THE question usually asked when considering the origins of war is, are humans essentially peaceful or violent? This is not how frames his well-researched and broad-ranging study, and for that reason alone his ideas on war are worth reading. The point is that there is no single “human nature”.
Smith lays out much compelling evidence that humans are reluctant killers. At the critical American civil war battle of Gettysburg in 1863, thousands of soldiers on both sides loaded their weapons repeatedly without firing them, to avoid shooting at the enemy. The US army general and historian S. L. A. Marshall, after extensive interviews with American soldiers during the second world war and the Korean war, estimated that 75 to 85 per cent of them did not fire their guns when given the opportunity to do so. His conclusion echoes an observation made by many throughout history: the average person “has such an inner and usually unrealised 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”.
Yet the author also makes the case in certain circumstances for humans as glorified killer apes, driven to war by our biology. War enhanced our male ancestors’ reproductive success, he says. As Smith puts it: “The masculine warrior mentality is a sexually selected trait, bred into ancestral men by women who preferred warrior mates.” Natural selection favoured a brain primed, when necessary, for violence.
Advertisement
This is where things get interesting: how do you persuade the reluctant killer to succumb to his warring nature? Social psychologists have shown that people can be persuaded to do things in groups that they would never do when acting alone, especially if the group is pitched against people who differ from it in some real or imagined way. In the right circumstances – such as times of political or social tension – it isn’t hard to persuade people that others who are ethnically different, or have different beliefs or political views, are in some way less human. The Balkans conflict and the Rwandan genocide are examples of how easily political leaders can persuade groups of disgruntled people that their neighbours are in fact their enemy. Differences that seem trivial in everyday life become a reason to kill.
“Differences that seem trivial become a reason to kill”
Army commanders also know the value of dehumanising or demonising an enemy. Even trained fighters find it easier to kill an animal than a human, and a human they believe to be evil than one they think is innocent – though I was not persuaded by Smith’s suggestion that killing comes more freely when “images of predators, of evil, devouring monsters, are awakened in the soldier’s mind as ancient cognitive mechanisms swing into action”. Since Marshall made his observations we have also learned that soldiers are more likely to kill from a distance: it is easier to throw a grenade into a bunker than to shoot at the whites of someone’s eyes.
Smith’s essential point is that all these factors lead people into a delusional state that allows them to kill – though given the high rate of post-traumatic stress among soldiers it doesn’t seem to protect them from psychological damage afterwards. If we want to stop war, he says, we must understand this process and become intolerant of it.
Disappointingly, Smith doesn’t expand on how we can resist this delusional state or efforts to manipulate us towards it, whether by generals, politicians or gang leaders. Others, however, are already onto this, though not necessarily in the context of war. , a psychologist at Harvard University, has been exploring how teaching people mindfulness – an intentionally heightened awareness of their thoughts and actions minute-by-minute – can help them to resist negative social pressures and break ingrained habits. Another psychologist, – best known for his 1971 – has taken up a similar theme in a study of heroism. He has developed techniques to help people resist influences by such means as thinking critically before acting, taking personal responsibility for decisions and actions, and valuing independence.
Perhaps what’s needed is for such techniques to be taught in schools. If everyone was more aware of how vulnerable we are to social influence and how liable to self-deception, challenging the wisdom of conflict might be the norm instead of the exception.
St Martin’s Press
