That leads us to the next question, then.
If we can't blame genes, if we can't blame
some kind of hardwiring, how do we explain it?
We go back to the causes.
All right, so we're not programmed to do this.
We don't have to do this.
Why do we do it?
And I want to argue that we can divide this
sort of social scientific answers to this into three kinds.
There is a cultural explanation for war, there are
materialistic explanations for wars, and then there's psychological explanations.
Let's first start with the cultural explanations.
I'm very worried the idea that some
people are just more predisposed towards war than others.
That is, one wrong way of understanding the cultural analysis of
war is to say that some societies, some cultures produce more war.
They are more war-like.
That is, that we can point to some societies and go, what did you expect?
They're going to be much more violent than others.
Now this is evidence, but significant shifts in the levels
of violence between groups, that is, we find groups that can
coexist for years, even for centuries, and all of a sudden,
in a moment, can cause huge damage to each other.
Moreover, we can also find societies that had been at war for a
great deal of time and who then can establish some kind of cooperation.
This notion of a cultural predisposition for its war is a perfect example
of the kind of false sense of superiority that Euro-centric perspectives can have.
What you often find that European and
North American authors or authorities saying that some
other group, some more primitive, non-European groups
are more likely to have war than others.
Yet, if we actually look at the history of the 19th and
the 20th century, if not others, the real part of the war,
world, that has had the most kind of warlike violence, that has
had the most organized kind of violence is Europe and North America.
If you culminating in World War II and culminating
of course in the development of nuclear weapons.
So instead of looking at the other side and saying this other side is
more predisposed to this kind of violence, we might want to look more at ourselves.
A much more productive way of looking at this is
not to think of some kind of permanent culture characteristics,
which don't exist, but rather perhaps a the mentalities
of bellicosity, what Jeremy Black has called the mentalities of bellicosity.
That is, not constant cultural traits, but actually a contextualized and
temporary moments when shared notions of glory and honor, uphold our honor.
Who is the us?
A fight for us, who is this?
Who, how do we explain that going to
war has become this defense of this group honor?
When you have moments of this kind of perspective, it's
much more likely that you're going to engage in war.
That is, when you have the spontaneity of bellicosity, which begins by claiming
some kind of common identity, then you are much more likely to have war.
But this is not unique to any particular situation.
We can say that Serbians or Croatians or Shiite and Sunni are naturally
predisposed, but can we not also say that Americans are always fighting?
Can we not say that, that depending on
the mentality, pretending on the particular culture of American
society or any European society that you might want to
choose, war is much more likely under those conditions.
War occurs in situations in which societies, collectives,
convince themselves they have no choice but to fight.
That's very different from some sort of
cultural predisposition towards violence and has a
great more to say about how societies
perceive themselves and perceive the outside world.