War is like love; it always finds a way.War, like tools, communication and problem-solving, is not uniquely human, but we're a damn sight better at it than anything else is. In fact, we enjoy war, or may of us do, anyway, and it is certainly one of our great preoccupations, up there with the pursuit ofsex, wealth, power, and the favor of the gods, and notoriously overlaps with all of them. Now, in a liberal, plural society, there is (almost by definition) room for the pursuit of a myriad different obsessions which leave each other alone, and if war were just another one of those things which gets some people very excited, like baseball, Morris dancing, theology, psychoanalysis, the Grateful Dead or mathematics, we might be able to arrange things so that, like baseball fans, Morris dancers, theologians, Freudians, Deadheads or mathematicians, warriors more or less kept war to themselves and didn't bother the rest of us unduly as they got their kicks.---Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, 6
Unfortunately, we are very far from this happy condition, nor, in fact, does it seem to be in the cards at all. It's not just that war kills people --- so does driving cars, and for that matter hiking in the mountains. Rather, the real problems with cordoning off warfare are that, first, modern war is by its very nature total and mass-destructive, and, second, warriors are able to dictate terms to non-warriors, and are only with the greatest difficulty, and considerable bribery, kept under any kind fo control at all. Most bluntly, since 1945, warriors have technically been able to exterminate the vast majority, perhaps all, of the human race, themselves included. For the rest of us to gain some understanding of what they are about, and how they got that way, seems only prudent.
McNeill's first chapter presents a somewhat schematized picture of war and commerce in the typical civilization, any time between say 3000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. The bulk of economic life consists of redistribution governed either by tradition or by explicit commands from armed thugs, ``specialists in violence''; market exchange is at best secondary in importance, and is most prominent in long-distance trade in scarce resources and luxury goods. In between the peasant masses and the thugs, there are some small strata of artisans, traders and and other specialists, some attached to the households of thugs, some relying on the market. Power grows from the shaft of a spear, and the limits on power are the limits on making spears, assembling them, keeping them in the field, and keeping them under control. From time to time some mutation in arms or tactics would introduce a new and better sort of spear, and the local thuggery would adopt the change or be replaced. One of the most significant of these mutations led to the appearance in Persia of horses large and strong enough to carry a man in heavy armor, especially effective once some nomad genius dreamt up the stirrup. This meant that you either had to support the brutes (and their horses), or find a way of unhorsing them, or be chopped down with relative impunity. Only the Chinese escaped a period of rule by riders, owing to the fact that ``crossbows capable of knocking an armored man from his horse at a distance of 100 yards or more were readily available''; Islam, by favoring ``the urban and bureaucratic as against the feudal principle of military and social organization'' later performed a similar service for the Middle East.
This was, simply, the long, long age of command: ``Prior to A.D. 1000, the preponderance of command systems for mobilizing human and material resources for large-scale enterprises was never in doubt. Wars were fought and taxes were collected by command. Public works were built by command. Settlement of border regions was carried on by command.'' Even merchants who accumulated wealth through the market had powerful incentives to somehow ``gain access to a place in some local command hierarchy'' --- namely, without such a place and the force implicit in it, the wealth was very easily taken away.
About A.D. 1000, as already intimated, this began to change, in a country providentially free from domination by heavy cavalry, Sung China:
[During the ``Era of Chinese Predominance''] a new and powerful wind of change began to blow across the southern seas that connected the Far East with India and with the Middle East. I refer to an intensified flow of goods and movement of persons responding mainly to market opportunities. In seeking riches or a mere livelihood, a growing swarm of merchants and peddlars introduced into human affairs a far more pervasive changeability than earlier centuries had ever known.Quare: European drill derives from Arrian's _Ars Tactica_ --- so why didn't the Romans have similar developments? (Maybe they did, and that's what distinguished them from any other Italian tribe gawking at the Etrusans for heating their houses and letting their wives go out to dinner.) Quaere: How is it that the main European powers have escaped military dictatorship, that our dictatorships have been single-party states, rather than military ones? It's not that the later are unfavored by modern armaments --- viz. Latin America, Asia and Africa after the breakup of European empires. European exceptions: Poland between the wars; maybe Hungary and Spain, I don't know enough about them to say. This is a very remarkable accomplishment, especially since our militaries are more powerful than any in the past, and our civilian sphere not capable of effective armed resistance.China's remarkable growth in wealth and technology was based upon a massive commercialization of Chinese society itself. It therefore seems plausible to suggest that the upsurge of market-related behavior that ranged from the sea of Japan and the south China seas to the Indian Ocean and all the waters that bathe the coasts of Europe took decisive impetus from what happened in China. In this fashion, one hundred million people [a figure McNeill is curiously fond of repeating], increasingly caught up within a commercial network, buying and selling to supplement every day's livelihood, made a significant difference to the way other human beings made their livings throughout a large part of the civilized world. Indeed, it is the hypothesis of this book that China's rapid evolution towards market-regulated behavior in the centuries on either side of the year 1000 tipped a critical balance in world history. I believe that China's example set humankind off on a thousand-year exploration of what could be accomplished by relying on prices and personal or small-group (the partnership or company) perception of private advantage as a way of orchasterating behavior on a mass scale.
Obedience to commands did not of course disappear.... But political authorities found it less and less possible to escape the trammels of finance, and finance depended more and more on the flow of goods to markets which rulers could no longer dominate.... New forms of management and new modes of political conduct had to be invented to reconcile the initial antipathy between military power and money power; and the society most successful in achieving this act of legerdemain --- western Europe --- in due season came to domiante the world. [pp. 24--25]
Ehrenreich's answer --- which I find entirely convincing, in a why-didn't-I-think-of-that way --- is that the ecstasy of war, our capacity to sacralize it, is an out-growth or redirection of emotions and instincts which evolved as adaptations for defending human groups against predators: ``The sacralization of war is not the project of a self-confident predator . . . but that of a creature which has learned only `recently', in the last thousand or so generations, not to cower at every sound in the night'' (p. 22).
This should not be confused with the old speculations about a ``killer'' or ``aggressive'' instinct, which Ehrenreich briskly dismisses as irrelevant: ``There is no plausible instinct . . . that impels a man to leave his home, cut his hair short, and rill for hours in tight formation . . . . Instinct may, or may not, inspire a man to bayonet the first enemy he encounters in battle. But instinct does not mobilize supply lines, manufacture rifles, issue uniforms, or move an army of thousands from point A on the map to B'' (pp. 9--10). (1) Ancient civilizations are not early enough (2) Who says there was ever a goddess-worshipping society? (3) Error re Andreski --- secondary sources? (4) Means of coercion (5) Nationalism, democratization of glory (6) War as meme, as abstract, reproducing pattern (7) How'd we test this idea? --- Archaeological/paleontological evidence about human ecology; possible psychological tests on modern humans? (8) Evolution: how did this get started? See Maynard Smith (1982, ch. 13) on how ``kin selection is often needed for the initial spread of a trait which, once it is common, can be maintaned by mutualistic effects alone.''
Obvious influence of Russell, esp. Power, which is generously acknowledged --- his ``spiritual guide,'' as an early footnote says.
Ranges quite comfortably over the whole of Eurasia, Africa, S. America (pre-Columbian and since) --- almost encyclopedic on the subject of organized violence. (After Russell, his greatest debts seem to be Max Weber and Ibn Khalddun.)
His three key variables --- the military participation ratio, the degree of subordination in the military, and the degree of cohesion in the military --- are useful, and the first never seems to have been formalized before. They are not wholly satisfactory, however, for a number of reasons. He defines the MPR as the fraction of the adult male population involved in the military --- neither restriction is justified, particularly under modern conditions; and things like reserve units make it desirable to count person-years, not just persons. The degrees of subordination and cohesion do not so obviously admit of quantification, alas, and they are themselves not independent, since subordination implies cohesion (though not vice-versa), suggesting that two different, truly independent variables would be more information. {Perhaps cohesion could be measured by the weight other units have on the decisions of any given unit, and subordination by the weight given to units of a higher rank. In principle information theory could give us the tools to measure this, e.g., the fraction of bits in messages from HQ which are in practice ignored, that is, have no effect on behavior. Such studies may have already been done by the Pentagon and its tentacles, for all I know.}
To what extent Andreski's successful predictions --- the Sino-Soviet rift, the rise of the American national security state, etc. --- actually derive unambiguously from his model, as he claims in the preface to the second edition, is a nice question. Probably it could be answered, but at the cost of formalizing his ideas much more than they already are, e.g., taking his ``all else being equal'' talk as talk about partial derivatives. It may not be worth the effort. Getting hold of a reliable, extensive database on which to check his model seems, however, highly desirable.
On two points of prophecy Andreski has proved definitely wrong. The developed, industrial countries --- even the ostensible hegemon, this, the Goddess's Own Country --- have shifted from ``neferic'' (MSC) to ``mortazic'' (mSC) militaries, ostensibly because of the increasing ocst of the best weaponry available. (We may wonder whether a low-road, brute-force and massive numbers strategy mightn't be mor effective militarily but less politically and economically desirable.) --- We may note in passing that, like many other mortazic militaries, the Pentagon recruits extensively from otherwise poor and low-status groups, at least at the level of the grunts. --- The other development he missed was the rise of terrorists and militias, which would be in his schema msC.