Should it be the case that war was somehow the driving mechanism, the hidden motor behind what we deem most good regarding human life, trapped in some militaristic version of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, then we might truly feel ourselves in the grip and the plaything of something like the demon of Descartes’ imagination, though rather than taunt us by making the world irrational we would be cursed to a world of permanent moral incomprehensibility.

When it comes to human evolution we should probably begin to address the question by asking how long war has been part of the human condition? Almost all of our evolution took place while we lived as hunter gatherers, indeed, we’ve only even had agriculture (and anything that comes with it) for 5-10% of our history. From a wide angle view the agricultural, industrial, and electronic revolutions might all be considered a set piece, perhaps one of the reasons things like philosophy, religion, and literature from millennia ago still often resonate with us. Within the full scope of our history, Socrates and Jesus lived only yesterday.

The evidence here isn’t good for those who hoped our propensity for violence is a recent innovation. For over the past generation a whole slew of archeological scholars has challenged the notion of the “peaceful savage” born in the radiating brilliance of the mind of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Back in 1755 Rousseau had written his Discourse on Inequality perhaps the best timed book, ever. Right before the industrial revolution was to start, Rousseau made the argument that it was civilization, development and the inequalities it produced that was the source of the ills of mankind- including war. He had created an updated version of the myth of Eden, which became in his hands mere nature, without any God in the story. For those who would fear humanity’s increasingly rapid technological development, and the victory of our artificial world over the natural one we were born from and into, he gave them an avenue of escape, which would be to shed not only the new industrial world but the agricultural one that preceded it. Progress, in the mind of Rousseau and those inspired by him, was a Sisyphean trap, the road to paradise lie backwards in time, in the return to primitive conditions.

During the revived Romanticism of the 1960’s archeologists like Francis de Waal set out to prove Rousseau right. Primitive, hunter-gatherer societies, in his view, were not war like and had only become so with contact from advanced warlike societies such as our own. In recent decades, however, this idea of prehistoric and primitive pacifism has come under sustained assault. Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined is the most popularly know of these challenges to the idea of primitive innocence that began with Rousseau’s Discourse, but in many ways, Pinker was merely building off of, and making more widely known, scholarship done elsewhere.

One of the best of examples of this scholarship is Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Keeley makes a pretty compelling argument that warfare was almost universal across pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer societies. Rather than being dominated by the non-lethal ritualized “battle”, as de Waal had argued, war for such societies war was a high casualty affair and total.

It is quite normal for conflict between tribes in close proximity to be endemic. Protracted periods of war result in casualty figures that exceed modern warfare even the total war between industrial states seen only in World War II.Little distinction is made in such pre-agricultural forms of conflict between women and children and men of fighting age. Both are killed indiscriminately in wars made up, not of the large set battles that characterize warfare in civilizations after the adoption of agriculture, but of constant ambushes and attacks that aim to kill those who are most vulnerable.

Pre-agricultural war is what we now call insurgency or guerilla war. Americans, who remember Vietnam or look with clear eyes at the Second Iraq War, know how effective this form of war can be against even the most technologically advanced powers. Although Keeley acknowledges the effectiveness and brutal efficiency of guerilla war,  he does not make the leap to suggest that in going up against insurgency advanced powers face in some sense a more evolutionarily advanced rival, honed by at least 100,000 years of human history.  

Keeley concludes that as long as there have been human beings there has been war, yet, he reaches much less dark conclusions from the antiquity of war than one might expect. Human aversion to violence and war, disgust with its consequences, and despair at its, more often than not, unjustifiable suffering are near universal whatever a society’s level of technological advancement. He writes:

“… warfare whether primitive or civilized involves losses, suffering, and terror even for the victors. Consequently, it was nowhere viewed as an unalloyed good, and the respect accorded to an accomplished warrior was often tinged with aversion. “

“For example, it was common the world over for the warrior who had just killed an enemy to be regarded by his own people as spiritually polluted or contaminated. He therefore had to undergo a magical cleansing to remove this pollution. Often he had to live for a time in seclusion, eat special food or fast, be excluded from participation in rituals and abstain from sexual intercourse. “ (144)

Far from the understanding of war found in pre-agricultural societies being ethically shallow, psychologically unsophisticated or unaware of the moral dimension of war their ideas of war are as sophisticated as our own. What the community asks the warrior to do when sending them into conflict and asking them to kill others is to become spiritually tainted and ritual is a way for them to become reintegrated into their community.  This whole idea that soldiers require moral repair much more than praise for their heroics and memorials is one we are only now rediscovering.

Contrary to what Freud wrote to Einstein when the former asked him why human beings seemed to show such a propensity for violence, we don’t have a “death instinct” either. Violence is not an instinct, or as Azar Gat wrote in his War in Human Civilization:

Aggression does not accumulate in the body by a hormone loop mechanism, with a rising level that demands release. People have to feed regularly if they are to stay alive, and in the relevant ages they can normally avoid sexual activity all together only by extraordinary restraint and at the cost of considerable distress. By contrast, people can live in peace for their entire lives, without suffering on that account, to put it mildly, from any particular distress. (37)

War and violence are not an instinct but a tactic, thank God, for if it was an instinct we’d all be dead. Still, if it is a tactic it has been a much used one and it seems that throughout our hundred thousand year human history it is one that we have used with less rather than greater frequency as we have technologically advanced, and one might wonder why this has been the case.    

Azar Gat’s theory of our increasing pacifism is very similar to Pinker’s, war is a very costly and dangerous tactic. If you can get what you are after without it, peace is normally the course human beings will follow. Since the industrial revolution, nature has come under our increasing command, war and expansion are no longer very good answers to the problems of scarcity, thus the frequency of wars was on the decline even before we had invented atomic weapons which turned full scale war into pure madness.

Yet, a good case can be made that war played a central role in putting down the conditions in which the industrial revolution, the spark of the material progress that has made war an unnecessary tactic, occurred and that war helped push technological advancement forward. The Empire won by the British through force of arms was the lever that propelled their industrialization. The Northern United States industrialized much more quickly as a consequence of the Civil War, Western pressure against pre-industrial Japan and China pushed those countries to industrialize. War research gave us both nuclear power and computers, the space race and satellite communications were the result of geopolitical competition. The Internet was created by the Pentagon, and the contemporary revolution in bionic prosthetics grew out of the horrendous injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thing is, just as is the case for pre-agricultural societies it is impossible to disaggregate war itself with the capacity for cooperation between human beings a capacity that has increased enormously since the widespread adoption of agriculture. Any increase in human cooperative capacity increases a society’s capacity for war, and, oddly enough many increases in human war fighting capacity lead to increases in cooperative capacity in the civilian sphere. We are caught in a tragic technological logic that those who think technology leads of itself to global prosperity and peace if we just use it for the right ends are largely unaware of. Increases in our technological capacity even if pursued for non-military ends will grant us further capacity for violence and it is not clear that abandoning military research wouldn’t derail or greatly slow technological progress altogether.

One perhaps doesn’t normally associate the quest for better warfighting technologies with transhumanism- the idea “that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology”-, butone should. It’s not only the case that, as mentioned above, the revolution in bionic prosthetics emerged from war, the military is at the forefront of almost every technology on transhumanists’ wish list for future humanity from direct brain-machine and brain- to-brain interfaces to neurological enhancements for cognition and human emotion. And this doesn’t even capture the military’s revolutionary effect on other aspects of the long held dreams of futurists such as robotics.

The subject of how the world militaries have and are moving us in the direction of “post-human” war is the subject Christopher Coker’s  Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War and it is with this erudite and thought provoking book that the majority of the rest of this post will be concerned.

Warrior Geeks is a book about much more than the “geekification”  of war, the fact that much of what now passes for war is computerized, many the soldiers themselves now video gamers stuck behind desks, even if the people they kill remain flesh and blood. It is also a book about the evolving human condition and how war through science is changing that condition, and what this change might mean for us. For Coker sees the capabilities many transhumanists dream of finding their application first on the battlefield.

There is the constantly monitored “quantified-self”:

And within twenty years much as engineers analyze data and tweak specifications in order to optimize a software program, military commanders will be able to bio-hack into their soldiers brains and bodies, collecting and correlating data the better to optimize their physical and mental performance. The will be able to reduce distractions and increase productivity and achieve “flow”- the optimum state of focus. (63-64)

And then there is “augmented reality” where the real world is overlaid with the digital such as in the ideal which the US army and others are reaching for-to tie together servicemen in a “cybernetic network” where soldiers:

…. don helmets with a minute screen which when flipped over the eyes enables them to see the entire battlefield, marking the location of both friendly and enemy forces. They can also access the latest weather reports. In future, soldiers will not even need helmets at all. They will be able to wear contact lenses directly onto their retinas. (93)

In addition the military is investigating neurological enhancements of all sorts:

The ‘Persistence in Combat Program’ is well advanced and includes research into painkillers which soldiers could take before going into action, in anticipation of blunting the pain of being wounded. Painkillers such as R1624, created by scientists at Rinat Neuroscience, use an antibody to keep in check a neuropeptide that helps transmit pain sensations from the tissues to the nerves. And some would go further in the hope that one day it might be possible to pop a pill and display conspicuous courage like an army of John Rambos. (230)

With 1 in 8 soldiers returning from combat suffering from PTSD Some in the military hope that the scars of war might be undone with neurological advances that would allow us to “erase” memories.

One might go on with examples of exoskeletons that give soldiers superhuman endurance and strength or tying together the most intimate military unit, the platoon, with neural implants that allow direct brain- to-brain communication a kind of “brain-net” that an optimistic neuroscientist like Miguel Nicolelis seems not to have anticipated.

Coker, for his part, sees these developments in a very dark light, a move away from what have been eternal features of both human nature and war such as courage and character and towards a technologically over-determined and ultimately less than human world. He is very good at showing how our reductive assumptions end up compressing the full complexity of human life into something that gives us at least the illusion of technological control. It’s not our machines who are becoming like us, but us like our machines, it is not necessarily our gain in understanding and sovereignty over our nature to understand underlying genetic and neural mechanisms, but a constriction of our sense of ourselves.

Do we gain from being able to erase the memory of an event in combat that leads to our moral injury or lose something in no longer being able to understand and heal it through reconciliation and self-knowledge? Is this not in some way a more reduced and blind answer to the experience of killing and death in war than that of the primitive tribes people mentioned earlier? Luckily, reductive theories of human nature based on our far less than complete understanding of neuroscience or genetics almost always end up showing their inadequacies after a period of friction with the sheer complexity of being alive.

There are dangers which I see as two-fold. First, there is always the danger that we will move under the assumptions that we have sufficient knowledge and that the solutions to some problem are therefore “easy” should we just double-down and apply some technological or medical solution. Given enough time, the complexity of reality is likely to rear its head, though not after we have caused a good deal of damage in the name of a chimera. Secondly, it is that we will use our knowledge to torque the complexity of the human world into something more simple and ultimately more shallow in the quest for a reality we deem manageable. There is something deeper and more truthful in the primitive response to the experience of killing than erasing the memory of such experiences.

One of the few problems I had with Coker’s otherwise incredible book is, sadly, a very fundamental one. In some sense, Warrior Geeks is not so much a critique of the contemporary ways and trend lines of war, but a bio-conservative argument against transhumanist technologies that uses the subject of war as a backdrop. Echoing Thucydides Coker defines war as “the human thing” and sees its transformation towards post-human forms as ultimately dehumanizing. Thucydides may have been the most brilliant historian to ever live, but his claim that in war our full humanity is made manifest is true only in a partial sense. Almost all higher animals engage in intraspecies killing, and we are not the worst culprit. It wasn’t human beings who invented war, and who have been fighting for the longests, but the ants. As Keeley puts it:

But before developing too militant a view of human existence, let us put war in its place. However frequent, dramatic, and eye-catching, war remains a lesser part of social life. Whether one takes a purely behavioral view of human life or imagines that one can divine mental events, there can be no dispute that peaceful activities, arts, and ideas are by far more crucial and more common even in bellicose societies. (178)

If war has anything in human meaning over and above areas that are truly distinguishing between us and animals such as our culture or for that matter experiences we share with other animals such as love, companionship, and care for our young, it is that at the intimate level, such as is found in platoons, it is one of the few areas where what we do truly has consequences and where we are not superfluous.

We have evolved for culture, love and care as much as we ever have for war, and during most of our evolutionary history the survival of those around us really was dependent on what we did. War, in some cases, is one of the few places today where this earlier importance of the self can be made manifest. Or, as the journalist, Sebastian Junger has stated it, many men eagerly return to combat not so much because they are addicted to its adrenaline high as because being part of a platoon in a combat zone is one of the few places where what a 20 something year old man does actually counts for something.

As for transhumanism or continuing technological advancement and war, the solution to the problem starts with realizing there is no ultimate solution to the problem. To embrace human enhancement advanced by the spear-tip of military innovation would be to turn the movement into something resembling fascism- that is militarism combined with the denial of our shared human worth and destiny. Yet, to completely deny the fact that research into military applications often leads to leaps in technological advancement would be to blind ourselves to the facts of history. Exoskeletons that are developed as armor for our soldiers will very likely lead to advances for paraplegics and the elderly not to mention persons in perfect health just as a host of military innovations have led to benefits for civilians in the past.

Perhaps, one could say that if we sought to drastically reduce military spending worldwide, as in any case I believe we should, we would have sufficient resources to devote to civilian technological improvements of and for themselves. The problem here is the one often missed by technological enthusiasts who fail to take into account the cruel logic of war- that advancements in the civilian sphere alone would lead to military innovations. Exoskeletons developed for paraplegics would very likely end up being worn by soldiers somewhere, or as Keeley puts it:

Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it. (158)

Our only good answer to this is really not technological at all, it is to continue to decrease the sphere of human life where war “makes sense” as a tactic. War is only chosen as an option when the peaceful roads to material improvement and respect are closed. We need to ensure both that everyone is able to prosper in our globalized economy and that countries and peoples are encouraged, have ways to resolve potentially explosive disputes and afforded the full respect that should come from belonging to what Keeley calls the “intellectual, psychological, and physiological equality of humankind ”, (179) to which one should add moral equality as well.  The prejudice that we who possess scientific knowledge and greater technological capacity than many of our rivals are in some sense fundamentally superior is one of our most pernicious dangers- we are all caught in the same trap.

For two centuries a decline in warfare has been possible because, even taking into account the savagery of the World Wars, the prosperity of mankind has been improving. A new stage of crisis truly earthshaking proportions would occur should this increasing prosperity be derailed, most likely from its collision with the earth’s inability to sustain our technological civilization becoming truly universal, or from the exponential growth upon which this spreading prosperity rests being tapped out and proving a short-lived phenomenon- it is, after all only two centuries old.

Should rising powers such as China and India along with peoples elsewhere come to the conclusion that not only were they to be denied full development to the state of advanced societies, but that the system was rigged in favor of the long industrialized powers, we might wake up to discover that technology hadn’t been moving us towards an age of global unity and peace, after all, but that we had been lucky enough to live in a long interlude in which the human story, for once, was not also the story of war.