Department of War

Most of us have grown up hearing about DOD (Department of Defense), and this is still how it is universally known. However, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has decided to rename it the Department of War, and that is how you will find it on the official federal website (www.war.gov). The index of departments and agencies still lists it as Defense, but its leaders consider it the Department of War.

 

 

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this change, to America, and in the eyes of the world.

Consider how one would evaluate the effectiveness of a federal agency. If it is the Department of Defense, the question we need to answer is, Is America being adequately defended? I am not including those tasks that have been assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. Since most Americans do not live in fear of foreign aggression, we could conclude that DOD is doing its job and the Secretary of Defense is doing his.

But if we call it Department of War, then this department has to be fighting a war somewhere, or else it is not doing its job. If America is not fighting a war, then the War Department is effectively inoperative. This is why Pete Hegseth believes that, at any given time, America must be fighting at least one war. Otherwise, Hegseth is not doing his job.

People often ask if there is an Iran exit strategy. If not, what is it that we are trying to accomplish? But that is not the right question. We need to have at least one war, and from this war we must not have an exit strategy. We must be permanently at war.

This is what our supposed allies think when they see us. We are a nation that must be permanently at war. And we must find someone to conduct war against. Right now it is Iran. Who will it be next? Will it still be Iran five years from now? Or will we find another target? But we must have one or more targets or else we, as a nation, are failures.

That, at least, must be the view of Trump and Hegseth.

The Cost of Peace

I think that peace is always better than war in every possible way, including economic benefits. But peace comes with lots of costs, and we should not let them take us by surprise. Here is an example.

Ethiopia has, it seems, always been embroiled in civil war. The Tigray War continues, though it is in the news less than at the beginning of the year. It would seem that everyone would want Ethiopian civil wars to end.

Ethiopia has 1.8 million hectares of irrigable farmland, very little of it being currently used. If civil war ended, they could irrigate most of this land. Right now, nobody would invest in Ethiopian infrastructure that might be destroyed by conflict at any moment. Peace would encourage international investment.

But international investment would not be absolutely necessary. The people could build low earth dams (called micro-dams) that would trap a lot of water in small irrigation ponds. If the only war problems were international, these micro-dams would not constitute a military target—too many of them.

Ethiopia is the source of 86 percent of the water that flows through the Nile. Right now, most of that water is claimed and used by Egypt and the Sudans. But if Ethiopians built all the possible micro-dams, they could use 7.2 billion cubic meters of water per year and could store 50. This would vastly reduce the water flow in the Nile. Egypt’s plans to irrigate large new areas would be jeopardized. The Aswan High Dam is a very visible military target, although Ethiopia could probably not endanger it. War, however, might be unavoidable.

This is an example of how peace can cause more war. If you add on top of this the inevitable droughts, which make people and nations feel desperate, you have an ugly situation. And that is in a part of the world we pretty much ignore.

Peace is worth almost any cost, but these costs must not take us by surprise.

Face to Face with War: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, part 3

This is the third essay I have written about the novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Spanish novelist Vicente Blasco Ibañez. The world in 2021 is no less vulnerable to war than in any previous year, decade, century, or millennium.

I suppose it is about time to describe the novel itself. It is focused on Marcelo Desnoyers, a Frenchman who fled France to avoid being drafted into the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He earned a fortune in Argentina and returned to France for what he considered to be the pinnacle of cultured life. He bought a big house, and then bought a castle in the country near the Marne River. He filled both places with incredible treasures. His two children were Argentinian citizens. One of them, his son Julio, became well-known in Paris for his dancing and his wasteful lifestyle. In particular, a married woman was his lover.

When the Great War started, Marcelo was too old to fight, and Julio was exempt because he was not a French citizen. The war changed everything for all of them. Marcelo went out to his castle, just in time, it turned out, for the Battle of the Marne. He saw it all from his castle, which the Germans attacked and plundered. The Germans not only slaughtered all of the people they could find in the village near the castle but were also full of arrogance. The German officers feasted on Marcelo’s food, and even dressed themselves in his daughter’s dresses and danced around. They shat upon the rugs. Ibañez vividly describes the scenes, using all of the senses. In the wounded villagers, brains were visible, throbbing behind faces without noses. A cannon ball tore off the head of one soldier, who for just a split second kept walking, with two jets of red blood shooting upward from his neck. Disemboweled horses trampled their own entrails. It was at the greenest time of year, when the wheat was in full grain, the most vivid contrast possible between life and death.

The German officers also pretended to be sincerely good people. They carried photos of their beloved families and proclaimed that only by destroying France would their families be able to live. This was an incredible lie but one that, Ibañez suggested, the Germans actually believed. They recognized Marcelo as the castle owner, and instead of just shooting him they tried to convince him of the righteousness of their cause.

But the Germans were beaten back. During their retreat, they transformed the ruined castle into a military hospital. Here Marcelo watched some of the very officers who had so recently boasted of their inevitable victory return, mangled almost beyond recognition, and die. When the French army returned, the Germans fled.

Northern France began to recover. But life for the Desnoyers family changed forever. Julio’s lover, feeling guilty at cuckolding her husband, found that the husband had become a military hero as he was wounded in battle. She sought him out, stayed by his side, and nursed him back to health. Julio, heartbroken, felt that he could do only one thing: join the French army as a foreign volunteer. He did so and became a hero himself. His motivation was not patriotism so much as it was forlorn love, and to just do something with his life rather than just to enjoy his wealth. His father Marcelo, who every day felt the guilt at having fled his patriotic duty in 1870, was now intensely proud of his son.

As you can certainly guess, Julio was killed in battle. The story ends, after almost 500 pages, with Marcelo and his family feeling almost infinite grief out in the middle of the burial fields, months after the battle was over. The bodies of slaughtered French soldiers had been piled up and their burial places marked only with little wooden crosses. The bodies of the German soldiers were piled in unmarked pits and covered with dirt.

The scale of the burial fields is nearly impossible to imagine apart from Ibañez’s description. I got only a tiny glimpse of what it must have been like when I hiked with my son-in-law’s family in the Vosges Mountains that divide Alsace and Lorraine in France in 2016. We went quickly past a World War One cemetery. The French family had seen it, and dozens of others, scattered throughout the mountains, but for me it was a powerful experience.

To a large extent, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was a story that wove together improbable circumstances in order to give the author, who was a journalist with first-hand experience, the excuse to write about the ideas that led to the war. How likely would it be that the sister of Marcelo’s wife would just happen to marry a German who became a top official in the evil German government, and explained his point of view to the rest of the family in great detail? How likely that Julio and later Marcelo should befriend a Russian socialist living in Paris, who explained his point of view in great detail? He said that the supposed Christianity of the Germans was actually the worship of Thor rather than of Jesus. It was the atheist socialist, not the German Christians, who believed that “blessed are the peacemakers.” But the characters were not simply excuses for ideas; they were, to me, vividly real.

And was it not all ultimately futile? Ibañez wrote, through the mind of Marcelo, “I wonder if any star knows that Bismarck ever existed! I wonder if the plants are aware of the divine mission of the German nation!” But I wonder if Ibañez would have been able to guess that, a hundred years later, the European Union, led by France and Germany, would get the Nobel Peace Prize?

But hope remains defiant. At the very end, Marcelo’s daughter hugged her fiancé, a wounded hero, right out in the middle of the burial fields—love may not triumph over, but it remains defiant against, death.

Just How Strong Is Altruism? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, part 2

In my columns and books, I have written extensively about altruism. Altruism is doing well by doing good. It is what happens when one animal is good to another animal in the same species. Altruism has been studied extensively by evolutionary scientists, not only via mathematical theory, but with lots and lots of examples from the animal, including the human, world. Altruism occurs because, very often, the best way for an animal to pass its genes on to the next generation (which is what natural selection is all about) is to cooperate with other animals. It often pays to be good. Not only that, but natural selection has favored many positive emotions to encourage altruism: it feels good to be good.

But in order for altruism to work, there has to be a dividing line between the inside and the outside of the group in which altruism occurs. Natural selection may favor altruism inside the group, but favors behavior that is merciless, and feelings of hatred, outside of the group. An undeniable trend of human history has been the uneven and gradual extension of the dividing line, so that we incorporate more and more people as insiders. A lot of us include the whole world, even the non-human world, in our inside group, or at least we think we do. The question, therefore, is not whether altruism is beneficial or even possible, but how common is it? That is, altruism is part of human nature, but so is brutality. Is human nature good, or bad? I believed that it is both. One of my students, however, drew upon his military experience, in which he was traumatized by what he saw in Bosnia and Afghanistan, to say that human nature is evil. I thought he was wrong. Now I’m not so sure. After reading The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (see previous essay), I wonder whether altruism might be fragile and might even go extinct in our world of the immediate future. Are, as the author Ibañez said, the Four Horsemen the reality of the world?

For those of you who may not know, The Apocalypse is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which a man named John described a vision. In just part of this vision, he saw four supernatural horsemen. One was war, another was disease, another was famine, another was death. Can altruism really keep these metaphorical horsemen from galloping around the world? Or is the world actually theirs? I’m no longer sure.

Ibañez envisioned the Four Horseman galloping freely over the Earth. In one scene, Ibañez described an apartment in Paris in which a Frenchman was married to a German woman. As soon as the war began, the Frenchman went off to kill Germans. He did not consider his wife to be part of the hated outside group, despite her nationality. But she felt the guilt of knowing that she was a German surrounded by the French who did not deserve to be attacked by her people. She jumped off her porch and died in the plaza. It was the Four Horsemen, said Ibañez, who pushed her.

A French servant woman, having seen the devastation of war, said something that might summarize the thoughts above: “God has forgotten the world.”

Who Is to Blame for War? The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (novel) Part 1

As humans culturally evolve to a point of greater knowledge and understanding, one would expect war to become obsolete. There is probably nothing that war can accomplish that cannot be accomplished better through less violent means. But nations, unlike some individuals, have almost never been known to resolve conflicts peacefully. When they do, it is a cause for celebration; the European Union got the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for simply not having war for six decades.

But wars are not just things that happen. Somebody has to start them. I thought about this as I read, in English translation, the classic novel about World War One: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Vicente Blasco Ibañez, written in 1916 even before the war was over. I will tell a little about this novel in a later essay.

Seldom are wars started solely by ordinary people who may want to take resources from, or who feel animosity toward, people of other countries. War is started by governments, who then stir up masses of ordinary people into a frenzy of patriotism, fueled by religion. And, sometimes, fueled by something else as well: scientists and other intellectuals. As a scientist, I hate to admit this, but…well, let me give you an example.

The war that is now called World War One (The Great War, prior to the second) was a war that, as it happened, and even a century after it ended, has been hard to explain. Ask anybody what caused World War Two, and they will say Hitler and Mussolini and the imperialists of Japan. But World War One? Most people would guess Germany—and that is the correct answer—but that is about as far as they could go. I didn’t know much more about it than this before I began reading the novel.

Germany started World War One. It arose from the unresolved animosity from the Franco-Prussian War. In 1870, Prussia insisted that it had the right to rule France. The German Prussians had to retreat from France, except for Alsace. Then, in the Great War, the Germans attacked France again. This time the Allies beat them back past Alsace, to the east of the Rhine River. Then they did it again. Full resolution did not happen until Germany’s unconditional surrender after World War Two. Since that time, peace has been maintained in most of Europe.

German aggression did not result simply from economic and military leaders ordering German troops to attack France (as well as Belgium and other countries). The German people (not all of them, but millions of them) believed with all their souls that Germans were the master race and deserved to rule as much territory as they could get, by whatever means they could get it. They believed whole-heartedly in the war, and the German soldiers fought ferociously. According to Ibañez, German soldiers killed anyone they could find in Belgium, even cutting off women’s breasts and nailing them to doors, or spiking babies on bayonets and parading them around town. Only religion—in this case, a religion of German superiority—can so strongly parasitize the human mind as to make people believe and do things like this.

The Germans began World War One with the claim that the war would be brief and intense. They claimed that by beating down the other countries, particularly France, with utter ferocity, they would make it impossible for any European war to ever occur again. They thought of it as the war that would rid the world of future wars. This was their justification for utter, and often insane, brutality. According to Ibañez, the Germans said that cruelty was actually kindness. Cruelty would force an earlier surrender and an earlier end to the sufferings. It was necessary to kill even the children because, if left behind, the children would grow up as Frenchmen who did not worship the power and glory of Germany.

Who stirred up the Germans to such an intensity of evil? The government and military leaders deserved most of the blame. Religion, far from engendering careful humanitarian thought, became just a rallying point for bloodthirstiness. Ibañez said that, to the Germans, “outside of Germany everything was despicable, even their own religion.” That is, the Germans were proud of their Christianity but hated that of the French. He also said that one of the kinds of people who vanished during the war was the man “of complex spirituality,” whose beliefs could not be summarized by a flag.

I now explain why I include this essay in a science blog. At this point in history, Germans considered themselves the most civilized people on Earth. Theirs was, they believed, the greatest music and the greatest art. And they fancied themselves to be the leaders of the intellectual world. Ibañez makes it perfectly clear that German scholars created a framework of intellectual justification for the brutality. Ernst Haeckel, the biologist, claimed to be inspired by Darwin. Actually, Haeckel took most of his inspiration from the Englishman Herbert Spencer, who believed that Darwinism proved the superiority of the white race. Haeckel substituted German for white. The German intellectuals had prepared the way for the war, giving it a “varnish of scientific justification,” in the words of Ibañez.

As I am an intellectual, this sent a chill down my spine. The words that I write in my books and blogs, and the things that I teach in my classes, might be ignored by most people. But, even if I do not intend it, some of my words might take on a life of their own and become a scourge to history. Those of us who have the holy duty of seeking and telling the scientific truth about the world need to be proactive, and always frame our statements in a context of humanitarianism, even of love.

I will next post an essay about The Four Horsemen and altruism.

A Word of Advice from the Animal Kingdom

I recently ran across a copy of a letter that I sent to Bill Clinton back in 1993, right after his inauguration as president. It will speak for itself.

[To] “Socks” the cat

c/o President Bill and Mrs. Hillary Clinton

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington DC

Dear Socks:

            Remember me? I’m Millie, George and Barbara’s dog. We met briefly. I hope you like your new home.

            I’m writing to pass along some advice about foreign policy. My master complimented me highly on my knowledge of foreign policy. Perhaps you would be kind enough to pass this advice on to President Clinton? Actually, what I’m about to say, you already know, because us animals know a lot more about the world than those humans.

            First, tell Mr. Clinton that he should be sure to have a strong and sound environmental policy. (He knows this; just remind him.) We animals are acutely aware of our dependence on the environment. But humans like to think that they are not animals. They waste energy and materials, destroy plants and animals, and pour pollutants into whatever remains. The “environment” is us. The air, water, soil, plants, and animals of the earth belong to all of us. If the U.S. pollutes the air that every country breathes, pollutes the oceans that every country shares, how can we be at peace with other countries? This is Millie’s First Law of Foreign Affairs: Other countries will get mad at us if we despoil the earth that belongs to all of us.

            Second, tell Mr. Clinton that his foreign policy should fairly address the plight of the world’s poor. (Again, he knows this, just remind him.) Some of my fellow dogs have roamed the garbage heaps of the world and seen a side of reality that kings and presidents usually ignore. There are billions of hungry people who will not sit idly and let rich countries like the U.S., or rich rulers of their own countries, trap them in poverty. Millie’s Second Law of Foreign Affairs is: The only way to lasting peace is to hear the cries of the world’s poor and to respond to these cries.

            All of us animals know that these are the two most important principles of foreign policy. And these two principles are tied together in many ways. For instance, it is the desperate poor who cut down the last trees for firewood so they can boil their last polluted water.

            Best of luck to you and to the rest of the family. Tell Chelsea to learn everything she can in school. And don’t let the Lords of Creation forget that they are, like us, animals.

            Sincerely, Millie the dog

            I included my own address as a c/o, and I got a card back from the White House thanking me for my note.

Would We Rather Go to War than to Recycle?

We need aluminum (for those of you in the UK, it’s aluminium). Lots of it. It is a light and strong metal. To make new aluminum, you begin with bauxite ore, and use a lot of electricity. But to recycle aluminum, you start with aluminum, and use ten times less electricity than it takes to make it from bauxite.

In addition to the energy used to refine bauxite into aluminum, there is also the fact that the largest bauxite reserves are in countries that often have low industrial capacity and do not use very much aluminum. They are small countries that would not be able to put up much resistance if a country like the USA told them we wanted their bauxite. The largest reserves (7.4 billion metric tons) are in Guinea, a small poor African nation. Brazil has 3.6, Vietnam 2.1, and Jamaica 2.0 billion metric tons. The only significant industrial power with large bauxite deposits is Brazil, with 3.6 billion metric tons. Industrial countries have far less: China has 0.8, Russia has 0.2, and the USA has only 0.04 billion metric tons of bauxite reserves.

Our extravagant use of raw aluminum, while throwing used aluminum into landfills, makes economic sense only because we can get new aluminum from smaller countries. What if these countries decided to charge more money for it, or preferred to sell the bauxite to one of our competitors, such as China? Would we go to war for bauxite rather than to recycle what we already have? I wonder how many Americans are lazy and selfish enough that they would prefer to see an aluminum war rather than to take a few extra moments and a few extra steps to recycle aluminum cans? Half of our federal budget is for the military. How many Americans consider half of our tax money (and the money we borrow from other places), and the lives of our fellow Americans in the military, to be expendable so that we can throw whatever we like in the garbage? Go ahead. Next time you see a soldier, tell her or him that you would rather see them engaged in open conflict than for you to recycle, then tell yourself what a patriot you are.

There are a lot of rare and expensive metals in cell phones. One example is gold. At present, it is cheaper to mine gold from ore than it is to recycle it from electronic equipment. But that is only because, first, we ignore the environmental costs of gold mining, such as at the big mine in Australia shown in the figure, and second, we assume that we will never run out of ore. It is easy (in most places) to recycle old cell phones; electronics stores have receptacles for them, and some will even pay you for them. But Americans prefer to throw them away: ninety percent of them. Would we, perhaps, be willing to go to war for gold rather than to recycle it?

Some of those elements you heard about in high school chemistry actually have some very important uses. Praseodymium, for example, is a component of metal used in aircraft engines. Cerium is used as a catalyst to refine petroleum. Lanthanum is used in carbon arc lights such as those used in projectors. Neodymium is used in welders’ goggles. Samarium is part of the crystals used in optical lasers, and absorbs neutrons in nuclear reactors. Gadolinium is used in color picture tubes and magnetic resonance imaging. These are highly specialized but very important uses.

The reason I chose these particular metals is that Afghanistan has raw ores for these metals—a trillion dollars’ worth.

Though not a chemist, I can imagine that recycling these metals must be difficult, much more so than recycling aluminum. Imagine getting neodymium out of old welder’s goggles. At what point does it become cost-effective to recycle rare metals? The answer depends, of course, on the availability of raw ores for these metals. If Afghanistan will allow American corporations to mine their ores, and let us do so for cheap, then our industrial and political leaders will probably choose to use new, rather than recycled, rare metals.

But Afghanistan seems to be continually at war; America has had a very active and expensive military presence since 2002. When industrial leaders make their calculations for investing in rare metal mining in Afghanistan, they assume that American military presence will be available to protect them for free, that is, at taxpayer expense.

And, of course, our economic competitors such as China want these metals too.

This brings up the uncomfortable possibility that America might be willing to go to war for raw ores of these important rare metals rather than recycling them. We may choose to go ahead and throw away all those metals and, if we start to run out of them, just go to war and take what we need. As any black or Native American can tell you, American history consists largely of the white American government and economic leaders benefiting from the forced labor of, or taking land and all its resources away from, people of color. I am not suggesting that our current Afghan war is motivated by the desire for these metals at this time. One the other hand, maybe it is, or will soon be.

A war for raw mineral ores can be avoided by recycling, which is very easy to do for aluminum, very difficult to do for neodymium, but always possible.

Recycling is the right thing to do for world peace.

What We Can Learn About Ourselves from Other Animals: More Insights from Konrad Lorenz

I have a few more observations that I learned while reading Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring.

Some animal species are even more cruel than humans. A male roebuck, if confined in the same enclosure as females or young, will kill them and slit their bellies open. And doves, the paragons of peace, or so we think, will (if confined) kill one another; the victor will pluck the feathers off of the vanquished. In many cases, the animal that knows that it is about to be vanquished will engage in submission behavior, in order to keep from being killed. A turkey, for example, will lie down when it knows it is losing a fight. But peacocks do not recognize turkey behavior; so when turkeys and peacocks are confined together, the peacock kills the turkey.

That is, doves can be very cruel. At the same time, wolves are often submissive to one another and refrain from outright combat and cruelty. Lorenz then asks, at the end of one of his essays written early in the Cold War era, will we be submissive like wolves or murderous like doves? The entire future of the world may depend on the answer to this question.

Horrors of War, Pleasures of Peace

France, Part 2.

On July 13, my wife and I visited the Musée Historique de Strasbourg. On July 15, we were back in Old Strasbourg at the Place Kléber (Kleber Plaza) and the Cathedral. What I saw at those times was immensely moving and significant and may have been my most memorable experience in France.

The museum documented a thousand years of history in which Strasbourg, on the Rhine River, was nearly always consumed in war between places that are now part of France and now part of Germany. Throughout this time, Strasbourg thought of itself as Alsacian rather than strictly French or strictly German. And why not? Whichever side it took, it would be conquered by the other side within a century or two anyway. And while it was fun to dress up in simulated medieval armor (see photo), there is no avoiding the fact that this constant state of warfare was gruesome and entailed unmeasurable amounts of suffering.

Most striking of all were the centuries of religious intolerance and slaughter. Throughout most of the history of Strasbourg, as in all other European cities, the Jews were forced to live in ghettos; near the museum you can still walk on the Rue des Juifs, which is very narrow just as it was in ghetto days, only it is now clean and free.

Then there was the Reformation, when Alsace was divided up into little enclaves: Territoires passés a la Réforme (territories becoming Protestant at the Reformation), Territories restés catholiques (territories remaining Catholic), Zones où la Réforme a été combattue (combat zones), and (the smallest of all) Territoires où les deux confessions ont été tolerées (zones where both “confessions” were tolerated) (see photo).

Inevitably, toward the end of the tour of the museum, we saw the photos and artifacts of Nazi occupation in World War II. The French did not simply surrender; they had a heavily fortified Maginot Line right in Alsace, ready to defend France from a German invasion across the Rhine. But the Germans invaded Belgium and took over France from the north, making the Maginot Line useless. In the museum we saw a photo of Hitler standing at the base of Strasbourg Cathedral, and of big Nazi military displays in the Place Kléber, which they renamed Karl Roos Platz. There was even a display about brutal Nazi experimentation on living humans. When liberation came, under General Leclerc, the Nazi influence was swept away with great enthusiasm (see the photos).

Here is the part that meant the most to me. A couple of days later, on July 15, when my wife and I happened by the Cathedral—there very Cathedral where Jews were oppressed for centuries, and where Hitler walked—we saw a klezmer band making some of the most joyous Jewish music you ever heard. Everybody loved this Jewish music and its talented performers. Take that, Hitler! And take that, you priests who oppressed the Jews for millennia! Right at that moment, while the lead musician (who played my old instrument the euphonium) was when I felt, more than ever before in my life, the joy of international peace, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human species.

The Biology of War

In 2013 scientific attention was focused on a pair of books that addressed why humans have war. Edward O. Wilson, in his book The Social Conquest of Earth, maintained that war was a human instinct, and that humans have had war as long as we have existed as a separate species. (This was not the main thing Wilson’s book was about.) In contrast, science writer John Horgan, in his book The End of War, argued that war is something that humans learned to do and that we can unlearn.

While this seems like an important debate, I fear that it is mostly over semantics. Humans have had violent conflict as long as we have existed (a fact Horgan does not deny), but full-scale wars have occurred only in the last 11,000 years or so. Did I miss something? When human population started to increase, and humans started living in defined locations such as cities, then violent conflicts became big enough to be classified as wars. Isn’t war just a big violent conflict? Was the conflict between the Cherokees and the Creeks, culminating in the Battle of Taliwa in 1755, a war or an intertribal conflict? I don’t think this would have made any difference to Nanyehi, my 6^th great grandmother, whose saw her husband killed in that battle, and who became a Cherokee war hero right at that moment. She was a war hero, even though no massive troop engagements were involved. She, also at that moment, became an advocate for peace, because whether it was a war or a mere conflict, she was a widow and her two children were orphans.

Nevertheless, Horgan does get us to think about a few very interesting things. He makes the invalid argument that, if violence is part of human nature, then why has war been so sporadic? I think it is obvious why he is wrong. We all feel the occasional zeal of violence; the fact that we do not always put it into action does not mean that it is not part of our nature. But the interesting point is this: war does not always occur when resources are scarce or when there is hostility. War is an emergent property, I think, that must be induced under the right circumstances. Not every conflict of interests between tribes or nations turns into war, just as not every dry grassy field burns. But when war is induced, the violent component of human nature is waiting there as fuel.

Still, Horgan brings up a good point, when we consider that war is not something that automatically happens but something that we must decide to do. To a certain extent, it is something that we have to learn. Sometimes it becomes a tradition into which we are trapped. That is, war is something that our leaders lead us into. Most people (except psychopaths) have a natural tendency to want to not harm other people. But this resistance to major acts of violence can be overcome by intense training, commands from authority figures, long-range weapons, and propaganda. The long-range weapons allow us to kill others without having to see them die.

Horgan makes the point that we start wars not because we are wolves but because we are sheep. We may be inclined to seek peaceful solutions, but we do whatever our leaders tell us to. This is the aspect that can make a whole population become violent, not just the one to two percent who are psychopathic.

The violence that leads easily to war is part of human nature. But peace is also part of human nature. Because of this, war may not be inevitable, if we can break the cause-and-effect chain that keeps war going. This chain goes all the way back to the story of Cain and Abel, which fundamentalists accept as history and I accept as an image. You can think of each human as half Cain, half Abel. Which half will we choose? Perhaps we will always have war, but there is room for diminishing its intensity and frequency.

And to do so we need to cultivate empathy. We need to practice it, think about it, incorporate it into our movies and novels and music and art. We cannot eradicate our violent nature, but maybe we can encyst it so that it does not poison the rest of our collective person. We have to tell ourselves, in celebration, that we all feel the same things. We all love our children and most of our neighbors and most of the people we work with. (As for the ones we don’t love, maybe we can tolerate them.) As Nanyehi said, “The white men are our brothers. The same house shelters them, and the same sky covers us all.”

Unlearning War

The vision of the Peaceable Kingdom was a popular one among the Old Testament prophets. They probably all knew it, and two of them (or their followers) incorporated it into their writings: the first Isaiah (chapter 2) and Micah (chapter 4). The prophets envisioned a time when armies would stop fighting wars and instead raise food for their people: “Beat your swords into plowshares.” This image is just as powerful today as it was thousands of years ago, as depicted in a statue at the United Nations.

But this vision is not something that we can all of a sudden decide to do. We cannot go directly from a war mindset to an attitude of peace. We have to learn to think in a new way. Both Isaiah and Micah say, “Nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither will they learn war anymore.” Soldiers cannot create an effective agricultural economy by poking holes in the ground with their swords to plant seeds. It takes a wholesale economic restructuring, in which industry produces plowshares instead of swords, or better yet, recycles the now-useless implements of war into the equipment of peace.

Unfortunately, we can go the other way also. Because of our violent human nature, bequeathed to us by evolution, we can easily slip back into a mindset of war, without having to retrain our brains. The Old Testament prophet Joel did this (chapter 3), when he envisioned a time when people would beat their plowshares into swords.

Thirst for Conquest

May 28, 2015, was the 175^th anniversary of the Indian Removal Act. On that day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the bill that required the U. S. Army to evict southeastern Native tribes, including my Cherokee tribe, from their native lands and send them to Oklahoma. Many people think of this as a land grab; that is, the federal government wanted Native land and whatever resources (such as the Dahlonega gold mines) it might possess. That is, the motivation was primarily economic. However, as I will explain, this does not seem to be the case. I believe that the primary, if unrecognized, motivation was the thirst for conquest.

My first piece of evidence for this comes from the Indian Removal of the 1830s. The federal government had to spend a lot more money to send the Cherokees and other tribes on forced marches than they could possibly have recovered, especially since most of the land and its wealth went to the states, such as Georgia, rather than into federal coffers. The federal government had to expend army resources to drive the tribes westward, and had to provide Natives with food and shelter (both barely adequate, but still costly on the whole) during the journey. Then, when the Native tribes got to Indian Territory, the government had to maintain forts to protect the Cherokees and other relocated tribes from attacks by the tribes who originally lived in the region. Ft.Gibson, in northeastern Oklahoma, was built in 1824 but primarily served to protect the Cherokees after the Trail of Tears after 1839. Ft. Washita, Oklahoma, was built in 1842 for the express purpose of protecting Chickasaws and Choctaws from the indigenous tribes in southern Oklahoma.

So the federal government spent a lot of resources to move and then protect the southeastern tribes. It seems unlikely that the federal government came out economically ahead by this. Therefore the Indian Removal was not merely, to use a term from Steve Inskeep’snew book, a land grab.

My second piece of evidence to demonstrate that the federal government wanted to conquer Native tribes rather than to just get their land comes from the story of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe. The army had already taken his tribe’s land, and he and the remnant of his tribe was fleeing to Canada. When they were only forty miles from Canada, the federal army caught them in 1877 and sent them as prisoners to various reservation localities. If the only motive was to get their land, then the federal government would have let them flee U.S. territory. All the rest was unnecessary expense intended only to crush the Nez Perce.

In prehistoric times, the thirst for conquest may have been a profitable adaptation. When one tribe fought another, they did not merely desire the other tribe’s land or resources, but experienced a bloodlust, fully experiencing the other tribe as evil, feeling a desire to make the other tribe suffer before being slaughtered. That is, natural selection may have favored both the behaviors and the feelings of conquest and annihilation. The white American government did not just want Native American land, but wanted to drive Native Americans to extinction or at least to put them somewhere where they could be forgotten.

Another set of behaviors and feelings that may have been profitable to prehistoric humans is to depict the enemy tribe as not merely evil but powerfully evil—that is, to believe and feel that the enemy has supernatural force. A tribe that believes its enemies to be supernaturally evil will fight harder than a tribe that considers its enemies to be merely humans worthy of annihilation. Unfortunately, while the thirst for enemy annihilation is pretty much a thing of the past in America, the belief that one’s enemies are supernaturally powerful is not.

There are two recent examples of this.

• In 2012, according to the Houston Chronicle, Lubbock County (Texas) judge Tom Head said regarding President Barack Obama, “He’s going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the (United Nations), and what is going to happen when that happens? I’m thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we’re not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we’re talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy…Now what’s going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He’s going to send in U.N. troops. I don’t want ‘em in Lubbock County. OK. So I’m going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say ‘you’re not coming in here’.”
• In 2015, Texas governor Greg Abbott feared that President Obama was planning a military takeover of Texas. Not satisfied with words, Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor a U.S. Navy Seal training operation.

In both of these instances, the Texas officials accused President Obama of planning to do things that are very nearly physically impossible. By what possible set of causal factors could President Obama order United Nations troops into Texas? By what possible set of causal factors could President Obama bring about a military takeover of Texas? In both cases, the Texas officials seemed to be giving Obama a kind of infernal, supernatural power. To them, he is not merely a political opponent but the manifestation of spiritual evil. (Strangely enough, a little over a week later, Governor Abbott begged this same President Obama for federal assistance to recover from Texas flash floods.)

The tribes who had a desire to annihilate enemy tribes, and the desire to depict one’s enemies as supernaturally evil, prevailed in the prehistoric struggle for existence. We are their descendants. And their behaviors and feelings live on in us, as manifested in recent history and in current events.

War, Peace, and Human Nature Again

So, what were you all doing this past weekend while the world was waiting to hear whether the U.S. would attack Syria? As for me, I was at the Cherokee National Holiday in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. My family and I got to listen to a very funny Cherokee storyteller, the incomparable Richard Lewis, and take a brief tour of a reconstructed Cherokee village in the style of the eighteenth century, before most of the tribe adopted white American building styles.

And then in the evening we went to the nearby state university to see a performance of a musical based on the life of my 6^th-great-grandmother, a Cherokee woman named Nanyehi, also known as Nancy Ward, who is the most powerful woman in the history of Cherokee tribal government. First she distinguished herself as a war hero. She insisted on accompanying her husband to the Battle of Taliwa in 1755, between the Cherokee and Muskogee tribes. When her husband was killed, she took his rifle and killed the man who had killed her husband, then rallied the Cherokees to a decisive victory. She was given a position of power that allowed her supreme authority to decide the fate of captives and of prisoners of war.

And though a war hero, Nanyehi consistently chose to either release captives or to adopt them into the tribe. This brought her into continual conflict with her cousin, the war leader Dragging Canoe. Throughout this musical, Nanyehi’s path of peace and Dragging Canoe’s path of war came into conflict. It is the same conflict that the world has seen throughout history, and that we see today in our struggle to decide what to do about Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria. It also brings important and evolved components of human nature into sharp contrast.

First let me tell you about the musical Nanyehi, directed by free-lance director Nick Sweet, with music by composer Becky Hobbs (see the website). Both have many credits to their names, but this musical must be the pinnacle of their careers. This is without question the best musical I have ever seen, and this includes Broadway performances of Jersey Boys and Phantom and I think it is even better than 1776. Every aspect of this production, from the quality of the performers (whether as singers or acrobats), most of them local, to the structure and dialogue of each scene, to the beauty of the music, is spectacular. The drama is utterly compelling. I have never cared so deeply and shed as many tears for characters in a play or movie as I did for all the characters in this musical, except for the ones who were evil. Perhaps most importantly, this musical is about a person and a story that is not well known outside of the Cherokee tribe, and not known very well even by most Cherokees. Nick Sweet has outdone his 2002 production, Trail of Tears, and this is no small accomplishment. I believe this musical deserves a permanent place in the hall of fame of American creative productions.

It is difficult to pick out just one thing that is most compelling about this musical, but I think I can do so. The main characters are portrayed as complex human beings. Over and over again, Nanyehi’s path of peace and Dragging Canoe’s path of war come into conflict, and in no case is it clear which one is right. Dragging Canoe is absolutely not portrayed as an evil warrior interfering with Nanyehi’s pursuit of holy peace. They both make decisions that end up causing an immense amount of trouble. Some of Dragging Canoe’s warlike decisions resulted in unnecessary bloodshed, but this is also true of some of Nanyehi’s peaceful decisions. She pardoned a white American prisoner, and in return for this act of mercy the white Americans slaughtered a Cherokee city. Who was right, Dragging Canoe or Nanyehi? To me, the climax point was when Nanyehi surveyed her slaughtered fellow Cherokees, and a white American found her and decided to shoot her also. Dragging Canoe shot him before he could kill Nanyehi. Nanyehi decided to spare the wounded white American. I do not know and I suspect that no one will ever know whether this was the right decision. (I don’t even know whether it really happened, though this musical has inspired me to read as much as I can about Nanyehi, and I may someday find out.) Both the instinct of war and the capacity for peace are part of evolved human nature. They never neutralize each other; they are both always present, always next to one another like strands of color in marble. And so it is to this very day. Should we blast the hell out of Bashar al-Assad? Clearly he and his inner circle deserve annihilation. But will the consequences bring even more suffering?

But this much is clear to me. Peace and prosperity are possible only if both parties consider one another to be humans. Nanyehi pointed out, over and over, that for every enemy warrior you kill, you leave a widow and orphans and bereaved parents. Of course, Dragging Canoe knew this, but he considered it more important to avenge attacks than to forgive them; bereavement of survivors is an unfortunate price to be paid. But what happens when an enemy does not consider you to even be a human? There was a clear example of this in the musical. That example was none other than the government of the United States. It was the American army that slaughtered Cherokee villages and used treachery to do so. Nanyehi died in 1822 and did not live to see the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and to see it brutally carried out on the Cherokee beginning in 1835 in the Trail of Tears (which the Muskogee, Chickasaws, and Choctaws also suffered). According to the character in the musical, this would have broken Nanyehi’s heart and perhaps made her give up her faith in the path of peace, had she known of it. But even in the Trail of Tears, there was some decency mixed with the total evil. President Andrew Jackson, whose life the Cherokees had once saved, even defied the U.S. Supreme Court in order to force the Cherokees out of their land. By order of this commander in chief, Cherokees were put into concentration camps before being put on a forced march. I consider President Jackson to be purely evil and his image on our $20 bill, perhaps the image seen most by the rest of the world, is a national shame. But the general who actually carried out the removal, Gen. Winfield Scott, was as merciful as his orders allowed him to be, and he mourned the suffering of the Cherokees. Jackson did not consider Cherokees to be human. Gen. Scott did.

What better thing can be said about a performance, whether a musical, a movie, or a play, than that it grasps our minds and forces us to face the important, even if insoluble, questions about our own evolved human nature? And the best performance does this without making us depressed. The circumstances around the gradual conquest of the Cherokees are enough to make anyone (not just any Cherokee) depressed, but from this depression we are inspired by spirits of indomitable hope, none better than Nanyehi.