Blood and leviathan: a Stanford historian thinks war is the engine that drives civilization. Is he right?

• Author: Davies, Stephen
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Book review

War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots, by Ian Morris, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 495 pages, $30

Is war good for anything? In the long run, the Stanford historian Ian Morris argues, it's good for almost everything. In War! What Is It Good For?, Morris makes the case that war has played an essential role in mankind's development and in the growth of human well-being. The book endorses not just strong government but imperialism; as applied to recent history, this translates into strong support for the historic role of the British Empire and the current global policies of the United States.

Morris isn't one to shy away from big, sweeping theses. In Why the West Rules--For Now (2010), he took on the much-studied subject of why modernity first appeared in northwestern Europe and has been dominated by that part of the world and its offshoots. Its sequel, The Measure of Civilization (2013), proposed a metric for assessing how "developed" any particular historical culture was.

His new book's argument is rich and subtle. That is not to say it is convincing. It has a number of crucial ambiguities and at least one central thesis that is very controversial and, like all good theses in history, subject to empirical disproof. The story also has an important missing element, one that makes sense of things the author otherwise has difficulty fitting into his argument. Adding that missing element--the way that resource constraints limited human options until innovation took off in the 17th century--gives us a different, more accurate picture.

The book's thesis is Hobbesian, as Morris explicitly lays out. Human beings, he writes, are naturally territorial and aggressive; Lord of the Flies is a better portrait of our nature than Coining of Age in Samoa. Consequently, the default setting for human society is one with little or no large-scale, organized conflict but lots of persistent small-scale violence, such as fights, brawls, and raids.

The result is a very high rate of violent death, amounting to as much as 20 percent of all deaths in hunter-gatherer societies. (This claim is disputed, as Morris notes, but he is correct that the evidence supports this reading of the Stone Age past.)

In this, human beings are like one of our two closest biological relatives (chimpanzees) but unlike the other (bonobos).The amount of chronic interpersonal violence means that complex social institutions and trade do not develop--not among chimps, and not among humans for most of our history as a species.

Unlike chimpanzees, Morris continues, human beings have the ability to evolve socially as well as biologically. Our ancestors invented agriculture in those parts of the world (the "lucky latitudes") whose flora and fauna were particularly suited to domestication. This led to a rise in human numbers, to more division of labor, and to greater pressure on resources. The initial response to that pressure was migration into empty lands. Meanwhile, high levels of violent death remained the norm. Eventually, Morris argues, population pressure changed the incentives and led to a major innovation: war.

The obvious immediate result of war is a sharp rise in the number of violent deaths as the scale of killing increases. But war also creates bandit groups that control the means of violence and use it to organize people. The incentives facing these predatory groups initially encourage them to plunder and kill others, but soon it becomes clear that the longer-term incentive is to conquer them (often brutally) and incorporate them into an expanded social unit. Once this is done, the roving bandits become stationary bandits: a polity's ruling class.

This Leviathan then reduces the level of chronic violence in society, Morris writes, by punishing violent conduct and getting the...