Oxytocin Beats Testosterone?: Why We Fight

Why We Fight. Mike Martin. London, UK: Hurst & Company, 2021.

In about 1/25th of a second—or the length of a quick glance—a person can identify where another person ranks in society in relation to oneself. This insight helps explain why we fight: humans, or groups of humans, wage war because they want to improve their status and to be part of a community, or so Mike Martin argues in Why We Fight. As such, nations, much less individuals, do not fight because of ideology, religion, morality, or any other sort of belief system.[1] Rather, engaging in warfare reflects processes lodged deep inside the brain; ideas simply provide the convenient conscious justification for the subconscious. Martin seeks to demonstrate that “power is analogous to status, belonging is analogous to identity, and...biologically speaking, status and belonging are resources.”[2] Or, more straightforwardly, war is “exciting because our ancestors received an evolutionary benefit from it, and hence we are motivated to prosecute it.”[3]

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Martin’s own life has been shaped by this reality. The author, who experienced combat in Afghanistan, always wanted to be a soldier. Martin’s own family exemplifies a split between those who want to fight and those who do not, with Martin’s brother struggling to understand what compelled Martin to seek combat.[4] Before his time in Afghanistan, Martin attended Oxford University, where he studied biology. These two divergent interests come together in Why We Fight, where he synthesizes scientific research conducted on the brain’s evolution to explain warfare. Martin believes this field offers more productive opportunities to understand warfare’s origins than can be gleaned from anthropology and international relations.[5]

In addition to the powerful need that drives many to fight, there is a competing evolutionary trend at work that makes humans increasingly liberal, Martin contends, as they evolve to become “more sociable.”[6] This development can be explained by the fact that as groups grow in size, they engage in less violence.[7] As groups grow, they must solve problems related to identity, trade, hierarchy, disease, and punishment if they want to remain coherent and relevant.[8] In one of his more fascinating examples of how groups coalesce, Martin explains how inhabitants of Britain, Scandinavia, and Spain all stopped eating fish at one point...because of identity, not because of ecological or other changes. A food taboo helped to signify who belonged to the group and who did not.[9]

Ultimately, one is left asking if the United States went to war in Afghanistan to increase its status, as Martin’s thesis suggests? Or to strengthen its internal cohesiveness? Martin offers no compelling proof to answer either question. Rather, he implicitly asks readers to rely on the theory he has built. But if a theory cannot account for the questions it seeks to answer in the first place, then it is potentially flawed. Martin also concludes that war is not “rational nor conscious” but “emotional and subconscious.”[20] It is difficult, however, to reconcile the rational emphasis on the need to acquire status and seek protection in groups in the first place with an emphasis on emotion.

In addition, the theory in some ways applies only to half of the world’s population. The book implicitly contends that the “we” in Why We Fight is “men.” Some of this omission makes sense, because the author claims testosterone largely drives status seeking. At times, however, the author provides little substantiation that men seek status more than women or related lines of thought.[21]

The book also might benefit from tighter connections between this and previous work by Martin about his recent experience in Afghanistan, which relied in part on about 150 interviews. Why We Fight shifts back and forth between brief references to Afghanistan and its dominant focus on neuroscience. This setup makes for fascinating reading, but it also may be the work’s greatest weakness. As Martin admits in the 2021 foreword, it became clear to him in Afghanistan that humans did not go to war for the reasons they think they do. Thus the author foreordained his argument prior to conducting his secondary research. The work would be much stronger had the author interwoven evidence from two works to show stronger causal links between theory and practice.

The emotional responses of many veterans to the Biden Administration’s recent announcement of a withdrawal from Afghanistan is worth considering in light of Martin’s argument. As one Operation Enduring Freedom veteran, Mike Jason, reflected, “We tried to do good. I tried to do good.”[22] One may certainly use Martin’s framework to explain away this statement as the individual’s conscious attempt to rationalize. But one may also use other frameworks to explain his experience, such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where wealthy nations may fight in part for self-serving motivations in addition to higher-order ones. Admittedly, some Western nations have this luxury. As a result, they can fight for more than status, a sentiment that comes through in Jason’s Twitter biography, which asks, “KFOR/OIF/OEF/What-FOR?” The commentator has not lost any status, but still wonders at the reason for fighting, again suggesting a higher-level motive.

Some have also argued the Taliban gained a key advantage precisely because they could motivate others to fight through the power of intangible ideas. Carter Malkasian recently has written, “The Taliban were able to tie themselves to religion and to Afghan identity in a way that a government allied with non-Muslim foreign occupiers could not match.”[23] This argument may align with Why We Fight by suggesting the Taliban only sought to use others’ beliefs for their leadership’s own worldly enrichment in power and resources. Or, alternatively, one may acknowledge ideas do matter to many, at times providing a crucial edge in morale precisely because of how deeply individuals hold to ideas.

Martin’s approach to considering conflicts also verges on one-size-fits-all. Additional discrimination is needed between conflicts like Afghanistan and more existential conflicts. Many World War I volunteers, for example, arguably joined the Army “in the expectation of a desperate fight for national defense” to “guard their homes and families from the horrors of foreign occupation.”[24] This distinction is important in terms of implications for the ongoing tension between testosterone and oxytocin. In writing the foreword to the paperback edition of Why We Fight in January of 2021, Martin argues that he expects “major wars” to break out “fairly soon.”[25] This opinion differs from the more optimistic tone of earlier editions, which argued that “violence and war have been putting themselves out of business.”[26] The author now insists that societies must develop meaningful global organizations to resolve a host of seemingly intractable problems.[27] This solution is at odds with the proverbial infantryman’s cynicism that may explain the reason the book exists.[28]

Why We Fight gives the reader much to consider and is particularly useful due to its unique approach that complements works in other fields like political science. There are no easy answers to why we fight. Regardless of some of oxytocin’s evolutionary victories over testosterone, this book provides much to ponder and understand regarding the inherent job security of being in the business of war.

Heather Venable is an associate professor of military and security studies at the U.S. Air Command and Staff College and teaches in the Department of Airpower. Venable is a managing editor for The Strategy Bridge and is a nonresident fellow at Marine Corps University’s Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Creativity. She is the author of How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Marine Corps Mystique, 1874–1918. These views do not represent the Department of the Defense or the U.S. Air Force or the Department of the Defense.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Mike Martin, Why We Fight (London, UK: Hurst & Company, 2021), x.

[2] Martin, 7.

[3] Martin, 11.

[4] Martin, 41-43.

[5] Martin, 5.

[6] Martin, 38.

[7] Martin, 39.

[8] Martin, 200.

[9] Martin, 176-177.

[10] Martin, 93 and 99.

[11] Martin, 94.

[12] Martin, 103.

[13] Martin, 110.

[14] Martin, 175.

[15] Martin, 202.

[16] Martin, 203-205.

[17] Martin, 162. 

[18] Martin, 162.

[19] Martin, 173.

[20] Martin, 199.

[21] Martin, 78-79.

[22] Mike Jason, Tweet, April 13, 2021. The author corresponded with Mr. Jason on the same day and requested and received his permission to use his tweet. Also see a similar thread: https://twitter.com/MattGallagher0/status/1415124789619011585

[23] Carter Malkasian, “What America Didn’t Understand about Its Longest War,” Politico, 6 July 2021; https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/06/afghanistan-war-malkasian-book-excerpt-497843.

[24] Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British ARmies, 1914-1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 49 and 51.

[25] Martin, xiv.

[26] Martin, 107.

[27] Martin, xiv.

[28] For this cynicism, for example, see John C. McManus, Grunts: Inside the American Infantry Combat Experience, World War II through Iraq (New York: Dutton, 2011) or here.