The “New Biology” and the Causes of War

Abstract

Imagine the clash of two great armies. Now think of two cats spitting at each other on your garden fence. The average observer would probably dismiss as preposterous the suggestion of any basic similarity between the two situations, between the din and drama of battle and the petty backyard cacophony. But a growing and increasingly popular body of literature makes a coherent case for the opposite view. It argues that the differences between human war and animal aggression are dissimilitudes of scale and sophistication only; that both are "natural"; that both are rooted in drives basic to the psychic make-up of cat and man alike. This latest in a long series of attempts to explain categorically what "causes" war calls itself the "new biology." The present paper is a study of the work of the school's most representative spokesmen, the German biologist Konrad Lorenz and Robert Ardrey, an American naturalist and dramatist. First, we shall briefly consider historical antecedents to the new-biology school. Then the argument linking man's proclivity to war and his evolutionary heritage will be adumbrated and criticised. Finally, the implications of this ambitious thesis will be considered: first, for the student who analyses war; second, for the statesman who all too often makes war. I. Historical antecedentsThe new biology is not as novel as its name implies. Rather, its proponents follow a large and respectable tribe of theorists who have attempted to locate the roots of international conflict in what they have seen as the inherent pugnacity of human nature. 1 It would be appropriate to sketch, in chronological order, the main highlights of this tradition:A. THE CLASSICAL EXPLANATION "We need not say yet whether war does good or harm," Plato wrote in the Republic, "but only that we have discovered its origins in desires which are the most fruitful source of evils both to individuals and states." 2 These war-causing desires-for land, loot, slaves-unite with man's "spirited element" to subvert the rule of reason and lead the state on an expansionary course and, inevitably, to war. The Platonic tradition can be traced, through Aristotle, to many thinkers of postReformation Europe. Spinoza, for one, although ignoring Plato's spirited element, 'These thinkers must be seen in turn as part of a larger galaxy of scholars advocating "systemic" theories of war causation. Besides human nature, other "systems" identified as responsible for war have been: autocratic domestic political systems (Kant, nineteenth-century liberals); exploitative economic systems (Marx, Lenin); repressive cultural systems (Margaret Mead, twentiethcentury anthropologists); and the anarchic state system itself (Rousseau).