War: What is it good for? (3 page)

When we put these three claims together, only one conclusion is possible. War has produced bigger societies, ruled by stronger governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for prosperity. Ten thousand years ago, there were only about six million people on earth. On average they lived about thirty years and supported themselves on the equivalent of less than two modern American dollars per day. Now there are more than a thousand times as many of us (seven billion, in fact), living more than twice as long (the global average is sixty-seven years) and earning more than a dozen times as much (today the global average is $25 per day).

War, then, has been good for something—so good, in fact, that my fourth argument is that war is now putting itself out of business. For millennia, war (over the long run) has created peace, and destruction has created wealth, but in our own age humanity has gotten so good at fighting—our weapons so destructive, our organizations so efficient—that war is beginning to make further war of this kind impossible. Had events gone differently that night in 1983—had Petrov panicked, had the General Secretary actually
pushed the button, and had a billion of us been killed over the next few weeks—the twentieth century's rate of violent death would have soared back into Stone Age territory, and had the toxic legacy of all those warheads been as terrible as some scientists feared, by now there might have been no humans left at all.

The good news is not just that this didn't happen but also that it was frankly never very likely to happen. I will return to the reasons why in
Chapter 6
, but the basic point is that we humans have proved remarkably good at adapting to our changing environment. We fought countless wars in the past because fighting paid off, but in the twentieth century, as the returns to violence declined, we found ways to solve our problems without bringing on Armageddon. There are no guarantees, of course, but in the final chapter of this book I will suggest that there are nevertheless grounds for hope that we will continue avoiding this outcome. The twenty-first century is going to see astounding changes in everything, including the role of violence. The age-old dream of a world without war may yet come to pass—although what that world will look like is another matter altogether.

Stating these arguments so baldly has probably set off all kinds of warning bells. What, you might well wonder, do I mean by “wars,” and how can I know how many people died in them? What am I counting as a “society,” and how can I tell when one is getting bigger? And what, for that matter, constitutes a “government,” and how do we measure how strong one is? These are all good questions, and as my story unfolds, I will try to answer them.

It is my central argument, however, that war has made the world safer, which will probably raise most eyebrows. This book is being published in 2014, exactly a hundred years since World War I broke out in 1914 and seventy-five since World War II erupted in 1939. The two conflicts left 100 million dead—surely enough to make marking their anniversaries with a book saying that war has made us safer seem like a sick joke. But 2014 is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Cold War in 1989, which freed the world from reruns of Petrov's nightmare. I shall argue in this book that the whole ten-thousand-year-long story of war since the end of the last ice age is in fact a single narrative leading up to this point, in which war has been the major actor in making today's world safer and richer than ever before.

If this sounds like a paradox, that is because
everything
about war is paradoxical. The strategist Edward Luttwak sums the issue up nicely. In everyday life, he observes, “a noncontradictory linear logic rules, whose
essence is mere common sense. Within the sphere of strategy, however, … another and quite different logic is at work and routinely violates ordinary linear logic.” War “tends to reward paradoxical conduct while defeating straightforwardly logical action, yielding results that are ironical.”

In war, paradox goes all the way down. According to Basil Liddell Hart, one of the founding fathers of twentieth-century tank tactics, the bottom line is that “war is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.” Out of war comes peace; out of loss, gain. War takes us through the looking glass, into a topsy-turvy world where nothing is quite what it seems. The argument of this book is a lesser-evil proposition, one of the classic forms of paradox. It is easy to list all the things that war is bad for, with killing coming at the top of the table. And yet war remains the lesser evil, because history shows that it has not been as bad as the alternative—constant, Stone Age-type everyday violence, bleeding away lives and leaving us in poverty.

The obvious objection to lesser-evil arguments is that they have a decidedly mixed record. Ideologues love them: one extremist after another has assured his followers that if they just burn these witches, gas these Jews, or dismember these Tutsi, they will make the world pure and perfect. And yet these vicious claims can also be turned around. If you could go back in time and strangle Adolf Hitler in his cradle, would you do it? If you embrace the lesser evil, a little killing now might prevent a lot of killing later. The lesser evil makes for uncomfortable choices.

Moral phitosophers are particularly interested in the complexities of lesser-evil arguments. Imagine, I have heard a colleague in my university's philosophy department ask a crowded lecture hall, that you have captured a terrorist. He has planted a bomb but won't say where it is. If you torture him, maybe he'll tell you, saving dozens of lives. Will you pull out his fingernails? If the students hesitate, the philosopher ups the stakes. Your family, he says, will be among the dead. Now will you reach for the pliers? And if he still refuses to talk, will you torture
his
family?

These uncomfortable questions raise very serious points. In the real world, we make lesser-evil decisions all the time. These can be wrenching, and in the last few years psychologists have begun to learn just what the dilemmas do to us. If an experimenter were to strap you down, slide you into a magnetic resonance imaging machine, and then ask you morally challenging questions, your brain would behave in startling ways. As you imagined torturing a terrorist, your orbital cortex would light up on the machine's display as blood rushed into the circuits of your brain that handle
unpleasant thoughts. But as you calculated the number of lives you would save, your dorsolateral cortex would follow suit as a new set of circuits activated. You would experience these conflicting emotional and intellectual urges as intense inner struggles, which would fire up your anterior cingulate cortex too.

Because lesser-evil arguments make us so uncomfortable, this book might be a disturbing read. After all, war is mass murder. What sort of person says something good can come from that? The sort of person, I would now answer, who has been astonished by the findings of his own research. If anyone had told me even ten years ago that I would one day write this book, I don't think I would have believed him or her. But I have learned that the evidence of history (and archaeology, and anthropology) is unambiguous. Uncomfortable as the fact is, in the long run war has made the world safer and richer.

I am hardly the first person to have realized this. Three-quarters of a century ago, the German sociologist Norbert Elias wrote a densely theoretical two-volume treatise called
The Civilizing Process,
arguing that Europe had become a much more peaceful place over the five centuries leading up to his own day. Since the Middle Ages, he suggested, upper-class European men (who had been responsible for the lion's share of brutality) had gradually renounced the use of force, and the overall level of violence had declined.

The evidence Elias pointed to had been lying around in plain sight for a very long time. Like a lot of other people, I encountered some of it for myself the first time I was told (in high-school English, back in 1974) to crack the spine of one of Shakespeare's plays. What got my attention was not the beauty of the Bard's language but how touchy all his characters were. At the drop of a hat they flew into rages and started stabbing each other. There were certainly people like that in 1970s Britain, but they tended to end up in jail and/or therapy—unlike Shakespeare's thugs, who were more often praised than blamed for cutting first and asking questions later.

But could Elias really be right that our own world is more peaceful than that of earlier centuries? That, as Shakespeare put it, is the question, and Elias's answer was that by the 1590s, when Shakespeare wrote
Romeo and Juliet,
his murderous Montagues and Capulets were already anachronisms. Restraint was replacing rage as the emotion that defined an honorable man.

This was the sort of theory that ought to have made news, but—as publishers always tell authors—timing is everything. Elias's timing was simply tragic.
The Civilizing Process
came out in 1939, just as Europeans began a
six-year orgy of violence that left more than fifty million of them dead (Elias's mother among them, at Auschwitz). By 1945, no one was in the mood to be told that Europeans were getting more civilized and peaceful.

Elias was not vindicated until the 1980s, when he was well into retirement. By then, decades of painstaking labor by social historians, working through archives of crumbling court records, had begun yielding statistics suggesting that Elias had been right all along. Around 1250, they found, roughly one western European in a hundred could expect to be a victim of homicide. By Shakespeare's day, that had fallen to one in three hundred, and by 1950, to one in three thousand. And, as Elias insisted, the upper classes led the way in getting along.
³

In the 1990s, the plot thickened further. In his book
War Before Civilization,
as remarkable in its way as Elias's
Civilizing Process,
the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley marshaled rafts of statistics to show that the Stone Age societies that still existed in the twentieth century were shockingly violent. Feuding and raiding typically carried off one person in ten or even one person in five. If Keeley was right, this would mean that Stone Age societies were ten to twenty times as violent as the tumultuous world of medieval Europe and three hundred to six hundred times as bad as mid-twentieth-century Europe.

It is harder to calculate rates of violent death in the Stone Age societies of prehistory, but when Keeley looked at the evidence for murder, massacre, and general mayhem in the distant past, our early ancestors seemed at least as homicidal as the contemporary groups studied by anthropologists. The silent testimony of stone arrowheads lodged between ribs, skulls smashed by blunt instruments, and weapons piled in graves reveals the civilizing process as a longer, slower, and more uneven business than Elias realized.

Not even the world wars, Keeley recognized, had made modern times as dangerous as the Stone Age, and a third body of scholarship has now reinforced his point. This began taking shape back in 1960, with the publication of another remarkable (albeit almost unreadable) book. This was
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels,
by the eccentric mathematician, pacifist, and (until he abandoned his career after realizing how much it helped the air force) meteorologist Lewis Fry Richardson.

Richardson spent the last twenty-odd years of his life seeking statistical patterns behind the apparent chaos of killing. Taking a sample of three hundred wars fought between 1820 and 1949, including such bloodbaths as the American Civil War, Europe's colonial conquests, and World Wars I and II, he found—to his evident surprise—that “the losses in life from fatal quarrels, varying in magnitude from murders to world wars, were about 1.6 per cent of all deaths in this period.” If we add the modern world's wars to its homicides, then, it seems that just one person in 62.5 died violently between 1820 and 1949—about one-tenth the rate found among Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

And there was more. “The increase in world population from 1820 to 1949,” Richardson discovered, “seems not to have been accompanied by a proportionate increase in the frequency of, and losses of life from, war, as would have been the expectation if belligerency had been constant.” The implication: “Mankind has become less warlike since
A.D.
1820.”

More than fifty years on from Richardson's book, building databases of death has grown into a minor academic industry. The new versions are more sophisticated than Richardson's and more ambitious, extending back to 1500 and forward beyond 2000. Like all academic industries, this one is full of controversy, and even in the best-documented war in history, the American-led occupation of Afghanistan since 2001, there are multiple ways of counting how many people have died. But despite all these issues, Richardson's core findings remain intact. As the world's population has grown, the number of people being killed has not been able to keep up. The result: the likelihood that any one of us will die violently has fallen by an order of magnitude.

The new intellectual edifice got its capstone in 2006 with the publication of Azar Gat's monumental
War in Human Civilization
. Drawing on an astonishing range of academic fields (and, presumably, on his own experience as a major in the Israel Defense Forces), Gat pulled the new arguments together into a single, compelling story of how humanity had tamed its own violence across thousands of years. No one can nowadays think seriously about war without engaging with Gat's ideas, and anyone who has read his book will see its influence on every page of mine.

Thinking on war has gone through an intellectual sea change. Just a
generation ago, the decline-in-violence hypothesis was still the wild speculation of an aging sociologist, not even worth mentioning to schoolchildren baffled by Shakespeare. And it still has its opponents: in 2010, for instance, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá's book
Sex at Dawn,
strenuously denying that early human societies were violent, became a bestseller; in 2012, after several years of making similar arguments in the pages of
Scientific American
magazine, John Horgan pulled them together in his book
The End of War;
and in 2013, the anthropologist Douglas Fry assembled essays by thirty-one academics in his volume
War, Peace, and Human Nature
questioning whether rates of violent death really have fallen across the long term. But though all of these books are interesting, full of information, and well worth reading, all seem to me (as will become clear in the chapters that follow) to use the evidence rather selectively, and all have been overtaken by a tidal wave of broader studies reinforcing the key insights of Elias, Keeley, Richardson, and Gat. While I was writing the first version of this introduction, not one but two major works on the decline in violence appeared in the space of a single month: the political scientist Joshua Goldstein's
Winning the War on War
and the psychologist Steven Pinker's
Better Angels of Our Nature
. A year later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer Jared Diamond devoted the longest section of his book
The World Until Yesterday
to the same point. Arguments continue to rage, but on the basic issue, that rates of violent death really have declined, there is growing agreement.