The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life. All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Humanity of War/Perspectives on War
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来自 Princeton University 的课程
Paradoxes of War
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从本节课中
The Causes of War
Causes of war may be described as material, cultural, and psychological. At the heart of war is the product of us-them dynamics.
与讲师见面
Miguel A. CentenoMusgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Sociology
I want to argue that it's really important that we come
to terms with what I'm calling the humanity of war.
That is that war is not something that makes us less human,
but actually war may be an expression of this of our humanity.
There is the famous Seville statement on war that says that it is scientifically
incorrect to say that war is caused by instinct or any single motivation.
We cannot blame our genes for war.
We cannot blame our chemicals for war.
We cannot blame our bodies for war.
What we find is that the emergence of modern warfare, warfare has been a journey
from the primacy of emotional and motivational factors,
that is what we might find in non-human
primates, those very basic instincts to
claim some kind of property, protect some kind
of property, but it has been a progress from this to a much more complex procedure
of training human beings.
Modern war involves the institutional use, the institutionalization of particular
human characteristics, of obedience, of
suggestibility, of idealism, of social skills.
These are things that'd not arise naturally out of our bodies.
We're not hardwired for these, necessarily.
Although some aspects of it we may be,
but the whole combination of these sets of life
skills if you will, that contribute to war
are very much a product of our social humanity.
In the end, biology does not condemn humanity to war.
We are not hardwired for war.
There is no natural law to explain all war.
What we need to do is to understand what is the aspects of our society, what
is the aspects of our organization as communal
human beings that might lead us to war.
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.
A very different perspective is a materialist one.
Simply put, one side has something that the
other wants badly enough to risk fighting over.
That is, war here becomes very simple.
War is very much like a child grabbing another child's marbles.
War is about this pursuit for a particular kind of resource.
And as that resource becomes scarcer, whatever it may
be, then you're much more likely to have war.
War in this way is it's most rational.
That is, that some kind of cost-benefit analysis is made, that says war is
going to cost us x and y, but if we win, we're going to be able to get a and b.
And we can some kind of rational versions of this.
For example, war can be used as a form of population control.
That is, some of the first wars and some of the most common types of war.
And lets think about the tradition of the Iliad.
What is the Iliad about but
the competition for exogenous genetic resources?
That is, for raids on female captives that societies,
because of the incest taboo, which has a great
deal of physical functionality behind it, societies, particularly small
societies, need a constant inflow of new genetic patterns.
That is, of new genes that can contribute to that society.
That means that there is this, there's going to be competition for females in
order to be able to differentiate
the genetic landscape of any particular society.
Again, another way of thinking about war as a materialist solution is that
war represents a possible solution to the problem of too many young men.
We see this, for example, in non-human primates where you will have fights in the
groups as a group of young primates develops
and then they start challenging the older ones.
Well, war, since it's usually practiced by young men being forced to,
to do so or being convinced to do so, is a way, is
a functional way of reducing, in a sense, the ratio of young men full of
testosterone, and perhaps aggression, full of challenges to establish authority.
And a way of getting rid of these kinds of problematic people,
if you pardon my saying that, is by sending them off for war.
There are the other examples.
You can have competition for territory.
Territory might have resources.
It might have water.
It might have better land.
It might have minerals.
It might have oil.
It might have gold.
And here we see war in a sense as simply a land grab.
War as an oil grab.
Now, this is very tempting and it's very tempting to
always try to find some kind of materialist reason behind war.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work.
There are many times when we can not find a particular reason for war.
There's no possible benefit to be had by war on any kind of rational level.
Moreover war, remember, requires the willingness of
soldiers to sacrifice themselves for a collective good.
That is, that this notion of war being
this rational response, that war being a way of,
in a sociobiological extreme, a war being a way
of assuring one gene's pool continues by protecting it.
Nevertheless, remember we have this instinct for self preservation.
Yet, war requires this willingness of soldiers to sacrifice for
a collective good that has no immediate benefit for them.
Often the people who are fighting in a war are not going to benefit from it.
So we have to start understanding, how is it that you can take this
group of people, who are, as most human beings or all human beings, self
interested, venal, not particularly oriented towards the
collective good, and yet you can convince
them that yes, they should do this, even if it's against their own interests.
That means that the materialistic response has, the materialistic
cause of war, has some potential and yes, wars
are often about these kinds of resources, but that's
not going to be enough to explain why they occur.
It's not going to be enough to explain why people engage in it.
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