Annie: Will there ever be a world without war? Is war necessary, and do you think it can be prevented? And do you see a future where there will no longer be war?

 

Ian: Wow, that is a big set of questions. That opens up all kinds of things then. I guess I find—, the reason I got interested in the history of war was I’m a historian interested in the large scale of history, how things have changed over thousands of years. And when you look at history at that scale, one of the astonishing things is that just how you never seem to get away from war. It’s there in the story so much. It plays such an important part in the human story that if you don’t try to understand the history of war, you’re never really gonna understand history. So this is what got me looking at war.

 

And one of the obvious questions right at the beginning is why so much war? Why is this relentlessly going on? And I found that the best way to approach this was by bringing together the skills and questions of a number of disciplines. And I felt that ultimately, it’s an issue in biology, a root cause. Almost all animals have evolved to be able to use violence to settle their problems and their disputes. Not absolutely all, but almost all. It’s there as an option. And pretty much all animals fight mostly although they don’t do it all the time.

 

At the same time, there are only a very few species who have evolved to do anything vaguely like what we would call warfare, organized group violence aiming to actually kill people and chase them off. In every case, these species, they’re social animals, and they’ve evolved to be able to cooperate closely together.

 

War is part violence, and war are parts of our biological evolution. You can legitimately say they’re hardwired into us, and in that way, we’re all just like all the other species of animals. The weird thing, what makes us different from all the other species of animals is if you look at chimpanzees or hyenas or pick whatever sort of animal you like, evolution is able to calculate what they call an evolutionarily stable strategy. A certain way of using violence which is the most effective way for these animals for transmitting their genes onto the next generation, and the more you use violence in a way that fits with the evolutionarily stable strategy, the more successful you’re gonna be in passing the genes onto the next generation.

 

And humans are just the same in this. If you’re a chimpanzee, pretty closely genetically related to us, we’re as close as anything, if you’re a chimpanzee, if you’re a male, you’ve got roughly a 10, 10 to 20 percent chance you’re going to die violently, the male chimpanzees. There’s a lot of evidence now with hunter-gatherer societies which of course, all humans were hunter-gatherers up until 10,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherer societies, a lot of them have rates of violence that are kind of similar to chimpanzees, which is not wildly surprising given that we’re so genetically close. But the weird thing is we don’t, in the mark of an industrialized world, we don’t have rates of violence anywhere near that.

 

And in fact, if you’d live ten thousand years ago, you would stand roughly one in ten chance of dying violently. If you’d live in the twentieth century which had the biggest wars in history, saw nuclear weapons get used, Holocaust committed, genocide, just terrible, terrible things, if you’d live in the twentieth century, your chance of dying violently globally is about one in a hundred: one tenth of what it was if you lived in the Stone Age.

 

If you lived now as we do, for us living in the world in 2017 globally a person’s chance of dying violently is 0.7%. It’s fallen down by more than an order of magnitude, and this is extraordinary. No other animal has been able to do that, and I feel like understanding the history of war, you’ve got to understand these two sides of it. One is the side where the ability to use violence is part of our biology, and it colors everything in human life, the possibility that somebody might use violence.

 

And then the other side is that we’re the only animal that has through social means reduced the amount of violence we’ve used by a spectacular amount. If the trends of the last 10,000 years continue, then theoretically, it’s perfectly plausible that we could live in a world without war. In fact, if you brought somebody here from the Stone Age, they would probably say, “You kind of already do.” There is so little war in the world, and it’s so geographically clustered in specific places.

 

A place like the modern US would look like a magical kingdom to somebody from the Stone Age. The fact that you can have large groups of people come together and the chances of somebody pulling out a stone axe and smashing your head in are close to zero because the problem is if somebody pulled out an automatic weapon and started shooting, they could kill a lot more people than with a stone axe. This is the downside of this. How do we put these two, what appear to be facts, and explain them?  

 

Annie: That’s really amusing. I think the connection of war to the human-biological aspect is something that a lot of people have overlooked and how it’s so inextricable to our history.

 

Ian: It’s very controversial as well. Some people think that if you’re saying that war and violence are part of our biology, you’re saying that they’re somehow natural, so it’s sort of okay that we’re violent.

 

But that is sort of silly. The fact that we die is part of our biology. That doesn’t mean that it’s okay that I’ll really die (laughter). I don’t think it’s okay. It’s become very politicized which is very unfortunate.

 

Annie: What is your opinion on some of the famous wars in history or some of the wars that are occurring to this day?

 

Ian: Yeah, when you study history, you can easily forgive that oh my god, it’s nothing but war. It’s war to war. It just dominates most of the writings that survived up until relatively recently. The wars have changed dramatically in the way that they’re fought. In terms of sheer destruction and killing, the Second World War is so far ahead of any other war that’s ever been fought. It’s just extraordinary.

 

The reason why, in sort of proportional terms, the 20th century is so much safer to live in than any other century is not that we are not killing each other. It’s just that there’s so many more of us. The world’s population becomes so absolutely enormous that we don’t really know how many people died in the Second World War. It’s in the 50-100 million range though in the course of six years. It’s a staggering number of people.

 

Most wars are not like this. Most of us tend to—when you say war, you tend to picture a WWII movie or something. Most wars are nothing like that. Most wars are—the sort of thing we see nowadays is nasty, it’s the dirty wars where things are not so clear. It’s not so clear. You’ve got these two easily definable governments that are fighting against each other. There are sort of rules that they follow, and things are predictable in a certain way as to how this war will be fought.

 

Most wars tend to be fought by much less organized groups. Ambushes, murders in the night. The kind of confusion and messiness you were getting. A few years ago, in the eastern parts of Ukraine where it appears that Russian activists were stirring up trouble, that’s much more typical, the kind of wars that happened in the past, which is very messy and we can’t tell which side people were on.

 

Annie: And now, it’s getting a lot more organized.

 

Ian: Well, it did. This is one of the big trends across the last few hundred years, was towards clearly defined nation-states who controlled the politics within their borders and organized political coalitions and fought against other nation-states.

 

Now that has become very, very rare. There are very few wars between nation-states anymore, and one of the big reasons—again, historians argue over this endlessly—I think one of the big reasons why war between nation-states has declined so much has been the introduction of nuclear weapons.

 

All of a sudden, the presence of nuclear weapons means that the downside risk of trying to use violence to settle your problems if you’re a political leader, the downside risk is going up toward infinity. There’s a real possibility that say, obviously if the US and the Soviet Union had gone to war, there is a very real chance that by the 1980s, they could destroy all life on the planet.

 

When you have that in the back of your mind, that focuses your lot. It sort of trickled down from the superpowers. There’s a strong incentive for the Americans to prevent any of their allies from actually going to war with a country in the Soviet orbit because these things can get out of control so quickly. Nuclear weapons raise the cost of using violence to solve your problems, and humans reacted to that, I think, very rationally by trying to find less violent ways to solve these problems between states.

 

But there’s a kind of scaling problem. Like say, if you’re Dwight Eisenhower - president of the United States in the 1950s - you could look at Stalin, Khrushchev and say, “If you invade West Germany, there will be nuclear war and everything will end.” And Khrushchev knows very well that there’s a very real chance you mean this.  

 

On the other hand, if Ho Chi Minh, guerilla leader in Vietnam and Indochina, if Ho Chi Minh has this irregular, semi-bounded army besieging the French in Dien Bien Phu, if you look at Ho Chi Minh and say, “If you come here with a siege, I will drop nuclear weapons in Indochina,” he laughs in your face because he knows you’re not going to do it. There would be a totally disproportionate response. If you use your nuclear weapons, all of your allies will revolt against you. Everybody will be so appalled at the way you’re behaving. You can’t use them in these lower level, less formal conflicts.

 

And so we got this weird system which is actually not that weird, it’s quite common in history, where certain kinds of violence become prohibitively expensive, but in other contexts, violence can still be used. It can seem to you if you’re unhappy with the Syrian government back in 2011, it can seem to you that using violence against Assad is a good idea. Nobody is trying to stop you. I’m trying to overthrow the president this way, and the president will fight back with violence at his disposal, knowing that this is unlikely to escalate into a superpower conflict. He’s not gonna come with too much pressure from outside. These smaller wars kind of rumble on; they’re much harder to stop.

 

Annie: Oh, okay, and it seems like a lot of these wars that we’re talking about have negative consequences like cities collapsing or people dying. Do you think that there are any benefits to violence or war?

 

Ian: Well, I think this is one of the paradoxes of the history of war, the long term history. The one thing with humans is that we have driven down the rate of violence across the last 10,000 years - a very, very slow process, but spectacular changes have been the result. And when you ask why and how did this happen, what was it that made for that, there’s a lot of different things involved in that, but overwhelmingly, the big thing that’s happened, the big causal factor here is the creation of bigger and bigger states with governments that have amounts of violence at their disposal that other people don’t have.

 

Say you don’t like how this interview is going and you take your pen and attack me savagely (laughter) with it, I pull out my cell phone and I call the cops. Then the cops come, and they have so much more violence at their disposal than you have, and so you’re going to put down your blood-soaked pen and go quietly with them. And if you don’t, they’re going to beat you up, and they’re going to take you away to the cells and beat you a lot more when you get there.

 

We’ve created governments that have this huge power to intimidate the people under them. This is not a new observation. This is what Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher, observed back in the seventeenth century when he wrote Leviathan. The government’s—if you’re the ruler of a country, the ruler of England or whatever it might be, what you really want from your subjects is for them to quietly go about their business and pay taxes to you. You don’t want them fighting each other and burning down their farms, settling their problems with violence.

 

If you’re gonna succeed as a government, you need to suppress the violence that your people use. They’re devoting enormous efforts to doing so. This has been the kind of big force driving the decline in rates of violence. There are governments with policing powers of various cares which make it clear to you that the cost of using violence vastly exceed the benefits of doing so.

 

Over time, we have been doing this for thousands of years. Over time, we’ve started to internalize a lot of these values, and we get to the point now where on the whole, people tend to think it really would be wrong for you to use that pen to attack me if I say something offensive during the interview. It would be much better to lodge a complaint to the Dean or something like that, so we internalize these values.

 

The scary thing actually is how quickly we can go back the other way. In the end of the ancient world where the great empires collapsed all the way from the Roman Empire to Han China, rates of violence go back up again really quickly once you take away the governments that are able to control people and suppress violence. It goes back up again very quickly, but the long term trend has been the bigger, more organized states are more intimidating to their citizens and drive down the rates of violence within their societies.

 

Of course, these bigger states also fight against other big states, but as the states get bigger and more intimidating, the costs of going to war against each other go up as well, so there’s a decline overall  in the number of wars being fought. But the reason why I say that this is all a paradox, it is when I say where do these bigger states come from?

 

Well, they’re created by violence. People seize control, intimidate and dominate their rivals, use forces to intimidate their rivals, use force to intimidate their subjects. There’s this weird story that basically, violence has been putting violence out of business. Of course, it’s not such a weird way again if you think of this in the sort of way an evolutionary biologist would do.

 

Animals adapt biologically, genetically, but also you can adapt culturally. You adapt to your environment, to flourish in the niche that you’re in. But your adaptation then changes that environment. Suppose you’re a bunny rabbit and there are all these coyotes out there who want to eat you. There’s a selective pressure toward bunnies who can run faster because the parents who run faster are more likely to have children and their children will… so on of course.

 

So bunnies are under selective pressure to evolve to run faster. That then changes the world because coyotes now are finding they can’t catch the bunnies anymore because the bunnies run that bit faster, so the coyotes are starving to death. All the slow coyotes starve to death, creating selective pressures that favor the evolution of faster coyotes which then creates a new problem for the bunnies.

 

And on it goes. And as each species changes, it ripples and affects other species too. Bunnies multiply rapidly, they eat all the grass or something then other species start to starve, and everything connected to everything else. In a way, I think that everything makes complete sense when you put it into this bigger evolutionary perspective, but it just sounds very weird to say the force that reduces violence in the world is ultimately violence itself. Very peculiar.

 

Annie: It’s contradictory, but it makes sense that states with such strong governments and police powers would be able to demonstrate to the citizens that using violence has more costs than it does benefits.

 

Ian: Yes, which raises all kinds of questions about things like why is it that out of all the world’s most developed countries, the United States has a rate of internal violence so much higher than just about any other developed state, and some parts much higher than other parts. It casts an interesting new light on that question.

 

Annie: Given what we know about war and its causes and origins and costs and benefits, what is your perspective on how we can end war?

 

Ian: Yeah, well, I think the big long-term trend that we’ve been seeing has been toward forming these larger and larger societies with clearly defined internal laws. I think humans are very good at being rational even though it often doesn’t really look like it. In the long run, we are very rational creatures, and we are able to reason our way to understanding that violence doesn’t usually pay in the world that we live in.

 

If I am teaching a class with some student that asks some obnoxious question I don’t like, I don’t need to consciously think about the police before I decide not to walk over and punch the student. We internalize these values, and I think most people have. And on the whole, the less you internalize the values of non-violent solutions to problems in the modern world, the less well you’re going to do.

 

The people who go to prison for violent crimes tend to come from poor backgrounds. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that contribute to that outcome, but one of them is that there is a connection between using a lot of violence and your lifetime income. Very tight correlation there. On the whole, don’t do it. It’s not a good idea.

 

The more we create a world where more and more people understand that the payoffs from violence are lower than the payoffs from non-violence, the less and less violence there is going to be. I don’t think we’ll ever have a world where there’s no violence at all unless something fundamental happens to the human genome to make us into a different sort of animals from what we currently are.

 

Of course we live in an age where fundamental things are happening to the human genome where we have our ability to manipulate the genetic code to all kinds of things, break down the boundaries between humans and the machines we’ve created. And again, anybody can sit around, making up stories about where they think this is all going to take us, but it’s not insane to think that one possible outcome of this sort of revolutionary changes we’re now seeing what it means to be a human being, one possible outcome is a world where violence just loses its payoffs pretty much completely. It’s one possibility at least.

 

Annie: And then we would see people understand and internalize the benefits of war, I guess.

 

Ian: We are very good at it. It may be a utopian world to say that there is no violence at all, and there’s going to be a species of animal where we’re going to be talking about an evolutionarily stable strategy and all kinds of typical behaviors, but there’s always outliers, and people sort of go off in the decision tree and do weird and wacky things, and there’s always going to be weirdness.

 

There’s also the process of people redefining what violence means. I read a very good book about this just last year. There’s a lot of discussion now about microaggression and stuff, which is, in a way, redefining what counts as an act of violence. I no longer have to punch you in the nose to have committed an act of violence by saying something hurtful, even if I’m not doing it  deliberately. Some people would say that that’s kind of an act of violence as well, which I think through most of history, would just be insane.

 

Now that because in some parts of the world, there is so little actual physical violence going on that it’s starting to seem more reasonable to think about violence more broadly.

 

Annie: As the definition of the term expands, I think we can also include maybe online violence or even racial violence that is unconscious.

 

Ian: Yeah, we have already seen dramatic redefinitions. Most countries up till relatively recently technically, legally, there was really no such thing as sexual violence as it just wasn’t considered to be—an act of sexual violence wasn’t considered to be the same kind of thing as an act of violence in the sense of shooting someone. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.

 

Annie: That’s really  interesting.

 

Ian: And so, in a lot of countries, there is really no such thing as sexual violence within a marriage because it was considered that you are flesh of one flesh, that it can’t be violence by definition. The world has changed in mostly good ways (laughter).