Three more victims were found near Nataruk, two of whom were also killed with obsidian tools.
Every War Is Different
Scientists cannot agree on when the first warfare par excellence appeared. In his book How War Began, the anthropologist Keith Otterbein proposed an extremely interesting concept to reconcile various conflicting theories on prehistoric wars. He felt we should carefully distinguish between two types of hostilities: those of Paleolithic hunting communities, and later warfare that grew out of nascent statehood.
Otterbein believed that both types of war could be observed well into the 20th century. The former persisted wherever people were still hunting large game (such as kangaroos in Australia, or lions in east Africa). Ethnographic statistics showed that hunter societies became embroiled in conflicts more often than those who were chiefly gatherers. The same tools used for hunting were also used to attack people. However, there was no concept of “conquering” a beaten group—they were mostly driven away (hence the researcher considered that war itself was incapable of creating countries). Pitched battles did take place, but served rather for sides to test their own strength and that of the enemy. The predominant fighting techniques were ambushes and dawn raids. Tribes would engage in hostilities based on rules of kinship.
The mass extinction of species across the globe, together with climate change, meant that individual nations began farming the land. At the same time, warfare correlated with hunting was on the decline. After all, transitioning to agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle is impossible during constant hostilities. Cultivation required lasting peace—and wherever that was absent, agriculture failed to develop.
A period of relative calm followed the Neolithic Revolution. Settlements transformed into villages, then into towns. Disparity of possessions gave rise to internal conflicts, which resulted in leaders and further centralization of power. Leadership degenerated into despotism, bringing things one step closer to Lugalzagesi’s conquest of Sumer, which typified a completely different type of hostilities, unlike those of hunter societies. Those who were beaten began to be “conquered.” Wars were fought by specialized, professional armies, and battles and sieges started to become the mainstay of warfare. Complex military organization with an imposed command structure began to appear. Wars broke out independently in the four different world centers where great political systems were developing: Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, Peru, and northern China. Now, countries made wars, not vice versa. In that respect, Otterbein’s views concurred with Arnold J. Toynbee’s observations. The British historian felt that war as we know it (i.e., fought between states, not tribes) is a product of “civilization.” Waging war requires a basic condition that “primitive” man could not provide—economic surplus, allowing for complex organization, sustaining an army, and the development of military technology.
Not Just a Matter of Resources
If we take the simple definition of war as one independent group waging an armed assault on another, we may speculate that wars emerged with Homo habilis, since they were using sticks and stones, and were capable of organizing ambushes and raids on hostile groups.
Obviously, what these prehistoric people actually fought about is pure conjecture. One can assume, however, that the overall population density at the time was not large enough to provoke fights over material resources. 20th-century ethnology clearly demonstrated that hunter-gatherer economies can easily satisfy the needs of nomadic tribes.
Ethnography and history are brimming with examples of warfare that broke away from the simple pattern of competing for resources. For hunter societies, clan conflicts, fighting over a woman, or revenge could all be excuses for war. For instance, in many tribes, killing someone or participating in battle was regarded as a rite of passage. The headhunters of Borneo and the ancient Celts hunted neighboring tribes, killing not because there was nothing to eat, but because they required human heads, which were seen as a source of magical power. They believed that collecting heads made a warrior stronger; they were also an indicator of social prestige. As the Zapotecs’ settlements developed, they fostered a population increase, but the arable land area was still extremely large. Therefore, food shortages were not the cause of wars between the settlements, but simply rivalry between Zapotec chiefs. The Aztecs mostly lived in a permanent state of war because they needed prisoners to sacrifice to their gods.
Perhaps the idea of “fighting over resources” is a construct specific to Western culture, for they have been highly prized in recent centuries and are what wars tend to be fought over. Nevertheless, projecting this rationale onto other fighting clans makes it impossible to understand them.
Certain theorists respond to the above arguments by expanding their concept of resources. They maintain that war can break out not only over material resources, but also “social” resources specific to and produced by a given culture. In the case of the tribes of Borneo, those resources were human heads and the inherent prestige of possessing them. For the Aztecs, it was entire bodies and souls. But this seems like an artificial solution to the problem. Contemporary society generates a range of strong needs in us, which go far beyond the basics, yet if our needs are not satisfied, we do not consider massacring potential providers of the desired goods to be a natural reaction. A lack of resources does not justify organized carnage—that requires something more.
The Power of Thanatos
The supposed universality of war has led several researchers to seek its origins in human nature. Disturbed by World War I, Sigmund Freud supplemented his drive theory with the idea of a death drive, to explain the human proclivity for destruction. Destructive tendencies can be directed “outward” (e.g., by killing others) as well as “inward” (e.g., through masochism, illness, or suicide). With his “repetition compulsion” concept, Freud proposed an additional, fascinating explanation for the existence of a death drive. Based on the premise that life sprang out of inanimate matter, the founder of psychoanalysis postulated that the death drive might be an expression of a desire to return to that state. Obviously, this was unverifiable speculation, but still undeniably ingenious.
Erich Fromm criticized the death-drive concept, developing and expanding it in an article originally titled “The Psychological Origins of War” (presently known as “War within Man: A Psychological Enquiry into the Roots of Destructiveness”). There, he made the common-sense remark that most living organisms indeed fight for survival, and only in rare cases is it a self-destructive urge. The purported duality of human drives—for life and for death—cannot be confirmed by experimentation. Some people derive genuine pleasure from destruction, but they are the minority. Fromm proposed a theory of human biophilia-necrophilia; the former a fondness for life, the latter—for death. But these are not two opposing, independent, innate forces in competition. Necrophilia is almost like suppressed biophilia—destructive tendencies arise out of undeveloped life potential. But Fromm’s critics noticed a certain contradiction in the very title of his text. War is a relationship between at least two political entities, countries, or tribes, and it cannot be explained by individual perversions—those may be activated during a war, but cannot be its root cause.
The Joy of Warfare
Another common version of the theory linking war to human essence was devised by a proponent of sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson, who deemed our species intrinsically aggressive, and demonstrated similarities to aggression among other animals. In his book On Human Nature, Wilson wrote that “if hamadryas baboons had nuclear weapons, they would destroy the world in a week.” Whenever we compare human combat to that of ants, we are following a train of thought set off by Wilson’s theory. Although aggression takes many forms—one must differentiate between fighting over a sexual partner or competing over territory, for example—the researcher believed that the universality of war could always be explained by aggression.
The eminent cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins excellently scrutinized this theory in The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociology. He remarked that people are not necessarily aggressive during hostilities, but are generally terrified. Something that Wilson termed the “biological joy of warfare” is possible, but not a rule. Aggression in itself is also insufficient to explain “military culture” as a whole. The complex, lengthy process of training soldiers is not an act of aggression. Elaborating battlefield strategies does not require aggression either—on the contrary, they must be cold and calculating. Irrational aggression may be useful during spontaneous scuffles, but not for archery—in order to be effective, at least some of the attackers at Nataruk had to keep a cool head. Samurais, the ideal warriors, never lose themselves in a fit of rage; they are masters of careful cuts, who keep their reactions under control.
War does not respond to “natural” human requirements and inclinations; it merely mobilizes them. Sahlins’s critique coincides with the ideas of another researcher, Konrad Lorenz, who devoted the bulk of his work to human violence. In his book The Waning of Humaneness, the eminent zoologist referred to Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research, describing the phenomenon of “collective-aggressive enthusiasm” which can materialize not only on the battlefield, but also in the streets or stadiums. Supposedly, the danger of this mechanism which evolution has equipped us with is that—when triggered—it suspends all other values except the one “enthusing” a given group (a nation, god, favorite soccer team, or political party/option they are smitten with). Lorenz affirmed that this value is not chosen by accident—we see the phenomenon of society instilling enthusiasm for the subject. Thus, like Sahlins, Lorenz felt that although humans do potentially have certain destructive tendencies, these can only be activated and propagated by culture. A culture can train and ignite aggression or destructive behavior, but can also stifle them.
Some may consider this an unproductive digression that boils down to wordplay—never mind whether we call war natural or culturally manufactured, it is everywhere, nonetheless. But that difference does matter and has practical consequences. If, like Wilson, we assume that war is inscribed in our very nature, as it is in the nature of ants or hamadryas baboons, then we lose the ability to criticize it, just as breathing and the order of the seasons are above criticism. Observing that certain cultures are more or less warlike is a common-sense conclusion, yet one not considered by the theories of Freud, Fromm, or Wilson. On the other hand, those theories do emphasize the human tendency for violence, which is also important. If we can acknowledge that, and avoid slipping into the ethnocentric belief that our own culture is “peaceful,” we have more chance of realizing what our “enthusiasm” might lead to.
Does Cruelty Have a Gender?
Nevertheless, various researchers of both sexes maintain that, even if war is not in the nature of our species, approximately half of us ought to be blamed for it. These days, one of the trendier views associates war with masculinity and the patriarchy.
The first problem with this theory is that it contradicts the facts. Although the belligerent majority are indeed men, women have also participated in fighting, and there is historical evidence of their cruelty. According to Barbara Ehrenreich, a feminist who criticized the theory in her well-known text Blood Rites, there is no proof whatsoever that women have any innate inhibition against shedding blood. When fighting is less formal in nature—such as during revolutions or insurgencies—women definitely participate. In 1677, a mob of women in Marblehead broke through a cordon of guards defending two captive Wampanoag tribesmen, stripping their flesh to the bone and beheading the corpses. In 1993, a group of women in Somalia attacked a car carrying journalists—four victims were dragged out and torn to pieces. In the 19th century, in the African kingdom of Dahomey, several thousand trained women, with women leaders, comprised a third of the warring nation’s army. 19th-century ethnographic records also mention women from Polynesia, the Americas, and Afghanistan who—although not involved in combat—would torture prisoners-of-war.
It should also be noted that ancient mother goddesses showed as much of an interest in violence as the patriarchal deities. The great goddesses of the Mediterranean and India were spectacularly cruel. Iconography depicts them surrounded by human skulls and predatory animals, and their worship entailed bloody sacrifices. In the case of the goddess Cybele, priests would sacrifice their own genitalia, flagellate themselves regularly, and were banned from eating anything other than meat. If these images of the Great Mother are vestiges of ancient, matriarchal communities, we have no grounds to consider those nations gentle or pacifistic, as the feminist archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued. One can draw a similar conclusion when examining women in power in modern times. For example, it is estimated that a third of the population of Madagascar perished under the reign of Queen Ranavalona I, and three thousand people were reputed to have died from torture she ordered.
From a historical perspective, the fundamental problem with blaming wars on men is that their “bellicosity” was conditioned by the “peacefulness” of women. In situations of constant threat—be it from other people or predators—the security and peace necessary to raise offspring could only be provided by armed males. They would kill not purely for the “biological joy of warfare,” but they also suffered, were afraid, and died in battle.
The above remarks do not contradict the fact that, in individual cases, a lust for power or profit, individual perversions, or a specific notion of masculinity may be apt explanations for the origins of wars. However, none of the theories presented can explain the entire phenomenon—considered holy or divine in some cultures—not only due to its fearsome power, but also because it remains so incomprehensible.
Translated from the Polish by Mark Bence
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