[extropy-chat] Back to Causes of War

[Lee Corbin]

Keith---in that amazing post that could launch a thousand threads---wrote

> [Lee wrote]
>> You seem to contend sometimes that it's war fever among a small ruling
>> elite, at other times that an entire tribe or nation has "grim prospects",
>> and at other times that it's current deprivation of an entire band, and so on.
>> Can you summarize?
> 
> No.
> 
> We are just working from such different data bases that I think I should 
> not respond again until you have read the Azar Gat paper.  Let me know
> when you have.
> 
> http://cniss.wustl.edu/workshoppapers/gatpres1.pdf

Okay, I read it. And it didn't take 15 minutes:  I had to ponder a lot of the
paragraphs  :-)

For me, the most striking thing about the paper was his relentless illustration
of the *normal* condition of human tribes, namely to be at constant war
with one another.  On to the trash heap went my views, for example, that
the American Indians of the Northwest Coast were peaceable, and that
the poor sweet !Kung of the Kalahari Desert (who, he says, are popularly
known as the "harmless people") were not violent.

    "Richard Lee who contributedd to the creation of this impression,
    nevertheless reports (1979) that in his study area in the period
    1963-1969, there were 22 cases of homicide; 19 of the victims
    were males, as were all of the 25 killers. This amounts to a rate
    of 0.29 person per thousand per year, and had been 0.42 before
    the coming of firm state authority."

What's this?  "Firm state authority"?  Ah, he means colonialism!  No wonder
I never heard about any of this in high school or college---the damned leftists
who run our educational systems have zero incentive to do anything but
suppress information like that.

Professor Gat is relentless:

    "Among the Eskimo of the central Canadian arctic,  who lacked
    group warfare, violent death, in so-called 'blood feuds' and 'homicide'
    was estimated by one authority at one person per thousand per year,
    10 times the 1990 USA rate."

Except for this tack, there was little that was new in the paper for me.
Anyone who has kept up at all with the EP literature---say, Matt Ridley's
books (1995, etc.), Miller's "The Mating Mind", Cosmides and Toomey's
numerous papers, and so on, will not be shocked by anything in the paper,
though he or she will see a lot of his or her believes carefully documented.
What Gat does is very thoroughly detail the behavior of human groups
in the EEA and in modern primitive societies still struggling under non-
colonial control by the civilized powers.

The real question (not addressed at all by this paper whose focus is 
entirely as I just stated) is Why are modern nations so *peaceful*?
And the original main purpose of this thread and its predecessors was
to address the causes of all wars, not just primitive fighting. 

I *will* summarize what I have written here on the topic.  First, civilized
societies are not necessarily more peaceful, even the literate ones!  E.g. the
Maya or the proto-nations and nations of Western Europe 500 AD -
1500 AD  Sometimes peace was establish in the old days---as in
approximately 100 AD - 180 AD---when some fairly reasonable empire
could maintain it (by force).

Second, a sea-change seems to have overcome the West around 1700 or 
1800:  gone were the constant wars of preceding generations. Especially
per capita, wars became fewer and fewer over time.  Go graph the number
of wars and the amount of blood shed between England and France:  it
monotonically decreases from 1000 AD to 1815, and then stops altogether.
(Of course there were fluctuations, but my point is that the wars really did
become fewer over the centuries and of less severity.)  What caused this
sea-change?

My answer is that it simply became more profitable to maintain peace than
to try to plunder adjacent nations. For one thing, there was less comparative
plunder than ever before (compared to the wealth of generating your own),
and another thing, the dang wars just got too expensive and the ability of
the other nation to inflict reciprocal damage kept growing.  So an era
of game-theoretic cooperation has emerged.

Three, the causes of modern era war are too numerous to allow generalization.
Keith sometimes said that population pressure causes war, and it is true that
high population growth in modern nations *facilitates* war, but it doesn't 
cause it.  For example, the high birth rates in Germany, England, and France
before WWI made for aggressive nations in two ways:  first, young people
are usually quite willing and able to go to war (until 1950 or so in the West);
they have the vitality and the group instinct I submit, and second, they
provide enough cannon fodder to make the wars a go.

Keith sometimes said that it was 'grim prospects' that caused war. Certainly
that is a factor, maybe a major factor, in the EEA as Professor Gat documents.
And *sometimes* it is a contributing factor in modern wars, if taken not too
literally.  Again WWI affords a great example:  the English were scared to
death that the Germans would overtake them economically (1914 in fact
was the very first year in which this occurred---see "The Illusion of Victory",
a rather new book by Thomas Fleming).  And the Germans were scared to
death that Russia and the Slavs in general were going to surpass them in a
variety of ways.  Paul Johnson in "Modern Times" states this as a attitudinal
fact among the German intelligencia apparently stemming from various
wacked-out German philosophers.

But throughout pre-modern times in the last millenium, a typical cause of
war was one prince's avarice towards the domains of his neighbors. Most
of the English-French wars were of this kind, for example, as were the
endless wars between the various Italian city states. Another typical
cause was vast population movement---the Avars or the Huns or someone
would be on the move (chased by another tribe even more formidable) and
the poor Romans or anyone else within range had to bear the consequences.

Yet none of these explanations account for all modern wars---exceptions
can be found for any and all of them. E.g. the Great Patriotic war, which
included the largest and most deadly battles ever fought,  was caused
entirely by one man's irrational urges and his warped philosophy.

Lee