War in Human Civilization (review)

"War was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in." Martha Gellhorn, a legendary war correspondent, saw things clearly. But why did mankind resign itself to this hard truth? Because of the age-old competition for food and sex, of course. Azar Gat's monumental interdisciplinary study links the enduring institution of war to the evolutionary logic of the human condition. A magnificent (if ultimately fatiguing) synthesis of the relevant scholarship—including paleontology, anthropology, archeology, and the modern devils, political science and sociology—it firmly fixes the roots of war in the innermost depths of the human psyche. Adjudicating the competing paradigms of Hobbes and Rousseau, Gat awards the crown to the Englishman. Mankind has never been free of conflict, even in the remotest prehistory. There was no "golden age."

As with other animal species, access to mates and food are the primary measures of evolutionary success, and everything else on which historians focus (power, wealth, fame, prestige, etc.) arose to satisfy these primary criteria. Gat is critical of scholars who place too much emphasis on the secondary factors, thereby creating a false distinction between human conflict and that seen elsewhere in nature. In prehistory—the "hunter-gatherer" epoch lasting about 95% of the time homo sapiens sapiens have existed on earth—the extended family group was the primary social unit, and evolution decreed the primacy of kinship. With resource scarcity triggering acquisitive violence toward those outside the bounds of kinship, successful hunters/warriors naturally gravitated to the leadership of interrelated clans and tribes. As social units increased in size, these chiefs and "big men" accumulated a disproportionate share of the most valuable resources, i.e., food and women. As Gat makes clear, the violence of prehistory was decidedly "asymmetric"—ambushes, raids, and opportunistic murder as opposed to pitched battles, and the retaliatory impulse fostered a more or less permanent state of conflict. The closest present-day analog to prehistoric warfare is found among the isolated jungle tribes of New Guinea and South America, where the percentage of adult males killed or wounded in inter-communal violence is far higher than that experienced elsewhere in the world. Perpetual conflict held obvious benefits for young males: prestige and the prospect of loot were powerful attractors, yielding better prospects for mating with a supply of desirable females already constrained by polygyny.

The invention of agriculture and domestication of animals triggered a long-enduring cycle of conflict between settled agricultural societies and more predatory "pastoral" societies pushed to the fringes. Somewhere along the line, Gat asserts, the evolutionary logic of kin selection was "inflated beyond its original applicability" as the spread of agriculture pulled people into ever-larger groups identifiable in terms of language and territory, what we now call "ethnicity." Consolidation of human populations was indisputably a military process. During the transition to statehood, tribal societies invariably formalized the dominance of the already powerful. Wealth accumulation facilitated "autocratic centralization"—the ability of armed elites to enforce internal peace in which the settled agricultural populations became "habituated to passivity." Meanwhile, beyond the frontiers of civilization the pastoralists coalesced into larger tribal groups which maintained themselves through predation: Gat includes an interesting survey of the "extortion conglomerates" of the Eurasian "steppe frontier," whose early domestication of the horse enabled them to prey on sedentary city-states and empires for centuries.

Too much of the book lapses into tiresome repetition of points already made, but "set pieces" stand out. In chapter 12, for example, "War, the Leviathan, and the Pleasures and Miseries of Civilization" is a splendid essay summarizing how war assumed its central place in premodern societies. The author does not shy away from controversial issues, such as the sexual component of human competition. He includes an informative passage about harems, along with a discussion of rape as a recurring wartime phenomenon that may generate some scholarly heat. Rape is "violently forced sex" and the contemporary social science view that emphasizes the...