The simplest possible interpretation of the causes of war that might
be offered is that war is a natural relation between original herds or
groups of men, inspired by the predatory instinct or by some other
instinct of the herd. To explain war, then, one need only refer to
this instinct as final, or at most account for the origin and genesis
of the instinct in question in the animal world. Some writers express
this very view, calling war an expression of an instinct or of several
instincts; others find different or more complex beginnings of war.
Nusbaum (86) says that both offense and defense are based upon an
_expansion impulse_. Nicolai (79) sees the beginning of war in
individual predatory acts, involving violence and the need of defense.
Again we find the migratory instinct, the instinct that has led groups
of men to move and thus to interfere with one another, regarded as the
cause of war, or as an important factor in the causes.
Sometimes a
purely physiological or growth impulse is invoked, or vaguely the
inability of primitive groups to adapt themselves to conditions, or to
gain access to the necessities of life. Le Bon (42) speaks of the
hunger and the desire that led Germanic forces as ancient hordes to
turn themselves loose upon the world.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of the nature of the
impulses or instincts which actuated the conduct of men originally and
brought them into opposition, as groups, to one another, we do find at
least some suggestion of a working hypothesis in these simple
explanations of war. Granted the existence of groups formed by the
accident of birth and based upon the most primitive protective and
economic associations, and assuming the presence of the emotions of
anger and fear or any instinct which is expressed as an impulse or
habit of the group, we might say that the conditions and factors for
the beginning of warfare are all present. When groups have desires
that can best and most simply be satisfied by the exertion of force
upon other groups, something equivalent to war has begun.
If we take the group (as herd or pack) and the instinct as the
original factors or data of society, however, we probably simplify the
situation too much. The question arises whether the motives are not
more complex, even from the beginning, and whether both the tendencies
or impulses by which the group was formed or held together and the
motives behind aggressive conduct against other groups have not been
produced or developed in the course of social relations, rather than
have been brought up from animal life, or at any point introduced as
instincts. We notice at least that animals living in groups do not in
general become aggressive within the species. Possibly it was by some
peculiarity of man's social existence, or his superior endowment of
intelligence or some unusual quality of his instincts, perhaps very
far back in animal life, that has in the end made him a warlike
creature. Man does seem to be a creature of _feelings_
rather than of
instincts as far back as we find much account of him, and to be
characterized rather by the weakness and variability of his instincts
than by their definiteness. It is quite likely, too, that man never
was at any stage a herd animal; in fact it seems certain that he was
not, and that his instincts were formed long before he began to live
in large groups at all. So he never acquired the mechanisms either for
aggression or defense that some creatures have.
Apparently he
inherited neither the physical powers nor the warlike spirit nor the
aggressive and predatory instincts that would have been necessary to
make of him a natural fighting animal; but rather, perhaps, he has
acquired his warlike habits, so to speak, since arriving at man's
estate. Endowed with certain tendencies which express themselves with
considerable variability in the processes by which the functions of
sex and nutrition are carried out, man never acquired the definiteness
of character and conduct that some animals have. He learned more from
animals, it may be, than he inherited from them, and it is quite
likely that far back in his animal ancestry he had greater flexibility
or adaptability than other animals. The aggressive instinct, the herd
instinct, the predatory instinct, the social instinct, the migratory
instinct, may never have been carried very far in the stock from which
man came. All this, however, at this point is only a suggestion of two
somewhat divergent points of view in regarding the primitive
activities of man from which his long history of war-making has taken
rise.
The view is widely held and continually referred to by many writers on
war and politics, that the most fundamental of all causes of war, or
the most general principle of it, is the principle of selection--that
war is a natural struggle between groups, especially between races,
the fittest in this struggle tending to survive. This view needs to be
examined sharply, as indeed it has been by several writers, in
connection with the present war. This biological theory or apology of
war appears in several forms, as applied to-day. They say that racial
stocks contend with one another for existence, and with this goes the
belief that nations fight for life, and that defeat in war tends
towards the extermination of nations. The Germans, we often hear, were
fighting for national existence, and the issue was to be a judgment
upon the fitness of their race to survive. This view is very often
expressed. O'Ryan and Anderson (5), military writers, for example, say
that the same aggressive motives prevail as always in warfare: nations
struggle for survival, and this struggle for survival must now and
again break out into war. Powers (75) says that nations seldom fight
for anything less than existence. Again (15) we read that conflicts
have their roots in history, in the lives of peoples, and the sounder,
and better, emerge as victors. There is a selective process on the
part of nature that applies to nations; they say that especially
increase of population forces upon groups an endless conflict, so that
absolute hostility is a law of nature in the world.
These views contain at least two very doubtful assumptions. One is
that nations do actually fight for existence,--that warfare is thus
selective to the point of eliminating races. The other is that in
warlike conflicts the victors are the superior peoples, the better
fitted for survival. Confusion arises and the discussion is
complicated by the fact that conflicts of men as groups of individuals
within the same species are somewhat anomalous among biological forms
of struggle. Commonly, struggle takes place among individuals,
organisms having definite characteristics and but slightly variable
each from its own kind contending with one another, by direct
competition or through adaptation, in the first case individuals
striving to obtain actually the same objects. Or, again, species
having the same relations to one another that individuals have,
contend in a similar manner.
Primitive groups of men, however, are not so definite; they are not
biological entities in any such sense as individuals and species are.
They are not definitely brought into conflict with one another, in
general, as contending for the same objects, and it is difficult to
see how, in the beginning, at least, economic pressure has been a
factor at all in their relations. Whatever may have been the motive
that for the most part was at work in primitive warfare, it is not at
all evident that _superior_ groups had any survival value. The groups
that contended with one another presumably differed most conspicuously
in the size of the group, and this was determined largely by chance
conditions. Other differences must have been quite subordinate to
this, and have had little selective value. The conclusion is that the
struggle of these groups with one another is not essentially a
_biological_ phenomenon.
The fact is that peace rather than war, taking the history of the
human race as a whole, is the condition in which selection of the
fittest is most active, for it is the power of adaptation to the
conditions of stable life, which are fairly uniform for different
groups over wide areas, that tests vitality and survival values, so
far as these values are biological. It may be claimed that war is very
often, if not generally, a means of interrupting favorable selective
processes, the unfit tending to prevail temporarily by force of
numbers, or even because of qualities that antagonize biological
progress. Viewing war in its later aspects, we can see that it is
often when nations are failing in natural competition that they resort
to the expedient of war to compensate for this loss, although they do
not usually succeed thereby in improving their economic condition as
they hope, or increase their chance of survival, or even demonstrate
their survival value. It is notorious that nations that conquer tend
to spend their vitality in conquest and introduce various factors of
deterioration into their lives. The inference is that a much more
complex relation exists among groups than the biological hypothesis
allows. Survival value indeed, as applied to men in groups, is not a
very clear concept. There may be several different criteria of
survival value, not comparable in any quantitative way among
themselves.
Scheler (77) says that we cannot account for war as a purely
biological phenomenon. Its roots lie deep in organic life, but there
is no direct development or exclusive development from animal behavior
to human. War is peculiarly human. That, in a way, may be accepted as
the truth. Warfare as we know it among human groups, as conflict
within the species is due in some way to, or is made possible by, the
secondary differentiations within species which give to groups, so to
speak, a pseudo-specific character. And these differences depend
largely upon the conditions that enter into the formation of
groups,--upon desires, impulses and needs arising in the social life
rather than in instinct as such. These characteristic differences are
not variations having selective value, but are traits that merely
differentiate the groups as _historical entities_. These secondary
variations have not resulted in the elimination of those having
inferior qualities, but have shared the fortunes of the groups that
possessed them,--the fortunes both of war and of peace.
_War, from
this point of view, belongs to history rather than to biology._ It
belongs to the realm of the particular rather than to the general in
human life. War has favored the survival of this or that group in a
particular place, but has probably not been instrumental in producing
any particular type of character in the world, either physical or
mental.
Very early in the history of mankind, in fact as far back as we can
trace history, we find these psychic differentiations, as factors in
the production of war. There are significant extensions and also
restrictions of the consciousness of kind pertaining to the life of
man, as distinguished from animals. Animals have not sufficient
intelligence to establish such perfect group identities as man does,
and they lack the affective motives for carrying on hostilities among
groups. They remain more clearly subjected to the simple laws of
biological selection, and are guided by instincts which do not impel
them to act aggressively as groups toward their own kind. Man proceeds
almost from the beginning to antagonize these laws, so that it is very
likely that the best, in the biological sense, has always had some
disadvantage, in human life, and may still have. The real value that
has thus been conserved by this human mode of life consists in
preserving a relatively large number of secondary types or individual
groups, rather than in insuring the predominance of any one
biologically superior type. _Man's work in the world is to make
history._ Even though war were a means of making a biologically
superior type of man prevail we should not be justified in saying that
it is thus vindicated as a method of selection.
Many writers whom we do not need to review in great detail have
contributed to the objections to the biological principle as an
explanation of war. Trotter (82) examines the doctrine that war is a
biological necessity, and says that there is no parallel in biology
for progress being accomplished as a result of a racial impoverishment
so extreme as is caused by war, that among gregarious animals other
than man direct conflict between major groups such as can lead to the
suppression of the less powerful is an inconspicuous phenomenon, and
that there is very little fighting within species, for species have
usually been too busy fighting their external enemies.
Mitchell (10)
says that war is not an aspect of the natural struggle for existence,
among individuals; that there is nothing in Darwinism that explains or
justifies wars; that the argument from race is worthless since there
are no pure races. M'Cabe (76) maintains that war is not a struggle
between inferior and superior national types. Dide (20) also discusses
the question of differences of race as causes of war, and the use that
has been made of this dogma. Chapman (39) says that no race question
is involved in the present war as has been supposed.
There is no
conflict of economic forces, no nations compelled to seek expansion.
Precisely how warfare originated (assuming that it arose in one way)
we shall probably never know, since we cannot now reconstruct the
actual history of man. We think of men as living at first in groups
containing a few individuals, and presumably for a long time these
small and isolated groups of men prevailed as the type of human
society. We can already detect the elements of conflict in these
groups, but whether warfare in the sense of deadly conflict originated
there we cannot know; or whether it was only in the experience of men
as large migrating hordes which had been formed by the amalgamation of
smaller groups under the influence of hunger or climatic change, that
warfare in any real sense came into the world. We do not know to what
extent the small groups of men we find in conditions of savagery now
represent primitive conditions. Fortunately, however, some of these
problems of origin are of but little practical importance and their
interest is chiefly antiquarian or historical.
The assumption that in the behavior of original groups of men war
arose as a natural result of the life of the group seems to be an
allowable hypothesis. Whether warlike conduct came by some
modification of the habits brought up from animal life as instinctive
reactions, or whether man invented warfare from some strong motive
peculiar to human life, and produced it intelligently, so to speak,
under stress of circumstances may have to remain an open question so
far as conclusive evidence is concerned. What we lack is a knowledge
of the type and form of the instincts of man in his first stages, and
the degree and kind of intelligence he had. But the reconstructed
pre-human history of man so far as we can make it seems to show, as we
have already suggested, that early man could have had no definite herd
instincts or pack instincts such as some of the animals have, that his
habits were plastic and guided by intelligence rather than by impulse.
His social life, his predaceous habits, the habit of killing large
game, his warfare must have been a gradual acquisition, and from the
beginning have been very different as regards motive and development
from animal behavior which judged externally may seem to be like it in
character and to have the same ends.
There are already inherent in any group of human individuals that fits
into such knowledge of man past and present as we have, all the
necessary motives of warfare in some form. There are the reactions of
anger made to any threat or injury, fear, the predaceous impulse and
habit, originating in hunger, the motives arising in sexual rivalry.
These motives are the source of behavior toward both members of the
group and outsiders. There is no absolute distinction between these
objects. It is of the nature of man to be both aggressive and social.
One instinct or motive did not come from the other, since there are
emotions and desires at every stage that tend, some of them to unite
and some to disrupt, the group. The sense of difference of kind and
the fear of the strange on the one hand, and the effect of propinquity
and practical necessity in the conduct in regard to the familiar on
the other make the reactions different in degree in the two spheres
but not different in kind. There is no aggressive instinct or war
motive that is directed exclusively toward the outsider.
Certain
tendencies toward violence and strife, modified and controlled within
the group, become unrestrained when directed toward the stranger.
Among these motives are those of sexual rivalry, fear, anger, desire,
and the play motive as an expression of any instinctive habits of
aggression that may have been phyletically established.
Since every individual creature has his needs that can be satisfied
only by preying in some way upon other animals of his own species or
others, the motives for strife are original in organic life. Every
animal lives in a world of which he is suspicious, and rightly so. He
is suspicious toward the members of his own kind and group, and toward
all strangers he shows watchfulness and fear. There are two motives,
therefore, of a highly practical nature that contribute to a general
state of unfriendliness in animal life. Both the motives of conflict
within the group, the habit of aggression and its complement, fear,
and the jealousy and display motive (the display itself probably
having originated as a show of ferocity on the part of males) must
have been transferred to relations between groups as a natural result
of the proximity of groups to one another, although this process is
not quite so simple as this would imply, since in part the outside
groups are produced by these very same antagonistic motives in the
group, for example the driving out of young males because of sexual
jealousy. The presence of other groups must have excited all the
motives of warfare at a very early stage, and this contrast had the
effect of stimulating the social feeling of the group and developing
control of impulses on the part of individuals within the group toward
one another. So the motives of combat, as shown within the group and
toward outsiders, developed, so to speak, by a dialectic process.
Fear and the predatory impulse, the sexual and display motive, play or
the hunting activity as a pleasure for its own sake, with a desire
perhaps to practice deception and to exercise intelligence, presumably
introduced some kind and degree of definite warfare among primitive
groups of men at a very early stage of human life, although of course
such a conclusion can be only speculative. Increasing intelligence,
the power of discriminating and of reacting to secondary likenesses
and differences, and especially the recognition of the nature of
death, and the advantages of killing rather than merely overcoming an
enemy, the discovery of the use of weapons, introduced warfare into
the world. Warfare is, then, not simply the negation of some original
principle of mutual aid, nor yet an expression of instinctive
aggressiveness or cruelty, but it is a product of original endowment,
of conditions of life, and of intelligence all together.
It is
practical, but at no stage can it be said to be _wholly_
practical.
Changes must have taken place in warfare as in other social reactions
as men passed through a number of stages from primitive wandering or a
relatively unstable life to a stable life, but the motives of conflict
cannot have been added to in any essential way. Through all the course
of history all the motives that originally made individuals of a group
or the groups as wholes antagonistic have remained, although the
mental processes have become generalized, fused and transformed. If
Gumplowicz is right we can still detect in any great society to-day
all the primitive individual and group animosities, tempered down and
held in check by laws and customs, but still existent and by no means
overcome and made innocuous.
These motives of warfare might best be traced out in four more or less
definite principles of conduct, or four purposes of war that appear
throughout primitive life. These are: 1) thievery, including wife
capture; 2) the fear motive; 3) cannibalism; 4) the display motive,
with the desire to intimidate and to display power (more or less
closely associated with the play motive, the love of hunting, gaming
and the dramatic motive).
Cannibalism, of course, is a special expression of the predatory
motive in general, or it is mainly that. Cannibalism was certainly
established early in primitive life, at least early enough to antedate
all religion, and although its origin and history are shrouded in
mystery, the motive was quite certainly practical.
Evidently it was
widespread if not universal. Whether it was introduced as a result of
a failure of animal food, as some think, or has a still more simple
explanation as a part of the original impulse which led men at a
certain stage of their development to become hunters, cannot be
determined. We know, however, that the alien human being was to some
extent included under the same concepts as the animal enemy and prey,
and presumably some of the strongest motives that led men to attack
animals also included man as an object, since the alien group was
regarded as in some degree different in kind from the in-group. It
may have been in the great migrations when all the aggressive motives
were increased that cannibalism became fixed as a habit.
Cannibalism may well have been the primitive motive of warfare as
serious deadly combat, but all predatory habits must have contributed
to establishing a more or less habitual state of warfare among all
groups of men. The predatory raid, with the reaction of defense, when
carried on as a group activity in any form, is in fact war, so far as
attack and defense were serious and deadly, and intelligence and
weapons were sufficiently developed to make man a dangerous opponent.
This predatory motive, of course, extended to all desired objects, and
these objects must have included all objects that could most simply be
acquired by stealing. They included food, women, and all other
possessions. The custom of driving out young males from the group, by
the jealousy of the old males, and of preventing males from obtaining
females within the group must have been one of the earliest and one of
the strongest incentives to predatory warfare. At first all property
of the group, for so long as groups were wandering, was to some extent
common, and attack and defense must have been common.
The objects of
predator