War & Human Nature: Crash Course World History 204

Summary

In this Crash Course World History episode, John Green explores the complex topic of war, questioning whether war is inherent to human nature. He discusses philosophical debates between Hobbes and Rousseau on humanity's violence, examines anthropological and archaeological evidence, and delves into evolutionary explanations for conflict. While acknowledging the thrill and transcendence some soldiers experience in combat, Green emphasizes that war is not inevitable. He urges viewers to recognize the importance of human choices in shaping history and ending cycles of violence, while cautioning against oversimplified biological explanations for war.

Takeaways

• 🎓 The Crash Course World History series tends to focus more on cooperation and trade rather than war, as they believe these aspects have a more significant impact on history.
• 🤔 The video discusses the controversial question of whether war is part of 'human nature', exploring philosophical and anthropological perspectives.
• 👨‍🎓 Nietzsche's view that humans are naturally war-like is contrasted with the idea that such instincts are not universal, particularly among young men who are more likely to go to war.
• 🧬 Anthropological evidence suggests that pre-civilization societies were violent, challenging the notion of a peaceful 'state of nature' as proposed by Rousseau.
• 🛡️ The video points out that while humans may have an innate capacity for aggression, this does not necessitate violence or killing, and many people live without resorting to such actions.
• 🌿 The scarcity of resources like food and mates in the past could have driven humans towards violence and war as a means of survival and reproduction.
• 🔥 The script highlights that the thrill and excitement of combat can be a powerful motivator for soldiers, suggesting an underlying biological attraction to the act of fighting.
• 🤝 Loyalty to comrades and the desire to protect one's group are presented as significant reasons why soldiers fight, beyond basic needs or evolutionary imperatives.
• 🧠 The video emphasizes the importance of human choice in the context of war, arguing that while biology may provide a predisposition, it is not deterministic.
• ✋ It concludes by cautioning against a fatalistic view of war as inevitable, advocating for the understanding that human institutions and choices can lead to peace and the prevention of conflict.

Q & A

What is the main subject of the Crash Course World History episode discussed in the transcript?

The main subject of the episode is war, specifically the reasons why people fight and whether making war is part of 'human nature'.

Why does John Green express initial reluctance to discuss the history of war?

John Green is reluctant to discuss the history of war because he feels it has been well-covered elsewhere and he has not yet figured out a way to approach the topic effectively within the Crash Course format.

What is the debate between Hobbes and Rousseau regarding human nature and war?

Hobbes believed that humans are naturally war-like and violent, while Rousseau thought that humans are naturally peaceful and only become violent due to civilization.

According to the transcript, what does anthropology suggest about the nature of pre-civilization societies?

Anthropology suggests that pre-civilization societies were often violent, with evidence of warfare and killing being common causes of mortality.

What does John Green argue about the evolutionary perspective on human aggression and war?

John Green suggests that while aggression might be an innate trait in humans, it does not necessarily lead to violence or war. He cautions against using evolutionary biology to explain cultural characteristics like warlike behavior and emphasizes that humans have free will to make choices beyond biological imperatives.

What role do resources like food and sex play in the evolutionary explanation for war?

In the evolutionary explanation for war, resources such as food and sex are seen as essential for survival and reproduction. Competition for these scarce resources could lead to violence and war.

What does the transcript suggest about the nature of warfare in the 'state of nature'?

The transcript suggests that in the 'state of nature', warfare often took the form of raids rather than large-scale battles, with violence occurring during surprise attacks on other groups.

Why does John Green mention Karl Marlantes and his views on war in the episode?

John Green mentions Karl Marlantes to provide insights from a soldier's perspective on why people fight, including the sense of transcendence, loyalty, and the thrill of combat.

What does the transcript imply about the role of institutions in human evolution compared to biological evolution?

The transcript implies that while human biology may not have evolved significantly in the past thousand years, human institutions have evolved significantly due to human choices, which have shaped the development of societies and the potential for ending cycles of violence.

How does John Green conclude the episode regarding the inevitability of war?

John Green concludes that war is not inevitable, emphasizing that while it is difficult to end a war, it is not impossible, and that human choices and institutions have the power to break cycles of violence.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Introduction to War in World History

John Green introduces the topic of war in world history, expressing the Crash Course team's reluctance to focus on it due to its extensive coverage elsewhere and the difficulty in addressing it meaningfully. Despite this, Green acknowledges war's significance in history and decides to discuss it abstractly, focusing on why humans engage in warfare. He questions whether war is an inherent part of human nature, referencing philosophical debates between Hobbes and Rousseau on the nature of humans in a 'state of nature.' Green then transitions into an anthropological and archaeological examination of pre-civilization societies to understand the roots of human violence.

05:00

🔍 The Roots of Human Aggression and Warfare

This paragraph delves into the possible evolutionary reasons behind human aggression and warfare. It discusses the role of kin protection and resource scarcity, such as food and mates, as potential drivers of violent behavior. The historical context of warfare is explored, highlighting that for most of human history, war took the form of raids rather than organized state conflicts. The paragraph also touches on the psychological aspects of warfare, such as the thrill and sense of transcendence experienced by soldiers, as described by Karl Marlantes in his writings. Green emphasizes the importance of human choice in the context of warfare and warns against the dangers of attributing war solely to evolutionary biology, which could lead to a fatalistic view of war as inevitable.

10:03

🎬 Production and Support Acknowledgements

The final paragraph shifts focus from the historical and philosophical discussion of war to the practical aspects of producing the Crash Course video series. It acknowledges the support of the production team, the studio, and the viewers who contribute through Subbable.com, a voluntary subscription service that helps keep the educational content free and accessible. The paragraph concludes with a customary sign-off, encouraging viewers to continue being awesome, reflecting the Crash Course's informal and engaging educational approach.

Keywords

💡War

War is a state of armed conflict between different groups or countries. In the context of the video, it is a controversial subject that the host, John Green, feels has been extensively covered but is still important to discuss. The video aims to explore whether war is an inherent part of human nature, delving into historical, philosophical, and anthropological perspectives to understand its prevalence throughout history.

💡Human Nature

Human nature refers to the innate characteristics and tendencies that are common to all human beings. The video discusses whether a predisposition for war is part of human nature, contrasting the views of philosophers like Hobbes, who saw humans as naturally violent, with Rousseau, who believed humans were naturally peaceful.

💡Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures and their development. The video uses anthropological evidence to examine the 'state of nature' and the prevalence of violence in pre-civilization societies, suggesting that human beings have a long history of aggression and conflict.

💡Evolutionary Biology

Evolutionary biology is the study of how species change over time through genetic variation and natural selection. The video explores the possibility that aggression and war could be evolutionary traits, discussing how the need to protect kin and secure resources might have contributed to a warlike human nature.

💡State of Nature

The 'state of nature' is a philosophical concept referring to a hypothetical condition of human life before the development of societies and governments. The video uses this concept to discuss whether humans were more violent or peaceful in their natural state, drawing on anthropological and archaeological evidence.

💡Cooperation and Trade

Cooperation and trade are social and economic activities that involve working together or exchanging goods and services. The video suggests that these activities are more significant and interesting than war, as they contribute to the development and progress of civilizations.

💡Kin Group

A kin group refers to a social group consisting of individuals who are related by blood or marriage. The video discusses how the biological imperative to protect one's kin group could be a factor in human aggression and war, as individuals may fight to ensure the survival of their genetic traits.

💡Resources

Resources in this context refer to materials or assets that are valuable for survival and well-being, such as food, water, and land. The video suggests that competition for scarce resources could be a driving force behind war, as individuals and groups fight to secure what they need.

💡Violence

Violence is the use of physical force to cause harm or injury. The video examines the roots of violence in human history, questioning whether it is an innate part of human behavior or a result of specific social and environmental conditions.

💡Free Will

Free will is the ability to make choices that are neither determined by natural causality nor predestined by fate or divine will. The video emphasizes that despite any biological predispositions, humans have the capacity to choose whether to engage in war or pursue peaceful alternatives.

💡Transcendence

Transcendence refers to the experience of going beyond ordinary human experience or understanding. The video mentions that soldiers may find a sense of transcendence in war, feeling part of something larger than themselves, which can be a powerful motivator for fighting.

Highlights

Introduction to the controversial subject of war in world history.

Disagreement with the notion that history is primarily about war.

Preference for focusing on cooperation and trade over violent aspects of history.

Acknowledgment of war's significance in world history.

Discussion on why humans engage in war and if it's part of 'human nature'.

Philosophical debate between Hobbes and Rousseau on human nature and war.

Anthropological evidence suggesting pre-civilization societies were violent.

Cave paintings and fossils as evidence of ancient human violence.

The middle ground between individual killings and modern wars in pre-civilization.

Evolutionary perspective on aggression as an innate human trait.

Caution against misuse of evolutionary biology to explain cultural characteristics.

Biological imperative to pass on genetic traits and protect kin as a potential cause for war.

Resource scarcity as a driver for conflict and war.

The psychological aspects of war, including the excitement and joy some soldiers feel.

The importance of free will and choice in the decision to engage in war.

The role of institutions and human choices in shaping history beyond biological drives.

Final thoughts on the non-inevitability of war and the power of human institutions.

Transcripts

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today we're going to respond to your many requests and talk about a controversial subject: War.

So here at Crash Course we're really not that into the history of war, partly because we feel it's been discussed well elsewhere and partly because we haven't really figured out a way to tackle it.

Mr. Green! Mr. Green! Nonononono, that's all history is: It's a series of wars.

Well, me-from-the-past, I can certainly see why you would think that, because that's how many history classes are organized.

But, in fact, I don't think that history is primarily about war.

But, I mean, humans find all kinds of ways to die, like, you could teach a whole Crash Course World History on smallpox.

In fact, we kind of did that last week.

Ultimately, I find cooperation and trade more interesting than the violent and destructive aspects of world history because I think they probably, ultimately, matter more.

But I do have to admit that war is a pretty big deal in world history.

So we better spend some time talking about it, at least in the abstract.

[Theme Music]

So today we're gonna focus on the question of why people fight.

And, more specifically, why human beings go to war.

Like, to put it in another way, we're going to look at whether making war is part of "human nature".

This gets into some nit-picky "How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin?" questions about nature, but we're just gonna put those aside for now.

So are human being hard-wired to fight and kill each other?

Well that's a question that philosophers have been asking for a long time.

Like, Nietzsche summed it up this way:

"I am by nature war-like. To attack is among my instincts."

But he was Nietzsche. He had a number of instincts that I'm pretty sure were not universal.

Anyway, that attitude might explain why Nietzsche is so popular among the group most likely to go to war: Young men.

Now among slightly less scary philosophers, the question of humans' war-like nature is often described as

a debate between Hobbes, who saw humans as war-like and violent, and Rousseau, who thought that humanity was naturally peaceful until civilization came along.

And we've heard echoes of this debate throughout our study of world history.

Like, were we better off as foragers, when we had way more time for scoodlypooping?

Stupid civilization, always ruining everything. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.

So was Hobbes right that life in the so-called "state of nature" was nasty, brutish and short, or was Rousseau right that it was amazing?

Well, without a time machine which would settle a lot of vexing historical questions and would also allow me to go back and fix my terrible, terrible mistakes at the eighth grade cotillion,

our best guide to what people were like in the "state of nature" comes from anthropology.

Making guesses about the very distant past based on observations of modern hunter-gatherers is extremely problematic, but it's the best we have to go on.

Well, that and archaeology.

So, what do anthropologists tell us?

Well, it doesn't look so good for Rousseau.

Many anthropologists suggest that in pre-civilization social orders, things were pretty violent.

In Australia, for example, killing and fighting was among the main causes of mortality,

and archaeology has revealed evidence of warfare going back thousands of years.

Now, some of these anthropological conclusions are controversial,

but when combined with cave paintings and fossils of humans who pretty obviously were killed by other humans,

it seems clear that we've been killing each other for what historians like to call "a long-ass-time".

So Hobbes seems to be right that life in the "state of nature" was probably violent and brief.

But was it war?

Again, anthropologists can give us some guidance here.

Some studies have reported relatively large-scale group confrontations similar to battles,

but these tend to be largely symbolic, and they often don't result in much killing.

Most of the actual violence that hunter-gatherers commit against each other takes place during raids,

in which one group sneaks up upon another and attacks.

So in the end there may be like a very violent middle path between the individual killings and like, Cain v. Abel, and the modern wars that we see today.

But why are we seemingly so hard-wired toward violence?

Well, it might be evolution.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So, I wanna be really clear about something.

We may have aggression "in our genes", but you can't kill people!

And also, you don't have to.

Many of us - most of us, in fact - make it all the way through life without killing a single person.

So I think it's going too far to say that our genes have, like, made us into stone-cold killers,

but it is possible that aggression is an innate trait in humans.

And under the right conditions, maybe it finds its expression in violence and war.

Now, we should all be very skeptical about applying evolutionary biology to cultural characteristics like warlike behavior,

because Darwin's ideas have been misused to explain all sorts of unpleasant things.

Especially in nineteenth-century concepts about race.

You know, if you're in a structurally privileged position in the social order, it's easy enough to be like,

"Huh, I wonder how I got here. Probably natural selection."

When in fact, you know, slavery was not a function of biology; it was a function of oppression.

And another reason we should be aware is that we often refer to cultures "evolving" very quickly like often in a generation, but biological evolution takes a lot longer.

That said, there are a few ways that evolutionary imperatives could contribute to a warlike human nature.

We'll start with the idea that it is a biological imperative to pass on genetic traits to successive generations.

Because our close relatives and kin contain the most genetic material in common,

we naturally want to protect them and ensure the continued survival of our genes.

So we might be expected to fight in order to protect members of our kin group.

But then again, trying to protect your family from harm is somewhat different from killing other people's families.

Well, here's where it's helpful to remember that for the vast majority of human history, war consisted of raiding.

It was about taking stuff from other people's kin group so that your kin group could have that stuff.

For 99% of human history, that's how we fought.

Not as organized states warring with each other.

So let's stop even thinking about, like, groups of humans or even individual humans and think for a second about genes.

Insofar as genes want anything, they want to go on.

Life wishes to continue.

And for those human genes to go on, they needed humans to go on, and for that, we need two resources:

Food and sex.

Both of which could be quite scarce in the many millennia before we settled down into agricultural-based societies.

It occurs to me they are also quite scarce in most American high schools unless you consider cheetos food.

So you can easily see how the competition for these two resources could become violent.

It might provide an evolutionary explanation for war.

Like, skill in fighting meant more access to food in the form of better hunting grounds.

It also meant more food, because you were better at fighting the food, too.

And there's a more horrifying aspect to this as well,

which is that in many of these raids, women were the principal goal.

They were to be acquired.

Also, as we know from the Odyssey, fighting has a tendency to breed more fighting.

Like, you kill my friend, it makes it more likely that I'm going to kill you.

I'm not going to kill you, but seriously, don't kill any of my friends.

We see a bit of this phenomenon in a description of intertribal warfare among North American Plains Indians.

"In an atmosphere charged with intertribal distrust,

even an imaged slight by an outsider could lead to retaliation against other members of his tribe...

It was much easier to start a war than to end one."

And as you may have noticed, that's still true today.

But okay, if war was a response to scarce resources, why do we have wars now?

Resources are relatively easy to acquire.

Well, that's a complicated question, and we're going to talk next week about how war may actually have contributed to civilization and proven socially useful by helping us create kingdoms and states.

But another way to examine the question of why we fight is to examine what soldiers have said about why they fight.

So here's one such voice, although I wanna be clear that there are millions of them.

Karl Marlantes was a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam who wrote about his experience in the novel "Matterhorn" and a memoir called "What It Is Like to Go to War".

That book includes a number of uncomfortable revelations about the way soldiers often think and feel about war.

For one thing, Marlantes tells us that soldiers achieve a sense of transcendence through fighting, by becoming part of something bigger than themselves.

Also, he says:

"There is a deep savage joy in destruction, a joy that goes beyond ego enhancement."

Now, today's soldiers rarely fight for food or mates, but they do fight for each other.

And not wanting to let your comrades down, feeling loyal to the group, those are powerful motivators.

More viscerally, fighting is exciting to humans.

It gets the adrenaline pumping.

According to Marlantes, "Combat is the crack cocaine of all excitement highs."

Neither of those things sound at all fun to me, but I guess we're all wired differently.

So what do we do with the fact that for many of us, there is joy and power in killing?

How do we respond when a former pilot tells us, as he whispered to Marlantes, that he enjoyed napalming the enemy, saying: "I loved it. I lit up the entire valley."

How do we respond to Marlantes's revelation that during Vietnam, he

"ran toward the fighting with the same excitement, trembling and thrill as a lover rushing to the beloved"?

Well, I think Marlantes reminds us that despite our biology, soldiers, just like the rest of us, have free will.

They make choices.

Marlantes also notes: "Choosing sides is the fundamental first choice that a warrior makes...

The second fundamental choice of the warrior is to be willing to use violence to protect someone against intended or implied violence."

Now, for many humans over millennia, that choice hasn't been much of a choice.

You fight for your kin group.

But in at least many parts of the world today, that choice is a choice.

Now, it may be that these uncomfortable revelations help to explain why we might want to search for a biological or evolutionary explanation for why humans go to war.

Maybe that's preferable to the idea that humans just take pleasure in the activity of fighting and pursue it merely for its own sake.

But just as there's a danger in celebrating warfare and its transcendence,

we need to be careful of explaining war merely as an outgrowth of evolutionary necessities because such explanations can lead to a fatalistic conclusion that war is inevitable.

But it's not. The cycle of violence that you see in the Odyssey gets broken all the time in human history.

And yes, it is much harder to end a war than it is to start one, but it is not impossible.

When we get carried away by biological explanations,

we forget that while humans may not have evolved all that much in the past one thousand years, our institutions have.

And that's happened because of human choices that go far beyond the desire for food or the need to reproduce.

Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.

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