Book review: Why We Fight Wars
War: An Enquiry, A.C. Grayling
Killing Others: A Natural History of Ethnic Violence, Matthew Lange
reviewed by Matthew Evangelista
Wars are not barroom
brawls writ large," wrote Barbara
Ehrenreich. She was responding to Francis Fukuyama’s claim in Foreign
Affairs magazine that men are mainly responsible for military
conflicts because "aggression, violence, war, and intense competition for
dominance in a status hierarchy are more closely associated with men than
women," and that "statistically speaking it is primarily men who
enjoy the experience of aggression." Ehrenreich, who earned a Ph.D. in
cellular immunology before turning to journalism and politics, rejected
Fukuyama’s belief that men’s warlike practices were "rooted in
biology," "hard-wired," "genetically determined," or
"bred in the bone." Unlike the lethal violence of the
chimpanzees who provided the hook for Fukuyama’s article, warfare is
organized, institutionalized, and socially sanctioned violence. If we seek to
explain it — and not only its gendered dimensions — evolutionary biology is not
the place to look.
Two new books on war,
one focused particularly on ethnic violence, try to offer alternatives to the
primal-aggression argument, but both fall short. In War: An Enquiry, A.C. Grayling summarizes the violent history and
state of the world but then throws up his hands at the difficulty of distilling
the evidence and drawing a conclusion. In Killing
Others: A Natural History of Ethnic Violence Matthew Lange blames ethnic conflicts on nationalist and religious pot-stirring
by the last two centuries’ evolving nation-states. Both books are inconsistent
in their logic, and neither is able to resist the pull of biological arguments
— at any rate, they spend a lot of time outlining them. Beyond that, both
authors ignore the more-pertinent evidence, which suggests that meddling,
self-interested outsiders, in conjunction with ill-advised neoliberal austerity
programs, bear much of the blame for the ugliest conflicts of at least the last
few decades.
The Syrian war seems
to defy Grayling’s effort to answer the question, "What, indeed is war,
and how does it differ from other kinds of violent conflict?" In
discussing Syria, he falls back on the pub-brawl metaphor he previously
disavowed. Lange, in Killing Others, deems Syria’s "an
ethnic civil war." Neither author accords much influence to the role there
of outside states — Russia, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey,
Qatar, to name the main parties — even though their arms, training, and direct
intervention have shaped and prolonged the violence.
Although the stated
objectives, and the books’ titles themselves, imply differences - Grayling’s is
broad, Lange’s narrowly focused - the authors occupy much the same territory.
In addition to pondering the genetic basis for aggression, both evoke the
psychologists’ distinction between in-groups and out-groups. Both consider the debate between
Steven Pinker and Douglas Fry, among others, over whether the archaeological
record shows prehistoric humans were more or less warlike than modern ones.
Both cover vast periods of the history of warfare - Grayling compactly in a
couple of chapters, and Lange with examples dispersed throughout the book. And
both ultimately fail to provide satisfying answers about war’s causes… read
more:
