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Brian Lehrer: Is war inevitable? Mahalia Jackson. Is war inevitable? Now we begin a series and interactive Brian Lehrer show project inspired by the US withdrawal from Iraq and a new book by science journalist, John Horgan. The end of our involvement in Iraq after 100,000 people died, got us asking, do human beings really have to do this over and over again? The book gave us a new way to answer that question. The book is called The End Of War and call him naïve, but after years of studying war a lot more Horgan has come to the conclusion that war is not inevitable and not part of human nature.

John Horgan joins us now to kick off the series that he helped inspire. John, thanks for a very thought-provoking book and welcome to WNYC.

John Horgan: Thanks so much for having me on.

Brian: Before we dive deeply into some of your arguments, let's do a blink test for our listeners to see where some people are starting out as the series begin. Listeners call us right now and answer the question, is war inevitable? 212-433 WNYC or post to wnyc.org or to Twitter using the #endofwar. Now don't study war too much before answering, for today let's just make it a blink test. What does your gut tell you? Is war inevitable in the human race? 212-433 WNYC 212 433-9692. 212-433-9692.

John as people calls are coming in let's get to know you just a little bit. You direct the center for science writing at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. You've written regularly for scientific American, and you have some previous books, including The End Of Science published in the '90s and Rational Mysticism from 2003. You've spent a lot of time going around asking people whether they think war is inevitable.

John: That's right. The reason that I decided to write this book is because for the past seven or eight years, I have been surveying people on this question of whether you think war will ever end. The first time I did it was when I was giving a talk at a church in my hometown, the priest had asked me to talk to his parish about something related to warfare. I decided to address the question of whether wars in our genes, and I reviewed some of the literature on that.

Then I tried to have this optimistic ending to the talk and said something like, "Maybe there is some kind of a biological predisposition in humans that makes them fight, but we can overcome it and we can achieve peace once and for all." Then everybody was looking at me skeptically. [chuckles] I asked them point blank. How many of you think war can end one day? Virtually no one raised their hands. I was really distressed by that because these were good liberal doves.

I have been surveying people ever since then. I've been surveying my students, people in, Europe, old, young, left, right. Overwhelmingly, people are very pessimistic about the prospects of ending war. They think of war as this permanent part of the human condition. I set out to write a book that would challenge that fatalism.

Brian: How many people do you think you've asked the question of total?

John: Oh, thousands by now. Just at my school it's probably at least a 1000 students and 100 more people as I said in Europe, every time I have a captive audience, basically, I ask people this question. As I said, the results are fairly consistent. In my book, I try to present evidence that counters this fatalism. For example, a lot of people are fatalistic because they think that war is part of human nature. As long as there have been humans and maybe even longer, we have been engaging in group violence against each other.

This has become a very popular scientific theory these days. There are some scientists who think that war goes all the way back to the common ancestor with chimpanzees, which would mean that we've been fighting for millions of years.

Brian: I know you don't believe that, and we're going to get into that. I think your theory on why not to look at the chimpanzees and say, that they are determinant of what we do is really interesting so we're going to get into that. We're going to get into what happened before agriculture. Let's just hear what some of our listeners are saying. George in Manhattan, is war inevitable?

George: Yes. War is inevitable.

Brian: Why?

George: As long as corporations are treated as individuals, and people can contribute as corporations as much money as they can to political decisions, politicians are going to listen to the corporations because the corporations are promising jobs-

Brian: Who are going to have more of an interest in war?

George: -equal war, war equal jobs.

Brian: Equal war jobs equal war. Citizens united promotes war says George in Manhattan to start us off. Patrick on Long Island, is war inevitable?

Patrick: It's not inevitable if we do the right things to prevent it. I think people have to be educated to understand what war achieves and what it doesn't achieve. If people aren't educated, we're doomed to keep perpetuating it.

Brian: Thank you. Mark, in Brooklyn, is war inevitable?

Mark: I'd say it is. I was convinced by the line from Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian that before there was man, there was war waiting for it's ultimate practitioner.

Brian: Thank you. Kathy in West Islip, is war inevitable?

Kathy: Yes. I think it probably is. I think it probably is . I think it's a potentiality if you look at our closest relatives, common chimps and bonobos, for two different ways to deal with conflict. Bonobos are, of course, the peaceful sexy ones and common chimps are the ones that not only have war, but it's also cannibalism amongst them. I think that we're as closely related to one as the other. I think the potentiality is always there.

I'm afraid and it's common for humans as it is for common chimps to band together as male groups then go out and wage war. I think the thing that changes it is among the bonobos, it's a female-dominated society. I'm not sure we'll ever get there.

Brian: We are definitely going to come back to that idea of men and women and bonobos with John Horgan, as we continue here. Harry in Queens, is war inevitable?

Harry: I think war is not inevitable. I think there could be an end to it. I think if we empower local people through greenhouses and sustainability and local vineyards, we would be able to end the conflict between them.

Brian: Eat locavore equals peace. Joel in Irvington, is war inevitable?

Joel: Oh, definitely. As much as we choose to deny and forget that we are primates, we're more closely related to chimpanzees than chimpanzees are to gorillas. We're devoted at the deepest level to our family clan, or troop mates. We're fiercely protective against those of other groups but as humans, our downfall is that others no longer simply defined by smell or territory. We are capable of symbolic thought and that makes us able to define other by anything. Labels, religious, national, and so on skin color, school of thought. Until we figure out how to deal with this ethological curse we will have wars.

Brian: Joel, thank you very much. All right. A little sampling and we could go on and we will go on. John, we'll come back to more calls as we continue here. Consider that our before sample as we start this series, is war inevitable, inspired by John Horgan's new book, The End of War. John, I was struck, maybe this is what you found with your thousands of interviews asking the same question. How many people referenced the chimpanzees?

John: This is a theory that is associated especially with an anthropologist at Harvard named Richard Wrangham. He and others beginning in the mid-1970s have observed bands of chimpanzees coming together and attacking chimps from another troop. Yes, chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives so this is very disturbing.

Here's some counter facts. First of all, Jane Goodall was watching chimpanzees for 15 years without ever seeing one of these cases of group against group violence. When it started emerging, Goodall herself thought that it might be because she had put bananas out to attract chimpanzees to her observing stations. There are scholars who think that this might be a behavior that's related to some of the unusual conditions at some of these reservations, plus human encroachment on chimpanzee habitat. Even so, these rates are extremely rare.

According to one estimate, an anthropologist would have to watch a typical chimpanzee troop for seven years before seeing one of these incidents. There are some communities that have never been seen engaging in this behavior. A listener mentioned the bonobos, another chimpanzee species that has never been observed seeing this behavior. I think a more important fact to keep in mind is that evidence of human warfare human group against group violence-

Brian: Before we even get to that, just before we get off the chimps and the bonobos, your point in the book, if I read it correctly, is that we are as close cousins with the bonobos as we are of the chimps.

John: That's right.

Brian: If one of those groups seems to have intergroup violence in their DNA, and the other one doesn't, who's to say we are determined by evolution to be like the chimps.

John: That's right. There's another anthropologist, he's the counter, Richard Wrangham named [unintelligible 00:10:57], who is at Emory University, and he has studied the bonobos. He's made the point that it's pretty much arbitrary, whether you choose to see bonobos or the more common chimpanzee species as a model for human behavior, and especially aggressive behavior.

In that case, I think it's important to look at the evidence from human archeology and anthropology and there I think that the evidence points clearly to the conclusion that war is a quite recent behavior. It doesn't go back hundreds of thousands, let alone millions of years. It really only started emerging 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, especially first in Mesopotamia, in Asia, and the Middle East, and then rapidly did spread around the world.

Brian: They're having a war in Mesopotamia right now.

John: That's right.

Brian: Though the US is pulling its troops out of there. Are you tying this to humans settling down from the hunter-gatherer era to start agriculture?

John: There's been this debate in anthropology that goes back decades, over whether hunter-gatherers engaged in war. It's an important question because humans lived as hunter-gatherers for most of our existence, going back to the beginning of the homogeneous about 2 million years ago. The evidence is conclusive. Hunter-gatherers do engage in war, but they only started very recently.

Brian: Listeners, I said at the beginning that this is an interactive project. We're going to do a number of segments on a number of ideas. Here in John Horgan's book, we are just going to scratch the surface today. We're going to do a before and after segment with him as well. John will be back later in the series. Here's the interactive part. We are collecting your responses to our, is war inevitable survey on our website. We're also collecting videos of people answering the question, is war inevitable? Can human beings ever stop fighting wars?

I posted a video with my answer to the question to get things rolling. It's a completely unsatisfying answer. You can see it if you want at wnyc.org. Click on Brian Lehrer Show. Consider posting your own as well as just answering the survey that's up there. Just go to wnyc.org, click on Brian Lehrer Show or you can go to wnyc.org/endofwar and get right there wnyc.org/endofwar. We have to take a break, John, in a minute and we'll continue, we'll take more phone calls from more listeners answering the question.

I want to close the thought from the caller who brought up the bonobos or bonobos, I don't know which is the right way to say it. That is that that's a female-dominated society. This is another idea that comes up time and time again. I will acknowledge I put it in my video, my skeptical answer to your question. Which is that, one of the conditions that probably needs to be met, if humans are ever to put an end to war, is that women would have to have 50% of all the seats of power in governments because just look at any schoolyard. Just look at who's any prisoner for violent crime and the stats on that.

John: That's right. According to one estimate, more than 99% of the combatants throughout history have been male. I think it's fair to say when you look at rates of violent crime and the pattern of warfare through history, that males are innately more aggressive than females. I think that female empowerment can reduce the risk of violence in any society. On the other hand, I want to get away from the idea that there are certain things that you must do to create a peaceful society like giving women equal power to men-

Brian: Or them taking it for themselves. Go ahead.

John: That's right. Or eliminating all poverty or creating some socialist utopia. They're all these solutions to war. The problem is, for example, in female empowerment, we have a century of growing female rights in this country in the United States and yet we've remained extremely militaristic. There are no silver bullets. I think female empowerment is something that's extremely important to pursue for its own sake, and especially in certain developing nations, there's a correlation between female empowerment and lower birth rates, which puts less strain on resources in those countries and has a whole cascade of positive effects.

One of the conclusions I came to in my book is that, wars is this independent variable that can perpetuate itself apart from all these other things that people traditionally have thought could be done to reduce the risk of violence. We need to address war as a problem in itself.

Brian: Listeners, is war inevitable? We'll take more calls in just a minute, as we continue with John Horgan, author of the new book, The End of War. Now, you've just heard John say some of the places that he thinks war does not come from, evolution, gender, poverty, industry. Well, here's some of the places that he thinks war does come from when we come back, and why he thinks that makes the end of war possible. Stay with us.

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Brian: Maryanne in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Is war inevitable?

Maryanne: I don't believe it is. My first thought is that if we really were to take on all the behaviors of the chimpanzees, we would all be throwing poop at each other too and that's not happening.

Brian: I don't know what neighborhood you live in.

Maryanne: If we could somehow equate war rather than a symbol of power, but as a last resort type situation that only the weakest of states have to resort to engaging in war, then it would be seen almost as a shameful sign of weakness. The other thought is if perhaps it was mandatory that every time we went into war, that anyone in Congress who had a daughter or son it would be an obligation to send that daughter or son on to the front line, I think that might do a lot to curb the [unintelligible 00:18:12]

Brian: Thank you very much. Irene in Oakland, is war inevitable?

Irene: Well, it seems in recent times, the United States has become a world-class war maker. We have long wars and short wars, all kinds of different wars in the name of freedom or democracy. When somebody like Ron Paul stands up and says, "Gee, we should maybe talk to these people first," he's booed and he's considered unpatriotic somehow. The thinking is, unless we're willing to go smoke them out and kill them and get them in the name of something like freedom, or democracy, or saving some people.

Brian: Does this make you think that war is inevitable because of that kind of reaction to Ron Paul?

Irene: Yes. If you look at the recent times in this country, yes. I also think it's cyclical, then you may have a peaceful time, but somehow people decide they have to get the other guy and it becomes the right thing to do, go and kill them.

Brian: Irene, thank you very much. Charlotte, in Sunset Park, is war inevitable?

Charlotte: I don't think it is. I only recently started to think that it wasn't inevitable because I see more and more information or data on sociability and cooperation. I'm just getting all of these signs that as a planet, as a globe, we're recognizing that in order to survive, we have to cooperate. It may be just something that I picked up on because I'm interested in it but I feel like there is this trend towards understanding on an evolutionary perspective that we've been suppressing this real strong evolutionary urge to, or human urge to cooperate, to empathize.

We're social creatures. I think if we want to survive, we have to adapt now for cooperation. We do want to survive that's what we've been doing for several million years. I don't think it is inevitable anymore.

Brian: Charlotte, thank you very much. John Horgan, my guest author of The End of War. Now, that is so interesting that Charlotte turns the evolutionary argument on its head and says, "Well, maybe we evolved to have war, but now that there's nuclear weapons and society can annihilate itself If we continue to be warlike, then we're probably going to evolve in the literal scientific sense to be more cooperative because the survival of the species depends on it." Real evolution takes many, many generations?

John: I don't think we are innate pacifists any more than we are innate warriors. I mentioned [unintelligible 00:21:05] before, he is an anthropologist who along with many others has pointed out that, we do have biological impulses toward cooperation, toward altruism, at least towards others in our in-group. One of the reasons why I'm optimistic at this particular point in history is because there are some cultural trends that I think are really pointing in the right direction. A really powerful one is the spread of democracy. A

century ago, only about 10% of humanity lived under democracy. Today, depending on how you count it, it might be about two-thirds of the human population. There is a finding in political science that suggests that democracies just don't wage war on each other. They are much less likely to. Another positive trend, I think, is the emergence of media which points out the horrors of war more than ever before. I do think that female empowerment which we were discussing earlier is another positive trend. All these different things are converging, I think, to bring us to the point where we can talk about renouncing war once and for all.

Brian: Yet you also deal in the book with what you call the 2% theory, which is that even if 98% of human beings are peaceful, it's only going to take that 2%. I'm trying to put this in exactly the right way. Those 2% might be the same people who are thirsty for power. The same people who are more likely to get into heads of state kinds of positions, even in democracy, and therefore be more likely to be us against them mindframe kind of person, the 2% may be all that we need in order to be doomed to perpetual war.

John: It's a scary theory. It's a subset of the more general biological theory which says that all men are innately violent and warlike. This is a theory that says there's a very small percentage of men that have these tendencies and there's suggestive research on this which says that, for example, about anywhere from 1% to 3% of the population is sociopathic. These are people who lack empathy toward others. They are the ones who perpetuate war and other extreme kinds of violence, genocide, and so forth.

The problem with that is it just doesn't hold up to scrutiny very well. When you look at world war II, world war I, these massive outbreaks of violence, it's not just a small percentage of people who are carrying out the violence. It is entire populations. I think the best explanation is that war itself, once it breaks out, makes people behave like sociopaths. It's ascribing war and these kinds of extreme acts of violence to bad barrels instead of a small class of bad apples.

Brian: Vince in Leonia, is war inevitable?

Vince: I think what is inevitable, Brian, is that we will always confront confrontation and disharmony among one another. I don't think it's inevitable that we have to react in a warlike fashion. What I'm saying is that we must anticipate disruptive behavior [unintelligible 00:24:43] by the conflicts, et cetera. Conflict is always going to be part of our nature, but our resolution to conflict is increasingly, I think, moving as he suggests towards human race, that's more empathetic and more compassionate and [unintelligible 00:24:59] different way, and appreciating parts of our evolution have.

Brian: Thank you very much. By the way, you mentioned Europe and the wars. I haven't seen this in the book yet. I haven't read every page yet, though I intend to. I put in my video that Western Europe is one of the strongest arguments, in my opinion, for the possibility of ending war, even though I remain skeptical because of what's happened since World War II. Here's a part of the world that was constantly or on-again, off-again, at war, whether in tribes, pre nations, or nations for 1000 years and more, and they seem to have put an end to war after World War II for that region.

They have a little softer notion of sovereignty now than they used to. Maybe the Euro wasn't such a great idea, but they still have a softer notion of sovereignty. Instead of us looking down our noses at the warring Europeans, as we did before entering World War I and World War II, they are now looking down their noses at us, as the warlike ones. We don't know if it will last but at least here is part of a continent that is trying on for size and identity that we are past war.

John: Right. What I look for are proofs of principle, just examples out there that show that people can go from a state of extreme violence to peacefulness very rapidly. The European Union is a great example of that. There are individual nations of Sweden and Switzerland, in the 18th century, who were extremely militaristic, and violent. They renounced militarism in the early 19th century, they have remained neutral, stayed out of wars ever since.

A wonderful example that I like to cite is Costa Rica, which, in the 1940s, went through a terrible Civil War and it emerged from that and collectively, Costa Ricans decided, "You know what, having an army seems to do us more harm than good. Let's just get rid of it and take those resources and invest them elsewhere."

Brian: There they are living in the middle of Nicaragua, and the Sandinistas and El Salvador, and their rightist and all of the whole thing and they abolished their army.

John: That's right. That shows to me that, not only that war can end in theory, but in practice, and it can end very, very rapidly. I see other examples, just in the end of the Cold War, who would have thought in 1980, 1985, that you could have a largely non-violent end to the standoff between the US and the Soviet Union? What the greatest totalitarian state in history basically renouncing its power, non-violently, the end of apartheid. There are all these positive examples out there.

Another one, Brian, is New York City itself. I have a classroom that I teach at my school at Stephens and my students, I bring up the question, do you think war will ever end? They're always so pessimistic, and they say, "War will never end as long as some people have more than others, as long as we differ in religion and ethnic group and so forth." I point up the window toward the skyline of New York City and say, "That contradicts what you're saying." There's this enormously diverse group of people, diverse economically, ethnically, in every possible way.

Brian: Nobody's a majority in New York City.

John: That's right. They argue, they squabble all the time, but largely non-violently, people aren't carrying out suicide bombings against each other. That's the kind of proof of principle that I'm looking for.

Brian: Robbie, in the aforementioned New York City, is War inevitable? Oops, Robbie I'm sorry. Robbie now we have you Robbie. I'm sorry.

Robbie: Yes, it is inevitable. Do you remember the book African Genesis, the author wrote it Robert Ardrey I think was his name. Ardrey wrote it with the-- He had traveled with [unintelligible 00:29:11] in Africa. We are descended from killer apes. The territorial imperative is powerful within us. All you have to do is take two 10-month-old babies, put them on the floor with some toys. They can't say, "That's mine. That's mine." They will fight over what's mine. They will bump each other over the head with the nearest thing to protect their territory.

Empathy is not inborn. We must quell our inborn aggressive nature by teaching empathy. I remember that African Genesis ended by saying that and at that time, there were only about three billion people on the globe. I guess we have six billion now. That the remarkable thing was that despite the petty humiliation one upping someone at the cocktail party, taking something from your neighbor, killing somebody nearby, that it was remarkable that there were enough people on the globe who were still stopping for red lights and not killing each other.

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Brian: You're not convinced by all this that you've heard so far from John Horgan.

Robbie: It's our nature. The territorial imperative, the power to protect our turf and control it and take other people in to help us control it, that's what makes a little war [unintelligible 00:30:33] big one.

Brian: Thank you very much. You mentioned the 10-month-old. It makes me think of Lord of the Flies with adolescents. Of course, that's a novel, it is fiction, but it's supposed to be reflective of human nature. John, you don't believe that scarcity leads to war, that people go to war when their societies are running out of food or oil because you can find societies that didn't, but you do believe that fear of scarcity sometimes leads to war and you cite examples, including Japan's brutal dominance of Asia in the 1930s and the first Gulf War involving the US and Iraq in 1991.

Do you want to take the US example because it's more familiar, and is it an important idea for you of what actually does lead to war, fear in general, or fear of scarcity as opposed to actual scarcity?

John: As you said, just empirically, when you look at the history of warfare and when you look at tribal societies, it is not the case that resource scarcity especially, combined with a growing population leads inevitably to conflict there. In fact, there are many societies where abundance seems to make conflict more likely. Of course, there's this terrible irony in the fact that when fear of resource scarcity does lead certain nations to fight against others over oil, let's say, or access to open water, then you get resource scarcity as a consequence of fighting. I think leaders are actually beginning to learn that lesson.

Here's how optimistic I am. I think that the American public and American leaders look at what has happened to the US, in Iraq and Afghanistan, they see the terrible economic consequences of our actions. They're beginning to realize that wars really don't serve a rational strategic purpose that they end up causing more harm than good and not morally, but just in terms of our strategic objectives.

Brian: Do you have a five-point plan for ending war?

John: Well, the United States, I'd have to say, is a big problem. I am very optimistic right now when I look into the future. On the other hand, I live in a country that has a gigantic swollen military, is pursuing still war in Afghanistan.

Brian: More military spending than every other country on earth combined. We have 52%.

John: That's right, which is extraordinary. We're prepared to fight the rest of the world all at the same time. We're carrying out drone strikes around the world, basically, just if we feel like it and so that also is very disturbing. I think now's the time for an American leader, I'm still hopeful that Obama could do this, to really take the initiative, to spell out a plan for helping all nations achieve some kind of state of world peace. We have to show leadership in what we do, not just through-

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Brian: I'm skeptical of the superpower theory of why there is war. I know the US is the 800-pound gorilla in the world right now, but you have, in your own book, how, in pre-Colombian times on this continent, the Pueblo Indians were peaceful. The Plains Indians would attack people just because that's what they did.

John: Here's the theory of war that I end up supporting after looking at all the literature is one that goes back to Margaret Mead, the great anthrolopologist-

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Brian: She's the hero of your book.

John: She really is and she's disparaged very unfairly by a lot of modern scientists. She pointed out that war can emerge for many, many different reasons in any society, including the simplest, and then it becomes this self perpetuating set of beliefs and behaviors. Fear of war, once war breaks out in a region, perpetuates war, revenge perpetuates it.

Brian: This is only the beginning of this series, but I want to give you one more response to anticipate Part Two because two weeks from today, we'll have the second installment of this with the author's Barbara Ehrenreich and Chris Hedges. She wrote Blood rites. He wrote, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. You take a shot at Barbara Ehrenreich, in your book, most known for her book Nickel and Dimed but she also wrote this book about war. Give me 30 seconds on a prebuttal to Barbara Ehrenreich.

John: Barbara, she's an example of a progressive, a very dovish, intellectual, very smart person who is very pessimistic about war, thinks of war as being like a meme and infectious cultural behavior that perpetuates itself apart from what we want. I agree with her that war is a meme.

I disagree with her that it's something that we can't control. I think if we become fatalistic about it, then the chances are less likely that we will be able to stop war once and for all. I think if we recognize war as something that is morally wrong, and that empirically is a behavior that many societies have around through history, then we can get rid of it once and for all. I'm optimistic. She's pessimistic. I think the facts are on my side.

Brian: All right, Barbara Ehrenreich and Chris Hedges up next in this series, two weeks from today. We thank John Horgan, head of the Center for Science writing at the Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken for inspiring the series with his brand new book, The End of War. Thank you very much. We will continue to talk over the next couple of months.

John: It's been my pleasure.

Brian: Listeners, remember, this is an interactive project. We want you to go to our website, fill out our survey about whether war is inevitable. See the video, my video response to John's book and maybe post your own as the series is just getting off the ground go to wnyc.org/endofwar, wnyc.org/endofwar. Coming up next we begin a week-long series on the five films with Oscar nominations for Best Documentary today undefeated, a coming of age story about a group of inner-city football players. Stay with us.

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