War and the Progress of Civilization

* Book: War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots. By Ian Morris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014

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Description

From the publisher:

"Archaeology, history, and biology show that war in fact has been good for something. Surprising as it sounds, war has made humanity safer and richer. In War! What Is It Good For?, the renowned historian and archaeologist Ian Morris tells the gruesome, gripping story of 15,000 years of war, going beyond the battles and brutality to reveal what war has really done to and for the world. Stone Age people lived in small, feuding societies and stood a one-in-ten or even one-in-five chance of dying violently. In the 20th century, by contrast - despite two world wars, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust - fewer than one person in a hundred died violently. The explanation: War, and war alone, has created bigger, more complex societies, ruled by governments that have stamped out internal violence. Strangely enough, killing has made the world safer, and the safety it has produced has allowed people to make the world richer too. War has been history's greatest paradox, but this searching study of fifteen thousand years of violence suggests that the next half century is going to be the most dangerous of all time. If we can survive it, the age-old dream of ending war may yet come to pass. But, Morris argues, only if we understand what war has been good for can we know where it will take us next."

Summary

Peter Turchin:

"The rise of large-scale complex societies can only be understood as a result of selection operating on cultural groups and whole societies. Throughout most of human history the major form this between-societies competition took was warfare. The main proponents of this theme at the workshop were Peter Richerson, David Sloan Wilson, and I.

Meanwhile Ian, coming from a very different background of the history and archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean, has independently converged on a very similar answer.

In his book Morris argues that “the main function of war in cultural evolution across the past 15,000 years—and particularly across the past 500 years—has been to integrate societies, increasing material wellbeing.” It was war, strangely enough, that made our societies larger, wealthier, and safer. It must be understood that the argument here is “over the long run.” It goes without saying that wars created, and continue to create an enormous amount of human misery. But warfare creates an environment in which only societies that are strongly cooperative manage to persist and expand at the expense of less cooperative ones. Without war (or more broadly, without competition between societies) cooperation would unravel and disappear. Thus, wars have not only a destructive side, but also a creative one.

I am in complete agreement with Ian that this general insight is very valid."

(https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/war-what-is-it-good-for/)