ENDNOTES
Introduction: Living in Wartime
11 “We had a great day. We killed a lot of people”: “A Nation at War: In the Field,” by Dexter Filkins, the New York Times, March 29, 2003.
14 “Only the dead”: for a discussion of this quote, often attributed to Plato, see this essay by the amateur philosophy scholar Bernard Suzanne,
plato-dialogues.org/faq/faq008.htm. The film
Black Hawk Down attributes the quote to Plato, as does General Douglas MacArthur in a 1962 speech at West Point. But according to Suzanne, scholars have not found the quote in Plato’s writings. It occurs in a book of essays by the British philosopher George Santayana,
Soliloquies in England (Scribners, 1924), p. 102. After overhearing British veterans exulting at the end of World War I, Santayana comments: “Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
18 The story is straight, unsentimental: “Reassuring Hands: A U.S. Crew’s Urgent Flight into the Afghan Desert,” by C.J. Chivers, the New York Times, December 19, 2010, p. A8.
18 But consider these incidents: the two incidents are reported in these two articles in the New York Times: “Afghan Investigators Say U.S. Troops Tried to Cover Up Evidence in Botched Raid,” by Richard A. Oppel and Abdul Waheed Wafa, April 6, 2010, p. A4; and “Study Cites Drone Crew in Attack on Afghans,” by Christopher Drew, September 11, 2010, p. A8.
19 the trial of Steven Hayes: see “Death Penalty for a Killer of Three in Connecticut,” by William Glaberson, the New York Times, November 9, 2010.
20 “rapidly rendering war obsolete”: I found this quote from Mill in On the Origin of War, by Donald Kagan, Anchor Books, 1995, p. 2.
20 The Great Illusion: Angell’s book was originally published in 1909 under the title Europe’s Optical Illusion.
21 “We are living through”: No More War!, by Linus Pauling, 25th anniversary edition, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1983, p. xiii.
21 “problems of the kind”: ibid., p. 229.
21 “there will be no need to republish the book”: ibid, p. xv.
24 “There is no way”: the pacifist and social activist A.J. Muste is credited with coining this slogan during World War I.
Chapter One: War Is Not Innate
28 “These results,” he writes: “The Myth That War Is Intrinsic to Human Nature Discourages Action for Peace by Young People,” by David Adams and Sarah Bosch, Essays on Violence, edited by J. Martin Ramirez et al, Publicaciones de la Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, 1987, p. 134.
30 Hilali Matama, a researcher at Gombe: this incident is recounted in Demonic Males, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
31 “Chimpanzee-like violence,” he writes: Wrangham, ibid., p. 63.
31 Human males “enjoy the opportunity”: unless otherwise indicated, Wrangham’s quotes are from interviews that I conducted with him by phone on May 10, 2007, and May 18, 2009 (this latter interview was posted on
Bloggingheads.tv on May 23, 2009,
bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/19925).
31 “Yay, our side won!”: Wrangham made this remark while speaking at “The Evolution of Human Aggression,” a conference held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, February 25-27, 2009.
32 “In the real world”: Wrangham, Demonic Males, p. 241.
32 Hillary Clinton is reportedly a fan: Francis Fukuyama calls Demonic Males “a favorite book” of Hillary Clinton in his essay “Women and the Evolution of World Politics,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 77, no. 5, 1998, pp. 24-40.
33 “feminine” political leaders: ibid.
33 Sex and War, by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, BenBella Books, Dallas, Texas, 2008.
33 The Most Dangerous Animal, by David Livingston Smith, St. Martin’s Press, 2007.
33 “Chimpicide,” he writes: The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker, Viking, 2002, p. 316.
33 “the median death rate from intergroup aggression”: “Killer Species,” by Richard Wrangham, Daedalus, vol. 133, no. 4, Fall 2004, pp. 25-35.
34 only twelve deaths from lethal intergroup aggression: “Are Humans Inherently Killers?” by Robert Sussman and Joshua Marshack,
Global Nonkilling Working Papers, # 1, 2010,
nonkilling.org/pdf/wp1.pdf.
34 These observations are based on 215 total researcher-years: ibid.
34 “five o’clock news”: Sussman made this remark at “Man the Hunted,” a conference that he organized at Washington University in St. Louis, March 12-24, 2009.
34 coalitionary killings are “certainly rare”: “Chimpanzee Violence Is a Serious Topic,” Richard Wrangham,
Global Nonkilling Working Papers, # 1, 2010,
nonkilling.org/pdf/wp1.pdf.
35 “was having a marked effect”: this Goodall quote is from Sussman and Marshack, op. cit., p. 22.
35 “related to population stress”: email communication, Ian Tattersall.
35 “significant cultural variation”: “Cultures in chimpanzees,” A. Whiten et al (co-authors include Jane Goodall and Richard Wrangham), Nature, vol. 399, June 17, 1999, pp. 682-685.
36 “enormous variation in the rates”: Wrangham, Global Nonkilling Working Papers, p. 39.
36 “the roles of specialized military units”: ibid., p. 38.
36 I visited Frans de Waal: I interviewed de Waal at the Yerkes Primate Research Center on June 12, 2007. I also communicated with him by email several times thereafter.
37 evidence of chimpanzees’ generosity: these and other incidents can be found in de Waal’s The Age of Empathy, Three Rivers Press, 2009.
38 “The frontal orientation of the bonobo vulva”: “Bonobo Sex and Society,” by Frans de Waal, Scientific American, March, 1995, pp. 82-88.
38 “females often rush to the other side”: ibid.
38 Some critics charge: see for example “Swingers,” by Ian Parker, the New Yorker, July 30, 2007, pp. 49-61.
38 “exactly, equally relevant”: interview, de Waal, June 12, 2007.
39 Ardipithecus ramidus “reveals that the early: “Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus,” by C. Owen Lovejoy, Science, vol. 326, October 2, 2009. For another take on the significance of Ardi, see also “Our Kinder, Gentler Ancestors,” by Frans de Waal, the Wall Street Journal, October 3, 2009.
39 “tectonic shift”: email communication, Owen Lovejoy.
40 The killer ape theory was discredited: the story of Dart’s work is told in
Beyond War, by Douglas Fry, Oxford University Press, 2007. For a discussion of the influence of Dart and Robert Ardrey on Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark, the creators of the novel and film versions of
2001, see also
users.muohio.edu/erlichrd/350/odyssey.php.
40 “an old way of thinking”: interview, de Waal, June 12, 2007.
41 adolescent rhesus and stump-tailed macaques: “Modification of Reconciliation Behavior through Social Experience,” by Frans de Waal and Denise Johanowicz, Child Development, 1993, vol. 64, pp. 897-908.
41 “they would destroy the world in a week”: On Human Nature, by Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University Press, 1978, p. 104.
42 “nearly as unprecedented as baboons sprouting wings”: “A Natural History of Peace,” by Robert Sapolsky, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006.
42 “Forest Troop’s low aggression”: ibid.
43 “I looked up and gasped”: Yanomamö: The Fierce People, by Napoleon Chagnon, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, p. 5.
44 In 1988, Chagnon made headlines again: “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population,” Science, February 26, 1988, pp. 985-992.
45 “wimps”: Chagnon used this term when I interviewed him by telephone in 1988.
45 Critics have accused Chagnon: the most serious critique of Chagnon can be found in
Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney, Norton, 2000. I gave the book a positive review in the
New York Times Book Review, November 12, 2000, p. 6, but many scientists savagely criticized the book. Wikipedia, as of 2011, has a balanced assessment of Chagnon’s controversial career:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon.
45 I wrote a positive account: “The Violent Yanomamö,” Scientific American, March, 1988, pp. 17-18.
47 “whose way of life had remained unchanged”: this quote is from the publisher’s description of
The Harmless People, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Vintage, 1989 (originally published in 1959). For a report on another modern-day hunter-gatherer group, see “The Hadza,” by Michael Finkel,
National Geographic, December 2009. The author states flatly: “The Hadza do not engage in warfare” (
ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text).
47 in the nineteenth century the !Kung raided: War Before Civilization, by Lawrence Keeley, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 29.
48 Jebel Sahaba: for a discussion of the Jebel Sahaba site, see Keeley, op. cit., p. 37, and Fry, op. cit., p. 53. Fry notes that “homicides and executions” could account for the violent deaths at Jebel Sahaba, which also apparently occurred over several generations rather than in one incident.
48 The oldest known homicide victim: see Keeley, op. cit., p. 37.
48 Most of the other evidence for warfare: for good overviews of the evidence of early warfare, see Keeley and Fry,
ops. cit.;
How War Began, by Keith Otterbein, Texas A&M Press, 2004; and “The Birth of War,” by Brian Ferguson,
Natural History, July/August 2003 (online at andromeda.
rutgers.edu/~socant/Birth%20of%20War.pdf).
48 “You find a lot of evidence of bumps”: email interview, Trinkhaus, 2010. Keeley, op. cit., p. 36, also acknowledges that “many of the traumas found on early hominid skeletons have been proved by subsequent investigation to have had non-homicidal causes or cannot be distinguished from accidental traumas of a similar character.”
49 “cannot be considered evidence”: email interview, Tim White.
49 “we can be fairly certain that lethal aggression”: this and other quotes in this chapter are from a 2011 email interview with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. I also spoke to Hrdy at “The Evolution of Human Aggression,” held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, February 25-27, 2009.
50 clear-cut relics of other complex cultural behaviors: for an overview of evidence for art and other complex behaviors, see The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton, Bloomsbury, 2009; Catching Fire, by Richard Wrangham, Basic Books, 2009; Mothers and Others, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Belknap, 2009; and The Prehistory of the Mind, by Steven Mithen, Thames and Hudson, 1996.
50 capacity for language is innate: see The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial, 1994.
50 “The Irrelevance of Biology”: Keeley, op. cit., pp. 158-159.
51 In his interviews with me, he consistently denied: I interviewed Chagnon by phone in 1988 and by phone and in person during and after the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Santa Barbara, June 28-July 2, 1995.
51 Many Yanomamö warriors have confessed: Yanomamö: The Last Days of Eden, by Napoleon Chagnon, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. xvi.
51 “Steve Gould and I”: phone interview, Chagnon, 1995.
52 more than 99 percent, according to one estimate: War and Gender, by Joshua Goldstein, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 10.
Chapter Two: You Can’t Blame It All on a Few Bad Apples
54 “War is a lot of things”: War, by Sebastian Junger, Twelve, 2010, p. 144. For a radically different view of war, read With the Old Breed, by Eugene Sledge, Presidio Press, 1981. Sledge, a Marine infantryman during World War II, gives an excruciatingly vivid grunt’s description of vicious battles in the Pacific between Americans and Japanese. Sledge captures the decency, courage, and camaraderie of men in war, but also the savagery, randomness, terror, waste, filth. After weeks of nonstop combat, the Americans hated the Japanese. Sledge and his buddies occasionally found the corpses of American soldiers with their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths. Marines would never do such a thing, Sledge says. But one soldier in his troop sliced open the cheeks of a still-living Japanese soldier to more easily pry out his gold fillings. An American officer cheerfully urinated into the mouths of dead Japanese. “War is brutish, inglorious and a terrible waste,” Sledge writes. But “until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibility and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country.”
54 “moral basis of the war”: Junger, pp. cit., p. 25.
54 Junger cites the work of Wrangham: Junger, op. cit., p. 281.
55 “Indeed, it is not necessary”: An Intimate History of Killing, by Joanna Bourke, Basic Books, 1999, p. xvii.
55 “immune from this intoxication”: ibid., p. 19.
55 “great and seductive beauty”: ibid., pp. 1-2.
56 soldiers involuntarily urinate or defecate: On Combat, by Dave Grossman, PPCT Research Publications, 2004, pp. 9-10.
56 more than half a million soldiers: On Killing, by Dave Grossman, Little Brown, 1996, p. 43.
56 psychiatrists Roy Swank and Walter Marchand: For a discussion of Swank and Marchand’s 1946 study, see Grossman, On Killing, pp. 43-44.
57 “The average and normally healthy individual”: ibid., p. 1.
57 Critics have questioned whether Marshall:
ibid., p. xv. (See also the Wikipedia entry on Marshall, which reports on the controversies surrounding his work:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.L.A._Marshall.)
57 A survey of World War II fighter pilots: ibid., p. 30.
57 experiment carried out by the Prussian Army: ibid., p. 19.
57 hundreds of Prussian soldiers: ibid., pp. 10-11.
57 French troops discharged 48,000 rounds: ibid., p. 12
58 “powerful, innate human resistance”: ibid., p. xxix.
58 “With the proper conditioning”: ibid., p. 4.
58 “kill, kill, kill”: ibid., p. 251.
58 firing rates among infantrymen rose: ibid., p. 35.
58 As many as 25 percent: ibid., p. 247.
59 9 percent of all Vietnam veterans still suffer: “The psychological risks of Vietnam for U.S. veterans,” by B.P. Dohrenwend et al, Science, August 18, 2006, p. 979.
59 it “can give us purpose, meaning”: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, Anchor Books, 2002, p. 3.
59 “part of the human condition”: ibid., p. 16.
60 “the capacity for levelheaded participation in combat”: Grossman, op. cit., p. 184.
61 “aggressive psychopathic personalities”: ibid., p. 44.
61 3 percent of all males show symptoms of antisocial personality disorder: DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 648.
61 Psychopaths “lie and manipulate”: “Inside the Mind of a Psychopath,” by Kent Kiehl and Joshua Buckholtz, Scientific American Mind, September 2010.
62 “insights into others’ vulnerabilities”: ibid.
63 2 percent of Hutu males: I found this statistic in “Why Isn’t There More Violence?” by John Mueller, Security Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, Spring 2004, p. 200.
63 small percentages of men… are responsible: Final Solution, by Benjamin Valentino, Cornell University Press, 2004.
63 Barbara Oakley argues: Evil Genes, by Barbara Oakley, Prometheus Books, 2007.
63 “the greatest of all experiences”: I found this Hitler quote in A History of Warfare, by John Keegan, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, p. 366.
63 “terribly and terrifyingly normal”: Eichmann in Jerusalem,by Hannah Arendt, Penguin, 1995, p. 276.
65 In 1993, the National Academy of Sciences concluded:
Understanding and Preventing Violence, National Academy Press, 1993. See also Wikipedia’s excellent overview,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome.
65 British researchers reported links: “Role of genotype in the cycle of violence in maltreated children,” by Avshalom Caspi et al, Science, August 2, 2002, pp. 851-854.
65 followup studies failed to confirm: “Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and antisocial behaviors in the presence of childhood and adolescent maltreatment,” by Brett Haberstick et al, American Journal of Medical Genetics, May 5, 2005; and “Interaction between MAO-A genotype and maltreatment in the risk for conduct disorder,” by S.E. Young et al, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 163, no. 6, 2006, pp. 951-953.
66 touting what was now being called “the warrior gene”: the oldest use I have found of the term “warrior gene” to describe the MAO-A allele is “Tracking the Evolutionary History of a ‘Warrior Gene,’” by Ann Gibbons, Science, May 7, 2004, p. 818.
66 “It is well recognized”: “Monoamine oxidase, addiction, and the ‘warrior’ gene hypothesis,” by Rod Lea and Geoffrey Chambers, Journal of the New Zealand Medical Association, March 2, 2007.
66 media hailed an experiment: the scientific report on the experiment is “Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) predicts behavioral aggression following provocation,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by Rose McDermott
et al, January 23, 2009, online at pnas. org/content/106/7/2118.abstract. The ABC News report on the research, titled “One-in-three men have violence gene,” can be found online at
abcnews.go.com/Nightline/warrior-gene-tied-violence/story?id=12422661&page=1 , and the National Geographic broadcast, titled “Born to Rage?”, is online at channel.
nationalgeographic.com/series/explorer/4833/Overview.
68 “Almost everyone, including the Yanomamö”: Yanomamö: The Last Days of Eden, by Napoleon Chagnon, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, p. xvi.
69 “a less cruel, happier, and better man”: Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society, by Jose Delgado, Harper Colophon, 1969, p. 232. Delgado also writes: “In some old plantations slaves… were probably happier than some of the free blacks in modern ghettos. In several dictatorial countries the general population is skillful, productive, well behaved and perhaps as happy as those in more democratic societies. It is doubtful, however, that slavery or dictatorship should be our models.” See also my profile of Delgado and other early brain-chip researchers, “The Forgotten Era of Brain Chips,” Scientific American, October 2005.
70 The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name: the historian Daniel Kevles provides a gripping history of eugenics in In the Name of Eugenics, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
70 the hormone oxytocin: for an overview of oxytocin, see “Depth of the Kindness Hormone Appears to Know Some Bounds,” by Nicholas Wade, the
New York Times, January 10, 2011, online at
nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11hormone.html.
70 “sporting contests”: On Aggression, by Konrad Lorenz, Harcourt, Brace, 1966, p. 282.
70 propensity for war and their fondness for sports: see “War, Sports and Aggression: An Empirical Test of Two Rival Theories,” by Richard Sipes,
American Anthropologist, vol. 75, no. 1, February, 1973, online at
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1973.75.1.02a00040/abstract. Sipes suggests that, if anything, sports and war are positively correlated. He notes that “where we find warlike behavior we typically find combative sports, and where war is relatively rare combative sports tend to be absent.”
71 war sexually arousing: war has always been associated with high levels of rape and consensual sex. “There is in wartime a nearly universal preoccupation with sexual liaisons,” writes Chris Hedges, op. cit., p. 100. In his book What Every Person Should Know About War, Free Press, 2003, p. 33, Hedges cites a survey which found that American soldiers stationed in Europe during World War II had sex with women, on average, during their last year of service. Grossman, On Killing, op. cit., pp. 270-271, offers a Darwinian explanation of the correlation between sexual arousal and violence: “There might be a tendency for a female to be drawn to an alpha male who can protect her, and there might be a tendency for the male to spread the genes around in the face of anxiety and sudden death.”
71 women can make also ferocious warriors: the material on the Dahomey female warriors, the Russian “Battalion of Death,” and the white-feather campaign is from War and Gender, by Joshua Goldstein, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
72 “the men knew no shame”: ibid., p. 75.
72 “We would be lucky”: ibid., p. 131.
Chapter Three: Does Resource Scarcity Make Us Fight? (No, Not Necessarily)
75 Entering the lobby: I interviewed Steven LeBlanc at the Peabody Museum May 18, 2007, as well as over the phone and by email before and after that date.
76 “a common and almost universal human behavior”: Constant Battles, by Steven LeBlanc and Katherine Register, St. Martin’s Press, 2003, p. 8.
76 “Since the beginning of time”: ibid., p. xiv.
77 “the competition over scarce resources”: War in Human Civilization, by Azar Gat, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 668.
78 “more rather than less likely”: I found this quote in Eaarth, by Bill McKibben, Times Books, 2010, p. 82.
78 “civilization itself could distintegrate”: “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?” by Lester Brown, Scientific American, May 2009, p. 50.
80 “Force, and not enlightened self-interest”: Carneiro, op. cit., p. 734.
81 fighting among the Chumash escalated: “Patterns of Violence in Prehistoric Hunter-gatherer Societies of Coastal Southern California,” by Patricia Lambert, chapter four in Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past, edited by Debra Martin and David Frayer, Gordon and Breach, 1997, pp. 77-109.
81 Norse culture in Greenland: Jared Diamond provides a gripping account of the rise and fall of the Norse Greenland colony in his book Collapse, Viking, 2005.
83 Abü Hureyra: the anthropologist Keith Otterbein discusses the significance of Abu Hureyra in How War Began, Texas A&M University Press, 2004 pp. 222-223. He calls Abü Hureyra a “wonderful example” of a society that “can survive for thousands of years without warfare.” See also “The Eloquent Bones of Abu Hureya,” by T. Molleson, Scientific American, August 1994; and Keeley, War Before Civilization, p. 120, where he cites examples of early agricultural communities in the Near East that experienced large population growth with “no indications of warfare at all”; conversely, widely dispersed populations of hunter-gatherers in central Europe “seem to have been quite violent.” Keeley concludes that “the association between human density and the intensity of warfare was as complex or weak in prehistory as in the ethnographic record.”
83 Ur and Uruk… thrived for centuries: see A History of Warfare, by John Keegan, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 128. Otterbein, op. cit., also claims that evidence of warfare appears late in some early agricultural civilizations.
83 “War is bad and nobody likes it”: Keeley, op cit., p. 145.
83 “If one insists on a narrow cause-effect relationship”: Yanomamö: The Last Days of Eden, by Napoleon Chagnon, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. p. 113.
84 Human Relations Area Files: see the HRAF website,
yale.edu/hraf.
84 I interviewed them in their offices: I interviewed the Embers in New Haven on July 13, 2004.
84 186 cultures from all over the world: the Embers summarize their findings in papers such as “Violence in the Ethnographic Record,” a chapter in Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past, edited by Debra Martin and David Frayer, Gordon and Breach, 1997; and “Making the world more peaceful,” an essay in Prevention and Control of Aggression and the Impact on its Victims, edited by M. Martinez, Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001.
85 “Societies with only the threat of disasters”: “Resource Unpredictability, Mistrust, and War,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 36, no. 2, June 1992, p. 256, online at
jcr.sagepub.com/content/36/2/242. For a list of the cultures included in the Embers’ study, see
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cross-cultural_sample . For an interesting discussion of the link between fear—and especially fear of death—and social behavior, see this Wikipedia entry on terror-management theory:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory . The theory holds that societies become more distrustful, authoritarian, ideologically rigid, and warlike when citizens are reminded of their mortality.
86 Thomas Homer-Dixon: see his book The Upside of Down, Island Press, 2006. For another excellent discussion of the link between resource scarcity and war, see Diamond, op. cit.
87 Average standards of living remained stagnant: the data in this section on historical changes in income, the surge of wealth caused by the industrial revolution, and the success of the “Green Revolution” come from two books by the economist Jeffrey Sachs: The End of Poverty, Penguin, 2007; and Common Wealth, Penguin, 2008.
87 survive on less than $1.25 a day: see Sachs,
Common Wealth, and this website for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals:
un.org/millenniumgoals.
89 3 million Indians starved to death: Churchill’s Secret War, by Madhusree Mukerjee, Basic Books, 2010.
89 Richardson spent his early career: a brief biography of Richardson is included in his posthumous book The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, edited by Quincy Wright and C.C. Lienau, Boxwood Press, 1960.
90 “rich and poor were usually intermingled”: ibid., p. 205.
91 29 percent of the 244 causes were economic: ibid., p. 210.
92 “radically different national homicide rates”: “Income inequality and homicide rates in Canada and the United States,” by Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Shawn Vasdev,
Canadian Journal of Criminology, April 2001, pp. 219-236, online at
psych.mcmaster.ca/dalywilson/iiahr2001.pdf.
92 less evidence linking economic inequality to homicides: “Income inequality, poverty, and homicide across nations,” by Paul-Philippe Pare and Richard Felson, American Society of Criminology, October/November 2006.
92 “capitalism with a human face”: Sachs, The End of Poverty, pp. 357-358. For critiques of humanitarian aid, see Dead Aid, by Dambisa Moyo, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009; and The Crisis Caravan, by Linda Polman, Metropolitan Books, 2010. Moyo is an investment banker raised in Zambia, and Polman is a Dutch journalist. Polman’s critique is especially harsh. She charges that aid to Africa—including funds, food, medical supplies, and other items funneled into war-wracked regions like Darfur—ends up exacerbating rather than relieving violence and suffering. Militants steal aid or demand payment from aid workers, Polman asserts, and even commit atrocities—such as cutting arms and feet off civilians—to attract more international attention and hence aid.
93 the government has forced thousands: my friend and former
Scientific American colleague Madhusree Mukerjee, author of the aforementioned book
Churchill’s Secret War, has reported on abuses of multinational mining companies perpetrated in India and elsewhere in the name of globalization. See for example her articles “Sludgy Secrets of the Aluminum Companies,”
Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 2010, online at
articles.philly.com/2010-10-15/news/24983259_1_aluminum-smelter-aluminum-companies-bauxite; and “Dancing Around the Flame,”
Dissent, March 11, 2011,
dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=459.
93 He cites… the Pentagon report: McKibben, op. cit., p. 85. McKibben also writes, p. 82, that “conflict seems as likely as cooperation” if the U.S. and other nations do not immediately cut back on fossil-fuel consumption.
95 “naturalist”… “materialist”: Keegan, op. cit., p. 79.
95 1957 study by… Sorokin: Social and Cultural Dynamics, by Pitirim Sorokin, American Book Co., 1957.
96 “Dreams of an end to war”: “The Peace Paradox,” by David Bell, the New York Times Magazine, February 4, 2007.
Chapter Four: Is War a Cultural Contagion? (Yes)
97 “Mead misled a generation into believing”: the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s list of the worst books of the twentieth century can be found online at
isi.org/journals/ir/50be.st_worst/50worst.html. For more balanced looks at Mead’s career, see
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead , and “Bursting a South Sea Bubble,” by Melvin Konner,
Nature, March 11, 1999, pp. 117-118. Konner, a prominent anthropologist, says that Mead “got some things wrong,” but he praises her contributions to “fighting racist theories, demonstrating the flexibility of sex roles, promoting respect for exotic traditions, challenging the ethnocentrism of psychologists, sociologists and historians, fighting colonialism, questioning research methods that ‘objectify’ non-Western people, preserving disappearing cultures and resisting the generalizations of sociobiology.” Five years after her death, the anthropologist Derek Freeman published
Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Harvard University Press, 1983. Freeman accuses Mead of imposing her sexual fantasies on Samoan culture. Mead’s female informants told him that Mead’s depictions of their sex lives were inaccurate, in part because they had made up much of what they told her. Mead’s defenders in turn accused Freeman of biased, flawed scholarship; he did not take into account the fact that missionaries had converted Mead’s former informants to Christianity and had taught them to be ashamed of their youthful sexuality. The anthropologist Melvin Ember, who did fieldwork in Samoa, accuses Freeman of projecting his “aggressive and authoritarian” personality onto his subjects. “If Mead was projecting what she wanted unconsciously to see, and I am not convinced she was,” Ember states in “Evidence and Science in Ethnography: Reflections on the Freeman-Mead Controversy,”
American Anthropologist, vol. 87, 1985, pp. 906-910, “it is at least as likely that Freeman is projecting what he wants to see.”
98 “blank slates” unconstrained by biology: The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker, Viking, 2002, p. 25. Pinker quotes, disapprovingly, Mead’s statement that “human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.”
98 “human evil is a culturally acquired thing”: Demonic Males, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Houghton Mifflin, 1996, p. 84.
101 the Waorani and the Semai: these societies are contrasted in “Cultures of War and Peace: A Comparative Study of Waorani and Semai,” by Clayton and Carole Robarchek, a chapter in Aggression and Peacefulness in Humans and Other Primates, edited by James Silverberg and Patrick Gray, Oxford, 1992, pp. 189-213.
101 sixty eight times more dense: ibid., p. 208.
102 “We killed, killed, killed”: this quote from a Semai scout is from War Before Civilization, by Lawrence Keeley, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 31.
103 war, like an infectious disease: ibid., p. 128, Keeley notes that war among North American Indians often stemmed from “rotten apples that spoiled their regional barrels,” that is, belligerent tribes that forced others to fight. Keeley also lists western rotten apples, including “republican Rome, Late Classical Germany, medieval (Viking) Scandinavia, sixteenth-century Spain, seventeenth-century France, revolutionary-Napoleonic France,” as well as, more recently, the United States, Germany and Japan. Two other books that explore the contagiousness of war are The Parable of the Tribes, by Andrew Bard Schmookler, State University of New York Press, 1995; and Blood Rites, by Barbara Ehrenreich, Metropolitan Books, 1997.
103 the desire for revenge: Keeley, op. cit., p. 200.
104 “walling off of boys beyond a certain age”: email interview, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, 2010. See also her book Mothers and Others, Belknap, 2009.
104 “The deeds of warriors”: Mead, op. cit. I recalled Mead’s words in 2006 during a trip to Washington, D.C., when I spent one morning jogging past many of the capital’s tourist attractions: the White House, ringed with barricades and guard posts, marked and unmarked security vehicles. The Washington Monument, America embodied as a sword. The Lincoln Memorial, where Lincoln broods forever over whether preserving the Union–and even ending slavery–was worth 1 million lives. The half-buried black gash of the Vietnam War Memorial, etched with the names of 58,000 dead American soldiers. And finally, a huge memorial for World War II. The memorial consists of a fountain ringed with columns, one of which bears this inscription from General George Marshall: “WE ARE DETERMINED THAT BEFORE THE SUN SETS ON THIS TERRIBLE STRUGGLE OUR FLAG WILL BE RECOGNIZED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AS A SYMBOL OF FREEDOM ON THE ONE HAND AND OF OVERWHELMING FORCE ON THE OTHER.”
104 Europeans brought their violent customs: A vigorous proponent of the idea that westerners provoked and exacerbated violence among indigenous people is the anthropologist Brian Ferguson. See his articles “The Birth of War,”
Natural History, July/August 2003, online at andromeda.
rutgers.edu/~socant/Birth%20of%20War.pdf); “Tribal Warfare,”
Scientific American, January 1992,
andromeda.rutgers.edu/~socant/Tribal%20Warfare.pdf; and “Blood of the Leviathan,”
American Ethnologist, vol. 17, no. 2, May 1990, online at
andromeda.rutgers.edu/~socant/documents/Blood_of_the_Leviathan.pdf .
105 “They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells”: this quote is from A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, fourth edition, HarperCollins, 1999, p. 1. My account of the fate of the Wampanoag also comes from Zinn’s book.
106 after decades of pondering World War I: Keegan made this confession in “Eliminating the Causes of War,” a speech at a conference in Cambridge, England, in 2000, online at
pugwash.org/reports/pic/pac256/keegan.htm.
106 “terminated European dominance”: A History of Warfare, by John Keegan, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 391.
107 “institution of war itself”: Keegan, “Eliminating the Causes of War.”
108 Simon speculates that extreme altruism: “A Mechanism for Social Selection and Extreme Altruism,” by Herbert Simon, Science, December 21, 1990. pp. 1665-1669.
108 Milgram’s experiments: Milgram first described his experiments in “Behavioral Study of Obedience,”
The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 67, no. 4, 1963, pp. 371-378. See also Wikipedia’s entry for “Milgram experiment,”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.
109 “The extreme willingness of adults”: “The Perils of Obedience,” by Stanley Milgram, Harper’s Magazine, December 1973, pp. 62-77.
110 “a fatal flaw”: Obedience to Authority, by Stanley Milgram, Harper and Row, 1974. p. 188.
110 Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo describes the experiment at length in his book The Lucifer Effect, Random House, 2007.
111 “rogue” or “rotten” soldiers: ibid., pp. 325-326.
112 “terrifyingly normal”: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt, Penguin, 1995, p. 276.
112 My Lai: my account of My Lai comes from An Intimate History of Killing, by Joanna Bourke, Basic Books, 1999, pp. 159-163.
112 Calley also cites a biblical precedent: ibid., p. 161.
113 “Under the extreme stress of combat conditions”: Zimbardo, op. cit., p. 416-417.
113 When I asked him in an interview: I interviewed Zimbardo in San Francisco on June 14, 2007.
113 “one of the ‘fittest’ of memes”: Ehrenreich, op. cit., p. 234.
114 “must prepare themselves”: ibid., p. 241.
115 “I don’t think there’s anything”: I interviewed Peter Mansoor at the “Hybrid Warfare” conference on May 15, 2010.
116 James Mattis: in 2005, Mattis was rebuked by the Pentagon for saying in a public talk in San Diego: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” See
topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/james_n_mattis/index.html.
117 Carneiro suggests that a “world state”: Carneiro makes this suggestion in “The Role of Warfare in Political Evolution: Past Results and Future Projections,” an essay in Effects of War on Society, edited by Giorgio Ausenda, Boydell Press, 2003, pp. 87-102. Carneiro notes that the British poet Alfred Lord Tennyson imagines a united world government in his 1833 poem “Locksley Hall,” which reads in part: “the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d/In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world./There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,/And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law.” Tennyson presents this vision with tragic irony rather than hope.
117 “If we had a world government”: I interviewed Pauling in Palo Alto, California, in 1992.
118 9.8 homicides for every 100,000: Trends in U.S. homicides and other crimes in the twentieth century can be found in the “Historical Data” chapter in
Crime and Justice Atlas 2000, published by the Justice Research and Statistics Association, online at
jrsa.org/programs/Historical.pdf. See also the website of the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov.
119 “soft-wired… is nearly as resistant”: J. David Singer made these remarks in “Genetic and Cultural Evolution: Implications for International Security Policies,” an essay in Human Nature and Public Policy: An Evolutionary Approach, edited by Albert Somit and Steven Peterson, Macmillan, 2003, p. 260.
120 “If we know that it is not inevitable”: Mead, op. cit.
120 “addicted” to war: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges, Anchor Books, 2002, p. 3.
121 “two-edged sword”: Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, by Margaret Mead, 1935, William Morrow and Company, p. 289.
121 humans have already invented countless methods: all these methods of conflict resolution are from The Human Potential For Peace, by Douglas Fry, Oxford University Press, 2006.
122 humans “have a great capacity”: ibid., p. xiv.
Chapter Five: Choosing Peace
123 As a boy growing up in Turkey: ghe science journalist David Berreby has an excellent account of the life and work of Sherif in Us and Them, Little Brown, 2005. See also The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation, by Muzafer Sherif et al, Wesleyan, 1988.
125 Indian emperor Ashoka: see the Wikipedia entry on Ashoka, en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Ashoka.
127 “Once one group adopts it”: “Cultures of War and Peace: A Comparative Study of Waorani and Semai,” by Clayton and Carole Robarchek, a chapter in Aggression and Peacefulness in Humans and Other Primates, edited by James Silverberg and Patrick Gray, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 197.
128 “unanimously stressed their relief”: ibid., 206.
128 “the people themselves”: ibid., p. 205.
128 In a 1999 paper: “Global Action to Prevent War,” by Randall Forsberg et al, Boston Review, February/March 1999, pp. 4-16.
129 interviewed Forsberg in 2003: I interviewed Forsberg in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 17, 2003.
129 “change in moral beliefs”: Forsberg lays out this view in “Socially-Sanctioned and Non-Sanctioned Violence: On the Role of Moral Beliefs in Causing and Preventing War and Other Forms of Large-Group Violence,” a chapter in Conflict and Violence in the Developing World: Festshrift for Ulrich Albrecht, Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001, pp. 201-237.
130 “respect for the dignity and worth”: ibid., p. 231.
130 initially freed slaves in rebel regions: A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, fourth edition, Harper Collins, 1999, pp. 191-192.
131 “because of Hitler”: Forsberg made this comment during our 2003 meeting.
131 “on the wane”: Forsberg, “Socially-Sanctioned and Non-Sanctioned Violence: On the Role of Moral Beliefs in Causing and Preventing War and Other Forms of Large-Group Violence,” p. 230.
132 major armed conflicts… wrack fifteen regions:
SIPRI Yearbook 2011, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2011. See also
sipri.org.
132 AK-47s: the vast majority of war casualties over the past few decades have resulted from so-called “small arms” such as the AK-47, according to the International Action Network on Small Arms (
iansa.org), a London-based group. Small arms, which can be carried and operated by a single person, including a child or small woman, range from pistols and rifles to rocket-launched grenades and shoulder-fired missiles (the latter are sometimes called “light weapons”). There are more than 600 million in circulation globally, according to the IANSA.
133 8 million to over 17 million: Quiet Cataclysm, by John Mueller, Harper Collins, 1995, p. 135.
135 fell from seven to four: SIPRI Yearbook 2011.
136 Scholars have attributed: see for example “A History of Violence,” by Steven Pinker,
The New Republic, March 19, 2007, online at
edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html; and “The Liberal Moment Fifteen Years On,” by Nils Peter Gleditsch,
International Studies Quarterly, vol. 52, 2008, pp. 691-712. Both Pinker, a psychologist, and Gleditsch, a political scientist, suggest that global trade and communications might be contributing to the recent decline of war.
136 the media has helped: the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, some of whose writings are quite pessimistic about the prospects for world peace, nonetheless said in a 1982 speech that “thanks to modern communications, we now have something we never had before: reason to mourn deeply the death or wounding of any human being on any side in any war.” See
vonnegutweb.com/archives/arc_avoidingbigbang.html.
137 “the strongest non-trivial or non-tautological statement”: I interviewed Bruce Russett at Yale on July 13, 2004, and by phone several times between 1991 and 2004. Unless indicated otherwise, quotations are from these interviews. Russett presents the case for democratic peace in Hegemony and Democracy, Routledge, 2001; and Triangulating Peace (co-written with John Oneal), Norton, 2001.
138 Only 12 percent of humanity: How War Began, by Keith Otterbein , Texas A&M Press, 2004, p. 223-224.
139 “The reason why I’m so strong on democracy”: Bush is quoted in “In the Name of Democracy,” by Jonathan Power, the
New York Times, February 14, 2006, online at
nytimes.com/2006/02/14/opinion/14iht-edpower. html. In 1968 the comedian and social activist Dick Gregory said: “When we can make democracy work, we won’t have to force it down peoples’ throats. If it is really such a good idea, and if they can see it working, they’ll steal it.”
139 “emerging” democracies: the problems of new democracies are spelled out in
Electing to Fight, by Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, MIT Press, 2005. In addition to this caveat, some critics claim that because “democracy” is difficult to define precisely, proponents can too easily categorize societies as democratic or un-democratic to support their theory. A column in
India Times, January 31, 2006, online at
atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA31Ak01.html, derides this sort of
post-hoc definition as the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. You define a Scotsman according to some behavioral criterion, and when confronted with a Scotsman who behaves otherwise, you conclude that he is “no true Scotsman.” Argument: “Ach! No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.” Reply: “But my uncle Angus likes sugar with his porridge.” Rebuttal: “Ah yes, but no
true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
139 I met Mueller: I spoke to Mueller at Ohio State on May 14 and 15, 2010. I have also communicated with him by phone and email before and since that date. My quotes of Mueller, unless otherwise indicated, are from the interview at Ohio State. Many of Mueller’s writings can be found at his website,
psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller.
140 “attitudes towards it have changed: “War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment,” by John Mueller, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, p. 320.
140 “prolonged peace favors”: ibid., p. 301.
140 “almost always enlarges”: ibid., p. 301.
140 “All the great masterful races”: I found this quote from Teddy Roosevelt in Zinn, op. cit., p. 300.
141 War is “an institution”: Mueller, op. cit., p. 320.
141 “[W]e may be reaching a point”: ibid., p. 298.
142 Mueller discounts the view: see Atomic Obsession, by John Mueller, Oxford University Press, 2010.
142 “Even allowing for stupidity, ineptness”: ibid., p. 41.
143 home appliances and deer: see “Why Isn’t There More Violence?” by John Mueller,
Security Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, Spring 2004, p. 195; and “Hardly Existential: Thinking Rationally about Terrorism,” by John Mueller and Mark Stewart,
Foreign Affairs, April 2, 2010, online at
foreignaffairs.com/articles/66186/john-mueller-and-mark-g-stewart/hardly-existential?page=3.
143 “remnants of war”: see Mueller’s book The Remnants of War, Cornell University Press, 2004.
143 “predatory militia bands”: Mueller, “War Has Almost Ceased to Exist,” p. 321.
144 “cyber war”: see “Cyber Combat: Act of War,” by Siobhan Gorman and Julian Barnes, the Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2011.
144 “you don’t have to get rid of weapons”: Interview with Mueller, May 14, 2010.
145 war causes economic inequality: The Real Price of War, by Joshua Goldstein, New York University Press, 2004.
145 a self-described “pro-feminist”: War and Gender, by Joshua Goldstein, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. xiii.
145 limited their son’s exposure: Goldstein told me about this parental strategy when I interviewed him at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, on July 30, 2004.
146 “War is not a product of capitalism”: Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 412.
146 “somewhat more pessimistic”: ibid., p. 412.
146 Costa Rica… was ranked number one: I found these data on Costa Rica’s “happiness” in “The Happiest People,” by Nicholas Kristof, the
New York Times, January 6, 2010, online at
nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07kristof.html.
147 “If you want peace, work for justice”: this slogan has been attributed to both Pope Paul VI and H.L. Mencken.
Chapter Six: The Power of Nonviolence
150 I wrote up a few ideas: here are two other ideas I gave Centra: hiring volunteers to pretend to be members of terrorist “sleeper cells” to gain insight into terrorist thinking; and creating a website where anyone could anonymously submit plans for terrorist attacks.
150 “too political”: the irony is that Sharp’s first book, published in 1973, was funded by the Pentagon via the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
150 “shy,” “stoop-shouldered”: “Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, the New York Times, Feb. 6, 2011, p. 1.
151 “helping to advance”: “American Revolutionary,” by Philip Shishkin, the Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2008.
151 his first major work: The Politics of Nonviolent Action, by Gene Sharp, Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973.
151 translated into more than thirty languages: Many of Sharp’s writings can be downloaded from the website of the Albert Einstein Institution,
aeinstein.org.
151 a wide variety of tactics: For a full list, see the appendix of From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp, The Albert Einstein Institution, 1993.
152 “Do not the figures make it clear”: Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, p. 30.
152 “consider it a shame to assist”: ibid., p. 32.
152 a low, gravelly growl: I interviewed Sharp at the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston on September 16, 2003.
154 “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”: Webster’s Quotationary, edited by Leonard Roy Frank, Random House. 1999, p. 906.
154 working-class plebeians: Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (op. cit.), pp. 75-76.
154 ordered Norwegian teachers: ibid., p. 89.
155 “can end oppression”: A Force More Powerful, by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, Palgrave, 2000, p. 8.
156 rape, robbery, and other crimes: For a balanced discussion of charges against U.N. workers, see “Is the UN Doomed?” by Tony Judt, the New York Review of Books, February 15, 2007, pp. 45-48.
158 “Apocalyptic prophets abound”: You can find Arias’s lecture at nobelprize. org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1987/arias-lecture.html.
159 was keen on holy wars: Sex and War, by Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, Benbella, 2008, p. 244.
159 should be waged ruthlessly: Just and Unjust Wars, by Michael Walzer, Basic Books, 2000 (first published 1977), p. 47. This book by Walzer, a social scientist, provides a good introduction to Just War theory. The book is marred, however, by Walzer’s condescending dismissal of nonviolent resistance and his rejection of a world without war as a utopian dream, p. 329: “In our myths and visions, the end of war is also the end of secular history. Those of us trapped within that history, who see no end to it, have no choice but to fight on, defending the values to which we are committed, unless or until some alternative means of defense can be found.”
160 Bombs dropped by NATO planes: see “Libyan Rebels’ Convoy Mistakenly Hit by NATO, Rebel General Says,” by C.J. Chivers and Kareem Fahim, the New York Times, April 8, 2011, p. A12; “Libya: Nato admits civilian deaths in Tripoli air raid,” by Nick Hopkins, the Guardian, June 20, 2011; and “Libyan rebels accused of reprisal attacks,” the Washington Post, by Sudarsan Raghavan, May 21, 2011.
160 In a 2003 essay: “Power of Love,” by Alastair McIntosh, Resurgence, no. 219, July/August 2003, pp. 42-44.
161 “The non-violent resistors will have won the day”: this Gandhi quote is from Is There No Other Way? by Michael Nagler, Berkeley Hills Book, 2001, p. 249.
162 “does not make wars less likely”: I found the Einstein quotes in this section in an essay, “Einstein and War Resistance,” on the website of the International Peace Bureau,
ipb.org/einstein.html.
162 Zinn flew in a bombing raid: Zinn tells this story in his memoir You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Beacon Press, 2002 (originally published 1994).
162 when I interviewed him: I interviewed Zinn at his home in Massachusetts on September 17, 2003.
163 “I see this as the central issue of our time”: Zinn, op. cit., p. 101.
164 In an episode of 60 Minutes: John Mueller describes this episode in Atomic Obsessions, Oxford University Press, 2010. pp. 134-135.
166 drone attacks: the U.S. military has deployed more than 7,000 unmanned airborne vehicles, or drones, according to the security analyst P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institution. At least forty-three nations—including England, Israel, and Iran—have already deployed or are building drones and other military robots, he says. The Obama administration has carried out far more drone attacks than the Bush administration. The number of attacks in Pakistan alone in 2010 was 117, more than all previous years combined, according to “Americans Launch Drone Missile Attacks Despite Recent Pakistani Objections,” by Eric Schmitt, the
New York Times, April 13, 2011. A 2010 United Nations report, online at
www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/14session/A.HRC.14.24.Add6.pdf, complains that drone attacks—especially in Pakistan and Yemen, nations with which the United States is not at war—are “doing grave damage to the rules designed to protect the right to life and prevent extrajudicial executions.” A 2009 Brookings Institution report, online at
brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0714_targeted_killings_byman.aspx?p=1, estimates that U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan kill ten civilians on average for every militant.
166 We sell weapons to other nations, and to their adversaries: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI,
sipri.org/, documents how the U.S., by far the world’s biggest arms dealer, supplies arms for races in many volatile regions. The U.S. sells fighter jets and other advanced weaponry to both Pakistan and its arch–enemy India, and to Israel and its unfriendly Arab neighbors. In the fall of 2010, the Obama administration announced a $60 billion sale of fighters and other weapons to Saudi Arabia, the largest such sale in history. U.S. officials issued reassurances that the U.S. would help Israel maintain its superiority over Saudi Arabia and all other potentially hostile states in the region. See “Pentagon plans $60 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia,” by Dana Hedgpeth, the
Washington Post, October 21, 2010.
167 Paul Chappell… two essays: Will War Ever End? Rvive Books, 2009, and The End of War, Easton Studio Press, 2010.
170 Wilson asks Christians to join him: The Creation, W.W. Norton, 2006.
171 “not only human, but protohuman”: Rising Up and Rising Down, by William Vollmann, Harper Perennial, 2004, p. 23. (This is the abridged edition of the original, seven-volume edition published by McSweeney’s.)
171 “human violence itself cannot be altered”: ibid., p. 25.
171 “putting aside any notion”: ibid., p. 21.
172 “No one knows enough”: I found this quote in Nagler, op. cit., p. 272. Epilogue: In Defense of Free Will
173 “It is hard to imagine”: The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam Books, 2010, p. 32.
174 “the moon were gifted”: I found this Einstein quote in The Illusion of Conscious Will, by Daniel Wegner, Bradford Books, 2002, p. 342.
174 “What you’re aware of is a decision”: I interviewed Francis Crick in November 1991 and wrote about his views on free will in my 1996 book
The End of Science, Broadway Books, 1996. The man with whom Crick co-discovered the double helix, James Watson, was a much more egregious biological determinist, as indicated by “Fury at DNA pioneer’s theory: Africans Are Less Intelligent than Westerners,” by Cahal Milmo, the
Independent, October 17, 2007, online at
independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html. . Watson confesses to being “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” Watson is essentially blaming Africa’s problems on the innate inferiority of blacks. For an overview of research showing that environmental factors—including poor schools and parenting—explain poor black performance on IQ tests and other measures of intelligence far better than genetic theories do, see
Intelligence and How to Get It, by Richard Nisbet, W.W. Norton, 2009.
174 “Our belief in free will”: The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris, Free Press, 2010, p. 141.
176 “confabulations”: Wegner, op. cit., p. 171.
176 “not what tradition declares it to be”: Freedom Evolves, by Daniel Dennett, Viking, 2003, p. 13.
177 “an evolved creation of human activity”: ibid., p. 13.
177 “point to a significant value”: “The Value of Believing in Free Will,” by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler,
Psychological Science, vol. 19, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49-54, online at
csom.umn.edu/assets/91974.pdf.