FTA: “The majority of archaeologists are against the warfare theory,” says Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the new study’s lead author. “Nobody likes this ugly idea because obviously warfare is a horrible thing, and we don’t like to think it can have any positive effects.”
I find it really concerning if this is actually true. How can you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part of human history?
> How can you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part of human history?
Archaeologists are not arguing that warfare hasn't been a major part of human history, rather they don't implied idea that warfare benefited humanity.
However this isn't what the study is saying, the study is saying that "the introduction of mounted warfare and the emergence of iron weapons" resulted in an increase in social complexity.
* An increase in social complexity may or may not be a good thing for humanity overall. For instance the indicators of social complexity used here were among other things: size of bureaucracy and size of empire. The fall of the Russian empire likely resulted in a decrease in social complexity for Poland: Poland no longer part of a larger state. Many Polish people will tell you that gaining their freedom was an improvement.
* There can be different types of increases in social complexity. One might be beneficial to humanity and one might be terrible for humanity. These are not distinguished.
* The study is upfront about social complexity not being the same as cultural complexity. You can have an increase in social complexity while seeing a decrease in cultural complexity.
* They are looking at one specific innovation, iron weapons and mounted warfare. This doesn't generalize to all warfare. The war between Carthage and Rome resulted in Carthage's total destruction, this did not benefit Carthage and reduced the social complexity of Carthage to null.
It's a very big leap from, societies that gain a set specific of weapons improvements gain in social complexity as they build bigger empires --> warfare offers more benefit to humanity than it costs.
However this isn't what the study is saying, the study is saying that "the introduction of mounted warfare and the emergence of iron weapons" resulted in an increase in social complexity.
Turchin isn't saying that majority of archaelogists don't believe that warfare was a major part of human history.
It's a specific statement about theories about enabled/drove the increase in societal complexity in the last 10,000 years. The question is about the relative importance of agriculture and warfare as enablers and drivers.
Unfortunately without the whole interview/quote, it's hard to parse out exactly what Turchin means when he says "the warfare theory". We do know that Turchin is arguing that warfare (external conflict) and agriculture are together the two dominant factors in driving societal complexity.
The most charitable explanation would be that the people who are "against the warfare theory" would probably argue that agriculture is the dominant factor, with external conflict firmly in second place, as an important (perhaps the most important) secondary factor. Another reasonable reading would be that the majority of archaeologists do not believe that warfare is the dominant factor in societal complexity.
My understanding of Turchin's argument from Ultrasociety is basically that for very early civilizations people were generally worse off individually giving up autonomy to absolute rulers, and that it goes against most people's and similar primates feelings about fairness/egalitarianism.
As a result there must have been some very large advantage to centralization, which he argues was likely war in order to defend against external threats or raiders.
The thing about warfare is the side that is better organized and led tends to win. Strategy and tactics play a huge role in victory, and don't arise spontaneously. I would expect it to drive society to more complexity.
That is very emphatically not the argument Turchin is making and the tenuousness of the connection between military success and institutional complexity is evident by looking at the pretty obvious exceptions like the Mongol empire, the Huns, etc.
It's pretty easy to imagine that war significantly slowed humanities advancement and caused significant pain and suffering along the way. Anything good that came out of warfare might also have come out of less horrible methods.
Not sure why you are having so much trouble with this.
My intuition would say that surely can't be true, given recent history. Both WWII and the Cold War advanced technology tremendously. Sure, most of it would have happened anyways eventually, but advances in aviation, radar and nuclear would have taken decades longer. Our space launch capabilities are by many metrics only now catching up to where they were under war conditions 50 years ago. Who knows how long it would have taken if the Germans didn't invent the V2 to bomb London, and the Americans and Russians didn't develop it into intercontinental missiles, culminating in a space race for ideological superiority.
That said, this might all be recency bias on my part. Historically war has been a big drain on scarce resources, most of all non-agricultural manpower. It's hard to advance society if everyone who isn't on the fields is working on war-related things.
Then again, without the military demand for better barrels and stronger steel, would we have developed the technology that enabled the pistons and steam engines that powered the industrial revolution?
I think the trouble is that you're emotionally wedded to the idea that war is absolutely bad. That's preventing you from even considering the possibility of higher order consequences of war having positive aspects. It's conceivable that warfare improved the human capability for advanced cooperation, motivated engineering advances, inspired great art, selected for stronger and healthier men, lead to beneficial gene flows between populations, and had other largely positive effects.
Warfare also provided the motivation (and the resources) for much better medical care. Major advances were made during each major conflict over the last 200 years.
I'm not having any trouble at all, I can entertain both the idea that war has advanced society despite other issues and the idea that it has not. It is, in fact, unclear to me.
I'm replying to a comment that says the idea that it has not is obviously impossible to entertain.
The Shadows from Babylon 5 disagree. A contrarian point of view would be to look at the long term results of extinction events or pandemics, like the Black Death in Europe. One could argue that major disruptions shake up the status quo, leading to new evolutionary outcomes that were suppressed. Dinosaurs get replaced by mammals. Old European monarchies and treaties get replaced by modern democracies and capital.
Much as I dislike it, I’m having trouble too. Warfare will push the society to create better weapons (metallurgy, chariot making etc,), better logistics, solidify hierarchies etc. The spoils of war are extremely effective motivators at a very base human level (power, land, wealth, rape).
I doubt peaceful means could achieve what war can.
> I doubt peaceful means could achieve what war can.
It works the other way as well, I doubt war can achieve what peace can.
> Warfare will push the society to create better weapons (metallurgy, chariot making etc,), better logistics, solidify hierarchies etc.
In many historical examples this also involved the destruction of knowledge. The Roman empire set mathematics back a thousand years. The Greeks were very close to calculus.
Large hierarchies often stagnate societies.
The result of the Peloponnesian War was a diminished Athens and stagnant slowly dying Sparta.
Did WW1 help Europe by killing two generations of French and German Mathematicians? Königsberg was one of the top intellectual centers of the world for 300 years? How is it doing now? Can you even find it on a map?
Warfare isn't just on thing that we isolate and ask, "is it beneficial?" The impact of a war on a society depends enormously on context and the chaos of history. Did WW2 result in massive advances in human science, I think so. How can we know what the world would have looked like if so many human lives had not be lost? The world got really good jet engines but what did it lose?
Did WW1 set science back, I also think that is true. WW1 also helped set in motion the end of European colonialism which is a long term good for the world.
There is no meaningful answer to this question when set at a scope as large as you have set it.
Despite these catastrophic civilization collapses, civilizations have grown increasingly more advanced despite a localized minimum.
The need to wage war to defend or gain resources seems like a major driver of complexity. To maintain a military it needs equipped and fed, requiring large supply chains, and hence, more complexity. If you didn't need to defend your food stores, you wouldn't need such complexity.
Part of it is clarifying the claim. Is it "some positive effects" meaning some subset of all the effects being positive or "overall positive effect" meaning the sum of all the negative and positive effects is positive? The first one is pretty simple, you just need to find one positive effect. The second is much more difficult and requires making judgements of the relative size of good and bad effects which is much more subjective, and I could see someone's view of subjective waits making it impossible for this to ever be true.
But both views still require deciding if something is positive, which isn't exactly a scientific question. It is a bit like asking if evolution has positive effects. From a purely scientific view, is life or increased complexity of life a positive?
Humans would not engage in warfare if they didn't think it was of benefit.
In fact, the first labor saving invention was to steal someone else's food. All animals practice it when they can. That's all some species even do - we call them scavengers. Like vultures and hyenas.
Peter Turchin likes to cast himself as a bit of a rebel "against the establishment", despite the fact that he's one of the most prominent academics in that establishment. What you are understanding from that statement is, unsurprisingly, very uncontroversial. To understand what Turchin is actually saying though, it's worth framing the underlying paper:
Turchin is a big advocate of something he calls cliodynamics, which is essentially psychohistory. One of the fundamental assumptions underlying it is that all of human history obeys uniformitarian rules and thus figuring out those rules is simply a matter of having enough data. So, he's spent the past while gathering a dataset and in this paper does PCA against it to find the variables that are most correlated with his measure of social complexity.
Where most people would find issue is with the underlying assumptions there. A lot of people don't agree that human history obeys uniformitarian rules and if they do, they don't necessarily agree with lumping different societies together in a PCA.
Because they don't like the implications that "might is right". Evolution itself is survival of the fittest and "will to power", so it naturally follows that civilizations would advance along the same axis of complexity. Technology developing along with methods of conquest and war isn't a very controversial claim, not sure why this one would be.
A generous way to read it is that they don't like the idea, but not necessarily claim that it is wrong. Although the use of the word "against" would plausibly imply "opposed" rather than "made uncomfortable by"
> I find it really concerning if this is actually true. How can you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part of human history?
My understanding is that clear evidence of conquest and genocide, like artifacts associated with a culture ceasing to be made while all new artifacts of a different culture begin to be made, is habitually explained away as mere cultural exchange. The hypothesis is that the resident population wasn't wiped out, it just wholesale adopted a different culture.
Another issue is that archeologically speaking it's pretty hard to tell war from migration. That's one of those clear scientific results that researchers prefer not to talk too much about on account of the political elite's position on migration.
I find it really concerning if this is actually true. How can you be an archaeologist and not think war has been a major part of human history?