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Kenneth Payne
King’s College London, UK
© Kenneth Payne 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Payne, Kenneth, 1974–
The psychology of modern conflict : evolutionary theory, human nature
and a liberal approach to war / Kenneth Payne, Lecturer in
International Relations, King’s College London, UK.
pages cm
ISBN 978–1–137–42858–5
1. War (Philosophy) 2. War—Psychological aspects.
3. Liberalism. I. Title.
U21.2.P336 2015
355.001 9—dc23 2015003822
For my father
Of all the passions that inspire man in battle, none, we have to admit,
is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honour and renown.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction 1
Part I
2 Violence and Human Nature 19
Part II
4 Reciprocal Altruism 59
5 Honour 80
Part III
6 Liberal Society and War 101
Notes 176
Bibliography 183
Index 193
vii
Tables
viii
Acknowledgements
I developed the ideas for this book largely while teaching my MA class
on psychology and war at the UK’s Joint Services Command and Staff
College. The students on that course, among the most able of their peers,
proved to be an excellent and challenging sounding board. At the same
time I was rowing with my Oxford college, Green Templeton. If you
haven’t experienced the small, intense world of competitive rowing,
you probably don’t know how consuming it can be. Sport is certainly
not war, but I suspect that the small group dynamics that I describe here
are similar. My thanks, then, to the men’s squad, particularly its cap-
tain, Jamie Manuel, and president, Kareem Ayoub, for their comradeship
during some intense times.
I’m grateful to my King’s College London colleagues for their con-
tribution to my thinking, in particular David Houghton and Jon Hill,
and also to my friends for putting up with my fixation with evolution-
ary psychology with good humour. I’d like especially to thank Natalie
McDaid, and not just for her excellent coxing. Thanks also to Stephen
Hare and Stephanie Jones, two friends who are always buzzing with
ideas.
Lastly, during the writing of this book my father became ill, and soon
afterwards he died. A lifelong RAF serviceman, he was, I am sure, largely
responsible for my interest in conflict. Happily spared the horror of close
combat, he was, nonetheless, a thoroughly military man, with an under-
stated sense of patriotism and duty hiding, in that British way, beneath
a thick layer of humour and irony. This book is dedicated to him.
ix
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1
Introduction
1
2 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
peers. The particulars of honour, like the particulars of much other social
behaviour, vary widely between societies, but all share those common
themes.
The honourable warrior is one who commands public acclaim for his
acts in war, a display of skill, a bold act conducted at personal risk or,
as I argue later in a discussion of close-quarters combat, the strength
of character to stand alongside one’s peers amid great danger. Honour
is also a characteristics of states, and I suggest, as does Ned Lebow, that
honour, or esteem, is one of the principal motivations that explains why
states fight wars (Lebow 2010). Honour might also explain why liberal
states engage in military interventions overseas, in defence of a burgeon-
ing international norm that sometimes privileges the human rights of
individuals and groups over the sovereignty of states (MacFarlane 2005).
To be an ‘honourable’ liberal is not to fight tenaciously what is right for
yourself, or even for your own group, but to recognise the demands and
rights of others beyond it. In a logical sense, the entirety of humanity
becomes the liberal’s referent group, deserving of even-handedness. That
is not how the world works, of course. Our interests and our passions
remain more often parochial and self-centred. We may have imagined
into being vast national communities of complete strangers, conjur-
ing up sufficient emotional attachment between them so as to produce
extreme altruism in combat, yet many liberal warriors will tell you that
they fight and die not for those grand ideas but for the small group of
comrades alongside them.
some 10,000 years ago, presents a break with this earlier period in which
most evolution happened – sometimes referred to as the human ‘state
of nature’, or the ‘ancestral’ environment. Evolutionary psychology is
then able to offer some rationale for why we behave in the way that we
do, despite strong environmental imperatives to act differently – to a
certain extent, scholars have focused on maladaptive behaviours, ideal
for hunter-gatherers but less suited to different environments. And yet
we know that dramatic change to species can happen rapidly, even over
a period of generations, whether in response to changes in the environ-
ment, as with fish introduced to new streams with different predators,
or in response to artificial selection – deliberate breeding of traits in ani-
mals by humans. The Soviet biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila
Trut, for example, managed to domesticate foxes in only a few genera-
tions by breeding together those with the shortest startle responses (Trut
1999). The physical change in the foxes were dramatic as they came to
resemble in appearance domestic dogs – hardly surprising given that
dogs are essentially domesticated wolves.
We might, if we were so minded, reverse the trend and produce wilder
and more aggressive animals through selective breeding. Indeed, this is
done with certain dog breeds, and in a matter of generations. When it
comes to mankind, I argue that a similar process of domestication has
long been under way, with important implications for violence and war.
We might date that domestication to some 10,000–20,000 years ago: not
long in the evolutionary scale of things.
Where does this subtle approach to genes and natural selection leave
us when it comes to violence? Many men, and their societies, live out
lives of peace with little or no exposure to intraspecies violence. I would
venture that this demonstrates the effect of the environment on the
expression of violent behaviour. There are still violent humans, even in
the most peaceful societies, and in the right circumstances many of us
would be capable of physical violence.
Part of my argument here, borrowing from Azar Gat and Steven Pinker
in particular, is that modern liberal societies have sufficiently altered
the payoffs from violence so as to render it a poor option – although,
as with gorging on sugary snacks, even poor options can be hard to
resist if we are genetically disposed to choose them (Gat 2006; Pinker
2011). In such circumstances our innate tendency towards cooperation,
and even altruism, is an inclination that has greater promise. Has the
8 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
modern world had sufficient time to produce less violent men who are
better able to prosper by non-violent strategies? The answer, which must
be tentative, is that violence remains a viable strategy in the modern
world. However, the ‘modern’ world, if we take a long enough view to
start with the emergence of culture, language and larger social groups,
has certainly had long enough to work on ‘domesticating’ humans, like
those foxes in the Soviet Union. It is this domestication, I venture, that
has driven the decline in violence over the last 10,000 years or so – a
point to which I return in Chapter 2.
Evolutionary pressures selected for certain traits, including violence
against outsiders with whom one is in direct competition for scarce
resources. We have evolved to fight, and there is compelling evidence,
which I address in more detail in the next chapter, to show that there
was a great deal of intraspecies violence between many hunter-gatherer
societies. For all that, there is little direct evidence regarding the genetic
component of prowess in combat. Some evidence on violence more
broadly is, however, available. Criminal violence in particular provides
some evidence for tendencies towards violence more broadly, although,
of course, it differs markedly from violence in war, not least since it is
not sanctioned by the community at large.
Studying a large dataset of all convictions for violent crime in Sweden
between 1973 and 2004, Thomas Frisell and his colleagues revealed vio-
lent crime clusters in families (Frisell et al. 2011). This finding does
not, of course, distinguish between genetic and environmental reasons
for the violence since both are implicated. In a later large-n study,
Frisell reviewed data that attempt to do that by considering variation
in the convictions of twins and siblings who were raised in differ-
ent environments (Frisell et al. 2012). Here, he and his colleagues
found a far greater risk of conviction for violent crime among men
than women; and, moreover, that many of these convictions were
for violent assault. This result resonates with the evolutionary logic
that I explore later that suggests that men are more disposed to fight.
On genetic disposition for violence, Frisell found what they called ‘mod-
erate’ heritability – so that 55% of the variation in aggressive criminal
behaviour of those in the dataset might be accounted for by genes, with
some 13% being down to the environment within the family. By com-
parison, the heritability of height in a population has been variously
assessed as some 70–80% – in other words, there appears to be a very
strong genetic influence on height (Visscher 2008). Optimism, in con-
trast, was found in another twin study, this time in Australia, to be only
36% heritable (Mosing et al. 2009). There is clearly plenty of scope for
one’s outlook on life to be informed by environmental factors, especially
Introduction 9
during early development, but genes are also important. Another recent
study, this time of prisoners in Finland, implicated two particular geno-
types in extreme violent criminality (including homicide and battery) –
the authors argued that 5–10% of all severe violent crime in Finland
could be attributed to just these two genotypes (Tiihonen et al. 2014).
Of course, that still leaves 90% of the violent crime determined by
other genetic combinations or the environment – or, most likely, a mix
of both.
There is much that we do not know about genes and violence, and
we should accordingly be modest about drawing firm conclusions, par-
ticularly about the relationship between particular genes, and violent
and impulsive behaviour. The expression of violence is probably not the
result of simple genetic differences – more than one gene is almost cer-
tainly involved in prompting a range of behaviours, and that is even
before we get to the effects of the environment on our development,
and then to their interaction with our genes. The authors of the Finnish
study were at pains to note that the sensitivity of their genotype find-
ings were much too low to permit any sort of screening to anticipate
violent crime.
Moreover, we know from the very rapid changes in societal expres-
sions of violent behaviour that there must be a large environmental
contribution to aggressive behaviours, both in our development as
juveniles and later in establishing the context in which we act. The
anthropologist Jared Diamond’s discussion of the rapid and widespread
transformation of Papua New Guinean society during the period of his
own anthropological career makes this point abundantly clear, as does
the widespread and sustained phenomenon of falling crime rates in
many Western societies (Diamond 2012).4
The great evolutionary leap for humans came with the ability to coordi-
nate their behaviour and shape the environment about them. Now they
could thrive in a range of incredibly diverse environmental niches, from
the Arctic tundra to the Congo basin. The development of language
and learning, and the increasing sophistication of cooperative projects,
allowed humans to act on their environment, rather than simply experi-
ence their environment acting on them, as do all other animals. Natural
selection continued to act on humans, but now they had the capacity
to shape the bounds within which it did so.
The period during which humans have possessed this capability is
relatively short. For the sake of brevity, and as with ‘liberalism’, I shall
10 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
again avoid the rather lengthy debates about the definition of culture
and find myself in broad sympathy with the anthropologist Clifford
Geertz’s view that it is a shared web of understanding between peo-
ples (Geertz 1973). This implies communication, via language, and
a degree of intentionality – a capacity to mentalise what others are
thinking. Culture is a product of our advanced sociability. Once the
social/cultural revolution had happened – a matter of just tens of thou-
sands of years ago – the relationship between evolution and human
behaviours became vastly richer and more complex.5
The aim of Part III is to examine one such cultural manifestation
in the light of what I have said earlier about evolution. I argue that
an understanding of evolution is essential to fathom some of the
behaviours that we see, even in a context as far removed from that of the
hunter-gatherer as seems humanly possible: the modern liberal societies
of Western Europe and North America.
Specifically, I argue that the logic of reciprocal altruism is essential
to an understanding of our extended form of modern empathy, and
our social identities that can extend far beyond our small, largely kin
groups to include people that we may never meet or have very much
knowledge of. In essence, I argue that in liberal societies our evolved
ability to cooperate with non-kin members has moderated our long-
standing tendency to be suspicious of and hostile to strangers from
outside our small kin group. These parochial tendencies clearly haven’t
gone away, and the direction of travel towards ever greater liberalism is
not inevitable. We have a fragile and contingent capacity to empathise
with total strangers, and we continue to favour those most similar to us.
We may even unconsciously choose our friends based on shared DNA – a
recent study found that genetic similarity of friends relative to strangers
was at the level of fourth cousins (Christakis and Fowler 2014). We are
not, in short, too far removed from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, at
least in an evolutionary sense.
This view of liberalism as transformative of established patterns of
human behaviour is hardly new – liberals themselves have been arguing
for centuries that improved communications, increased trade interac-
tions, and shared collected identities beyond the nation (professional,
confessional and ideological) can ameliorate the chauvinism that is
more typical of human interaction with strangers (Howard 2000). Some
liberals go further than this, seeing an almost inevitable progression
of human relations from barbaric prehistory towards an enlightened
future. This is overdone – there is no compelling evidence for a
teleological direction to history, or History, in the sense implied by
Introduction 11
which evolution can happen, there is simply not enough time – cultures,
like other groups, are in a constant state of flux.
The view I adopt here, by contrast, is that culture itself has been catal-
ysed by a process of ‘domestication’ which is relatively recent in the
history of humans – gathering pace some 20,000 years ago, as the palae-
olithic era began to give way to the neolithic. Human evolution has
proceeded sufficiently slowly that there is a common thread connecting
us moderns with earlier humans – that main contention of evolutionary
psychology. But modern humans are nonetheless different from their
ancestors, not least in their capacity to live in larger groups than the
small, mostly kinship bands of the hunter-gatherer, palaeolithic man.
Thus, my argument is that evolution created the potential for culture,
and not, à la Wade, that culture shapes evolution. Though I would not
disavow the potential for human ‘niche’ selection, in which humans
change their environment and in so doing shape the parameters within
which they will subsequently evolve, I am not convinced that this has
produced pronounced, culturally distinct traits.
Liberal culture, I argue, is the logical apotheosis of this enhanced
human sociability, or domestication. In the first instance, domesticated
humans learned to cooperate together more effectively with unrelated,
or at least more distantly related, humans. Culture served, among its
many other advantages, as a marker of who might be deserving of the
bonds of trust, and even altruism, that bound a large group together.
My argument is that such groups would have had a comparative advan-
tage over others that were less social. If competition between groups
turned violent, as it assuredly did, non-cooperative humans would have
had less sophisticated weapons, fewer numbers and cruder tactics.
But within these larger groups of extended clans, tribes and regional
confederations, the payoffs from violence were likely to differ from
those of the small hunter-gatherer group. There would have been a
larger in-group with whom to cooperate. Such groups would have had
more scope for comparative advantage in peaceful intracommunity
social exchanges, to the benefit of both parties; and there would also
have been a hierarchy to compel adherence to group norms. In such
societies there would have been a premium on understanding others;
working out who best to trust, and in portraying oneself as a trustwor-
thy person. Raw aggression in response to provocation or as a strategy
to earn a fierce reputation may often have been a less viable approach
in such groups.
Does this widening and deepening of social cooperation mean that
we are becoming progressively more pacifistic? I argue that we are, in
Introduction 13
contrast with undomesticated humans. And that process may well still
be in train. At its extreme, though, has liberalism created a niche within
which more peaceful types might evolve as a different sort of human?
I am sceptical. First, there has not been long enough in liberal societies
for such changes to feed through into later generations: only a mat-
ter of a few hundred years. Second, violence remains a part of liberal
societies. While liberal societies may well reward cooperative, pacifistic
strategies and allow for mutual gains in esteem, they do not punish
those who are less adept in such an environment with anywhere near
the same severity as did the harsh, resource-scarce and violent world of
the hunter-gatherer. The violent criminals in the large Swedish survey
were testament to that – violence clustered in families, and was to a con-
siderable degree hereditary. The response of the liberal society was not
to annihilate the criminals, or prevent them from breeding, but rather
to punish them within the confines of liberal justice – incarceration for
a spell in a materially comfortable prison.
In short, liberalism is the apotheosis of domesticated man. If liberal
societies were perfect, ideal-types, there really would be no fighting, as
empathetic and caring souls everywhere would seek to maximise the
common collective good. But liberal societies are not like that, and prob-
ably never will be. While in many circumstances violence does not pay,
it remains part of our evolved repertoire of possible behaviours. We are
physically and mentally equipped to fight hard. Moreover, in our rela-
tionship with outsiders, liberals, like their über-socialised, domesticated
ancestors, remain capable of great violence. Indeed, it seems very pos-
sible that their superior capacity to instrumentalise violence was key to
their success – providing the motive force for the process of evolving
ever greater cooperation, and a richer culture.
Liberal warriors
Conclusion
19
20 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Peaceful prestate societies were very rare; warfare between them was
very frequent, and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeat-
edly in a lifetime . . . In fact, primitive warfare was much more deadly
than that conducted between civilised states because of the greater
frequency of combat and the more merciless way it was conducted.1
Dishonourable outsiders
Later he notes that, with the exception of one occasion, his ‘kills were
made when I was in the frame of find that I was killing someone from
another species. It was more like killing animals, bad enough, but not
horribly guilt provoking’.7 Jared Diamond describes a similar state of
affairs among the warriors whom he studied in Papua New Guinea:
‘Those people are our enemies,’ one tribesman declares. ‘Why shouldn’t
we kill them? – they’re not human.’8
Psychologists suspect that this process of dehumanising makes it far
easier to inflict violence on someone, and it is the extreme manifesta-
tion of a commonplace tendency to value the members of one’s own
30 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
they fight to exclude males from access to fertile females and from the
food on their territory.
This business of altruism and sociability matters immensely because
it is a key point of departure from the narrow ‘realist’ worldview of
man in a state of nature, dominated by a fear of predation and acutely
concerned with the accumulation of power through which to protect
himself. That seems closer to the world of the chimpanzee. Instead we
are left with a richer and more complex view of human nature. Security
remains overwhelmingly important, of course, because without it we
cannot realise our evolutionary goals. But we must realise those goals
via our social group. This social group has allowed mankind to adapt to
a huge variety of environmental niches, easily outstripping the capac-
ity of even the more socially adept primates to do comparably. The
path of natural selection down which Homo sapiens has travelled has
favoured cognitive and social solutions to environmental challenges,
placing extensive resources in the development of a large and flexible
brain that is capable of mapping social dynamics, intuiting meaning
and communicating ideas. In short, and contra Rousseau, there never
really was a ‘state of nature’ in which man existed in isolation, before
civilisation came along to corrupt him. Instead, alongside the drives for
security and resources, we must allow for the desires for companion-
ship and esteem, and the search for meaning. The pace with which
this seems to have impacted on human society, moreover, accelerated
rapidly towards the end of the palaeolithic era. After millennia of pro-
ducing the same simple stone tools, human creativity now mushroomed
into something much richer – the capacity for abstract reasoning, lan-
guage and enhanced empathy – all of this in larger groups of humans,
cooperating together.
Chimps are strategic actors in the sense that they are capable of
envisaging sequential steps to achieve a task, and also of coordinating
with others to do so. However, they lack the linguistic sophistication
of humans, and they may also lack the capacity to imagine possible
futures with the degree of rich consciousness that humans do. And
while chimpanzees are their own weapon system (and a heavily mus-
cled, immensely powerful one at that), humans, more slender of build
and far less physically impressive, are nonetheless more deadly because
of their twin capacities for sociability and for culture. So we have the
essential distinction that humans are comparatively sophisticated and
deadly strategists, but that their larger groups and intense sociability
may put the brakes on violence and make it somewhat maladaptive in
many social circumstances.
Violence and Human Nature 35
38
Classical Realists on Honour 39
The realist tradition, one of the most influential and enduring in think-
ing about international affairs, has a rather dispiriting message: the
world is a dangerous and uncertain place, and ultimately the only way
40 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
But survival of the fittest is close to the view of primitive man that was
painted by a second key realist thinker, Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan
(Hobbes 1968). He described a ‘state of nature’ in which man lived
before the onset of civilisation. Individual men in the state of nature
had no one to rely on for protection but themselves. In direct contrast
with Rousseau, it was the agreement of men to live under the power of
an overarching government that relieved them from this state of war
and predation.
Hobbes might not have intended his description to be a literal exe-
gesis of the life of early man – after all, he was a Christian who was
writing centuries before Darwin developed his theory of evolution, and
well before modern archaeology and anthropology arrived at Lawrence
Keeley’s view of primitive warfare. We should, however, hardly be sur-
prised by the cynical, downbeat take on human nature that is implicit
in Hobbes’ account of men who will be able to form mutually agreeable
society only with the coercive power, or at least the threat of punish-
ment, from an overarching authority. Hobbes was writing in the context
of greatly unsettled political circumstances in Europe and England. The
Thirty Years War had ravaged great parts of the continent, part of a rad-
ical transformation of the political order in which notions of empire
Classical Realists on Honour 43
Reinhold Niebuhr is the second classical realist of the modern era with
an interesting take on honour. For him there was an important distinc-
tion to be made between the ethics that obtained within a group and
that which held between groups of whatever ilk. Much of his analysis
is concerned with domestic and economic relations, but he also applies
the logic directly to international affairs, critiquing the liberal idealism
of the 1920s, particularly the League of Nations. In essence, Niebuhr
argues that society between groups was thin, so that one could contrast,
as in the title of his key book, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr
2003). On an individual basis, and contra Hobbes’ state of nature, men
could feel a sense of conscience, or empathy, towards other men; but
the potential for such empathy was dramatically curtailed at the level of
the collective. Thus he wrote: ‘Man is endowed by nature with organic
relations to his fellow-men; and natural impulse prompts him to con-
sider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.’1 This
is pretty close to the view of small-group cooperation and empathy that
we derive from evolutionary psychology, and which I elaborate in the
following chapters. It is a more rounded view of the individual than one
finds in Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’, where the imperatives of individual
survival necessarily curtail such charity.
However, while Niebuhr sees more scope for compassion, this is
strictly limited beyond ‘the most intimate social group’; when the group
grows any larger, coercion is required to bring about cooperation.2 The
trouble is that such coercion privileges order over justice – the power-
ful are able to secure their interests at the expense of others. Niebuhr
allows that it may be possible for enlightened reason to increase the
circle of empathy, but only at the margin. Absent that, we inevitably
value our own interests more highly, and will use force to secure them
if we can. The ‘intimate social group’ he has in mind is left undefined,
but it’s fair to suppose that he means something like the small family
or largely kinship group that is the focus of our evolved tendency to
behave altruistically.
Thus, in Niebuhr’s view, intergroup tensions are arbitrated in the usual
realist manner: by power, deployed in the service of the group’s partic-
ular interest. In this respect he is an authentic realist, notwithstanding
his more benevolent view of human compassion. ‘Society’, he notes in
48 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Amour-propre
The last ‘classical’ realist I want to consider is the French sociologist
Raymond Aron, whose theory of international relations contains great
subtlety, and gives full reign to the idea that honour and standing moti-
vate human relations (Aron 2003). He was undoubtedly a realist insofar
as his writing emphasises those hardy perennials of realist thought –
security, power and anarchy. And, like the other realists, he readily
extends the logic of the individual to that of the collective group. Yet
there is more than that in his account of human nature underpinning
politics – and much of it has a strong flavour of evolutionary psychology,
which usefully bridges the ground between the stark reading of Hobbes
and Machiavelli that I outlined above and the concept of reciprocal
altruism that we shall consider in the next chapter.
Classical Realists on Honour 49
Aron sees politics, both within and between states, as being about
resource allocation and competition. However, he also stresses the
importance of honour and justice in motivating political decisions. This
is the sort of language that a social psychologist would recognise, the
quest for esteem, standing and respect being central to our own sense of
wellbeing. Politics can thus be understood ‘in terms of the reconciliation
of complementary and divergent aspirations (equality and hierarchy,
authority and reciprocal recognition, etc.)’.6
More than this, Aron conceives of politics, both internal and
intergroup, as being shaped to some extent by what we would call
norms (rules of the game) whether explicitly laid out or implicitly
understood – that is, encultured. He takes a conventionally realist view
of the inevitability of war, writing that ‘The nobles who fight for prestige
can never be through fighting.’7 Status requires constant attention and
jealous guarding, and as the original goal approaches attainment, new
horizons open through which glory might be achieved anew. Moreover,
glory is a public virtue by definition: it requires recognition from others,
and there is always an element of insecurity in the seeker after glory –
how sincere are others in their praise or recognition?
Consider the following in line with the caricature of a realist who
would describe a world that is shaped by insecurity and the attendant
quest for power:
‘Perhaps the true causes are buried in the collective unconscious.’9 This
idea of a collective mythology certainly resonates with the psycholog-
ical analysis to come below. On both sides of very many conflicts, the
belligerent societies are convinced of their own justice; their own narra-
tive account of the conflict. The power of ‘social proof’ is evident here –
rather than an ontologically given ‘truth’, we derive meaning through
the shared understanding of our group. Different facts are engaged
to support competing narratives. Adherence to the dictates of that
narrative are very much what defined honourable behaviour – it is con-
tingent on the mores of the group. More than this social psychological
phenomenon, Aron’s thought points to another important psycholog-
ical theme: the power of the unconscious to shape our attitudes and
behaviours.
The final thought from Aron that is worth considering here is almost
a throwaway line that immediately follows on from the last sentence
quoted. ‘Perhaps,’ he speculated, ‘aggressiveness is a function of the
number of men or of the number of young men.’10 That, in the context
of ageing liberal societies that are firmly committed to gender equality,
is a point that deserves further attention, especially given the second
level at which honour is considered here: that of the soldier, in the ser-
vice of his society. Azar Gat makes a related point about the decline in
violence being related to the place of young men in society, and it fits
with the idea from evolutionary psychology that young men take risks
in pursuit of reproductive success, and that a prickly sense of honour is
a proxy for the ultimate goals in life.
For states, the lesson of classical realism is clear: reality dictates that
moral scruples should be given short shrift. There may be moral scruples
within society – such is the stuff of politics. However, at the interna-
tional level, society is thinner, and honour is costly. As Bradley Thayer
sees it, the parallels between international affairs and evolutionary the-
ory is profound: the comparison between the authentic ‘state of nature’
and the realist world of states in a ‘state of nature’ holds, at least insofar
as imparting some useful insights (Thayer 2004).
The same imperative ought, from a realist perspective, to drive the
conduct of war. There is an efficiency argument to war – fight hard and
effectively, or go down to defeat and annihilation. In the real world,
by contrast, the style of fighting that a society pursues necessarily bears
some relation to the social conditions obtaining within it.
Classical Realists on Honour 51
be. For example, there are the political constraints on the use of force,
as when President Johnson limited air attacks against North Vietnam
in the mid-1960s lest the war should escalate to include direct conflict
with China or the USSR (Payne 2014). And there are also moral con-
straints on the use of force, even when fighting is desperate and the
stakes are seemingly very high. In the Second World War, for example,
chemical and biological weapons were employed by neither side, despite
the incredible carnage, despite a dramatic weakening in pre-war norms
that prohibited attacks on non-combatants (Price et al. 1996). Another
dramatic deviation from the efficiency argument of warfare is the taboo
against the assassination of enemy leaders (Thomas 2000).
The challenge for me in the remainder of this book is to discern a rela-
tionship between the particular values of liberal society and the causes
that it fights for and the way in which it does so, and then to see how
that relates to the evolutionary theory outlined above. There is some-
thing about a liberal society that shapes both the sorts of wars that it
fights and the ways in which it does so. While there is often a narrow,
parochial explanation for the strategic decisions of liberals states, there
is sometimes a broader terrain to consider too – one in which liberal con-
cerns also feature, both in shaping the way in which liberals organise to
fight and in influencing the causes for which they do so.
Like all others, liberal societies have a distinctive war-fighting style.
In the light of the many differences between them, and my intention
to focus primarily on US and UK examples, I should say immediately,
‘styles’. I say much more on this later, but for now it is sufficient to point
out two points. First, the liberal style of war is sometimes inefficient – it
leads to commitments that a realist might abjure, and it imposes limits
on the sorts of violence that might be employed. And, moreover, in
contrast with a simple, realist view of expedient war, this inefficiency
cannot be readily set aside because that style constitutes both the group
and its interests.
Second, this inefficiency as a result of liberal norms brings it into
tension with liberal warriors. Liberal societies differ from their own war-
riors in an important respect that should be clear from my discussion
of Machiavelli – while the warriors of liberal society must engage in the
sort of consequentialist logic that appealed to Machiavelli, thoroughgo-
ing liberals cannot adhere to the same rules, as a matter of philosophy.
Of course, practical liberalism is a different thing from philosophy, and
many real-world liberal societies have engaged in precisely the sort of
cold-blooded ends-means calculus that Machiavelli recommended to his
prince. But the philosophical difference remains.
Classical Realists on Honour 53
Liberal societies can fight, and have fought, with great brutality
against their enemies. In his uncompromisingly bleak history of the war
in the Pacific, John Dower documents the great brutality that existed on
both sides (Dower 1986). This was a war of kamikaze attacks, and suici-
dal frontal assaults against heavily defended positions. Prisoners of the
Japanese were starved and worked to death. On the other side, there
was mutilation of bodies, living and dead. Surrender was refused on
both sides, and prisoners were summarily executed. The fighting was
intense in a struggle that both sides saw as existential. But there was
more at work here than the logic of efficiency in combat. The way in
which each side stereotyped the warriors of the other was revealing.
This was a war with high stakes, uncompromising goals, high-intensity
war-fighting, reaching all the way up to the aerial bombing by incendi-
ary and nuclear weapon of swathes of Japanese cities. Yet the war against
Germany in Western Europe was, for all of its comparable intensity, less
savage. The Germans, unlike the Japanese, were from the same ethnic
community as the Americans and the British. And while many hun-
dreds of thousands were killed, including, of course, civilians who were
massacred in bombing attacks, there was less of a pejorative edge to the
violence – the Japanese were sometimes seen as beyond the pale and
something less than human. This was a war with a strong efficiency
logic to it, but also one where liberal values were less effective as a check
on brutality. There was a firebreak between the Germans (deserving of
liberal empathy) and the Japanese (less deserving).
There is a tension here for liberals – from a realist perspective, they
ought not to limit their wars to protect their values at the expense
of achieving their goals in war. And on the other hand, from a lib-
eral perspective, they should apply their values consistently to all other
humans. That they do neither consistently suggests that neither the
strict realist worldview nor the liberal philosophy provides a full account
of strategic behaviour.
As liberalism has become more robustly observed in Western societies,
we might expect its values to have a greater hold on society than they
did in the Pacific or, say, in the Indian wars of the American frontier.
And, broadly, that is what we observe. That may, however, just be a
question of the limited goals for which these modern wars are fought –
wars in defence of liberal values, on behalf of oppressed groups else-
where, express a cosmopolitanism that may only be partly felt by the
liberal societies that are engaged in them. As a result, their commitment
to those wars may be more limited. Under attack directly after 9/11, by
contrast, the prosecution of the ‘War on Terror’ by the USA was notably
54 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Conclusion
59
60 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
meet, there is far more cooperation than the basic, rational actor model
would lead one to suppose. Real humans, these studies seem to sug-
gest, just can’t help cooperating. That is what we might expect too from
our notion of reciprocal altruism in its evolutionary context. Altruism
can’t be expected to work on the basis of a very careful cost–benefit
analysis of the situation in hand. Sometimes we might need a more
instinctive response, as, for example, in situations of sudden and acute
danger. An altruistic instinct would be more adaptive than a laborious
introspection on the merits or otherwise of the recipient of our charity.
This fits what neuroscience tells us about the role of instinct and the
unconscious in our decision-making. From cognitive psychology, par-
ticularly the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, comes the
idea that we use simplified models of reality, or ‘heuristics’, to make
many of our decisions for us (Kahneman et al. 1982). This research
has already made its mark in political psychology and strategic stud-
ies via scholarship on the decision-making of foreign policy elites. Yuen
Foong Khong and David Houghton have both explored the use of
heuristics by senior US administration officials in the Vietnam War and
the Iranian hostage rescue crisis, respectively (Khong 1992; Houghton
2001). Particularly influential was the idea that we use simplified ana-
logical reasoning to compare a given situation with earlier examples
that we know about. This can be adaptive in situations where infor-
mation is ambiguous, or the pressures of time are severe, but as Khong
demonstrates, they can also introduce costly errors into policy-making
by ignoring some important differences between analogies. More recent
research has expanded the concept of heuristics, with Kahneman distin-
guishing between two broad types of cognition: one a more instinctive,
automatic process that can deliver rapid and often accurate decision-
making; the other a more deliberate and considered process, typically
more demanding on time and effort, and that can involve the conscious,
self-aware mind (Kahneman 2011). This conceptualisation almost cer-
tainly aggregates different mental processes but nonetheless captures
an important idea: that much of our decision-making takes place away
from the conscious mind.
In his neuroscientific research, Antonio Damasio has pointed to
the tremendous importance of emotion in shaping our decisions. His
patients with damage to parts of the brain that are responsible for pro-
cessing or interpreting emotional information displayed a pronounced
inability to make effective, timely decisions (Damasio 2005). Rather
than being an impediment to effective decision-making, Damasio sug-
gests, emotions may be an integral part of it. If something feels good
68 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
to us, why not go with it? Emotions, seen in this way, are a powerful
heuristic. Indeed, Paul Slovic refers to an ‘affect heuristic’ (Slovic et al.
2007). Another, related concept is that of ‘cognitive fluency’, which
sees the brain as a labour-saving cognitive miser, always on the look-
out for the path of least effort. Daniel Kahneman’s ‘type 2’ cognition,
the deliberative, conscious and effortful sort of thinking, is engaged
when something draws our attention to it, or when the decision is not
already made by our unconscious mind (Kahneman 2011). This is the
sort of research that profoundly challenges notions of rationality that
have anything in common with the theoretical agent that is elaborated
in the rational actor model. Indeed, rather than a rationalist, this gives
us a sense of the conscious self as someone arriving late at the scene
of an event and rationalising what has happened. This is an important
point to which I shall return when considering memory, storytelling
and agency later on.
Which group?
Flexible groups
evolution through time of their attributes are all part of our desire to
fit in and be esteemed by other group members.
Reciprocity, or at least some promise of it, becomes key to the for-
mation of groups, which then are in turn the font of culture. After all,
culture is what constitutes the group, at least once it expands beyond
the close band of kin. This is the view of culture that is articulated
by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who described it as a sort of
spider web, marked by a shared understanding of how things ought
to be done (Geertz 1975).2 The artefacts of culture – dress, speech
(both language and dialect), tools, buildings and so on, to include, of
course, weapons – are not just symbols of the group but very much
what actually constitutes it. And that, to a considerable extent, is
a fluid concept – whether the group is of Kandinsky enthusiasts or
Indonesia.
Group loyalty
the argument out to the group that provides the individual with the
means to survive.3
This evolutionary logic can help us to understand the otherwise mys-
terious forces of patriotism and honour, where people are willing to
make tremendous sacrifices on behalf of a far larger group than the small
band in which humans evolved for much of our history. It is simply not
possible to know more than a tiny percentage of the population of one’s
country. The stereotypes that we apply to make sense of our nationality,
and that of others, can only ever be crudely reductive. And yet the hold
that our own country, and our countrymen, can have on us is profound.
It can be even more powerful than the bonds of kinship. We see this in
the evident pride of some mothers of suicide bombers in Palestine, cele-
brating the martyrdom of their own sons and daughters. Wilfred Owen
captures the strange sentiment of glory that is associated with dying,
quite horribly, for one’s country in his most famous poem:
Would you send your own children off to likely death in a brutal and
savage war? Perhaps, if it were an existential struggle, one might make
a decent case for it, but most wars are not. Many are fought not over
territory, or even the right to live in a particular way of life. Owen
was appealing against the awful consequences of nationalism amid the
most destructive of wars. Yet, despite its apparent absurdity, nationalism
retains a powerful hold on our sense of identity.
The same loyalty to group over kin is true, on a smaller canvass, of
cults. In his landmark 1950s study, Leon Festinger and a few colleagues
joined a Doomsday cult to discover what would happen when the clock
struck midnight and space aliens arrived from another planet to take
off cult members before the earth was destroyed (Festinger et al. 2008).
This was a ridiculous belief. Indeed, perhaps fearing ridicule, members
had shunned all publicity, at least before D-Day. But they had also made
some serious sacrifices to be part of this group – leaving jobs, friends
and, in some cases, family.
Reciprocal Altruism 75
There are intriguing ironies about all of this altruism and cooperation.
There is a dark side that Trivers observes is the delicate balance of decep-
tion and detection that underpins it, as we cheat and free-ride wherever
possible, even while trying to fool everyone, including ourselves, about
what morally upstanding actors we are. But there is an even darker
irony in Samuel Bowles’ suggestion that a key driver of the evolution
of altruism has been war (Bowles 2009).
Using a dataset that includes a variety of archaeological and ethno-
graphical case studies, Bowles asks whether, if we assume that coopera-
tive groups were more likely to succeed in conflict with less cooperative
ones, there was enough conflict in these societies to make this a selec-
tive pressure for greater altruism. It seems to be a reasonable assumption,
and his answer, necessarily tentative given the constraints of data and
modelling, is that the level of violent death that we observe is suffi-
ciently high to have allowed the proliferation of altruism – that is, war
was so costly, and the gains from altruism so significant, that individual
altruism at significant cost to the altruist could occur.
Warfare thus provides the answer to the puzzle of why altruists would
not be selectively bred out of populations by cunning and selfish free-
riders. The answer is partly that the sensitivity to cheating and the
profound sense of outrage on discovering that we have been cheated
polices the activity effectively. However, Bowles’ logic provides an addi-
tional, reinforcing rationale. We have to cooperate under pressure of
conflict because, if we don’t, groups that do will in time annihilate us.
This is similar to the argument that was offered by Bradley Thayer and
earlier by Robert Bigelow – that the pressures of predation and warfare
act as a spur to intelligence: groups with more intelligent members can
outperform others in warfare (Bigelow 1969; Thayer 2004). What Bowles
argues is that war acts as a spur for social intelligence. Cooperation
Reciprocal Altruism 77
Conclusion
For much of evolutionary history the group remained small, with most
members knowing others, and thereby being able to build a picture of
who to trust. It would be possible to gossip about most members, shar-
ing information and shaping reputations. To be reciprocally altruistic
towards individuals in this group would be tantamount to being altru-
istic towards the group. The boundaries with kinship altruism would be
similarly blurred – many members would be related, even if distantly,
and those who were unrelated would stand a decent chance of even-
tually being involved in the onward propagation of one’s own genes.
In the sense of the small evolutionary group of 50 at an overnight camp,
then, altruism makes inherent good sense. In ambiguous, often danger-
ous, situations, or where survival is a matter of small margins eked out
in difficult environmental niches, we develop a pretty acute notion of
who we can trust and who we should do favours for.
Groups eventually became larger – a function, among other things,
of language, culture and the capacity for specialisation. We had the
mental capacity to develop an abstracted sense of identity and fealty to
78 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
a group that was larger than the hunter-gatherer band. As part of that,
groups became larger, because of the pressures of war. There is an econ-
omy of scale in warfare: might is not inevitably right, but having larger
groups permits specialisation in fighting and allows the development
of tactics and weaponry. Often victory does go to the big battalions,
and their assembly requires a supporting societal foundation that can
generate and sustain fighting power. In such armies, we might not
know everyone else, except perhaps for some powerful figures who have
earned a reputation for battlefield performance. With weapons increas-
ing the impact of surprise through raid and ambush, we might expect
to see human groups clustering together for safety in numbers, which
would in turn involve the development of settled and fortified camps –
which, of course, require further intense cooperation, hierarchy and role
specialisation.
This tension between offence and defence in intergroup conflict
remains a feature of war down to the modern era, with the balance being
prone to shift in response to changes in weapons technology and tactics,
both of which are reflections of culture. That culture rests on the tremen-
dous cognitive capacity for ingenuity and cooperation of anatomically
modern humans, a capacity unleashed, according to Dunbar, by the
evolutionary resolution of the iron grip of time constraints on forag-
ing, resting and managing tensions in social interactions. The key to
human evolution is our capacity to knit together larger groups via laugh-
ter, music and language – in short, our inherent sociability within the
group. This, combined with threats from without the group, lead to ever
bigger cooperative bands that are capable of increasingly sophisticated
approaches to war.
So to Bowles’s argument that war selects for altruism, we might add an
addendum: war and the altruism that it promotes allows groups to grow
beyond Dunbar’s main constraint – the size of the human neocortex.
The remarkable conclusion of Bowles’ work sets the stage for the argu-
ment to come: groups in war select for altruism – the very basis of the
liberalism that is inherent in the modern conception of warfare in the
West is, somewhat ironically, a product of intergroup conflict, and all of
the savagery that comes with it.
In sharpening the division between group identities, war facilitates
the essential sacrifice within groups that is the bedrock of civilisation.
Charles Tilly famously remarked that war made the state and the state
made war (Tilly and Ardant 1975). We can see the essential truism
of this in evolution too: war shaped our evolution, selecting for new
groups with new cooperative capabilities, and these in turn acted to
Reciprocal Altruism 79
80
Honour 81
dancers (Little et al. 2011). But liberals also venerate other, non-physical
attributes, including selflessness, intelligence and wealth. Of course, for
all of these one can also discern an evolutionary logic.
In an evolutionary setting, in contrast with liberal society, the connec-
tion between fighting and honour would likely be more pronounced.
Earlier I argued that men were overwhelmingly the warriors in ‘primi-
tive’ warfare, a similar picture to chimpanzee wars, in which much of
the fighting is done by the males. Moreover, while the gains of combat
may accrue directly to the belligerents – eliminating rivals for feeding
territory and obtaining access to women – these gains might fall dispro-
portionately on some members of the fighting group, particularly those
who are able to dominate rivals or gain status through their public per-
formance in battle. I argued further that we humans are often on a hair
trigger to defend our esteem, as gauged by other members of our refer-
ent group. Garnering a status as an effective warrior, or leader, was one
great way of achieving this esteem within the group and, via that proxy,
securing greater access to the essentials of evolutionary life. Against that
there was, of course, a trade-off: exposing oneself to risk.
In fairly egalitarian societies with limited coercive powers, leader-
ship would probably be earned by example rather than via formal
hierarchy, which would complicate the ability of leaders to compel
particular behaviours, thereby making for simple tactics, especially
in pitched battle. Nonetheless, and especially as larger, more coop-
erative groups develop, groups might become more hierarchical and
tactics more formal and sophisticated. In such societies, ‘big men’ could
emerge, with more clout in collective decision-making, more women
with whom to father children and more material goods as currency to
be converted into genetic success. Hence, perhaps, that evidence sug-
gesting a disproportionately small number of ancestral fathers relative
to mothers.
Warriors, then and now, achieve esteem by public displays of courage
or by killing their enemies. Trophies – heads and scalps, for example –
could be taken by way of account, a practice with direct modern paral-
lels. In the Falklands Conflict of 1982, severed ears were found in the
ammunition pouch belonging to a dead British parachutist, and there
have been allegations of mutilation of Taliban fighters in the recent
War in Afghanistan too. Of course, modern trophy-taking by Western
soldiers is prohibited and greatly offends the liberal sensitivities of soci-
eties that hold individual self-worth in high regard. Such behaviour by
Western warriors has been seen as an emulation of the primitive way of
war, as with the adoption of scalping by some US army soldiers in the
82 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Public honour
Societal honour
shaped and a degree of society come into being. Rather, even if we allow
for considerable normative variations between the societies that consti-
tute individual states, we are still in a position where values of some sort
or other shape behaviour.
In part, this society will be a reflection of the norms that obtain
domestically, and that form our personal moral framework. It is difficult,
contra Niebuhr, to be a moral agent domestically but not interna-
tionally. This would require an inhuman suspension of the sort of
psychological processes, many of them unconscious, that govern our
innate sociability. The classical realist aspiration for dispassionate states-
manship that is enacted in pursuit of a ‘national interest’ is nonsensical
when our values do so much themselves to constitute our interests.
As Ned Lebow argues, ‘our interests depend on identity, and identity
in turn depends on community’.4
We can, additionally, venture more about what constitutes those
values, and in so doing make the case for a broad commonality of inter-
ests across groups. Specifically, we seek fairness, albeit fairness for our
particular referent group. Earlier I introduced the idea of reciprocal pun-
ishment to uphold the norms of a group. In a fascinating experiment,
Oriel FeldmanHall and colleagues found that when individuals had been
unfairly treated by another person, they preferred compensation with-
out retribution – even when that retribution could be had cost-free
(FeldmanHall et al. 2014). Victims just want redress. But onlookers who
perceived the same violation of the fairness norm preferred the most
punitive option available to them. Clearly, if we have a stake in uphold-
ing the rules of the game, it makes sense to punish transgressions. And,
as argued earlier, if we are a powerful actor with a key stake in the exist-
ing normative framework, we may choose to bear a disproportionate
cost to altruistically punish norm violators.
This finding might tell us something about honour for a liberal state.
Liberals, especially powerful and hegemonic liberals, have an important
stake in upholding the values of the international society that they have
created, and in spreading and deepening its normative hold. Certainly
they seek to satisfy their own, narrow self-interest, and might respond
to perceived injustice with the sort of pique that we would expect of any
other social group that encounters a slight. But their philosophy, with its
expansive idea of community and reciprocal obligation to all, entails a
larger sense of community than the state itself. If a group identifies with
a particular set of values, then we might expect that violation of those
values by a perceived outsider will sharpen the contrast between ‘us-the-
slighted’ and ‘them-the-violator’. Some of the military interventions of
90 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Honour has some broad and basic parameters – it entails public sac-
rifice for a group, and may earn a reward in terms of status. But in
its particulars, precisely what is honourable changes, and sometimes
rapidly. Related to this is the concept of who is deserving of what sort of
behaviour: we may have a quite complex hierarchy of obligation.
This is because honour is related to a concept of group and society,
and as such is flexible and contingent, depending on who is ‘in’ and who
is ‘out’ of whichever social identity is salient at any time. The British
social attitudes survey provides compelling evidence of the possibility
of significant shifts in attitudes across a range of issues, with the gen-
eral direction in recent decades being towards more socially liberal and
inclusive opinions.5 In the mid-1980s, for example, half of the respon-
dents thought that a man’s job was to earn money, and a woman’s to
look after home and family – a figure that had fallen to 13% by 2013.6
In 1983, one in three British people did not affiliate with a religion,
whereas now half of the population do not.7 On race, British people
self-report that they are becoming more tolerant: in 1983, 35% described
themselves as prejudiced, but by 2001 that had fallen to 25%. After that
year, and perhaps as a result of the wars against militant Islamism and
associated terror attacks, that figure began to rise, reaching a new high
of 38% in 2011, before falling again to 30% by 2013.8 Older people,
unskilled workers and men tend to self-report higher levels of prejudice
than younger people, professionals and women. On immigration, by
contrast, British people might, prima facie, be considered to be less lib-
eral, with 75% advocating a reduction in overall immigration – perhaps
Honour 91
World War and the Second World War acted to shift societal atti-
tudes towards equality by increasing the demands for women in the
workplace.
As these examples demonstrate, the character of societies changes,
and quickly, the result of continual negotiations between members
about what is right and how one ought to behave. There is little honour
from duelling, and less shame, one hopes, in being a gay serviceman.
In liberal societies, one earns honour less from upholding archaic and
chivalric standards and more from inclusivity and tolerance. I chose
these examples because they illustrate what seems to be a broad trend
towards greater inclusivity in liberal societies, including, as here, in
the military sphere. That is intriguing because it pushes against some
enduring themes in military culture – notably its conservatism and tra-
ditionalism, and, in the case of women, which I explore more below, a
notion that close combat in particular is a male activity.
Indeed, in all of these examples, from duelling to tolerance of homo-
sexuals, the response of the military was arguably lagging the attitudes
of wider society. Again, we should guard against making too general a
point – Western militaries have become more socially liberal at differ-
ent rates. But it seems that, while they inevitably reflect the character
of their societies in some respects, they do not, as a specialised subset,
mirror it. For militaries, indeed, perhaps the most salient referent group
is less wider society and more other, similar militaries – what Farrell
and others refer to as military isomorphism (Farrell 2005). Similarly, for
soldiers, even liberal ones, the point of reference, and reciprocity, need
not be the broad community of liberal society but the smaller commu-
nity of warriors. Their sense of honour might, accordingly, be shaped in
response to the needs of that community.
There are some staples in honour and war that reach back through
human history and myth to the verses of The Iliad, with its ideal of
the hero, who achieves eternal acclaim through performance in bat-
tle. This is a key and enduring theme – the veneration of valour in battle.
Related to that is the acceptance of great personal risk, including death.
The archetypal warrior accepts bleak odds with equanimity, even with a
display of sangfroid.
Another theme is that war is, for the warrior, somehow existential.
There is a glory to fighting that is distinct from the rationale for the con-
flict and the society on whose behalf it is fought. Yeats’ verse ‘An Irish
96 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
In this third part of the book, I draw on the earlier work on evolutionary
psychology and honour and apply it to the modern era. There is a
puzzle here: the character of war is manifest through human history
in such a bewildering variety of ways that it can be hard to discern a
deep underlying evolutionary logic to war. That is a particularly tricky
task in an age in which war, as practised by Western, liberal societies,
seems to be in stark contrast with war in its recent, industrial guise,
but also with war in a longer, historical sense. What can evolution tell
us about that Western impulse to intervene in seemingly remote con-
flicts, or about the strict limits that Western states place on their soldiers
during combat?
A caveat is in order. In much of the analysis I focus on the UK and
the USA. There is no such thing as a ‘typical’ liberal state – all have
unique features – but these two may strike some as rather untypical:
they are, for example, among the most globally active, employing large,
expensive militaries, even as some liberals states are spending propor-
tionately less on their own armed forces. The USA is the leading world
power with all of the attendant responsibilities that entails, while the
UK has a legacy as the former hegemon, and was later a great and colo-
nial power. Perhaps both states might take less of a liberal view of war
than, say, Norway and Ireland. I concentrate my attention on these two
states, however, for two reasons. First, they are the societies that I am
most familiar with as a scholar of US foreign policy who works with
the British armed forces. Second, and more importantly, they constitute
a ‘hard case’ to the extent that they are considered less authentically
liberal than those other two states, at least in the foreign policy realm.
Keeping that caveat in mind, what can we say about the liberal way
of war?
101
102 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
is that Clausewitz captured the essence of war, and not just of human
war. The essential nature of war involves coordinated acts of violence in
pursuit of political ends – and these are governed by a sense of purpose
and agency among those that decide on the right course of action. The
evolved responses of humans to these motivations are what underpins
the wars of prehistory with those of today.
Michael Howard’s Invention of Peace offers another take on war and
history that is different from Coker’s, one more along the lines of my
argument here (Howard 2000). Where Coker limits the phenomenon
of war to the historical era, Howard is content with the notion that
war has been a constant of human society, but he argues imaginatively
that with the onset of the Enlightenment, and the spread of a liberal
worldview, beginning in Europe, there grew a notion of progress towards
peace – the idea that there could be a world after war. It wasn’t that
civilisation invented war, as Coker argued, but that war was a constant
of human affairs, until liberals essentially invented peace – the idea that
there could be something other than war. The liberal project sought
to escape war through the extension of reason and empathy. Liberals
pointed to the importance of commerce and representative, transparent
government in building the mutual bonds between national societies –
reducing the predatory motive for war, and the capacity of elites to wage
it to their advantage over those of their constituents.
This attractive liberal idea has its modern form in the writings of
Steven Pinker, John Mueller and Francis Fukuyama, among others
(Fukuyama 1992; Mueller 2007; Pinker 2011). There were, of course,
plenty of periods of peace in human history before the Enlightenment,
and there have been many great outpourings of intergroup violence dur-
ing it, but as a systematic philosophy, it took liberalism, with its appeal
to human reason and empathy, to generate a logic of peace. If there
was something innate in human sociability that contributed to war,
as Bowles suggests, then liberalism and modernity offered the prospect
of superseding it. There was an important addendum: perpetual peace
would come about by working with human nature, not against it.
The argument, perhaps best articulated by the philosopher and ethi-
cist Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle, is that our evolved
tendencies for cooperation, which are so vital to extending the group
to non-kinship members, underpin an ever enlarging circle of empathy
towards other humans (Singer 2011). Pinker builds on Singer, holding
that the genie of reason and logic, once uncorked from the Enlighten-
ment bottle, has contributed to this expanding circle. Our subconscious
largely shapes how we react to those who are in out-groups, as we saw
104 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
earlier. We seek fairness for our group and act to punish those who
transgress norms against it, even at a cost to ourselves. We may be prej-
udiced against out-groups even if we logically and consciously aver that
all men are equal. But the modern liberal has no out-group: everyone
is theoretically part of that circle of empathy, whether they are liberal
or not.
The last piece in the puzzle has come from modern technologies that
compress time and distance, lending a practical dimension to the theo-
retical notion of empathy for all. Much of life is still distinctly local,
but the meaning of being foreign has changed. There are no longer
barbarians lurking in the shadows beyond the pale against whom the
norms and conventions of civilisation need not be rigorously applied.
Mass migration, particularly into liberal European societies and the USA,
has changed what it means to be a foreigner. In the most cosmopolitan
cities – London, Toronto, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam – many people
are from overseas. This is not necessarily a liberal utopia. Very many
frictions remain, and sometimes clashes in group culture can result in
violent confrontations. All too often, groups coexist rather than inter-
mix. A map of the USA that charts the ethnic makeup of individual
households reveals a pattern of deep ethnic segregation in some urban
neighbourhoods.1 In parts of Western Europe in particular, the issue
of Islam has become highly politicised and contentious, prompted by
large-scale immigration into previously homogenous indigenous neigh-
bourhoods, especially in deprived areas. And if the pattern of liberal
tolerance and intercommunity empathy is patchy within liberal soci-
eties as a whole, then it is even thinner in the large parts of the world
that are less distinctively liberal.
against other democracies. There are exceptions. There are some from
the ancient world, as in the war between Athens and Syracuse that
formed an important part of wider Peloponnesian conflagration; and
there are others from modern times, as in the ongoing conflict between
a democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza and its democratic
Israeli neighbour. There are complications in measuring the robustness
of the democratic peace – not least in defining the two key terms,
‘democracy’ and ‘peace’. If we allow, for example, that a USA with a
limited franchise and constitutionally permitted slavery is a democracy,
and that a similarly limited franchise in the UK also constitutes a democ-
racy, we could include the Anglo-US war of 1812 as a contra-example.
We might also include the American Civil War as another example.
Overall, however, the correlation between democracy and peace is a dis-
tinctive feature of international affairs that has stood up well to scrutiny,
certainly compared with any other relationships.3
Correlation, however, does not make for cause: perhaps it is the case
that the absence of war has allowed democracy to flourish, rather than
the other way around. Perhaps both variables are dependent on some
other underlying factor – industrialisation, for example, might make for
a large middle class that seeks to defend its property and intellectual
rights by pressing for more representative and transparent government.
It might also prompt more economic interdependence with other enti-
ties, thereby discouraging hostilities because of mutual economic vul-
nerability and enhanced understanding and empathy through repeated
exposure to other cultures. Such was certainly the hope of liberals in the
nineteenth-century tradition of Cobden and Angel. If wealth creation
depends more on speculative capital and comparative advantage in
export production than it does on the ownership and exploitation of ter-
ritory, peoples or primary resources, then predatory war is of diminished
utility.
For the purposes of this analysis, what matters is the process itself –
the progressive spreading and deepening of a body of liberal ideas, atti-
tudes and behaviours that have reshaped Western European and North
American societies in the last few generations. The changes that have
been wrought by these shifts are profound and touch on a welter of
issues, including in health, education and law and order. The military
domain, as we shall see, has been no less affected. Social attitudes have
changed rapidly towards such life-and-death issues as euthanasia, capital
punishment and abortion. They have shifted on female emancipation,
education and equal participation in the labour force. Racial equality has
become de jure the norm, even if de facto it is still imperfectly observed.
108 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
least. First is the idea one finds in Aron and Gat that fighting relates to
aggression and risk-taking by young men. There are fewer fighting-age
men proportionately in liberal societies compared with those in more
bellicose parts of the world, and compared with the same societies a cen-
tury ago. Even these males now have alternative outlets for their restless,
combative urge to forge an identity through adventure in war. Sex and
material wealth are readily available to many young Western males with-
out the risks of campaigning – and, in any case, modern liberal armies
afford scant opportunity for rape and pillage. Related to that is the rise
of the elderly population, with vested interests in preserving the status
quo, particularly in the baby-boomer generation with generous welfare
and pension entitlements, property ownership and sometimes equity
portfolios. Female participation in public life might also be conjectured
to have an impact on bellicosity, at least in an evolutionary sense in
which females have less to gain and more to lose from combat, given
their deeper and longer maternal investment in child-rearing.
Last is an idea that Gat does not broach but that seems essen-
tial. To articulate it I draw on the language of John Turner’s self-
categorisation theory – a development of Tajfel’s work (Turner et al.
1987). Liberal societies offer new and non-violent ways to attain esteem
through the fashioning of a satisfying individual identity. This redef-
inition of esteem in liberal societies means that success relative to
our peers is no longer derived from the defence of individual honour
through combat but is instead realised as an expression of prototypical-
ity in the group that we have self-categorised as being important to us.
Esteem comes from being a successful entrepreneur of our own iden-
tity. Of course, few of us are actually motivated to create unique and
iconoclastic identities; instead we join existing niches and perhaps, at
best, modify them somewhat. Even those who fervently desire to be
individuals may end up as just part of a group of similar folk, which
Jonathan Touboul entertainingly calls the ‘hipster effect’, and seeks to
model using some complex maths that allows convergence to emerge
even when individuals seek difference (Touboul 2014). We probably
don’t need the maths – the desire for individualism is always up against
the pull of some reference group or other. We gain respect from authen-
ticity, but that is shaped by the norms of the group. Want to be a hipster?
If so, esteem comes from being the most authentic hipster you can be.
In a society that venerates the individual, this more realistically means
the possibility of conforming to more varied and selective group iden-
tities. This is the ultimate expression of the self-actualisation that was
articulated by Maslow: few people in modern society are compelled to
Liberal Society and War 111
way of war’, reaching back over the millennia, building on the capac-
ity of democratic, or at least representative, societies to organise for
and prosecute violence with a degree of technical proficiency that their
many and varied adversaries could not match (Hanson 2001).
Strategic culture in recent years has blossomed as a field of study, with
scholars seeking evidence of particular national or strategic behaviours
that reflect underlying cultural norms. There are, however, a number of
significant problems with the approach that bear elaboration here. The
first and most significant is the question of what constitutes a culture.
For Clifford Geertz, as we saw earlier, culture could be seen as a web of
shared understandings. It is a collective mesh of norms and attitudes
that holds for a given group at any time. The trouble is that the bound-
aries of this group can be somewhat indistinct: How much variation in
culture is permissible before we are talking about a separate grouping
altogether? In what sense does it make sense to talk about a distinc-
tively ‘American’ culture when there are pronounced differences within
American society across a range of social issues, including those that
relate to strategic matters?
Another issue is the extent to which culture is static, or shifts through
time. This is a key problem for political scientists who seek to use cul-
ture as their ‘independent variable’ to explain behavioural outcomes.
If we allow that cultures can change, and indeed change rather rapidly,
as I have argued here, the clear danger is of tautology: if culture
is explaining behaviour, but that very behaviour constitutes culture,
a causal relationship becomes impossible to falsify. The solution for
many scholars has been to suppose that culture is either static or very
slow moving. Alistair Iain Johnson takes this view in his account of
a Chinese strategic culture that stretches across millennia (Johnston
1998). Colin Gray offers an account of British strategic culture that
stresses the UK’s enduring maritime character (Gray 1999). There is an
even longer perspective in accounts such as that offered by Jared Dia-
mond in Guns Germs and Steel, or by Fukuyama in his Origins of Political
Order, both of which reach back into early and prehistory to develop
explanations of societal behaviour that are influenced partly by physical
geography and partly by human evolution. (Diamond 1998; Fukuyama
2011).
My focus, by contrast, is on the modern, fast-changing culture in
liberal societies of the last half-century or so. Notwithstanding the long-
term effects of the generation of culture, the style of warfare that is
fought by liberal states has changed dramatically in recent decades.
My contention is that these changes are linked to the growing liberality
Liberal Society and War 113
reluctance to permit ‘boots on the ground’. And yet, after the terror
attacks of 9/11, the USA committed to two long-running campaigns
in which several thousand American personnel were killed in combat
and many were more wounded. Public unease at these conflicts grew
slowly over time, and they were never, aside from an immediate rush
of enthusiasm, particularly popular causes. There was, nonetheless, no
catastrophic outpouring of public opposition on the basis of the service-
men’s deaths. A tentative explanation might lie in the limited size of
the armed forces relative to the overall population, allowing the public
to remain relatively disconnected from the somewhat remote theatre of
operations relative to previous wars. The Second World War, the Korean
War and the Vietnam War had all involved large numbers of combat
soldiers, many of them conscripted into service. Moreover, the numbers
that were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, while high by the standards
of the risk-averse 1990s, were still low by comparison with other major
conflicts, including the largely irregular confrontation in Vietnam.
For all of that the technological sophistication of liberal armed forces
has as part of its rationale a desire to limit human exposure to the
dangers of combat. The essence of social liberalism is to avoid harm
wherever possible, and technology affords a way of doing so, while
happily also conferring a war-fighting advantage. Combat deaths risk
undermining public support for ongoing operations. For the leader-
ship of the armed forces themselves, there is an acute dilemma here.
On one hand, the supportive relationship between society and its ser-
vicemen is a boon, which is worth fostering. The British military initially
welcomed the outpouring of public grief at the repatriation of fallen
soldiers through Wootton Bassett. On the other hand, too much sympa-
thy paints the soldiers as unhappy victims of callous forces that have
embarked on dubious conflicts or prosecuted them with insufficient
consideration of the well-being of those involved. And so, in the case of
the British fallen, military leaders sought to shape public opinion away
from the notion of soldiers as victims, and simultaneously moved to
downplay the repatriation ceremonies, including by moving them away
from Wootton Bassett.7
Technology fits the liberal ideal in another way too: minimising casu-
alties not just to one’s own forces, but also to civilians and even enemy
combatants. The scenes of carnage on the road back from Kuwait into
Iraq at the end of the 1990/1991 Gulf War caused a degree of pub-
lic unease in Western societies. Iraqi conscripts in their hundreds had
been trapped in a convoy that was seeking to flee from advancing coali-
tion forces and was attacked mercilessly from the air. The overwhelming
Liberal Society and War 117
in some operationally vital roles towards the rear of the action. In the
modern era, British women can serve as fighter pilots, as warfare officers
onboard surface ships, and on combat patrols with the infantry, albeit
in the role of medics rather than as infanteers. At the time of writing,
a review of the role of women in the branches of the British Army that
are involved in close-quarters combat is ongoing. Even if it does not do
so on this occasion, the British Army will, I suspect, inevitably follow
the trend of Australia, Canada and the USA in allowing women to apply
for these roles, and serve in them if successful. Gender bias within liberal
armies remains an issue, but this is also the case in society more broadly,
and sometimes the reaction to it is illustrative of a change in attitudes.
The head of the Australian armed forces recently took to YouTube to
remonstrate against officers who were implicated in sexual harassment,
rebuking them in stark terms.8
In one important sense, however, the military remains distinct from
wider societal liberalisation. This is in the core activity of combat –
particularly of close combat – closing with and killing the enemy.
7
Liberal Warriors
The previous chapter explored the question of the way in which Western
armies are reflective of the societies from which they are drawn, and the
extent to which they and their societies have been changing. For our
purposes here, the point of that was to frame a discussion of modern
warfare. In what way are the scholars of strategic culture right that a
society’s martial style reflects the way in which it fights? If Western soci-
ety has become increasingly liberal and individualistic, as I argue, what
does that mean for the military, and for honour? The answer I find is
that liberal soldiers are capable of killing in combat, motivated likely
by the same forces that shape all warriors, notably a powerful group
solidarity and aversive reactions to enemy out-groups.
Later, in the last two chapters, I link this discussion about mod-
ern honour to the earlier argument about evolutionary psychology, to
explain how liberal warfare is consistent with our evolutionary heritage.
Military life is still set apart from all other vocations in one impor-
tant respect – the business of fighting: of killing and risking death in the
service of the state. Modern wars, at least as fought by Western armies,
involve fewer casualties. In part this is because of the political stakes
that are involved in conflicts. Western societies have at their disposal
the wherewithal to inflict utterly devastating violence, at the extreme
destroying the planet in a series of thermonuclear explosions. Their
capacity for conventional violence also outstrips that of any potential
rival. There are 11 US aircraft carriers and a score of ‘mini carriers’
besides. The most that any non-Western power can muster is a single
carrier task group. US military spending alone accounts for over 40% of
the total world defence expenditure (IISS, 2014).
Moreover, military forces involve fewer warriors. Armies are smaller,
reversing a trend towards mass that started, in the modern era, with
121
122 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
violence are, after all, an integral part of a great many cultures, and there
is nothing about that which is inconsistent with the über-altruism that
underpinned the emergence of culture in the first place. We should not,
perhaps, make too much of modern liberal man’s culturally imbibed
pacifism, allowing instead that the ability to form large-scale social
groups with strangers far pre-dates us and rests on an ability to resolve
disputes without violence. The real step change in violence likely came,
as Gat argues, with the development of protostates; and those states,
I have argued, rest on a capacity for empathy and cooperation that is
antithetical to aggression.
Marshall noted the disconnection between those who seemed to have
soldierly traits in peacetime – good leadership, discipline, deportment
and so forth – and those who would perform on the battlefield by
simply firing their weapon towards an enemy: there seemed to be no
connection between the two. He also noted that the same men who
were prepared to fire their weapons would do so consistently, day after
day, and would also be the ones who were most involved in manoeuvres
around the battlefield – in flanking or storming enemy positions. These
few men, who in his view constituted only some 15% of the combat
units, were what we commonly think of as warriors. Their capacity for
violence was simply greater than that of their fellows.
Chris Kyle, the most successful sniper in the history of US arms, noted
the tendency in Iraq, even among snipers, to resist shooting. ‘A little bit
of hesitation was common for the new guys. Maybe all Americans are
a little hesitant to be the first to shoot, even when it’s clear that we are
under attack, or will be shortly.’6 For Karl Marlantes, by contrast, killing
came relatively easily. He was evidently one of the 15%:
When people come up to me and say, ‘you must have felt horrible
when you killed somebody,’ I have a very hard time giving them the
simplistic response they’d like to hear. When I was fighting . . . either
I felt nothing at all or I felt an exhilaration akin to scoring the
winning touchdown.7
Kyle denigrates his enemy as ‘savages’ and terms them all evil. He
has a Crusader cross tattooed in red on his forearm – indicative of
Liberal Warriors 127
He seemed far from help, but I was going to make sure. Just as we
had been taught. I leaned forward and thrust my bayonet towards the
man’s body as hard as I could . . . . I heard the metal slice through the
flesh, felt it break bone and cut gristle as it glided further in, right up
the hilt. Did I hear a small gasp from the man? I don’t know, perhaps
it was the devil inside me playing with my imagination. When it
could go no further, I twisted the bayonet to increase the damage.
Just as we had been taught.11
After a frantic assault, Manchester confronted the sniper, whose rifle was
caught in its harness and could not be brought to bear. Realising this,
the Japanese soldier ‘was backing toward a corner with a curious crablike
motion’. The American shot him in his thigh, which proved enough to
quickly kill him, leaving Manchester transfixed:
Jerking my head to shake off the stupor, I slipped a new, fully loaded
magazine into the butt of my .45. Then I began to tremble and next to
shake, all over. I sobbed, in a voice still grainy with fear: ‘I’m sorry.’
Then I threw up all over myself. I recognised the half digested C-
ration beans dribbling down my front, smelled the vomit above the
cordite. At the same time I noticed another odour; I had urinated in
my skivvies.14
There is pathos here – a reality more sordid than any clichéd hero-
ism. Manchester also reveals a sense of disgust at the situation in
his detailed description of the Japanese soldier’s death and his curi-
ous ‘crablike’ scuttling movement. And even before his fear has ebbed,
the sense of guilt begins, evident in his apology to the dead man.
Revulsion, reluctance and guilt are the overwhelming sentiments here:
along with the inevitable terror of being killed, there is the manifest
130 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Moreover, it didn’t matter to those who were taking action against the
enemy that their comrades were not – they were unaware. What mat-
tered to them was that someone was there, standing with them. Fighting
was a social activity, Marshall stressed. Both fear and courage are conta-
gious, depending on the actions of those around us. And, in particular,
he noted the role of esteem in all of this. The judgement of others was
all-important. That was one reason for the abject performance of indi-
viduals who had been separated from their own unit and made to fight
in formed units whose members they did not know. By contrast, even
a small group of soldiers who were familiar with one another would
perform capably when fighting amid strangers. Marshall wrote:
When a soldier is unknown to the men who are around him, he has
relative little reason to fear losing the one thing that he is likely
to value more highly than life – his reputation as a man among
other men.16
valued more than life itself by the majority of men’.17 It is a finding that
ought not to surprise us, given my earlier argument about the evolu-
tionary significance of the small group, and the vital importance of our
standing within it.
The intensity of combat forges the closest links – at least for the
duration of the fight. Chris Kyle, the SEAL sniper, wrote:
It’s a cliche but it’s true: you form tight friendships in war . . . I became
close friends with two guys in the Guard unit, real good friends;
I trusted them with my life. Today I couldn’t tell you their names
if my life depended on it. And I’m not even sure I can describe them
in a way that would show you why they were special.18
This desire for honour need not be sufficient in a group to provoke acts
of great individual valour, but it would be enough, Marshall argued,
to hold men in place, even amid the terror of battle. If those near at
hand were familiar to him, and if they were behaving with self-control
under fire, then an individual would do his very best to avoid disgrace.
Conversely, the least signal of flight, which might very easily be miscon-
strued amid the confusion and ambiguity of battle, could be sufficient
to send a group of seasoned troops into wild retreat. The finding is
similar to that of another seminal study of troops in combat from the
Second World War, this time by Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz on
the Wehrmacht soldiers, who had displayed remarkable tenacity during
their extended retreat from the Soviet Union (Shils and Janowitz 1948).
The key to their continued effectiveness as a fighting force, Shils and
Janowitz argued, was their small-group social cohesion.
This emphasis on the small group should not be surprising if we pause
for a moment to think about the similarity between modern military
structures and the social groups through which we evolved. I noted
earlier the resemblance between the 150 or so individuals in a mil-
itary company and the number that Dunbar suggests correlates well
with our neocortex size as the scale of group with which we can have
meaningful social interaction. In fact, this military connection is one
that was made by Dunbar himself. In addition, however, he identified
other layers of social group that seem to have an evolutionary basis –
a small group of very close intimates, numbering around 5 with whom
we spend most time, and likely to be our close family; a larger group,
including them and some others, whom we might count as very close
friends, of about 15; and then a group of some 50, who would consti-
tute an overnight camp in the evolutionary sense – coming together
132 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
for protection from predation after dark. These too would be people
with whom we were very familiar, and we would be cognitively capa-
ble of tracking social relations among them. For each of these there
is a military parallel – the 3- or 4-man fire team, the 15-strong squad
and the 50-man platoon. The ratio, Dunbar noticed, seems to increase
in multiples of three, as it does with military organisation, so that a
group roughly three times the size of a company makes a battalion, and
three groups that size a regiment. The number of possible combinations
for exchanging information becomes correspondingly more complex
at each level of magnitude. Modern military units were certainly not
designed by evolutionary psychologists, but the relationship is striking
and likely to reflect function – particularly the need to communicate
effectively amid chaotic and fast-changing circumstances; the ability to
control and direct subordinates; and, perhaps most importantly at the
tactical level, given our current discussion, the ability to form groups
with familiar individuals that will foster cohesion and stiffen our resolve
amid great danger. For the modern soldier then, the small group is both
the source from which honour is derived and the best remedy for any
potential to earn dishonour. The values and bonds of the group are the
powerful adhesive that bolsters the individual in times of acute dan-
ger. To be clear, this collective dimension of war is a timeless feature of
human combat, not particular to the industrial or liberal age, despite
the emphasis in antiquity and duelling on individual honour.
Standing firm in combat is but one element of bravery. Honour rests
additionally on acts of choice, like those of Marlantes, Manchester and
Beattie. To gain honour we must act decisively and of our own volition,
publicly displaying agency. But the agency seems, if we believe those
brave fighters, to be instinctive, almost unconscious. A recent study of
testimony from recipients of the Carnegie Hero Medal found that these
‘extreme altruists’ who had risked their lives to save others thought
that they had acted largely instinctively, rather than by engaging ratio-
nal, conscious deliberation (Rand and Epstein 2014). If that is true of
warriors too, is their heroism really a choice? Do they deserve the acco-
lades? If you cannot deliberately will yourself into action, to what extent
is your instinctive behaviour really honourable anyway? And what of
those who break and flee? We seem to be back at the point reached
earlier about the distinction between conscious and unconscious mind.
There I noted that we might see the conscious mind as a rationaliser
of behaviours that are initiated elsewhere. And we know too from that
discussion that the group is an important influence on our unconscious
decisions. I see this daily, to offer a spurious example, when the crowds
Liberal Warriors 133
of working crew who served weapons – machine guns and mortars: this
would get them actually firing a weapon without necessarily being the
trigger puller. Even soldiers, he thought, might be made less reluctant
to kill by diminishing their proximity to the task – via technology that
increases killing distance and that deindividuates their personal share in
the task.
Snipers working in two-man teams are a collective killing system.
Bomber crews flying high over the drop zone are less intimately aware
of the destruction below and are focused on the technical problems at
hand – flying the aircraft, navigating to the target, defending against
enemy interceptors and ground fire. However, for the infrantryman, the
essential problem of closing with and killing another human remains.
It is an explicable aversion seen in the light of the self-domestication and
altruism that I discussed earlier. But if the problem (in a military sense)
is caused by our sense of solidarity and empathy with others, there is a
solution in taking the others – the enemy – out of the equation, as far
as is possible.
To circumvent the problem of killing among infantry groups, it
proved necessary to depersonalise the firing, as far as possible, to cre-
ate a context like that facing the bomber crew, or the artillery battery.
This involved creating interlocking ‘fields of fire’ and directing fire onto
a target, rather than picking out individuals. ‘The average firer’, Marshall
thought, ‘will have less resistance to firing on a house or a tree than a
human being.’19 The key was to increase the weight of fire, and better to
have willing, even trigger-happy, soldiers directing their fire onto some
inanimate object than reluctant soldiers seeking to preserve ammuni-
tion and direct fire against individual targets. In addition to minimising
the humanity of the enemy, combat effectiveness might be improved by
stressing the humanity of one’s comrades, on whose behalf one fights.
Lastly, as Beattie found, another approach was to instil some degree
of automaticity in the process by repeated training, sometimes involv-
ing unarmed combat. This all complicates the notion of courage and
warrior-like behaviour on the battlefield. We may celebrate the individ-
ual exploits of particular heroes, but fighting, as Marshall described it,
is very much a collective activity, with even those who are more willing
to shoot at their fellow humans taking solace from the presence about
them of a small cohesive group of known comrades.
In the end, the essential elements of honour on the battlefield remain,
as an ideal at least. Honour implies an individual display of sacrifice or
solidarity with the group that involves choice and demonstrates mar-
tial prowess. It can also involve an appreciation of the shared values
of combat – the warrior fights and kills, but within a code of accepted
Liberal Warriors 135
ranks. The values of the soldier therefore stress the community – the
small group that provides cohesion and moral support and to whom his
loyalty is primarily dedicated, and the larger group on behalf of whom
he fights. The soldier has a duty which may involve sacrificing his life.
He must follow orders that endanger him and others. And his life is not
worth as much, in the ultimate calculation, as achieving the political
goals of war. That is a profoundly illiberal state of affairs.
The more liberal society moves apart from their values, the sharper we
might expect the contrast between society and its soldiers to become.
We can see that in the culture of the military and its popular representa-
tion, although here again we should be on our guard against cliché and
reductivism, as well as any tendency to package things too neatly into
cultural silos. Certainly, the literature written by soldiers indicates that
tension with civilians is sometimes acutely felt. The hero myth persists
among soldiers and society alike. Liberal society may be non-militaristic,
but the military profession retains its capacity to fascinate. You can see
this in the volume of action-filled memoirs and journalistic accounts of
the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Books such as Sniper One and
One Million Bullets attest to the way in which combat continues to spark
the public imagination (Fergusson 2008; Mills 2008).
However, modern literature and film also capture the sense of alien-
ation of warriors from their society. Soldiers returning home from the
Vietnam War faced an unwelcoming society that either rejected or cas-
tigated them, or simply ignored their experience. The trauma of that
rejection, perceived and real, has been the subject of many accounts of
that conflict. In Chickenhawk, helicopter pilot Robert Mason describes
his homecoming to the USA in an airport gift shop in Hawaii:
The clerk, a young woman, took my money and asked if I was return-
ing from Vietnam. I said, yes, proudly. She suddenly glared at me and
said, ‘murderer’. I stared at her for a long minute, feeling confused.20
In If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O’Brien recalls his return from Vietnam:
‘And over Minnesota you fly into an empty, unknowing, uncaring, puri-
fied stillness. Down below the snow is heavy, there are patterns of old
corn fields, there are some roads. In return for all your terror, the prairies
stretch out, arrogantly unchanged.’21
The soldiers of the current conflict have fought in a war that has not
fully captured the attention, still less the support, of wider society. There
is a strange mixture of disengagement and approbation for those doing
the fighting. Modern warriors who are returning from these wars are not
Liberal Warriors 137
For some reason, a lot of people back home – not all people – didn’t
accept that we were at war. They didn’t accept that war means death,
violent death most times. A lot of people wanted to impose ridiculous
fantasies on us, hold us to some standard of behaviour that no human
being could maintain.25
For him, war remained about fighting and killing, even if the liberals
did not understand. ‘Do you want us to conquer our enemy? Annihilate
them? Or are we there to serve them tea and cookies?’26 It is a familiar
trope among warriors – the equation of victory with annihilation by
those tasked with fighting – who cannot see that this would amount to
a catastrophic defeat for liberal society.
In Redeployment, a collection of short stories by Phil Klay, a Marine
Corps veteran is describing his college mates:
thinking. Then there were the political kids who had definite opin-
ions and were my least favourite people to talk to. A lot of these
overlapped with the insufferable public interest crowd, who hated
the war, . . . didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to own
a gun, let alone fire one, but still paid lip service to the idea that
I deserved some sort of respect.27
Not much empathy, perhaps, but at least better than being called a mur-
derer. And that, it seems, has been the sort of reaction to the wars –
mild curiosity about soldiering, apathy or scepticism about the logic that
sends them to fight, and warmth and sympathy for casualties.
Not everyone is cool about the idea. War remains attractive to a seg-
ment of society – young men who aspire to prove their worth to peers,
to earn glory and to belong. Philip Caputo, the US Marine officer in the
Vietnam War, wrote:
Enlisting for him was a chance to live the myth of the hero – embarking
on an existentially fulfilling journey that might provide the opportunity
for honour. These are timeless staples of conflict itself and the liter-
ature of war: the yearning for comradeship, and a life more exciting
that appeals to young men down the ages. The industrialisation of war,
and the commensurate diminishment of the individual relative to the
scale of fighting, did little to dampen the ardour with which young men
aspire to become warriors.
But what has changed in the modern era, I venture, is the distinction
between the values of wider society and that of the warrior, or of those
who aspire to become warriors. Both are motivated by honour, to be
sure, but the warrior attains this through sacrifice for his comrades, and
only then, perhaps, for wider society.
Cultural exchange
How far different, then, are liberal warriors from their counterparts else-
where? Patrick Porter’s Military Orientalism reminds us that we would
do well not to see culture either as static or as hermetically sealed from
outside influences (Porter 2009). For him, culture is constantly evolving
and feeding off other, outside influences.
Liberal Warriors 139
Women in combat
stand apart from their societies, and in the case of liberal societies may
lag behind its cultural attitudes, are nonetheless tethered to them.
So, I concur with Azar Gat when he suggests that the evolution of cul-
ture greatly lengthened the leash that connects the societal expression
of violence to its evolutionary roots, even if it always bears remember-
ing that that the leash is there. Darwinian selection, viewed narrowly,
might suggest a struggle for efficiency in war that requires a functional
split between men and women. Groups that best nurtured and protected
the individuals who carry their genes would on balance survive better
than those that did not. Given the levels of intergroup violence and
other predation, clearly there was a need for the best warriors. These
might be individuals with the most aggression, the greatest muscular
strength and a capacity for risk-taking. If the odds were in their favour,
men had much to gain from combat – not least access to sex, which
was a scarce resource. And if we buy the evolutionary logic advanced by
Dunbar of the human male as protector, or ‘hired gun’, to keep away
other males who were bent on securing their own genetic inheritance,
we have a plausible explanation for comparatively larger and more com-
bative males. Similarly, the best nurturers were needed to look after
the young with their long period of infancy, and women had evolved
particularly strong nurturing and attachment traits (Haidt 2006).
But this traditional warrior role for men need not be the whole story.
First, it is not inevitable that men make the best warriors from the point
of view of natural selection. For starters, genes are not fate, as I argued
from an interactionist perspective. Some women may be physically
more capable than some men, or more aggressive. Some men may have
more of a nurturing tendency than their peers. Second, the group is an
important factor in shaping the onward success of genes that belong to
individuals within it. In conditions of much historical and evolutionary
warfare, while it may be advantageous to split gender roles so that men
do most of the fighting, it need not always be thus. If the shared ideals
that constitute the group require equality and diversity, then the greater
evolutionary good may be served by a more equitable division of fight-
ing labour. In the West, our groups are increasingly synonymous with
our liberal values. We may still be defined to a considerable extent, of
course, by geography, and even by race or ethnicity, but modern liberal
states are also constituted by their values. And as an organising philoso-
phy for societies, liberalism has proved to be remarkably advantageous,
including in war. If we see culture as shared meaning, this is hardly
surprising. Technology and migration have facilitated the spread of lib-
eral ideas, and those ideas have logically challenged the organisation
Liberal Warriors 143
but recruiters in both the USA and the UK have increasingly found it
difficult to meet even these modest targets. Have modern liberal citi-
zens become less effective warriors? My answer is that as domesticated
humans we may be less inclined to fight, and that as modern liberals
we might also be encultured not to fight. But both of these factors can
readily be modified by the more proximate environment.
In a vintage experiment, John Seward found that when rats believed
that they had lost a fight, they would respond less aggressively the next
time they were in a confrontation (Seward 1946). The defeated rats had
encountered an environment in which force did not pay off, and so they
had learned to fear fighting. Another, later experiment conversely found
it possible to condition an automatic aggressive response from rats –
they would respond more confidently having learned to do so from
earlier experience (Ulrich et al. 1963). In a third experiment, from the
1980s, van de Poll and colleagues found that rats that had been defeated
(they were fighting a consistently more aggressive strain of rat) learned a
significant and enduring inhibition – they demonstrated thereafter less
initiative and aggression. The reverse was true of the same type of rat
when put in confrontations with a less aggressive strain (Van de Poll
et al. 1982). In all of these experiments the interaction of inherited
traits and environmental conditions produced either a more or a less
aggressive response from the rats, depending on what they had learned.
There was a genetic component to aggression which was latent in the
rat but was called forth by the context of the moment and by what it
had learned from experience.
In modern liberal societies, force does not pay off, most of the time.
There are punitive consequences for resorting to violence, and – more
than that – there are the social constraints that we encountered in the
previous chapter. Perhaps then the traditionalists are right and we lib-
erals are degenerate. We have learned through our development that
violent responses are wrong; and as adults we live in environments
where few peers offer social proof of violence working. Moreover, we
are descendants of humans who have evolved cooperative approaches
to problem-solving.
Might it be that a selective breeding programme would be able to
produce more aggressive humans that are capable of outstanding per-
formance in close-quarters combat? Richard Dawkins certainly thinks
that is possible (Dawkins 2009). After all, it rests merely on the sort of
‘artificial selection’ that is seen in dog breeding. In a very short period
of time, breeders can select for all sorts of physical traits, including
aggression. The military itself has an interest in this sort of artificial
148 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
form meaningful group bonds, and to make high-cost sacrifices for our
fellows. We cooperate instinctively and are motivated to punish those
who threaten the group, either physically or by attacking their ideals.
Liberals and liberal warriors have all that in common; they may just
differ in the size of the group in question and in the depth of their
emotional attachment towards it.
8
Liberal War Stories
This chapter links the evolutionary ideas that were explored earlier to
the rather postmodern idea of constructed social meaning. In interna-
tional relations the constructivist tradition suggests that what might
seem to a realist scholar to be ontological realities of strategic affairs
are in some degree social creations. The two schools need not, in fact,
be mutually exclusive (Barkin 2010). In fact, for a classical realist such as
Raymond Aron, the idea that meaning and identity are integral elements
of human intergroup relations is not at all strange. From an evolution-
ary psychology perspective too, there is nothing new in the idea that
the stories that we tell one another can in part constitute our reality.
In this chapter I consider stories of war and heroism, and find that, while
they are an enduring feature of human society, there is, nonetheless,
something distinctive about liberal society’s war stories.
We have evolved as storytellers, embedded within a social group that
provides the basis for our security and self-actualisation. Our ability
to interpret and respond to the world around us, especially our social
world, and to express this to others is possibly the biggest thing that
sets us apart from our primate cousins.
The capacity for language and stories presupposes the existence of
conscious, reflective minds, whose deliberations are the stuff of abstract
thought. There is plenty of cognition going on outside our conscious
mind, as I argued earlier, and we may well be deluding ourselves to sup-
pose ourselves possessed of a free will, independent of the unconscious,
often instinctual decision-making that actually drives our behaviour.
But illusory or not, we see ourselves as purposive agents who are able
to interpret and reflect on the world. If the self is essentially an illu-
sion, as Sam Harris and many others have argued, then it is a powerful
one (Harris 2012). We can see this unified self as our internal reflections
151
152 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Myth
The search for meaning via stories and myth is an integral constituent
of human warfare, serving both instrumental and existential purposes.
The stories that we tell about war are at once a way of describing the
phenomenon and seeking to ascribe meaning to it, which may go far
wider than the ontological realities of war itself. War is inevitably a social
activity, and war stories have a social dimension, including delineating
and defining the group, and perhaps bringing it closer together in sharp
contrast with its enemies.
War is also an individual activity, and the stories that we tell about it
will in part be about preserving the space for individual agency – that
capacity for action; the ability to reflect and respond to the violence
about us; and to find personal meaning in what is happening. Richard
Hillary’s romanticised notions of aerial warfare that we encountered
earlier offer one response to war that reveals this search for narrative,
agency and meaning. The violence is savage and brutal – after all, Hillary
paid with extensive burns and ultimately his life. But it is also evident
that he finds meaning and purpose in his actions – war is existentially
fulfilling. Not everyone, of course, can lay claim to similarly uplifting
experiences of warfare, though there are many accounts of war that
involve joy and happiness, as we saw with Karl Marlantes and Chris
Kyle earlier, even in the grimness of close-quarters combat. In Sebastian
Junger’s War, the soldiers feel particularly alive amid combat and worry
that they will not recapture that feeling as civilians (Junger 2010).
Lastly, since the individual does not exist in social isolation, war sto-
ries may reflect on the relationship between the protagonist and the
group, and these last are the stories of honour and heroism, since I have
defined honour as necessarily related to the dictates of society. To attain
honour in war, the individual acts at personal cost to uphold public
good, becoming in so doing a valued member of society. These themes
are the essential ingredients of the mythology of war, across time and
cultures, as true of today’s liberal societies as they were of protohistorical
156 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
The arguments that are offered above about storytelling apply to society
in general, not merely to liberal societies. This consistency is revealing –
liberal societies share with many others a capacity for spirituality, even
absent institutional religiosity. There are still collected stories constitut-
ing identities. And in many respects the moral framework is similar,
especially in its emphasis on justice for us over justice for them. We lib-
erals are still animated by a desire for revenge and punishment, and we
still have the capacity to make reductive, stereotypical and pernicious
judgements about others.
Evidently too there is a still an empathy gap – some stories are more
emotionally engaging than others, although it’s not always evident why
one particular narrative might gain traction and another not. Enemies
are still hajis, slopes or gooks – and to popular culture too, not just to the
fighting man. We still hear about ‘ancient hatreds’ that animate more
primitive societies, juxtaposed with our modern rationality.
Liberal War Stories 161
Celebrity in any case has always been a part of heroism. The heroes
of recent wars are often the anonymous figures of the Special Forces
community, like the SEALs of the successful raid on Abbottabad dur-
ing which bin Laden was killed. There are some exceptions: figures who
are publicly acclaimed for their heroism. The death of Pat Tillman, star
American football player, while serving with the US Army Rangers in
Afghanistan, is a story of heroic and noble sacrifice to set against the
barbarism of 9/11. He unites in one person Armstrong’s notion of the
hero-as-celebrity with the hero-as-warrior. The controversy over whether
Tillman was shot by his own side misses the point: his heroism rests
on his action, fighting with the group, for his comrades.4 In the UK,
meanwhile, Private Johnson Beharry won his Victory Cross for two inci-
dents in which he rescued comrades from ambush, displaying courage
under fire and while badly injured himself.5 The hero here is one who
saves rather than destroys. Beharry achieved deserved public renown,
but at great cost: he later suffered post-traumatic stress and reportedly
attempted suicide. These are heroes who exemplify the sort of pro-
fessional, collective ethos that brings the army its favourable public
reputation. It is an old-fashioned heroism, somewhat at odds with the
more modern, knowing and ironic hero of modernity.
This, I would argue, is the larger difference between the heroes of old
and today. Modern societies are sceptical and sometimes cynical about
the stories that we tell ourselves, about the nature and authority of
knowledge, and about who gets to arbitrate meaning. The phenomenon
goes under the broad rubric of postmodernity, of course – a pushback
against the Enlightenment era’s scientific certainties and optimism. The
irony that results is perhaps more than anything else the symbol of mod-
ern liberal societies, resting above all on a knowingness and scepticism.
This knowingness is perhaps nowhere more sharply distinct than when
modern societies wage war. And so we are angry when it turns out that
the casus belli for war was exaggerated, or even manufactured by elites,
but we respond with a jaded ennui.
There is, for example, tremendous irony in pursuing the heroic quest
despite foreknowledge of failure and the cost to oneself. The best mem-
oirs of Vietnam capture that sense of doom foretold, and the very
best writing, such as that of Philip Caputo and Karl Marlantes, you
watch unfold uneasily despite the benefit of hindsight. This is self-
awareness of futility, of the individual who knows that the scale of
war dwarfs his efforts at agency and meaning. Here is a reluctant
hero, created by circumstances and forces that he cannot control, yet
who nonetheless follows though, seeking to do the right thing by
his men.
164 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
Caputo argued that there was little scope for heroism in Vietnam.
‘A good death involved a certain amount of choice, ritual and style,’ he
wrote, before concluding that ‘there were no good deaths in the war.’6
The killing there was simply too random, stripping the warrior of agency
and skill, and the fighting of meaning. War was just one attritional
ambush after another, without decision, in the pursuit of goals that
seemed remote and ludicrous to the fighting men. Yet this was Caputo
at a low point; elsewhere he rightly notes the heroism of his friend and
fellow officer, who was killed while trying to rescue an injured Marine,
despite his own injuries. Caputo describes the essentials of heroism in
that small act of courage – it is sacrifice for the small group of warriors,
done instinctively, and with little connection to the wider rights and
wrongs of war. Caputo writes: ‘I had to admire his determination to do
the thing as it was supposed to be done . . . he had probably done it as he
had done everything else – naturally and because he thought it was the
right thing to do.’7
It was in the larger search for meaning, of course, that the Vietnam
War was so disruptive – tearing the fabric of US society and robbing the
warriors themselves of wider acclaim for their courage. Caputo writes of
the herald, or ‘battle singer’ of old, who ‘sang verses around the war-
rior’s guttering fires to wring order and meaning out of the chaotic clash
of arms, [and] to keep the tribe human by providing it with models
of virtuous behaviour’.8 This is the notion of the mythological hero,
and of war as a story, themes that I argue are common to liberal and
early modern war alike. But for Caputo there was a problem with the
Vietnam War:
The battle singer’s task was the same. The nature of war made it
exceptionally difficult: how to find meaning in such a meaningless
conflict? How to make sense out of a succession of random fire fights
that achieved nothing? How to explain our failings? And what heroes
could be found in a war so murky and savage?9
search for meaning and identity, for moral guidance and, I contend, for
honour and heroes.
There is a further irony in much of this literature in the contrast
between heroism and the hero’s obvious human flaws and failures.
Caputo here embodies the flawed hero, reduced by endless sustained
combat pressure to a visceral hatred for his enemy that sees him encour-
age subordinates to kill two suspected enemy Viet Cong in dubious
circumstances, an action that bring criminal charges against him; and
lead the earlier rampaging of his men through a Vietnamese village,
which he does nothing to check. He has come a long way from the boy
who joined the Marine Corps seeking only a chance to live heroically in
a commonplace world.
What difference, muses Caputo, is there between the indiscriminate
violence that was wrought by his shattered men at close quarters and
that of napalm canisters and artillery shells from afar? The vicious,
pointless war corrodes the morals of those doing the fighting, who are
exhausted, stressed and frightened, making them capable of great brutal-
ity and abuse, but capable, all the same, of heroism and tenderness – for
one another at least. Daydreaming in a Saigon bar about going AWOL,
Caputo writes that he was ‘constrained by the obligation I had towards
my platoon. I would be deserting them, my friends. That was the real
crime a deserter committed: he ran out on his friends.’10
Modern war in all of these senses is ironic, and so is the art that it
produces – a point well made by Christopher Coker in his account of
war in literature (Coker 2014). There is also a lesson here in the anti-
heroes of modern currency. Joseph Conrad’s Mr Kurtz is reimagined as
a sinister US colonel operating alone upriver in Vietnam in Coppola’s
Apocalypse Now (Conrad et al. 2007). Kurtz’s improving mission ends in
alienation, hostility and horror, which might seem to be a more appo-
site representation of the interventions of liberal armies. A less overtly
sinister figure is Alden Pyle, Graham Greene’s Quiet American, whose
earnest desire to impress and to transform Vietnam contrasts with the
mature knowingness of his English friend (Greene 2004). The novels are
steeped in a knowingness about the limits of action and intention. The
audience shares a sense of foreboding at what Kurtz has been getting
up to behind the back of civilisation and of what damage the foolish
Pyle will wreak. The irony there is of a hero whose actions and sac-
rifice produce a counterproductive outcome. These are modern fables
for liberal societies that may disavow violence, but that find themselves
embroiled in long war for dubious, but ostensibly noble, reasons with
little prospect of a favourable outcome. As stories, they achieve a place
166 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
in the modern consciousness, not only because they are great art or
because they retain those essentials of the war story – the search for
meaning and esteem through honour – but also because they speak to
the postmodern concern with a self-aware irony.
Modern liberal culture remains deeply affected by the Vietnam War
and the art that it produced, sometimes explicitly, as when Alex
Garland’s fictitious account of a gap-year backpacker in Thailand opens
with a daydream of Vietnam, of helicopters blaring Wagner, an incom-
ing artillery round, and wasted Saigon days on LSD (Garland 2005).
In Jarhead, Anthony Swofford opens his memoir of combat with the
US Marines in the 1991 Gulf War with the unit gathered in Kuwait,
killing time before the invasion:
we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit,
the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam
films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures
of that war helped write our training manuals . . . We watch again the
ragged, burnt out fighters walking through the villes and the pretty
native women smiling because if they don’t smile, the fighters might
kill their pigs or burn their cache of rice.11
These war films, Swofford notes, might strive to be anti-war, but they
are not to the young Marines watching them, excited at the thought
of their own impending combat experience. There is certainly irony
in that, as the weary knowingness of Coppola’s lens is again refracted
into gung ho enthusiasm by a new generation of warriors. ‘I bet more
Marines have joined the Corps because of Full Metal Jacket than any
fucking recruiting commercial,’ one Iraq War veteran tells another in
Phil Klay’s Redeployment. ‘And that’s an anti-war film,’ the other replies.
‘Nothing’s an anti-war film.’12
More often the artistic resemblance to Vietnam is implicit, but no less
pervasive. The modern wars of liberal states differ in many particulars
from that formative war, but in some respects they are the same – the
Vietnam War was mediatised – in film, in music, in its essence. It was
the first war that was unambiguously lost by the most powerful lib-
eral state, and the one that challenged the esteem of the establishment,
the veterans who fought in it and wider society. Vietnam demonstrated
that the triumph of liberal society was not inevitable, and, moreover,
war itself would challenge and corrupt that liberalism. Modern war sto-
ries from Iraq and Afghanistan struggle in vain to escape its shadow,
whether they are straightforward stories of heroism, such as that told
Liberal War Stories 167
Conclusion
For liberal societies, then, war remains a story about honour, with
heroes and villains. But it also comes with a cynical edge, which is
shared by citizens and soldiers alike. The Vietnam War represents, for
now, the apotheosis of this postmodern narrative, but a similar jaded
knowingness certainly infuses the stories from more recent conflicts.
These modern wars are different from Vietnam in many respects: they
involve broad coalitions of liberal countries; the soldiers are invari-
ably professional volunteers; and the armies are smaller. Perhaps as
a result, the fractures that are consequent in liberal society are less
pronounced. But there are similarities too, including an initial opti-
mism about the mission, both among the soldiers and within society
at large.
Prestige is involved in these modern liberal wars. In Vietnam, Henry
Kissinger railed against ‘insolent’ Vietnamese negotiators, and Lyndon
B. Johnson saw a ‘pissant’ adversary in Hanoi (Payne 2014). In the mod-
ern wars, Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, saw ‘ancient
hatreds’ at work in Bosnia – somehow less rational and more backward
than the liberal West. Later, Richard Armitage, Powell’s deputy at the
State Department, threatened to bomb Pakistan ‘back to the stone age’
unless it cooperated with the ‘War on Terror’.14 Meanwhile for Tony
Blair the ‘battle of ideas’ was very much a struggle against dark forces
168 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
of extremism, but one that could very readily include great swathes of
the non-Western Islamic world:
I don’t mean just telling them that terrorist activity is wrong. I mean
telling them that their attitude to America is absurd, that their con-
cept of governance is pre-feudal, that their positions on women and
other faiths are reactionary.15
values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of
liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society, then that is in
our national interests too.’17 As an authentic expression of liberal society
and intervention, that is as succinct as it gets.
This European notion of security, as the British diplomat Robert
Cooper has observed, largely consists of expanding the area that shares
its collective liberal norms (Cooper 2011). If the stories that we tell, as
I argued, constitute our collective identity, then this liberalism is more
than window-dressing for a narrower and more cynical national inter-
est. Even if it were designed as a fictional window-dressing for a more
cynically self-interested realpolitik, as a classical realist such as Hans
Morgenthau might argue, the liberal narrative would still have some
effect: just reading fiction about people from different cultures, as Dan
Johnson and colleagues found experimentally, can make us less sus-
ceptible to reaching for negative out-group stereotypes (Johnson et al.
2014).
This liberal society is the cultural high watermark of the domesticated
human that I introduced in the opening chapter. It is the logical end
point of the cognitive and social revolution that has moved us beyond
the Hobbesian hunter-gatherer world. The stories that liberal society
tells about war reflect its enduring fascination with conflict, but also
its strong aversion to prejudice and violence against others.
The group that motivates liberal society’s soldiers, by contrast,
remains resolutely small – the group of comrades whose solidarity is
forged in the intensity of battle. We might see in their solidarity the
evolutionary logic of the primitive warrior. The discipline and hierarchy
that attend modern battle are not authentically part of our evolutionary
heritage, except insofar as they reflect our evolved ability to construct
large and hierarchically differentiated societies. But just like liberal soci-
ety at large, the warrior is motivated by his relationship with that group
and the personal esteem that he derives from it. What we see then,
in both instances, is the same evolved conception of altruism operat-
ing in different cultural domains. The liberal and the liberal warrior are
both domesticated humans; altruists, and inveterate storytellers; and for
both, theirs is a story about honour and obligation.
9
Conclusion: Heroic Warfare
170
Conclusion: Heroic Warfare 171
soldier stands apart from society in an altogether different way from the
elitism that today distinguishes the warrior from his community. Yet
for now there is a window in which the warrior can exist, as a special
manifestation of the modern liberal.
If Coker’s vision points to a possible future for the warrior, what about
the liberal society that he serves? The surprising lesson for strategic
studies is Bowles’ notion that it is the very threat of violence that has
produced this evolved liberalism – a function of predation, altruism and
our capacity for large and elastic groups, stretching far beyond those of
other primates.
And yet, in the end, there is sometimes a disconnect between the
motivations of society and those of a professionalised military, which
is responsible for conducting its violence. As Strachan argues, volun-
teer, professional armies widen the gap between ‘why a nation thinks
it is at war and how its army does the fighting’.3 He and I ought not
to overdo this – patriotism remains a powerful urge, both for society
and its soldiers. We saw that after 9/11, when troops went into combat
with New York Fire Department memorabilia in honour of those who
had died while attempting to rescue people trapped in the Twin Towers.
The fissures become more pronounced as society becomes less engaged
with the sorts of wars that their liberal ethos leads them towards. The
‘Blair Doctrine’, which was outlined in Chicago, was a recipe for military
intervention in pursuit of authentically liberal goals. However, like the
warriors, liberal society is often motivated by more parochial concerns.
Altruism remains instinctively local, even in the most liberal-minded
breast. And while Peter Singer may optimistically point to an expand-
ing circle of empathy, we still need compelling stories that feature
emotionally engaging individual humans to spur us to sympathy. The
state and the ethnos remain, for now at least, more powerful imaginary
communities than does the entirety of humanity.
Recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have commanded the support of
limited proportions of liberal society, perhaps reflecting their less than
existential nature, but also a reluctance to intercede more vigorously in
the management of international society. The disengagement of soci-
ety from its own security is reflected in the priority that is given to
defence spending, with the USA as the only notable exception. It is not
that liberal society has become blasé about risk either – across a range
of issues, the public remain concerned about risk, arguably out of pro-
portion to the actual consequences or likelihood of adverse outcomes.
However, the prospect of war does not seem to alarm liberals as much
as do other risks to their security.
174 The Psychology of Modern Conflict
ethnic, ideological and other lines. The encounter with modernity has
been transformative of many parts of the world, but destabilising too,
and certainly incomplete.
Honour, an apparently old-fashioned quality, remains an unavoidable
consequence of our innate sociability. Western liberal societies demand
honourable behaviour, much as any other. Coker is correct to argue that
honour is ‘just as important today as it was in our prehistoric past’, even
if the language of honour has morphed to that of ‘credibility’ – which,
after all, appears to be so much more rational.4 And in conflict, liberal
society also demands honourable behaviour from its warriors. There is,
as a result, an inevitable tension between the honour of the warrior, with
its emphasis on collective duty and sacrifice, and the profound individ-
ualism of liberal society, with the rights of the individual to follow their
own course being sacrosanct. But both codes of honour have their roots
in our evolved capacity for altruism.
In the end, the eternal debate about man’s propensity for violence
seems insoluble, perhaps because we retain the tendency for intense
cooperation and extreme aggression. We are always social, we always
cooperate; yet we are always self-interested, insecure and on our guard
for deception. And running through it all is a desire for meaning and
esteem: the stories that we tell ourselves about war and honour are an
integral part of who we are and why we fight, liberal or otherwise.
Notes
1 Introduction
1. Mill, J. S. and G. Himmelfarb (1985). On Liberty. Harmondsworth, Penguin,
p. 72.
2. Rawls, J. (2009). A Theory of Justice. Massachusetts, Harvard University Press,
p. 53.
3. For a review, see Bouchard, T. J. (2004). ‘Genetic influence on human psy-
chological traits a survey.’ Current Directions in Psychological Science 13(4):
148–151.
4. The European Commission reported in 2014 that violent crime had declined
across the European Union’s member states by 10% between 2007 and 2014.
The trend, however, was not uniform – violent crime fell dramatically in the
UK, but there were significant rises in some countries, including Hungary and
Denmark. The finding points to the heterogeneity of liberal societies and the
subsequent need for caution in identifying unifying social attitudes, a point
that I return to in later chapters. See European Commission, Eurostat Crime
Statistics, January 2014, http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/
eurostat/home/ (accessed 29 October 2014).
Meanwhile, in the USA, the fall in violent crime has been even more dra-
matic, with FBI data showing a remarkable 48% decline in violent crime
between 1993 and 2012. See http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-
the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_
1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants
_1993-2012.xls (accessed 29 October 2014).
The reasons for the decline remain subject to considerable discussion in the
criminological literature, and my argument that there is a cultural dimension
in explaining crime would cover an array of possible contributory factors,
including changing economic activity, age demographics and incarceration
rates.
5. For an accessible recent overview of man’s evolutionary history, see
Harari, Y. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London, Random
House LLC.
6. See ‘A troublesome inheritance’, letter to the editor, New York Review of Books,
8 August 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/letters-a-
troublesome-inheritance.html?_r=1 (accessed 8 November 2014).
176
Notes 177
3. See Douglas Fry (2013). In Fry, D. P. War, Peace, and Human Nature: The
Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views. New York, Oxford University
Press, p. 6 and R. Brian Ferguson, ‘Pinker’s list’, in ibid., pp. 112–131, at
p. 126.
4. Frans de Waal, Foreword in ibid., p. xi.
5. See Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in
History and Its Causes. London, Allen Lane, p. 49.
6. Marlantes, K. (2011). What It Is Like to Go to War. London, Corvus, p. 40.
7. Ibid., p. 49.
8. Diamond, J. M. (2012). The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from
Traditional Societies?. London, Allen Lane, p. 125.
9. See ‘The chimpanzee’s monkey ambush’, Predators. BBC Earth, via YouTube,
9 November 2011, http://youtu.be/40SEMy4Z_zM (accessed 15 November
2014).
10. See Salk Institute, Domestication and Human Evolution Symposium,
10 October 2014, http://carta.anthropogeny.org/events/domestication-and-
human-evolution (accessed 17 November 2014).
11. See Wilson, M. L. (2003). ‘Chimpanzees, warfare and the invention of peace’,
in Fry, D. P. War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and
Cultural Views. New York, Oxford University Press.
4 Reciprocal Altruism
1. See twitter.com/FacesPics.
2. To share Geertz’s view of culture as understanding does not imply agreement
with his view on the essentially socially determined nature of the human
world, on which see John Tooby and Leda Cosmides (1992). ‘The psycho-
logical foundations of culture’, in Barkow, J. H., L. E. Cosmides et al., The
Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford,
Oxford University Press, pp. 19–136.
178 Notes
3. Dawkins, R. (2009). The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.
London, Simon and Schuster, p. 248.
5 Honour
1. See ‘Conformity – Elevator Candid Camera’, http://vimeo.com/61349466
(accessed 13 November 2014).
2. Elena Cresci (14 November 2014). ‘Swedish “social experiment” shows
people ignoring domestic abuse in a lift,’ Guardian, http://youtu.be/R1-
A7R15uYU (accessed 15 November 2015).
3. ‘The “door” study,’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ (access
ed 15 November 2014).
4. Lebow, R. N. (2003). The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 354.
5. See NatCen, British Social Attitude Survey, http://www.natcen.ac.uk/our-
research/research/british-social-attitudes/ (accessed 10 November 2014).
6. See NatCen, British Social Attitude Survey 30: 2013, ‘Gender roles: An incom-
plete revolution?’, http://bsa-30.natcen.ac.uk/read-the-report/gender-roles/
introduction.aspx (accessed 30 November 2014).
7. See NatCen, British Social Attitude Survey 28: 2011, ‘Religion: Losing faith’,
http://ir2.flife.de/data/natcen-social-research/igb_html/index.php?bericht_
id=1000001&index=&lang=ENG (accessed 30 November 2014).
8. See NatCen, British Social Attitude Survey, ‘30 years of British social atti-
tudes self-reported racial prejudice data,’ http://www.natcen.ac.uk/media/
338779/selfreported-racial-prejudice-datafinal.pdf (accessed 30 November
2014).
9. See NatCen, British Social Attitude Survey 29: 2012, ‘Immigration: Fewer
but better,’ http://www.bsa-29.natcen.ac.uk/read-the-report/immigration/
introduction.aspx (accessed 30 November 2014).
10. See NatCen, ‘30 years of British social attitudes: Self reported racial prejudice
data’, British Social Attitude Survey, 2013, http://www.natcen.ac.uk/media/
338779/selfreported-racial-prejudice-datafinal.pdf (accessed 15 November
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11. To participate in the research by taking a test, see Project Implicit, https://
implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ (accessed 10 November 2014).
12. See Stonewall, ‘Top 100 employers, 2014’, http://www.stonewall.org.uk/
at_work/stonewall_top_100_employers/default.asp?fontsize=large (accessed
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13. Hillary, R. (2014). The Last Enemy. London, Michael O’Mara Books, Kindle
loc 72.
14. Ibid., Kindle loc 100 (this is my translation from the French original that
Hillary provides).
15. See Heather Saul (12 November 2014). ‘Rob O’Neill: US Navy Seal
claims team never planned to take Osama bin Laden alive’, Inde-
pendent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rob-oneill-us-
navy-seal-claims-us-never-planned-to-take-osama-bin-laden-alive-9855068.
html (accessed 12 November 2014).
Notes 179
7 Liberal Warriors
1. Marlantes, K. (2011). What It Is Like to Go to War. London, Corvus, p. 30.
2. Ibid., p. 30.
3. Marshall, S. L. A. (2000). Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command.
Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Press, p. 50.
4. Ibid., p. 52.
180 Notes
5. Ibid., p. 78.
6. Kyle, C., S. McEwen et al. (2012). American Sniper: The Autobiography of the
Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. New York, William Morrow, p. 308.
7. Marlantes, K. (2011). What It Is Like to Go to War. London, Corvus, p. 26.
8. Kyle, C., S. McEwen, et al. (2012). American Sniper: The Autobiography of
the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. New York, William Morrow,
p. 431.
9. Ibid., p. 163.
10. Ibid., p. 217.
11. Beattie, D. and P. Gomm (2009). An Ordinary Soldier: Afghanistan – A Fero-
cious Enemy, a Bloody Conflict, One Man’s Impossible Mission. London, Pocket,
Kindle loc 1746.
12. Ibid., Kindle loc 4089.
13. Manchester, W. (1980). Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War.
Boston, Little, Brown, p. 5.
14. Ibid., p. 7.
15. Marshall, S. L. A. (2000). Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command.
Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma Press, p. 41.
16. Ibid., p. 153.
17. Ibid., p. 149.
18. Kyle, C., S. McEwen, et al. (2012). American Sniper: The Autobiography of the
Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. New York, William Morrow, p. 220.
19. Ibid., p. 78.
20. Mason, R. (2005). Chickenhawk. London, Penguin, p. 388.
21. O’Brien, T. (2003). If I Die in a Combat Zone. London, Flamingo, p. 203.
22. Finkel, D. (2010). The Good Soldiers. London, Atlantic Books, p. 271.
23. Beattie, D. and P. Gomm (2009). An Ordinary Soldier: Afghanistan – A Fero-
cious Enemy, a Bloody Conflict, One Man’s Impossible Mission. London, Pocket,
Kindle loc 4082.
24. Ibid., Kindle loc 4102.
25. Kyle, C., S. McEwen et al. (2012). American Sniper: The Autobiography of the
Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History. New York, William Morrow, Kindle
loc 4948.
26. Ibid., Kindle loc 4942.
27. Klay, P. (2014). Redeployment. London, Canongate, pp. 250–251.
28. Caputo, P. (1999). A Rumor of War. London, Pimlico, p. 5.
29. See https://twitter.com/COLRICHARDKEMP.
30. See Kevin Voight (17 September 2014). ‘Who pays? NerdWallet study
finds gender roles remain strong among couples’, NerdWallet, http://www.
nerdwallet.com/blog/finance/featured-articles/who-pays-first-date-gender-
roles-couples/ (accessed 17 November 2014). The key finding was that 77.4%
of those who were surveyed who were in a relationship thought that men
should pay for the first date. On female earnings and marriage prospects, see
Bertrand, M., J. Pan et al. (2013). Gender Identity and Relative Income within
Households, National Bureau of Economic Research.
31. The latest figures from the UK show that 18.9% of 10–11-year-olds in
the UK are obese, with a further 14.4% being overweight. See Pub-
lic Health England, ‘Child obesity’, http://www.noo.org.uk/NOO_about_
obesity/child_obesity (accessed 17 November 2014).
Notes 181
17. Tony Blair (22 April 1999). Speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, http://
www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international-jan-june99-blair_doctrine4-23/
break (accessed 5 November 2014).
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194 Index
Leviathan (Hobbes), 42, 48 loyalty, 73–6, 123, 127, 136, 144, 174
Levin, D. T., 84 Luttrell, M., 167
liberalism
and altruism, 70–2 Machiavelli, N., 39, 43–5, 48, 52,
evolution and, 11–13 54, 123
foundation of, 14 consequentialism, 43–5
tradition vs., 145–6 Prince, The, 43–5
liberal society(ies) virtù, notion of, 44–5
advanced technologies, 114–17 virtuous statesman, 43–6
defined, 108 machine guns, 134, 141, 171
empathy for all, 103–4 majority power, 48
end of war and history, 104–9 maladaptive behaviours, 6–7, 34, 60,
esteem in, 110, 123 82, 149
ideal-type, 2, 11–13 Malayan insurgency, 86
liberal warriors and, 13–14 male warriors, 25–7, 142
Niebuhr’s view, 47–8 ‘hired gun’ thesis, 26
progressive spread of ideas, 107–9 physical strength, testosterone and
progress towards peace, 102–4 dancing ability, correlation
reasons for diminished bellicosity, between, 26
109–11 pursuit of reproductive success,
social/cultural revolution, 9–13 25, 27
strategic culture, 111–12, 114 sexual jealousy, 26
and war, 101–20 women favouring, 26–7, 80–1
war-fighting style, 111–20 and women warriors, 25–6
war stories, 151–69 malnutrition, 149
Western militaries and, 112–20 Manchester, W., 129, 130, 132, 144,
liberal state, 3–4, 37–8, 42, 72, 75, 80, 180 n.13
87, 89–90, 101, 109, 112, 136, Manichean worldview, 127
142–3, 166 manoeuvres, 111, 126, 133, 172
Libya, 139, 179 n.4 manufacturing, 118
Lieberman, M. D., 76, 87, 105 marginalisation, 3, 46–7, 87
liking, 68–9 Marlantes, K., 29, 123–4, 126–30, 132,
Lippold, S., 26, 72 155, 163, 177 n.6, 179 n.1,
literature 180 n.7
development of, 24, 71, 73 Marshall, S. L. A., 125–7, 130–1,
war, 136–8, 151–69 133–4, 158, 179 n.3, 180 n.15
Little, A. C., 81 Marshall plan, 158
logistics, 51 Martinescu, E., 152
London, 87, 104 martyrdom, 74, 97
Lone Survivor (Luttrell and masculinity, associated health
Robinson), 167 problems, 146
losing the will to fight, warriors, Maslow, A. H., 104–5, 110
146–50 Mason, R., 136–7, 180 n.20
artificial enhancements for massacre, 36, 53
warriors, 148 mass graves, 21
artificial selection, 147–8 mass migration, 25, 104
conditioning warriors, 147–9 material wellbeing, 37
health problems, impact of, 146 Mayor, A., 25–6, 140
modernity, impact of, 149 Mazar, N., 85
206 Index
McEwen, S., 180 n.6, 180 n.8, 180 Mill, J. S., 2– 3, 108, 171, 176 n.1
n.18, 180 n.25, 181 n.1 notion of liberalism, 2–3
meaning, 2, 6, 34, 40, 50, 76, 85, milling, 124, 148
95–7, 142, 151–60, 163–6, 175 Mills, D., 136
Mearsheimer, J. J., 39 mindreading, 85, 153
Medal of Honour citation, 156 Mindwise (Epley), 65
medals, 132, 156, 161 minorities, 48, 72, 162
media, 25, 117, 172 Mitani, J. C., 31
medics, 94, 120 ‘moderate’ heritability, 8
melée, 133 modern economic activity, 108, 118
‘Melian dialogue,’ 41–2 modernity, 11, 23, 103, 146, 149,
memes, 140 162–3, 175
memoirs, war, 30, 129, 136–7, modern states, 21–3, 122, 157
163, 166 monarchs, 88
memory, 61, 68, 124 Monsoor, Mike, 156
mercenaries, 123 moral codes, 39, 85, 88, 125–6, 161
Mercer, J., 35, 75 morale, 55, 168, 171
Metropolitan Police Service, ‘morale’ bombing, 37
London, 87 morality, 39, 88
Middle East, 174 Moral Man and Immoral Society
(Niebuhr), 47
migration, 25, 90–1, 104, 109,
moral values, 39, 45, 85
119, 142
Morgenthau, H. J., 5, 44, 46, 55, 169
militants, 39, 90, 117
Morris, E., 40
military
mortality, 91, 149, 158–9
activity, 122–3, 157–8
mortars, 134
clothing, 139
Mosing, M. A., 8
costly expeditions, 39, 101
motivation to fight, 4, 14, 25, 27–8,
culture, 95, 136, 159
35–6, 55, 77, 82, 90, 102–3,
desegregation of units, 94
170, 173
education/training, 118–19, Mueller, J. E., 103
127, 135 murder, 26, 136, 138
effective communication, 132 mutilation, 30, 53, 81
group cohesion, 131–3 My Lai massacre (1968), 36
hardware, 55 myths, 24, 41–2, 153–5
identity, 3 capacity to remember, 155
isomorphism, 95, 118 modern, 154
life, 121, 146, 162 and religion, 154
power, 109, 111, 122–3 symbolic meaning and moral
private companies, 122–3 dimension, 153–4
professionalised, 35, 173
spending, 121 napalm canisters, 165
structures/organisation, 131–2 Napoleonic wars, 51, 94, 113, 122
technologies, 36, 78, 114–18, 122, ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ 42–3, 87
134, 140, 143, 145, 149, 158 national interest, 5, 89–90, 168–9
values, 118, 139–40, 145, 162 nationalism, 51, 71, 74, 106, 113, 174
vocation, 14, 35, 121, 146–7 National Security Agency, 167
Military Cross award, 128 national service, see conscription
Military Orientalism (Porter), 138 Native Americans, 43
Index 207
NATO, 115–17, 122, 139 Pacific war, 30, 37, 53, 125, 129, 168
natural selection, 5, 9, 12, 20, 28, 34, pacifism, 12–13, 22–4, 109, 111, 126
37, 42, 46, 59, 73, 122, 140, 142 pain, 87
nature–nurture debate, 6 pair bonding, 26, 32–3, 72
Nazis, 5, 93, 148, 158 Pakistan, 117, 167
Neanderthals, 72, 153 palaeolithic era, 6, 12, 15, 19–20,
negotiation, 49, 51, 92–3, 95, 167 23–4, 32, 34, 54, 72, 109
Neitzel, S., 93 Pan, J., 180 n.30
neolithic era, 12, 23, 54, 72 Panksepp, J., 124
nepotism, 71, 118 Papua New Guinea
neuroscience, 5, 39, 67, 76, 87, 93, fighters, 28–9
124, 148, 153 modern hunter-gatherer
newspapers, 139 communities, 22–3
New York, 104 transformation of society, 9
Fire Department memorabilia, 173 parental care, 26, 32–3
New York Review of Books, 11 Paret, P., 51
niche selection, 12, 140 pastoralists, 24
Niebuhr, R., 2, 5, 47–8, 89, 177 n.1 patrilocal societies, 27
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 46 patriotism, 74, 96, 170–3
9/11 attacks, 53, 116, 157, 159, patrol, 31, 40, 94, 120, 133
163, 174 Payne, K., 52, 86, 102, 157, 167,
New York Fire Department 179 n.7
memorabilia, 173 peace
Nixon, Richard, 80 invention of, 102–11
non-compliance, 86 negotiated peace, 49
non-cooperative humans, 12 settlement of disputes, 20
non-kinship members, 2, 10, 14, 84, societies in, 7, 11–13, 21, 27, 33,
103, 144 35, 114
Northern Europe, 2 peacetime, 28, 35, 126
North Vietnam, 52 Peloponnesian War, 40–2, 107
Norway, 101, 109, 113 pension, 110
army’s unisex dorms, 119 Pentagon, 114, 117
nuclear weapons, 25, 37, 53, 64, 121–2 Pentagon Papers, 167
‘escalation dominance’ strategy, perception, 24–5, 40–1, 84, 159
64–5 Percy, S., 123
Persia, 145
O’Brien, T., 136, 180 n.21 personal security, 125
One Million Bullets (Mills), 136 pharmaceuticals, 148, 172
organisation, 48, 102, 118, 132, physical traits, 24, 33, 69, 71, 80, 147
142, 149 Piketty, T., 108
organised violence, 102, 141 pillage/pillaging, 36, 110, 166
Origins of Political Order pilots, fighter, 94, 96, 120, 128,
(Fukuyama), 112 136, 161
ostracism, 46–7, 86–8 Pinker, S., 7, 22–5, 33, 103, 106, 109,
out-groups, 15, 30, 48, 61, 65, 103–4, 153, 177 n.5
121, 149, 169, 174 pitched battles, 21, 28–9, 81
Overmier, J. B., 171 police, 48, 62–3, 76, 83, 85, 87–8, 172
Overy, R. J., 37 political psychology, 67
Owens, W. A., 115 political theory, 39
208 Index