The Center for Science Writings

In my latest appearance on Bloggingheads.tv, I chat with Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers and authority on the origins of warfare. Brian offers insights into the Hobbesian versus Rousseauian views of pre-civilized humans, the violent Amazonian tribe the Yanomamo, the effect of western contact on violence among "primitive" people, the link between male violence and reproductive success, the behavioral differences between chimps and bonobos, the first clear-cut archaeological evidence of mass violence, the relative contributions of nature and nurture to warfare and lots of other stuff relevant to the debate over why we humans fight wars and whether we can stop. I discuss Brian’s work in my recent article “Is War Inevitable?”

Toward the end of our conversation, Brian delves into an extremely important question: whether anthropologists, psychologists, psychiatrists and other scientists should provide the military with advice on everything from handling hostile populations in Afghanistan and Iraq to conducting interrogations in Guantanamo. All scientists–hell, all people, because our taxes pay for this military consulting–should be pondering this ethical issue.

In my last post I argued that we can never stop trying to solve problems like cancer and war, no matter how often we fail. The chemist Linus Pauling, one of history’s greatest scientists, devoted himself to ending both war and cancer. He also explained the chemical bond in quantum terms, for which he won his first Nobel Prize in 1954, and helped found molecular biology and genetic medicine with his pioneering work on the structure of proteins and antibodies and diseases such as sickle-cell anemia.

Pauling might have correctly deciphered the structure of DNA before Watson and Crick did in 1953, but the U.S.—gripped by anti-communist hysteria—punished him for his peace activism by denying him a passport and hence the benefit of visiting foreign laboratories. Pauling won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Peace for helping to bring about a U.S.-Soviet ban on atmospheric nuclear testing.

In his 1958 book No More War! Pauling wrote: “We are living through that unique epoch in the history of civilization when war will cease to be the means of settling great world problems. We shall soon enter upon the continuing period of peace, a period when there will be no more war, when disputes between nations will be settled by the application of man’s power of reason, by international law. It is the development of great nuclear weapons that requires that war be given up, for all time. The forces that can destroy the world must not be used.”

Pauling urged the creation of a World Peace Research Organization, under the auspices of the U.N. “This would mean, of course, carrying out research on how to solve great world problems, problems of the kind that have in the past led to war,” he wrote. Noting the “multiplicity of the fields of human knowledge pertinent to the problem of peace and the complexity of the problem itself,” Pauling suggested that the organization be staffed by thousands of scientists representing all scientific disciplines. Pauling added, however, that scientists cannot overcome war on their own; peace must stem from the concerted effort of all people, including leaders and ordinary citizens.

In a preface to the 1983 edition of his book, issued 25 years after its original publication, Pauling stated: “I hope that when the year 2008 arrives, after another twenty-five years, the world will have survived and the human race will still be here (although I probably shall no longer be living), but that there will be no need to republish the book, because the goal of world peace will have been achieved, militarism and nuclear weapons will have been brought under control, and the threat of world destruction will finally have been abolished.”

Here we are in 2008, still grappling with the problems of war and militarism. Pauling’s vitamin-C therapy also failed to eradicate cancer, and in fact by the time he died in 1994 many scientists viewed him as a crank for his adamant advocacy of the therapy. But Pauling’s greatness stems as much from his grand failures as from his many successes.

P.S.: We plan to add an interview I carried out with Pauling in 1992 to our “Science Shapers Speak” archive.

If visionaries keep predicting an event and it keeps failing to occur, at what point should we stop taking that prediction seriously? It depends on what’s being predicted. When it comes to Messiahs, for example, or Theories of Everything, I think we may already be at the point where we can dismiss the prophecies once and for all. We’re even justified in mocking—in a nice way–those who cling to belief in Messiahs and Theories of Everything.

There are other goals that we can never stop trying to achieve, no matter how often our hopes are dashed. Scientists have often claimed that they’re on the verge of curing cancer. Although we should certainly be skeptical when we hear these claims, we should not mock researchers trying to find a cure or tell them to stop, just because they have failed so far. Cancer is such a scourge that we never can—or should—cease trying to overcome it. The quest for a cure is noble.

War is a far greater source of suffering than cancer, and it diverts vast amounts of human energy and other resources away from all our other problems. There is also this crucial difference between cancer and war: Whereas cancer is a stubborn aspect of nature that in many respects lies beyond our control, war is entirely our creation. War can end tomorrow through a simple act of will on the part of a relatively small number of leaders and fighters around the world. That gives us an even greater responsibility to persist in our efforts to abolish war, no matter how many times our hopes for peace have been dashed.

Yet some eminent scholars mock those who hope that war will end. In On the Origins of War, the Yale historian Donald Kagan—sire of neoconservatives Robert and Frederick Kagan–remarks that “over the past two centuries the only thing more common than predictions about the end of war has been war itself.” He contends that war stems from the enduring human desire for respect, honor and, above all, power. Doubting that human reason can ever entirely overcome these impulses, he contends that “war is probably part of the human condition and likely to be with us for some time to come.” He dismisses disarmament efforts as naive and advocates maintaining peace through military strength.

Kagan, for obvious reasons, is an intellectual favorite of hawks like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. So is the historian Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who in his 2001 book Carnage and Culture defends militarism and war as necessary, civilizing forces and derides the end of war as a “fantasy.” War “seems innate to the human species,” Hanson writes. “Nations, clans and tribes, it seems, will continue to fight despite international threats, sanctions and the lessons of history.”

Kagan, Hanson and others who sneeringly dismiss hopes for a world without war think of themselves as tough, unsentimental realists. I view them as anti-intellectual, misanthropic fatalists of the most contemptible sort. These pessimists–certainly not optimists, like Jeffrey Sachs and Edward Wilson, who believe that humanity is intelligent and creative and decent enough to solve war and poverty and other age-old scourges—deserve to be mocked and cast out of the community of respectable intellectuals.