‘War – what is it good for?’ asked Edwin Starr on his 1970 single of the same name, before answering his rhetorical question: ‘Absolutely nothing.’ In this, Starr was not only excoriating America’s contemporary folly in Vietnam. He was implicitly endorsing the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s recommendation that humanity could and should trade up from endless war to perpetual peace, and the anthropologist Margaret Mead’s suggestion that war was not natural to our species. In 1940 she wrote:
War is just an invention known to the majority of human societies, by which they permit their young men either to accumulate prestige or avenge their honour or acquire loot or wives or sago lands or cattle or appease the blood lust of their gods or the restless souls of the recently dead.
Mead’s account, cited in the military historian Richard Overy’s timely and engaging book, may not very precisely map on to what Hitler was doing to Europe in that year, nor what is currently happening in Ukraine or Gaza, but the point remains: war is not just often morally wrong but catastrophic for humanity.
For 400,000 of the 600,000 years of human development, argued Mead’s fellow anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, there was intra-species unpleasantness but no martial conflict. Other anthropologists suggested that 98 per cent of human history was warless. Only when our ancestors started farming in Mesopotamia 400 generations ago and hubristically carving up the biosphere did war become our degraded species’ boon companion. Weaponry used for the hunt could be repurposed to target our own species in ways scarcely conceivable to other social animals, chimpanzees settling differences by hurling faeces included.
Such perspectives are nonsense, though, if one accepts that war is imperative to the evolution of our species.
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