Why War?

Why War? Christopher Coker. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2021.

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There are four central chapters bookended by an introduction and a speculative conclusion about how artificial intelligence and cybernetics may remove the human component from war and ironically leave the species vulnerable to being out-competed, much as he hints that early Homo sapiens outcompeted the other species of Homo. The central chapters are guided by a paradigm developed by ethologist Niko Tinbergen. The paradigm identified four key questions in animal behavior: What are its origins? What mechanisms allow it to flourish? What has been its ontogeny or development over time? And, how does its function facilitate reproductive success? Coker transmutes these questions into his chapter titles, in each case asking specifically about war as a behavior: “Origins;” “Cultural Mechanisms;” “Ontogeny;” and “Functions.”

The first chapter explores the evolutionary roots of group violent behavior and how that process shaped the species. Among other things, our evolutionary past has fostered human sociality, partly in response to the central role of fear: group interaction is one of the processes our brain chemistry promotes. Unfortunately, however, our “dense sociality” also separates insiders from outsiders and our fear response enables violence against them.[1] Ultimately, our biological evolution merged with increasingly rapid forms of cultural evolution, which other scholars called the “dual inheritance” model. Crucially, the cultural evolution of our species has long been enhanced and shaped by our tools, including the animals we domesticated. Coker’s technique, here and throughout, is to slide easily from the deep human past to presumed modern parallels; to invoke literary imaginings or representations of human behavior; and to tie it all together in a seductively well-written package. He does not proceed through a linear argument, using scientific or social scientific evidence as traditionally construed to suggest a cause-and-effect relationship. His method is more essayistic and suggestive, informed by wide reading and perhaps shaped by the need to fill in the gaps in our knowledge in a humanistic way. A key theme throughout is that whatever else war is, it is human. It is not a free-ranging abstraction that follows its own rules, à la Carl von Clausewitz’s philosophical notion of ideal war.

Chapter 2 turns to the products of our cultural evolution, stories, myths, histories, theories, art, cinema, and so on to examine them as mechanisms that have promoted war as a behavior. We have been able to wage war because we have held ourselves together through myth. We can persist in combat because histories have persuaded us of our unique right to survive and even conquer. In this realm we find “manliness,” reputation, honor, and so on. Cultural mechanisms that enable war are thus superimposed on the original biological imperatives of sociality and reproductive success. Other authors working in this realm of the human motivational complex might focus on the sociological origins and consequences of concepts like honor, Coker, however, is more interested in the cultural mechanisms of transmission. How has representational art, for example, promoted, expanded, or even glorified those concepts, injecting them into the naïve minds of young men bound for the front? At times his discussion feels very narrowly guided by a vision of art that is not only exclusively western, but which elides the more gruesome genres common in secular medieval art and also in early modern Germanic representations of war. Where he sees artistic rejection of war’s horror emergent only in World War I with artists like Otto Dix—admitting only a few exceptional earlier figures like Francisco Goya or Jacques Callot—there were in fact numerous artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who not only focused on the daily life of soldiers and war, but on war’s destructive effects.[2]

That functionality is the subject of the last main chapter. War continues to fulfill social and psychological needs. Here Coker complains about the inadequacy of Clausewitz’s “war is the continuation of politics with other means” claim–setting aside whether Clausewitz’s analysis is in fact that simplistic. Coker argues that such a view of war misses its mythic appeal. Furthermore, war has a “mimetic” power; it is self-replicating, even as it has become biologically or materially dysfunctional.[3]

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Coker is well-read and has a creative and flexible mind, much on display here. At times it feels like he hops around within a section or chapter, but there is usually a linkage waiting unseen just around the next paragraph. It is a rewarding reading experience, and unlike most surveys of military history, it is deeply concerned with prehistory and the fundamental problems of human nature.

Coker borrows freely from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, which also explores the evolutionary and cultural reasons why humans remain, in her words, “gripped” by war.[4] On the other hand, Coker fails to take advantage of Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization, although Coker’s summaries of the literature on early human violence and social evolution often track closely with Gat’s.[5] But both Ehrenreich and Gat had more specific arguments to make. The former identified a modern pattern of “sacralizing” war and found its origins in the human experience of being the prey of carnivores. The latter identified a crucial shift in the utility of war associated with modernity: whereas war had long served an evolutionary or social/material function, it has now lost that functionality and persists only as a maladaptive behavior. Coker’s approach is more essayistic and humanistic. He has read deeply in the English literature of war—and key English translations of Homer, Sebastian Junger, and their ilk—and he uses that reading liberally throughout the book to both provide examples of the human experience of war and to posit a continuity of experience thereof. Homer’s reading—to use just one common example—of human nature at war, is applicable forward and backward in time.

Unfortunately, despite its significant virtues, Why War? is marred in a number of ways, some serious and some trivial but worrying. A number of flat-out errors or completely unsubstantiated claims are scattered throughout the book. There are many more than three universities in the U.S. that offer Ph.D.s in military history; Maverick, from Top Gun fame, did not ride horses for fun, he rode a motorcycle; although predictable, the enemy tribes in the famous ethnographic film Dead Birds did not announce their battles ahead of time; human raiding parties do attack isolated individuals when on campaign; humans are not the only species whose young are helpless; and the people in our modern era who have elevated Kim Kardashian to astonishing heights of wealth do not as a rule debunk glamor to instead “extol the quotidian.”[6]

These errors may not in themselves be distressing, but they matter in a book that is highly essayistic and not transparently documented. Coker uses parenthetical citations, but not systematically, and never with page numbers. Many of his claims are difficult to check. And more seriously, especially given the heavy role he assigns to human evolution, Coker cites E.O. Wilson for claims about group selection without acknowledging that among evolutionary biologists Wilson remains an outlier on that subject. And Coker’s discussion of epigenetics and behavior is vague at best; it’s not clear that he realizes that it is epigenetics that he is trying to describe.[7]

Despite these flaws, there is much to chew on in Coker’s analysis. Historians interested in war’s longue durée will profit from contemplating the many connections he draws.

Wayne E. Lee is the Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. He is the co-author of The Other Face of Battle: America’s Forgotten Wars and the Experience of Combat and author of Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History and Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865, among other books. Lee also has done archaeological field work in Greece, Albania, Croatia, Hungary, and Virginia.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Christopher Coker, Why War? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 43.

[2] See for example J. R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

[3] Coker, Why War?, 175.

[4] Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997)

[5] Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Coker does cite one of Gat’s articles.

[6] Coker, Why War?, 24, 170, 34, 37, 84.

[7] Coker, Why War?, 201.