War and the Progress of Civilization

* Book: War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots. By Ian Morris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux,

URL =

Summary

Peter Turchin:

"The rise of large-scale complex societies can only be understood as a result of selection operating on cultural groups and whole societies. Throughout most of human history the major form this between-societies competition took was warfare. The main proponents of this theme at the workshop were Peter Richerson, David Sloan Wilson, and I.

Meanwhile Ian, coming from a very different background of the history and archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean, has independently converged on a very similar answer.

In his book Morris argues that “the main function of war in cultural evolution across the past 15,000 years—and particularly across the past 500 years—has been to integrate societies, increasing material wellbeing.” It was war, strangely enough, that made our societies larger, wealthier, and safer. It must be understood that the argument here is “over the long run.” It goes without saying that wars created, and continue to create an enormous amount of human misery. But warfare creates an environment in which only societies that are strongly cooperative manage to persist and expand at the expense of less cooperative ones. Without war (or more broadly, without competition between societies) cooperation would unravel and disappear. Thus, wars have not only a destructive side, but also a creative one.

I am in complete agreement with Ian that this general insight is very valid."

(https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/war-what-is-it-good-for/)