by Ian Morris
Back in the real world, however, Petrov did draw a line. He later admitted to having been so scared that his legs gave way under him, but he still trusted his instincts over his algorithms. Going with his gut, he told the duty officer that this too was a false alarm. The missile attack message was stopped before it worked its way up the chain of command. Twelve thousand Soviet warheads stayed in their silos; a billion of us lived to fight another day.
Petrov’s reward for saving the world, however, was not a chestful of medals. It was an official reprimand for submitting messy paperwork and failing to follow protocols (it was the General Secretary’s job to decide whether to destroy the planet, not his). He was shuffled sideways to a less sensitive position. From there he took early retirement, had a nervous breakdown, and sank into grim poverty as the Soviet Union fell to pieces and stopped paying its old-age pensioners.1
A world like this—in which Armageddon hung on shoddy engineering and the snap judgments of computer programmers—had surely gone mad. Plenty of people at the time thought so. Within the American alliance, where people were free to do such things, millions marched to ban the bomb, or protested against their governments’ aggression, or voted for politicians who promised unilateral disarmament. On the Soviet side, where people were not free to do such things, a few more dissidents than usual took a stand and were betrayed to the secret police.
But none of it made much difference. Western leaders were returned to office with increased majorities and bought even more advanced weapons; Soviet leaders built even more missiles. In 1986 the world’s stockpile of nuclear warheads reached its all-time high of more than seventy thousand, and the meltdown of the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl gave a tiny taste of what might be in store.
People cried out for answers, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain the young turned away from aging, compromised politicians toward louder voices. Speaking for a new post-baby-boom generation, Bruce Springsteen took the greatest of the Vietnam-era protest songs—Edwin Starr’s Motown classic “War”—and sent a supercharged cover version back into the top ten:
War!
Huh, good God.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Say it, say it, say it …
Oooh, war! I despise
Because it means destruction
Of innocent lives
War means tears
To thousands of mothers’ eyes
When their sons go to fight
And lose their lives…
War!
It ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker.
War!
Friend only to the undertaker…
Peace for Our Time2
In this book, I want to disagree. Up to a point, anyway.
War, I will suggest, has not been a friend to the undertaker. War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer. War is hell, but—again, over the long run—the alternatives would have been worse.
This will be a controversial claim, so let me explain what I mean.
There are four parts to the case I will make. The first is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently.
This observation rests on one of the major findings of archaeologists and anthropologists over the last century, that Stone Age societies were typically tiny. Chiefly because of the challenges of finding food, people lived in bands of a few dozen, villages of a few hundred, or (very occasionally) towns of a few thousand members. These communities did not need much in the way of internal organization and tended to live on terms of suspicion or even hostility with outsiders.
People generally worked out their differences peacefully, but if someone decided to use force, there were far fewer constraints on him—or, occasionally, her—than the citizens of modern states are used to. Most of the killing was on a small scale, in vendettas and incessant raiding, although once in a while violence might disrupt an entire band or village so badly that disease and starvation wiped all its members out. But because populations were also small, the steady drip of low-level violence took an appalling toll. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone Age societies died at the hands of other humans.
The twentieth century forms a sharp contrast. It saw two world wars, a string of genocides, and multiple government-induced famines, killing a staggering total of somewhere between 100 million and 200 million people. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 150,000 people—probably more people than had lived in the entire world in 50,000 B.C. But in 1945, there were about 2.5 billion people on earth, and over the course of the twentieth century roughly 10 billion lives were lived—meaning that the century’s 100–200 million war-related deaths added up to just 1 to 2 percent of our planet’s population. If you were lucky enough to be born in the industrialized twentieth century, you were on average ten times less likely to die violently (or from violence’s consequences) than if you were born in a Stone Age society.
This may be a surprising statistic, but the explanation for it is more surprising still. What has made the world so much safer is war itself. The way this worked, I will try to show in Chapters 1–5, was that beginning about ten thousand years ago in some parts of the world, then spreading across the planet, the winners of wars incorporated the losers into larger societies. The only way to make these larger societies work was for their rulers to develop stronger governments, and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence within the society.
The men who ran these governments hardly ever pursued policies of peacemaking purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They cracked down on killing because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. The unintended consequence, though, was that rates of violent death fell by 90 percent between Stone Age times and the twentieth century.
The process was not pretty. Whether it was the Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacifiers could be just as brutal as the savagery they stamped out. Nor was the process smooth: for short periods in particular places, violent death could spike back up to Stone Age levels. Between 1914 and 1918, for instance, nearly one Serb in six died from violence, disease, or starvation. And, of course, not all governments were equally good at delivering peace. Democracies may be messy, but they rarely devour their children; dictatorships get things done, but they tend to shoot, starve, and gas a lot of people. And yet despite all the variations, qualifications, and exceptions, over the ten-thousand-year-long run, war made governments, and governments made peace.
My second claim is that while war is the worst imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the only way humans have found. “Lord knows, there’s got to be a better way,” Edwin Starr sang, but apparently there isn’t. If the Roman Empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls and Greeks, if the United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans—in these cases and countless others, if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity could have had the benefits of larger societies without paying such a high cost. But that did not happen. It is a depressing thought, but the evidence again seems clear. People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.
If I am right that governments have made us safer and that war is pretty much the only way we have discovered to make governments, then we have to conclude that war really has been good for something. My third conclusion, though, goes further still. As well as making people safer, I will sugg
est, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long run—made us richer. Peace created the conditions for economic growth and rising living standards. This process too has been messy and uneven: the winners of wars regularly go on rampages of rape and plunder, selling thousands of survivors into slavery and stealing their land. The losers may be left impoverished for generations. It is a terrible, ugly business. And yet, with the passage of time—maybe decades, maybe centuries—the creation of a bigger society tends to make everyone, the descendants of victors and vanquished alike, better-off. The long-term pattern is again unmistakable. By creating larger societies, stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the world.
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 Europea
n 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