Every Clime, Class and Colour

The World Is A Mess, But Not Inherently

The world right now feels chaotic. Maybe it often has been, but we are simply more aware of it in the modern age. Regardless, the war in Ukraine and Palestine threaten to spill into regional ones. The UN is at a standstill due to lack of funding. The United States seems to be heading towards a recession, threatening their neighbours with annexation on the way down. Underpinning all of this is the looming threat of climate change.  It is easy to fall into nihilism when facing so many problems. In such scenarios it is common for people to talk as if conflict is part of human nature. Of course we will have another world war because we have already had two. It is part of who we are, why fight it?  I argue because becoming apathetic and Darwinian is a surefire way of ensuring the situation will continue to worsen. On that note, today I am going to talk about an article first published in 1940 named Warfare is Only an Invention — Not a Biological Necessity.

I initially believed that war developed out of agricultural society. Settled communities at some stage in pre-history used their surplus of food and wealth to wage the first war. I presumed that to have been inevitable. Once the material conditions arose that could support a war effort, wars we had. Extreme violence has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time. Even Neanderthals may have in part been driven to extinction by Homo Sapiens once we arrived at Europe (Gilpin, Meldman and Aoki, 2015). However, Mead’s article Warfare is Only an Invention — Not a Biological Necessity changed how I conceptualised the start of warfare. She argued that the rise of warfare (and the continuation of it in the modern era) was/is not inevitable. Rather, it is a social invention that developed in some cultures and not in others. Inuit of North America she argued, never developed the concept of war until relatively recent times. This differed from similarly advanced society of the Pygmies in Africa, who routinely engaged in warfare throughout history (Mead, 1940). And if warfare is something that has been invented, perhaps it could be replaced in the future with something that is less destructive.

This must have been comforting for Mead as WW2 had just broken out in the time of her writing. Her theory on pygmies and Inuit’s may be incorrect. Perhaps some preserved Inuit’s will be found with wounds from a battle and war did come to the Inuit’s sooner than we think. But I think it is important to keep the overall idea from Mead in mind. War is a social invention, the same as marriage and taxes, and perhaps can be changed by the societies of the future. It is easy to think of war as part of human nature and therefore inevitable. This can lead to apathy and in the worst case excuse the brutality that is carried out in war. But if we conceptualise war as distinct from nature, as something that comes about not because of our biology, then it is something we can change. It’s when we accept something as inevitable that we give up on ever trying to adjust the direction we are going in. We become lethargic individuals with no agency and that’s not how people with integrity act. At a time where liberal institutions such as the United Nations is under attack from those who shun multilateralism, this becomes important. Neither the Israeli conflict nor the Russian invasion of Ukraine was inevitable, and neither are future wars.

A better future is always possible.

Bibliography

Gilpin, W, Meldman, M.W and Aoki, K. 2016. “An ecocultural model predicts Neanderthal extinction through competition with modern humans.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113: 2134-2139.

Mead, Margaret. “Warfare is Only an Invention — Not a Biological Necessity.” In The Dolphin Reader. 2nd edition. Ed. Douglas Hunt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. 415-421.