War Before Civilization Read online

  But recorded history represents less than half of 1 percent of the more than 2 million years that humans have existed. In fact, prehistory ended in some areas of the world a mere thirty years ago. At the dawn of the European expansion (A.D. 1500), only a third of the inhabited world was civilized; all of Australasia and Oceania, most of the Americas, and much of Africa and north Asia remained preliterate and tribal. These long chapters in humanity’s story and all the recent “peoples without history” are the special focus of anthropology—of the archaeologists who study the former and of the ethnographers who have observed the latter.

  What, then, has anthropology said about the warfare conducted by prehistoric and “primitive” societies? The simple answer is: very little. By recent count, only three complete books (and a handful of anthologies and ethnographies) devoted exclusively to primitive warfare have been published in this century, far fewer than are published on the American Civil War each year.1 Information on the topic is not lacking, but it is tucked away in technical journals or scattered as brief passages in ethnographic and archaeological reports. Compared with the tens of thousands of volumes and countless articles on civilized military history, however, this imbalance is striking, considering how much of humanity prehistoric and primitive peoples represent. The subject of war among ancient and modern tribal peoples remains prone to glib speculation, the caprices of intellectual fashion, and the deeper currents of secular mythology.

  Even today, most views concerning prehistoric (and tribal) war and peace reflect two ancient and enduring myths: progress and the golden age. The myth of progress depicts the original state of mankind as ignorant, miserable, brutal, and violent. Any artificial complexities introduced by human invention or helpful gods have only served to increase human bliss, comfort, and peace, lifting humans out of their ugly and hurtful state of nature. The contradictory myth avers that civilized humans have fallen from grace—from a simple and primeval happiness, a peaceful golden age. All the accretions of progress merely multiply violence and suffering; civilization is the sorry condition that our sinfulness, greed, and technological hubris have earned us. In the modern period, these ancient mythic themes were elaborated by Hobbes and Rousseau into enduring philosophical attitudes toward primitive and prehistoric peoples.

  HOBBES AND ROUSSEAU

  The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) reached his conclusions about warfare and society via a series of logical arguments. In his great work, Leviathan, he first established that, in practical terms, all men were equals because no one was so superior in strength or intelligence that he could not be overcome by stealth or the conspiracy of others. He found humans equally endowed with will (desires) and prudence (the capacity to learn from experience). But when two such equals desired what only one could enjoy, one eventually subdued or destroyed the other in pursuit of it. Once this happened, all hell broke loose. The similar desires of others tempted them to emulate the winner, and their intelligence required them to guard themselves against the fate of the loser. When no power existed to “overawe” these equals, prudent self-preservation forced every individual to attempt to preserve his liberty (the absence of impediments to his will) by trying to subdue others and by resisting their attempts to subdue him. Hobbes thus envisioned the original or natural condition of humanity as being “the war of every man against every man.” In this primeval state of “warre,”2 men lived in “continual fear and danger of violent death” and, in Hobbes’s most famous phrase, their lives were therefore “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” He claimed vaguely that “savage people in many places in America” still lived in this violent primitive condition but gave no particulars and never pursued the point further.

  Humans escaped this state of war only by agreeing to covenants in which they surrendered much of their liberty and accepted rule by a central authority (which, for Hobbes, meant a king). And since “Covenants, without the sword, are but words,” the king (or state) had to be granted a monopoly over the use of force to punish criminals and defend against external enemies. Without the state to overawe humans’ intelligence by force, mediate their selfish passions, and deprive them of some of their natural liberty, anarchy reigned. Civilized countries returned to this condition when central authority was widely defied or deprived of its power, as during rebellions. All civilized “industry” and the humane enjoyment of its fruits depended on a peace maintained by central government; the “humanity” of humans was thus a product of civilization. Hobbes acknowledged that nation-states between themselves remained in a “posture of war.” But because they thereby protected the industry of their subjects, “there does not follow from it that misery which accompanies the liberty of particular men.” In other words, a world of states necessarily tolerated some wars and much preparation for war, but these preserved havens of peace within each state. In the primitive condition, there was no peace anywhere.

  Hobbes never claimed that humans were innately cruel or violent or biologically driven to dominate others. The condition of war was a purely social condition—the logical consequence of human equality in needs, desires, and intelligence. It could be eliminated by social innovations: a covenant and coercive institutions of enforcement. War would recur only if these covenants were broken or if the police powers of the central state waned. His argument was certainly intended as an apology for absolute monarchy; but later, yielding to circumstance, he admitted that it applied equally well to other forms of strong central government, even republics. Whatever his views on the ideal form of the state, the point of central relevance here is that Hobbes considered the inertial “natural” state of humanity to be war, not peace.

  For the past two centuries, the most influential critic of Hobbes’s view of primitive society and “man in a state of nature” has been Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau disdained the logical rigor of the philosopher, the plodding empiricism of the historian and the scientist, and the unbridled invention of the romancer, but he combined a semblance of all three with an assertive style to become an intellectual sensation. Like Hobbes, he constructed an origin myth to explain the human condition, but his denied civilization its humanity while proclaiming the divinity of the primitive.

  Rousseau, like Hobbes, asserted the natural equality of mankind but saw humans in their natural state as being (justly) ruled by their passions, not their intellects. He argued that these passions could be easily and peaceably satisfied in a world without the “unnatural” institutions of monogamy and private property. Any tendency toward violence in the natural condition would be suppressed by humans’ innate pity or compassion. This natural compassion was overwhelmed only when envy was created by the origins of marriage, property, education, social inequality, and “civil” society. He claimed that the savage, except when hungry, was the friend of all creation and the enemy of none. He directly attacked Hobbes for having “hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel” when in fact “nothing could be more gentle” than man in his natural state.3 Rousseau’s Noble Savage lived in that peaceful golden age “that mankind was formed ever to remain in.” War only became general and terrible when people organized themselves into separate societies with artificial rather than natural laws. Compassion, an emotion peculiar to individuals, gradually lost its influence over societies as they grew in size and proliferated. When artificial, passionless states fought, they committed more murders and “horrible disorders” in a single engagement than were ever perpetrated in all the ages that men had lived in a state of nature.

  Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau seemed genuinely interested in whether his contentions were confirmed in the observations of real “savages” then being encountered by European explorers. His disciples accompanied French explorations and brought back mixed reports.4 The explorer Louis de Bougainville reported that Tahitians exactly fulfilled Rousseau’s predictions, although to reach this conclusion Bougainville had to ignore their rigid class stratification, their arrogant chiefs, and some of the
most horrific warfare on record (Chapters 4–7). But another explorer told Rousseau of a sudden unprovoked attack on French explorers by the very simple and previously uncontacted aboriginal Tasmanians, despite the most peaceful gestures by the completely naked French emissaries. Rousseau was shocked: “Is it possible that the good Children of Nature can really be so wicked?” Of course, Noble Savage apologists then and since have remarked that such fracases were only the result of the natives’ misunderstanding of the emissaries’ intentions or anxiety that the explorers meant to stay. Even so, what had happened to the savages’ natural compassion and lack of jealousy? Similar cases of tribesmen at first contact “shooting first and asking questions later” (which with hindsight seems prescient on their part) did not trouble Rousseau or his disciples to the point of reconsidering their assumptions. They were too thoroughly convinced that the natural state of human society was a peaceful combination of free love and primitive communism to see these violent first encounters as anything but rare aberrations.

  Despite Rousseau’s influence, Hobbes’s view of primitive life held the upper hand during the nineteenth century, which not coincidentally was the heyday of European imperialism and colonization. One of the principal apologies for Western imperialism was the pacification of ever-warring savages by European conquest, missionary activity, and administration. The natives, living in Hobbesian turbulence, could enjoy the comforts of Christianity and the benefits of civilization only after they were pacified and controlled by Europeans. Europeans also awarded their own the highest ranking among the few civilizations they recognized (such as those of Asia and the Near East) because they reckoned that theirs had progressed further than any other from the violent and impoverished state of nature. Not surprisingly, the soldiers, missionaries, and colonial functionaries sent out to establish Western dominion brought back accounts that emphasized the Hobbesian features of societies they sought to conquer and transform. These portraits were the only information available to the first anthropologists as the discipline emerged during the 1860s. Only a handful of anti-imperialists, reformers, and self-consciously iconoclastic artists—few of whom had ever directly observed real primitives—clung to Rousseau’s pacific view of uncivilized life.

  THE CONCEPT OF PRIMITIVE WAR

  In the early part of the twentieth century, the mass of unsystematic observations of prestate societies that had accumulated during European expansion was superseded by the new data of ethnography. Trained in the new technique of participant observation, anthropologists went out to live with the subjects of their studies for months and even years, learned their language, and made observations of their customs and behavior with their own eyes. The young science of anthropology had left its armchair.

  All of this data, old and new, indicated that with only rare exceptions primitive life was not particularly peaceful. It was no longer possible to declare, as the eminent sociologist William Sumner did at the turn of the century, that primitive man “might be described as a peaceful animal” who “dreads” war.5 In 1941, the great ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski could argue that “anthropology has done more harm than good in confusing the issue by … depicting human ancestry as living in the golden age of perpetual peace.” Yet it was also clear that, contrary to Hobbes, life in small-scale societies was not “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Anthropologists who actually lived among such people, got to know them as individuals and as friends, and participated in their daily affairs found it very difficult to maintain a Hobbesian disdain for their way of life. Ethnography exposed primitive cultures as perfectly valid and satisfying ways of being human and found that they often possessed features that were preferable to comparable aspects of Western civilized life.

  Few of these ethnographers were explorers, however, and they usually lived with people who had already been pacified by Western administration.6 Thus they had to rely on their informants’ memories of precontact warfare and had little opportunity to observe it directly. But such accounts tended to idealize or bowdlerize behavior. While informants’ descriptions of many aspects of social life could be enhanced or corrected by the anthropologists’ direct observations, independent checks on their descriptions of warfare were usually impossible. For example, an ethnographer studying the Sambia of New Guinea found that Sambia warriors “unconsciously repress the gory parts of war tales, tranforming the once traumatic into drama” when recounting their war experiences.7 When such idealized native accounts were filtered, by the questions asked, through the intense interest of anthropologists in customary rules and rituals, the images of primitive combat that emerged had a very stylized, ritualistic allure.

  In The Face of Battle, historian John Keegan notes an exactly corresponding tendency in military historians’ accounts of civilized battles.8 Some of these make bloody combat between groups of frightened, overexcited men seem no more hurtful than a barroom brawl or a prosy Romantic thunderstorm. In these accounts, individuals and groups are motivated by a hunger for glory or avenge for previous defeats, by a desire to maintain the reputation of the regiment, retain the good opinion of their comrades, or gain the notice of superiors. The soldiers are very rarely depicted as driven by hatred of the enemy and never as fighting for the base motives of material gain or fear of punishment. Were such accounts our only source of information, we could easily conclude that modern Western warfare has been highly ritualized, psychologically motivated, and not particularly deadly. Only actual casualty statistics and rare unedited eyewitness memoirs by front-line soldiers challenge such impressions. But anthropologists, with very few exceptions, have had information of only the historiographic type to guide them in generalizing about uncivilized warfare.

  In some rare instances, ethnographers were able to observe actual primitive combat. But even these observations showed a marked bias toward pitched or formal battles.9 Because such battles are the primary goal and most dramatic events of modern warfare, the eyes of ethnographers were drawn to comparable clashes in the tribal societies they studied. They noticed that these primitive battles were often suspended after only a few deaths, and—even if they were renewed after a brief interval—the total number killed in a series of battles was usually small. The ethnographers seldom analysed casualties in relation to the small numbers who fought and thus could not compare them on this basis to larger-scale civilized battles. The raids, ambushes, and surprise attacks on villages that constitute a major component of tribal warfare were seldom observed and paid little notice. The general impression drawn from rare glimpses of formal battles was that primitive warfare was not very risky.

  By midcentury, it became possible to save the Rousseauian notion of the Noble Savage, not by making him peaceful (as this was clearly contrary to fact), but by arguing that tribesmen conducted a more stylized, less horrible form of warfare than their civilized counterparts waged. This view was systematized and elaborated into the theory that there existed a special type of “primitive war” very different from “real,” “true,” or “civilized” war.

  The architects of this concept of primitive war, Quincy Wright and Harry Turney-High, were academics of vastly different character and experience. Despite the essential similarity of their views, neither of them ever acknowledged in print the existence of the other’s work.

  Quincy Wright (1890–1970) was professor of international law at the University of Chicago. He directed that university’s long-term study of the causes of war, which began in 1926. This project eventually involved a large number of faculty members and graduate students from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology. The study of war by primitive societies was but a small part of this great enterprise but had a considerable effect on much subsequent thinking by anthropologists.10 Wright’s two-volume summary of this project, A Study of War, was published in 1942. An abridged edition of this work remains in print today. Not surprisingly, Wright took a rather lawyerly view of war and was especially concerned with identifying the laws and customs that m
ight moderate or even eliminate it. Indeed, he defined war as a temporary legal condition permitting hostile groups “to carry on a conflict by armed force.”11 His attitude toward war seems one of judicial disapproval for such a wasteful and brutal way of settling disputes.

  Harry Holbert Turney-High (1899–1982) was, for most of his career, a professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina. But unlike most academics, he maintained a lifelong involvement with the modern military, rising from a private in the cavalry to a colonel of military police in the U.S. Army Reserves. He served in Europe during World War II as a military policemen but apparently never saw actual combat.12 As an ethnographer, he collected “memory culture” data on the Flathead and Kutenai Indians of Montana and wrote the standard ethnography on these groups. The character of tribal warfare remembered by these fringe Plains tribes and his own admiration for the principles of warfare he learned in training as a cavalryman obviously strongly influenced his views of primitive warfare. His seminal book, Primitive War (1949), remains the only anthropological synthesis on warfare; it is still in print.

  Rather than viewing war as a temporary legal condition, Turney-High saw it as a social institution that served a variety of functions. Not only could war be useful, especially in a civilized context, but it was also an exciting diversion. Turney-High reserved his disapproval for what he saw as substandard, halfhearted, or cowardly warfare, not war itself. Writing in a rollicking, opinionated style, he radiated contempt for anyone ignorant or heedless of the civilized soldier’s craft and trade, whether the uninformed were social scientists, tribal warriors, or modern guerrillas. Indeed, one has the uneasy sense that Turney-High thought a little whiff of cordite smoke, some military discipline, and a touch of wholesome field punishment would do everyone a world of good.