Is the desire to begin wars an innate part of humans?

can you name a point in time where no humans were fighting?

I believe war is in our structure and for many humans it will always be.

No. I don’t think so.

I was reading George Bataille’s Tears of Eros today. He’d written about how our oldest ancestors didn’t create war. There are probably still tribes of Inuit people who don’t have any knowledge of war.

To Bataille, there has always been a destructive tendency, linked with eroticism. This “death instinct” (he doesn’t discuss Freud, but the term applies) sometimes takes the form of war. The atrocities of war peaked in the late Middle Ages, with brutal torture techniques being used regularly.

Now, war has become more mechanical. It’s no longer full of passion. It is work. Even though World War I and II killed tons of people, it was done largely the work of technology, shooting people from afar so that the brutality can’t be seen up close.

Basically, my argument is that there is no desire for war, but a desire for destruction in humans that is manifested as war. And the nature of war is changing.

Well, the warriors have this annoying habit of seeking out the peaceful & slaying them…..

I strongly believe that in every case, if the responsible parties felt convinced that war was a stupid idea that those acts would not be committed. I think war only happens when someone in power really doesn’t know what else to do.

Of course it is. Humanity strives for competition, and there is no greater competition than war. I’ve heard so many people say that humanities most basic instinct is to survive, but that is wrong. We are too far up the food chain to merely “survive,” and thus we kill.

I would say a warlike nature is an innate part of men. It can be channeled elsewhere like sport.

I think the need for power is an innate part of most people. This need for power when taken to its extreme, morphs into a need for war.

Of course not.

@Jiminez Can you give me a time in history that humans have not been at war, a time when there was no killing?

@Kelly27 Yes I can. Various groups of humans all throughout history have forged and sustained peaceful communities/collectives. But violence is news. Violence is what we include in our history books. Tibetan monks have lived in peaceful harmony maybe for a thousand years. Why is that not a suitable example? Hierarchies are themselves dependent on a violent minority. When you live in a hierarchical society the culture is changed into whatever the person in the position of power wants it to be; and that’s nearly always a violent culture. Culture is why we are violent and violent cultures exist because violent individuals exist.

@Jiminez I wasn’t talking about groups of people not at war at any given time, I was asking if you could tell me a time when there was NO fighting at all, somewhere on the planet. As far back as I can tell in history there has been fighting and there have been wars. Whether or not this is an innate part of who we are, I don’t know.

@Kelly27 Well, I would if human beings thought peace was interesting enough to write down in history books. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

And even if their were war… that doesn’t speak to any innate part of who we all are, but instead an innate part of who a small number of us are.

I think the prevalence of war (discounting, of course, as Jiminez aptly pointed out, how peace doesn’t exactly make most history books) speaks more to the ability of some – perhaps under the influence of small social circles very detached from the risk of severe loss war brings – to drag so many others into fights to satisfy their egoistical schoolyard posturing or greed. Something about our social organization seems to heighten our risk for this happening.

Very strongly I suspect warring increased as those who declared them and had the most to gain from them, due to new forms of social/political organization, weren’t the ones bearing the brunt of the suffering of war… and as those who were given no choice but to fight (either through force, or for having no other way to support their families) had their political voices stolen; and as those who suffer through dying, being enslaved, losing loved ones, their homes &tc. (which, while of course not exclusively, was muchly the lot of women & children) had even less say in the social decisions which heavily affected them.

I think humans evolved a tendency toward aggression. It served its purpose as a way to propagate strong genes.

I agree completely with @Grisson. There’s plenty of evidence of primates engaging in conflict over territory, food or sex. There’s only so much of each to go around, and most animals (humans included) don’t share well. Whether the practice of forming armies to fight is innate, I don’t know, but conflict over resources is a very well-observed phenomenon in ecology.

To fight, yes, but not to begin wars: Apes don’t even know what it is so it’s not in their nature. But fighting and defending our rights and releasing aggressions is a quite important part of us!

Unfortunately, it’s part of our genetic makeup. However social behavior and kindness is also part of our genetic makeup. Good parenting and education can enable all humans to control the beast within us. I think it’s totally realistic to eliminate (almost) all wars within the next 50 years.

It seems to be :(

@mattbrowne It’s not a part of my genetic make-up. How common do you think people like me are? I say very common.

“Nobody wants war any more, but wars keep happening. Why?” – Robert Anton Wilson

That’s a very important question to be asking, because it’s true that nobody wants war. And it’s true that they keep happening.

@Jiminez – Aggression, hostility, the urge of revenge and so forth, even a deeply buried killer instinct is part of the genetic makeup of most of homo sapiens, including you, I’m afraid. It may sound very disappointing, but in fact it is not. Some of those traits help firemen facing a dangerous situation, policemen rescuing innocent victims and even normal people doing brave things (like what happened after the Minneapolis bridge collapse). This beast in us can be rendered harmless in normal situations. We can control the beast. We have a very large rational brain and a limbic system capable of showing kindness and other forms of social behavior. We can eventually eliminate wars but we have to acknowledge the full range of human nature otherwise it’s very hard to understand and control.

@Jiminez: I believe you are sadly unaware of your own genetic makeup. It is a scientifically known survival trait that the flight/fight instinct is present in all humans. What you are experiencing is the civilized response to that trait. Yes, with control and education, we can choose less aggressive reactions, but it is still present. Let one of your own get attacked, killed or such, and your response will be just as always.

@Yarnlady and @mattbrowne – There is a difference between “desire to begin wars” and “aggression”. I think we can all agree that there is an aspect of human nature that involves violence and death. @Jiminez was not talking about that – he was talking about armed conflict between two groups of people (war).

Actually, @mattbrowne, you agreed with me (and @Jiminez) when you wrote: “We can eventually eliminate wars but we have to acknowledge the full range of human nature otherwise it’s very hard to understand and control.” @Jiminez was merely using himself as an example.

There is less violence in the world. Things are getting better and I think it cannot be avoided. I think there’s some good evidence out there that shows that either we’ll kill ourselves out completely in one fell swoop one day by accident.. or else things will improve towards utopia. But things won’t just stay the same. We seem to be better than that.

@shadling21” If you wish to limit the statement “begin wars” to a very narrow view. I submit when brother disagrees with brother, and chooses to fight, that is war. If you think it needs more, than we have a semantics issue.

well, how should we define “war” for this discussion?

In order to answer the question, the definition is up to the asker.

@shadling21 – Yes, there’s a difference between “desire to begin wars” and “aggression” but the eventual desire to begin wars is rooted in the deeper human traits. A civilized society will never have a “desire” to begin a war, but decides to do so as a last resort. Had civilized society done so in Rwanda hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. And right now we are once again observers of what’s going on in Darfur.

@ninjacolin @Yarnlady I apologise for the lateness of this reply but i’ve been quite busy. Generally I prefer that those who reply apply their own definition of the more ambiguous terminology within the question or better yet respond to each possible definition that they can speculate, however I can sympathise with the particularly vague nature of the term ‘war’ and so, for the sake of argument, shall state that the question is referring to it in a general context i.e. Two ‘nations’ declaring war on one another and typically proceeding to conflict with one another by means of militairy action.

Psychoanalytically speaking, each new generation of men (@14 years) has a war.

@Carol There are few enemies more dangerous than ourselves

k, from an individual’s perspective war is just a project that you can embark on.
it’s not innate in humanity. it’s a concept that comes up in the mind and which may or may not seem like a “good idea” pending circumstances.

People don’t start wars without a reason.

The author Desmond Morris discusses this question in his book “The Naked Ape”. He is an evolutionary psychologist who explains how natural aggression has become perverted in our modern society.

In the rest of the natural kingdom, aggression is used to maintain social structures, to maintain boundaries, and to protect oneself and family. In the animal kingdom, this seldom results in death.

Humans, on the other hand, have have had our natural aggression twisted into the pathology we are left with today. We have continued to separate ourselves from our oponents until we now can cause so many deaths by just pushing a sequence of buttons in a room on the other side of the world.

In conclusion, the answer to your question is no, war is not in our nature. But it is in our society, which influences our psychologies, our behaviour, our beings.

If you read the book of Job it says Satan uses three kinds of attacks on people: diseases, natural disasters, and other people. In the Indus Valley cities have been discovered with a total population of about two million people, and NO war. No preparation for self defense at all. About 12,000 years ago they all got up and went away, and the world has had continuous war ever since.

It is not an “innate” desire, it’s just that an inspiration from Satan always seems like the most brilliant idea you ever had. Like “Let’s go kill something.”