MY SURVEYS

Not many people share this faith. I first realized how pessimistic most people are about the prospects for permanent peace in 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. An Episcopal priest in my hometown, Frank Geer, asked me to speak to his congregation about whether war is “in our genes.” I told Frank’s parishioners that war seems to be both primordial and perhaps partially innate; chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, engage in deadly group raids, and so did prehistoric humans. Some men seem to get a kick out of killing; the New York Times had just quoted an Army sharpshooter saying, “We had a great day. We killed a lot of people.” Nonetheless I ended with the obligatory upbeat coda: if the capacity for war is in our genes, so is the capacity for peace. We will end war someday, I said. The only question is how, and how soon.

I expected my neighbors to share my hope, just as most shared my dovish politics. But when I asked the sixty or so audience members if they thought humanity would ever abolish war, only a dozen—hesitantly—raised their hands. This was no anomaly. Ever since that evening, I’ve obsessively asked people whether they think war will end, once and for all. I’ve carried out polls whenever I have a captive audience—at talks I’ve given around the U.S. and in Europe, on the internet, at parties, even in the street. Over 80 percent of those I’ve queried—liberal, conservative, male, female, affluent, poor, educated, uneducated—say that war will never end.

A survey I carried out for the show “RadioLab” was typical. I approached a score of pedestrians on the streets of Hoboken, where I teach, and asked them if humans would ever stop fighting wars. I got three tentative Yeses and seventeen immediate, adamant Nos. “No,” replied Mark, a sixty-year-old dentist, “because of greed, and one-upmanship, and the hierarchy of power, in which everybody wants more.” War “is a universal law of life,” agreed Patel, a twenty-four-year-old computer scientist. “To get something, you have to fight for something.”

Young people seem especially fatalistic. I teach a course called “War and Human Nature” at my university. One assignment requires my students to ask ten or more classmates: “Will humans ever stop fighting wars, once and for all? Why or why not?” More than 90 percent of the four hundred or so respondents said “no.” The justifications were diverse: “We’re naturally evil” was especially common. “People are always going to hate and try to destroy ‘inferiors.’” “Monkeys fight with each other and because humans are animals too, we follow that pattern.” “Men are power crazy and women are not in power.” “People would just get bored with no war.”

Even more disconcertingly, some of those who answered “Yes” revealed in their explanations that they were actually pessimists: “Yes, because in the future the human species will unite to fight alien species.” “Yes, but it will only happen under the same one religion, because one’s beliefs are a driving force.” “Yes. When someone (Korea) launches a nuclear weapon. Then we’ll all stop messing with each other and keep it cool.” “Yes. Humanity will end wars once everyone is killed.” So, war will cease after we band together to fight alien invaders, we all convert to the same religion, we undergo a nuclear attack, or we all die.

Many authorities on war share this lack of faith. One of the Hudson Highland’s chief cultural attractions is the West Point Museum of the U.S. Military Academy. The museum offers a tour of the entire history of weaponry: Paleolithic stone axes, slings, chariots, crossbows, cannons (which during the Civil War were forged in Philipstown, where I live), blunderbusses, pistols, grenades, mortars, howitzers, machine guns, tanks, and bombers. The tour culminates with a replica of Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The displays are weirdly reminiscent of those showing the evolution of life, with increasingly deadly weapons substituted for organisms.

Proclamations throughout the museum heighten the sense of war’s inevitability. One, unattributed, reads: “Unquestionably, war-making is an aspect of human nature which will continue as nations attempt to impose their will upon each other.” Others quote Churchill: “Nothing is worse than war? Dishonor is worse than war. Slavery is worse than war”; Thucydides: “Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on”; and Plato: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Actually, the museum got this final attribution wrong. The philosopher George Santayana uttered these words as a bitter rebuke to descriptions of World War I as “the war to end all wars.”

The U.S. Commander-in-Chief, President Barack Obama, also seems to lack faith in our ability to overcome war any time soon. On December 1, 2009, I heard a fleet of helicopters thrumming past my home, bearing Obama and his retinue to West Point. There, Obama told an assembly of cadets that, after months of deliberation, he had decided to send thirty thousand more troops to Afghanistan. Nine days later, while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, Obama declared: “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man.” He added: “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.” Obama seemed to be echoing the message promoted at the West Point Museum: We have always fought, and we always will.

SEEING WAR AS A CHOICE

I wrote this book to challenge that gloomy attitude, and to make the case that the end of war is possible, and even imminent. My optimism stems not from wishful thinking—or not just from wishful thinking—but from scientific investigations of warfare. Since I preached to my Philipstown neighbors in 2003, I have immersed myself much more deeply in research on war, and as a result I have become much more upbeat about the prospects for permanent peace. What was once a faith based on moral conviction has become a belief based on empirical evidence.

War seems, at first glance, to defy scientific analysis. Scientists have tried, in vain, to trace war to a single cause or set of causes—whether genetic, ecological, economic, political, or cultural. This failure is not surprising, given war’s enormous complexity and mutability. Think about it with me for a moment: if war is defined as deadly, organized fighting between two or more groups, that definition includes the feuding of Yanomamö hunters in Amazonia, the clash of competing chiefdoms on Easter Island, Alexander’s conquest of Persia, the Crusades, the Napoleonic wars, World Wars I and II, the civil conflicts rending Colombia and Sudan, and a thousand other skirmishes and full-on battles. Consider the differences in combatants, weaponry, tactics, politics, purported causes, and cultural contexts just in wars involving Americans: from the War of Independence to the Indian Wars, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first and second wars against Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the air war against Libya…

But investigations into war do yield a few compelling insights. First, contrary to what I suggested to my neighbors in 2003, war is not innate. Let me say that again: we are not hardwired for war. Evidence of lethal group violence dates back not to the emergence of the Homo genus millions of years ago, nor to the emergence of our species hundreds of thousands of years ago, but to less than thirteen thousand years ago, shortly before the dawn of civilization. Moreover, from prehistory up through the present, many societies have resisted the allure of war and militarism, belying the notion of a biological drive or an instinct that impels us to fight. In fact, odd as it may sound, humanity as a whole has recently turned away from war, at least by some yardsticks. Annual war-related casualties have dropped more than ten-fold since the cataclysmic first half of the twentieth century—even as the world’s population has surged.

The most important lesson to emerge from research on lethal conflict is both subtle and profound: war is not something that happens to us. We make it happen. In other words, war is not foisted on us by forces beyond our control, whether innate male aggression, competition for scarce resources, or entrenched cultural attitudes. Wars all begin with human decisions. Choices. Of course, throughout history some people—chiefs, pharaohs, kings, emperors, autocrats, presidents, and warlords—have had the power to impose their choices (for good or ill) on others. But a crucial reason for the decline in war over the past half century is the worldwide surge in democracy since the end of World War II. Democracy does not guarantee peace. In fact, the desire for freedom can result in conflict. But more people are living more freely today than at any time in history, and they are choosing peace over war.

Forecasting human affairs is a tricky, paradoxical business. Isaac Asimov made this point in his great science-fiction series Foundation. A central character is the brilliant mathematician Hari Seldon, who creates a computer model that predicts the future of societies, just as statistical mechanics predicts the behavior of gases. The model is limited in one crucial way: if people learn about their destiny, they may avoid it by changing their behavior. Seldon’s model predicts the collapse of the galactic empire into a catastrophic civil war, but he never makes his prophecy public, and so it comes true.

If Seldon had revealed his forecast, war might have broken out anyway; factions within the empire might have launched preemptive strikes against each other instead of pursuing peace. Human choice—free will—is the wild card, the asterisk that must be appended to all predictions about humanity. So I am not offering a prediction here so much as a prescription: we can end war if we want and choose to end it.

NOT EVEN WRONG

Scholars often squabble over war’s definition. Should the term include chimpanzee assaults? Feuds among hunter-gatherers? State-sponsored genocide, like the Nazi slaughter of Jews? Or just conflicts between uniformed soldiers? In this book I use the term broadly to describe lethal group violence of all kinds. I do not want to be accused, as some scholars are, of minimizing the problem of war in our evolutionary past—or in the present, for that matter—by defining the term too narrowly. When I talk about the end of war, however, I mean first and foremost war (and even the threat of war) between nations. I envision military clashes between any two nations becoming as inconceivable as war is now between Germany and France, the U.S. and Canada, even New York and New Jersey. My hope, and expectation, is that other forms of large-scale violence—genocide, civil wars, insurgencies, terrorist attacks, and killings by criminal gangs—will eventually become rare as well.

I believe war will end for scientific reasons; I believe war must end for moral reasons. War has always struck me as not only wrong but crazy, absurd, contradictory—even when fought for seemingly noble reasons. The cognitive dissonance that war generates in me has grown over the years, and it stems in part from my growing affection and admiration for my species, in spite of all its flaws. Our remarkable progress—scientific, technological, medical, political, moral—makes war’s persistence all the more unfathomable.

Even in war zones, combatants routinely carry out acts of heroic kindness and generosity toward each other. Soldiers and government officials often complain that journalists fail to report positive news, but feel-good stories are staples of war journalism. Take, for example, an article published in the New York Times in 2010. The reporter, C.J. Chivers, describes how a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter crew flew an Afghan woman enduring a prolonged, painful labor to a Red Cross hospital, where doctors helped her deliver a healthy boy. The story is straight, unsentimental reporting—Chivers notes that the helicopter crew only undertook the mission after ensuring that no nearby American or Afghan units needed assistance—but moving nonetheless.

But consider these incidents involving U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2010: in February, American and Afghan special forces stormed a home in southeastern Afghanistan, shooting to death two Afghan men and three women, two of whom were pregnant. The soldiers initially claimed that the women were already dead of knife wounds when they entered the house, but Afghan investigators claimed that the soldiers had dug bullets out of the women’s bodies to cover up the shooting. Although they denied the cover-up, U.S. military officials eventually accepted responsibility for the women’s deaths.

That same month, U.S. drone operators in Nevada reported spotting armed Afghans traveling in three trucks in Oruzgan province. A helicopter fired missiles at the vehicles, which turned out to be carrying not militants but civilians, including women and children. The attack killed twenty-three people and wounded twelve others. The U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal, apologized for the “mistake.”

While reading about these sickening events in the New York Times, I was also following the trial of Steven Hayes, who together with an accomplice, broke into a home in Connecticut belonging to a husband and wife and their two daughters. After ransacking the house, the men raped and strangled the wife, raped one daughter and then doused her and her sister with gasoline and set them on fire. The men savagely beat the father, but he alone survived. After a protracted, expensive trial, a jury convicted Hayes, and the judge sentenced him to death, more than three years after his crime.

It struck me, reading about the trial, that my country treats a rapist-murderer with more judicious, careful thought than innocent civilians in a foreign war zone. This contrast encapsulates war’s insanity. Even when civilians are spared, even when soldiers fight justly for a just cause, like the defeat of fascism, war demeans us. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli liked to disparage truly bad theories as “not even wrong.” That is an apt description for war. Even when it’s seemingly “just” or “right,” war is so wrong that it is not even wrong.

In the end, no matter what science reveals about war’s roots, I think we are morally bound to seek its end or reduction, just as we must try to abolish rape and racism in spite of any alleged genetic underpinnings for these behaviors. Even the most hawkish fatalists acknowledge as much. So let’s say researchers confirm that our ancestors waged war for millions of years, and that natural selection favored genes that predispose some males to enjoy chopping people into little bits. These findings, however daunting they would be, would not let us off the hook. But science fortunately reveals that war, far from being deeply rooted in our nature, is a recent human invention that many societies have relinquished. We have no good excuses to keep fighting.

ENDING WAR VERSUS CURING CANCER

Optimists have proclaimed the imminence of peace many times in the past. In 1848, John Stuart Mill suggested that commerce between nations was “rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which act in opposition to it.” The British journalist and politician Norman Angell offered similar arguments in 1909 in his international best seller The Great Illusion, which asserted that the nations of Europe no longer had any rational reason to fight.

Never mind that World War I actually bore out Angell’s claim that war’s destructive consequences vastly outweigh its benefits, even for victors. Past prophecies of world peace raise a legitimate question: if a predicted event keeps failing to occur, at what point should we stop believing the prediction? It depends on what’s being predicted. The chemist Linus Pauling, the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, devoted himself to ending both war and cancer. He won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for explaining the chemical bond in quantum terms. In 1962 he won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to bring about a U.S.—Soviet ban on atmospheric nuclear testing. Pauling spent the final decades of his life seeking ways to prevent and cure cancer.

In his 1958 book No More War! Pauling wrote: “We are living through that unique epoch in the history of civilization when war will cease to be the means of settling great world problems.” He urged the U.N. to form a “World Peace Research Organization” dedicated to solving “problems of the kind that have in the past led to war.” Twenty-five years later, in the preface to the 1983 edition of No More War!, Pauling expressed hope that after another twenty-five years “there will be no need to republish the book, because the goal of world peace will have been achieved, militarism and nuclear weapons will have been brought under control, and the threat of world destruction will finally have been abolished.”

2008 has come and gone, and we still live in the shadow of war and militarism. Cancer also continues to ravage humanity, in spite of the efforts of Pauling (felled by prostate cancer in 1994) and many others. Given the poor record of cancer research, we should certainly be skeptical when scientists say a cure is imminent, as they have countless times over the past few decades. But we don’t mock them or tell them to abandon their search just because they have failed so far. Cancer is such a scourge that we could never—nor should we—cease trying to overcome it.

Like cancer, war causes immense suffering, and it diverts vast amounts of human energy, intelligence, and resources away from other dire problems. But war and cancer differ in one crucial way: whereas cancer is something that happens to us, war is entirely our creation. This sets war apart not only from diseases like cancer but also from droughts, storms, floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis. Yes, we can stop smoking to curb cancer rates. We can reduce our consumption of fossil fuels to make droughts, floods, and hurricanes less likely. We can construct buildings and early-warning systems to minimize the devastation from earthquakes and tsunamis. But for the foreseeable future, these natural disasters will continue to afflict us. War, on the other hand, could end tomorrow through a simple act of will on the part of a relatively small number of leaders and combatants around the world.

Pessimists—who sometimes call themselves realists—dismiss world peace as a utopian or even religious fantasy. But the end of war does not mean the end of all conflict, as skeptics often imply. If large-scale military violence ceases, the world will still be roiled by economic, political, ethnic, and religious disputes. Most people will simply find ways to resolve differences without killing each other by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions.

STAYING UPBEAT

One of my classrooms offers a magnificent view of the Hudson River and the Manhattan skyline. This perspective comes in handy when I talk to my students about war. When they tell me that people will fight as long as some have more stuff than others, or as long as people hold different political and religious views, I point across the river at the skyscrapers of New York and say: that disproves what you are saying. New Yorkers include people of every possible race, ethnic background, and creed, poor people and rich, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and atheists, right-wing Republicans, and hard-core lefties. New Yorkers bicker incessantly about many things, but with rare exceptions they do not settle disputes by bombing or machine-gunning each other.

I have moments—days—of doubt. One began when I asked students in my “War and Human Nature” course if they had been in a physical fight within the previous five years. I wanted to make the point that violence is rare, but to my dismay virtually all of the students—including several women!—raised their hands. When I walked into my house that evening, I found my son Mac in the living room gleefully assembling an “Airsoft” sniper rifle—an electric-powered BB gun modeled after the M-4 used by many U.S. troops—that had just arrived in the mail. Mac participates in Airsoft war games with scores of other camouflaged enthusiasts, many of them veterans of real combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also eagerly consumes documentaries and books about war. Once, when I expressed puzzlement over his fascination with war, Mac reminded me that my grandfather and father were soldiers; I, the peacenik, am the oddball.

When my faith in a warless future wavers, I remind myself that in the late 1980s humanity still faced the threat of a global nuclear holocaust that could destroy not just the U.S. and U.S.S.R., but all life on Earth. Then, incredibly, the Soviet Union dissolved and the cold war ended peacefully. Apartheid ended in South Africa without significant violence, and democracy has spread elsewhere as well. President Obama and the president of Russia have begun slashing their nuclear arsenals, and Obama is carrying out his campaign promise to pull American troops out of Iraq. Early in 2011, unarmed protesters in Tunisia and Egypt toppled two corrupt, repressive regimes, inspiring similar protests throughout the Islamic world. Yes, some of these protests provoked violent counter-reactions. But humanity, in starts and fits, still seems to be headed toward a world with less and less war.

To keep my mood upbeat, I pin anti-war slogans to the bulletin board facing my desk. One is a sticker from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a venerable anti-war group, which reads: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” Beside that is a full-page ad that Yoko Ono placed in the New York Times on the fortieth anniversary of its original publication as a protest against the Vietnam War. The ad proclaims in huge type WAR IS OVER, and adds in small letters at the bottom of the page, “if you want it.” Wishful thinking, perhaps, but also—I hope to persuade you—scientifically supportable statements.

If you find this book totally persuasive, I’d be thrilled. But my more realistic goal is to start a conversation about why we fight and how we can stop. I invite you pessimists, especially, to question your attitudes toward war. I hope to provoke you into talking to others about their views on these questions. If you’re unimpressed by the diagnoses and prescriptions offered in this book, come up with new ones! If we all want peace—and every sane person does—surely we’re smart enough to achieve it. Or rather, choose it. When we start believing that we can end war, we’re already well on our way.