The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Richard Overy. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Richard Overy. Richard is an author and a historian. He’s the author of more than 30 books, mostly on World War II and the Interwar era. He is a professor of history at the University of Exeter in the UK. His research interests include the history of the Hitler and Stalin dictatorships, the Second World War and air power in the 20th century. Welcome, Richard.
Richard: Thank you.
Jim: Yeah, it should be an interesting conversation. As I was looking through the list of Richard’s books, I realized I have one of them on my bookshelf, which is A History of War in 100 Battles. Really quite interesting. As I recall, it goes back to the Trojan War maybe, something like that. Today though, we’re going to talk about his most recent book, which is called Why War? You actually start off by inserting yourself in the discussion and pointing out that, surprisingly, historians haven’t been too heavily engaged in this discussion. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Richard: Well, they haven’t. I mean, historians like to talk about a particular battle or a particular war, which will have its own causes and explanations, but they’ve been rather shy of thinking about, theoretically, about the nature of war across thousands of years. That’s something which is done much more by anthropologists, archeologists, even sociologists. I think historians are shy of doing it because you have to speculate quite a lot, and I think historians prefer to deal with pretty hard facts.
Jim: You mentioned an earlier precursor with the same title, which was a correspondence between Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?
Richard: Well, one of the things that sparked off my interest in writing this book was working on the Freud-Einstein correspondence some years ago. Einstein was invited by the League of Nations to choose somebody to correspond with on a big topic, and Einstein chose a topic of war, and he chose Sigmund Freud because he was convinced that to understand war, you had to understand the psychology, human psychology, and so he asked Freud, “Why do human beings make war?” He got a very disappointing answer. Freud simply said, “Well, we’re a bit like animals. We all have this urge to destruction inside us as well as other urges, and that drive is going to be very difficult to eliminate.” And that was the end of the story, but I wanted to see really how the sciences in particular have dealt with this question of the last hundred years since Freud and Einstein corresponded.
Jim: And the first thing you have to do when you’re asking a question of this sort is what do you actually mean by war?
Richard: Oh, indeed, yeah. There’s a greater argument about that as well. Historians are very inclined to see war as something modern in the course of the last few thousand years when states were formed that could build armies and so on, and armies could organize strategy and weapons, et cetera, et cetera. Well, there were plenty of other scientists in biology or archeology and so on who argue that you’ve got to take this much further back. There’s evidence of violence, there’s evidence of weapons, there’s evidence of massacres, et cetera, going back thousands of years before the first organized states. And so we ought to be thinking about not just individual wars, but the phenomenon of warfare. Why is it that the evidence tells us that human beings have been engaged in collective violence against each other for a very long period of time? And I favor that interpretation, that we need to see collective violence, warfare, as something which is rooted much more deeply in the human experience than simply building states and having armies.
Jim: Yeah, and you talk about the fact that earlier warfare is often in the form of raids or ambushes or even ritual violence. Tell us a little bit about those things.
Richard: Yeah, yeah. I mean, early wars are obviously not like modern war, not organized in the same way. You don’t have the same weaponry. Much of the evidence we have from tribal societies in the recent past suggests that a characteristic feature of early warfare is the ambush, the early morning raid where you massacre the entire village and so on. Even ritual warfare between rival tribes or groups. In other words, lower level kinds of combat, but nevertheless lethal, often in fact leading to the entire massacre of a particular group rather than just a battle between men.
Jim: That seemed to have been common from the archeological record in places like the Highlands of New Guinea, where genocidal warfare was a relatively common occurrence.
Richard: Yes. Yeah. I mean, there are plenty of examples. We can look at the Aboriginals in Australia, there’s evidence from African hunter-gatherers, and it’s very likely the hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago behaved the same way. When they felt threatened, when they felt the neighboring tribes are taking all their game, their food, if they suspected the neighboring tribe of magic at their expense, these are all things which might prompt collective violence between groups, and I think we can read that kind of violence back from what we know of more modern tribal communities all the way back to early tribal communities, even perhaps to hunter-gatherers 20, 30,000 years ago.
Jim: One of the things you mentioned, and I have to admit, I’ve read about it over the years and was always very skeptical, which are the anthropological tradition of the pacified past or the noble savage.
Richard: Yes. Yes. Well, the pacified past is something associated with some of the world’s leading anthropologists in the middle of the 20th century, Margaret Mead for example, and their view was very much that war is a modern invention. It doesn’t have any utility and we ought to find some way of getting rid of it, but they were not prepared to accept that early man necessarily engaged in violence, and they tried to find examples from 20th century to illustrate what they were saying, tribal societies that didn’t any longer fight. They didn’t fight of course because the imperial powers were stopping them. But that became a prevailing view right the way through much of the 20th century, and it’s only really recently, I think anthropologists, not all of them, but many anthropologists have come to accept that violence is in fact integral to our understanding of the remote human past, and that we need to find ways of integrating that into our discussion of how human beings evolved.
Jim: Yeah, I always found it highly unlikely, right? If only for basic game theory reasons, right? You get groups of people together, and while peace in theory can be an evolutionary stable strategy, I tend to use the game theory and complexity lens on a lot of things, and so one could imagine peace being stable, but as soon as one player moves away from peace, everybody else is forced into it, and that seems like a natural end state. So the idea of a pacified past always struck me as wishful thinking probably.
Richard: Well, it is true, of course, that early man clearly cooperated too. They couldn’t have survived if they hadn’t. So what we’re looking at is the evolution of communities that can cooperate, but at the same time have war on the back burner, violence if they need it, if it’s necessary. If they feel the threat, if they feel fear, insecure, whatever, the violence is something they will reach for.
Jim: In fact, the interplay between warfare and cooperation is quite interesting. My colleague at the Santa Fe Institute, Sam Bowles, has done quite a bit of work, theoretical work, simulation, et cetera, and along with Herb Gintis on how warfare may well have been one of the forcing functions to help develop the human superpower of cooperation, basically in-group cooperation. Obviously, strong group selection pressure on being better at being cooperators at the group level so that you can be better at warfare with your neighbors.
Richard: Exactly. So yes, I mean, there’s a strong link between the capacity to cooperate, willingness to cooperate, and the willingness to participate in collective violence. One of the things that might well have made communities more cooperative and bound together was the fact that they had to defend themselves against others.
Jim: Yeah, that’s clearly the argument of Bowles and Gintis, for instance. All right. Well, let’s start out with your first section, which is on the biology of what we know about war. I think you start with Darwin as I recall.
Richard: Well, it starts with Darwin. There was a habit in the late-19th, early-20 century to look to Darwin as the person who scientifically explained why we made war. I think very few biologists now accept that Darwin in fact thought that human beings were more and capable of peace by the time he was writing. Really, what matters in biological explanations is to see this is a product of human evolution and you have to explain why would it be a product if human evolution, and biologists have got one set of answers, not everybody accepts it, that is basically it was to preserve your gene pool, to protect your kin, to expand your gene pool.
If that was threatened or if you wanted to expand your gene pool by seizing the women from a neighboring tribe, then you did that, but the object was to ensure the survival of human groups. There were other ways of ensuring it as well, but the argument is that at times when it was necessary, violence would be one of the things they would reach for, and that probably goes right back in time, not just 10,000 years ago, but 100,000 years ago or more.
Jim: And you mentioned recent ethological studies of chimpanzees, for instance.
Richard: That’s a rather tricky one actually, because the studies of chimpanzees have all actually very small numbers of chimpanzees, and so it’s quite difficult to make an analogy between their violence and human violence, and the real problem I think is that although early man, and I’m talking now for a million years ago or more, may well have imitated the way the great apes operated, the gap between human beings and the great apes became huge very quickly. The capacity to make tools, the capacity to walk, the capacity to make fire, the capacity to hunt, all of these things separated human beings out from the major apes, and although there may well be some useful analogies, I’m quite skeptical of it. I think we need to look at human evolution, in fact, why humans evolved so differently. So they did develop the capacity for collectiveness, the capacity to make war against each other. Chimpanzees might kill a lone chimpanzee, but they don’t make war on each other.
Jim: I do believe there is new field work that shows something that looks a bit like war, wars of attrition. At least they’ll do these individual raids and border skirmishes until they’ve depleted the males and then they’ll invade the territory and grab the remaining females.
Richard: Yes. Well, I would say there may well be analogies there, but I think that the real problem is the extent to which human societies very quickly differentiated themselves from the great apes. I mean, that’s why great apes still use stones and sticks occasionally, and as I said in the book, we’ve developed a thermonuclear bomb. So they gap got wider and wider and wider, and I think a wider and wider and wider half a million years ago or a million years ago, not just in the last 50 years.
Jim: That then brings us naturally to the next topic, which is psychology, because it is our psychology that is this gigantic gap. Genetically, we’re pretty close to gyps, 98% probably, and you look at our organs, internal organs are fairly similar, et cetera, but our psychology is vastly different. When you say psychology, what are you pointing at?
Richard: Well, psychology is a complicated question too because after Freud was asked this question, psychoanalysts thought they ought to start talking more generally about this psychological courses of war, and for 20 or 30 years, psychoanalysts argued that you’ve got to look for the sources of war in early childhood development and so on, even in the nursery, and that the violence displayed by children against their parents and so on, the anger and destructiveness of the infant and so on, is repressed normally, but they argued that when it was released, it was released in violence against another state or another community. Almost nobody believes that now. Instead, evolutionary psychologists have joined forces with evolutionary biologists who argue that together with the biology, if you like, human beings in the end developed a set of psychological apparatuses which allowed them to take part in collective violence and to endorse it.
It wasn’t something they did all the time. It’s not, in other words, built into us so that we all do it all the time, but it became something that they were psychologically adapted to over time, and so when the pressure came, when they had to fight, defend themselves or attack an enemy, they were psychologically disposed to do so, and that’s something you can probably chase from those very early humans all the way through to the modern day. The psychology of making war now, psychology behind wanting to make war has probably not changed a great deal from the way in which that initial psychology was rooted.
Jim: Yeah, I think about interesting things like the reports. It seems like the libido for war in Europe in 1914, that the fools, especially the young men, thought this was going to be a great exciting adventure and everybody was looking forward to it in a horrible way after something like a hundred years of lack of major war in Europe. Been obviously some small wars like the Franco-Prussian wars and the Prussian wars of consolidation with Austria and Denmark and such. So there is something in that psychology, particularly of the younger male.
Richard: Indeed. No. I mean, I say we don’t it all the time. I’ve been talking about cooperative violence too, not just the single rogue aggressor, but collective violence, the willingness to cooperate together, understanding that it’s something that you have to do. And it’s interesting, the First and Second World Wars, there were lots of people who obviously didn’t want to go off to war, lots of young men who didn’t want to be killed, but nonetheless, there was a psychological commitment in a sense to defending your country, defending your family or whatever it is, and it’s almost certain, I think, that there’s psychological traits, it can be traced right back in time, otherwise it’d be difficult really to mobilize men to go to war and to mobilize them as they’ve been mobilized over the last thousands of years.
Jim: One of the psychological traits you mentioned related to this is conformity, and you mentioned the famous Asch studies.
Richard: Yes. Well, social psychology actually probably has more to contribute… I think I said that in the book, really. … than evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is still, of course, quite speculative because we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years ago. Social psychology is talking about the modern day and trying to explain how it is possible for groups to collaborate in order to be violent, and social psychology has got quite a lot to tell us there, I think, particularly the way in which you form the sense of an enemy.
And when you’re fighting, because you’ve got to have an enemy, you don’t just fight for the fun of it, you fight because you think you’ve got an enemy, and social psychologists have spent a lot of time exploring the way in which our mind constructs the idea of an enemy, begins to dehumanize the groups that you feel hostile towards until when you’re actually making war on them, it’s possible to do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. I think social psychology of all the branches of psychology has probably got the most to tell us about why it is that men, it is almost always men, willing to engage in collective violence and to do so often with an extraordinary level of cruelty.
Jim: Yeah, we’ll get to that a little bit later. Now, the next section talks about where a lot of the evidence comes in from anthropology and archeology, and you discussed basically four major types of evidence. The first is skeletal trauma.
Richard: Yes. Well, that’s in some ways the best evidence. For a long time archeologists were not looking for it particularly. They were not told to look for it. But in the last 30, 40, 50 years, I mean, a huge amount of research has been done on very ancient skeletons, and we can find evidence of trauma. We can find flint arrowheads embedded in the spine, we can find… Well, the most common thing are skulls dented in by stone axe, and a lot of those have been found, and again, these go back thousands of years. And the more that research is done, the more skeletons we uncover, the more evident it becomes that death by violence was common, not an aberration.
Jim: Even the famous Iceman, as it turned out, had a arrowhead embedded in his back, as I recall.
Richard: That’s right, yeah, and the blood of three other humans on his dagger. But nobody for the first 10 years, nobody thought to ask those questions about the skeleton or to find out a bit more about how he might’ve died.
Jim: The second category evidence you talk about is iconography, symbolic renditions and symbolic renditions of violence.
Richard: Yeah. That’s also quite common. There’s a great argument there from other anthropologists who say that sometimes an image on a cave wall of primitive fighting, matchstick men fighting each other could simply be symbolic. It could simply be a way of indicating something from their own cosmology and so on. Whereas other anthropologists say, “Well, the evidence seems to suggest that they are in fact illustrating forms of collective violence between groups.” There’s plenty of other iconography from perhaps nearer the modern age, which again, shows the same kind of thing. I’m skeptical of the idea that all of this is simply a cultural manifestation, just something they do to illustrate a cave wall or a stone. I think that these are manifestations of collective violence, and it’s an indication we have of how far back that goes.
Jim: And then the third one, which always seemed to me very compelling, is the evidence of fortifications. I mean, fortifications are expensive, and there’s only one reason you’re going to build a fortification.
Richard: Yes. Well, again, they’re everywhere. The earliest evidence of fortifications go back a long, long way before the foundation of the first states, and they’re also universal, which is interesting. You find evidence of fortification in China, in Russia, in South America, in North America, in Europe. Yes, it’s one of the first things you will do when you feel you’re under threat, or there’s the prospect that migrating tribes might think your land looks rather nice, and so you’ve got to protect yourself. There are quite a number of fortified sites, palisades and so on where there are large numbers of flint arrowheads, for example, or occasionally very large numbers of dead bodies stuck in a ditch. So you know that people didn’t fortify because they thought it looked pretty, they fortified because they wanted to protect themselves.
Jim: Yeah, then the final bit of archeological evidence that you reference is evidence of weapons, particularly in mortuary practices where weapons were buried with warriors.
Richard: That’s right, yes. Again, that goes back quite a long way. The problem of weapons, of course, is that many of early weapons were double purpose, you could also be used for hunting, of course, and so again, that’s occasionally a great deal of argument about are these really weapons? I don’t think it matters actually, because if you’re using an axe to chop up a tree, you can use an axe to chop up your enemy. It’s only later that you get a specialized weaponry, particularly with the coming of metal.
But we know from the pattern of mortuary practices, burying of weapons, particularly from the Neolithic times onwards, those last 8, 9,000 years, is that a warrior elite was gradually developing so that the people who were buried with their weapons, they were often buried with a wide range of weapons and artifacts to indicate that they were pretty much of an elite, and I think that through this period you did get the evolution of a more specialized military force in tribal communities and so on, and the fact that they’re buried with expensive weapons is an indication of the esteem with which warriors were regarded from very early on.
Jim: And then the other datum from the world of anthropology is surveys across multiple peoples, and what does that tell us about the prevalence of warfare in earlier times?
Richard: Yeah. I mean, it’s so interesting. Well, also if we’re looking at surviving tribal communities that have been observed over the last 2, 3, 400 years, particularly by Europeans, what we understand is that many of the things we’ve been talking about are universal, and if they’re universal, that suggests there must be some rather universal explanations starting with biology and psychology, but then moving on to the anthropologist’s concern with culture that you create cultures in which fighting, war-making, the warrior are central features of that culture and it’s sustained over time.
Jim: Yeah. You think about where culture then locks in the nature of warfare, which then presents a game theory problem to everybody else. So you got Sparta as a fine example. If you’re a neighbor of the Spartans, Sparta has created a culture of war, and if you’re a neighbor of the Spartans, then you have to respond to that.
Richard: Yeah. I mean, there’s some famous examples. The Spartans are perhaps the best. You might think of the Vikings too. These are very much warring cultures, but there were plenty of other warring cultures, particularly in South, Central America and so on, in North America before colonization. And if we think about it, because Europe has a long tradition of warring cultures. In fact, it’s the most bellicose continent in the world in the last 6,000 years, and culture supports that. In the end, you find that the elite, the warrior elite, young men, they want to go off and fight. They want to become a warrior. They want to be to win this esteem, find a fine wife, whatever, and that reinforces, in my view, a biological and a psychological predisposition which has been created long before. It reinforces and sustains it and does until the present day actually, because militarization is still a common feature of Western cultures.
Jim: Though perhaps the status of warriors has declined tremendously. Unlike in feudal times where government was basically government by warriors that we’ve now over the last 300 years separated the warrior class from the leadership class.
Richard: I suppose so. If you think of Eisenhower.
Jim: There’s some crossover, but it’s not ubiquitous.
Richard: No, we have. Yeah, indeed. Although, we need to think about the First and Second World Wars and how elevated the status of the senior commanders became, field martialists, general, that, so everybody knew who they were and they thought that these were the people are going to save the world. So it’s not quite the same as the Middle Ages, but warriors are still there.
Jim: I must say that from the perspective of thinking about how to run a society, it’s hard to think of anything more negative than war. We’re caught in this trap by all these things that you talk about in the book, but you go, “Goddammit. Is there an escape from this trap?”
Richard: Indeed. Yeah.
Jim: We’ll talk about that in the conclusion, so we won’t actually give the punchline there, but your next section of things that drive war is ecology. It makes perfect sense. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that?
Richard: Yeah. Ecological theory operates at several levels, I think. First of all, looking back at early man, it’s very likely the ecological pressures, i.e., dramatic climatic change, the loss of hunting territory, competition for food resources and so on, that this did act as a trigger for war probably quite often as a trigger for war. In the modern day, we focus quite a lot on climatic change and whether this is going to usher in a new age of warfare as we compete for resources, as changing rain patterns and so on affect communities, you get mass migrations, et cetera. That’s, I think, a more questionable assumption. I’m much more persuaded that thousands of years ago, people certainly fought over these kinds of things and we had plenty of evidence of that. Whether we’re going to fight in our 21st century about climate and its consequences, I think is more questionable.
Jim: Yeah. Some of the examples you give are the Anasazi, for instance, the Pueblo people.
Richard: Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, in Central and Western United States, there were long periods of aridity, serious periods of aridity, of the loss of game and so on, the loss of cultural land and et cetera, and there’s plenty of evidence of increased violence, massacres and so on, even cannibalism as a result of climatic change, and that’s quite a good example because quite a lot of archeology has been done on it in order to establish whether there is a link between changing climate and violence. The same is true in China too, where quite a lot of work has been done on exactly the same thing. Climate change in the steppe land of Russia, which drives the nomads to attack the Chinese Empire in order to get additional food and resources and so on. Again, you can make quite a good link there, I think.
Ecology is one of the factors we need to bring in. When we thinking about the evolution of war and warfare, why it happens. As I say, in the modern age, it’s something which is more questionable, partly because you can also deal with the effects of climate, whereas when we’re talking about 8,000 years ago, nobody knew what to do. The land dried up, the game disappeared. What did you do? Well, you went hunting somewhere else.
Jim: Now, closely related, but you distinguish between them is war about resources. Why don’t we start by actually how you distinguish war about resources from war driven by ecology?
Richard: Well, my distinction is really ecology is really about… It is about the natural environment and the way it changes and how that affects you and where you respond to that by violence. Resources is where you see that somebody else has got something that you want and you are willing to wage war in order to get it. In other words, war for resources is basically acquisitive. It’s about taking what somebody else has got, whereas ecological warfare is really about survival, where are we going to get the food, how will we find more water, and so on. People might think that’s rather fine distinction, but if we look at the war for resources, that’s clearly what it is.
The Romans sack a town, they take all its treasure and send it back to Rome. The senators get fat and happy, and you go on to seize the next lot of resources. We look at the Vikings, I mean, that’s a resource-led warring culture. They go out, they take what they want and it serves their material interest, but only way they get it is by basically acts of collective piracy. There are plenty of examples we can look at through recorded history where resources are something that people want and they’ll get it by warfare.
Jim: When I was reading the book, I had an example in my mind that I couldn’t put into either the ecology or the resources bucket cleanly, maybe you can decide where it lands, and that is the Romans who were driven by the need to increase the supply of grain to the city of Rome and Italy more generally, and they ended up conquering Egypt and North Africa, which in those days still was pretty good grain-producing area. Would you put that in the ecology side or the resources side?
Richard: The resources side. I mean, with ecology, it’s something people are not really conscious of what’s happening, it just happens to them, if you like.
Jim: I gotcha. So this is fact, you see other people have something that you want to get. You could argue ecology on the other case that Italy had overpopulated relative to its caring capacity, and therefore the Romans need to go grab some more land.
Richard: Well, you could trade, of course.
Jim: That’s true. That’s true.
Richard: I mean, you could find other ways of getting access, of course, to your resources. I mean, the Roman habit was to conquer a place and to take what it had.
Jim: It worked for quite a while. Then of course, World War II was a big example of that with the Germans wanting to grab Lebanon’s room in the east, and of course they also lusted after the Russian oil and other things, and the Japanese feeling threatened with respect to their resources, and in fact, perhaps the trigger of Pearl Harbor was when the US did an oil embargo against Japan. What can you tell us about, say, World War II and resources as a driving factor?
Richard: Yeah, I talk about that in the book, and it’s partly to challenge the view, I think, for some historians that when we’re talking about resource wars, well, we’re looking back a long way. It doesn’t happen now, but the Second World War is the classy example, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Whatever other motives Hitler had, and he had other motives, of course, one of the things that drove him to fight the Soviet Union was to seize their land and resources and oil, and he and those who fought with him were convinced if they did that Germany would become a superpower, would have no more problems about access to food, would’ve all the oil it needed, et cetera, et cetera.
And the Japanese did the same. I mean, once they were cut off by the United States embargoes, they’d already thought, “How can we get better access to the resources of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific?” But the American move pushed them that way, and they thought the only way we can get the resources we need to make further warfare is by making war. Something of a paradox. And it turned out to be a paradox in both the German and the Japanese case. They never extracted what they wanted from the areas they conquered, and most of it was in fact retained in the warring zone. Their aim was long term, they’ll win the war and then they’ll have those resources and control over them.
Jim: When I finished that section, I was pondering, “Is there anything…” Looking ahead in the book, I said, “There’s one piece that is missing, and of course it’s only a modern phenomenon, and that is the warfare for markets.” I think like the British Empire, you bloody pons who conquered 25% of the world significantly for markets.
Richard: Yes, indeed. Well, in a way, of course it is resources. You’re looking for areas which you can exploit for cash crops or for minerals and so on, and that’s going to make your merchant class rich back home, and if necessary, you have to resort to violence in order to protect it. The British have been very clever actually at trying to pretend that their empire was never violent, that people actually like being ruled by the British. Well, maybe that was true some of the time, but most of it was got by violence, and we should be aware of that and sustained by the threat of violence, of course.
Jim: I always thought it was quite amazing how the 50,000 Brits managed to control a hundred million Indians.
Richard: I know, yeah.
Jim: Of course it was the classic British game of pitting one group of Indians against the other and using economics and trade and markets as incentives to various people. Very clever.
Richard: No, they were very clever, but they wanted… If the market needed securing, they secured it. I mean, you had to do that.
Jim: Yeah. So I guess bottom line is you would put warfare for markets under the same category as resources, more or less.
Richard: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, war for markets is… It’s also a modern phenomenon. That’s how modern economies like to work, and we don’t generally fight each other for our market shares.
Jim: Yeah. Though Marx indicated that we might, right?
Richard: Yes. Well, we have done in the recent past, yeah.
Jim: You want to talk a little bit about the Marxian analysis of war?
Richard: Well, it’s not… Because Marx, in fact, didn’t have much to say about war, but Marxists had quite a lot to say about war, particularly in the 20th century, where he assumed that war was a product of capitalist imperialism, the existence of capitalism made more inevitable, that capitalism is a belligerent system, and that became a fashion on the left really for much of the 20th century, and the idea that some or other, if you look behind the other motives people have found, it’s always going to be capitalists. Capitalists who wanted the First World War and sustained it. German capitalists, for example, who wanted Hitler to wage war in the 1940s. I think most historians are skeptical of in the year’s explanations, but it was a powerful argument that there must be a connection between capitalism and war because of the 3 or 400 years of imperialist history, which merchant classes in European states and later on in the United States would resort to violence when necessary to protect their interests.
Jim: So perhaps the Marxian analysis has something to say about the modern times, but the story of your book is that the history of warfare goes way back before capitalism even existed, so it can’t be the cause, right? Maybe that it’s one of the current drivers, but not the fundamental cause. All right, your next section is on belief, that belief has been a cause in all kinds of odd ways from beliefs about sorcery, et cetera. Tell us about belief and warfare.
Richard: I think many scholars are skeptical of the idea that belief is really a driver for war because they always assume that there must be other motives at work which are more material, [inaudible 00:37:19] for resources, seizing neighboring tribe and so on and so on, and the belief can often be used to cover this. I think belief is much more important than that, and it goes back, right the way back to early cosmologies about which we don’t know very much, but clearly there must be moments at which a tribal group thinks that the neighboring tribe is involved in sorcery of some kind or other, or challenges their gods or insults their gods, and the only way you can get recompense in the end by waging war against them.
Later on, we can find a religious belief being a driving force, the Christian wars in the Middle East, Islamic wars in North Africa and the Middle East. It’s not enough to say, “Well, they’re actually being driven by power, politics or desire for land.” Quite clearly religious belief is a powerful motivator, a powerful motivator for the perpetration of actually quite unpleasant violence, in fact. In the modern day, the temptation is to say that all totalitarian and so on, their ideology drives them to war, and it certainly plays a part in explaining that, but I think that we need to be cautious in the modern day about linking belief clearly with a desire to go to war. The one exception perhaps is the current wave of Islamic revivalism where protection of belief is clearly very important, even though many people say, “Well, it masks other motives.” There would be no point, I think, in perpetrating that level of defense of Islam were it not that Islam as a system of belief is taken very seriously.
Jim: I was thinking the same thing that the intractable problems in the Middle East seem, more than anything else, driven around very intense holds on belief systems, and not just Muslims versus Jews or Christians, but Sunnis versus Shia, which is just about as vicious as the other kind, and I think a very clean example of belief as a driver of war was the early Crusades, right? There was no good reason to send big armies to the Middle East. There was no benefits to be gained, but it had to have been… At least, I can’t think of any. It had to have been belief-driven to go retake the Holy Land, right?
Richard: Yes, and be forgiven all your sins. In other words, heaven is one step away.
Jim: Of course, Venetians figured out how to turn that into a power play later when they sacked Constantinople in 1204.
Richard: No, there were plenty of other motives at work on the way there, but as you said and I was arguing in the book, for the First Crusade in particular, there’s no point in being there in the desert, hungry, thirsty, being attacked regularly by Arab and Kurdish armies, a long way from home in the expectation that somehow or other you will reach Jerusalem and free it from the Muslim grip. It seems to me a classic example of belief driving warfare, and no better indication of it that when they captured Jerusalem, slaughtered the Muslim population, and indeed much of the Jewish population as well.
Jim: Indeed, and the other example you give is the Aztecs. Their system was driven by all kinds of strange beliefs that required warfare.
Richard: The Aztecs had a strange cosmology, which was based on a fundamental belief that they had to capture people and sacrifice them in order to stave off the end of the world.
Jim: Yeah, the sun wouldn’t rise if they didn’t sacrifice a hundred teenagers a week or something nuts like that, right?
Richard: Yes. And so that drove their warfare because only way you’re going to get… People didn’t volunteer to be sacrificed by the Aztecs. The only way you’re going to get it is by waging war, which they did.
Jim: And of course, that’s why Cortez with a few hundred guys was able to overthrow them, because the Aztecs had absolutely horrified all their neighbors, and when the Cortez came to town said, “Let’s go fuck over those Aztecs,” everybody said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
Richard: Yes. Even then it was a close-run thing, and the soldiers of course experienced the climb up the pyramid to the table where you had your heart cut out.
Jim: As I said earlier, war is like one of the mankind’s weirdest and baddest inventions, and I would put religion right up there as number two, and the two are intimately intertwined together.
Richard: Yeah.
Jim: Just tries to be nuts that here we are, we’ve come so far as a species and yet we’re still captive by gross superstition and this game theoretical plus all these other things you talk about drive that forces us to destroy vast amounts of resources and human life and distortion in warfare.
Richard: We’re still doing it, yes.
Jim: Still doing it.
Richard: Still doing it.
Jim: Yep. Now, your next topic, this is sort of the Kissingerian Metternich kind of perspective, and that’s power. What the hell is power? What do you mean when you say power?
Richard: People have difficulty, in fact, defining it. They think they know what it is, and one of the things I say in the book is that it is often power for something. You exercise military power because you want more land, you want to capture resources. You want to protect yourself and your community more effectively and so on. But the pursuit of power, just for its own sake, which is something usually leaders do, of course, rather than led, is more unusual. I’ve quoted the three examples we all know about Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Hitler, who are all obsessed with the idea that war is the root of their power, and they’re impatient to make war. They don’t stop making war even when stopping might make a great deal of sense. That’s one form of power, I think, that it’s unpredictable whenever you’re going to find this person, who is this person going to be? Who’s going to set themselves up, take over a country and say, “We’re going to wage war. That’s what we need to do.”? Now, it may be in the 21st century there’s just somebody around the corner. I hope not.
Jim: Yeah, Charismatic sociopath of sufficient power, right?
Richard: Yes. Well, some people suspect Putin is one of those, but I’ll suspend my judgment.
Jim: I’m not sure I like your terminology. You call it a hubristic warfare. I’ve sometimes called it big man warfare, and I suspect it goes way back further than the three you named, and in fact, it may have been the way states formed, right? In fact, I’ve proposed this to anthropologists and they go, “Not bad,” which is that the transition from chiefdoms to early states might’ve been around the random popping up of a sufficiently powerful charismatic sociopath.
Richard: It might indeed. I mean, you’d have to find some pretty firm evidence of that, but it’s-
Jim: Yeah, I gave some statistical evidence. I said here is a statistical evidence that might prove or disprove the Ruttian hypothesis was look at chiefdom stage societies and determine how broad the political class was. If societies had a very narrow political class, say a single clan, then the probability of the emergence of a powerful psychopath is smaller. If it has a broad political class where pretty much anybody can in theory be a leader, then it’ll have a higher propensity to throw one of these off. So plot on one axis the breadth of the political class in the society, and the second, the time it took to transition from chiefdom to state, and if there is a substantial positive correlation between those two, then I would argue that the Ruttian hypothesis has some support.
Richard: Yes. Well, I’m sorry, I haven’t included it in my book.
Jim: It’s an oddball idea, but I will say I’ve passed this on to a number of anthropologists now and go, “Maybe.” Now, the other example, the very interesting one is Rome.
Richard: Yes, indeed.
Jim: Tell us what you think about Rome and how power is related to Rome’s continuous wars for hundreds of years.
Richard: I think there were mixed motives in the Roman case, but yeah, I mean, what the Romans, as they established their state in Italy and the state spread out, what they didn’t ever want was a challenge to their power, and so the more challenges they met, the more they responded until that power was extended right across the Mediterranean and Europe. And they thought that their power was a good thing, that it was good for people to be ruled by Rome. Some people no doubt thought that too who were being ruled, but the critical thing is that once you set yourself up as the power hub, if you like, of Europe, you were constantly defending it, and in my book, I talk quite a lot about the issue of security for Rome, because the two things go hand in hand. The more power you have, the more you extend that power and so on, the more insecure you’re likely to become and the more you’re going to want to secure that power one way or another. So that in a sense, security is as much of a driver in the end as power.
Jim: Your next and final section, and this is where it really becomes about game theory, which is security.
Richard: Indeed. Yeah. Well, I argue that this is probably one of the most important of all the factors that I’ve talked about, because way back in time too, I mean, one of the critical things is you need to be able to protect your community. Whether your community is a bunch of hunter-gatherers, whether it’s a tribe, whether it’s a mini-state, or whether it’s a state, there’s no way of guaranteeing your security, however many treaties you make, however many hands you shake. The point of Thomas Hobbes made in the 17th century is that in the end, there is no security because nobody else is there outside with an interest in protecting you. The only protection you can have is your own. You’ve got to find your own protection.
And insecurity, I argue, plays a very important part. People’s fear, misapprehension of how the others are going to behave, perception of threat when there’s no threat actually there and so on, and this will quite often encourage preemptive warfare, make a country more militaristic than it needs to be and so on and so on, and security in that sense. There’s something we are all worried about. We all talk about European states, why do they need after 70 years of peace, why do they need all these weapons? Well, they need all these weapons because however much they may want peace, and however much European society has calmed down in the last 70 years, you can never be sure of when you aren’t going to need to resort to violence.
Jim: I’ve often read, I think you mentioned it in the book, I don’t really recall, that international relations is a domain of anarchy. There is nothing above the nation state or the state, and hence, you’re stuck into a basically pure game theory situation here where you have to figure out what you do as a sovereign actor to protect yourself.
Richard: Yes, indeed. Yeah. Well, I mean, most of the time people more or less get the issue right, but it’s very easy to get it wrong, and you need to make sure that either you’ve got allies who are going to help you or you don’t have any allies, that you’re strong enough to be able to ensure your own protection, and there are so many examples in recent history where states wanted to be secure but weren’t, were not strong enough. They misperceive what potential enemies are going to do, and so on and so on. And we come straight to nuclear warfare because one of the things that people talk about all the time, and rightly in the nuclear confrontation, when is the point where people feel so insecure, misperceive what their enemy is going to do, and eventually push that button? And we hope it never happens. But it’s an interesting analog for a long history of warfare where security has been a very important consideration.
Jim: Yeah, you give some other historical examples, the fact that there’s a large percentage of wars or border wars and oftentimes trying to secure physical frontiers like mountains or rivers, et cetera, or the sea, that think adds to their security, or the famous example of the Great Wall of China. How much resources must have gone into that sucker, right?
Richard: Even then, it didn’t work, of course. In the end, the Manchus managed to overthrow the Ming Dynasty because they found ways of getting round the wall.
Jim: Of course, the wall is all you have to do is break it in one point. So it’s actually a bad theory.
Richard: Well, no, security isn’t a sense of illusion because let’s take the United States, the most powerful country in the world, almost half of world military spending is in the United States. It’s probably got the most sophisticated establishment of security studies anywhere in the world, and yet there’s still that constant sense of insecurity. What will China do? How do we cope with Russia? Are there threats closer to home? You can be the most powerful state in the world and still be obsessed with security.
Jim: You hit on what will they do, and I think from a systems perspective, and you alluded to it earlier, that it’s uncertainty is really the big question because if it’s in a state of anarchy, you can’t really trust anybody and thought about this a little bit, that perhaps if there is a way to get away from war, it’s to increase our transparency. Our problem is opacity. We don’t know what Putin’s up to, but suppose the Ruttian hypothesis of how to eliminate war was that all countries must allow anybody to go anywhere at any time and record anything they want to, and if that were to come into play, I don’t know how you get to that point, but let’s assume you get to there, what do you think about that as a way to break this endless cycle of war, to have radical transparency about what all nation-states are doing?
Richard: Well, that’s part of the argument, how can we be more transparent? How can we be more honest with each other about what our intentions are? And the problem is historically that’s very tricky because leaderships change, governments change, and so on. Economic pressures of one kind or another can change quite sharply. You might be transparent one year, but want to be opaque the next.
Jim: Yeah, you have the defection problem. Let’s say the whole world agrees to this Ruttian doctrine of radical opacity where anyone’s allowed to go anywhere, absolutely anywhere, you could walk into Los Alamos and start taking pictures, but then a year later, somebody comes to the power of the United States says, “No more transparency.” So you’d have to have some strong enough collective action potential to prevent defectors. So again, game theory. It’s always about game theory.
Richard: Yes. Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Jim: Yeah, unfortunately. Unfortunately. You also talked about alliances and collective security has historically been a part of how people achieve peace. Often Rome had their client states, for instance, that they allied with Rome, and if anybody picked on them, Rome would come and kick their ass. And we have things like NATO, people in NATO, seems unlikely the French and the Germans are going to get into it again, their collective intelligence, but we also know from World War I that collective security agreements can lead to unexpected expansions of small problems like Austria-Hungary versus Serbia. Suddenly, all of Europe’s at war. So that’s the downside of collective security.
Richard: I mean, there’ve been plenty of examples of efforts of collective security as you’re going back in hundreds of years, not just something which you’ve got from the 20th century. I mean, the two key examples, League of Nations and the United Nations have both been signal failures. They can’t stop war. In both cases, they’ve stood on the sidelines and watched war going on, but then [inaudible 00:55:19] of the members. The only way you can get collective security is through NATO or the Warsaw Pact, or whatever it is. But these are all temporary. I’ve noticed it’s been around some time, but a few hundred years’ time, and we look back at this period, again, NATO won’t exist, something else will. I mean, what all these collective agreements and mutual assistance pacts and so on, they’re all there to try and guarantee security, but at the end of the day, it’s your own state security that you’re worried about.
Jim: All right, we’ve gone through these eight classes, and I’ll just repeat them for people to think about structuring this. Biology, psychology, anthropology, ecology, resources, belief, power, and security. So after you have done all this thinking, and this is by the way, a very detailed book. It’s relatively short, it’s like, what, 270 pages or something, but there’s a lot of meat in this book. Took me a while to go through this thing. What is your conclusion? What’s the future hold for war?
Richard: Well, I’m an historian and historians are very shy of predicting the future because we almost almost get it wrong.
Jim: But nonetheless.
Richard: I think what you can say is what I say in the last line of the book, war obviously has a future. In fact, we are now living with war. When I started writing this book, we weren’t living with war. There was no war in Ukraine or in Gaza. Now we’re living with war again and warfare threats are made all the time. I think the crucial problem is that through human history at moments of crisis or necessity or fear, human beings have resorted to collective violence, and however much people say, “Well, we hope it’s going to die out now,” it’s characterized the whole of human history. And so you’d have to be an optimist to imagine that 21st century is going to be very different.
What we all mercifully hope is that it won’t result in nuclear war, which is, in a sense, it’s the ultimate absurdity from warfare, and we hope that the world’s leaders will understand that. But lesser causes a war, whether it’s ecological shock and so on, whether it’s resource competition, whether it’s just simply the rise of a leader like Putin who wants to reassert his country and thinks one way of doing it is making war, and all of these things are likely to contribute to a less than stable future. I regret saying that. Like you, I wish we were collectively able to collaborate and to put war to one side, but it’s proved impossible to do in the modern age, thousands of years ago.
Jim: Alrighty, well, that’s a pessimistic conclusion.
Richard: It is, I’m afraid.
Jim: But it might be a realistic one. I really do want to thank Richard Overy for this very interesting conversation on his very interesting book, Why War? If you’re interested in this conversation, I’d suggest that you check the book out, and as always, we’ll have a link to the book on the episode page at jimruttshow.com. So thank you, Richard.
Richard: Thank you very much, Jim. Thanks.
Jim: That was a good conversation.