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  • Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History,

  • and today we're going to respond to your many requests and talk about a controversial subject:

  • War.

  • So here at Crash Course we're really not that into the history of war,

  • partly because we feel it's been discussed well elsewhere

  • and partly because we haven't really figured out a way to tackle it.

  • Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Nonononono, that's all history is:

  • It's a series of wars.

  • Well, me-from-the-past, I can certainly see why you would think that,

  • because that's how many history classes are organized.

  • But, in fact, I don't think that history is primarily about war.

  • But, I mean, humans find all kinds of ways to die,

  • like, you could teach a whole Crash Course World History on smallpox.

  • In fact, we kind of did that last week.

  • Ultimately, I find cooperation and trade more interesting

  • than the violent and destructive aspects of world history

  • because I think they probably, ultimately, matter more.

  • But I do have to admit that war is a pretty big deal in world history.

  • So we better spend some time talking about it, at least in the abstract.

  • [Intro]

  • So today we're gonna focus on the question of why people fight.

  • And, more specifically, why human beings go to war.

  • Like, to put it in another way, we're going to look at

  • whether making war is part of "human nature".

  • This gets into some nit-picky "How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin?" questions about nature,

  • but we're just gonna put those aside for now.

  • So are human being hard-wired to fight and kill each other?

  • Well that's a question that philosophers have been asking for a long time.

  • Like, Nietzsche summed it up this way:

  • "I am by nature war-like. To attack is among my instincts."

  • But he was Nietzsche. He had a number of instincts that I'm pretty sure were not universal.

  • Anyway, that attitude might explain why Nietzsche is

  • so popular among the group most likely to go to war: Young men.

  • Now among slightly less scary philosophers,

  • the question of humans' war-like nature is often described as

  • a debate between Hobbes, who saw humans as war-like and violent,

  • and Rousseau, who thought that humanity was naturally peaceful until civilization came along.

  • And we've heard echoes of this debate throughout our study of world history.

  • Like, were we better off as foragers, when we had way more time for scoodlypooping?

  • Stupid civilization, always ruining everything. Let's go to the thought bubble.

  • So was Hobbes right that life in the so-called "state of nature" was nasty, brutish and short,

  • or was Rousseau right that it was amazing?

  • Well, without a time machine which would settle a lot of vexing historical questions

  • and would also allow me to go back and fix my terrible, terrible mistakes at the eighth grade cotillion,

  • our best guide to what people were like in the "state of nature" comes from anthropology.

  • Making guesses about the very distant past based on observations of modern hunter-gatherers

  • is extremely problematic, but it's the best we have to go on.

  • Well, that and archaeology.

  • So, what do anthropologists tell us?

  • Well, it doesn't look so good for Rousseau.

  • Many anthropologists suggest that in pre-civilization social orders, things were pretty violent.

  • In Australia, for example, killing and fighting was among the main causes of mortality,

  • and archaeology has revealed evidence of warfare going back thousands of years.

  • Now, some of these anthropological conclusions are controversial,

  • but when combined with cave paintings and fossils of humans

  • who pretty obviously were killed by other humans,

  • it seems clear that we've been killing each other for what historians like to call "a long-ass-time".

  • So Hobbes seems to be right that life in the "state of nature" was probably violent and brief.

  • But was it war?

  • Again, anthropologists can give us some guidance here.

  • Some studies have reported relatively large-scale group confrontations similar to battles,

  • but these tend to be largely symbolic, and they often don't result in much killing.

  • Most of the actual violence that hunter-gatherers commit against each other takes place during raids,

  • in which one group sneaks up upon another and attacks.

  • So in the end there may be like a very violent middle path

  • between the individual killings and like, Cain v. Abel,

  • and the modern wars that we see today.

  • But why are we seemingly so hard-wired toward violence?

  • Well, it might be evolution.

  • Thanks, thought bubble.

  • So, I wanna be really clear about something.

  • We may have aggression "in our genes", but you can't kill people!

  • And also, you don't have to.

  • Many of us - most of us, in fact - make it all the way through life without killing a single person.

  • So I think it's going too far to say that our genes have, like, made us into stone-cold killers,

  • but it is possible that aggression is an innate trait in humans.

  • And under the right conditions, maybe it finds its expression in violence and war.

  • Now, we should all be very skeptical about

  • applying evolutionary biology to cultural characteristics like warlike behavior,

  • because Darwin's ideas have been misused to explain all sorts of unpleasant things.

  • Especially in nineteenth-century concepts about race.

  • You know, if you're in a structurally privileged position in the social order, it's easy enough to be like,

  • "Huh, I wonder how I got here.

  • Probably natural selection."

  • When in fact, you know, slavery was not a function of biology;

  • it was a function of oppression.

  • And another reason we should be aware

  • is that we often refer to cultures "evolving" very quickly

  • like often in a generation,

  • but biological evolution takes a lot longer.

  • That said, there are a few ways that evolutionary imperatives could contribute to a warlike human nature.

  • We'll start with the idea that it is a biological imperative to pass on genetic traits to successive generations.

  • Because our close relatives and kin contain the most genetic material in common,

  • we naturally want to protect them and ensure the continued survival of our genes.

  • So we might be expected to fight in order to protect members of our kin group.

  • But then again, trying to protect your family from harm is somewhat different from killing other people's families.

  • Well, here's where it's helpful to remember that for the vast majority of human history,

  • war consisted of raiding.

  • It was about taking stuff from other people's kin group so that your kin group could have that stuff.

  • For 99% of human history, that's how we fought.

  • Not as organized states warring with each other.

  • So let's stop even thinking about, like, groups of humans or even individual humans

  • and think for a second about genes.

  • Insofar as genes want anything, they want to go on.

  • Life wishes to continue.

  • And for those human genes to go on, they needed humans to go on,

  • and for that, we need two resources:

  • Food and sex.

  • Both of which could be quite scarce

  • in the many millennia before we settled down into agricultural-based societies.

  • It occurs to me they are also quite scarce in most American high schools

  • unless you consider cheetos food.

  • So you can easily see how the competition for these two resources could become violent.

  • It might provide an evolutionary explanation for war.

  • Like, skill in fighting meant more access to food in the form of better hunting grounds.

  • It also meant more food, because you were better at fighting the food, too.

  • And there's a more horrifying aspect to this as well,

  • which is that in many of these raids, women were the principal goal.

  • They were to be acquired.

  • Also, as we know from the Odyssey, fighting has a tendency to breed more fighting.

  • Like, you kill my friend, it makes it more likely that I'm going to kill you.

  • I'm not going to kill you, but seriously, don't kill any of my friends.

  • We see a bit of this phenomenon in a description of

  • intertribal warfare among North American Plains Indians.

  • "In an atmosphere charged with intertribal distrust,

  • even an imaged slight by an outsider could lead to retaliation against other members of his tribe...

  • It was much easier to start a war than to end one."

  • And as you may have noticed, that's still true today.

  • But okay, if war was a response to scarce resources, why do we have wars now?

  • Resources are relatively easy to acquire.

  • Well, that's a complicated question,

  • and we're going to talk next week about how war may actually have contributed to civilization

  • and proven socially useful by helping us create kingdoms and states.

  • But another way to examine the question of why we fight

  • is to examine what soldiers have said about why they fight.

  • So here's one such voice, although I wanna be clear that there are millions of them.

  • Karl Marlantes was a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam who wrote about his experience

  • in the novel "Matterhorn" and a memoir called "What It Is Like to Go to War".

  • That book includes a number of uncomfortable revelations

  • about the way soldiers often think and feel about war.

  • For one thing, Marlantes tells us that soldiers achieve a sense of transcendence through fighting,

  • by becoming part of something bigger than themselves.

  • Also, he says:

  • "There is a deep savage joy in destruction,

  • a joy that goes beyond ego enhancement."

  • Now, today's soldiers rarely fight for food or mates, but they do fight for each other.

  • And not wanting to let your comrades down, feeling loyal to the group,

  • those are powerful motivators.

  • More viscerally, fighting is exciting to humans.

  • It gets the adrenaline pumping.

  • According to Marlantes, "Combat is the crack cocaine of all excitement highs."

  • Neither of those things sound at all fun to me, but I guess we're all wired differently.

  • So what do we do with the fact that for many of us, there is joy and power in killing?

  • How do we respond when a former pilot tells us, as he whispered to Marlantes,

  • that he enjoyed napalming the enemy, saying: "I loved it. I lit up the entire valley."

  • How do we respond to Marlantes's revelation that during Vietnam, he

  • "ran toward the fighting with the same excitement, trembling and thrill as a lover rushing to the beloved"?

  • Well, I think Marlantes reminds us that despite our biology,

  • soldiers, just like the rest of us, have free will.

  • They make choices.

  • Marlantes also notes: "Choosing sides is the fundamental first choice that a warrior makes...

  • The second fundamental choice of the warrior is to be willing to use violence to protect someone

  • against intended or implied violence."

  • Now, for many humans over millennia, that choice hasn't been much of a choice.

  • You fight for your kin group.

  • But in at least many parts of the world today, that choice is a choice.

  • Now, it may be that these uncomfortable revelations help to explain

  • why we might want to search for a biological or evolutionary explanation for why humans go to war.

  • Maybe that's preferable to the idea that humans just take pleasure in the activity of fighting

  • and pursue it merely for its own sake.

  • But just as there's a danger in celebrating warfare and its transcendence,

  • we need to be careful of explaining war merely as an outgrowth of evolutionary necessities

  • because such explanations can lead to a fatalistic conclusion that war is inevitable.

  • But it's not. The cycle of violence that you see in the Odyssey

  • gets broken all the time in human history.

  • And yes, it is much harder to end a war than it is to start one,

  • but it is not impossible.

  • When we get carried away by biological explanations,

  • we forget that while humans may not have evolved all that much in the past one thousand years,

  • our institutions have.

  • And that's happened because of human choices

  • that go far beyond the desire for food or the need to reproduce.

  • Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.

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Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History,

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