Is it not wonderful for a man, having been born a man, to die at the hands of another man and then, with his quiver and bow at his side, lie on the ground as a corpse?1
—Mongolian proverb from the time of Genghis Khan
However and wherever war begins, it persists, it spreads, it propagates itself through time and across space with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech. War spreads and perpetuates itself through a dynamic that often seems independent of human will. It has, as we like to say of things we do not fully understand, “a life of its own.”
Biological metaphors for war are popular among those who study war abstractly, through the grid of mathematics.2 Normally we think of war as a product of human volition—an activity, a habit, perhaps an “institution”—growing out of human needs and cultural proclivities. And of course it is that: Take away human whims and passions, and there is no war, or at least no human versions of it. But if we consider war abstractly, we see that something else is going on. As the Dutch social scientist Henk Houweling points out, the mathematical study of outbreaks of war and of national decisions to participate in wars shows “strong indications of epidemicity”:
By using methods of epidemiology we do not suggest, of course, that wars are transmitted by bacteria or by common exposure to some causal variable in the environment. Our analysis does not reveal the cause of war. But it does suggest that one of the causes of war is war itself.3
If war is analogous to a disease, then, it is analogous to a contagious disease. It spreads through space, as groups take up warfare in response to warlike neighbors. This may seem obvious, but statistical studies show that warfare is indeed more intense and frequent in the vicinity of warlike groups.4 War has another way of spreading, too, and that is through time. Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later. Even the conditions of peace may serve as a springboard to new wars, as the modern world learned from the Treaty of Versailles; among the Central Enga of New Guinea, unpaid indemnities from one war are a common excuse for the next one.5 So, to continue the epidemiological metaphor, if war is regarded as an infectious “disease,” it is caused by a particularly hardy sort of microbe—one capable of encysting itself for generations, if necessary, within the human soul.
Stated in more conventional terms, war spreads from band to band and culture to culture because it is a form of contact that no human group can afford to ignore or disdain. If outsiders show up hoping to woo mates or trade goods or induct you into their religious practices, you can always tell them to go away. But, as Andrew Bard Schmookler argues in his brilliant exploration of human power relationships, The Parable of the Tribes, you can no more brush off a war party than you can tell a mugger who demands your money or your life that, frankly, you’d rather keep both and continue peaceably along your way.6 If the other tribe harbors a corps of thuggish aggressors, so must yours—or fall prey to those who thought up thuggery first. No warlike instinct, greedy impulses, or material needs are required to explain why war, once adopted by some, must of necessity be adopted by all. Peaceable societies will survive only in isolated or marginal locales—the deep forests of the Mbuto, the snowfields of the Inuit. Everyone else is swept up into the dynamic of war. As Schmookler writes:
Among all the cultural possibilities, only some will be viable.… The warlike may eliminate the pacificistic; the ambitious, the content.… Civilized societies will displace the remaining primitives, modern industrial powers will sweep away archaic cultures. The iron makers will be favored over those with copper or no metallurgy at all, and the horsemen will have sway over the unmounted. Societies that are coherently organized and have strong leadership will make unviable others with more casual power structure and more local autonomy.… What looked like open-ended cultural possibilities are channeled in a particular, unchosen direction.7
In other words, as it spreads from place to place, war tends to stamp a certain sameness on human cultures. At the most obvious level, it requires that each human society be as war-ready as the other societies it is likely to encounter; that spears be matched with spears, fighting men matched with the men of potential enemy groups; and that in all groups, similar proportions of energy and resources be dedicated to destructive ends. No doubt there are other directions in which human cultures might have evolved—toward greater emphasis on the arts, for example, or philosophy, or more lighthearted games and rituals. But war, once chosen by some, quickly became the “unchosen direction” imposed on all.
Most scholars have paid little attention to the homogenizing effects of war. The enemy, after all, is always the fearsome and wicked Other. “The occasions for each particular war will vary perhaps,” Robin Fox has written,
But ultimately “we” fight “them” because they are different, and their difference is threatening in its challenge to the validity of the ideas we live by.8
Similarly, Ruth Benedict argued that the problem arises from what is basically a cognitive confusion: Our fellow humans often look to us like animals. Give the other tribe a strange accent, a peculiar religion, or unusual style of body paint, and, in our provincialism, we take them for a different species. In “primitive” societies, she wrote,
human beings are merely one’s own little tribe; the rest are nonhuman like the animals. Killing animals is of course acclaimed, and nonhuman bipeds of the neighboring tribe are equally objects of prey. Their death proves my strength just as a successful lion hunt does.9
Left unexplained in this account is why Homo sapiens, being so famously intelligent in other respects, should alone of all the species be unable to recognize its own kind. In fact, there is reason to believe that diverse cultures have been capable of peaceful interaction for many thousands of years, meaning that they were also capable of recognizing one another as human. For example, the vast distribution of “Venus” figurines throughout the Eurasian continent would seem to attest to cultural contact and exchange among presumably quite different peoples as early as the Upper Paleolithic. By the Neolithic, goods like obsidian were being traded across thousands of miles in the Mediterranean and Near East—again presumably among people who recognized one another as human beings.10 Even the most parochially minded Paleolithic bands were probably exogamous, that is, disposed to pick mates from outside the band rather than risk incest within.11 Diversity is endemic to the human race, which would have had to realize long ago that the stranger may be next year’s trading partner, or kin.
Conversely, warfare is hardly confined to groups that differ strikingly in culture, language, and appearance. On the contrary, anthropologist Lawrence H. Keeley observes that “ethnographers have frequently encountered tribes that intermarried and traded with one another but were also periodically at war.”12 Peaceful trading and socializing may alternate with vicious warfare—a pattern observed among certain Inuit, North American Indian, and Brazilian tribes. To quote Keeley:
When the Sioux came to trade at Hidatsa villages along the Upper Missouri, a truce was in force only within sight of the villages; once the [Sioux] nomads passed out of sight by climbing over the bluffs, they might steal horses or kill Hidatsa and were themselves subject to attack. The Mae Enga of New Guinea asserted, “We marry the people we fight.”13
But the notion that war arises, basically, from ignorance and provincialism has persisted because it is in many ways an optimistic one: If war represents a failure to recognize human diversity, then all we have to do to end it is to learn to see through the local variations in language, culture, religion, and so forth and rediscover our common humanity. In this view, the flaw that leads humans into war is not a moral but a cognitive one and can be cured through the kind of education that engenders an enlightened tolerance of human differences.
Now, from the point of view of any particular side, in any particular war, the enemy may indeed be seen as a repulsively different Other. But the differences are often almost imperceptible to an outsider—as between Protestant and Catholic Irish people, for example, or Serbs and Croats, or one subtribe of Yanomamo Indians and another—and over time they will be overshadowed by the common and overarching imperatives of war. Certainly this is true at the level of technology, where failure to mimic the enemy can be fatal. An American commentator observed of the Cold War:
All things Communist remain anathema, but the slightest word of some new development in Russia is sufficient to set in motion investigations by several congressional committees and private foundations to find out why we are not doing the same thing.14
But the symmetry between enemies goes beyond the instruments of war. During the Cold War, the ostensibly democratic United States developed the permanent bureaucracy of the “national security state,” parallel to that of the Soviets and including government agencies dedicated to rooting out and suppressing domestic dissent. In general, as Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld explains:
Given time, the fighting itself will cause the two sides to become more like each other, even to the point where opposites converge, merge, and change places.… The principal reason behind this phenomenon is that war represents perhaps the most imitative activity known to man.15
There is a mechanism—almost a human reflex—that guarantees that belligerents will in fact be “given time” for this convergence to occur, and that mechanism is revenge: A raid or attack or insult must be matched with an attack of equal or greater destructive force. One atrocity will be followed by another; and no matter how amicable the two sides may once have been, they will soon be locked together in a process from which no escape seems possible. To the warrior, the necessity of revenge may be self-evident and beyond appeal:
The Jibaro Indian is wholly penetrated by the idea of retaliation; his desire for revenge is an expression of his sense of justice.… If one reprehends a Jibaro because he has killed an enemy, his answer is generally: “He has killed himself.”16
The “necessity” of revenge may well be another legacy of our animal-fighting, prehistoric past. Revenge has a pedagogical purpose, whether the enemy is animal or human: It teaches the intruder to stay away. Conversely, the creature that does not fight back marks itself as prey. At the Paleolithic kill sites where early humans battled competing scavengers, some version of revenge may have been essential to establishing the human claim to meat. Like modern dogs, canine intruders could have been taught to keep their distance by being struck or stoned. Similarly, many wild predators have learned that the price of human meat can be gunshots, spear wounds, or fiery sticks waved in their faces, and they seem to have passed the lesson along to their young. In the face of nonhuman enemies, retaliation makes sense: The animals will not counterretaliate at some later time but, being sensible, will slink away.
But no matter how often we are told that some human enemy must be “taught a lesson,” the impulse to revenge is by no means entirely rational. In traditional societies, wars may be started for no other purpose than to overcome grief. The Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest often followed up natural deaths with retaliatory headhunting raids:
The dead relative might equally have died in bed of disease or by the hand of an enemy. The head-hunting was called “killing to wipe one’s eyes,” and it was a means of getting even by making another household mourn instead.17
Among South American Indians living near the Putumayo River, even damage caused by a thunderstorm could be an excuse for a retaliatory raid, since “every ill that befalls a man they set down to the evil intent of an enemy.”18 Similarly, the Miyanmin of New Guinea lacked the concept of a “natural” death, so that all adult deaths were viewed as “political acts carried out by the enemy.” Every death, then, was an insult, which had to be avenged by going to war:
After a period of mourning (marked by violence and brawls) the hamlet may be abandoned, as if the survivors of the deceased were war refugees, and/or retaliatory attacks on other hamlets (on whom blame has been assigned by ritual).19
Grief, depression, helplessness—these are the experiences of prey. The obvious way out, the way our species learned through a million years of conflict with larger and stronger animals, is to assume the stance of the predator: Turn grief to rage, go from listless mourning to the bustling preparations for offensive attack. This, more or less, is what Achilles does in the Iliad: He recovers from the paralysis of hurt feelings and grief through his spectacular revenge for Patroklus’s death. Animals secure in their predator status know nothing of revenge. But humans are hardly secure; our triumph over the other species occurred not that long ago, and childhood, for each of us, recapitulates the helplessness of prey. For purely emotional reasons, then, human antagonists readily find themselves caught up in the well-known “cycle of violence,” taking turns as prey and predator, matching injury with injury—bound together as powerfully as lovers in their bed.
The dance of action and reaction engenders a symmetry between belligerents which warriors recognize and sometimes consciously enhance. To defeat an enemy, you must know that enemy and learn to think as he thinks. Before Achilles can kill Hektor he must become as much like him as possible, spending books 18 to 20 of the Iliad mimicking him and usurping his identity as a hunter. Conversely, if someone is so truly and incomprehensibly different as to be subhuman in the sense Ruth Benedict suggests, he may never achieve the status of a genuine “enemy.” Nineteenth-century European aristocrats refused to duel with their social inferiors, nor did Europeans always bother to dignify their campaigns against indigenous peoples with the word “war.” The clashes of British against French or French against Prussian were “wars,” recalled with definite names and dates, but—with a few exceptions like the Zulu Wars—their fiercely resisted incursions against Africans and Asians tend to be lumped together indiscriminately under bloodless phrases like “imperialist expansion.”
At the level of the individual, the symmetry of war may even be expressed as a kind of love. Enemies by definition “hate” each other, but between habitual and well-matched enemies, an entirely different feeling may arise. Sometimes this love is reserved for the trophies created from the bodies of dead enemies, their shrunken heads or scalps:
The scalp of an enemy was of remarkable importance for the Cocopa warrior. He brought the object back with him and soon retired to a place isolated from other people where he spent several nights and days in communion with the scalp. During that time it talked to him, “especially at night, telling him how to be a great warrior and giving him special powers.”20
Or the dead enemy may be incorporated by his killer’s tribe as a kind of honorary kinsman. The practice of naming a child after a particularly valiant enemy was once widespread, from New Guinea21 to the North American plains.22 Genghis Khan’s birth name, for example, was Temu-jin, taken from a tribal enemy his father had vanquished and captured.23
There have been, in some instances, ritual occasions for the face-to-face expression of love between enemy combatants. When an Aztec warrior subdued an opponent in battle, he formally reassured his prisoner that he would not be eaten, and “considered his captive as his own flesh and blood, calling him son, while the latter called him father.”24 Or consider what Richard Barber, the historian of medieval European knighthood, called “the curious custom of fighting in mines.” The besiegers of a fortress often dug mines under the fortress walls; the besieged would dig countermines in order to get out and harass the besiegers. If a mine met a countermine, a fight might ensue, conducted by torchlight and according to the rules of the tournament. The odd part is that, merely by participating in this underground combat, enemy knights were transformed into “brothers-in-arms,” meaning that their personal enmity was dissolved and they were henceforth “bound to one another in such a way, that each will stand by the other to the death if need be.”25
The symmetry forged by war echoes the peculiar symmetries often found in sacrificial rites. In Aztec ritual, the sacrificial victim was sometimes dressed to impersonate the god or goddess who was the intended recipient of the sacrifice. In Christian imagery, which reflects far earlier traditions, Jesus is both the sacrificial “lamb” and, through the mystery of the Trinity, the deity to whom the lamb is offered. Hubert and Mauss noted the extreme and complicated “doubling” in ancient Greek sacrificial rites. The great Dorian festival of the Karneia, for example, celebrated in honor of Apollo Karneios, was supposedly instituted to expiate the sacrificial killing of the soothsayer Karnos, who is himself Apollo Karneios.26 These symmetries may reflect humankind’s primordial experience of being both prey and predator—an experience faithfully re-created in every battle.
War, then, is not simply a clash of Others, made possible by an ignorant horror of difference. The warrior looks out at the enemy and sees men who are, in crucial respects, recognizably like himself. They are warriors, too, and whatever differences they may have, whatever long-standing reasons for hatred, they share the basic tenets of warriordom: a respect for courage, a willingness to stand by one’s comrades no matter what, a bold indifference to death. Even when divided by race and vast cultural differences, enemies may admire each other for their conduct as warriors. To the medieval European Crusaders, for example, the
enemy was not a priori an object of hatred.… The Saracen, strong, brave, and fierce and always vanquished in the end, was the ideal adversary in the medieval warrior’s imagination.27
More ambivalently, a British colonel wrote of the West African Asantes he had helped to defeat: “It was impossible not to admire the gallantry of these savages.”28 In a sense, warriors everywhere constitute a tribe unto themselves, transcending all other tribes and nations.
Certainly, and especially in our own time, warring cultures have sought to magnify their differences for propagandistic reasons—witness the demonization of the “Huns,” “Japs,” and “gooks” Americans have fought against. But at the same time, as Schmookler observed, war also works to flatten out many of the differences—of culture, if not, of course, of race or language—that distinguish tribes and nations. Trade does this, too, imposing similar tastes and fashions on people who may share little else, but war does it in a highly specific way. For one thing, the concentration of the weapons and prestige of war in the hands of men reinforces male supremacy, which is in itself a nearly universal characteristic of human societies. Certain common patterns of gender relations have been observed, for example, among warlike, small-scale horticultural societies, whether they are in the Amazon basin, New Guinea, or parts of Africa. In these societies women are valued largely as prizes of war or as prestigious possessions accorded to victorious warriors, and have little or no voice in group decision-making. As anthropologist William T. Divale observes:
Primitive warfare is part of a syndrome which also includes female infanticide, polygyny, and marriage alliances. The almost universal occurrence of this syndrome in primitive cultures plus its important ecological role has led to the conclusion that the syndrome constitutes the basic structural framework or template of primitive social organization.29
In addition, the maintenance of warriors itself imposes certain disciplines and forms of organization: Weapons must be manufactured, sometimes out of raw materials gathered from distant sites, and potential warriors must be instructed in their use. The use of metal weaponry in particular demands a complex division of labor and, usually, a centralized command system to coordinate the mining and transport of ore and the manufacture of the weapons. In the ancient world, the imperatives of weapons manufacture and warrior maintenance often went along with despotism and the formation of highly centralized, dynastic states. But not always: The ancient Greeks fought on foot, in a phalanx formation that stressed equality and interdependence, and, as historian Victor Hansen has convincingly argued, this mode of warfare was compatible with the limited democracy of the city-state. In general, the early-twentieth-century sociologist Stanislaw Andrzejewski argued, militarism has a decisive influence on forms of political organization, but whether it favors democracy or despotism depends on the particular mode of warfare practiced.30
So there is no single cultural pattern stamped by war on all human societies, everywhere and at all times. We can say, though, that similar technologies and styles of warfare place similar demands on human cultures, and that these demands tend to impose a kind of sameness in areas of social endeavor that are seemingly remote from the business of war. Contrary to Marx, it is not only the “means of production” that shape human societies, but “the means of destruction,”31 and for much of human history the means of destruction have favored societies ruled by warriors themselves.