- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
“I think everybody likes to fight. At a certain age, most people find out it’s not for them, so they choose something else. But deep in their heart, every guy likes to fight.”
—Bas Rutten, Former UFC Heavyweight Champ
Dealing with violence is a large part of what the martial arts are about. On the most basic level, they’re about physically responding to violence. But to do that, we learn more than just punches and kicks. We learn about the nature of violent confrontations. We look into how they start and why. We study ways of defusing situations before things get physical.
Stay in the arts long enough, and all this thinking about violence will lead you to questions about human nature. Are we inherently violent, or do circumstances make us so? If violence and aggression aren’t in our genes, why do so many choose them over nonviolence? Those questions are at the heart of what it means to be a martial artist. They’re also at the heart of The End of War, a new book by John Horgan.
Horgan is best-known for writing another “end of” book, the mid-1990s best-seller The End of Science. His new book is a survey of what science tells us about war—that conflict is not in our genes or based on environmental causes.
The evidence seems to show it’s a consequence of our choices. Horgan argues that war is coming to an end because we’re slowly reaching the limits of our tolerance for it.
The First Few Sections
The first few sections of the book survey the evidence from studies of apes that lethal aggression is innate. Special attention is given to primatologist Richard Wrangham’s research on how and why chimpanzees kill each other.
Similar patterns in chimps and humans, he argues, suggest a common tendency toward lethal aggression. And his observations of groups of chimps in the wild killing lone members of other groups for no apparent gain does seem depressingly similar to human cruelty.
He says that chimps may kill other chimps for no reason other than they like killing and that humans, especially men, are the same.
But when Horgan reviews the research on primate violence, he finds much less evidence for lethal aggression being innate. For example, he looks at the actual rate of lethal group attacks by chimps and finds they happen about once every seven years. He even gets Wrangham to admit in an interview that chimps killing each other is rare.
Then Horgan surveys studies of other primates and finds more evidence that environmental factors determine their level of violence. The most eye-opening was a study of a troop of baboons in which the most aggressive males were killed off by disease.
That led to “conflict within the troop dropping dramatically,” and the change in violence “persisted for more than two decades, even after [the troop] absorbed males from other nearby populations.” In other words, our shared genetic heritage is more about adaptability to change than a tendency to kill.
Research on Violence
The book examines anthropological and genetic research on violence. The anthropology shows there’s wide variation between cultures in their levels and frequencies of lethal violence.
What’s surprising is how little evidence Horgan could dig up for violent group conflict in human prehistory. It suggests that war is a human invention, not an inescapable fate. The genetic research is about efforts to find a “warrior gene” and the failure to locate one.
Horgan sums up this shortcoming by talking about crime rates: “No purely biological model can explain why, for example, recent U.S. homicide rates are 10 times lower than in El Salvador and 10 times higher than in Japan.”
The focus then turns to external causes of violence. If we aren’t born to kill, maybe our circumstances force us into lethal conflict. Horgan goes over the connections between war and things like population density and resource scarcity.
The research shows that these are very real risk factors for conflict, but peace can be maintained in their presence. Sometimes wars are waged even when risk factors are absent. As Horgan puts it, “Many conditions appear to be sufficient for war to occur, but none are necessary.”
We’re left with the conclusion that lethal group violence is a collection of our choices. Nothing makes this kind of violence inevitable, not genes and not environmental circumstances. We choose violence.
Either it’s a rational choice, like when a nation defends itself from attack, or it’s an irrational choice, like when people kill because they fear or hate another culture or race.
The Best Part
The best part of The End of War is the evidence that humanity may be choosing a more peaceful world. Horgan’s review of the statistics shows there were roughly 4 million war-related deaths per year worldwide in the first half of the 20th century, compared to 1 million per year in the second half. That number has dropped to 250,000 per year since the turn of the century.
My only quibble with the book is that the focus on lethal violence and war obscures the general aggressive tendencies in people. We may not be born to kill, but I agree with the Bas Rutten quote.
All primates, including humans, put on angry displays and engage in nonlethal fights. And really, it’s a rare person who doesn’t occasionally want to bury his fist up to the elbow in another guy’s face. We may not do it, but we feel it.
These general aggressive tendencies are not the same as lethal violence, but they’re related. I would have liked to see more about what science tells us is normal aggression and how it’s distinct from lethal conflict.
Overall, The End of War presents a compelling argument that lethal group violence is not inevitable and that we can and should do something about it. It’s a message that many martial artists are sympathetic to but one most of us base on beliefs, not evidence.
What Horgan gives us is that missing evidence and some solid reasons to be optimistic about the future.
