A History of Violence

1280 CE is not one of those years that jumps out of the history books at you, but eyeglasses seem to have been invented about then. Robert the Bruce was six years old,Thomas Aquinas was six years dead, and Marco Polo was in China at the court of Kublai Khan. Meanwhile, away from the center of the World, Native Americans were occupying the Gila Cliff dwellings in what is now New Mexico and Polynesian sailors were arriving in New Zealand, where they colonized it, killed off the megafauna, and became the very warlike Maori.

A couple of hundred years later, about the same time that Columbus was sailing the Ocean blue, some of their descendants colonized the Chatham islands, became the Moriori and developed a rigorously non-violent and pacifistic society. Unfortunately, these Moriori traits did not serve them well when their Maori cousins arrived in 1835 and proceeded to exterminate their culture and all but a tiny number of them.

We humans clearly have the capability of either warlike or peaceful behavior, but the message of history is that violence is by far the more prominent thread. It easy to imagine, also, that there was nothing freakish about the outcome of the encounter between Moriori and Maori - when peace meets war, war usually wins.

Intergroup warfare is actually fairly rare in the animal kingdom. Besides us, our Chimpanzee cousins, wolves, and ants there doesn't seem to be a lot of it. It seems clear that our history of violence has at least some support in our genetics, since it seems unlikely that our grim history would have unfolded as it has otherwise.

Peace loving people, and that includes most of us, have an obligation to take into account our nature when they try to construct a world without war. We need to understand what it was that made the Maori fierce and their close cousins peaceful. Those who propound on economics need to realize - as they often fail to - that policies that ignore this central human propensity are pointless academic exercises.