But the costs of peace and the benefits of war are not completely sufficient explanations for aggressive behavior. First, we have seen instances where peace has been kept even though the price borne by some of the parties to it was disproportionately high, as in the case of the Indians of western Canada during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Second, although people tend to be overly optimistic about their chances of success in war, combat is a very risky business. Peace may have its risks too—droughts, diseases, pests, and countless human errors—but these are mostly unpredictable, whereas the risks of war are expected and obvious. Third, since these costs and risks are relatively higher for tribal societies (because of their smaller populations and thinner subsistence surpluses), war should be less common among such groups than among states and empires. But, as we have seen, the opposite appears to be true. Its high frequency at all levels of social organization implies that war may be many times more profitable or less risky than peace. This implication of the cost-benefit explanation for war conflicts not only with most scholars’ expectations, but also with the opinions of all tribal peoples polled by ethnographers. The universal preference for peace is not just the product of arbitrary moral choice or deep psychology; it is practical and rational. War is frankly parasitic—absorbing the profits of peaceful endeavors while imposing additional costs. Clearly some factor beyond costs and gains must be included in explanations of war.
This additional element surely involves the difficulty that societies experience in establishing and maintaining peace with equals. When no third party exists to adjudicate disputes over marriage arrangements, personal injuries, trade, territory, and other economic concerns, or when the mediators that do exist cannot enforce their decisions on the recalcitrant, disputants regularly resort to violent self-help. Peace is unavoidably rare in settings where no institutions have the moral authority and physical power to maintain it by compelling restitution or retribution for injuries, imposing resolutions to disputes, and ensuring the survival of component social units. Any peace lacking powerful institutions to uphold it usually amounts to little more than a prolonged truce. As anthropologist Marvin Harris put it: “Primitive peoples go to war because they lack alternative solutions to certain problems—alternative solutions that would involve less suffering and fewer premature deaths.”33
But to have peace, it is not enough to establish Hobbes’s Leviathan. Institutions of mediation and enforcement merely guarantee that the costs of violence or war will be high and that the enjoyment of any gains so obtained will be limited. To ensure a peace, a society must provide rewards—or at least no penalties—for keeping it. If people are confident that their labor will provide at least the necessities of life and some access to comforts and luxuries, violence will generally attract only the pathological. At the same time, even when peace is institutionalized in the form of courts and police it will be broken by violence, sabotage, or rebellion if it becomes more costly and risky than war. To put it simply, people must be given more inducement than just fear of punishment if peace is to endure.
Why war and why not peace? War represents a method, derived directly from hunting, for getting from one group what another one lacks and cannot peacefully obtain. It also serves as a means of preserving a group’s persons and possessions from the predatory or desperate and as a way of enforcing the harsh reciprocity of the lex talionis when no other mode of satisfaction is available. However, such simple answers are of little practical use in the complex and highly various social situations in which human beings strive to prevent wars and sustain peace. The proceeds of war vary tremendously with time, place, and culture: here cattle, there petroleum reserves, elsewhere slaves or salt cakes. The price of peace can be raised by belligerent neighbors, rapid population rises, trade imbalances, climatic changes, and a host of other difficulties peculiar to a time and place. Which methods and institutions are most effective in preserving peace is a question that has exercised the minds of leaders, rulers, councils, philosophers, and visionaries for millennia, without producing any enduring or generally applicable answers.
ELEVEN
Beating Swords into Metaphors
The Roofs of the Pacified Past
As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the anthropological concepts of primitive war and prehistoric peace are extremely contrary to ethnographic and archaeological fact. But how and why did such delusions develop, especially among academics? Why were they maintained in the face of contrary facts? Why did Quincy Wright ignore the implications of his casualty figures for primitive societies? Why did Harry Turney-High never consider the actual effects and effectiveness of primitive compared with civilized warfare? Why have Brian Ferguson and others never mentioned the archaeological data that was so obviously relevant to their theory of prehistoric peace? Why have archaeologists glibly interpreted remains that testify unambiguously to violent conflict in symbolic or ritualistic terms? Each of these questions points to a prevailing studied silence about prestate warfare; the causes of this silence are to be found in events and intellectual currents outside academic anthropology.
SEEING THE ELEPHANT
The concepts that provide the framework for the pacified past originated in the period immediately following World War II. Several features of that particular war and its aftermath encouraged a pervasive and profound odium for everything connected with warfare. Since the hearth and wellspring of modern Western culture remains western Europe, the events in and the attitudes of that region are of key concern because they soon radiate to the New World and beyond.1
World War II was an especially traumatic experience for western Europe, which had not seen combat across its whole territory since the days of Napoleon. During World War I, the fighting in the West had been confined to a narrow strip of territory along the trench lines. But almost every populous region of France, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and the Low Countries was an arena of combat and devastation during World War II or the preceding Spanish Civil War. Guerrilla warfare spread the horror even to remote rural areas. For the previous 125 years, for most western Europeans, war had always taken place elsewhere, and it had therefore been viewed with a degree of detachment.
Unlike previous European wars, World War II left most western Europeans (and North Americans) with plentiful scars from direct injuries and stains of innocent blood on their hands. The devastation, disease, displacement of populations, and near famine of the war’s aftermath encouraged self-pity among the nations that started the war and charity from the United States—die war’s only unequivocal victor. After the passions of the war had cooled, the widespread slaughter of noncombatants by bombing became distasteful even to those who had inflicted it. Even in our revisionist age, it is difficult to deny that the Allied victory delivered the world from evil, but the total war necessary to achieve this deliverance entailed economic, human, and moral costs that still seem staggering.2 And the almost immediate development of the Cold War revealed that all this suffering had merely eliminated one rivalry only to expose another even more dangerous. Europe remained an armed camp. Historian John Keegan notes that World War I persuaded only the victors that “the costs of war exceeded its rewards,” whereas World War II convinced the “victors and vanquished alike of the same thing.”3 After generations of seeing war masked by a degree of comfortable distance, western European society was brought face to face with its true visage, and it conceived a most profound aversion for it.
This general change in the Western appreciation of war can be seen in two areas of popular and academic culture. The war stories, novels, and poems of the nineteenth century celebrated the adventure, heroism, and glory of war.4 Those produced between the world wars treated war and soldiers’ experience of it as an epic tragedy that, if lacking in any pretense to glory, nevertheless provided the stage for stoic heroism and comradely self-sacrifice.5 The literature of the past fifty years, by contrast, has tended to treat war as a brutal bedlam in which humans merely struggle,
usually unsuccessfully, to preserve their lives and sanity. Postwar American war novels, for example, portray men as the dazed neurotic victims of psychotic officers, the petty tyrannies and stupefying boredom of military life, and the mindless cruelty of war itself.6 War had changed in literature from an uplifting melodrama, to a elegiac tragedy, to a surrealist black comedy.
The great American academic historians of the nineteenth century often dealt with military subjects—for instance, Parkman’s France and England in North America, Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, and Mahan’s very influential naval histories. But by the middle of the twentieth century, history professors at prestigious universities were concerned almost exclusively with social and economic matters.7 A recent acknowledgment of this tendency occurs in the preface to Princeton historian James McPherson’s magnificent Battle Cry of Freedom, in which the author feels compelled to justify the space (about 40 percent of the book) devoted to military campaigns, in a book about the American Civil War! Military history has been relegated to a few professors at provincial institutions and the military academies, to nonacademics, and to amateurs. As war has come to be represented in literature as an absurd nightmare, academic interest in military history has waned.
The newly discovered madness of war is symbolized by the mushroom cloud. Not only did atomic weapons immediately exterminate and devastate on a gigantic scale, but their radiation continued to kill and maim for generations after hostilities had ceased. These Old Testament qualities of nuclear weapons had such a special resonance for the Western mind that people began to speak not of another world war but of Armageddon. As the Cold War developed and nuclear weapons proliferated, “atomic fear” gripped the civilized world. Even before it was a practical proposition, visions of an atomic apocalypse appeared in the popular literature and films of the 1950s and 1960s. Typically, these productions asked not whether humanity could survive a nuclear war, but whether such a war was worth surviving. They depicted a world returned to the Stone Age, populated by nightmarish mutant species and tiny tribes of impoverished survivors. Once “mutually assured destruction” (with its perfect acronym, MAD) became technologically possible in the 1960s, the concepts of victory and defeat, “good guys” and “bad guys” lost their significance. War was seen as more man just stupid or cruel; in its atomic form, it was suicidal lunacy—a lunacy that Western civilization had induced and could not cure. Western Europe had “seen the elephant” (as American soldiers called seeing combat during the Civil War), and the very thought of it became an anathema.
THE END OF IMPERIALISM
By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Hobbes’s view of primitive life had gained the upper hand because it was, of course, superbly convenient to European colonial and imperial ambitions. What political or territorial rights could be granted to heathens whose lives were one long criminal spree, who (because of their violent anarchy) could neither produce nor enjoy any of the fruits of civilized industry, whose very proximity radiated disorder and anxiety into the frontier zones of civilized settlement? With such a view, colonists and colonial administrators could no more tolerate “unpacified” Hobbesian primitives nearby than they could leave pirates or brigands unmolested. The consequences of these applications of Hobbes’s arguments were transformed, by the end of the nineteenth century, into the sanctimonious “white-man’s burden” of bringing the peace and bounty of civilization to “lesser breeds without the Law.” Few Westerners paused to consider that the “law” they brought often meant slavery and penury to the natives or that these “lesser breeds” might legitimately view the greedy colonials as pirates and brigands whom the natives could ill-afford to leave unmolested.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, sociologists and anthropologists united the neo-Hobbesian perspective with something quite foreign to Hobbes’s careful arguments for human equality: Social Darwinism and racism. Imperialists had long been troubled by the common and often violent refusal of native peoples to acknowledge the superiority of European culture and religion or adopt them willingly. The new doctrines of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest provided a cornucopia of explanations and justifications. The spread of Western civilization and Europeans at the expense of other cultures and races became a splendid illustration of Spencer’s survival of the fittest. Inherited mental inferiority thus “explained” the intractable resistance to European civilization by “primitive races.” The lives of savages were “nasty, brutish and short” because the humans who lived them were both culturally and genetically limited. Late-nineteenth-century imperialists thus discovered a moral duty and a biological right to wrest dominion of the earth from such less-favored peoples.8
If prewar European imperialism encouraged a view of war and conquest as normal and right, World War II and its aftermath severely challenged it. One especially shocking aspect of World War II was that the Nazis attempted to do to fellow Europeans what the latter had long been doing (less efficiently and less brutally) to non-Europeans. The Nazis justified genocidal “clearances,” the grossest forms of labor exploitation, and tyrannical government over conquered peoples by an uncomfortably familiar reference to a self-proclaimed superiority of race, technology, and culture. After the Nazis, warfare and conquest looked less like noble crusades or direct expressions of a law of nature and more like the basest of crimes. After four centuries of western European imperialism, the sauce for the goose had finally been applied to the gander.
However bitterly contested and involuntary it may have been, postwar decolonization also lifted a considerable burden from the backs of western European intelligentsia. The demise of their nations’ empires virtually eliminated any need for apology or self-reproach. Indeed, in the postwar period, European nations became quasi-colonies themselves—their empires liquidated, their economies dependent on those of the United States and the Soviet Union, and they themselves reduced to second-rate client-states of “the Great Powers” (which no longer included them). Postwar western European intellectuals, both right and left, began seeing themselves and their societies as victims of imperialism and neocolonialism, even if they felt the peas of their victimization through increasing mattresses of prosperity.9 A generation after the end of World War II, it became intellectually fashionable in western Europe to identify with the many non-Western peoples that once were colonial subjects.
THE DISAPPEARING PRIMITIVE
As cynics often observed in the United States during the nineteenth century, the nobility of “savages” was directly proportional to one’s geographic distance from them.10 During the late nineteenth century, Easterners were thus very sympathetic to the plight of the western Indians, doted on James Fennimore Cooper’s sentimental portrayals of eastern Indians, and put the fine speeches of Indian orators in their children’s schoolbooks. Yet the grandparents of these same sympathetic Easterners had offered bounties on Indian scalps and had ruthlessly expelled the natives from their states. One such rapid shift in white attitudes was responsible for the irony that the general who presided over the final defeats of the western tribes, Ohio-born Tecumseh Sherman, was named for a great Shawnee chief (William was added only when he was nine). Of course, it had been a generation before Sherman’s birth that Chief Tecumseh had pursued his vain quest for a great tribal coalition to drive the Americans out of the old Northwest, including Ohio. Most Westerners still in direct contact with “wild” Indians, on the other hand, regarded them as dangerous vermin, turbulent brigands, or useless beggars to be expelled or exterminated at any opportunity. Once the natives were safely reduced to living on reservations, however, Westerners were just as inclined to become sentimental about them and their traditional ways of life as Easterners were.
This change from fearful hatred to nostalgia as distance in time or space increases is not peculiar to the United States. The difference in attitude toward the German tribes evidenced by Julius Caesar and Tacitus, the increasing admiration of neo-Australians for Aborigine
s (actually, “traditional” Aborigines), the Boer fascination with the Bushmen, and the softening of Japanese attitudes toward the Ainu are examples of similar phenomena. It is much easier to admire tribal life once it has been destroyed and little chance remains, except in fantasy, of its returning. In Western popular culture, Rousseau triumphs over Hobbes only when “man in a state of nature” is no longer a viable competitor and has faded from direct sight.
The disappearance of uncivilized ways of life began with the evolution of the first urban societies 6,000 years ago, but the incorporation of tribal peoples into civilized economies definitely accelerated after World War II. Before the war, “primitives” could still be found living traditional lives in some isolated areas of the world, such as highland New Guinea, west-central Australia, and parts of tropical South America, the Phillipines, and Africa. But the rapid postwar growth in Third World populations, dramatic improvements in transportation and communications technology, and the voracious appetite of industrial economies for ever-scarcer raw materials have carried modern civilization to every corner of the inhabited world. As anthropologists are acutely aware, the primitive world of traditional prestate economies and cultures had completely vanished by the late 1960s. Thus tribal societies can no longer impede civilized enterprises, and direct observations can no longer contradict sentimental views of them. Any unpleasant behavior on the part of the subjugated remnants of such societies can be dismissed as being due to their corruption and degradation by Western civilization. The increasing bowdlerization of precivilized life in popular culture over the past few decades is just a broader and more final version of the changing attitudes toward traditional Indian lifeways observed in the United States during the nineteenth century.
War Before Civilization Page 23