On the Inevitability of War, or, Against Warmongering

This article was exclusively written for The European Sting by one of our passionate writers, Mr. Alexandros K. Liakopoulos. The opinions expressed within reflect only the writer’s views and not necessarily The European Sting’s position on the issue.

“War is the Father of All Things” – Heraclitus

“Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum” – “If You Want Peace Prepare For War” – Roman Dictum

“In the midst of chaos there is also opportunity” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War 

War is as old as human civilization; yet the human species is much older than human civilization. In the grand scheme of things, we tend to forget big truths like this one. Humans preexisted human civilization for hundreds of thousands of years. Quarrels we may have had, even deadly ones; however, catastrophic wars we cannot find any proof that we had before we managed to create the first organized communities, aka civilization. So, how did we come to believe that war is an inherent part of our heritage to the extend Heraclitus made his observation three thousand years ago?

The thing started progressively, some thousands of years before Heraclitus, when for the first time in our History as a species we managed to conquer Nature in an unprecedented way: the Agricultural Revolution gave us the means to obtain much more calories than we needed per day and store them for a long period of time. Until then, we were hunter-gatherers, wondering around in small bands and had to respect the natural capacity of our brains to remember faces and connect emotionally with other people, i.e. the so-called Dunbar number, which is between 200 and 500 persons. These small bands hunted and gathered food during the day and brought it back at the camping site afterwards. For the individual, some days might have been good for hunting and gathering, some might have been bad. For bigger prays, groups of people had to cooperate. In any way, while people were gathering at the camping site, they were sharing the food among all the members of the band, as the ones that were unlucky one day could not be left to starve while the ones that were super-lucky could not eat all the food they had gathered or hunted; essentially, the latter were “storing” the extra food to the bodies of the former, as no refrigerators existed and if the food was left to the open space it would rot. 

This way, the bonds of the band were getting stronger, along with the compassion of its members for one another, their empathy, and their solidarity. While sharing their food, it is easy to imagine they would discuss the important matters of the band, reaching important decisions. Elders, who had vaster experience would have more to say and so their wisdom would more respected than everyone’s mere intelligence. However, if some young member happened to come up with some brilliant idea or invention, through her/his intellect or by mere chance, the band would more probably endorse it. So, innovation was not excluded, and the bands were rather progressive, in the same time they could keep their wisdom intact.

Living from their habitat, these bands knew quite well they could not exhaust the ecosystem they were praying from. So, they wondered around and left the Nature to nurture new food till they come back. They had an ecological understanding because it was vital for their survival. As the community was growing and reaching the threshold of the Dunbar number, it was becoming more difficult to operate with the same rules: thus, it split in two and each half left for a new habitat. Unavoidably, while different bands met in the same habitat quarrels may have erupted, especially between different species of the homo family. But we have no track record of catastrophic wars of these bands. This came with the civilized societies, which came with the Agricultural Revolution.

The Agricultural Revolution was one of the greatest discoveries in our history. Until then, Homo Sapiens had mostly drove extinct all other species of the homo family, as it was a cleverer species from the rest, which meant more social and more cooperative, creating better tools and more efficient hunting-gathering methods, and pushing other homo species to less formidable environments, where they progressively went under survival thresholds. Through these tools and its genius, Homo Sapiens made a new discovery: if it would dig and plow the land in specific times of the year and put in the ground the seeds of some eatable plants, it could harvest their crops after fixed times. This new discovery promised lots of extra calories, but also pushed for a new social organization, a paradigm shift that was never foresaw at the time. More calories that could be stored, meant bigger communities that could be built in fixed spatial places on the one hand, and security needs for the storages of the crops and the whole of the communities on the other. It also meant that the roles of men and women had to change, as plowing needs extra strength from the upper half of the body, which only men possessed. Further, it needed the change of our relation to animals, as the bull had to be castrated and become an ox, to help with plowing. From animistic religions we had to invent theistic religions; from gender equality we moved to patriarchy in most of the cases; from open bands we created fortressed societies; and from lose security, we had to go to strict security. 

All these needs were superimposed on the bigger communities made possible by the extra calories that far surpassed the Dunbar number, which meant that the communities were not any more personally connecting all their members through compassion and empathy and solidarity, as not everyone knew everyone. The decisions could not be taken holistically anymore. A new system had to be invented. So, from holarchy, we moved to hierarchy, with the help of the theistic religions. These religions must have been invented by community pioneers that were seeking for peaceful resolution of internal community conflicts, yet, obliging to our very human nature, they were forged at the expense of external communities, at the expense of “the others”. Recent studies of the human brain confirm that we all tend to be afraid of “the other”, of people who are dissimilar to us, at least if we are not in contact with them from the very first moments of our lives. The pioneers of the religions and the first communities based their rules on this very characteristic and forged their rules in a way that made external communities the eternal enemy as a means to protect the internal members and their resources.

And here comes a twist. Since these communities were mostly impersonal in nature and were binding their members with rules that were abstract, it was possible for some members to climb up the social hierarchy without doing their part for the community, be that a specific work or a special task, just by mimicking empathy and compassion and solidarity while in fact they had none of those characteristics, through promising they would deliver wider benefits by securing bigger resources if they would attack and steal the resources of other communities. Why bother plowing all day long when other people are plowing all day long? Just wait for them to harvest and then attack them, steal their crops, and distribute them among us. The idea of war has been born from sociopathic behavior, a behavior that would not be possible in the previous lifestyle of hunter-gathering, as sociopaths were easy to spot and exclude from the band when everyone knew everyone. 

Megalomaniacs could not exist in hunter-gathering bands for long, for they were dangerous for the survival of the band. However, in the new format of the community, megalomaniacs could not only just exist, but they could also thrive and promise for other people to thrive. This made a qualitative difference to the new historical phase humanity entered, as it was essentially a sociopathic historical phase that only now becomes apparent macroscopically. The historical personalities we recognize as “Great” were all megalomaniacs that would have never made it for hundreds of thousands of years before the Agricultural Revolution. Yet, they did make it after it, making our History the History of Hierarchic Structures, of Sociopathic Conquest of these structures and of the Wars amongst them.

Observing these structures internally, as Heraclitus and the Romans did, one cannot miss to point out the inherent nature of war in human affairs. It is true that war is eternal, coming and going among societies, at all times and places on the planet. But if we take a bird’s eye view of our species we can see better: war is not in our nature, it is in the nature of the ones reaching to the top of our hierarchical social ladders, the way we have built our societies to be, through and with war, for the last 10.000 years. Yet, our nature is much older than that. Writing an extraordinary book on our “Blueprint and the evolutionary origins of the good society”, Nicholas Christakis of the Yale University explains how are very nature has all the characteristics to help us raise ourselves beyond the low point we had obliged our nature to be through our civilization and our history and our very thoughts, for if we look deeper we can find our common humanity, which binds us all, as members of a wider band that seeks to live, not to die, that seeks to love, not to hate, that seeks to understand, not to misunderstand. 

Half a century before Christakis, Bertrand Russell, the cherished philosopher, in a BBC radio podcast titling Man’s Peril From The Hydrogen Bomb, was expressing the same challenges we face today, with which I will close this article. But before doing so, let me state one fact: the social-ladder-holders are but a tiny fraction of the world population. With the means of communication and interaction we have today in our hands, we can create systems of cooperation and decision-making that are based on holarchies, instead of hierarchies, reversing the arrow of time and coming closer to our very human nature. If we fail to do so, the warmongers will destroy the world, if not for any other purpose, in order to prove themselves “Great” and be written in History. After all, War is all they know to do, being sociopaths as they are, whether they are diagnosed or not. But, as Sun Tzu has it, in the midst of Chaos there is also opportunity. This is the opportunity for the Healthy People of the World to Rise and Push for a Paradigm Shift that is needed for Peace, Prosperity, Ecological Sustainability and Survival. With this, I close with Bertrand Russell’s words: 

“There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal, as a human being to human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, nothing lies before you but universal death.”