Is War in Our Nature and Thus Inevitable?
War Defined

To avoid confusion with other forms of human homicidal violence, war needs to be defined. Then we can consider whether it is an inescapable facet of what kind of animal we are.

Murder clearly is not war. As used here, revenge killing of specific individuals over personal grievances, things like lethal family feuding, is also not war. Although the reality of miniscule homicide rates in a variety of societies makes clear that we do not need to tolerate high rates of either homicide or revenge killings, we’ll not completely eliminate either of these any time soon. Both go back deeply into our past, perhaps even before our predecessors became humans. (Ferguson 2013a, pp 112-131; 2013b, pp 191-240)

War, as used here, is when people band together to indiscriminately kill people in another group and the majority of the community’s noncombatants and religious leaders sanction this action. It’s a community’s sanctioned killing of people in other groups who have not personally harmed the killers that distinguishes war from other forms of killing. For example, two drug gangs killing each other or even outsiders is not what’s being considered because they are not supported by the larger communities where they live, nor by their religious leaders. Gang killings are considered to be policing issues.

So, is war as so defined inescapable? Is it a part of human nature? Or is it actually a cultural late-comer to human behavior? 

War - Nature or Nurture?

We consider first the work of anthropologists who’ve studied people called hunter-gatherers or nomadic foragers. These societies are our best window into our deep human evolutionary past; they reflect how Homo sapiens likely lived during the hundreds of thousands of years (~200,000) when we lived off the land as nomads. These were the eons during which we evolved to be what we are today, before we started living in permanent settlements or villages.
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In two books, The Human Potential for Peace and Beyond War, the anthropologist Douglas Fry reviewed the literature on many aspects of thirty-five extant hunter-gatherer cultures. (Fry 2006, 2007) If you combine and analyze all of them together, which generally has been the practice by others, no particular pattern emerges with respect to war. But Fry separated them into two groups: simple hunter-gatherers and complex hunter-gatherers.

                                                                Table 1 – Douglas Fry – Beyond War (p. 77)
                                                          Adapted from Robert Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum:
                                                            Diversity In Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways (Kelly 2013a) - n=35

Variable	Simple Hunter-Gatherers	Complex Hunter-Gatherers
Primary Food	Territorial game (or plants)	Marine resources or plants
Food Storage	Very rare	Typical
Mobility	Nomadic or semi-nomadic	Settled or mostly settled
Population	Low population density	Higher population densities
Political system	Egalitarian	Hierarchical-wealth or heredity
Slavery	Absent	Frequent
Competition	Not accepted	Encouraged
War	Rare	Common

Now interesting patterns do emerge. Eight social variables are listed down the left column. We can compare social characteristics between the simple hunter-gatherers and complex hunter-gatherers. A fundamental resource difference exists between them having to do with food supply that affects mobility and population density. Compare primary foods, top left column. Simple hunter-gatherers rely on highly mobile terrestrial game. Or in some cases, like the Hadza of Africa, they rely on insufficiently rich or unreliably available plants.

Complex hunter-gatherers rely on marine resources or reliably available plants. The classic example of complex hunter-gatherers were tribes along the north-west coast of the United States and Canada that depended on intertidal edibles and massive salmon fish-runs, described for example by anthropologist Robert Kelley. (Kelly 2013b)

Consequently, food storage is rare for simple-hunter gatherers but typical for complex hunter-gatherers. Note also the effect on mobility: complex hunter-gatherers are settled or mostly settled. Their food resource is sufficiently rich and stable that they can put down permanent roots. Settling, which only began roughly 10,000 to 15,000 YA, (Ferguson 2013a,b) created new physical and social environments for our ancestors. This elicited, or triggered, many consequences. Compare effects on population size—low population densities vs. higher population densities—or behavioral/psychological changes, like attitudes about competition.

Note especially differences in political systems, a feature central to this book. For simple hunter-gatherers the political/social system is egalitarian. Important decision-making affecting all group members (e.g., whether to move camp, or punish a group member for a serious infraction, or presumably to start a war) is not patriarchal or matriarchal. It is by mutual egalitarian agreement of all members, men and women: a koinoniarchy (shared male/female governing).

Egalitarian is not meant in the sense that all individuals are respected or treated equally in these groups. They are not. We are a very hierarchically inclined species, and as will be described below, our males are particularly interested in dominance status and are predisposed to improve their own. Michelle Rosaldo pointed out that even in egalitarian simple hunter-gatherer groups there exists a tendency for women to defer to men; for example, letting men sit under the shadier tree. (Rosaldo 1974, pp 17-42) Reasons will be described in several essays to follow for why women, even in an egalitarian community, often may prefer to defer to men rather than to quarrel in ways that would create social disharmony. (e.g., "Sexual Dimorphism--What is It?")

In these nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, egalitarian is meant in the sense that there is no chief or even group of men who lead and can impose their will on others. Family units tend to manage their affairs independently, and decisions affecting the entire group are made by mutual discussion and consensus of all group members, men and women.

Because of our hierarchical tendencies, for egalitarian groups to remain egalitarian, urges to rise in social status over others must be suppressed. The anthropologist Christopher Boehm, who studied egalitarian groups, noted that they used a variety of techniques like ridicule or shunning to nip in the bud any tendencies of “upstart males” (or females) to rise in status. (Boehm 1999)

Now consider WARFARE (bottom left) and note that nomadic, simple hunter-gatherers—who arguably most resemble our deeply ancient ancestors—rarely make war. Significantly, some of those cultures have never been recorded as making war. This is strong evidence that war is not a genetic predisposition. Otherwise all of these people, including the simple hunter-gatherers, would commonly make war. Also remember, because it is important later, that the social/political system of these non-warring groups is egalitarian…women’s preferences contribute to making decisions affecting the entire group.
 
When we relatively recently began to settle permanently, however, archaeological findings make clear that warfare emerged and became increasingly common. This cultural shift is explored in Fry’s War, Peace, and Human Nature by authors David Dye, Brian Ferguson, and Robert Kelly. (Fry 2013; Dye 2013, Ferguson, 2013a, 2013b; Kelly 2013b)

Now it may seem universal, but war does not occur everywhere. In The Human Potential for Peace (pp. 63-65, 92-93), Fry lists over 80 cultures anthropologists classify as nonviolent/and or/non-warring. (Fry 2006) The website www.peacefulsocieties.org describes twenty-five. They’re not Utopias. They are human beings who have arguments and conflicts. Sexual jealousy can be a problem. So can general “trouble-makers.” For example, in Beyond War (pp. 148-165), Fry describes how social conflicts are resolved in several “peaceful” societies, even including rare instances of homicide. (Fry 2007) But using physical aggression is uncommon. And in the societies described, war is absent.

Some of these societies are fairly familiar: the Amish, Hopi, and Sami. Notably, in The Human Potential for Peace (p. 63), Norwegians are included in the list of internally peaceful societies. Sadly, the existence and nature of nonviolent cultures is, with rare exceptions, not taught in most schools, conveying the impression to children that war is part of what kind of animal we are.

Non-warring religious groups (e.g., Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baha’i, Mennonites, Hutterites) live within a state-level, warring culture, but they create a way of life that avoids war, or fighting in wars of groups around them. Their existence also offers proof that making war is a bad—arguably evil—recent cultural phenomenon, not a genetic inevitability. These examples indicate that war is fundamentally a result of nurture, not nature. We’ll return to this issue. But now we turn to the issue of sex—specifically sexual differences that are part of the phenomenon called sexual dimorphism.​

                                                                   C4 - Sexual Dimorphism - What is It?
                                                                   Return to Table of Contents

Boehm, C. (1999) Hierachy in the Forest. The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard Univ. Press.
Dye, D. H. (2013) "Trends in Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America." In: Fry, D. P. (Ed.) War, Peace
     and Human Nature, 132-150, New York: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, R. B. (2013a) "Pinker’s List. Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality." In: Fry, D. P. (Ed.) War, Peace and
     Human Nature, 112-131, New York: Oxford University Press.
Ferguson, R. B. (2013b) The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East. In: Fry, D. P. (Ed.) War, Peace
     and Human Nature, 191-240, New York: Oxford University Press.
Fry, D. (2006) The Human Potential for Peace: an Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence. 
     New York: Oxford University Press.
Fry, D. (2007) Beyond War: the Human Potential for Peace. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fry, D. (2013) War, Peace and Human Nature, New York, Oxford University Press.
Kelly, R. L. (2013a) The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
     University Press.
​Kelly, R. (2013b) "From the Peaceful to the Warlike: Ethnographic and Archaeological Insights into Hunter-Gatherer
     Warfare and Homicide." In: Fry, D. P. (Ed.) War, Peace and Human Nature, 151-167, New York, Oxford University
     Press.
Rosaldo, M. Z. (1974) Woman, culture, and society: a theoretical overview. In Rosaldo, M. Z. & L. Lamphere
     (Eds.) Woman, Culture, and Society, 17-42, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
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