Column: We are inherently war-mongers
By Charles Jeanes
“Just as ‘wars begin in the minds of men’, peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.”
— Seville Statement on Violence, 1986
https://abolishwar.net/wp-content/uploads/Seville-Statement-on-Violence.pdf
“I was a conscious being reading the instructions for my own creation… Had this upgrade also targeted the heart of my mother’s complaint about our species’ flawed genome? Had she discovered a way to re-calibrate Homo sapiens’ balance between sentiment and reason? …
“I was shielded from my own sentiment. Or rather, from its controlling effect. I could put my feelings inside a cage deep within the recesses of my mind. I could close the door. I could even lock it.” [*Editor’s note: the mother is a genius genetic engineer*]
— Blake Crouch, Upgrade [a novel]
“Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.” — US General G. S. Patton
War on the front burner again
With due respect to the idealists who wrote the Seville Statement (see above) war is NOT “invented” in human mind. It is not a human cultural innovation. War is not like our use of fire, a “discovery”. It is a part of us, like our other innate characteristics.
War is the most obvious killer of our species by others of our species. Why we war is a question whose answer is without any agreed consensus.
I leave aside that question for later consideration. It suffices now to say, we are a warlike species, and the only solution to the endurance and persistence of our warlike way is a better kind of human being.
But what about changing our selves with “better” culture – nurture, education and socialized learning? Again, suffice it to say here that, surely, in our history culture has demonstrably failed to improve us.
We have a science, genetics, that might engineer a better us, and we have the essential tool to make genome change, A. I. Should we upgrade? I say Yes.
[ Note: what I think I know about genome upgrades I learned from a research-novel by Blake Crouch, referenced in the epigraph. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/blake-crouch/upgrade/ ]
Humans are not monsters — but we’re most certainly not capable of a cultural repair to the inborn war-making bias of our species.
[ for a soldier’s view, see https://aeon.co/essays/how-philosophy-helped-one-soldier-on-the-battlefield * “I would slowly learn that, as Gray put it, ‘destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves” ]
Species and their natural behaviours
Face it. War is not cultural. We have it in our genes. Culture is a fig-leaf over our shame. We’re wrong to deny that we are driven; we aren’t free to choose.
I want to move fast through the facts of our war making ‘nature’ so I will paste three recent scientific pieces on the species who make war: ants and us.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ants-and-the-art-of-war/
If we do not control war by alteration to our genomes, as we have the science now to accomplish, the other solution is culture. I don’t have faith in that. To be clear: I accept any particular war is a choice; Trump celebrates this fact. I assert that war is not a choice for the species. War is a species-property.
[ a brilliant essay https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/05/what-if-most-people-love-violence/]
Human self-control and prevention of war
The Seville Statement on Violence is a direct refutation of my opinion, and the scientists who articulated it are far beyond me in their academic and scientific credentials. The Statement was signed in 1986; there have been no re-issues. I stand by my opinion: war is in us, not merely culturally but biologically.
I’m also completely committed to any cultural institutions that will limit, chill, control, mitigate, regulate, and render least-destructive, any and all wars. I am a strong advocate of the U.N. Charter, Treaties, Geneva Conventions, world courts, the accords and ‘laws of war’. All such efforts deserve our respect.
[ See https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/kellogg when war was made “illegal” !]
Wars in Europe and Asia Right Now
On the day I was writing Conclusions to this Arc, two more serious wars began. Afghanistan and Pakistan have begun “open war” on their borders – the Afghan leadership promises “legitimate and responsible” military action – while not far away in Iran, Israel and the US have launched “Operation Epic Fury” aimed at changing the regime of Iran’s Islamic Republic. A regime Trump likes better is supposed to be the end-goal but no one believes he cares to help that happen.
February 24 marked the fourth anniversary of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, an invasion Putin might have truly believed was going to be welcomed by Ukraine’s people because they wanted “liberation” from their government; his “special military operation” was not a war, he told Russians, and his regime prosecuted Russians who called it a war. Then everything changed when his army was humiliated and he faced a war like Stalin fought: an endurance contest.
Putin now frames the contest as a war with the West, with Ukraine as the West’s proxy trying to weaken poor Mother Russia. Well, China is behind Russia just as NATO is – shakily, inconsistently, incoherently at times – behind Ukraine.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-grinding-war-ukraine
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2421-1.html
https://www.chinausfocus.com/peace-security/war-cost-calculations-in-ukraine-conflict
The other European war – for surely Israel is part of Europe, not Asia – is the Gaza war. Netanyahu is Israel’s leader but not as Putin is Russia’s. Israel is a democracy with all the political and human-rights culture of the West. Israel is unable to fight without massive US aid; the US can influence Israeli war plans. https://warontherocks.com/2026/02/does-guaranteeing-israels-qualitative-military-edge-still-serve-u-s-interests/
Israel conducts war by standards Western nations recognize; that is its policy. https://www.econtalk.org/a-military-analysis-of-israels-war-in-gaza-with-andrew-fox/
Rational and Justified Use of Force
I have to mention these current wars for one simple reason: they refute the fantasy that post-1945 humanity made progress toward peace. Europe’s decent run, decades without war (1946 to 2022) ends. Now the myth of progress must end too. War is in an active phase once again; I believe this phase will persist.
Europe, the first civilization to make the break-through to modern human living, has a culture of military professionalism that argues for the rational application of violent force in specified political circumstances, to use war as a solution for political challenges: “the pursuit of politics by other means.”
As a quick example of the thinking that war is a choice for Canadians at times, here’s an opinion from the Canadian Legion: the CCF (our socialist party in 1939) erred when it preferred “pacifism over sensible war.” Sensible war, hm?
There it is: war is rational, a choice, we can take it or leave it. NO.
British Isles as microcosm
This is a slight tangent, but worthwhile. I want to assert the primacy of culture over our minds and what we think is reality, the power of narrative to rule us.
The British Isles, whose history has been my life-long passion, have an agreed narrative that divides the population in a simple fashion: Celtic or Germanic. I have come to see that in terms of genomes, the dichotomy is quite false, and the gene pool of the isles population is not summarized scientifically like that.
“The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago.” https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/identity/51881/myths-of-british-ancestry-revisited
It is the simple fact that the base genome of the Isles was in Neolithic humans, humans who lived there when the words Celtic and Germanic meant nothing. The Celtic/Germanic gene variation is miniscule; it is meaningful only as a cultural marker. History and mental/cultural habit made a dichotomy “real.”
I add this sidelight on the discussion for one reason: humans “construct” the reality of their relations to other humans. “The Other” seems to be a universal category our minds require, perhaps cannot do without. And of course in war we fight The Other. We need cultural enablers for war (e.g. patriotism, heroes, religion, song) but war is not choice. A particular war, yes, but in general, no.
My own observation from reading fairly deeply into war in history is that a war will last long enough to exhaust a need for it, and a premature “nearly-done” peace pact will always fail when there has not yet been ‘sufficient violence’; for example, witness northern Ireland, 1969 to 1999, or recently, Sudan or Gaza.
Yes, there are areas of choice in war, but for our species, war is inherent biology; cultural overlay to tell the story of The Other will emerge at need.
The bio-ethics of species change
Can homo sapiens still evolve? Can the newer version of us, be better? Can we, the homo sapiens of today, be the active agents for evolving the new, better version? I think the answer to all three questions is “yes”.
[* I will assume my readers are secular and agnostic, as I am, and adhere to the theory of evolution for the origins of organic life on earth, and its diversity. But for the sake of completeness, here is an essay arguing against that: https://www.icr.org/home/resources/resources_tracts_scientificcaseagainstevolution/ *]
I pitch my case to those who accept evolution, the facts of species, their origins, and of the transformation in species, with new species originating across spans of time. Since we can alter our species by design, we should, in my opinion.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/speciation-the-origin-of-new-species-26230527/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat05.html
https://sdmdiving.com/wildlife-travel-blog/tag/dire+wolf+resurrection
But, do you, dear reader, trust the species? Or more precisely: do you trust any individuals – with knowledge and capacity to make experiments – to build, to evolve by design, better, more-peaceful, loving-compassionate, humans? A species which will never, in any circumstance, make war? Incapable of war.
To whom would you grant this power to alter humanity? A ‘saint’? Aliens?
I know my own mind on this. I trust absolutely no agency on earth or off it.
Today there is no other ethical question more urgent for thinkers who engage with right-and-wrong-morality in scientific research on humans.
[Chinese scientists declare they trust the government – meaning China’s Party-State led by Xi Jinping – to decide issues of bio-ethics; “Confucian ethics” are specifically endorsed. Government prosecutes law-breaking scientists in court, for violation of ethics around gene editing on unborn fetuses. The State is the arbiter of moral and ethical law.
https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2023/03/08/he-jiankui-crispr-baby-scientist-comeback/ https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2025.1600829/full?utm_source=chatgpt.com ]
Conclusions: living with it
I hold to the conviction that I am a realist, not a misanthrope, and my disbelief in human power to end war is not pessimism but a recognition of what is real. I have to say “No” – the evidence of our defects across history would argue we cannot be trusted to upgrade ourselves. Humans are too flawed to do it right.
And there’s this: we are still, across cultures and civilizations, too different in our definition of a “better” human species and what it means “to do it right”. A Westerner – say, a Swede – and an Arab and Indian and Chinese, would argue endlessly over that. Add in aboriginal peoples, Muslim Africans, American Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Israeli Jews: forget consensus among humans.
No doubt my casual dismissal of the power of culture/nurture to alter human behavior, at the level of our war-making drive, has provoked some readers. For some folks the narrative of the human species’ moral Progress is an article of faith: ‘we are becoming an improved being/soul’; we learn by trial and error. I respect the opinion to a point, but I certainly do not share it.
The West’s claim is, we apply violence with justice under reasoned rules for ‘Just War’. And for all our vaunted idealism and morality, we’ve not ended it.
Culture is a wonderful part of our being, and consciousness as it manifests in homo sapiens is inseparable from culturally-constructed reality.
We can face the fact about our species – war is our biology, beyond cultural commandment – but also, still, we make the heinousness of war a little less agonizing with the balm of culture. So I will end today’s column with poetic words about war – – from people whose songs and writing I know, not a selection of canonized ‘greats’.
“And so if you call me brother now
Forgive me if I inquire
“Just according to whose plan?”
When it all comes down to dust
I’ll kill you if I must
But I will help you if I can
Yes when it all comes down to dust
I’ll help you if I must
I will kill you if I can
So have mercy on our uniform
Man of peace or man of war”
– Leonard Cohen, Song of Isaac
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met where any bar is
– Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.
– Ilya Kaminsky, We lived happily during the War
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Appendix: war poetry
There’s so many different worlds
So many different suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones
We’re fools to make war
On our brothers in arms
Oh the iron will and the iron hand
In England’s green and pleasant land
I’ve witnessed your suffering
As the battles raged higher
Well alas we’ve seen it all before
Knights in armour, days of yore
The same old fears and the same old crimes
We haven’t changed since ancient times
– Mark Knopfler, from two songs: Iron Hand; Brothers in Arms.
A soldier came knocking upon the Queens’ door /He said I am not fighting for you anymore…/I’ve wondered who’s the woman for whom we all kill /But I am leaving tomorrow and you can do what you will /”Only first I am asking you why”
And she said, “I’ve swallowed a secret burning thread”
“It cuts me inside, and often I’ve bled.” …
And she took him to the doorstep and she asked him to wait
She would only be a moment inside…
Out in the distance her order was heard
And the soldier was killed, still waiting for her word
– Susan Vega, The Queen and the Soldier
I raise my hand in peace
I never bow to the laws of the thought police
I take a holy vow
To never kill again. To never kill again.
I’m living with war in my heart
I’m living with war in my heart and my mind
I’m living with war right now
– Neil Young, Livin’ with War
evil minds that plot destruction
sorcerers of death’s construction
in the fields the bodies burning
as the war machine keeps turning
death and hatred to mankind
– Black Sabbath, War Pigs
Answers you will not find
Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take ’til he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind
– Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the Wind
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