Ian Morris is a historian and archaeologist. He teaches at Stanford University in the United States. In his 2010 book "Why the West Rules—For Now", Morris offered a long-run account of the west's global hegemony. As one reviewer observed, this was history on a grand scale in the manner of Toynbee and Marx: the origins of the story Morris was telling there lay in agricultural innovations made in the western core some time around 9500BC.
His latest book, "War! What Is It Good For?", is no less ambitious and no less indifferent to disciplinary proprieties (he ranges widely and confidently across terrain that his colleagues in departments of zoology, philosophy or political science might reasonably regard as their own). Morris defends a simple claim: that "over the long run, [war] has made humanity safer and richer." That simple claim ramifies in several directions—wars, Morris argues, have created larger and more organised societies in which the risk of dying a violent death are greatly reduced; and for all its horrors, war is the "pretty much the only way" human beings have found of creating larger and more peaceful societies. In fact, not only do wars make us safer, he goes on, they make us richer: "By creating larger societies, stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the world."
I spoke to Morris when he came to London a few weeks ago. The argument of the book, he confessed, had "taken [him] by surprise".
It came out of the reading I did for my previous book, Why the West Rules. I realised that not only has the world become a much safer place to live over the last 10,000 years, but that there seemed to be this big paradox behind that fact: the unintended outcome of violence has been to produce a safer and richer world.
JD: Not just random violence, but war, specifically. What’s the difference?
IM: I went to some effort to avoid getting into formal definitions of what counts as war and what doesn’t. You have a spectrum of the various forms of violent death—from two guys having a fight in a pub in which one gets killed up to Germany invading the Soviet Union at the other end. Under certain circumstances, violence starts to create larger and larger groups that become internally pacified, and this has the paradoxical effect of driving the rate of violence down.
This is not just a book about war. It’s also a book about the state isn’t it? There’s a subheading in the introduction that reads: “War makes the state and the state makes peace.”
One way in which anthropologists and political scientists like to talk abut states and governments is to say that a state is a way of arranging groups of people where one group has got pretty much a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Violence is ultimately what states and governments are all about. Law, taxation—all of this ultimately rests on the ability of the state to get what it wants.
And the state is an arrangement that is born out of violence as well …
Yes. It’s easy to imagine a situation in which there’s been an agreement that you and I are the best people to draw up the law code and make all the big decisions. But if we don’t exercise a monopoly over the use of violence, then the first time we make a decision, and there is someone who has more means of violence at his disposal than we do, then that decision is not going to stand. These two things have always gone together.
So what are sometimes called “failed states” are states in which there no single entity exercising a monopoly over the use of violence?
Right. Somalia is a classic case. I once spent eight years running an [archaeological] excavation in western Sicily, in the heart of Mafia territory. People there would often say, “We have a state within a state. There’s the state up in Rome, which is completely ineffectual. Sometimes they take your taxes, but other times they’re not even organised enough to do that. But if you need something done, you don’t write to your member of parliament, you go and talk to Guido. He’ll sort your problem out for you.” That’s very much what a modern failed state is—a situation where the government can’t impose its will.
You’re talking about Italy there, a state in the heart of Europe. That suggests that the legitimacy of states is pretty precarious. So it might be argued that the optimistic note on which the book ends is somewhat misplaced, a triumph of hope over expectation.
I think overall the prognosis ought to be pretty hopeful. But at the same time you’d be kidding yourself if you didn’t recognise the fragility you’re talking about. It’s certainly possible that we will annihilate ourselves altogether at some point in the future! But I think the odds are against that. And I’d like to think I’m not just extrapolating that from the long run of history; not just making a linear projection into the future.
You say at the end of the book that there are good reasons to be optimistic about the future, that it’ll be more peaceful than the past. What are those reasons?
The biggest thing is the way that people are being transformed in the 21st century. The linkage of people through technology I see as the thing that’s changing the rules of the game and changing what you can possibly hope to gain through violence. In a way, this is utterly unlike anything we’ve seen before. If you look back over the past few hundred years of history, you see the creation of the first “globocop” in the form of the British empire in the 19th century. Frankly, it wasn’t a very good globocop. It broke down, you had terrible wars and then the creation of a much superior American version—a much more effective globocop. One conclusion you can draw from that is that the trend is towards stronger and stronger globocops.
Are you not concerned that the current world policeman or globocop, the US, is beginning to think again about whether it wants to continue to assume the responsibilities and obligations that go with that role?
I gather the plan is for the US army to shrink to its smallest size since 1940. In 1940, the US army was smaller than the Belgian army! This is a long debate in American politics that goes back to the First World War, about how engaged the US should be with the outside world. It seems to me that the argument I’m making in this book has very clear policy implications. Specifically, that if the US were to withdraw from its global role this would be disastrous for everybody. So this is a real concern. But I’d be really surprised if the US really began to step back completely. But American politicians have done weird things before!
The argument in the final chapter of the book is quite complicated. In the first place, it’s an argument about geopolitics, it seems to me—an assessment of the current balance of forces between the US and China. But it’s also an argument about really fundamental changes to humanity’s relationship to machines and the dawn of what has been called the “Second Machine Age”. You think this is going to have dramatic implications for violence and war in the 21st century don’t you?
Yes. I had an interesting experience while I was writing this book. After Why the West Rules came out, I started getting invited to speak to people who previously wouldn’t have wasted their time on me. So several times I went to talk to security and defence people, and also to tech conferences. I was astonished to discover how little communication there was between the security experts and the tech people. There are certainly a few organisations that are looking at the security implications of technological change, but it’s relatively unusual. But I don’t see how you can’t foresee massive consequences here. The NSA/Snowden affair is just the thin end of the wedge.
In that last chapter you say that one of the consequences of technological progress is that it will make war less bloody...
One of the consequences of it so far as been a tendency towards greater precision. And that has made wars less bloody. I point out in the book that military types like to say that the atom bomb was a solution to a 1940s technical problem. Then, you couldn’t hit anything with a bomb. If you needed to destroy specific things, you either carpet-bombed an area or, better still, you came up with something that had kilotons of yield in a single bomb. Now we can hit stuff, so you don’t need to do that. There may be conditions in which a politician says, “What the heck? I’m going to annihilate millions of people of anyway.” But you don’t need to do that sort of thing any more. A lot of things have been developed that have given us greater precision. Drone strikes are a good example. Of course, US drone strikes have killed many thousands of innocent people, but if we didn’t have that sort of “precision” technology, then politicians would have the choice of either not attempting to knock out the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda or using old-fashioned methods in which a lot more people would have got killed.
While you were writing Steven Pinker published his book about the decline in human violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature. I’m interested in the quite significant differences in temperament between his book and yours. His argument, as I understand it, is that humanity is converging on an outlook that he calls that of “liberal enlightenment”. Your outlook, it seems to me, is somewhat darker. It’s more Hobbesian isn’t it?
Yes, it is Hobbesian (though Pinker used to be a hardcore Hobbesian—now he’s stepped back from that). Until about ten years ago, I’d lived in a Margaret Meade-type world. I’d been taught that early societies were very peaceful places. But then I began to see the world in a very different way.
You swapped Rousseau for Hobbes?
Yes. I was a default Rousseauean.
You identify four main ways of thinking about war in the book: the “personal approach”; military history; “technical studies”; and the evolutionary approach. Is the suggestion that none of those approaches is entirely satisfactory?
Each of them is really powerful for telling you certain things about war and violence. But none of them by itself is enough. I think over the last 30 or 40 years, the personal approach has become the dominant way for most people to think about war. That has had many good results. The triumph of the personal approach has been very valuable in helping people to understand what actually happens in wars. But it does obscure certain other things. For instance, it encourages the view that war is fundamentally irrational. If that’s true, then you have to wonder why humans have always used violence. Just focusing on the personal side blinds you to the larger patterns that explain why violence is so persistent.
"War! What Is It Good For?" is published by Profile Books (£25). Ian Morris will be appearing at the RSA in London on 10th April to discuss the book with the historian Anthony Beevor.
His latest book, "War! What Is It Good For?", is no less ambitious and no less indifferent to disciplinary proprieties (he ranges widely and confidently across terrain that his colleagues in departments of zoology, philosophy or political science might reasonably regard as their own). Morris defends a simple claim: that "over the long run, [war] has made humanity safer and richer." That simple claim ramifies in several directions—wars, Morris argues, have created larger and more organised societies in which the risk of dying a violent death are greatly reduced; and for all its horrors, war is the "pretty much the only way" human beings have found of creating larger and more peaceful societies. In fact, not only do wars make us safer, he goes on, they make us richer: "By creating larger societies, stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the world."
I spoke to Morris when he came to London a few weeks ago. The argument of the book, he confessed, had "taken [him] by surprise".
It came out of the reading I did for my previous book, Why the West Rules. I realised that not only has the world become a much safer place to live over the last 10,000 years, but that there seemed to be this big paradox behind that fact: the unintended outcome of violence has been to produce a safer and richer world.
JD: Not just random violence, but war, specifically. What’s the difference?
IM: I went to some effort to avoid getting into formal definitions of what counts as war and what doesn’t. You have a spectrum of the various forms of violent death—from two guys having a fight in a pub in which one gets killed up to Germany invading the Soviet Union at the other end. Under certain circumstances, violence starts to create larger and larger groups that become internally pacified, and this has the paradoxical effect of driving the rate of violence down.
This is not just a book about war. It’s also a book about the state isn’t it? There’s a subheading in the introduction that reads: “War makes the state and the state makes peace.”
One way in which anthropologists and political scientists like to talk abut states and governments is to say that a state is a way of arranging groups of people where one group has got pretty much a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Violence is ultimately what states and governments are all about. Law, taxation—all of this ultimately rests on the ability of the state to get what it wants.
And the state is an arrangement that is born out of violence as well …
Yes. It’s easy to imagine a situation in which there’s been an agreement that you and I are the best people to draw up the law code and make all the big decisions. But if we don’t exercise a monopoly over the use of violence, then the first time we make a decision, and there is someone who has more means of violence at his disposal than we do, then that decision is not going to stand. These two things have always gone together.
So what are sometimes called “failed states” are states in which there no single entity exercising a monopoly over the use of violence?
Right. Somalia is a classic case. I once spent eight years running an [archaeological] excavation in western Sicily, in the heart of Mafia territory. People there would often say, “We have a state within a state. There’s the state up in Rome, which is completely ineffectual. Sometimes they take your taxes, but other times they’re not even organised enough to do that. But if you need something done, you don’t write to your member of parliament, you go and talk to Guido. He’ll sort your problem out for you.” That’s very much what a modern failed state is—a situation where the government can’t impose its will.
You’re talking about Italy there, a state in the heart of Europe. That suggests that the legitimacy of states is pretty precarious. So it might be argued that the optimistic note on which the book ends is somewhat misplaced, a triumph of hope over expectation.
I think overall the prognosis ought to be pretty hopeful. But at the same time you’d be kidding yourself if you didn’t recognise the fragility you’re talking about. It’s certainly possible that we will annihilate ourselves altogether at some point in the future! But I think the odds are against that. And I’d like to think I’m not just extrapolating that from the long run of history; not just making a linear projection into the future.
You say at the end of the book that there are good reasons to be optimistic about the future, that it’ll be more peaceful than the past. What are those reasons?
The biggest thing is the way that people are being transformed in the 21st century. The linkage of people through technology I see as the thing that’s changing the rules of the game and changing what you can possibly hope to gain through violence. In a way, this is utterly unlike anything we’ve seen before. If you look back over the past few hundred years of history, you see the creation of the first “globocop” in the form of the British empire in the 19th century. Frankly, it wasn’t a very good globocop. It broke down, you had terrible wars and then the creation of a much superior American version—a much more effective globocop. One conclusion you can draw from that is that the trend is towards stronger and stronger globocops.
Are you not concerned that the current world policeman or globocop, the US, is beginning to think again about whether it wants to continue to assume the responsibilities and obligations that go with that role?
I gather the plan is for the US army to shrink to its smallest size since 1940. In 1940, the US army was smaller than the Belgian army! This is a long debate in American politics that goes back to the First World War, about how engaged the US should be with the outside world. It seems to me that the argument I’m making in this book has very clear policy implications. Specifically, that if the US were to withdraw from its global role this would be disastrous for everybody. So this is a real concern. But I’d be really surprised if the US really began to step back completely. But American politicians have done weird things before!
The argument in the final chapter of the book is quite complicated. In the first place, it’s an argument about geopolitics, it seems to me—an assessment of the current balance of forces between the US and China. But it’s also an argument about really fundamental changes to humanity’s relationship to machines and the dawn of what has been called the “Second Machine Age”. You think this is going to have dramatic implications for violence and war in the 21st century don’t you?
Yes. I had an interesting experience while I was writing this book. After Why the West Rules came out, I started getting invited to speak to people who previously wouldn’t have wasted their time on me. So several times I went to talk to security and defence people, and also to tech conferences. I was astonished to discover how little communication there was between the security experts and the tech people. There are certainly a few organisations that are looking at the security implications of technological change, but it’s relatively unusual. But I don’t see how you can’t foresee massive consequences here. The NSA/Snowden affair is just the thin end of the wedge.
In that last chapter you say that one of the consequences of technological progress is that it will make war less bloody...
One of the consequences of it so far as been a tendency towards greater precision. And that has made wars less bloody. I point out in the book that military types like to say that the atom bomb was a solution to a 1940s technical problem. Then, you couldn’t hit anything with a bomb. If you needed to destroy specific things, you either carpet-bombed an area or, better still, you came up with something that had kilotons of yield in a single bomb. Now we can hit stuff, so you don’t need to do that. There may be conditions in which a politician says, “What the heck? I’m going to annihilate millions of people of anyway.” But you don’t need to do that sort of thing any more. A lot of things have been developed that have given us greater precision. Drone strikes are a good example. Of course, US drone strikes have killed many thousands of innocent people, but if we didn’t have that sort of “precision” technology, then politicians would have the choice of either not attempting to knock out the leadership of groups like al-Qaeda or using old-fashioned methods in which a lot more people would have got killed.
While you were writing Steven Pinker published his book about the decline in human violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature. I’m interested in the quite significant differences in temperament between his book and yours. His argument, as I understand it, is that humanity is converging on an outlook that he calls that of “liberal enlightenment”. Your outlook, it seems to me, is somewhat darker. It’s more Hobbesian isn’t it?
Yes, it is Hobbesian (though Pinker used to be a hardcore Hobbesian—now he’s stepped back from that). Until about ten years ago, I’d lived in a Margaret Meade-type world. I’d been taught that early societies were very peaceful places. But then I began to see the world in a very different way.
You swapped Rousseau for Hobbes?
Yes. I was a default Rousseauean.
You identify four main ways of thinking about war in the book: the “personal approach”; military history; “technical studies”; and the evolutionary approach. Is the suggestion that none of those approaches is entirely satisfactory?
Each of them is really powerful for telling you certain things about war and violence. But none of them by itself is enough. I think over the last 30 or 40 years, the personal approach has become the dominant way for most people to think about war. That has had many good results. The triumph of the personal approach has been very valuable in helping people to understand what actually happens in wars. But it does obscure certain other things. For instance, it encourages the view that war is fundamentally irrational. If that’s true, then you have to wonder why humans have always used violence. Just focusing on the personal side blinds you to the larger patterns that explain why violence is so persistent.
"War! What Is It Good For?" is published by Profile Books (£25). Ian Morris will be appearing at the RSA in London on 10th April to discuss the book with the historian Anthony Beevor.
