History of the Passions of War
* Book: Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. By BARBARA EHRENREICH. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Compnay
URL = https://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/titles/barbara-ehrenreich/blood-rites/9781455543700/
Description
"In the conventional account of human origins, everything about human violence is explained as a result of our species' long prehistoric sojourn as hunters of animals. It is the taste for meat and the willingness to kill for it that supposedly distinguish us from other primates, making us both smart and cruel, sociable and domineering, eager for the kill and capable of sharing it. We are, in other words, a species of predators--"natural born killers" who carried the habit of fighting over into the era of herding and farming. With the Neolithic revolution, wild ungulates were replaced as prey by the animals in other people's herds or the grain stored in other villages' fortresses; and the name for this new form of "hunting" was war. In this account, the sacralization of war arises only because the old form of hunting, and probably also the sharing of meat, had somehow been construed as sacred for eons before.
No doubt much of "human nature" was indeed laid down during the 2 1/2 million years or so when Homo lived in small bands and depended on wild animals and plants for food. But it is my contention that our peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence is rooted in a primordial experience that we have managed, as a species, to almost entirely repress. And this is the experience, not of hunting, but of being preyed on by animals that were initially far more skillful hunters than ourselves. In particular, the sacralization of war is not the project of a self-confident predator, I will argue, but that of a creature which has learned only "recently," in the last thousand or so generations, not to cower at every sound in the night.
Rituals of blood sacrifice both celebrate and terrifyingly reenact the human transition from prey to predator, and so, I will argue, does war. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of wars that are undertaken for the stated purpose of initiating young men into the male warrior-predator role--a not uncommon occurrence in traditional cultures. But more important, the anxiety and ultimate thrill of the prey-to-predator transition color the feelings we bring to all wars, and infuse them, at least for some of the participants, some of the time, with feelings powerful and uplifting enough to he experienced as "religious."
Having made that case--convincingly, I hope--in the first half of this book, Part II will consider the sacralization of war in historical times, and its evolution from an elite religion observed by a privileged warrior caste to the mass religion we know today primarily as nationalism. It is in our own thoroughly "modern" time, we will see, that the rituals and passions of war most clearly recall the primitive theme of resistance to a nonhuman threat."
(https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/ehrenreich-rites.html)