WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
Ian Morris
Hachette India
495 pages; Rs 699
If there is a Murphy's Law to predict the conclusions of a spate of recent books, it is thus: A provocative premise tends to a nonsensical conclusion.
When the books seek to explain why the world looks the way it does, that conclusion is usually a version of the myth of the social contract in which we all surrender our autonomy and voluntarily ask that we be governed by a state incapable of building a village toilet.
And so we have Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest and this latest work by historian Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?
His answer, to quote from the book, is "War makes the state, and the state makes peace". Unless the state doesn't make peace - in which case it goes to war again, and eventually there is peace, of some form, for some time, and that is enough for Morris to move to the next chapter.
Each iteration of this cycle results in lower rates of violent death, as a percentage of the global population when averaged out over the long arc of human history, suggesting that this is a desirable outcome.
Here's the empirical core of Morris's case: Archeological remains of burial sites suggest a large number of Stone Age folk suffered a violent end. Today, we have the European Union. This would not have been possible without the progress made through thousands of years of warfare.
"In the ten thousand years since we invented productive war, we have evolved culturally to be less violent," Morris writes, "As a result, the average person is now roughly twenty times less likely to die violently than the average person was in the Stone Age."
There are, as the reader may gather, several ways to critique such an approach.
As Morris admits, we know very little of the rates of "violent crime" in the Stone Age. Burial sites are not representative indicators of ways of death across a society, and most numbers are projections based on fairly small sample sizes.
Here's a hypothesis: What if those slain in battle were buried, but those who died of disease were burnt and the ashes scattered to the winds? But even if the statistics were more accurate, I would argue against surrendering the space of philosophical inquiry to a mere totting up of death tolls.
War, after all, has been a subject of philosophical debate since the Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BC). And, civilisation is a moral concept.
"It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?" ask the people of Milos, in the Milian dialogue written by Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War.
"To you the gain will be that by submission you will avert the worst; and we shall be all the richer for your preservation," reply the Athenians with remarkable candour.
"But must we be your enemies? Will you not receive us as friends if we are neutral and remain at peace with you?" the Milians wonder.
"No, your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship; for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness," the Athenians say.
In the event, Athens laid Milos to waste - men of military age were put to death, the women and children were enslaved. War, it appears, is good for states that survive the onslaught. But does a stronger state necessarily imply happier citizens?
What we know, is that for most of history, most states have been built, and maintained, through a process of enslavement. All ancient states were slave states with a sprinkling of citizens and a vast population of captives that was continuously replenished through warfare.
Most developing states in Asia, Africa, and South America continue to exist by virtue of tightly policed borders. We are, as the legions of "illegal" immigrants testify, unwilling prisoners of our states.
Morris, however, seems to think we are moving towards what he calls "open access orders" which "thrive on inclusion, because the bigger their markets and greater their freedoms, the better the system works."
This, he briefly considers, may not be to everyone's advantage, "In the eighteenth century, the Europeans who colonised America brought Africans into the Atlantic open-access order primarily as slaves; in the nineteenth, industrialised Europeans and Americans frequently used guns to force other Africans and Asians into larger markets."
In the twentieth century, we had two world wars, the Cold War, and hundreds of localised conflicts - which apparently killed less people as a percentage of global population than a Stone Age bar brawl - and here we are in the 21st, looking back at all our progress.
The problem with such books is their refusal to subject the narrative of progress to even the mildest inquiry. We can choose - at an individual, and communal, level - an austere present for the sake of a presumably bountiful future, but to appropriate the scarcely understood events of the past as an appropriate sacrifice for this present moment is just unwarranted arrogance.
Ian Morris
Hachette India
495 pages; Rs 699
If there is a Murphy's Law to predict the conclusions of a spate of recent books, it is thus: A provocative premise tends to a nonsensical conclusion.
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When the books seek to explain why the world looks the way it does, that conclusion is usually a version of the myth of the social contract in which we all surrender our autonomy and voluntarily ask that we be governed by a state incapable of building a village toilet.
And so we have Niall Ferguson's Civilisation: The West and the Rest and this latest work by historian Ian Morris, War: What is it good for?
His answer, to quote from the book, is "War makes the state, and the state makes peace". Unless the state doesn't make peace - in which case it goes to war again, and eventually there is peace, of some form, for some time, and that is enough for Morris to move to the next chapter.
Each iteration of this cycle results in lower rates of violent death, as a percentage of the global population when averaged out over the long arc of human history, suggesting that this is a desirable outcome.
Here's the empirical core of Morris's case: Archeological remains of burial sites suggest a large number of Stone Age folk suffered a violent end. Today, we have the European Union. This would not have been possible without the progress made through thousands of years of warfare.
"In the ten thousand years since we invented productive war, we have evolved culturally to be less violent," Morris writes, "As a result, the average person is now roughly twenty times less likely to die violently than the average person was in the Stone Age."
There are, as the reader may gather, several ways to critique such an approach.
As Morris admits, we know very little of the rates of "violent crime" in the Stone Age. Burial sites are not representative indicators of ways of death across a society, and most numbers are projections based on fairly small sample sizes.
Here's a hypothesis: What if those slain in battle were buried, but those who died of disease were burnt and the ashes scattered to the winds? But even if the statistics were more accurate, I would argue against surrendering the space of philosophical inquiry to a mere totting up of death tolls.
War, after all, has been a subject of philosophical debate since the Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BC). And, civilisation is a moral concept.
"It may be your interest to be our masters, but how can it be ours to be your slaves?" ask the people of Milos, in the Milian dialogue written by Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War.
"To you the gain will be that by submission you will avert the worst; and we shall be all the richer for your preservation," reply the Athenians with remarkable candour.
"But must we be your enemies? Will you not receive us as friends if we are neutral and remain at peace with you?" the Milians wonder.
"No, your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship; for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness," the Athenians say.
In the event, Athens laid Milos to waste - men of military age were put to death, the women and children were enslaved. War, it appears, is good for states that survive the onslaught. But does a stronger state necessarily imply happier citizens?
What we know, is that for most of history, most states have been built, and maintained, through a process of enslavement. All ancient states were slave states with a sprinkling of citizens and a vast population of captives that was continuously replenished through warfare.
Most developing states in Asia, Africa, and South America continue to exist by virtue of tightly policed borders. We are, as the legions of "illegal" immigrants testify, unwilling prisoners of our states.
Morris, however, seems to think we are moving towards what he calls "open access orders" which "thrive on inclusion, because the bigger their markets and greater their freedoms, the better the system works."
This, he briefly considers, may not be to everyone's advantage, "In the eighteenth century, the Europeans who colonised America brought Africans into the Atlantic open-access order primarily as slaves; in the nineteenth, industrialised Europeans and Americans frequently used guns to force other Africans and Asians into larger markets."
In the twentieth century, we had two world wars, the Cold War, and hundreds of localised conflicts - which apparently killed less people as a percentage of global population than a Stone Age bar brawl - and here we are in the 21st, looking back at all our progress.
The problem with such books is their refusal to subject the narrative of progress to even the mildest inquiry. We can choose - at an individual, and communal, level - an austere present for the sake of a presumably bountiful future, but to appropriate the scarcely understood events of the past as an appropriate sacrifice for this present moment is just unwarranted arrogance.