Being fascinated with wars and warfare since I was a kid, perhaps inordinately so, my interest was piqued when I saw this title in a used bookstore: *Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War by *Barbara Ehrenreich. I was vaguely aware of Ehrenreich as a kind of muckraker known for biting social critiques so I worried the book might mainly be an anti-war polemic. Flipping through the pages, however, I was encouraged to see she had read and liked John Keegan, a conservative but very good military historian. Then the page flip landed on this quote:
Is it not wonderful for a man, having been born a man, to die at the hands of another man and then, with his quiver and bow at his side, lie on the ground as a corpse?
-- Mongolian Proverb from the time of Genghis Khan
I laughed and bought the book. It would turn out to be an eye-opener and a significant influence going forward. I've read it three times.
Ehrenreich's purpose starting her research was to come up with a coherent theory of warfare, something that seemed lacking despite copious amounts of writing on the topic. I'm not sure she succeeds in a thoroughgoing sense (I think she would acknowledge she doesn't) but the open-ended exploration is what carries the book.
Looking at warfare in history, Ehrenreich observes that when men go to war, a transformation takes place. Some process, training or ritual turns the ordinary man into a solider or a warrior, in effect making him a killing monster. While this is true across cultures and time, she notes that something is lacking in modern cultures that existed in indigenous ones: A reverse process, rituals that turn the monsters back into men.
Maori warriors returning from war cover their heads, vomit and refrain from sex as a means of becoming normal human beings again. The Taulipang Indians of South America, to get out of their warrior mode, flog each other with whips and run cords through their noses. Such rituals don't really exist for modern soldiers. When they struggle to fit back into normal life, we treat it as a pathology, a condition to be cured or treated. The Maori, on the other hand, acknowledged the psychological effect of war and made it part of their culture rather than try to eliminate it.
I find this interesting but it doesn't get at the origins of war. Or does it? That people need to be transformed in order to go into battle suggests the warrior state is not inherent, not a smooth fit to our normal existence. There's something hard to place about it.
Ehrenreich notes that human beings are odd creatures for top predators. We have no fangs or claws and we're not particularly fast or strong. It dawns on her that homo sapiens really haven't been top predators for long. In actuality, throughout most of our evolutionary history as upright hominids, we have been prey.
Mock tiger attack
The fossil evidence for this is extensive. All those human bones in caves weren't collected by other humans; they came from large predators dragging back their kills. But you don't need to look so far as the distant past. Even today people are subject to predation in areas where large predators still roam -- lions and leopards in Africa, tigers in India and eastern Russia. In some areas, the frequency of attack can be quite high and, Ehrenreich suggests, the number of attacks are probably under reported.
Maybe that's where our paranoias, our nightmares, and other insecurities come from -- a long past where we were often hunted and killed.
Another observation Ehrenreich makes is the tendency for people to make the fighting of war a sacred endeavor. We see this in monuments, speeches, stories and films -- heroes fighting for freedom, democracy, king, country, or other lofty causes. But this "sacralization" is also kind of strange. War perhaps is necessary but why do we idolize it so much?
... it is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress. And this is the experience, not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves. In particular, the sacralization of war is not the project of a self-confident predator, I will argue, 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.
When our ancestors invented spears, in a blink we were a top predator. But it was like a white-tailed deer -- a naturally fearful creature -- suddenly gaining claws, fangs and a taste for meat. The deer becomes a hunter but all of its fearful prey instincts remain and the mix of impulses generates strange behavior. It doesn't move with the same confidence as a mature predator like a lion or a tiger.
Animals secure in their predator status know nothing of revenge. But humans are hardly secure; our triumph over the other species occurred not that long ago, and childhood, for each of us, recapitulates the helplessness of prey.
Something in this psychological brew of predator and prey instincts, Ehrenreich asserts, encourages warfare.
We will not find the roots of the human attraction to war by searching the human psyche for some innate flaw that condemns us to harass and kill our fellows. In war we act as if the only enemies we have are human ones, but I am proposing that the emotions we bring to war are derived, in an evolutionary sense, from a primal battle that the entire human species might easily have lost. We are not alone on this planet, and we were once decisively outnumbered by creatures far stronger and more vicious than ourselves.
Yet, in a relatively short amount of time, we "won" the battle and no longer were other large animals a substantial threat to us as a species. And with the advent of agriculture and domesticated animals, we no longer even had to hunt. So who do we prey on now? Each other, naturally. And in warfare we continue our roles as both prey and predator.
Most people are not eager for war but it's a hard thing to stop once it starts. If there's aggression, there's need for defense against it. And often, to the strong, the vulnerable will look like prey.
War is like love; it always finds a way.
-- Bertolt Brecht
Taulipang boys
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