University of New England

Nexus
Is our desire to wage war deeply rooted in human evolution?

by Steve Price

War is hell. Not to mention brutal, destructive and, in the minds of some, insane. So why, after some six million years of human evolution, have we failed to transcend this barbaric activity? The answer, according to philosophy professor and author David Smith, Ph.D., lies in evolution. Or, more specifically, evolutionary psychology.
 
Evolutionary psychology tries to understand the human mind and human behavior in the framework of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which takes us far back to prehistory and the origins of our species. “If we’re going to understand the human mind, human behavior, human emotions, we need to take this long evolutionary view,” states Smith. “An evolutionary picture can take us very far in understanding these things.”
 
As far back as we have evidence of human activity, we have evidence of  war in one version or another, asserts Smith. “Which leads one to suspect that war is rooted deeply in the human character.”
 
He points out that our closest relation, the common chimpanzee, also engages in something very like war. So our common ancestor must also have been warlike. This suggests that we are genetically wired for war, and that war is “adaptive behavior.” That is, a viable solution to life’s problems. Prehistoric groups who could exterminate their neighbors had a distinct advantage: they could acquire valuable resources, then flourish and reproduce.
 
Moral Grounds
This scientific theory seems very reasonable. Then Smith makes the statement that “War is a profoundly moralistic activity.” War moral?
 
Yes, he explains. “Human warfare is almost always justified by its perpetrators on moral grounds. It is conceived as an altruistic behavior that rids the world of evil (think Hitler and the Jews, Saddam Hussein). We say soldiers ‘serve.’ We don’t say soldiers kill, even though that’s what their business is about.”
 
Smith says that war is very different from murder, which is not moral or socially acceptable. “The basic morality of social primates [apes and humans] is that violence within the group is not permissible, while violence outside the group is not only permissible, it’s often obligatory.”
 
The precondition for war, Smith states, is that one must see the enemy as fit to kill. Most often we think of our enemies as profoundly dangerous. From a prehistoric perspective, we must view the ones we want to kill as either dangerous predators, as parasites or as the carriers of deadly disease. But humans are highly intelligent creatures, and know that the enemy, as despicable as they may seem, are still part of the human family. So, to be psychologically capable of killing them, we must deceive ourselves into believing that they are less than human. Thus, political propaganda and military education.
 
Modern Warfare
But to look a man in the eye and then kill him goes against basic human nature. Smith says that when we see a human face, this inhibits the impulse to kill. So to kill, he explains, we must create either physical or psychological distance.  This was greatly enhanced with the advent of modern warfare, dating back to the 14th century and the invention of the longbow. Since then, there’s has been less and less face-to-face contact in the business of war. “War today is much like playing video games,” observes Smith, with highly trained technicians pushing buttons that send smart missiles hundreds of miles to their deadly mission.
 
And while we’ve learned to brilliantly deceive ourselves to wage war, we are still caught between contradictory forces. “On the one hand, we have it in us to kill. But we also have a horror of shedding blood of our own kind,” Smith says. So we still pay a high price for killing each other. “The psychological distance doesn’t last,” notes Smith. “It catches up to people.” He mentions the high rates of post-traumatic stress modern soldiers experience. They are often haunted, for the rest of their lives, by what they did and saw on the battlefield.

David Smith is not overly optimistic about humankind’s ability to rise above its nature and put war on the shelf. But he remains “an informed optimist.” His new book, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, to be published spring 2007, will get his ideas into the public marketplace.
 
Smith says, “If I can contribute to people being just a little bit more reflective about this horrible business of war, then I’m deeply gratified.”

Smith's last book, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind captured the national media’s attention, including a review in Psychology Today, an article in the Wall Street Journal, and interviews on Fox News Live and Forbes.com, among other media outlets. U.S. News & World Report, for instance, quoted Smith in a December 2005 story titled "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire," which looked at media figures such as Baltimore Orioles player Rafael Palmeiro and Martha Stewart and at a New York Times/CBS poll on the Bush administration's credibility on the case for the Iraq War.

Smith is also co-director and co-founder of the University of New England's New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Biology.
 
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