The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
The COVID-19 lockdown has given me time to read books I otherwise would probably not have read. One of them is by Jared Diamond. I had previously read two of his other books, Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel. The UCLA professor of geography is intrigued by things which do not grab the attention of most people, but I am intrigued by what intrigues him. His latest book is entitled The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? It is about very primitive peoples who live in off-the-beaten-path places, such as New Guinea, the Amazon Basin, isolated tribes in Africa, and in the Australian Outback.
Jared Diamond says that almost all of these tiny tribes engage in war on a surprisingly regular basis. Because these peoples are so limited in number, however, few of them are killed or injured. And whereas people such as ourselves wage war with guns, ships, and planes, they wage them with bows, arrows, and spears.
The fascinated professor has made many expeditions to study small cultures, especially in the jungles of New Guinea. He wrote, “Boys are trained already in childhood to fight, and to expect to be attacked….Revenge plays a dominant role as a motive for cycles of violence….Warfare involves the whole population rather than just a small professional army of adult men: there is intentional killing of ‘civilian’ women and children as well as of male ‘soldiers.’”
In one battle on one day in June of 1966, 125 Dani warriors were killed in the New Guinea highlands. To us such a number is insignificant, but a higher percentage of Dani men were slain in that one battle than the percentage of all the allies who were killed on both sides in the ten years of World Wars I and II.
From this I deduce that since Homo sapiens evolved as a separate species of hominids, our males have had both an overpowering genetic urge to procreate as well as to annihilate. The first is good, up to a point. The second is bad, in almost all points. Females are not nearly as inclined to want to wage wars as are males, thank heaven.
We delude ourselves about war, too often concluding that it is a political and moral necessity. And even if it were necessary (which it never is), it is always a necessary evil.
It was the Union Army general William Tecumseh Sherman who declared that “War is hell.” He should know; his march to the sea from Atlanta to Savannah in 1864 and then into South Carolina unleashed heaps of hell on thousands of innocent Southerners.
Throughout history, various nation-states have obliterated various indigenous peoples who tried to prevent much larger armies from taking their lands, driving them to near or complete extinction. The United States government did this in its relentless drive to conquer the West.
Jared Diamond despairs of the persistent tendency of all peoples to go to war with those they perceive to be enemies. He said, “I sympathize with scholars outraged by the mistreatment of indigenous peoples. But denying the idea of traditional [i.e. primitive] warfare because of political misuse of its reality is a bad strategy for the same reason that denying any other reality for any other laudable political goal is a bad strategy. The reason not to mistreat indigenous people is not that they are falsely accused of being warlike, but that it’s unjust to mistreat them.”
As has often been said over the past few years, we can do better than this. War is hell. We can all do better than this. - May 13, 2020
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.