How Warfare Produces Civilization
Discussion
Brett Bowden:
"According to arguments such as Mill’s, it is only civilized societies that have the organizational capacity and professional stratification to be efficient and effective war-makers. As Arnold Toynbee (1951: viii) explains, “the possibility of waging war pre-supposes a minimum of technique and organization and surplus wealth beyond what is needed for bare subsistence.” At the same time, somewhat curiously, it is thought that war-making is the all-important grit around which the pearl of civilization grows and acquires its luster.
The anthropologist Robert R. Marrett (1920: 36), for instance, claimed in the early twentieth century that it “is a commonplace of anthropology that at a certain stage of evolution – the half-way stage, so to speak – war is a prime civilizing agency.” Quincy Wright (1965: 98-99) draws some similar conclusions in his expansive A Study of War, arguing that “Primitive warfare was an important factor in developing civilization. It cultivated the virtues of courage, loyalty, and obedience; it created solid groups and a method for enlarging the area of these groups, all of which were indispensable to the creation of the civilizations which followed.” Based on his own studies, along with his analysis of Wright’s (1965) data and further studies and analysis by Tom Broch and Johan Galtung (1966), William Eckhardt (1975: 55-62) argues that “anthropological evidence” points to the fact “that primitive warfare was a function of human development more than human instinct or human nature." He further argues it "was only after we settled down to farming and herding that the land became of importance to us and, therefore, something worth fighting for” (Eckhardt, 1990: 9). In much the same way that Hobbes explains the process and outcomes of socially contracted civilized society, Eckhardt (1990: 10-11) points out how the “agricultural revolution made available a surplus of food, which carried humans beyond the subsistence level of making a living to the point where the surplus could be used to pay some to govern others, and to engage in art, religion, and writing, and to engage in war in order to expand the benefits of civilization to others, or to get others to help pay for the process of civilization, or to defend oneself from those who might be tempted to take a short cut to civilization.” This suggests an entirely different relationship between civilization (or civilizing processes) and war to the argument that there is a direct correlation between civilized society and a propensity for peacefulness.
To the contrary, it is claimed that “the more civilized people become, the more warlike we might expect them to be” (Eckhardt, 1990: 15). To put it slightly differently, Wright (1965: 100) contends that “out of the warlike peoples rose civilization, while the peaceful collectors and hunters were driven to the ends of the earth.” For instance, Adam Smith (1869: 296-7) noted that whereas in “ancient times, the opulent and civilized found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous nations. In modern times, the poor and barbarous nations find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilized.” He continued, in “modern war the great expense of firearms gives an evident advantage to the nation which can best afford the expense; and, consequently, to an opulent and civilized, over a poor and barbarous nation.” Smith (1869: 297) ominously adds that the “invention of firearms, an invention which at first sight appears to be so pernicious, is certainly favourable, both to the permanency and to the extension of civilization.” Wright (1965: 99) makes the further point that as “primitive society developed toward civilization, war began to take on a different character. Civilization was both an effect and a cause of warlikeness” (1965: 99). Defining war as “armed conflict between groups of people organized and trained and paid for killing and wounding and capturing each other, involving one or more governments, and causing some minimum number of deaths,” which is not often agreed upon, Eckhardt (1990: 10, 9) makes a similar case “that warfare really came into its own only after the emergence of civilization some 5,000 years ago.” Following Wright, Eckhardt (1990: 14) concludes that in essence, “war and civilization, whichever came first, promoted each other in a positive feedback loop, so that the more of one, the more of the other; and the less of one, the less of the other.” This simultaneously civilized yet vicious circle forms the basis of Eckhardt’s (1990: 9-11) “dialectical, evolutionary theory of warfare” in which “more developed societies engaged in more warfare.” Moreover, as Eckhardt colorfully puts it, “civilized peoples took to war like ducks take to water, judging by their artistic and historical records,” with “wars serving as both midwives and undertakers in the rise and fall of civilizations in the course of history.” Evidence to support this general thesis comes in the form of statistical data concerning war-related deaths. On the basis of his monumental study, which included detailed analysis of 278 wars from 1480 to 1941 and a further 30 “hostilities” from 1945 to 1964, Wright (1965: 246-47) contends that “at least 10 per cent of deaths in modern civilization can be attributed directly or indirectly to war.” Furthermore, in respect to the general “loss of human life ... the trend of war has been toward greater cost, both absolutely and relative to population.”
Based on his own extensive studies and the work of others, Eckhardt (1990: 15) believes this is a particularly conservative estimate, arguing that if we accept “that war is some function of civilization, then civilization is responsible for one-third of 20thcentury deaths.” In his study of war-related deaths since 3,000 BCE, where war is defined as “any armed conflict, involving at least one government, and causing at least 1,000 civilian and military deaths per year,” Eckhardt (1991: 437) calculates that there have been at least 150 million war-related deaths during the period. Of these 150 million war-related deaths across fifty centuries, around 96 percent of all deaths have occurred in the past five centuries, with the twentieth century alone accounting for more than 73 percent of the total death toll. The nineteenth century accounts for around 12.8 percent of all deaths while the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries combined are responsible for about 8.7 percent. The sixteenth century is the only other century to account for more than one percent of deaths, and then only just (Eckhardt, 1991: 438-39; Eckhardt, 1992: 220-77). It is estimated that during the first eight decades of the bloody twentieth century, wars were responsible for the premature deaths of around 88 million people, or about 1.4 to 1.5 percent of the total population who lived during the period (Westing, 1982: 263).
Recalling that the twentieth century is characterized as “democracy’s century,” while the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are praised as home to “attempts to establish a stable and peaceful international order” based on “the increase in the humaneness and civilized character of human relations,” (Morgenthau, 1967: 374), these war death statistics paint a rather different picture."