War and Human Nature

Genocide is God's way of resolving territorial disputes.

War is His method of population control.
...................Cynical Sayings for Cynical Times

Most people profess to hate war, but it's an undeniable and intrinsic aspect of human nature. Such an intrinsic characteristic has to have its roots in biology, and those roots aren't hard to find: population pressure and the competition for resources. The oddity is that so few, liberal or conservative, are willing to acknowledge this rather obvious, if bleak, feature of human nature.

Ever since humans became the top predator, probably a million years or so ago, the main threat to humans has been other humans. There is a lot of unpleasantness associated with war, of course, so biology had to supply some motivational tools, and in fact it is remarkably easy to stir groups to righteous anger and murderous fury when they are presented with real or imaginary threats to their group, be it family, tribe, gang or nation.

Once the nation state had been created, politicians and other leaders quickly found that the biological tools designed for organizing in self-defense were easily co-opted to ensure their own power and profit. Group fear and group anger work well inside a nation as well as out. Racism and religious prejudice may be intrinsic features of human behavior, but they rarely explode into mass violence until some politician sees the opportunity to turn a profit.

It's a long and sorry history at work in our earliest records from the Bible and other sources, and it's still at work today. In Sudan, Rwanda, Israel, Georgia, Iraq, India, and Pakistan, politicians pump up their popularity by beating the same old drums of race, religion, and genocide.

In the US, that despicable tactic has become a favorite of the Republican party and the so-called Conservatives. Bush ginned up a war to get re-elected and McCain did his best to start one to improve his own shot at the Presidency.

This long and deplorable story is worth mentioning mainly because now, for the first time in human history, we have the opportunity to do something about it. We can't change human nature, but we might just be able to stop reproducing at a rate that guarantees that we will have to kill a bunch of each other off in wars. Much of the world has already taken this step, the Chinese by government fiat and the Westernized peoples mainly through the education of women. The fact that our weapons of war have become so much more efficient should be an additional motivating factor.