The Psychology of Modern Conflict

Evolutionary Theory, Human Nature and a Liberal Approach to War

K. Payne

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349682461, 9781137428585
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428592
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does modern warfare, as fought by liberal societies, have in common with our human evolution? This study posits an important relationship between the two we have evolved to fight, and traditional hunter-gatherer societies were often violent places. But we also evolved to cooperate, to feel empathy and to behave altruistically towards others.

1

Introduction

This book explores the relationship between our evolved psychology and the character of modern conflict as fought by Western, liberal democracies. Honour, I conclude, is central to both types of society even though they differ in a great many respects. Moreover, liberal conceptions of honour are the sort of thing that a hunter-gatherer from prehistory might easily recognise: we are describing the same fundamental impulse. The honour that motivates the liberal actor shares much with the desire for esteem that was sought by earlier humans. Specifically, this is honour as a form of public sacrifice for the group.

So I argue that there is a connection between the two worlds, no matter how dissimilar they ostensibly seem. The essential puzzle for me is to reconcile a static, or very slowly evolving, human nature with the profound and rapid shifts in the manifestation of warfare that we have experienced in the decades since the Second World War. I want to explore whether, despite the manifestly huge differences between the modern world and that of the early human hunter-gatherer, there are still connections in the way in which we fight, and the reasons we do so.

Second, the book says something about the relationship between society and those who fight on its behalf. I end up concluding that there is a tension between liberal values and those that are extolled on the battlefield. Liberal values and liberal warfare are not always in harmony. But paradoxically, perhaps, I find that it is the liberals and not the warriors who are nearer to the conception of evolutionary honour. The way in which Western and other armies fight is in some respects contrary to our evolved human nature. Their warfare demands discipline and obedience to hierarchy and it entails the veneration of tradition. These are cultural manifestations of war that have often paid off. As we shall see, they were not necessarily manifestations of war as fought by hunter-gatherers. Liberal armies and liberal society do agree, however, about the need to sacrifice for the group.

To preview the argument to follow, I argue in the opening part of the book that evolution produces a repertoire of possible behaviours in which violence within and between groups is only one possibility. Cooperation and altruism are also adaptive behaviours in many circumstances, and I explore the implications of this via Robert Trivers’ powerful notion of reciprocal, or non-kin, altruism (Trivers 1971). I then argue that modern liberal societies place a premium on cooperative, non-violent behaviours, in which empathy is an important trait. I conclude with the thought that liberal war is postmodern, in the sense that it involves a subjective storytelling element, including one about heroism and sacrifice. But I shall argue too that this ‘postmodernity’ itself is fundamentally premodern. Human society, I argue, invariably rests on stories about identity. These collective narratives provide meaning and establish standards of behaviour, including in war.

While abjuring any rigorous definition, I see liberal societies as those that endorse and, broadly, practise the notion that others should be free to do as they wish, provided that they do not in so doing hurt anyone else. This is John Stuart Mill’s conception of liberty, which is distilled in his remark that ‘The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.’¹ The philosopher John Rawls also comes close to the essence when he argues that as a basic principle of justice, ‘each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others’.² There is a second Rawlsian idea that is relevant here – that of the ‘veil of ignorance’: to agree that a societal arrangement is fair we must be prepared to accept it without knowing our place in that society. In such circumstances, we might be assumed to set aside all partial interests and really opt for the fairest solution, lest we find ourselves unfairly treated when the veil is lifted. Liberalism seen in this way challenges the idea of a vested interest in ourselves or our group.

Of course, ‘liberal’ societies in the real world fall far short of this abstract ideal-type. There are many real-world injustices, even in the socially liberal, ostensibly egalitarian societies of Northern Europe. As Reinhold Niebuhr, to whom I return later, succinctly argued, the ethics of a society often reflect the interests of power (Niebuhr 2003). We demand fairness for ourselves, or our group, and we attain it where we have the ability to enforce an unjust settlement. Idealised liberalism falls short in the real world on another important issue too – we might fancy that we know what we will want in life, but there is plenty of evidence from psychology to cast doubt on that, as well as on our ability to exercise free will in choosing it. When I return to describe real-world liberal societies, we will see the effect of these issues in producing an imperfect sort of liberalism.

Nonetheless, I maintain, it makes sense to talk of a group of liberal states that, to varying degrees, embody Mill’s notion of liberalism, with its core idea of not impeding the freedom of others to pursue their individual goals in life. The states in question are for the most part synonymous with the group of Western democracies in Europe, North America and the Antipodes. Readers will almost certainly have particular objections to the inclusion of one or another of these – for example, capital punishment in the USA, the marginalisation of aboriginals in Australia or gender bias in most of them. In my analysis I draw in particular on literature about the USA and the UK, further blunting any claim to generalisability. But my point is more abstract – liberal societies often fall short in the particulars of liberalism, but in aspiring to be liberal they nevertheless both create a logic of altruism and foster the attendant empathy that altruism requires.

This brings me to altruism, perhaps the central theme of the book and the concept which, as I explore in Chapter 3, seems prima facie to jar with the dog-eat-dog worlds of international politics and war. Liberalism venerates the individual over the power of the group. And yet, in an apparent paradox, it is the ultimate expression of a group, the force that binds it together. Altruism, potentially costly behaviour that directly benefits others but not ourselves, is central to liberalism because without it we would be acting in our own interests at the expense of others, and so be behaving illiberally. The sanctity of the individual human is the leitmotif of liberalism and the core of the collective identity in those societies that identify as such. Altruism is also central to military identity, since, as we shall see, combat is largely shaped by the ability of the participating soldiers to stand their ground amid carnage, risking their lives on behalf of their small group of peers. And altruism was the very basis of hunter-gatherer society – eventually allowing the extension of the group far beyond the small band of kinsfolk.

Honour is closely related to altruism. As with liberalism, I am similarly undogmatic in arriving at a definition of honour. But since this book argues that honour is the thread that best ties liberal society to human evolution, I will offer some broad thoughts here. I see honour as a public virtue, entailing self-sacrifice. It also involves adherence to existing codes of behaviour that are expected in society. And, lastly, it affords the honourable actor status, or at least some measure of esteem from peers. The particulars of honour, like the particulars of much other social behaviour, vary widely between societies, but all share those common themes.

The honourable warrior is one who commands public acclaim for his acts in war, a display of skill, a bold act conducted at personal risk or, as I argue later in a discussion of close-quarters combat, the strength of character to stand alongside one’s peers amid great danger. Honour is also a characteristics of states, and I suggest, as does Ned Lebow, that honour, or esteem, is one of the principal motivations that explains why states fight wars (Lebow 2010). Honour might also explain why liberal states engage in military interventions overseas, in defence of a burgeoning international norm that sometimes privileges the human rights of individuals and groups over the sovereignty of states (MacFarlane 2005). To be an ‘honourable’ liberal is not to fight tenaciously what is right for yourself, or even for your own group, but to recognise the demands and rights of others beyond it. In a logical sense, the entirety of humanity becomes the liberal’s referent group, deserving of even-handedness. That is not how the world works, of course. Our interests and our passions remain more often parochial and self-centred. We may have imagined into being vast national communities of complete strangers, conjuring up sufficient emotional attachment between them so as to produce extreme altruism in combat, yet many liberal warriors will tell you that they fight and die not for those grand ideas but for the small group of comrades alongside them.

An evolved human nature

Parts I and II of the book concentrate on our evolutionary legacy. I outline two themes from that literature. First is the idea of conflict as somehow being inevitable – a part of our innate human nature. Second comes the notion that there is a cooperative and altruistic side to our nature that makes us distinctively human. Animals, especially social animals, cooperate too, but not with the degree of depth and flexibility that humans manage, even among other primates (Burkart et al. 2014). Among other things, our evolved capacity for cooperation, especially via the development of language and conscious reflection, has unleashed culture.

In Part I, I link the hard-edged, violent evolutionary picture to the political philosophy of ‘realism’ as it has developed in thinking about relations between social groups. The notion of an evolved human nature resonates with much realist literature on strategic studies, not least in its view of the importance of power in an anarchical setting that is shaped largely by fear and insecurity. This is the picture of conflict as an inevitable aspect of human relations that comes to us from a selective reading of the canonical realists Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes. Later ‘classical’ realists such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau also adopted this view of power and insecurity shaping international behaviour, urging statesmen to prioritise a narrow, pragmatic conception of the ‘national interest’ over more ethically informed ones (Morgenthau 1949; Niebuhr 2003). In more sinister guise, evolution and conflict mix in the seductive but flawed theorising of social Darwinists, such as Herbert Spencer, who coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ and wrote about the extension of Darwin’s theory into the social domain. No one could lightly accuse Morgenthau, the Jewish refugee from Nazi racism, of being a social Darwinist, but the view of the realist does bear a passing resemblance to it, with groups under anarchy keenly focused on the power of their rivals, and trapped in a ‘security dilemma’ where increases in the power of potential rivals directly challenge one’s own power.

There is an important point to make in Part I, which describes the uncompromising and sometimes bleak realist worldview, which is that evolution is not deterministic. Unease over the implications of evolutionary theory as applied to human behaviour shaped the strong reactions to the sociobiology of the 1970s and 1980s. Uncomfortable ideas included the notion that there were distinct, evolved differences between men and women, or between different races of humans. Were men more predisposed to violence than women? Were some races cleverer than others? This was controversial territory, particularly amid a prevailing academic orthodoxy that highlighted the role of societies in constructing behaviours, especially by instilling them in the early years of childhood.

The revival of mainstream writing about natural selection and human society in recent years has been less divisive, armed with findings from the archaeological record, from the study of surviving modern hunter-gatherer communities, and with a growing body of evidence from experimental psychology and neuroscience. The new evolutionary psychology has ameliorated the determinist edge of sociobiology. Genes are, in very many instances, not our destiny. Most of our traits are shaped by complex combinations of genes, rather than owing to the expression of a single gene. Moreover, there is almost invariably considerable interaction between our genetic inheritance and our environment, such that the expression of the genes can be modified by environmental factors. In modern evolutionary psychology, there is no longer a nature–nurture debate, with both being recognised as fundamental to the way we are. It remains true that certain human traits, such as adult height (uncontroversially) and intelligence (much more so), are highly heritable – meaning that we can predict the variation in the trait with some confidence on the basis of genetic inheritance.³ But for a great many human characteristics, including those involved in war, it is hard to separate the genetic from the environmental. The environment, particularly during our childhood development, has such an impact on the expression of our genes – that is, passed along to the next generation.

In any case the search for simple genetic inheritance often oversimplifies our understanding of human character with its rich and subtle shades. As the poet Walt Whitman reminds us, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ We might, for example, find that someone more disposed to anger and even violence in response to life’s challenges is also someone with a warm and generous spirit.

Rather it makes more sense, I hold, to see our evolutionary inheritance as being responsible for generating a repertoire of possible behaviours or strategies, the adoption of which will be contingent on the range of environmental circumstances in which we find ourselves, and on the balance of our own proclivities. Sometimes this can be maladaptive, as with our modern overconsumption of sugar and salt – evolutionarily scarce resources that are suddenly available in great abundance in modern societies. Similarly, in the area with which we are concerned here – fighting – we might suppose that men are possessed of some innate instinct that drives them towards violence. Perhaps they feel anger and display aggression in the face of challenges to their esteem more readily than women do. More on that shortly. But these are inclinations, or behavioural scripts. Even if we take a somewhat minimalist view of free will, there is plenty of scope for the environment to alter the expression of these inherited traits.

A second important issue is the question of pace. How fast does evolutionary change happen? A large part of the writing on evolutionary psychology rests on the idea that humans have lived for some 90% or more of their evolutionary history in a particular lifestyle, and have evolved traits that are well suited to that context. Specifically, this is the era of the palaeolithic hunter-gatherer band, each of which might number some several dozen individuals who come together in an overnight camp, many of whom are related to one another. Modern life, which we might, albeit somewhat arbitrarily, date from the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago, presents a break with this earlier period in which most evolution happened – sometimes referred to as the human ‘state of nature’, or the ‘ancestral’ environment. Evolutionary psychology is then able to offer some rationale for why we behave in the way that we do, despite strong environmental imperatives to act differently – to a certain extent, scholars have focused on maladaptive behaviours, ideal for hunter-gatherers but less suited to different environments. And yet we know that dramatic change to species can happen rapidly, even over a period of generations, whether in response to changes in the environment, as with fish introduced to new streams with different predators, or in response to artificial selection – deliberate breeding of traits in animals by humans. The Soviet biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut, for example, managed to domesticate foxes in only a few generations by breeding together those with the shortest startle responses (Trut 1999). The physical change in the foxes were dramatic as they came to resemble in appearance domestic dogs – hardly surprising given that dogs are essentially domesticated wolves.

We might, if we were so minded, reverse the trend and produce wilder and more aggressive animals through selective breeding. Indeed, this is done with certain dog breeds, and in a matter of generations. When it comes to mankind, I argue that a similar process of domestication has long been under way, with important implications for violence and war. We might date that domestication to some 10,000–20,000 years ago: not long in the evolutionary scale of things.

Genes and violence

Where does this subtle approach to genes and natural selection leave us when it comes to violence? Many men, and their societies, live out lives of peace with little or no exposure to intraspecies violence. I would venture that this demonstrates the effect of the environment on the expression of violent behaviour. There are still violent humans, even in the most peaceful societies, and in the right circumstances many of us would be capable of physical violence.

Part of my argument here, borrowing from Azar Gat and Steven Pinker in particular, is that modern liberal societies have sufficiently altered the payoffs from violence so as to render it a poor option – although, as with gorging on sugary snacks, even poor options can be hard to resist if we are genetically disposed to choose them (Gat 2006; Pinker 2011). In such circumstances our innate tendency towards cooperation, and even altruism, is an inclination that has greater promise. Has the modern world had sufficient time to produce less violent men who are better able to prosper by non-violent strategies? The answer, which must be tentative, is that violence remains a viable strategy in the modern world. However, the ‘modern’ world, if we take a long enough view to start with the emergence of culture, language and larger social groups, has certainly had long enough to work on ‘domesticating’ humans, like those foxes in the Soviet Union. It is this domestication, I venture, that has driven the decline in violence over the last 10,000 years or so – a point to which I return in Chapter 2.

Evolutionary pressures selected for certain traits, including violence against outsiders with whom one is in direct competition for scarce resources. We have evolved to fight, and there is compelling evidence, which I address in more detail in the next chapter, to show that there was a great deal of intraspecies violence between many hunter-gatherer societies. For all that, there is little direct evidence regarding the genetic component of prowess in combat. Some evidence on violence more broadly is, however, available. Criminal violence in particular provides some evidence for tendencies towards violence more broadly, although, of course, it differs markedly from violence in war, not least since it is not sanctioned by the community at large.

Studying a large dataset of all convictions for violent crime in Sweden between 1973 and 2004, Thomas Frisell and his colleagues revealed violent crime clusters in families (Frisell et al. 2011). This finding does not, of course, distinguish between genetic and environmental reasons for the violence since both are implicated. In a later large-n study, Frisell reviewed data that attempt to do that by considering variation in the convictions of twins and siblings who were raised in different environments (Frisell et al. 2012). Here, he and his colleagues found a far greater risk of conviction for violent crime among men than women; and, moreover, that many of these convictions were for violent ass...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index