The Darkness at the Center of the Dream

The dream began, or might have, with a smooth stone. On the ground untouched, it was inert and useless. In a human hand, it acquired a kind of life. It could crack a nut. It could be shaped. Struck on another stone, it could make sparks which, catching on dry tinder, could make fire. With careful use, it became an extension of the hand, giving its holder a power over the environment undreamt of among animals which did not use tools.

Picking up that first stone and using it as a tool were not in themselves revolutionary acts. Other animals-most notably chimpanzees-use tools, but, for whatever reasons, they do not go beyond the simplest. Looking at a smooth stone, seeing in it not just one but many possibilities, learning to use it for more than one function, learning from using one tool that one might find or make other tools-these were acts of high genius. There is no parallel for them among other species. They are our glory-and our curse.

For the stone which could be shaped could be thrown to kill. It could be sharpened and, attached to a straight branch, become a yet more effective instrument of death. In a world where humans lived by hunting, the sharpened stone was necessary for survival. But in that same world, it could be used to hunt other human beings.

No one knows with certainty the origins of war among humans. Jane Goodall observed something resembling it among chimpanzees, but chimpanzee warfare was unusual. The instincts of the chimpanzees she observed were social and, though sometimes violent, led in only one case to anything like organized fighting. Primates, on the whole, are gentle creatures. The gorilla, for example, for all its fierce appearance, is a shy vegetarian who fights primarily when attacked.

Humans have no such instinctive gentleness. Our tools quite literally cut both ways. The blade which we sharpen for the kitchen is not different in principle from the blade of a bayonet or sword. We can use it to cut up vegetables, or, in a fit of rage, to stab another person to the heart. There is nothing inherent in the knife which says we must use it one way or the other.

So it was with that first stone. It represented the dream-of mastery over our fate, of building a world in which we could overcome our own small size and weakness and live without fear. And it represented the darkness at the heart of the dream-the knowledge not only of how to build, but of how to destroy.

None of this was inherent in the stone itself. It followed from the act of making the stone a tool. Yet neither peace nor war followed from our use of tools. What followed were the potential for a new world and the risk that in the process of building it we would destroy much, including ourselves.

Some years ago it became fashionable to argue that humans were "naturally" warlike. Those who believed this seemed to have the evidence on their side, for humanity's record is bloody almost beyond enduring. Millions of people-thirty-five million since World War II alone-have died in wars. Countless others have been wounded, maimed, made homeless. Cities, provinces, and entire countries have been laid waste. There is no time in recorded history when we have not made war, and there is good reason to believe that we made it before we began to write down our own terrible record.

Yet the issue is more complex than the advocates of instinctive aggression have made it seem. Most people are not soldiers; even in warrior societies like that of Alexander the Great, there were many peasants who were not in the army. As our tools have become more advanced and our social institutions more complex, the percentage of people who are soldiers has actually declined, even in wartime. Most soldiers in modern armies do not fight at all: they are support troops.

The greatest difficulty with instinct theories of war, however, is that they do not explain why we fight when we do and in the ways that we do. Eighteenth-century soldiers had no instinctive compulsion to form the geometrically precise lines and squares which were the essence of battle at that time. They had to be drilled, hour upon hour, so brutally that we get the word martinet from the name of a particularly harsh French general. World War I resulted from stupidity, miscalculation, and a badly flawed international system, not from some instinctive desire for mutual slaughter. Instinct for fighting, if there is any such thing, cannot explain any particular war or military technique.

There is, it is true, an air of inevitability to military history. The development of weapons and tactics has an inner logic which, seen in retrospect, makes alternatives seem virtually impossible. From the musket to the rifle to entrenchment to the tank to blitzkrieg to precision-guided anti-tank weapons-every step seems predetermined by a kind of malign fate. How could it have been otherwise?

Every war, that is, looks unavoidable after the fact. So, too, does the institution of war itself. Looking back at the development of war, it appears that we could not have chosen otherwise. The ballistic missile is child of the spear, and nothing could have prevented its birth. The only alternative to the inexorable logic of war, it seems, was not to have developed tools in the first place. Given power and our evil instincts, what followed must have followed.

History, however, always seems inevitable, for a very simple reason. It is the record of events in the past and cannot be changed. One event did lead to another. This does not mean that the course of events could not have been altered at the time. But altering them now is not in our control. We can only try to understand them.

So it is with the history of human bloodshed. From it we cannot conclude that people are naturally warlike. We cannot conclude that they are not. We can see that in fact they have fought terrible battles and committed atrocities beyond counting. But we cannot therefore say that it must have been so. On the contrary: history shows, as little else can, that wars are a product of particular cultures and social arrangements. That is, they are the product of human decisions about how human affairs will be ordered.

This is easier to see when we look at an institution like slavery, which was once considered natural and instinctive. In the days when slavery was accepted, many thinkers argued that it could not be otherwise. The most famous was Aristotle, who held that non-Greeks were subhuman and therefore fit for little else when in contact with the superior Greeks. That all these arguments were so much wind is now obvious. But they were seriously made at the time. The institution of slavery, far from being natural and instinctive, resulted from arrangements that humans had made and could change.

None of this suggests that change would be easy or painless. With a history so full of military bloodshed and military pomp, so centered around military glory, it could not be otherwise. But it is one thing to say that change would be difficult and quite another to say that it is impossible.

If in fact we are instinctive warriors, if we cannot change the arrangements that make wars possible, we are doomed. For the darkness at the center of the dream has grown more intense through the years. If the predictions of Carl Sagan and his colleagues are correct it may yet engulf us, bringing long winter and slow death to this and every other species. We must try to change. We have no alternative.

History, which is usually not very encouraging in these matters, does in fact suggest that we can change if we are willing to do so. The most serious problems which armies face arise from the essential unwillingness of most of their soldiers. Most people simply are not natural fighters. They may be attracted by the flag, but when the shooting starts, it is discipline and peer pressure that hold them in the line. Many never recover from the disjunction between what they must do in combat and how they have learned to behave in ordinary life.

Some cannot do it at all. Away from the life-and-death demands of battle, where failing to fight becomes almost unthinkable, thousands of soldiers simply walked away from the Vietnam-era U.S. military. Others refused orders, applied for discharge as conscientious objectors, or spoke against the war after they came home. Many are still speaking out today.

Each of these people, in his or her own way, has chosen to build, not to destroy. They know, more than most, that this decision is risky. The tools that build can, with small changes, become the tools that destroy. The mind that conceives of those tools can be used to good purpose or evil. That is a matter of choice. We have no instinct which will tell us what to do.

That is the burden and the glory of being human. There is nothing preordained about what we do or become. Each of us can, and must, decide between the dream and the darkness at its center.

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