War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  THE FADING HOPE OF PROGRESS

  The great shock of World War II savagery, atomic fear, the ex post facto awakening to the evils and indignities of imperial conquest, and the later spread of ecological sensitivity eroded all that remained of the Western myths of progress and civilized superiority. Attacks on these moribund notions have reached frenzied proportions in the past few decades. Industrial expansion and technological advance are now regarded merely as harbingers of ecological disaster and more destructive wars, while advances in medicine have only encouraged overpopulation and further misery. Mass communications and cheap transportation are regarded as having eroded human linguistic and cultural diversity while bringing the commercial corruptions of the West to every doorstep. These accusations imply some rather drastic cures—technological regression, depopulation, deindustrialization, decreasing human mobility, and censorship or suppression of global communications. Ironically, these prescriptions, taken simultaneously, resemble less Rousseau’s golden age and more the post-apocalyse world envisioned in science fiction. These neo-Rousseauian arguments curiously imply that we are only a nuclear winter away from a springtime of human equality and harmony.

  Cynics have observed that those who have benefited the most from “progress”—the citizens of the First World—are the people most inclined to disdain it. The privileged few who eat better, lead longer and more stimulating lives because of modern agriculture, medicine, education, mass communications, and travel, and are most cushioned from physical discomfort and inconvenience by industrial technology are the most nostalgic about the primitive world. This attitude is more difficult to find among the real “victims of progress” in the Third World except among members of these nations’ Western-educated elites. Despite the odds against them, the inhabitants of these countries flow in dense streams toward those shabby islands of modernity, the cities, attracted by the slim hope of material progress they offer. For many of these migrants, the primitive world they are fleeing is not a legend but a living memory. Perhaps the most bizarre expression of this impulse was the elevation of the notion of material progress to a religion by the Cargo Cults of the tribesmen of New Guinea.11 The concept behind these cults was to obtain the material plenty and comforts of civilization (Cargo) by magical means. The current Western distaste for progress may be just another luxury Westerners enjoy. But a less cynical gloss is that civilization inevitably looks grimmer to those intimately familiar with its thousand discontents, whereas its streets seem paved with gold in the eyes of those farthest from its citadel.

  Most of the evils attributed to civilization and progress—such as social inequality and subordination, murder, theft, rape, vandalism, and conquest—are found concentrated in the conduct and effects of war. Therefore, in a neo-Rousseauian world view, war itself constitutes one of the principal products of Western progress, and the precivilized condition and the non-Western world before European expansion must have been idyllic and peaceful. As ever, when faith in the myth of progress declines, the myth of the golden age finds new adherents.

  THE CREATION OF MYTH

  In the postwar atmosphere of anxiety, malaise, and dissatisfaction with Western civilization, anthropologists have introduced doctrines concerning precivilized violence consistent with this mood. But the concepts of primitive war and prehistoric peace were not the products of pure imagination or conscious falsehood. They relied on available evidence, but often the data cited were quiteirrelevant to their key ideas. Thus the proponents of safe and ineffective primitive war have focused on stylized and low-casualty battles in preference to the rarer massacres and much more frequent raids that killed most people. These proponents have evaluated the effectiveness of tribal war entirely on the ethnocentric grounds of how similar its conduct was to modern warfare rather than on the basis of its actual effects. They have devoted special attention to the murky question of motives. Similarly, the advocates of prehistoric peace ignore the very archaeological evidence that disproves their case. Archaeologists, relying on the time-honored method of “ethnographic analogy,” have contributed to the pacification of the past by blithely ignoring the problem of prehistoric violence. The resulting fashionable ideas concerning precivilized warfare are the products of discrimination, then, not ignorance or prevarication.

  The anthropologists whose interpretations have helped artifically to pacify the past were in a sense merely possessed by the spirit of their times. As is true of all ideas everywhere, scientific understanding is usually rooted in the values and attitudes of a particular era or culture. What saves scientific propositions from being mere intellectual fashions is their ability to withstand testing against critical evidence. The concepts of the pacified past are wrong not because they are fashionable or biased, but because they are incompatible with the most relevant ethnographic and archaeological evidence.

  Yet there is something to be criticized in the fashions themselves, whether those of the neo-Hobbesian past or those of the neo-Rousseauian present. Both deny tribal peoples their complete humanity. A previous era refused to acknowledge the intelligence, sociability, and generosity of uncivilized people and the richness, effectiveness, and rationality of their ways of life. Today, popular opinion finds it difficult to attribute to tribal peoples a capacity for rapacious-ness, cruelty, ecological heedlessness, and Machiavellian guile equal to our own. (For example, when ecological accusations fly, who recalls the ten marvellous and unique species of flightless birds [Moas] hunted to extinction by the ancient Polynesians who first settled New Zealand?) Both laypersons and academics now prefer a vision of tribal peoples as lambs in Eden, spouting ecological mysticism and disdain for the material conditions of life. In short, we wish them to be more righteous and spiritual (in our terms, not theirs), happier and less emotionally complicated, and less prone to rational calculations of self-interest than ourselves.12 With only rare exceptions, Westerners of the past few centuries have found it difficult to accept that primitive and prehistoric people were ever as clever, as morally equivocal, and as emotionally complex as themselves. When we attribute to primitive and prehistoric people only our virtues and none of our vices, we dehumanize them as much as ourselves.

  A wise writer once noted that “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”13 By believing that primitive and prehistoric peoples were far more humane and peaceful than their modern civilized counterparts, we metaphorically make beasts of ourselves. Our capacity for organized violence, the universal ugliness of war, and the intricate difficulties of keeping a peace are part of the “pain” of being human. Accepting the despairing myth of the pacified past encourages us to neglect solving these universal problems in the only place we can—in the present, among ourselves.

  TWELVE

  A Trout in the Milk

  Discussion and Conclusions

  What the dead had no speech for, when living

  They can tell you, being dead; the communication

  Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

  These favorite lines from an unfavorite poet sum up what this book has been about. The “communications” recorded here from the dead world of prehistory and the recently deceased “primitive” one are indeed eloquent on the subject of war. The burned villages, the arrowheads embedded in bones, the death tolls, and the mutilated corpses speak more truthfully, more passionately on this dismal subject than all the recorded verbiage of the living, which is riddled with cant, sophistry, and flights of fancy. The dead voices heard here tell us that war has an ugly sameness; it is always a compound of crimes no matter what kind of society is involved or when in time it occurs. After exploring war before civilization in search of something less terrible than the wars we know, we merel
y arrive where we started with an all-too-familiar catalog of deaths, rapes, pillage, destruction, and terror.

  This is a brutal reality that modern Westerners seem very loathe to accept. They seem always tempted to flee it by imagining that our world is the best of all possible ones or that life was better when the human world was far simpler. During this century, anthropologists have struggled with such complacent and nostalgic impulses, even in themselves. Their ambition was and is to explore the human condition at all times and in all places, to enlarge the narrow view of it that the written records of civilized life provide and to, in every sense, “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” But these goals and the raw subject matter of anthropology—the origins of humans and their various cultures, social life before cities, states, and historical records—are in every culture but our own the province of mythology. Myths are a consequence of many impulses and serve many purposes, but chief among these are didactic and moralizing ones. Anthropologists would be less than human themselves if they were immune to such impulses, and it is difficult to deny that on the subject of war before civilization they have shown a special susceptibility. After the depressing shocks of two world wars, anthropologists compromised between complacency and nostalgia, Hobbes and Rousseau, by conceiving of primitive war as a sometimes common but unserious and ineffectual activity. A few now seem poised to abandon even this compromise by quietly assuming or boldly declaring that life before civilization was remarkably peaceful. Yet whatever their tendency to mythologize, anthropologists have steadily accumulated observations and physical evidence through their ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork. It is precisely these painfully accumulated facts that prevent anthropology from lapsing into mythology.

  The facts recovered by ethnographers and archaeologists indicate unequivocally that primitive and prehistoric warfare was just as terrible and effective as the historic and civilized version. War is hell whether it is fought with wooden spears or napalm. Peaceful prestate societies were very rare; warfare between them was very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime. As we have seen, the very deadly raids, ambushes, and surprise attacks on settlements were the forms of combat preferred by tribal warriors to the less deadly but much more complicated battles so important in civilized warfare. In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly than that conducted between civilized states because of the greater frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted. Primitive war was very efficient at inflicting damage through the destruction of property, especially means of production and shelter, and inducing terror by frequently visiting sudden death and mutilating its victims. The plunder of valuable commodities was common, and primitive warfare was very effective in acquiring additional territory, even if this was a seldom professed goal.

  Primitive war was not a puerile or deficient form of warfare, but war reduced to its essentials: killing enemies with a minimum of risk, denying them the means of life via vandalism and theft (even the means of reproduction by the kidnapping of their women and children), terrorizing them into either yielding territory or desisting from their encroachments and aggressions. At the tactical level, primitive warfare and its cousin, guerrilla warfare, have also been superior to the civilized variety. It is civilized warfare that is stylized, ritualized, and relatively less dangerous. When soldiers clash with warriors (or guerrillas), it is precisely these “decorative” civilized tactics and paraphernalia that must be abandoned by the former if they are to defeat the latter. Even such a change may be insufficient, and co-opted native warriors must be substituted for the inadequate soldiers before victory belongs to the latter.

  The real weakness of precivilized war making has been at the highest strategic level, rooted in the weaker logistic capacities imposed by small populations, slim economic surpluses, and limited transportation capacities. These true deficiencies, all determined by the social and economic features inherent in tribal life itself, have made it almost impossible for tribal warriors to conduct planned campaigns and prolonged sieges. It was the concentration of resources and power in hierarchical political organizations, the millions of cannon-fodder citizens subject to their disposal, the galleon, compass and sextant, the ox-wagon, steam engine, railroads, and factory production, as well as smallpox, measles, and weeds, that allowed the nations of western Europe to gain ascendancy over the uncivilized world during the past half-millennium. It was not the much discussed and theatrical weaponry, discipline, and tactical techniques that gave soldiers their eventual triumphs, but their mastery of the rather pedestrian arcana of logistics. In modern guerrilla warfare, when superior primitive tactics are wedded to even very limited civilized logistics, more completely civilized adversaries are very commonly discomfited. Guerrilla warfare merely incorporates manpower and supply capacities on a civilized scale and uses more up-to-date weaponry. Primitive warfare is simply total war conducted with very limited means.

  The discovery that war is total—that is, between peoples or whole societies, not just the armed forces who represent them—is credited by historians to recent times. Some point to the French Revolution’s “nation in arms” or Napoleon’s aggressive use of it. Against this claim can be posed the doctrines of Jomini, Clausewitz, and (in naval warfare) Mahan, who analyzed the Napoleonic Wars and concluded that the primary objective in warfare should be the destruction of an enemy’s “main force” military units by formal battles, ideally a single decisive trial of strength. Other military historians claim with better justification that the realization of war’s total nature belongs to those peculiarly American military geniuses, Grant and Sherman, who are credited individually or jointly with the awful invention of modern total war. It should be clear from this book that this Western “discovery” is comparable to the European discovery of the Far East, Africa, or the Americas. The East Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, and Native Americans always knew where they were; it was the Europeans who were confused or ignorant. So it is with total war. For millennia, tribal warriors have been conducting smaller-scale and more ruthless versions of Sherman’s march and Grant’s war of attrition by ringing fruit trees, stealing or destroying herds and crops, burning houses and canoes, stealthily slaughtering individuals and small groups, and gradually abrading a foe’s manpower in very frequent but low-casualty battles. Primitive war is “war to the knife,” guerre à l’outrance. War has always been a struggle between peoples, their societies, and their economies, not just warriors, war parties, armies, and navies.

  Western nations gradually lost sight of this simple truth over many centuries after the decline of Rome. They more and more preferred to conduct war purely between proportionally smaller forces of specialists—first armored nobility, then mercenaries, and, later, professionals or regulars. They took what had been a nasty free-for-all, often literally a struggle for existence (like that between Rome and Carthage), and turned it into a chess game with highly specialized units, stylized movements, and constrained rules. This chess analogy may be trite, but it is a revealing one for civilized war. For example, the celebrated military historian John Keegan notes that for commanders warfare had changed very little over the 200 years before Waterloo. He employs the chess analogy in noting that despite many changes in technology and the social context of military leadership, the nature of civilized combat was very similar over several centuries. He approves of Wellington’s description of the Battle of Waterloo as “Napoleon just moved forward in the old style and was driven off in the old style.” Yet in his choice of examplars of military leadership, he skips from Alexander the Great (ca. 300 B.C.) to Wellington (ca. A.D. 1800), a “jump” of more than 2,000 years, implying that the rate of evolution in Western military methods was very slow during these two millennia.1 The results of this prolonged stultification or recoil from primitive realism in Western military culture were indecisiveness or stasis in a host of chess-like wars.2 Our modern names for several of these conflicts reflect their in
decisiveness: for example, the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Thirty Years’ War. It was only in the outposts, where the victors’ manpower consisted primarily of native levies naturally versed in real war and colonial militias who had relearned it from the natives, that the results were conclusive. While the fighting in the European heartland continued indecisively between A.D. 1500 and 1830, France, Spain, Portugal, and (to a lesser degree) the Netherlands lost great domains beyond Europe in the New World and in parts of Asia.

  But does this chess analogy apply to Grant’s repeated tactical defeats by Lee—which culminated in Lee’s, not Grant’s, surrender—or Sherman’s March away from the main Rebel force opposing him? No, Grant and Sherman defied the rules and doctrines of Western civilized warfare. It was not until World War II that the rest of the civilized world followed suit. Indeed, what is submarine warfare at sea or strategic bombing in the air but guerrilla (read “primitive”) warfare by new technological means in new mediums?

  When we turn to those old questions of what causes wars and helps maintain peace, we find that primitive societies are essentially similar to civilized ones. As with civilized wars, the motives of primitive participants and the causes of their violent confrontations have often been murky and complex. It seems universal that it is usually an act of violence by one side that precipitates a war and behind such acts are usually disputes of an economic character. The only difference that can be seen in this area between states and nonstates is that the latter never claim or appear to be fighting to subjugate another society—to subordinate an independent population to one group’s central political institutions. Since tribal and band societies lack institutional subordination and have decentralized political systems, their “ignorance” of this motive is hardly surprising.