Male-Male Competition: Globalization, War, and Violence

00:00:00 [Music] Is this working? Is this working? It's not working. Oh, it is. Uh, hi Joe. Uh, I'm Ednassian, director of the Helix Center. Uh, today's round table was u proposed and organized by professor sheets Johnson. Uh before I introduce her, I just like to uh remind

00:00:30 you that our next round table is on November 17 and it's on animal language. Uh professor she Johnson is a philosopher whose first life was a as a dancer, choreographer, professor of dance and dance scholar. Uh okay. She has an ongoing courtesy professor appointment in the department of philosophy of Oregon univers University of Oregon and she has published numerous articles and a number of books. Her books include

00:01:02 the phenomen The phenomenology of dance, the roots of thinking, the roots of power, animate form and gendered bodies, the roots of morality, the primacy of movement and the corporeal turn and anti interdisciplinary reader. She received an MA in dance and a PhD in dance and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin where she also studied evolutionary biology. She was awarded the distinguished fellowship for her studies of xenophobia by the institute

00:01:34 of advanced study Durham University think United Kingdom in its inaugural year the theme of which was the legacy of Charles Darwin. Uh professor she Johnson will introduce the other guests and then we'll move on. Thank you. Well, thank you very much to all of you for being here. I would also like to thank uh Edner Cessian for all of his extraordinary hospitality. It has been a great pleasure to uh be

00:02:05 invited here and to have organized uh this round table and to have gotten in touch with such illustrious people here um whom I've just had the pleasure of of meeting actually uh at lunchtime and getting to know except for Jim Lieberman whom I've been in correspondence with for at least the past year. But um I'd like to thank our participants also for coming and um because I have just had the pleasure of meeting them and I have

00:02:37 not memorized their backgrounds, I'm going to just introduce them now to you. Um this over here is Brian Ferguson. He's an anthropologist uh who teaches at Rutgers University. Um his main areas of interest are war and political violence. A generalist, he has published on war in tribal societies and among ancient states, archaeological evidence regarding the origins of war, large-scale identity linked violence in

00:03:08 the contemporary world on human nature and war and anthropological theory about war. He is currently writing a book that examines theories about human nature and aggression through reports about chimpanzees in the wild. His other interests are culture and biology, policing, and the development of organized crime in New York history. So he's has a very broad background that

00:03:38 I'm sure is going to enrich our discussion as is John Han's uh uh career as a writer, a science writer. He has written for a number of of uh journals and has been his most recent book end of war which was published in 2012 has been called the best book I've ever read in a very long time by the journalist David Swanson. It was called a thoughtful, unflapable, closely argued book by novelist Nicholas Nicholson

00:04:11 Baker and a heartfelt and important book by evolutionary psychologist David Barrage. So um he has also written for I should say he's a former senior writer at scientific American and is currently a science journalist and director of the center for science writings at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken New Jersey. Jim Lieberman is a psychiatrist

00:04:42 who uh is an ameritus professor at George Washington University. He was a practicing psychiatrist for many years. Uh he served as chief at the center for child and family mental health. Um he has written extensively on the psychiatrist Otto Ron most recently editing the letters of Sigman Freud and Otto Ronk and inside psychoanalysis a book that received very high credits in

00:05:13 a recent review. Other areas of interest are sex education and family planning, couples therapy and nonviolent conflict resolution. uh he plays the cello in a orchestral group and he has said that his firsthand experience in malemale competition includes chess and wrestling in high school and college and going through medical school at the University of California at San Francisco where within

00:05:44 82 classmates 72 of them were male. So uh we have a very fine bunch of of uh discussants here tonight. uh and what I want to do is start out with uh a few remarks, introductory remarks and from there we will go on to just a very unfolding discussion among us and uh with questions and and uh

00:06:15 confrontations maybe and elaborations among us. So uh I start with just saying that little attention is paid to the fact that in his book the descent of man selection and relation into with relation to sex. Darwin devoted 12 chapters to malemale competition. He called it the law of battle. Starting with mollisks and working his way up through avens through mammals, devoting ultimately two

00:06:45 chapters to man. Uh the law is certainly not sanctioned or obeyed by every male, but given human history, it appears an undeniable phenomenon all the same. Malemale competition warrants examination. It's buried in present- day research under the soberette of sperm competition and it never surfaces as real malemale competition. And I myself devoted a chapter to real malemale competition in

00:07:17 a book called the roots of morality. And I want to just uh offer a few quotations from different people to give a kind of uh idea of real life malemale competition. First of all, Churchill said that nothing is Churchill, Winston Churchill

00:07:48 said that there's nothing so exciting as to be shot at shot at without result. Erns Becker who wrote a book called the denial of death said that if we don't have the omnipotence of gods we can at least destroy like gods Shakespeare in the corolanis wrote one character said this these are lines from one of the characters

00:08:19 let me have war say I it exceeds peace as far as day does night it's spritly waking audible able and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplelexy, lethargy, mold, sleepy, insensible, a getter of more bastard children than wars, a destroyer of men, and it makes men hate one another. Reason because then they less need one another.

00:08:52 Then there's also a kind of poem by a religion scholar by the name of Sam Keane who also has written uh some something in science literature. It's called the enemy. Start with an empty canvas. Sketch in broad outline the forms of men, women, and children. Dip into the unconscious well of your own disowned darkness with a wide brush

00:09:24 and stain the strangers with the sin sinister hue of the shadow. Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed, the hatred, the carelessness you dare not claim as your own. When your icon of the enemy is complete, you will be able to kill without guilt, slaughter without shame. Finally, I'd like to quote Darwin. This

00:09:55 is from uh the descent of man and selection in relation to sex. He writes, "Man is the rival of other men. He delights in competition and this leads to ambition which passes too easily into selfishness. The thematic that will start our discussion, I hope, has to do with the idea that war is a to my mind a

00:10:27 cultural elaboration of malemale competition which in a biological sense serves the reproduction for the reproduction of the species. In other words, malemale competition in the biological world is a is a sexual phenomenon that serves reproduction. My point will be that that malemale competition has been culturally elaborated by humans in various incundry ways. But I'd like to start and ask uh

00:11:01 because it has come up in our discussion at lunchtime and it served as a kind of introductory. Brian, if you want to start in with some remarks on malemale competition and war. Certainly. Um, well, Maxine and I, uh, there are many literatures to read and your your own thoughts and your work are shaped by the literature that you're involved in. And I've been working on the anthropology of war for quite a long time. And that involves both looking at ethnographic

00:11:32 discussions of war archaeological evidence but also uh responding to uh and challenging some theories that I see coming out of primatology chimp studies in particular and also uh evolutionary psychology and in these areas uh those fields Darwin's law of battle not in that phrase uh is very prominent and it's the foundation of lots of theorizing about conflict and and more than that. In evolutionary psychology,

00:12:03 the idea of an unbroken continuum of struggle between males ultimately directed at reproductive success is not only the image of our past, but it's the foundation for many other theories about uh gender, the nature of different genders today, the inborn nature, uh on things like why we root for sports teams. uh many different theories are built upon it and my own research finds that ethnographically that is looking at

00:12:35 tribal peoples that have been discussed described since the time of Columbus and more recently by anthropologists there's a tremendous amount of variation in terms of how much violence there is how much warfare exists how people respond to aggressive impulses whether if you go from one society where one will be considered somehow not a man if one doesn't extract violent revenge on another man for uh reflecting light from a mirror on uh the other man's wife.

00:13:05 That is an expectation where in another society, this is South American Indian society, uh there's a real cultural disavowel of violence and such that when occasionally they have to kill a witch, which occasionally they do, even the person who does that with the social sanction of it's got to be done. no one will ever share food from the same cup from that person again because they think they're irrevocably damaged inside. So there are real cultural variations. But archaeologically I think

00:13:37 what is important is that there's many claims out there that the archaeological record shows uh war is ubiquitous in our in our prehistoric past. Those cases uh and I've done a lot of research on that and be happy to talk about it. Those cases involve very selective presentation of the of relatively few a very few examples where signs of multiple violent death are present. And if you take uh what I believe is a more proper methodology of looking at the

00:14:08 entire archaeological record of say uh Europe or the near east which I've just completed research on. What you find is an utter absence of signs of war in the earliest record. Then it begins sporadically in different places and gets more common until eventually you get to the copper age or so. Uh when war is is ubiquitous of course Europe it's our image of Conan the barbarian but you see it develop over time and it's not there to start. What I think is one of

00:14:41 the most important findings of this research is that in one particular area of the near east, which is known as the southern Levant, and this is an area that goes from Lebanon, uh, southern Syria, uh, Jordan and Israel, very different from the record today, that while you've got evidence of war in all other areas of the Near East and all through Europe, abundant evidence of war, there's not a single case that you can say war existed in a period that goes from 13,000 BC to well 13 thou 13

00:15:12 13,000 BC to about 3200 BC about 10,000 years uh 10,000 years without a single documentable case of war and I think the reason for that is that they found these are the people who domesticated plants and animals and I think they domesticated conflict and I think that there are signs that they had developed a peace system so I think that's an optimistic note but it also to me says that the Darwin's law of battle doesn't necessar necessarily apply to uh cultural beings. And I know your writing

00:15:43 talks a lot about culture and and uh humanity and how people try to distance themsel the the idea that humans are above uh the animal kingdom. Uh this is looking at culture as an emergent domain uh that has different ways of processing conflicts. So that's what I work on and that's what my kind of response to your uh topic here. Okay. John, do you want to add to that? Um, yeah. So, first I want to say that Brian is somebody who got me interested

00:16:17 in in the issue of war and especially the roots of war. Um, and and that culminated in my writing this book, The End of War, which just came out earlier this year. And um I actually wanted to ask this audience a a question by way of of setting up uh what I have to say. Um one of the reasons that I I wrote the end of war was because of uh my perception of public attitudes toward war. So here's my question for all of

00:16:47 you. How many of you think that it is possible for humanity to stop fighting wars once and for all someday? So a world without war between nations and and without even the threat of war, world peace, permanent world peace. How many of you think such a world is possible? Okay, this is fairly typical. What that's maybe seven or eight people out of out of maybe I don't know 50 or 60.

00:17:19 It's so I've been asking this question um at every opportunity for about 10 years now and uh and usually between 80 and 90% of uh respondents say war is a permanent part of the human condition. um my students I teach at a college in Hobok and it tends to be more 90 95% I' I've had classes where every single student said that um and not only uh will there not be world peace but hell

00:17:49 no there won't be world peace. They're adamant on this issue. They think that it's really naive to believe that humans can stop fighting uh wars once and for all. Let me ask you another question. How many of you think that there is a strong biological component um and even more than that that that war somehow is an expression of human nature? War is an expression of human nature really. So that means that some of you uh who think that war is inevitable um

00:18:19 maybe see other reasons as significant. I wrote my book first of all because I think that the view that war is an expression of n human nature that it's really ancient and innate this is what uh Brian was talking about is wrong empirically that there is massive evidence to show that war is actually a quite recent cultural um innovation. It started really the oldest evidence is maybe 13,000 years old this mass grave

00:18:50 uh in this den. Uh but really the evidence starts um about 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and then you see it arise in other parts of the world and and some people object that well we don't have any evidence of humans doing anything before 10,000 years ago and that's obviously false because we have evidence of the emergence of uh of art and and music and religion and all sorts of other cultural innovations going back tens of thousands of years before uh the origin of war. And what concerns me

00:19:21 about um the the fatalism uh toward uh warfare is that it can become uh self-fulfilling and I see signs of that um in the world today. Uh Barack Obama when he was accepting his Nobel Peace Prize um and I think uh I I I think he you know you can say this of him. I think he felt guilty that he was accepting it right after he'd announced he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He recognized that that was

00:19:52 a little bit embarrassing, but he had a statement to the effect, I'm pretty sure you've seen this, Brian, um that uh war appeared with the first man and we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetime. So, he's making a scientific statement there. I'm not sure if he had been reading the uh the literature on warfare written by especially for some reason a bunch of uh very prominent scientists at Harvard. I call them the Harvard Hawks. This is Edward Wilson, Steven Pinker, uh Richard

00:20:24 Rangum, Steven Leblanc, people like that. But uh this idea that war is in our genes somehow has become very per pervasive and I think it has led to uh an easy excuse for our own uh hawkishness and uh and militarism. So first of all it's empirically wrong and second it u has bad consequences in the world today. But don't you think that there is a difference between saying that it's in your genes and saying that

00:20:55 it's a cultural elaboration of something that is naturally there? Because the other thing is that indication is that I think the distinction needs to be made between using the term humans and using the term malemale competition because normally as far as history goes, it's not women who start wars and it's not women who fight wars. So you have to really make the distinction between uh malemale competition within a biological

00:21:25 framework that serves reproduction and malemale competition that has become culturally elaborated by humans more recently I agree more recently in the service of honing heroes cultivating warriors who will fight etc. And I think that uh that those two distinctions really need to be made because it's not that I don't think that war is in our genes. I I think that that's like a completely false and aberant notion. I

00:21:57 think on the contrary as per Samuel Keane's poem that I read uh it requires some very deep self-questing on the part of all humans in terms of their own predelections and own dispositions toward violence and toward uh uh just an awareness of their own um we'll just say uh their own morality with respect to other humans. What do you think, Jim?

00:22:27 A lot of thoughts here. Um, I grew up with movies like Batan and Corodor, uh, which the Americans were emptying their machine guns of the oncoming Japanese. Uh, and it took, uh, until after World War II for a new finding to emerge. General SLA Marshall found that most of the soldiers on both sides and in previous wars

00:22:59 were not firing their weapons at an oncoming enemy. If they could see the person, they would be less likely to shoot. 80% would not shoot. Then they looked back at stashes of weapons found uh in battlefields of for example the Civil War and they found these rifles that were muscle loaded were multiply loaded. They were soldiers figning pulling the trigger when they were not being supervised

00:23:30 because the oncoming enemy was an inhibition. And uh this uh these findings have been elaborated by Dave Gman in two books on killing uh which uh I think came out in 1995 with the second edition revised in 2009 and also he wrote on combat. He was a lieutenant colonel and trainer of troops at uh West Point, now retired. And he said that um

00:24:03 after World War II, while the General Marshall's findings were were hotly disputed by by military people, it's now been established, but it's also been established that uh normal men can be trained to shoot. First of all, uh if they're supervised closely. Second, if the shooting is at a distance where the face of the enemy is not coming toward you. And so many more military casualties are

00:24:33 inflicted on retreating troops than on advancing troops. Uh the other thing that's happened, of course, is that distance killing has been increased. The weaponry has been increased. It's easier to drop a nuclear weapon on a city than it is to shoot somebody whose eyes you can see. So it turns out that just as we have learned something about uh human nature being less violent than we thought, we also

00:25:03 have the capability to to be much more disruptive than we could in the past. So this is the dilemma, the the conundrum of of the present. Uh Gman says that of recruits nowadays uh to the military uh they can now with special training methods developed since World War II but prior to Vietnam you can convert the 80% or the 90% so that 90% now will

00:25:33 fire and did fire at human targets facing them in Vietnam. And Vietnam was also the beginning of a strong attention to PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a high suicide rate in in returning veterans and in uh active soldiers. So there's a lot of psychology that we have to uh struggle with in this. Uh but u in a way I think it's it's progress if we can save ourselves from the big instruments of

00:26:05 killing. Uh when I was growing up there was a draft and uh in order to be a conscious objector you had to show that you were a good Quaker or member of the Brethren church or whatever. Uh Catholics had a hard time although there was a Catholic peace movement and so on. And then uh the the draft ended and so uh there's uh really no need for anyone who hates war to sign up. But it's

00:26:35 interesting that when you sign up now, if you enlist, you have to sign a statement saying that you are not a conscientious objector. Which probably makes sense, except the people who are signing up now were not raised brethren or Quakers. They don't know what conscientious objector is really about until they get into the training. And then a lot of them crash. And so there's a there's an organization called the Center on Conscience and Ward which gives legal counseling to people who have signed a statement saying they're not a CEO and then they find out

00:27:06 that they are. The the derivative of this also is that Dave Gman says there may not be uh atheists in the foxholes but there are a lot of conscientious objectors. Any comments on that? Well, it's um this is an issue that's uh come up a number of times. I've come across it. Um Grossman's work uh Marshall's work is is something that I I find very uh

00:27:39 congenial. I I like the idea that humans don't that humans do have an inhibition against killing. Um, I just haven't been able to uh determine that by looking at the ethnographic record uh of other societies. What I I' I've looked there's it's really a gap in what anthropologists do when they study war of asking people how do you feel about uh having killed somebody? Uh they look at the acts of war, they look at what leads to war. Uh they don't ask

00:28:11 many questions like that. And what's interesting is that a number of societies have some kind of uh ritual that involves uh segregating the man killers after they've come back uh for a period of time and purifying them before they go back into their normal daily life. And if someone like the Yanomami, I've written about the Yanomami, this is a tribal group in Brazil uh and Venezuela. If you don't go through that ritual, the feeling is that you begin to

00:28:42 rot inside. Uh, and if too much time has happened between, like if you're in a raid that takes two weeks to get back from, you might begin to feel the sensations of rotting inside before you get home. So, this goes along with that very definitely. But there's a group of people called the Elangot in uh in Southeast Asia. Uh and an anthropologist and there were head hunters and the anthropologists queried them deeply about uh whether they felt shame uh or

00:29:14 anything like that for killing and just couldn't elicit anything like that at all. So the problem for me is that it hasn't been really studied. I I don't feel comfortable in making any kind of generalizations, but I can't say that I find Grossman's finding to be backed up. Maybe just because there hasn't been enough work on it. It seems that a lot of societies I mean and in United States societies in United States society unless you're in a military family and that's some people who work uh with soldiers are now

00:29:45 talking about the military class, you know, very unself-consciously. These are people who know this is what you're going to do when you get to be of that age. For someone like me who wasn't, the idea of killing anybody at any time was just uh uh impossible. Something you could see on a screen, but not something you would ever contemplate doing yourself. But in some other societies, it's kids are grazed with the idea of when you grow up, you're going to have to fight and uh and you you should want to fight. So, I just don't know how much this is a human thing and how much this is a cultural thing. And you know, the

00:30:15 malemale competition can be expressed in nonviolent ways as well. And and you know, I wouldn't I wouldn't disown female female competition. I I went to high school, you know, and and uh you have a daughter. Yeah, that's right. So, um but there's there's a there's gender stereotyping too that goes on of, you know, male competition means you punch him in the face and female competition means you say you ruin the reputation. Uh so

00:30:46 that's, you know, that's what you expect. I I think um in my book I I remind people that before we got into this age of uh of uh genetic determinism and fascination with biological uh contributions to um human nature. Um there was much more interest in cultural um explanations for what we do. I think that Margaret me still had one of the the best theories of war. She wrote a little paper came out in 1940. Uh I

00:31:16 think the title was something like war uh is an invention not a biological necessity and talked about war as an idea that people had to um invent and then it um and then it propagates just as many other ideas do marriage and and cooking and trial by jury and a lot of the things that actually have improved our lives. The problem with war is that it's got this bizarre property of uh spreading whether or not people want it.

00:31:48 And you can sort of think of how that happens in a very simple way. If you've got a a region with 10 peaceful tribes and and there's just one tribe in the middle, let's say it just happens to have a charismatic sociopath as its leader who thinks that fighting other people would be a really fun thing to do. And that tribe starts attacking the others. What are they going to do? they either can run away or uh they submit to the uh to the aggressive tribe or they fight against it. And in this way, uh,

00:32:18 warlike behavior and militarism spread. And the the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Herurie has written in a way that I find really persuasive about um how this process transform societies around you know beginning around 10,000 years ago the the time period that we talked about and how um it's because war actually and mass killing does not come naturally to uh to people that we started to uh come

00:32:48 up with these cultural norms that glorified uh marshall skills and killing and courage and uh and all the this sort of thing. It's a war transformed culture and it actually uh created the kind of macho model of uh masculinity that a lot of people now think is completely um innate. So um so I think culture actually is by far a more powerful explanation of war.

00:33:19 think uh that to understand something like the the you know Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan or even uh or the aggression of the United States um you can go back to the experiments of Stanley Mgrim the old the classics in social psychology where it's conformity and deference to authority that leads people to commit horrific acts even when they are revulsed by them. So the the Mgrim in the Mgrim experiments, a lot of those

00:33:49 subjects who thought that they were shocking people possibly um lethally. I'm assuming that everybody here is familiar with those. They were extremely distressed and in some you know some were sadistic and were quite happy to do it. But a lot of people were very distressed by it and they did it anyway just because this guy in a white coat was telling them to do this. So this I think is actually a more disturbing fact about about our our uh makeup than any kind of you know innate uh propensity

00:34:21 for war that we are so malleable. We are so subject to the influence of uh of people in power. Yes. I'm I'm glad you brought that up because I think that's a great um um motivation for people if there is a it's like Hitler's thousand-year Reich, mobilizing people because there's a leader there who is who is charismatic enough to propel people to take up their guns, etc. and and go fight for the glory of of their nation. But I think

00:34:54 also in present day times there's an equal. It's not only national but it's religious and the religious is feeding in in the same way that the national did and I think on the other hand that which we haven't mentioned is the development of technology which makes it so easy to uh decimate an enormous I mean a whole nation practically um in terms of just technological developments aside from the drones which can target smaller but

00:35:26 I was thinking of nuclear power and the uh the spread of nuclear power. Gman makes the point that about 3% of the recruits had no compunction about uh these exercises or actual killing. And he also points to the fact that uh demographically about 3% of the population would qualify as psychopathic which means not having a normal conscience, sense of responsibility or empathy. And it turns out that this is

00:35:57 not a disabling psychiatric condition. It may be and there are far more uh people uh with that diagnosis in prison than their numbers would warrant. That is to say, there might be 40% of prisoners in in uh penitentiies who would qualify. But um I recall hearing that the Nazi extermination machine was run by 3% of the population. And it's probably true when people say I I didn't know a thing about it that in fact most of the Germans didn't know about it. But it

00:36:30 that 3% can be very significant. Also the media like to play up the abnormal. So you hear a lot more about violence and and sadism and craziness of of this type or uh unscrupulous behavior than is represented in the population. And I think that there's this wouldn't be the case if somebody didn't have an interest in portraying human beings like this, whether it's to sell newspapers or to

00:37:00 sell uh machine guns or uh to sell police uniforms or to to to make purchase of guns legal, things like that. I just I'd just like to add something to that. Um that uh war turns people into virtual psychopaths. I think we've seen that over and over again. And I I suspect that there were there were more than 3% of the the German population who if they didn't participate directly in in genocide would have been willing to

00:37:32 do so because they'd basically been brainwashed. If you know I've read detailed accounts of what happened at MI lie. Um you know the the massacre in and Vietnam war and it's and it's it's mass psychopathy. Uh it's it's people who are transformed by the culture of war into monsters who have absolutely um no normal human uh concern for others and end up slaughtering brutalizing women

00:38:02 and children completely. They even killed all the animals in in uh in MI. And you see this over and over again through through human history. And I think that the obvious solution is to try to you know it's the old idea of of we have to recognize that war is is uh morally wrong. It's also practically it's it often devastates societies. I think our society is a lot of our economic problems are directly attributable to these uh huge costly

00:38:34 lengthy wars that we've had in Iraq and uh Afghanistan. And uh and I'm hopeful that finally once and for all we can have this kind of cultural um awakening and recognize how wrong militarism and war are and put it behind us once and for all again with the help of this kind of cultural malleability. How do you do that without a moral education? Well, I think it will require I I'm certainly working on my students.

00:39:05 Believe me, they they But how how in what way? I tell them first of all about um the that I think that the theories of war um that attribute it to biology are wrong because many of them uh believe in that. I also talk a lot about um the second most popular theory I'm sure a lot of people uh here believe it is um that war is the inevitable result of uh too many people and too few resources. So it's it's kind of ecological competition. Brian has has written about uh this

00:39:36 quite a bit. There's a uh an archaeologist at Harvard, Steven Leblanc, who's who's written a book on this. Um, and it's a very popular theory right now, especially, and I'm really I find this really sort of disturbing among green progressives, dovish green progressives who fear that overpopulation um and uh global warming are are going to come together to cause terrible uh scarcity in the future. famines and and

00:40:07 water shortages that are going to lead to catastrophic wars. I read this all the time. Bill McKibben, the leading environmental activist, has written about it. And the problem is that there's just no empirical evidence for that point of view. uh the evidence really strongly suggests that um you sometimes uh resources uh play a role and and some countries, Imperial Japan was looking for more secure sources of uh fossil fuels, but generally it's war. It's the old idea of

00:40:39 war beginning war. Cultures of uh of war, militarized cultures find reasons to go um to war. And if there's anything that is positive out of seeing war as this kind of self-perpetuating meme, it's that we don't have to do anything radical to our society as a means to ending war. We just have to end war. We have to focus on ending war and militarism uh themselves. But how how how do you do that? Just we'll have questions from the audience

00:41:10 in like uh just in a little bit. I just want to keep going around. Brian, did you have a Well, I think that uh I I agree with John that it's an an important point that we reg the question John asked before is how many people believe war can be abolished in the future. Um is really I think the second question they ask and the first question is how many people believe that war has always been with us. If you believe that war has always been with us, I think the second question is

00:41:42 always going to be with us kind of follows naturally. The thing that I'm finding uh in in my archaeological research, not one thing that's very important is that across the board there's an absence of war when you had highly mobile people uh even in the beginnings of agriculture. It's war isn't necessarily linked totally to agriculture. You had war before agriculture. you had a lot of agriculture without war, but that you could have one area that could go for 10,000 years uh through periods of

00:42:15 population crashes when population had grown during favorable conditions and then unfavorable conditions led to drastic reductions in populations in the area. Classic Malthusian problems. Still no signs of war. And but I didn't mention before is that this isn't a case of well you just haven't found the evidence for this because this period continues up to 3200 BC. What happened in 3200 BC is that this is when the pharaohs arose in Egypt and began a

00:42:47 colonial empire in uh what they call Canaan. And in a matter of a hundred years every settlement in Canaan was fortified. You can't find a single fortification for 10,000 years before that. Then you can't find one without fortification after that. So it's not just the recovery of evidence. This shows that you can have a system even when there are resource conflicts, even when there's there's environmental disasters where the result isn't going to war. And I think if people know that,

00:43:18 that's step one. Step two, and this is one of the reasons I I spend so much time challenging a lot of uh biological theories of war, is I think it distracts attention to where you should look. And where you should look, I think considering modern warfare, the wars after the fall of the Soviet Union, tribal warfare is in the the self-interests of uh leaders. I think that this is the the key to understanding war not the genes of

00:43:48 everybody but what's the interest of leaders and take resources there's uh we had uh there was a a conference we had some uh postsviet scholars there talking about the the conflicts that were erupting all over the former Soviet Union ethnopolitical conflicts land is always an issue it's never a question of uh land to farm. There's got plenty of land to farm. Sometimes it's oil, but

00:44:18 land was always big because leaders were rising to power on the claims of this is our homeland. This is symbolic to us. And they were benefiting uh by these pleas by these these this this constructed history uh that uses land as a symbol of us against them who've always taken it away from us. And to me this is where you need to look who is making the decisions for war. What are

00:44:49 their interests in that particular situation? And then what I think makes humans particularly dangerous is that once leaders have and it's not inevitable that leaders are going to argue for war that they see that as their interest but once they do um they come to believe their own propaganda. They come to believe their their own reasons that they put out there for why it's not just something we need. It's right, it's moral. Uh you're a coward if you don't. Uh this is how they convince

00:45:20 people. But I think through to avoid cognitive dissonance, they come to believe it themselves. And it's important to look away from war is in your genes or what chimpanzees are doing uh to what leaders are doing now who might say there's always going to be war. Do you think that I'm sorry? Surely as I'm listening to you, it seems to me that there is a kind of fluidity in the way you are moving from

00:45:53 mailmale competition, aggression, violence, genocide, and war. But these are not all the same. It may be that you have to have aggression in war, but these are different uh categories of things. Uh the second thing is that it seems to me more often uh than saying something is moral in matters of war is that people are scared

00:46:24 and they go to war. They tell them there is a threat. So uh let's say the situation with Iraq was that there is a nuclear threat from Iraq. That's why we have to go to war. Afghanistan is because of al-Qaeda that's why we have to go to war. So, and that seems to me in a way a normal reaction to the extent that when we feel we are threatened, we want to defend ourselves. And that's why I'm a little bit puzzled by the uh period you are saying for 10,000

00:46:57 years there was no war is that those people were not threatened, there was no danger, there were no No, because there was no one going to war in the area. No, but there must have been threats. There must have been Why must there Why must there have been threats? Because food may be scarce. Uh weather may be bad in one place and excellent in another place. So they have a lot of uh that's all true. And so how did they deal with those?

00:47:30 They deal with those apparently through cooperative responses. They had centers where redistribution. We can find the centers of redistribution where people from different areas came together. They had cultic centers that united vast areas of communal labor from people without residences around them. People were coming from different areas. How they handled these things is really the question I believe. Uh so it's that's a great question. But

00:48:00 the what I would suggest is that you're you're exemplifying the inevitability of violent conflict and the record doesn't show it. And it's it's again it's not that it's so long ago he can't find it. If you go to the northern tigress at the same area, if you go to Anatoli at the same area, abundant evidence of war, but in this area there isn't any. So this poses a question. What were they doing differently? And this is an area where domestication began. This is where they

00:48:32 began to where they went from wild to cultivated plants and wild to domesticated animals. And what I believe they did is somehow uh developed a peace system. One one of the things we know in anthropology we figured out in anthropology is that the the causes of war are one thing but there is a separate set of variables that you could call causes of peace. And they're not the same. Causes of peace include things like uh uh interchange between different areas, uh cooperative activities,

00:49:04 joining different groups, uh the recognition of some kind of social authority that can say no to violence, uh effective means of conflict resolution, and a value system that says you don't resort to violence. That's not the factors that lead to war, which you can say are resource scarcity, social hierarchy, bunch of other things, but they're different and together they make different kinds of combinations. Going back to the male male uh issue, one of the things that's intriguing about the

00:49:35 southern lavan, not definitive, but intriguing is that there isn't any sign uh basically looking at burials and art of a male oriented hierarchy. there isn't sign of a gender hierarchy there which is very intriguing but I just don't know enough because I don't know about other areas in the near east where there was war whether they had signs of a gender hierarchy or not the article was about the southern Levant but goes along with what you're saying here so there were threats there were dangers uh

00:50:07 there there was population crashes but when there was population crashes there you don't find war where in the northern tigress area you do so there's something about the way people handled it culturally. So if there were two tribes and they had some dispute because uh somebody stole a girl from one tribe and the tribe went to fight with them and get the girl back. Uh would you have considered that war or you have some other definition of war? No, that's that's what you would call

00:50:37 war among the Yanomami. They didn't do that. Uh the issue is how did they avoid it? And if they had some kind of mechanism for resolving the dispute, you've got a beef and here's how we're going to handle it. That's what you might infer. You don't have the evidence of it and people haven't really looked for the evidence of it yet. Uh somehow it was handled. So the it's not that this was sweetness and light that people didn't have problems if they found a way to do it. Now, why wouldn't one tribe like John's idea of uh one tribe is led

00:51:09 by this sociopath? If you have a a kind of a a a local world system of people who as you had in these areas who are imshed in trade and intermarriage and movement uh common ritual and all of these things, your life is dependent being on a part of this system. And someone who says to his followers, uh, let's go out and kill all of them. Uh, well, it might be very difficult to get a following to do that when people would say, are you crazy? Then they'll never

00:51:40 trade with us again. Then we'll never be able to marry with them again. Then they won't we won't be able to go to the ceremonies. Are you crazy? People credit. Go ahead. Go. Yeah, go ahead. I I'll make an exception. Wait until we have the question. Well, you ask questions cuz I think mail competition. Let let me let me in five minutes. In five minutes. May I make an exception, Ed, because

00:52:12 he's raised his hand several times. Okay. Is that all right? Okay. Okay. First of all, the problem is we can't you have to walk up otherwise you can't do it. Okay. So, could you just wait five minutes? I can wait 10 minutes. Okay. Okay. Um I'll still be here. Um this is um I wanted to bring Go ahead Jim. Did you want to say something? It'll be slightly different topic, but go ahead. Okay. because I wanted to follow this up

00:52:42 a little bit because in some ways this leads into globalization and the fact that we're living in a global world where there are more and more people to uh that we interact with and um it seems to me that uh it's it's really interesting to me that Jung Carl Jung the psychiatrist never never included strangers within his archetypal uh system and strangers are very much um

00:53:17 present in non-human as well as human uh animal societies. In other words, a stranger is recognized as someone who doesn't belong to our group and they are treated in a very different different way. And it seems to me that with globalization that uh there are fewer and fewer strangers now and more and more enemies or potential enemies because they either don't believe like we do or they have goods that we want that they're not

00:53:48 willing to send us and etc etc. So it seems to me that with globalization, I mean, you're talking about a small area here where people can interact and the thing that it seems to me that one of the things that that compounds the problem is the fact that there are different so many different languages now I mean in terms of English has become kind of standard but still that's an imposition on people who don't speak English that they have to they have to learn English and it's not their native

00:54:19 language. So there are a lot of ways in which this kind of communal coming together with tribal people is in this global world that we live in is it's it's a an exacerbated problem. And um it doesn't seem to me that we're able to grapple with it uh in some kind of moral way because it's so focused on economics and not on humanness and on recognizing this this uh poem by at least it made an

00:54:51 impression on on me. this uh this really delving into ourselves and coming to grips with the person that we are and our own uh aggressive or violent or greedy or selfish proclivities until we come in contact with that and I would also agree with with Ed's comment about fear because fear is a very very basic human emotion and with respect to strangers fear is a very

00:55:23 it's definitive emotion and it seems to me when that's magnified into when strangers become enemies or potential enemies then fear is also uh magnified. I just I just want to try to um to lay my optimism on on everybody again especially because I that was that was slightly uh dark the way you were describing uh globalization. One thing that has

00:55:54 happened, you read some quotes about war um that glorified war and uh that talked about war. You know, you can find quotes from Teddy Roosevelt and people like that that make war sound like absolutely the coolest thing that you can do. The ultimate extreme sport, right? Yeah. You don't have world leaders talking in those terms anymore. Um war is uh is sometimes necessary but but it's a necessary evil. That's how uh war is

00:56:26 discussed even though of course there is jingoism and and drum beating uh when we go to war. What about Ahmedad? Ahmed Dundad, from what I've read, also talks about defending his country against aggressors, not glorifying war for its own sake, which is something that I associate with social Darwinism, late 19th century, early 20th century. Then we had World War I, and then we had World War II, which shattered any of these romantic notions that we had about

00:56:58 war. And but what about North Korea then? I mean there are a lot of countries, but these are countries that justify their own militarism in terms of fear, not in terms of some kind of positive goal of uh conquest for its own sake as a kind of uh ultimate expression of of uh vitality. But I just want to give you some empirical evidence that I think we are learning our lesson that war is um that war is destructive. It also often

00:57:28 undermines our goals. So war leads to resource scarcity instead of resource scarcity leading to war. So you probably know I wrote about this but also Steven Pinker in Angels of Our Better uh nature. Um we are now in a one of the most peaceful periods in recent human history. So uh war casualties population has been going like this but war casualties over the last decade globally have been about uh onetenth what they were annually in the second half of the

00:58:00 20th century and about 100th what they were in the first half of the 20th century and I think you know there some scholars say it's you know we're we're just looking at random fluctuations. I think we're seeing signs of humanity learning its lesson and moving beyond militarism. There's one huge glaring exception to that and I think it's the United States which is by far the most warlike country in in the world right now has a has a military budget as big as all other nations combined is now

00:58:32 constantly developing new technologies such as drones that are leading to new arms races. Everybody else wants drones now. Of course, terrorist groups are already acquiring drones. We're the biggest arms dealer in the world. I think if the United States can uh recognize its own militarism and how we are are harming our security with these policies that uh that the world could become demilitarized quite rapidly. Okay. May I ask a question?

00:59:03 Okay. Economically, militarism is very uh makes the US prosperous. No, that's not true. Isn't that true? No, it's not. Militarism the the if you look at the Fortune 500 uh Lheed Martin is I don't know 45 or 50 among the biggest corporations in the world. Lhey Martin is the biggest defense contractor in the world. they are dwarfed by Google and Apple and Amazon and uh and Walmart and and uh companies like that that

00:59:36 actually don't want war. They will benefit of off war if they have to. Yeah. But and I'm talking about for example, I just heard recently that for example in the state of Virginia, Virginia has a lot built a lot of naval vessels. Yes. and they don't want to stop building naval vessels because it's a very highly pro I mean it's a very good thing for them to be building naval vessels. So there's something about the military in terms of the production of of equipment and and of all kinds that

01:00:10 definitely the military-industrial complex Eisenhoweris but what I'm saying is that for our society as a whole um the health of those companies is not the same as the health of our nation as a whole. The military industrial complex for the amount of money that we invest in it is a lousy producer of jobs. It's it's minuscule compared to the jobs we get from investment in healthcare and education and energy and things like that. I just wish I think there is

01:00:40 enormous potential right now for a a really large peace coalition if you have a a politician with the guts and the eloquence to point out how crazy militarism is for our society and for the world as a whole. and that the military-industrial complex, sure, Loheed Martin is going to try as hard as it can to keep the defense budget up and be selling its stuff around the world, but we have to recognize that their interests are not shared by the rest of us. It's a much lower multiplier effect for

01:01:12 government money going into military spending than into other things. It it it doesn't promote prosperity in the same way that non-military spendings. But I would like to say one thing about fear before we and and who else and and I'll stop it. the the Iraq war is very instructive. I think uh this was generated fear. Uh the this was something that was basically uh the intelligence on this was of the flimsiest sort about the weapons of mass destruction. uh the evidence that this

01:01:42 was part of a uh a geopolitical strategy of a small group of people uh as uh the way the United States should project its power in the near east and elsewhere. very strong. Uh, and the one of the most intriguing things is very shortly after this war, I was talking to someone who was the um was head of the New Yorker's Washington bureau at the time. And as they were going into the Iraq war, when everybody had decided they were going into the war before the shooting

01:02:13 started, but it was a foregone conclusion, the phrase went around that they had to moral it up. They had to uh moral it up. And that's where the democracy thing came in. And and this was a very clear idea. We we can't just use the fear. We've got that, but we've got to moral it up. And so this is where you've got to be skeptical about leaders because leaders very often are the ones who generate the fear. Yeah. Uh let me just say that because then

01:02:44 we'll we'll open it up to the audience. But I just want to ask Jim if you had any other comment about this. It's removed. So, why don't we open it up? Okay. Um, yes. Well, thank you for uh really providing some very stimulating louder. I'm sorry. I have a partially paralyzed vocal cord and this is all I can do. Closer to the mic.

01:03:14 But I I thank you all for your comments which I think have been very stimulating. I feel like it's a lot more complicated than the issues that you've mentioned. Um power and control I think are almost if not actually instinctual. Um I think that uh the human being uh has impulses to hurt.

01:03:44 Um, I just heard a patient tell me, a patient I've known a long time just told me the for the first time that when he was four to 5 years old, he remembers dropping kittens down the stairwell of his building, then holding them underwater until the bubble stopped. Now I understand that some of this kind of behavior is a result of the trauma that he had experienced earlier but there's a lot of that that's out there. There's a lot of people that love

01:04:14 Shotenfra. Okay. And I think that's very important and I think that's that's something that I think may may be instinctual and is not something that's educated. I don't think that a three or four year old boy has been has been uh culturated to kill cats or uh or dissect insects or break the heads off of chickens. I think there's something instinctual there. Well, that's pathological behavior. It's not normal, is it?

01:04:45 I mean, my experience, I was a boy myself. I don't remember. Well, well, I would say Well, I would say what is the norm? You see, what I would say is that you didn't do it. That doesn't mean that you were in the majority. I think I was. Well, you think you were, but I'm not sure you were. Okay. Okay. Because you think you were doesn't mean you were. I think the sadistic child fits well into the 3% or the 10% who are abnormal. Yeah. But I think there's more than 3%. I really do. Yeah. Because Churchill would fit into the 3%.

01:05:16 How many hundreds of thousands of people fill our football stadiums every year? That's the more than 3%. Okay. are soccer stadiums. If you go around the world, it's more than 3%. Yeah, but soccer soccer is not sadistic. Football is, I grant you. Well, you know, it depends on how you play soccer and which team you're following and which player you're talking about. I wouldn't say that soccer's necessarily not sadistic. So, I think that that there's something about there's also

01:05:46 part of the reason for for competition, male competition and war is castration anxiety. We have to prove that we're not vulnerable. And we deal with that by trying to castrate somebody else. And this is a different level than you all have been talking about. I'm a Freudian analytic therapist, so this is the level that I think about many things at. And uh so I just think that there's a there's a

01:06:16 there's a a more basic element. Now, our speaker here says there's no war for 10,000 years. You know something? I don't know how that could be right. I understand that you spent 20 years researching that, but I think there's either something you're missing or something you don't understand. I just cannot believe that there has there was That's exactly what I'm talking about. You don't know anything about the area, yet you know the history better than someone who's gone through the entire archaeological record of this, gone through every reputed case, looked at

01:06:48 every instance and spoke to. Well, it doesn't necessarily mean I'm wrong. Well, it it doesn't by any comment. Your standard of wrongness and rightness, you are wrong. It doesn't. Okay. I would just next question. Hi. Um, my name is Ben Roth. Um, I'm also a group therapist as well as being analytically trained. I've been working for 10 years since 911 on um psycho

01:07:18 group therapies avoidance of uh talking about violent groups. Um as part of a correction uh not everybody fired at MI there was one platoon that didn't fire. Um this comes from Bob Lifton who I've spoken with. Uh they had recently lost their sergeant who was very beloved as a caretaker and they were in mourning and of the people that responded as a group the only group

01:07:51 that didn't fire at me live was this group had had recently lost their sergeant. Also as a correction Mgrim's experiments did not require lethal. Uh that's one of the criticisms of Mgrim's study is that it was painful, not lethal. The the top at the top of the dial, uh the people were told that it could be life-threatening and the it could be lifethreatening. The actor said, "I think I'm having a

01:08:22 heart attack or had some kind there's a difference." And then he went silent. So the subjects thought that the that the person might be uncomfortable. But it's not the same as pulling a switch in Awitz. Um my interest is in genocide which is a particular form of killing, mass killing. Um and that is usually derived from war. But I want to tell you about a French group therapist who might support some of your findings. He essentially

01:08:52 says all groups are established to establish security first. that that's the main goal and to have free transactions among the group. It's only when that is disrupted in some form and there is no mechanism for dealing with it that a group will become violent. And one of the ways that groups become violent is to find and other and other is defined as somebody not like the main characteristics of the

01:09:24 group. It's not quite a stranger uh because a stranger can be brought in and can be educated. But the other other seems to be a group phenomena which is used uh uh was used by Solomon Ash in the German studies by creating otherization and if you hear and analyze Hitler's speeches I haven't done it but I just uh disgust and uh

01:09:55 contempt for another person or another group was descent central issue of how Hitler spoke about Jews and this is a process of otherization. So when you look at this study in terms of group behavior they were not they were bypassing this plane where they were making somebody else into another by maintaining a secure group. Is there a question or just Well, the question I'd like you to

01:10:26 respond to the idea of security, not just domestication. Can I just I just want to point out that in a way you could just be talking about tribalism and e even the kind of fanaticism that you get with sports fans which I experienced firsthand and it's totally irrational and I assume that there is some evolved program for that but but that doesn't necessarily lead to um and and you even see it between you know Obama supporters and and Romney

01:10:58 supporters now that doesn't necessarily have to become become violent. And if we could if we could have a world in which we still have fanatical tribalism and all sorts of bickering and fighting over over uh politics and sports and whatever, but without the violence, which I think is quite possible, then obviously that would be a better world. And there's no reason uh that we can't achieve that. The the two those two programs, the violence and the tribalism

01:11:28 are not necessarily connected. They're two different things. They are, but they are in group theory and all all the all the issues about group tend to disprove your hypothesis. Okay. I'm Fritz Kendzel. I'm a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. U little bit closer to the mic. Um I'd like to just question the the issue of the conference. Is malemale competition does it lead to war?

01:11:58 Um male the unconscious anxiety with with male competition is envy and jealousy. Yes. Envy and jealousy. Envy is an intent to bust out someone's lights. Is to snuff out their flame. I can't stand it that you have it and I don't have it. Jealousy is you have more than I do. Uh so I'm going to demote you. I'm going to pull you down. But neither of those are

01:12:29 killing. Uh the um the other issue is going from biology to humans. Uh I was in a US medical center for federal prisoners in Missouri and I had the most violent mentally ill people. Um I did a study on violent prisoners versus nonviolent prisoners. I had the violent I had the prisoner stand in the center of a room and was me with my white coat uh on said, "I'm going to

01:13:00 take a step toward you. If you feel I'm too close, tell me to stop. Take a step." He go say, "Okay, take another step. Stop." The body buffer zone or territoriality around the inmate was four times larger in the violent people than in the nonviolent people. So there's a pathological territoriality that I think may if if two are going down corridors at right angles and they bump into each other there is an assault there's violence and

01:13:35 uh there the men would describe when I hit that point when they said stop they felt I was looming they actually felt I was rushing it was almost a hallucination I had I had stopped but they felt almost as if I like a zoom camera that that I was I was looming at them. So there was a perception suddenly I was dangerous when in fact uh I was not. So, and the the final thing is um

01:14:05 the um weapons of mass destruction Iraq, you can make a case for a kind of paranoid group where the the Wolson, Bush, Cheney, and so on are whooping each other up. And I kind of um if you listen to Hitler's tone in in these two or threehour rants uh uh that he had a tone of almost ecstasy there's a quality of almost erotic arousal

01:14:37 um that um the French have the expression fully adu madness of two or follow and so on that this thing escalates and it escalates to the point where they almost have to go to war. In other words, it's a it's a psychotic, delusional state. And I guess that's what I want to just introduce the notion that war may be psychotic. And remember, they they had a lot of help from supposedly rational liberals like some of the pundits for the New York Times

01:15:09 and going into Iraq. Um, thank you. I appreciate your comments. My name is Ben White. I'm a a psychotherapist in training. a little closer to the mic. Can you hear me? Closer to the mic. My name is Ben White. I'm a psychotherapist in training. And uh as I was listening, I was thinking of two instances of of male male confrontation that I've had in the last uh 3 days. I live in southern Vermont and I walk with my dog every day across the road and it's a dirt road on National Forest land

01:15:40 and to let him off a leash. You wandered up a corner the other day and I heard a gunshot uh ring out and I rounded the corner and there was a guy walking down the trail. He had a 22 pistol in his hand and thankfully my dog was fine. He was sitting there and and uh my thought was what the heck just happened? and he approached me, thankfully holstered his weapon and and had this very strange interaction with him, uh, where he proceeded to convince me that my dog was

01:16:12 posing some sort of threat uh, to him. He perceived and I maintain, as I'm sure everybody else does, that my dog is the sweetest dog in the world. Uh, and his contention was, he's grow he was growling at me, man. And my thought was, well, maybe if you put that 22 away, he wouldn't growl at you. Um, and I was left with this sensation of what the hell happened to this guy? What what was it that caused that reaction? Um, I was very interested in your in your comments uh about, you

01:16:44 know, attributing these kinds of tendencies to respond to conflict in a particular way maybe back to one event. And I think the application of uh theories on the inter intergenerational transmission of these responses to traumas. Everybody history is not without its traumas. And I'm very curious about how that uh how that has worked itself out in our in our culture. And I guess if I could pose this in a question, uh I would ask what

01:17:16 do how would you classify our role as people having informed conversations uh uh about this sort of thing in furthering this conversation and and maybe as members of of this world and this culture. I don't I'm not so diluted that I think that I can change the entire world but uh what do you think is our role? And I also just want to comment on on how uh I saw our I hate to use you gentlemen as as a as an example, but how I saw our little moment of uh of

01:17:48 conflict there and just pose the question, how would that have worked itself out differently uh had you two had different backgrounds with how to resolve conflict? Uh so I'll open that I guess to anybody. I didn't have my drum with you. Well, there's a number of qu Oh, go ahead. Um Oh, no. Go ahead. No, no, no, please. A number of possible answers. I mean, one is that it could be uh if you two

01:18:20 had very different these two individuals had very different backgrounds, it could have been a very different result. Uh it would have been something that uh it would have been seen. I I did my field research in Puerto Rico and one of the things that I saw was uh conversations escalate into nearly violent arguments in ways that took me quite by surprise when someone said something to challenge the um kind of the legitimacy of someone else speaking uh where to me it was just kind of normal back and forth. It was

01:18:50 taken in a very different way and it was suddenly pulling people apart. Um, I don't want to make too much out of that, but it was just a a different kind of reaction than I was accustomed to. And there's infinite numbers of ways you could multiply it. And I think going back to one of the things Ed said before that we have been in this conversation kind of conflating things from individual to males versus females uh to cultures and war and these it's important to keep these things distinct. uh when we're talking about what we can do about it, if you're dealing at the

01:19:22 individual level, I think that that's where you can make the the impact. I I don't think that um while the the idea that you were talking about about uh psychopathy and war, there's an article in the journal military review uh which I I can't remember the author's name, but it's something about the military utility of or the utility of the military psychopath where it is stated quite clearly, not as an intellectual exercise, you've got to

01:19:53 find these people because you can use them. Um and then I went to my friend a former drill sergeant said is there a process of finding these people in in uh basic training and said yes there is. Um so you know that's that's part of the system. It's not why wars happen. So that's where you go from something like psychopathy to uh war. Not in a in an integral way, but uh if you have psychopaths at the top uh and this is something that a lot of people have

01:20:24 argued, but if you get to that point in our political system, pretty good chance you're a psychopath. You know, people have said that maybe then it does have a factor. The idea of trying to discriminate these things is very important, but in a you said this was fluid. That's what we're going for. you know, we're going for fluid. So, if you're writing a paper, you got to be non fluid uh and try and tamp it down at the larger global level of war. Um some of the reactions uh when I was working on this some time ago not the recent

01:20:56 work on the near east but uh a similar project looking globally I told both my mother and my mother-in-law neither of whom had any academic inclination whatsoever that the point was that there was a time before war if you're going just by the evidence it's clear that there wasn't war uh in these earlier records both of them came back with something like you've got to be kidding me, you know, cuz they they just knew there was war. And and you know, as as you do, and and what I'm saying is I

01:21:28 could be wrong, but if I'm answering this kind of question, I'm saying let's look at evidence and and it's and for the near east and for the earlier periods in Europe, it's clear that there is evidence at in some places and in some times and in other places and in other times there isn't. and that you should take that as as the facts and then try to make your theories accommodate those rather than what you know before you go into it from the way you've grown up in our society. So,

01:21:59 you've got to I think for what you're doing, I think working at the individual level in Vermont, you know, I've got friends in Vermont and and they complain about what they call the alternos, the the new people move up who complain when their spent their spent shells land on their roofs and make noise. You know, that these guys just don't know how to do country living. So, you may have to make an adjustment for the Vermont uh local culture, too. Shoot my dog. May I say the A rational person would not risk life uh

01:22:32 in a confrontation with somebody who has a gun when you don't. So the the psychopath could be on either side, but a person a person with reasonable judgment would be able to avoid conflict. Um I am recalling the eth ethnology studies in the 1960s that showed that social animals like wolves and apes uh do have the male uh uh establishment of hierarchy among males. But this number two guy will make a

01:23:05 resignation move like this exposing the the jugular which stops the fight and that's good for the species. And uh I think what happens if they don't some get killed a few that's that's the issue you see everybody but it's not a but the majority the the the reflex works the reflex is a signal and it's the same thing in bab wounds it's a signal of surrender yes which doesn't work for men and didn't

01:23:36 work for men how do you know it doesn't work for men because we have evidence that it doesn't work well I don't think we have evidence but it [Music] But don't turn your back on the person with a gun. Hi everyone. Thank you um for the talk. My name is Elizabeth Reid. Um perhaps informed by past lectures here, I've chosen to go into a masters in social work program at NYU. Um I have two reflections and a question. My first reflection is I was interested in the

01:24:07 idea of sort of the contagion of the sociopathic leader and then sort of the contagion of war. um and going back to this 10,000 years of peace that reminded me of Eden. So it's I just wanted to bring of Eden like this idea of um Eden and then the fall and in that case what is the fall? The fall is from a concept a concept of war. Um so I just want to bring that as we bring our different concepts and different disciplines. I think there's some way that each of those inform perhaps the concepts we we live out. Uh

01:24:40 second uh reflection. Um I guess I want to I was I want to declare by allegiance to the optimistic side um along with along with John Han and I want to um to the best of my ability enlists to join us. Um, one one of the things I think about is like a a suicide we who here as a clinician has dealt with someone who has suicidal ideiation and how serious is suicidal ideation. What makes suicidal ideation dangerous?

01:25:12 The ideation once again the the power of the concept and how do you work with someone who has suicidal ideation? You create a survival plant um or what I might call uh survival ideation. And I think that's really what you were talking about about sort of what leads to war versus what leads to peace, whether or not we have ways to share our grain and all the rest of it. Um, this leads me to the question. We didn't talk about I think to answer you, what what did these in these 10,000 years of

01:25:42 peace, what did they um who was the enemy? We talked about rise and fall in the population, was the enemy not disease or how fragile human life was. Um, and I think maybe we've lost that. And one thing we didn't talk about now is how much we don't accept the idea of death. We've disowned death in our culture. We prolong life at all cost. And maybe because we've lost this value of death. Is that related to war? And how? I'd like to answer that because I

01:26:14 was going to make a comment before and you have usurped my my comment because it ties in with with Ed's comment and I think it ties in with the whole notion of individuality also and that is and it also ties in with a moral education that we're talking at a certain level here but we're not talking about the individual and the individual feelings and emotions that go on in everyday life. And it seems to me that that's a really

01:26:44 important aspect because we are all vulnerable and we're all vulnerable in being alive among other humans. And that's a vulnerability that we don't we don't we're not really cognizant of. We don't let come into our uh aliveness at all. And uh it seems to me that that's a really important kind of realization. and the the realization of our own death too is something it's tied to that. Um,

01:27:16 and one thing that I wanted to bring out with respect to your comment, it has to do with the proliferation of guns in this country, which simply exacerbates our vulnerability in being alive among other humans because we don't know what the hell another human is going to do to us, whether they have a gun in their pocket and when it's going to happen or whatever. And it just seems to me that that can't help in subliminal ways influence us in our everyday lives. When we when we go we hear about Aurora or

01:27:48 when we hear about these things in Milwaukee or wherever it is, it can happen any place that somebody can pull a gun that we're simply vulnerable. And that's at an individual level. So in our present day lives, it seems to me are very much uh our our very our fragility has has been magnified in our here especially here in in America with the proliferation of guns. It seems to me a related comment. Yes, there are 50 gun suicides a day in the

01:28:19 United States and 38 murders. 50 suicides mostly by gun owners. Interesting. We don't hear about that from the NRA, but apparently they keep their membership roster up in other ways. By that the country shouldn't be a disappearing species. Well, if I could just uh do one response on the idea of Eden, that I think is an appropriate point. um the area that uh

01:28:49 around 3,200 BC um there was the the central uh templar region of the of central Jordan uh was Megiddo. There was an enormous temple structure there completely unfortified like all the temple structures had been. And then the Egyptian settlements which had been there for several hundred years put up their walls and Megiddo put up a wall uh virtually the same moment. We can't even tell which came first. And uh Megiddo

01:29:22 was shortly thereafter abandoned. We don't know whether it was attacked. It's only been partially excavated, but it was they put up a wall, a terrible wall. So it was a most poorly constructed defensive wall that you could find anywhere because they had never done it before. But one of the things that you see in the temple which is really striking is a completely without precedent in the whole area. There's a copper I'm sorry a bronze sword. There's never been a sword anywhere in

01:29:52 this area and now they've got a sword in their main temple and then it's abandoned. And the reason I think it's relevant to Eden is that Megiddo is the basis of uh Armageddon. That's what the war of the end of the world is. And I think in a sense the world of peace already did end at Megiddo. Armageddon happened in 3200 BC. It's interesting that you say that because when you when um you were talking earlier, I was thinking well that's I was thinking of

01:30:24 the Bible which of course is seems scholars seem to think um uh is based on um experience or myths that occurred um far more recently than uh that the period you're indicating. But you could also see Eden as that period. Okay. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm a a literature professor. Uh but I I want to go back to u the u

01:30:55 the question of which you really haven't um focused on is social structure. You did it um Mr. Han did it initially when you asked us whether we thought war was um inevitable or not whether peace was possible among nations and the description that um uh you gave us Mr. Ferguson about this period in the Levant uh indicates that probably they

01:31:25 weren't nations, they were tribal groups, cooperative societies and whatever. So my question really is um do you think it's possible to go beyond the nation state? Because I would argue that if you if you're stuck with the nation state, you're stuck with war. I I I disagree. Uh so I I know that um that there has been Einstein and uh and other leading intellectuals of the 20th

01:31:57 century after World War II thought that the only way to prevent this from happening in the future was to have a global government because nationalism inevitably would lead to war. But we see lots of relations between nations where there's not only um no war but there's but war is inconceivable. Uh so between the United States and um and Canada for example, what is remarkable today now is that war between Germany and France I

01:32:28 would say is also inconceivable. um you know maybe but think I mean you're you've got a very small period of time that I know but I but I think it's significant that we can feel that way when uh there was this horrific violence so recently and when you look at at the history where they're you know they're always at each other's throats. So I'm hopeful because I see this kind of social change happening at the national level and international level so rapidly. What you have, you know, I

01:32:58 think one of the most obvious kind of dumb reputations of the idea that that uh war is at all biological is that you get the most warlike societies on earth practically overnight turning into a bunch of pacifists which you had with Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Now those obviously were countries that were conquered. But you have other examples of very warlike nations like Switzerland and Sweden which in the the 18th century were were feared uh for their their

01:33:29 warlike ways suddenly uh getting sick of war and saying we're not going to do this anymore and you know they've managed to maintain at least neutrality right through all the horrors of the uh of the 20th century. So I think there are demonstration proofs through history and around the world today that nations can live uh peacefully together and I think that's the direction that human reason u points us in and the direction that any kind of reasonable

01:34:00 interpretation of history leads us in and I think that's why we actually are uh are doing it. I hope you're right. I think that the u the issue of nation states is uh what's happening now you shouldn't assume it's going to keep going uh things can change but the you look at South America which people don't talk about because there's no wars going on internal or external but they've got all of these states um Africa most of the wars that have been

01:34:30 going on recently are not between states but somehow within states or around states or across states Um the the nation state at present isn't really the wararm making unit in much of the world. Um, on your point of can we get past this, there's uh uh William Yuri, Bill Yuri is a anthropologically trained conflict resolution guy and he's uh he's got a book called Getting to Peace and his main idea is that we can use these

01:35:01 ideas of developing what he calls a third side of people standing outside of a conflict pressuring people belligerent to solve it without violence and also talking about the growing importance of horizontal al networks that aren't part of the the power pyramids that have characterized most of our until very recent history and that they may be a way of of moving in a different direction. Not we're not going to go back to simple hunters and gatherers. Um but horizontal conflicts rather than these pyramidical structures, that's a

01:35:32 possibility. May I pick up from a previous point made about concern about suicide? Um I have this concern emerging for example from the statistic that for two years running there were more of our troops committing suicide than lost in battle in Afghanistan. And I have read somewhere that um half of the suicides are among uh troops who

01:36:04 have not seen battle. But I I don't know if that's reliable. Not true. Okay. It doesn't surprise me. Uh the um thought comes to me this way. The the VA, the Veterans Administration hired a thousand new psychologists and so on to treat people. But can they ask this question that the the mind has been changed by the training, not necessarily by the experience of killing, but by the training to be able to kill. And when a

01:36:36 uh soldier gets home, as uh Gman points out, we don't have troop ships anymore as we did after World War II where people got reocialized and they stayed with the units until they got home and etc. There many factors. Uh but suppose you suppose you're trained to kill and you're sent home and you find out that you are angrier at your spouse or your neighbor or the guy who cuts you off in traffic than you ever were at the designated enemy. H how do you deal with that?

01:37:09 What's the way of going backwards now? Are the VA psychologists going to be able to take up the issue with their, shall we say, their bosses? There are people in the VA, I give them credit for coining the phrase moral injury as a contributor to this uh uh maybe post-traumatic experience leading to suicide and depression and so on, inability to fit in. But are we able to take psychiatric

01:37:39 professionals and and enable them to say what you've done to these people uh has to be prevented because it can't necessarily be cured. You mean as a kind of anti-war movement? No, it's that you we have to take responsibility for the training that enables people to kill very easily and then it leaves them suicidal in large numbers. that we own up to that, but then it's making them possibly less

01:38:10 effective as soldiers. Um, and that's why I'm hoping to take the next step and just say all this military military training is wrong. It's just someone traumatizing. Someone said today that the military trainers, somebody up there knows that psychopaths do very well and we should cultivate that. Pure psychopath army. That's what we need. Only heroes go be all that you can be. Yeah. Ask questions. Just a few good

01:38:41 few good psychopaths. Hi, thank you very much for great conversation and a lot of interesting points. My I um would like to point out that all here mostly like peaceful people but let's talk about who is on the top on military complex and high military officials. If we look at these um

01:39:16 no for example uh as um as a game they produce they invested a lot of um energy and a lot of um resources in producing new weapons and uh they have the and when when they look at these new um uh uh techn technological ical advances. They probably uh have um this feeling of

01:39:48 pleasure and they want to use them. They produce these toys. They want to play with them and don't you and we have so many toys already that how we can stop them. I don't I personally don't see the way and I would like to um um I have one of example of one of the maybe the biggest players in this kind of games and Ysef Stallion who said

01:40:19 the that the death of one person is a tragedy and of million person is statistics so they don't see soldiers or even us as human beings. They already on other level and they could not as as on Wall Street they also don't see us as people. They see us as potential for their for their for gaining uh for something gaining. So you see society is

01:40:51 so already divided on so many levels. Would it what do you think is it um of course in maybe some time long ago in in when when it was much more simply not divided on so many levels maybe it's was possible that so long a time of peace but is it possible today and how it's possible what's the uh real instruments of this I think we've been we've been talking

01:41:22 about psychopaths we've been talking about uh people who are happy to go to war and you just mentioned Joseph Stalin and and uh I you know I voted for Barack Obama and I I probably will again but I'm not happy about it. I I think he is a decent obviously extremely intelligent person but um he um is carrying out drone assassinations where he knows he will kill civilians and that has now become US policy has become accepted and I think that this is

01:41:55 war crime and uh George Bush also carried out war crimes and he was elected to a second term when it was apparent that uh he was carrying out immoral military pos policies. So, this isn't something that we can force off on leaders or people in the military industrial complex or psychopaths. It's something that we all in a democracy like ours bear responsibility for. And I think we have to examine what it is in us that allows us to because we collectively do um perpetuate these

01:42:28 attitudes that make it so easy to go to war uh in the future. It's not the crazies on the fringes. Um, it's it's really all of us. I I agree. And I I'm glad to report though that the people who operate the drones are also having stress syndromes because they view these uh people on television screens for days and weeks and then they kill them, right? And they're they're experiencing some of this post-traumatic stuff. Start to identify with the people and

01:42:59 then they have to push push the button. I I would just also ask again something about how we get to this better place that you keep envisioning and how we do it without some kind of moral education that involves some kind of deep selfsearching to find out who the hell we are and and just uh what it means to live among other humans in a peaceful way. I don't I think that there's a lot

01:43:30 that needs to be done. It's not some simple process. I think a moral education is really quite essential. I don't know whether the rest of and that involves really delving into feelings as you're saying in terms of fear and threat etc. Th this is going back to Ed's point about the different levels of analysis of what we're talking about. And I think that this is this is certainly true um at an individual level. Um the the focus

01:44:01 on the individual even the the gender differences of what it means to be a man uh or a woman. Um that this is something that has importance for our notions of uh war in our society. Joshua Goldstein, I I'll just mention as someone who's written about uh war and gender and has a a new book out on fighting for peace. Uh both I mean these are these are books that people who are interested in the subject. I disagree with him on some things but he's really on the mark there. But to go back also to your point

01:44:32 is that I I know generals like to uh people like toys. I don't think it's so much playing with them though. I was at a meeting yesterday on uh counterinsurgency which is something that I also work on because the military's really been trying to get anthropology they're to mine anthropology for counterinsurgency efforts and it's a real problem for the discipline of anthropology and this guy's a history professor at uh West Point but a dissident and he says that a counterinsurgency is dead and

01:45:04 that we now know that it doesn't work. it's dead. And um my question was uh I'd like to know that it's really most sincerely dead uh because of what it's doing for to anthropology. And then he said that even though it doesn't work um and when he's talking to field officers, they'll listen to them. But general staff, you cannot criticize the idea because it is doctrine. And the reason it's doctrine is that in the military and the Marines, this protects their budget. As they are pivoting to Asia,

01:45:37 it's the Navy and the Air Force. And the only way the military can protect its budget is counterinsurgency. So even though they know it doesn't work, I mean, I know it's a shocking idea that the Pentagon could support a program that doesn't work just to protect a budget, but um seems to be happening. and and that Seymour Milman, one of my mentors from long ago, wrote about uh the uh the military economy, uh just drilled it into me. He says it's the bureaucratic imperative. Protect your or expand your budget. Um that's what's the

01:46:10 important thing. And the budget is hinged on the the concept of successful counterinsurgency. It's not true. It doesn't work. But they're going to defend it. And this is why I say you've got to look at the leaders. And when someone in politics, either Obama or Romney or anybody else, says, "Let's go take it to the generals and see what the generals have to say." The generals are protecting their budgets. They're the last people to ask because they're there to protect the Army and

01:46:42 the Marines. They're the their enemy isn't the Taliban. It's the Navy and the Air Force. The peace, you know. Well, yeah. Uh so this this is you've got to look at the interests of people in power. So I I I agree with you although the playing with it they can play with it in peace time too. I mean George Bush landing on the aircraft carrier you can do that but it's their budgets are very important. Thank you all very very much. Thank you very wonderful

01:47:16 water thing. I would love to have some water. I have some difficulty. Thank you.