Book Review: Constant Battles
I was recently introduced by Richard Wrangham to a book I should have read in 2002 when it was published. It is Constant Battles by Steven LeBlanc, a physical anthropologist colleague of Wrangham’s at Harvard. LeBlanc’s book pulls together the uniformities of the behavior of ancient tribes as revealed at their living and battle sites around the world. The behavior pattern that emerged is well captured by the book’s title. These battles had high mortality rates: they were not the sham battles that some have reported. Even contemporary tribes such as the Hopi, with their well-deserved reputation of peacefulness, have a history of constant battles in the not-too-distant past. My lingering belief in the “myth of the noble savage” has been wiped out by the facts. However, I hasten to add, LeBlanc’s facts also reinforce the point made in Being Human, that tribal people were well bonded in mutual-caring ties within their tribes. The constant fighting was inter-tribal. I will be doing some rewriting of Chapter 5 of Being Human, where this issue is discussed, to take account of LeBlanc’s work.
But LeBlanc’s second point is the bigger one. He assembles evidence that inter-tribal fighting was tightly associated with an imbalance between the carrying capacity of the local eco-system and the size of the local population. In simple terms, when a tribes’ hunger exceeded its local food supply, the desperate tribe fought for the food of its neighbors. Hunter-gatherer tribes around the globe never seemed able to achieve a sustainable balance between their population levels and their local eco-system. Warfare was the consequence. This dramatic finding clearly has significant implications for the 21st century. There can be no doubt that the current worldwide balance between population levels and essential resources is moving toward the negative zone, and the problem of warfare has not yet been solved by any means. Of course, it can be argued that contemporary wars are often caused by ideological or cultural conflicts, and they might well be led by egomaniacal free-riders. But even if LeBlanc’s causes are only partial ones in today’s world, it is very difficult to argue that the search for ecological balance is not essential and urgent for the future of our species.
LeBlanc does offer us some good news. This is the finding that, if the tribes studied were ever able to attain an ecosystem /population balance as the Hopi now have, they became peaceable. There was no evidence of a universal aggression drive. This argues that it is possible for humans, with RD theory’s four drives at work in harness with a powerful cognitive capacity, to achieve a peaceful and comfortable life for all. There are sound reasons to expect that, if humans can now work their way into a sustainable relationship with the earth’s resources and constrain free-riders, a WWIII holocaust can be avoided.
Posted on: Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - Tags: Book Review, Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior.
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