The growing genre of war abolition books out-number, out-think, and — for anyone who reads them — probably out-persuade the bizarre recent genre of war-is-good-for-you books, which I take to include Christopher Coker’s Why War, Margaret MacMillan’s War: How Conflict Shaped Us, Ian Morris’s War: What Is It Good For?, and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Accessory to War. Now along comes another book called Why War, this one by Richard Overy. It’s not so much a war-is-good-for-you book as a war-will-always-be-with-us book.
Overy does not provide a persuasive case that war will always be with us. And not because he explains how war can continue very much longer without nuclear apocalypse eliminating us, a question he does not seriously address. Rather, his case amounts essentially to dividing the universe into the normal and the abnormal, compiling endless facts about the general commonness of war, declaring war normal, and concluding that “if war has a very long human history, then it also has a future.”
Does slavery have a future? Cannibalism? Blood feuds? Patriarchy? Small pox? Capital punishment? Astrology? Maybe. Not yes. Only maybe. And that’s all such books can and should say about war.
We simply do not know that war has a very long human history. Overy admits to having no evidence of war (or its absence) for most of humanity’s 200,000 years or so. He presents evidence that war has been more common during the past 10,000 or 20,000 years than some have believed. Much of that evidence is debatable, and even if it is all believable, it does not justify Overy’s strange leap to declaring war “universal,” “constant,” etc. Overy declares that he somehow knows that all human societies have waged war “when the circumstances made it seem necessary,” as could be said of anything, such as child sacrifice. The question is whether the circumstances should ever make something seem necessary. After all, we choose what seems necessary; the circumstances do not.
What if future archaeology firmly establishes that all humans everywhere have always waged war? What if investigative journalism proves that all the nations currently and in recorded history that we have thought lived without war have somehow secretly engaged in warfare? Do you seriously expect that to persuade me to stop working on war abolition? I’m a person, not a rock. Read some Sartre. Slap yourself in the face, man.
Arguments that war cannot be ended typically announce that war is in our genes or that war is imposed on us by our environment or by our economic system (which is in turn imposed by something else or which could be eliminated after which war could be). Overy touches on these topics and claims that war is possibly more biological-ish or inevitable-ish than some believe, yet ultimately debunks such cases that war cannot be ended. Overy only establishes that there have been a lot of wars with a lot of motivations. That’s not good enough. That’s not even news.
I think a number of considerations would help the writers and readers of books like this to see beyond their current horizons. One is a deep consideration of how different war is and how different the world is from the wars and the worlds of most of the examples that pack the books. Today a kid sits in a room, pushes a button, and blows up a building halfway around the world. A president sits in a room threatening to blow up entire cities without breaking a sweat. This is radically different in cost to victims, in cost to participants, in cost to the rest of the world, and in requirements to perform. Alternatives to weapons and war are also radically different. An occupation or a coup can be undone by strategic, organized, unarmed, civilian defense — a science and an art unknown to much of the history of war and certainly to virtually all of its historians even today.
Overy gives us motivations for wars that include resources, religions (and nationalisms), power struggles, security concerns, and so on. But he never distinguishes original motivations from propaganda. In wars like the wars on Vietnam and Iraq, we have the records of the decisions to go to war having been made prior to the meetings aimed at determining good motivations, and yet we often treat propaganda as all there is without even noting the means of its creation. Because many wars nowadays (and in many past days too) are launched by a tiny number of decision-makers — whereas no government that wanted to be able to launch wars would dare establish a public referendum requirement — a key answer to the question “Why War?” is obedience, a.k.a. the absence of democracy (ironically a popular propaganda excuse for some of the very wars in question).
Overy examines biology, psychology, anthropology, and ecology, but never campaign funding/bribery. He looks into resources, “belief,” power, and security, but never weapons sales. He doesn’t completely omit Western warmongering from his examples, but for the most part he does, which could help explain the lack of any serious investigation of the elephant in the room, the government with most of the weapons sales, most of the foreign bases, the most military spending, and the most engagement in wars, namely the government in Washington, D.C. Books that examine the U.S. gun death problem while avoiding all mention of the guns are not well received. Yet most places with wars manufacture no weapons, and most why-war books never mention the weapons.
Billions of people are born, live, and die without war. They display no symptoms of war deprivation. They make no efforts to get into wars. They often make tremendous efforts to avoid wars. They say, if asked, that they are against wars. A tiny percentage of them engage in anti-war activism, peace education, and so forth. Claiming that war will always be with us ought to locate its claim in some small minority of people, not in this majority. Except that a minority can only do what the majority allows it to, and most people do not engage in anything close to the level of action they could for peace. So, there is a problem of war acceptance, a problem significantly exacerbated by bad books. People only abolish what they think can be abolished. Your average reader, at the point at which they drop one of these books out of boredom, will be left imagining that it contains a pretty highfalutin case for the impossibility of ending war. I therefore recommend reading conclusions first.
In the case of Overy’s book, there’s just not much of a conclusion, and reading the chapters of the book explains why. After failing to establish a biological mandate for war, Overy goes into the psychology of war and decides that there is a “more universal” (sort of like more perfect) “predisposition” (just as there is a predisposition for screaming and crying). But if this meant anything and it were true, it would — I hate to break the news — have to also be biological. Psychology is a different means of looking at the same human beings, not a means of causing humans to consist of something non-biological. And we had already established in chapter 1 that biology did not doom us to war.
Overy turns to anthropology, which seems like it should have come first, and notes in the third paragraph of the chapter that there’s just not much there. Overy claims that if Margaret Mead were right that many societies had no war this would provide humans the “potential to embrace a pacified future.” But how could we not have that potential? Whether a higher percentage of societies have been peaceful (Mead) or a lower percentage (Overy, when he’s not throwing around words like “universal” that he’s built no case for), future societies are for us to create. Overy claims that 61 percent of modern hunter-gatherers engage in war. He seems to take this as a victory for war on the model of a football score. And war, having won the match, is therefore normal and universal and constant. Long live war! But — ahem — what about the other 39 percent?
Moving on to ecology, Overy cites a study finding 62.3 percent of academic articles claiming a connection between climate change and war, while the others “claimed that social, political, and institutional variables were more significant than the weather.” But a connection and a ranking in importance are different questions. Neither goes to the question Overy thinks they help answer of whether “climate really does generate violent conflict.” And that question, if sense can be made out of it, does not help with the critical question of how we living, breathing, thinking beings are going to deal with the coming ecological collapse. Mexico sending firefighters to help Los Angeles is one reaction. The U.S. threatening Greenland and Panama (and no doubt soon thanking the Mexican fire fighters by calling them dog-eating rapists) is a different one. We get to choose.