War: What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris, review
Even before I had opened this book, I wanted to hate it. According to Ian Morris war is not merely a necessary evil, it is actively good for us. Mankind, he argues, is incapable of resolving conflicts peacefully: we have only evolved complex civilisations thanks to organised violence, and we only live in harmony because of the threat of a big stick.
To prove this thesis, he has called on an impressive variety of sources from military history, archaeology, anthropology and evolutionary biology to map out how war has affected us at every stage of our development. Man has always been a selfish, brutal species. Stone Age skeletons invariably show massive injuries. Ten thousand years ago as many as one in five humans met a violent end – statistics borne out by studies of tribal societies today.
What put a stop to this perpetual state of “all against all”, paradoxically, was war. The tribe that could muster the most men, and the highest degree of cooperation, could defeat its neighbours and impose stability. Furthermore, agriculture made ransacking neighbouring territories counterproductive: true power lay in assimilating other peoples and their territories intact. This is what Morris calls “productive war”: tribal societies merged and grew into sophisticated empires capable of stamping out low-level violence, to bring peace and prosperity.
The Roman Empire might have raped, burnt and crucified its way across the world, but by the first century AD the percentage of people dying violently had dropped from 20 to just three or four per cent. Not much consolation for the Sabine women or Masada’s Jews, perhaps, but pretty impressive. Despite sickening atrocities, the British Empire and its American heir have created more peace and prosperity than they ever did bloodshed. Furthermore, he says, the United States must continue to threaten those who rock the boat, and even attack them when necessary, for the greater good: the alternative would be a return of widespread low-level war that would end up killing far more people.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10786021/War-What-Is-It-Good-For-by-Ian-Morris-review.html
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