War as a consequence
From the moment bacteria formed and life began survival has been a struggle; predator bacteria, hostile environments and other dangers haunted the trails of bacteria and continued to do so. Those that survived and replicated effectively grew to become more complex and eventually creatures scuttled out of the sea. This is natural selection and is the biological scalpel that sculpts our body, biological/chemical interactions and psychology.
The purpose of the story above is a reminder of the hostile environment each being faces, for there are two basic drives in evolution; to survive and to reproduce. These are the winds of the will to be, they push you along in your vessel of a body. But all beings to some degree are pushed along by the same will and collisions erupt and boats are damaged, storms brew and waves fall as the balance of opposites find equilibrium, all of which can threaten your own evolution of staying afloat and raising a little fleet of your own.
It is in this chaos that we evolved our psychological mechanisms, to aid us in maximising our basic drive of survival and reproduction. Mechanisms such as friendships and group living, for example drastically improve your personal survival by improving hunting success rates, defence against animals and from the elements. These benefits were successful enough to cause an ‘other’ to be a friend and form the friendship mechanism, a psychological mechanism that bonds you to another, by doing so goes further extends than inclusive fitness theory, whereby we see our self within a genetic relative thus allowing gene eye thinking (the closer the relative the stronger the altruism), justifying the sharing of resources and aid in raising their offspring and relations - a somewhat selfish account of altruism. By developing a stronger sense of this we remove the degree of threat another person may pose, without this friendship function of our psyche all others would be threats and we would miss out on the benefits of group living.
But the door swings both ways, and other males for example can pose a threat to you or another within your group as hierarchies develop, often minimising the reproduction of a weaker or older male. Sexual jealousy for example is a mechanism to stop other males from taking your spouse and also to stop your spouse from looking for another male, and vice versa. So an economy forms between the benefits and losses of group living. Who is worth investing in and not, who is a threat to that investment and who is an ally. From this give and take relationship that can be coined reciprocal altruism, fighting occurs, while there is no single hypothesis that explains aggression many evolutionary problems that need to be overcome (that is what these mechanisms do is to overcome survival and reproduction problems) issues like; rapine of ones own resources, intra sexual rivalry, defence against attack and rising up the social power structure. Aggression has many evolutionary benefits but some heavy costs if you fail.
This economy above is of a personal scale, same to with inclusive fitness and gene eye thinking with the currency of survival and reproduction, and clearly this economy is not in recession just yet, as we all living in communities. In social groups, group identity forms, a commonality in language, behaviours and dress that gives one face to a whole group, on many scales from a village identity to a national one, to an international and global one. It is why we sing the same song to the national flag and why we call ourselves English or Dutch or where ever you call home.
This can be understood as type/token relations, every citizen is a type of the token country; If A is a type from token B then A is AB, if Alan is from England then Alan is English. Whilst A is wholly A, A is only a part of B but B is a composite of all A’s and supervenes from them. It would be mechanisms like friendship that allows B to form in the first place and as such societies are emergent from the relations of psychology, like muscle tissue from cell arrangements.
It is interesting to wonder about identity, for in the first sense, many individuals with many different identities form one common face, which in turn plays a part in the identity of the individuals. So whilst B is utterly dependent on the composite of many, to what extent does the face of the tribe define the individual (which will lead in to social contract theory for another day; but in brief)? For Hobbes it is the king that is the individual and all subjects are the extensions of him, thus the issue of identity here is solved in one sense, simply by removing the individuals from the equation. For Rousseau, the theory takes on a sort of Family relationship with the government, whereby we create a father figure that we obey, thus our government becomes almost the super ego (sense of morality) protecting us from the id of our strong desires of survival and reproduction making us as children and removing fully fledged adult independence. Locke says what we form is more of a value system that is based in property and prevailing beliefs like stealing is unlawful, these agreements form the nations laws and thus by allowing individuals to own property that they had a hand in attaining and by acceptances of the laws, we can at once rise above the dangers of nature and minimise the dangers of group living so make more economical sense, giving us individuality and protection at the cost creating a capitalistic self maximising culture based on financial Darwinism.
Suffice to say there is an element of homogeneous identity within a tribe membership that taps into psychological mechanisms of friendship by activating inclusive fitness perception in non-genetic relatives, we see a bit of us in others and so we can justify helping and working together, for we then help ourselves. This is how groups can occur and social economics functions, extended inclusive fitness for maximising survival and reproduction purposes.
If within a tribe, fighting can occur over resources or power struggles between individuals, then if two individual tribe meet, why would the tribes behave differently than if they are on the personal scale. For if A is B and B meets C (another tribe) it is exactly the same as if two individuals from different tribes met, it could turn into an alliance or an enemy.
War is nothing but an extension of psychology, where a group united into one meets another group united into one and over resources, beliefs or power they fight for control. The other tribe has not this localized homogeneous identity that the first tribe has, and so inclusive fitness is not extended and so, pushed by our desire, our will to be, force our improved survival at the cost of another.
War is a natural extension of our psychology, neither good nor bad, just an enhancement of what we have evolved to survive. The issues of war itself is not a philosophical one in itself, war has no normative value or ostensive externality in which we can declare that it is wrong or right, for it is a state of nature, be it personal, social or national, fighting occurs in all beings to some degree.
But evolutionary psychology does fail to account for a few things such as where does this drive to survive come from? The will to survive and reproduce are considered as elemental to evolutionary psychologists as Gaia and Uranus was to the greeks, just as given (we have to want to live in order to develop ways in which you maximise your ability to survive). This will lead to interesting philosophy and flirts with the Conatus of 17th century philosophers like Spinoza or Hobbes, the innate striving that takes manifest as the will to live and reproduce.
In summary, War is not immoral, in fact to a degree it can even be seen as an ethics, though not a pleasant one, as war is a way of approaching life which can be viewed in nature (ants fighting ants for example) and some have advocated this strongly like Genghis Khan. Yet this ethic is not a humanism and so will ultimately become the weaker choice: through strength learn gentleness, through gentleness strength will prevail! But as yet War is a consequence of a composite of psychologies one to one, whilst we easily forget the homogeneous identity when we see dead individual soldiers and see war as a lots of individuals fighting, it is actually one person from many fighting another from their many, and is just a larger expression of us in the hostile forces of nature.
This is not to mean that war is necessary or inevitability, war is just a natural extension of ourselves at our current social evolutionary level, but new understanding of philosophy, psychology and science will show an abundance of resources and technologies that render conflict unnecessary, well that's the dream.
By Tomas Moon
The Philosophy Takeaway 'War' Issue 28
