Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [111]
Fighting Fatalism about War
JOHN HORGAN
As a youth with nothing to lose I indulged in fantasies about the end of the world. But I’m a father and a teacher now, and so I feel a moral obligation to be optimistic about humanity’s future and to persuade others to be optimistic, too.
My focus lately has been on warfare, whereby we destroy not only each other but also nature, in ways both direct and indirect. As the Vietnam-era poster said, “War is bad for children and other living things.” Fatalism about warfare is rampant now. I recently asked 205 students at the engineering school where I work the following question: “Will humans ever stop fighting wars, once and for all?” More than 90 percent answered “No.” That is roughly the same response rate I’ve gotten from journalists, scientists, friends, neighbors, hockey teammates, cab drivers, and others I’ve polled over the past few years.
Justifying their negative responses, most people offer variations on Robert McNamara’s remarks in the documentary The Fog of War: “I’m not so naïve or simplistic to believe that we can eliminate war,” the former secretary of defense says. “We’re not going to change human nature any time soon.”
In my writing, public talks and private conversations, I’ve been trying to persuade people that fatalism about war is wrong on both empirical and moral grounds. Empirical because the historical and even pre-historical record shows that war—far from being an inevitable manifestation of our innate aggression—is a response to certain environmental and cultural conditions. Moral because the belief that war will never end helps to perpetuate it.
Recent scholarship on warfare seems, superficially, to support the view that war is inevitable. Just a few decades ago, many scholars believed in the myth of the peaceful savage, which depicts war as a by-product of modern civilization that did not exist in pre-state societies. Actually, recent research in archaeology and anthropology reveals that the vast majority of primitive, pre-state societies engaged in at least occasional warfare. Mortality rates from violence in some societies reached as high as 50 percent.
But these grim statistics yield a surprisingly upbeat message: things are getting better! Hard as it may be to believe, humanity has become much less violent than it used to be. In fact civilization, far from creating the problem of warfare, is apparently helping us to solve it. In the blood-soaked twentieth century, one hundred million men, women, and children died from war-related causes, including disease and famine. The total would have been two billion if our rates of violence had been as high as in the average primitive society.
Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, argues in a recent essay that “today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.” Conventional wars between the armies of two or more nations and even civil wars have decreased sharply over the past halfcentury, he points out, as have casualties. We are now dealing primarily with guerrilla wars, insurgencies, terrorism—or what political scientist John Mueller calls “the remnants of war.” Noting that democracies rarely if ever wage war against each other, Mueller attributes the decline of warfare over the past fifty years at least in part to a surge in the number of democracies around the world—from twenty to almost one hundred.
These statistics do not provide much solace to the victims of violence in Iraq, Darfur, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Colombia, and other troubled regions, but they show that we are moving in the right direction. Other recent events offer more grounds for optimism. As recently as the late 1980s, we faced the threat of a global nuclear holocaust. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved and the cold war ended peacefully. South Africa’s apartheid also ended without significant violence, and human rights have advanced elsewhere around the world.
The Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, the world’s leading champion of biodiversity, is confident we will find