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A review by socraticgadfly
War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots by Ian Morris
2.0
Provocative book with logical holes the size of Swiss cheese
Squarely in the Pinker tradition, Ian Morris claims not only that we’re getting better all the time, but that “productive war” is a large reason why.
First, there’s the old “correlation is not necessarily causation” issue. It’s a huge one here. Human self-domestication, on both physical and cultural evolution, since the rise of the Age of Agriculture, is more likely to be more of, or more important of, a cause. On the physical evolution toward domesticity, it may not happen as quickly as with the Russian red foxes of Dmitri Belyaev and students but surely it happens. There’s good evidence for it.
And, since war is cultural, there’s surely other cultural evolution angles besides warfare that have had more importance in reducing human violence, even if we don’t know what they are. Again, though, agriculture and the forced sedentary nature of it is surely one factor, and Morris admits as much by noting that “non-productive war” was generally by nomads.
Second, while he notes that “productive war” has been less productive, to put it mildly, for the losers, especially nomad losers who got “cages,” he mever really wrestles with how much less productive, to use his words, it was.
He is definitely at fault here, like Pinker. Both likely overrate the violence of hunter-gatherer cultures, and ignore how "caging" (to use Morris' own word) of modern hunter-gatherers on largely "unproductive" (from agriculturalist POV) land increases that violence vis-a-vis pre-10,000 BCE hunter-gatherers.
Third, for making such expansive claims, he never even tries, other than death rates (and note what I said above about correlation and causation) to do a measurable explanatory framework.
Fourth, Morris ignores the issue of state monopolies on violence outside of war. Policing within nation states, as far as use of violence, is likely more “productive” in the way he means than war is. Here, he goes beyond even Pinker, who does take this into account.
Fifth, Morris has logical errors elsewhere. He talks about how the big testes of chimps are probably due in large part to sperm competition, and places this in the context of violence between males. He then notes bonobos have the same size of testes, and tries to claim sperm competition is the same for them. Likely not. Likely, being a Pinkerian, he’s latched on to an ev psych “explanation.”
I was on the 2/3 star borderline. Had its overall ranking here been a 3.5, it maybe might have gotten a third star from me. But at a 4 overall? No chance.
Squarely in the Pinker tradition, Ian Morris claims not only that we’re getting better all the time, but that “productive war” is a large reason why.
First, there’s the old “correlation is not necessarily causation” issue. It’s a huge one here. Human self-domestication, on both physical and cultural evolution, since the rise of the Age of Agriculture, is more likely to be more of, or more important of, a cause. On the physical evolution toward domesticity, it may not happen as quickly as with the Russian red foxes of Dmitri Belyaev and students but surely it happens. There’s good evidence for it.
And, since war is cultural, there’s surely other cultural evolution angles besides warfare that have had more importance in reducing human violence, even if we don’t know what they are. Again, though, agriculture and the forced sedentary nature of it is surely one factor, and Morris admits as much by noting that “non-productive war” was generally by nomads.
Second, while he notes that “productive war” has been less productive, to put it mildly, for the losers, especially nomad losers who got “cages,” he mever really wrestles with how much less productive, to use his words, it was.
He is definitely at fault here, like Pinker. Both likely overrate the violence of hunter-gatherer cultures, and ignore how "caging" (to use Morris' own word) of modern hunter-gatherers on largely "unproductive" (from agriculturalist POV) land increases that violence vis-a-vis pre-10,000 BCE hunter-gatherers.
Third, for making such expansive claims, he never even tries, other than death rates (and note what I said above about correlation and causation) to do a measurable explanatory framework.
Fourth, Morris ignores the issue of state monopolies on violence outside of war. Policing within nation states, as far as use of violence, is likely more “productive” in the way he means than war is. Here, he goes beyond even Pinker, who does take this into account.
Fifth, Morris has logical errors elsewhere. He talks about how the big testes of chimps are probably due in large part to sperm competition, and places this in the context of violence between males. He then notes bonobos have the same size of testes, and tries to claim sperm competition is the same for them. Likely not. Likely, being a Pinkerian, he’s latched on to an ev psych “explanation.”
I was on the 2/3 star borderline. Had its overall ranking here been a 3.5, it maybe might have gotten a third star from me. But at a 4 overall? No chance.