CHAPTER TWO
You Can’t Blame It All on a Few Bad Apples
In January 2011, a local theater in my hometown sponsored a screening of Restrepo, a documentary about U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, followed by a question and answer session with one of its makers, the journalist Sebastian Junger. Author of the best seller The Perfect Storm (turned into a film starring George Clooney), Junger is also an intrepid war correspondent. He first reported from a war zone, Bosnia, in 1993, and later he covered conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Afghanistan, which he first visited in 1996.
In 2007 and 2008, Junger spent a total of five months embedded with an American platoon in the Korengal Valley, one of Afghanistan’s most violent regions. Junger accompanied the soldiers as they built and defended a tiny outpost they named Restrepo, after a platoon member killed in action. Junger and a colleague, the photojournalist Tim Hetherington (who died in 2011 covering the conflict in Libya), recorded one hundred and fifty hours of video and turned it into a documentary.
Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award, provides an almost unbearably intense immersion into the lives of combat soldiers. It is like a first-person shooter game, except with real bullets and blood. The film shows boyish soldiers wrestling and razzing each other between firefights, howling in grief after a buddy is killed, cheering after blasting an enemy soldier to bits. The documentary simply records these events, foisting no particular interpretation on us.
In his 2010 book War, Junger attempts to make sense of what he witnessed in Afghanistan, and he advances a dramatic explanation of war in general. Wars occur, Junger suggests, at least in part because males enjoy them. “War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them,” he writes. “It’s insanely exciting.” Junger claims that the “moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers [in Afghanistan] much, and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero.”
In an interview with the Village Voice, Junger is more explicit. “The politically incorrect truth,” he says, “is that war is extremely ingrained in us—in our evolution as humans—and we’re hardwired for it.” As evidence for our predisposition for war, Junger cites the work of Wrangham, author of Demonic Males. In January 2011, I met Junger after a screening of Restrepo in my hometown. I confessed my belief that war might soon be abolished, and he gave me a quizzical look. He wished he shared my optimism, he replied, but his reporting and research had made him pessimistic about the prospects for long-term peace.
Junger is wrong that natural selection bred an affinity for war into our human and even pre-human ancestors, as I hope the previous chapter persuaded you. But could he be right that a subset of men find war “exciting” and are even “hardwired” for it? If so, that would make the challenge of abolishing war more daunting. There is certainly abundant anecdotal evidence that some men enjoy war—and I mean real war, not fictional representations of it in films and video games. The British historian Joanna Bourke has sifted through hundreds of first person accounts of combat by veterans of World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War, and these led her to conclude that many ordinary men take pleasure in combat, and specifically in killing.
“Indeed, it is not necessary to look for extraordinary personality traits or even extraordinary times to explain human viciousness,” Bourke writes. She quotes a Belgian socialist, Henry de Man, who before fighting in World War I had thought himself “immune from this intoxication” of killing. While serving on an artillery crew, he recalls, he “secured a direct hit on an enemy encampment, saw bodies or parts of bodies go up in the air, and heard the desperate yelling of the wounded or the runaways. I had to confess to myself that it was one of the happiest moments of my life.”
The journalist William Broyles Jr., who fought in Vietnam, revealed the pleasure he took from combat in his 1984 essay “Why Men Love War.” He says that some men dislike talking about war not because they were traumatized by it, but because they “loved it.” He likens the “great and seductive beauty” of killing to an ecstatic spiritual or sexual experience. Anecdotes like these—and humanity’s bloody history—seem superficially to confirm the claim that at least some males are “bad apples” who enjoy hurting others.
HOW MOST SOLDIERS ACTUALLY FEEL ABOUT KILLING
Although some men enjoy war some of the time, studies of combat veterans suggest that most find war traumatic. As many as one in two soldiers involuntarily urinate or defecate when first plunged into a battle. During World War II, the U.S. armed forces screened potential draftees for mental fitness, and yet more than half a million soldiers—mostly men—suffered a psychological breakdown during the war.
In 1946, the psychiatrists Roy Swank and Walter Marchand reported that after thirty days of continuous fighting, most American infantrymen started showing signs of “combat exhaustion,” including insomnia, tremors, and intense anxiety. After sixty days, 98 percent of the soldiers suffered full-blown psychiatric symptoms. Their thinking and responses to stimuli became sluggish and disordered. They became emotionally numb and apathetic, with some succumbing to a near-catatonic “vegetative phase.”
Many men apparently fear killing as well as being killed. At the end of World War II, Samuel L.A. Marshall, a U.S. Army brigadier general and historian, polled four hundred companies of infantrymen who fought in Europe and the Pacific. He found that only 15 to 20 percent of the veterans fired their weapons in combat, even when ordered to do so. Marshall concluded that most soldiers have a profound aversion to taking a life. “The average and normally healthy individual,” Marshall declares in his 1947 book Men Against Fire, “has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.”
Critics have questioned whether Marshall surveyed as many troops as he claimed, but his results have been corroborated by reports from World War I, the American Civil War, the Napoleonic wars, and other conflicts. A survey of World War II fighter pilots found that most never shot down or even fired at an enemy plane. Less than 1 percent of the pilots accounted for 30 to 40 percent of the enemy planes destroyed. In an experiment carried out by the Prussian Army in the late eighteenth century, infantrymen struck a target seventy-five yards away with 60 percent of their shots. Yet in one battle, hundreds of Prussian soldiers shot only thirty-two Turkish troops at a distance of thirty paces. During the Battle of Wissembourg in 1870, French troops discharged 48,000 rounds but struck only 404 Germans. This “hit-ratio” of roughly one per one hundred rounds was typical of infantry battles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—in part, perhaps, because many soldiers fired away from the enemy.
This remarkable evidence of soldiers’ empathy for the enemy has been brought to light not by a pacifist scholar but by Dave Grossman, a former lieutenant colonel and Army Ranger and professor of psychology at West Point. In his books On Killing and On Combat, published in 1996 and 2004, Grossman emphasizes that for most men combat is hellish. Although many soldiers are initially exhilarated by killing the enemy, he says, later they often feel profound revulsion and remorse, which may mutate into post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other ailments. Psychological troubles experienced by many veterans are evidence of what Grossman calls a “powerful, innate human resistance toward killing one’s own species.”
This resistance can be overcome by intensified training, direct commands from officers, long-range weapons, and propaganda that glorifies the soldier’s cause and dehumanizes the enemy. “With the proper conditioning and the proper circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can and will kill,” Grossman writes. Indeed, General Marshall’s report on low firing rates during World War II provoked the U.S. Army into revamping its training. Drill sergeants started ordering recruits to chant “kill, kill, kill” while exercising. Shooting drills conditioned soldiers to fire instantly and repeatedly at targets. The targets became much more realistic, with bull’s-eyes replaced by man-shaped targets that in some cases squirted red paint when struck. More recently, the armed forces have begun training soldiers in computer-generated virtual realities that precisely reproduce combat conditions.
As a result of these and other changes in combat training, firing rates among infantrymen rose to 55 percent in the Korean War and as high as 90 percent in the Vietnam War. Grossman suspects that this surge in firing rates—together with the unpopularity of the war—contributed to the high rate of PTSD among Vietnam veterans. As many as 25 percent of the 2.8 million Americans who served in Vietnam displayed some symptoms of PTSD, including anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. A study released in 2007 concluded that 9 percent of all Vietnam veterans still suffer from persistent trauma.
RAND Corporation, a quasi-governmental think tank, reported in 2008 that almost 20 percent of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or depression. Sebastian Junger, following up on the soldiers he lived with in Afghanistan, found that many were haunted by their experiences there and sought solace in drugs and alcohol. Combat may excite some men some of the time, but it leaves many people scarred for life, further undermining Junger’s claim that men are “hardwired” for war.
Junger is not the only war reporter to fear that we have a troubling affinity for war. Chris Hedges, who has witnessed war’s horrors firsthand in Central America, the Middle East, and the former Yugoslavia, reached a similar conclusion in his 2003 book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He compares war to a potent drug to which many people, including himself, become addicted, because it “can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living,” and help us escape “the shallowness and vapidity of much of our lives.” He fears that war “will always be part of the human condition.”
I haven’t experienced war as Hedges has, but I have an inkling of what he’s talking about. On September 11, 2001, when I stood on a hill and saw smoke rising from the Manhattan skyline thirty miles south of my home, my fear and horror was tinged with a strange exhilaration at the sheer spectacle of the event. As I walked home, the trees, sky, and clouds seemed preternaturally bright, as if a veil that normally dims my vision had been torn away. Others have told me that they felt the same sensation that day.
So yes, war—like any cataclysmic event—can rip us out of our daily routine and make us feel more alive, if only by reminding us of life’s fleeting nature. As Hedges documents, war can also test our courage and make us feel part of a grand narrative that lifts us out of our relatively petty, humdrum concerns. My grandfather re-enlisted in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, although he was in his forties. After drifting through the Depression without finding a satisfying job, he was, according to my father, eager to feel the same sense of purpose that he had experienced as a sailor during World War I.
But hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and other disasters can evoke profound emotional reactions in us, and test survivors’ fortitude, and yet no sane person wants them to happen. Hedges knows as well as anyone that war, ultimately, does not give us meaning. “War is brutal and impersonal,” he writes. “It mocks the fantasy of individual heroism and the absurdity of utopian goals like democracy.” War, in the end, annihilates meaning, because it renders individual lives worthless. That is why it traumatizes so many soldiers.
“THE 2 PERCENT WHO LIKE IT”
But what about those bad apples? A small subset of men do indeed seem to take pleasure in war, including killing. Dave Grossman notes that a few soldiers possess “the capacity for the levelheaded participation in combat that we as a society glorify and that Hollywood would have us believe that all men possess.” These are not, for the most part, crazed, compulsive killers but rather men who “if pushed or if given a legitimate reason, will kill without regret or remorse.” They may be excellent soldiers when well-trained and overseen by competent commanders, but they are also more likely than other men to use excessive force and commit atrocities.
Grossman calls these men “the 2 percent who like it.” The 2 percent figure comes from the aforementioned finding by the psychiatrists Swank and Marchand that 98 percent of World War II veterans who endured sixty days of combat suffered a psychiatric breakdown. The flip side of this statistic is that 2 percent of the veterans, far from being traumatized by intense, prolonged combat, enjoyed it. Swank and Marchand diagnosed the soldiers in this group with “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” To put it bluntly, combat didn’t drive these men crazy because they were crazy to begin with.
Today, some psychiatrists prefer the slightly less derogatory terms “sociopathy” or “antisocial personality disorder” to psychopathy. These syndromes all refer to the same cluster of traits: extreme aggression, lack of empathy for others, and lack of remorse for one’s actions. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM), which purports to reflect the consensus of American psychiatry, estimates that 3 percent of all males show symptoms of antisocial personality disorder and about half as many females. These percentages are suggestively close to Grossman’s 2 percent figure.
Psychopaths lack the innate empathy that most humans—and even, to a lesser degree, chimpanzees and bonobos—start to display in childhood. Psychopaths “lie and manipulate yet feel no compunction or regrets—in fact, they don’t feel particularly deeply about anything at all,” write the neuroscientists Kent Kiehl and Joshua Buckholtz in a 2010 article in Scientific American. Psychopaths not only lack empathy; they often have difficulty recognizing fearful or sad expressions in others. Psychotherapy, especially involving groups, is considered counterproductive for psychopaths, because “insights into others’ vulnerabilities become opportunities to hone their manipulation skills,” Kiehl and Buckholtz conclude. They estimate that as many as 35 percent of U.S. prisoners have psychopathic tendencies.
There is evidence that psychopathy—like schizophrenia, manic depression, autism, and other mental disorders—may be partially inherited. The Twins Early Development Study has tracked the progress of thousands of pairs of twins born in England between 1994 and 1996. In 2005 researchers asked teachers to fill out questionnaires about the behavior of 3,687 pairs of twins. About 5 percent of the children showed some degree of psychopathy. If one identical twin was psychopathic, the other was very likely to be as well; the correlation between fraternal twins was much smaller. The researchers estimated the heritability of psychopathy at 81 percent, roughly the heritability of height.
Some caveats: psychopathy is not a discrete syndrome, which you either have or don’t have; it comes in degrees. And far from being compulsively violent, people with psychopathic traits can be quite successful, especially in fields that reward ruthlessness, such as business, law, and politics. As Grossman points out, men who lack empathy and remorse can make excellent soldiers; they are not all bloodthirsty maniacs.
It is nonetheless tempting to blame war and other forms of violence on a small number of psychopathic thugs, and there is even circumstantial support for that conjecture. The political scientist Bruce Jones, a former U.N. official, estimates that 2 percent of Hutu males above the age of thirteen carried out almost all of the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda in the early 1990s. According to the political scientist Benjamin Valentino, small percentages of men—including leaders and soldiers—are responsible for much of the slaughter of the twentieth century, including mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, the Balkans, and Guatemala.
In her 2007 book Evil Genes, the biomedical engineer Barbara Oakley argues that Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other notorious tyrants displayed symptoms of psychopathy. Hitler was apparently one of the 2 percent who like it. During World War I, he served in the 16th Bavarian Reserve, virtually every original member of which was wounded or killed. Hitler himself was wounded several times, but fought to the war’s bitter end, and he later called his service in World War I “the greatest of all experiences.”
But in the famous 1963 essay in which she coined the term “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt contends that Adolf Eichmann and other Nazi war criminals were “neither perverted nor sadistic” but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who led the U.S. into Afghanistan and Iraq, show no signs of a personal affinity for violence. Both men took pains to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. Bush did not even play competitive sports in college. He was a cheerleader. Neither of these men were bad apples, as I have defined the term, and yet they plunged the United States into two wars.
The cataclysmic wars and genocides of the twentieth century—and indeed all of human history and prehistory—demonstrate that, under the right circumstances, virtually anyone can act like a psychopathic killer. As Grossman notes, training and propaganda can overcome men’s sympathy for and aversion to harming others. Neither psychopathy nor any other genetic explanation can account for war’s emergence some ten thousand years ago, or its on-again-off-again pattern since then.
Genetic factors cannot even account for patterns of violent crime, which vary enormously both between different regions and over time in the same region. No purely biological model can explain why, for example, recent U.S. homicide rates are ten times lower than in El Salvador and ten times higher than in Japan.
THE WARRIOR GENE
These facts have not discouraged scientists from seeking genes that predispose some people to violence, nor have they stopped the media from hyping this research. In the 1960s, for example, British scientists claimed that men born with two Y chromosomes instead of one were prone to violent outbursts. This so-called “XYY syndrome” affects about one in every thousand men. The British study was based on nine men incarcerated in a mental hospital for violent patients. Other researchers, also focusing on institutionalized patients and criminals, quickly claimed to have found evidence that XYY men were hyper-aggressive “supermales” at risk of becoming violent criminals and even serial killers.
The XYY-supermale claim was propagated by the New York Times and other mainstream media, enshrined in biology and social science textbooks, and even written into plots for films, novels, and television shows. Meanwhile, follow-up studies of non-institutionalized XYY men failed to corroborate claims that they are prone to violence. In 1993, the National Academy of Sciences concluded after an exhaustive review that there is no correlation between the XYY syndrome and violent behavior.
By then, however, scientists were reporting a link between violent aggression and a gene on the X chromosome that produces the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), which regulates the function of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. The correlation first emerged from studies of a large Dutch family whose male members were mildly retarded and extremely violent. Two were arsonists, one tried to run over an employer with a car, another raped his sister and tried to stab the warden of a mental hospital with a pitchfork. The men all lacked monoamine oxidase A, suggesting that they possessed a defective version of the MAOA gene.
Many groups tried and failed to find this flawed version of the MAOA gene in other populations. In 2002, however, British researchers reported links between violent aggression and a common variant, or allele, of the MAOA gene, called MAOA-L, which produces low levels of the MAOA enzyme. The correlation was allegedly stronger if carriers had experienced some sort of trauma as children. Two follow-up studies failed to confirm the British group’s claim, but again that did not stop the media from touting what was now being called “the warrior gene.”
Race became a factor in warrior gene research in 2007, when geneticists in New Zealand reported that MAOA-L occurs in 56 percent of Maori men. “It is well recognized,” the researchers commented, “that historically Maori were fearless warriors.” The researchers’ racial profiling was based on a study of forty-six men, who needed to have only one Maori parent to be defined as Maori. MAOA-L is reportedly less common among Caucasians (34 percent) and Hispanics (29 percent), but even more common among Africans (59 percent) and Chinese (77 percent).
In 2010, ABC News and other media hailed an experiment that supposedly demonstrated that MAOA-L carriers are “born to be violent,” as a National Geographic broadcast put it. The experiment, carried out at Brown University, examines whether MAOA-L carriers are more likely than non-carriers to respond with “behavioral aggression” toward someone they think has cheated them out of money they had earned in a laboratory test. “Behavioral aggression” is defined as making the “cheater” consume hot sauce.
Even disregarding the issue of whether giving someone hot sauce counts as “physical aggression,” the study provides little to no evidence for the warrior gene, since the difference between carriers and non-carriers is minuscule. The researchers examined seventy subjects, half of whom carried the warrior gene. Seventy-five percent of the warrior gene carriers “meted out aggression” when cheated—but so did 62 percent of the non-carriers. When subjects were cheated out of smaller amounts of money, there was no difference between the two groups.
The warrior gene just does not live up to its name. If it did, the whole world—and China in particular, if the racial statistics mentioned above are accurate—would be wracked by violence. My guess is that the warrior gene claims will eventually be discredited, because that’s the pattern with attempts to link complex behavioral traits to specific genes. Over the last two decades, researchers have announced the discovery of “genes for” male homosexuality, religious belief, gambling, alcoholism, heroin addiction, novelty-seeking, impulsivity, anxiety, anorexia nervosa, and seasonal affective disorder as well as violent aggression. So far, not one of these claims has been confirmed by follow-up studies.
These failures should not be surprising, since all of these complex traits and disorders are almost certainly caused by many different genes interacting with many different environmental factors. Moreover, geneticists’ methodology is highly susceptible to false positives. Researchers select a group of people who share a trait and then start searching for a gene that occurs not universally and exclusively, but simply more often in this group than in a control group. If you look at enough genes and traits, particularly poorly defined ones like “aggression,” you will almost inevitably find a correlation simply through chance. Scientists will no doubt keep announcing—and the media will keep hyping—the discovery of genes that make some people “natural warriors” or “bad apples.” But don’t believe these claims or accept their implication that war and other forms of violence are biological problems.
Many pessimists, I suspect, adhere to the bad apple theory of warfare. They believe that war keeps breaking out because the worst among us, the bad apples, invariably drag the rest of us down to their level. The Yanomamö take this attitude, according to their chief chronicler, Napoleon Chagnon. “Almost everyone, including the Yanomamö, regards war as repugnant and would prefer that it did not exist,” he writes. “Like us, they are more than willing to quit—if the bad guys also quit. If we could all get rid of the bad guys, there wouldn’t be any war.”
According to this view, even if the vast majority of us are decent, empathetic, and inclined toward peace, humanity will always be plagued by warmongers such as Genghis Khan, Hitler, and Osama bin Laden, who have violent ambitions and are charismatic enough to attract followers, who may be bad apples as well. We good guys, goes the thinking, must remain armed to protect ourselves against those bad guys, sometimes with preemptive attacks. By this logic, war and militarism will never end.
But this assertion does not withstand scrutiny. A few individuals do indeed seem to be incorrigibly aggressive, violent, and lacking in empathy for others. Bad apples. Fine. But war itself, rather than an innate lust for violence, turns most people into bad guys. When peace breaks out, bad guys are magically transformed into good guys, as history has demonstrated over and over again. England, France, Spain, Germany, and other European states clashed violently for centuries, but war between these members of the European Union has become unimaginable. My father, who as a young man fought the Japanese, now drives a Japanese car and watches a Japanese television. He and my sister Patty have vacationed in Vietnam, and my daughter Skye has a friend whose parents are Vietnamese American.
WHAT ABOUT BRAIN CHIPS, EMPOWERED WOMEN, OR OTHER BIO-SOLUTIONS?
Biological theories of war have inspired a slew of bio-solutions, which aim to repress, vent, or redirect our allegedly innate urge to fight. One of the most radical was proposed in the late 1960s by the Yale neurophysiologist José Delgado. Delgado, ironically, was one of the original signers of the Seville Statement, which repudiates biological theories of war. But he suggested that war and other forms of violence could be curbed by implanting radio-controlled electrodes in peoples’ brains.
Delgado was the pioneer—and flamboyant promoter—of this technology. In 1963, he stood in a Spanish bullring as a bull with a radio-equipped array of electrodes implanted in its brain charged toward him. Delgado pushed a button on a radio transmitter, causing the “stimoceiver” to zap a region in the bull’s brain supposedly associated with aggression. The bull stopped in its tracks and trotted away. The media marveled at Delgado’s transformation of an aggressive beast into a real-life version of Ferdinand the Bull, the gentle hero of the popular children’s story.
In other experiments, Delgado manipulated the limbs and emotions of cats, monkeys, chimpanzees, and humans (most of them mental patients) with implanted electrodes. In 1969, he extolled the potential benefits of brain-stimulation technologies, which would help us create “a less cruel, happier, and better man.” In the 1970s, brain-implant research got bogged down in technical and ethical issues, but it has recently made a comeback, as scientists have begun exploring the potential of implanted devices for treating epilepsy, depression, paralysis, and other disorders of the nervous system. The Pentagon has become a major funder of research on brain-implant devices, which could in principle boost soldiers’ physical and mental powers—and make them easier for commanders to control. This technology raises an obvious question: who gets the brain implant, and who gets the remote controller?
In the heyday of eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some scientists and commentators proposed that we reduce our aggression through selective breeding, just as breeders of dogs, cats, cattle, and other domestic animals have done. The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name, but recent research on genes associated with inherited diseases has resuscitated the idea that we can engineer ourselves to be nicer. Another possibility, say some, is pacifying people with drugs called serenics. One possible candidate is the hormone oxytocin, which has been linked to primates’ feelings of affection and trust.
Other bio-solutions are cultural rather than strictly physiological. In his 1906 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” William James suggests channeling young men’s martial urges into a “war against nature,” which would entail fishing, logging, digging tunnels, and other risky, invigorating work. The biologist and Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz, in his 1963 book On Aggression, proposes that societies vent their aggression through “sporting contests” both within and between nations. Some scholars have taken this proposal seriously enough to test it, and they have found no correlation between societies’ propensity for war and their fondness for sports.
If more sports doesn’t make us less violent, what about more sex? During the 1960s, counterculture pundits claimed that imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism, and other forms of violent social control stemmed from repressed sexual desire. The implication of this hypothesis—expressed in the hippie slogan “Make love, not war”—was that more sex would mean less war. This meme has been revived by research on the sexy, peaceful bonobos. But there is no evidence that violent human societies engage in less sex than peaceful ones, or vice versa. If anything, some men and women find war sexually arousing.
The most serious bio-solution entails giving women more responsibility in contemporary human culture. Because innate male aggression is the primary cause of war, the reasoning goes, bestowing more political power on women will decrease the risk of war. But women are not innate pacifists any more than men are innate warriors. Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi were formidable war leaders. Although 99 percent of the combatants in all wars have been male, women can also make ferocious warriors if given the opportunity.
One remarkable example is a female regiment founded in the eighteenth century in the west African kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin). In 1727, a Dahomean king formed an all-female troop that included as many as six thousand women and lasted until 1892, when France conquered Dahomey. The women warriors were renowned for their courage and cruelty. Their favorite weapon was a gigantic folding razor with a blade over two feet long, with which these soldiers decapitated and castrated enemies.
During World War I, a Russian peasant named Maria Botchkareva organized a female “Battalion of Death” consisting of several hundred female soldiers. Russian leaders hoped that the female warriors would inspire, or shame, males to fight more boldly against the German Army. The tactic failed. The female fighters mounted several advances on German positions, but few of their exhausted, demoralized male comrades joined them. Botchkareva complained bitterly that “the men knew no shame.”
Women have contributed to war indirectly as well. During World War I, women in England and America organized a campaign to shame men into joining the war effort. The women carried white feathers in their pockets and thrust them at men dressed in civilian clothes. After they received the vote in the U.S. and elsewhere, women did not favor less hawkish leaders and policies (as some male opponents of suffrage had feared).
The link between war and male dominance—like the link between war and every other factor—is tenuous. Some male-dominated societies are peaceful. Women only obtained the right to vote throughout war-averse Switzerland in the 1990s. Conversely, the United States has remained militaristic over the past century in spite of making progress in the direction of gender parity.
Biologically-based solutions cannot solve war, any more than biologically-based theories can explain it. “We would be lucky,” the political scientist Joshua Goldstein remarks in his 2001 book War and Gender, to find that war is totally determined by our biology. We could just “find the hormone or neurotransmitter” that inhibits lethal behavior and “add it to the water supply like fluoride. (Instant peace, just add water.) Unfortunately, real biology is a lot more complicated and less deterministic.” So the question remains: why did war begin in the first place? And what explains why it breaks out in certain times and places, but not in others?