What Manner of Beast?

Human biology is the first refuge of Things As They Are. Aristotle studied man and, good Greek that he was, found that foreigners were born to be slaves. Spencer read Darwin and found the benign hand of Evolution in the slums of London. Less respectable thinkers—Adolph Hitler, Bull Connor, William Shockley, the list could go on for pages—have always discovered or invented a human nature which suited their needs.

Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and others who argue that humans are instinctive warriors seem to fit this pattern. Lorenz argued that humans are naturally destructive animals: aggression is genetically-based, and the energy it creates will find release one way or another. Ardrey's Territorial Imperative suggests that people defend territory—a home, a back yard, a hunting ground, a nation—because that is how they are made. Aggression and defense of territory bring war and the thousand ingenious ways of killing that armies use.

Lorenz himself opposes war. He is a student of animal behavior who developed his theories because the evidence seemed to lead him to them. Ardrey, a dramatist and critic, also reached his conclusions more in sadness than in triumph. But Ardrey's and Lorenz's motives matter not at all to the central questions: Is the theory of instinctive aggression true? And, more important, does it justify war?

The theory is simple. It makes for excellent cocktail party conversation. Humans have a fighting instinct: hence there is war. Liberals can bemoan this and despair and begin Looking Out for Number One. Conservatives, who have seldom done anything else, find themselves justified. War is terrible, says the theory, but we can really do nothing about it. We can only learn to live with it and try to keep it from destroying us even as it goes on. We are not responsible; our genes are.

It is fascinating and oddly comforting stuff. Lorenz speaks of ducks adopting a human as their mother; Ardrey talks about damaged bones in a dig in Africa. It covers the whole panorama of human prehistory, leading in the end to a form of absolution. We need have less guilt about the evil that we do if we were simply born that way. We need not even be indignant, for we are here dealing with an unalterable fact of our minds and bodies.

Few people actually have these reactions. They are one—perhaps the most obvious—implication of the theory; yet we cannot easily accept the killing and wounding of thirty or forty million people. There is no real absolution in the face of such slaughter. This, too, is human nature. We forget it because it is much more interesting to talk about how bad we are. And the question keeps recurring: If we are not bloodthirsty, how can we explain our most bloodthirsty institution?

The instinctive aggression hypothesis became popular in the middle 1970s. Its critics included anthropologists like Richard Leakey and Ashley Montagu and the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. For a time it went out of fashion and was not even seriously discussed. But whether humans are naturally warlike is a significant issue that will not go away. Gwynne Dyer's War rejects the theory completely. Richard Holmes, in his monumental Acts of War—the most complete discussion yet written of human behavior in combat—gives the theory a qualified acceptance.

All this discussion is curious, for the theory does far less than its proponents claim. It does not explain what goes on in human combat. It does not explain war. It is in fact irrelevant to an understanding of war. Worse: the theory gets the process backwards.

"War" has many meanings. The clash between two hunting tribes, led by brave champions and fighting hand-to-hand, is war. So are the rigid infantry formations and battles of the eighteenth century, the entrenchments of World War I, and the jungle fighting of Vietnam. A concept which covers this much is nearly impossible to define, let alone explain. Broadly, however, one can divide warfare into three types. "Primitive warfare" and "drilled warfare" are the common categories used by military historians. A third type of warfare, which I shall call "automatic warfare," has developed out of the technology of destruction.

Primitive warfare need not be fought with spears. Its essence is a loose, sometimes even democratic military organization and an emphasis on individual action rather than group precision. A battle between two primitive armies may be decided by individual combats. No one may be killed, or even seriously injured. Hostilities may cease when one person is killed.

Drilled warfare is what we usually mean when we speak of war. There is a tight organization, with a chain of command, and group action made precise by training and repetition. Soldiers must follow orders, and the orders are part of a strategy. Modern land war, despite its gruesome scale, is drilled warfare. It is more destructive than older wars, more "total" because the weapons used are more efficient. But, though the details have changed, the philosophy of military organization has not altered very much since ancient times. Order, hierarchy, drill, group effort, precision—the Romans stressed these things, and so do modern armies.

Automatic warfare, the truly modern form of war, hardly involves people at all. It destroys them, but the agents of destruction are machines: "smart" weapons, nuclear missiles, automated battlefields. A soldier in automatic warfare must know how to operate the equipment, but he need not act aggressively. Destructiveness is there, but its execution is mechanical. It is built in at the factory.

It is easy to confuse these three types of warfare. To an extent the instinctive aggression hypothesis is built on just such a confusion. Primitive warfare appears to be —though in fact it is not—spontaneous. Drilled warfare appears to be—though again it is not—primitive warfare more efficiently organized. Automatic warfare appears to be drilled warfare with infinitely refined weapons. If primitive warfare is "spontaneous" yet essentially the same as drilled or automatic war, then all war must be "spontaneous." It must "erupt." It must be prompted by some inchoate natural tendency to fight.

Primitive warfare is far more complex than this. It does not "break out" unpredictably, but in most cultures is preceded by elaborate rituals to prepare the warriors. The rituals are an essential part of the battle: fighting could not occur without them. In primitive warfare, at least, aggression does not well up inside the opponents, drawing them irresistably toward combat.

But primitive warfare is relatively harmless. It did not kill, and probably could not have killed, fifty-nine million people between 1815 and 1945. Unless it is to miss the problem altogether, any theory of war must explain drilled warfare and automatic warfare. For, at bottom, they are what most concern us and what may kill us.

On December 25, 1914, quite spontaneously, troops along the Western Front declared their own Christmas truce. The shooting stopped, and the men on both sides met, embraced, wished each other joy of the season, and played games of soccer. The truce continued until the 26th, when the shooting began again. A year later there was another such truce, but every year after that until the end of World War I, Christmas passed with no break in the fighting. Feelings on both sides were too bitter. Too many had been killed, too many had gone mad in the trenches, too many had gone home crippled or blind. Reconciliation, even for a day, had become impossible.

The end of the Christmas truce idea was not as spontaneous as its beginning, despite the increasing carnage of the war. Official policy on both sides disapproved of the truce from the beginning. Even the official photographers were permitted to take pictures only of officers, for photographs of enlisted men "fraternizing" might have unpredictable effects on morale. Whether or not the truce idea might have caused the troops to question the war, the nations behaved as if they believed this to be so. The fighting could not go on if the troops grew to like each other—or so it was thought.

This little incident, so unusual that Viscount Montgomery devotes half a page to it in his History of Warfare, gives a clue to one flaw in the instinct theory. War begins for political reasons—by reasoned calculation, or simply because the political system has broken down. Those in power give the order, and the order makes enemies where there is no enmity. Professional soldiers, in fact, may have great respect for their opponents. They fight because the order says to fight, and the order says to fight because the strategy requires battle at this time and this place, and with these weapons. Anger, if it is there, is ancillary; it may even be part of the strategy. The nations create it by propaganda and by the very act of putting men into combat: when one's friends are being shot to pieces, one becomes a different being. Let the killing go on, and one loses all sense that there is any other way to act.

A destructive, deadly, brutal, appalling business: but not, in essence, an uncontrollable force expending itself. No general in his right mind would want an army whose wish to kill did not occur to order, but took possession of his troops when and as it pleased. The army which has only anger for its guide will die at the hands of the army which has a better strategy and strikes in cold blood. It will be a rabble, and half its men will run when fear strikes.

It is not normal to walk into shellfire or charge a machine-gun nest. Even the angriest man will think twice about it, and may end by striking his officer instead of his enemy. Military drill makes it possible for soldiers to do what they would not do in their right minds. They go on despite fear, despite the death of the soldiers around them, because their training is to follow the order. They kill because their training makes it possible for them to kill, and to make this possible they are drilled until they forget what killing means. Or until they want to kill.

That is the real horror of war: that two people who do not know each other, who are not even enemies, will fight each other to the death because someone behind the lines wishes to move a pin on a map. Chances are they do not know or understand the movement of that pin. They may have enlisted to save their country or for some other purpose deemed noble in war, but most soldiers fight for survival and the approval of their fellows. Larger ends and grand strategy mean little in a foxhole.

When an officer praises an aggressive soldier or unit, he is commending not anger but something more like a mixture of hustle and courage. An aggressive soldier will do his job well: move forward when advance is ordered, kill as many of the enemy as possible, penetrate where others fear to go. But he will not go berserk. When he does, he may be killed or rotated out of combat.

One speaks even of aggressive generals, though generals plan strategy and others execute it. An aggressive general will plan an attack where others fear to do so, devise bold maneuvers, invent movements never before thought of in battle. But he does not act. His troops, if they are well trained, follow the plan as each part of it filters down the chain of command.

A good general or line officer will not expend the lives of his troops simply to gratify some vague aggressive instinct. He will win with the minimum loss of life. One could argue that the ideal strategy defeats the enemy without a shot fired. That sort of generalship has never occurred, not because all generals are incompetent—though many are—but because war and the preparations for war create the very anger which appears to be instinctive. A perfect encirclement will seldom bring surrender. It is more likely to provoke the enemy to fight with the desperation of the already-defeated. Thus ideal strategy, if it existed, would still kill millions. Not aggression, but fear, pride, and the hope for a miraculous victory, would be the killers.

Automatic warfare, the most destructive of all, is the least aggressive. Throwing switches, watching blips on a radar screen, pushing buttons, are not aggressive actions. If people were instinctively aggressive, the soldiers in war rooms would occasionally smash chairs or slam doors to defuse their energy. In fact, they occasionally do, and missile operators carry guns so that they can shoot their partners if their partners go berserk. But this does not happen. The people who would launch the missiles, remain for the most part calm as they prepare for the deadliest war of all. The results of their work, if the missiles were launched, would be abstract to the operators; to the victims, never.

So the instinct theory is of less value than it first appears. It has got things backwards. War uses human aggression. It even creates it. But, though we can be brutal and angry, we do not have to be to make war. To make nuclear holocaust, we need not even be directly involved. Our machines will do it for us.

Ardrey's "territorial imperative" seems a more plausible theory. War, after all, is about territory, among other things. Millions died in World War I for a thousand yards of it. Hitler unleashed his tanks for it. And on and on.

But "defense of territory" is a trick phrase, with as many masks as Melville's confidence-man. A family will defend its home from an intruder, but it will not join the army to do so. It will not napalm the burglar or dig a trench, hide in it, and fire at him with a machine gun. The law regards this, and rightly, as lunacy.

The law, too, would not say that that family is at war with the burglar. Nor that I have gone to war when, attacked on a dark street, I kick the mugger in the groin and run from him. Self-defense is a kind of defense of territory, but it is not war.

So also with neighborhood gangs. They fight, but they do not make war, unless we are to stretch that word beyond any meaning at all. If they can be said to make war, it is primitive war, with aggression-building rituals and even ritualized battle rules. Or it is the vendetta-war of the Mafia, with hit men and machine-guns from a passing car.

Drilled warfare is a different quality entirely. Nations declare it against each other, they prepare for it, they dare each other toward it, they risk it, they mobilize for it. But those who live within the nations do not make these decisions. Left to themselves, to follow their natural interests, they probably would not fight. If they did, they would very likely choose different enemies from those the state wants them to choose—perhaps they would fight their neighbors.

This is not easy to see. We are so immersed in the propaganda of the nation-state, of "defense," that we cannot see it. But the nation is an arbitrary territory. It is not at all like the home or the neighborhood turf. It is buildings in Washington, London, Moscow, Berlin, or Paris. It is groups of men and women who exercise power and make laws. It is the laws themselves. Above all, it is a fiction in which we acquiesce.

Where is the nation? It is on the map—yet after every war, signatures on papers revise the map. It is "in the minds and hearts of the people"—yet the people soon develop their loyalty to the revised map or the new government. If they do not, the government campaigns to convince them to do so. The nation is very real, but it is seldom a "territory." The governments of the nations must constantly remind their people that the nation needs defense. Often it must conscript them in order to raise an army.

We may, that is, be territorial animals. There may even be a nation which is someone's natural territory. One could argue endlessly about that. But war between countries is not about natural territory but about power. Civil war, even more than international war, is about who controls the government—that is, about power.

The Germans who attacked Verdun in 1916 chose it because it symbolized the French nation. There was nothing about Verdun which made it so important that half a million Frenchmen and as many Germans should die for it. Strategically it was not vital to either side. A pure logician, unencumbered by the mystique of the place, would have abandoned it and withdrawn to a safer position to fight another day.

Here was the genie of "national territory" run amuck. For years the French leaders had identified Verdun with the nation. For years they had told their people that the fall of Verdun would mean the fall of France, and the fall of France meant the end of all that was good in the world. They could not have abandoned Verdun, for they had created the myth which made it impossible to do so—the myth upon which part of their power depended.

And so the people died. Senselessly, by their hundreds of thousands, they turned the fields into desert places and the fortresses into charnel-houses. The territory being saved was, as usual in war, turned to rubble. It had been life-and-death for the French to save it; now it became life-and-death to the Germans also. Nothing was gained. A million lives were lost. In the end, the fighting led only to stalemate.

Territory on the scale of the nation becomes rationalization for the movement of the pins on the war maps. For the soldier on the line, it means little or nothing, for one forgets the nation when the shooting starts and knows only living, dying, and following the order. Territory is a trick: it gets people into war, when they would do better staying at home. It keeps them coming in as the slaughter mounts.

Territory does not cause war. It is the occasion for war. It makes war possible because people can be made to believe in it, and they are made to believe in it because someone—a political leader, a vested interest, a maniac—finds it useful for them to believe in it. The process is not always conscious. Nor is it always destructive: the nation can provide much that is good. But it is in any case not instinctive. If it were, the U.S. Congress would not worry about military advertising that does not speak of "duty" and "country." There would be no need for advertisements: people would simply do as their genes required, and the country would have its army.

If war is not an instinct, what is it? I do not know, and the search for an answer is matter for another essay. But whatever war is, surely we and not our genes are responsible for it. We cooperate with it. If we ceased to cooperate with it, it would stop.

Humankind is, if nothing else, a species which can create its own world. It does so within limits—physical, biological, economic. That much is clear. But war is an evil which we have created. It does little good, and much harm, to suggest that, though we created it, we cannot choose to end it.

Essays and Thoughts • Essays on War • Selected Poems
givewings.com • Discover Germantown
Surviving the Future • About the Author