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?

The Cold War would count as peace per this exercise, though. Agreed re WW2 (and 1) though.

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.

And it arguably lead to a strategy game I spent a fair amount of time playing in my youth. Thanks for that!

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.

On the winner's civilization, mostly.

Even the losers - we borrow many ideas from plenty of failed civilizations.

And many ideas are also simply lost, history is full of the ebb and flow of advancement as civilizations are destroyed and plundered.

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.