‘If we move toward a more connected and interlinked world faster than the breakdown of the current U.S.-backed global order,’ says Stanford scholar Ian Morris, ‘the more likely it is we have a happy ending.’
In this series, Rudyard Griffiths, chair of the Munk Debates, Canada's leading public-affairs forum, discusses issues and trends just over the horizon with renowned analysts and policy-makers.
Why do you think the act of making war is the springboard for human progress?
One of the most exciting, most positive things about human history is that we seem to have become much less violent. If you lived in the Stone Age, you were looking at a 10– to 20-per-cent chance of dying violently. Even in the 20th century with two world wars, nuclear weapons, genocide, all these terrible things, globally your risk of dying violently was 1 to 2 per cent. I believe the one thing that has made people less violent is the rise of the state and organized governments that raise the costs of using violence to settle problems. When you look at the long history of humanity, the big thing you see driving the formation of bigger societies, stronger governments, lower rates of violence has been war. Once one society defeats or swallows up another, they create a bigger society, the rulers suppress violence, and the end result is a safer society. It is a weird paradox of history, but this is where the evidence seems to point.
What about the rise and fall of the great empires of the ancient world? Is this an example of war not leading to human progress?
No. If you compare one of the early empires, say the Third Dynasty of Ur in the late third millennium BC, which was, for its time, a big and complicated empire, with say the Roman Empire 2,000 years later, the latter is dramatically more sophisticated. You leap forward another couple of thousand years to [present] time and we have created societies exponentially more complex. Within any span of history you can pick a period and, say, hey, look, things seem to be getting worse in the short run, but the big trend has been toward consistently greater societal sophistication and lower levels of violence.
How do you explain the 1,000 years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance? This was a period of recurring war with very little, if any, civilizational progress.
From first millennium BC onwards, people living out on the steppes in Central Asia started breeding horses big enough that somebody could get on their back and ride around on them all day. This had a dramatic impact on warfare. Cavalry changes the balance of power on the battlefield. While everyone from the Roman Empire to Han Dynasty China were interested in using cavalry themselves, they were never in a position to compete with the steppe horsemen and this upends the balance of power. While the steppe societies became very good at knocking down existing empires they were not very proficient at running complex empires themselves. And it's this dynamic, from roughly 200 AD to 1400 that dominates Eurasia. It simply becomes very difficult to sustain the types of big, complex governments that can drive down rates of violent death, and as a result we have this millennium-long period where violence spikes back up again.
Is it our fate, as a species, to always be waging war on one another?I think this debate often gets set up in a much too polarized way. On one side people will say, yes, we are hardwired to be violent animals. On the other side, people say, no, we're hardwired to be peace-loving, co-operative animals and the only reason we're violent has been the rise of civilization which has corrupted us. I think both camps are missing the point of what the biological evolutionists are telling us. Every species of animal, humans included, is able to use violence to solve its problems. But what biologists are also telling us is that we have evolved biologically to have these huge, really fast brains, and these have made us the first animals in the world that are able to create culture and change the way we behave. Unlike any other species, we can create new institutions, new values that are not just given to us by our biology, that have driven down the rates of violent death. Yes, we have evolved biologically to be able to use violence, but we've also evolved biologically to be able to figure out ways to behave without being violent.
What does the long view of history suggest about the future of warfare?
In the past, when humanity's killing technology sped up, the biggest and most successful societies were best placed to take advantage. For example, when the concept of mass infantry armies in the first millennium BC emerged, it was the great empires that were able to use it most effectively. Similarly, the 20th-century innovations of tank warfare, nuclear warfare and aerial warfare played to the strengths of dominant powers such as the United States, Germany and the former Soviet Union. But we are now seeing existing and emerging weapons technology having the opposite effect. For example, the possibility of a non-state group getting hold of a nuclear weapon remains one of the great nightmares of the 21st century. Cyber-warfare is another example of where quite small actors can have a disproportionate impact on great states. In short, it is possible that we are seeing a shift in the balance of power away from the stable, established powers who would have traditionally been the beneficiaries of innovations in war fighting.
And what about the future of conflict between nation states?
In the last decade there is an increasing sense that the U.S. is not in a position or lacks the will to continue to act as the world's policeman and states can and should solve their problems by resorting to force. I would argue that this line of thinking is uppermost in the mind of Vladimir Putin. Russian rulers for centuries felt they must control Crimea to have access to the Black Sea and therefore the Mediterranean. He's terrified at the thought that Crimea might be lost to a Ukraine that falls into a pro-Western orbit. So he decides this is a big enough risk that he is willing to gamble on using force and grab it back. I don't think Putin would have done this 15 years ago. I think we are going to see more and more of this kind of behaviour if the perception spreads that there no longer is a stable global power backing up the international order.
Yet, ultimately you are optimistic that rates of violence within and between societies will decline to the point they are insignificant. Why?
One of the conclusions that I drew from looking at the span of human history is that the big thing that drives down rates of violent death is this calculation of what is the likely payoff or benefit from using violence. Anything that moves the world in the direction of raising the costs and lowering the benefits of violence pushes us toward a more peaceful world. One of the biggest things we've seen doing just this over the last few decades has been the rise of new kinds of technology that tie people together. The more connected groups of people are, the less likely payoff there is from using violence against each other. This trend is a big cause for potential optimism about the future. If we move toward a more connected and interlinked world faster than the breakdown of the current U.S.-backed global order, the more likely it is we have a happy ending to the story of warfare and violence.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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