The Military instinct: The Human Race as Feral Dogs

Guest Post by Fred Reed

As Washington bombs Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, militarily threatens Russia, Venezuela, North Korea, and China, sanctions Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Iran..one may wonder: Why?

Are wars about anything, or just wars? In modern times, a reason of sorts is thought decorous, yes: Ruritania is threatening us, or might, or does something wrong, or Ruritanians don’t think rightly about the gods. We must kill them. And yet everywhere in all times, almost miraculously, some reason for a war is found. It would seem that wars are not about anything, but just what we do.

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Recently the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared to offer a prospect of extended peace. There seemed nothing left to fight about, at least on any scale. Yet the United States quickly launched a half dozen wars of no necessity and threatened others. Why?

Because wars are what we do.

It may surprise many people to learn of evidence for a genetic foundation of human behavior. This should not be surprising. Dogs form packs, mark territory, and bark furiously at strange dogs. So, it seems, do people. An empire is just the result of these canine instincts..

Consider conservatives, as they are more relevant to the fighting of wars. (Liberals appear as genetically determined,)

Conservatives tend to be tribal, intensely loyal to their group–race, country, ethnicity, religious faith–which in national terms becomes patriotism. They lack empathy. They see the world in terms of threats, conflict, and dominance. They favor capitalism and the Second Amendment, revere the military, speak of blood and soil, oppose taxation of themselves to give to the less fortunate.

An important point here is that these traits clump together, although there is no logical connection. For example, one might rationally favor ownership of guns as necessary to self-defense yet oppose having a large military as unnecessary. One might favor a large military in what appeared a dangerous world, yet favor extensive governmental charity as what one might see as common decency.

Yet this almost never happens. If you tell me that you oppose abortion, with confidence I can predict that you fit the description above of a conservative. If you tell me that you oppose the Second Amendment, I can be pretty sure that you favor abortion, acceptance of immigrants, marriage of homosexuals, and so on.

We all have access to the same information about the world, to the internet, the same books and newspapers, and we all live in very much the same society. Yet liberals and conservatives arrive at sharply differing conclusions from identical evidence. This suggests an innate predisposition.

Soldiers invariably fit the conservative pattern, prizing loyalty to their units and to their country, seeing threats everywhere, and becoming alarmed easily. For example, if an ancient Russian prop-driven recon plane, technically a bomber in the Fifties, flies near England, fighters will leap into the air to intercept it, grrr, woof, though the idea that the Russians would send one ancient bird to bomb Britain is lunatic. It is very like dogs barking frantically at a passing pedestrian.

People in general seem designed to think about small groups, not countries of millions of people. It is impossible to think of, say, Russia as millions of individuals, especially when we have never seen even a single Russian. The almost invariable response is to compress a whole nation mentally into a sort of aggregate person. As I write, America is barking at North Korea, said to be a rogue state threatening several other countries. Countless men from the President through Congress to growling patriots in bars are saying angrily that “We can wipe North Korea of the face of the earth.” We’ll show the bastards.

North Korea consists of twenty-five million people of whom perhaps fifty might want to attack anybody at all. The let’s-nukem men–almost always men, who are genetically more truculent than women, which is also true of dogs–think of the whole country as one pudgy man with a bad haircut. “We must punish North Korea” makes sense to them in these terms. Exactly why several million children in kindergarten need to be burned to death does not enter their minds.

A great deal of international behavior makes sense, or at least makes no sense but does it in a consistent manner, if you look at the history of empire. This too appears to be instinctive, and therefore presumably genetic. Throughout history men–again, always men–have formed armies and set out to conquer, usually at the price of unspeakable bloodshed, lands they didn’t need. Sometimes the plunder brought a degree of benefit, seldom commensurate with the cost, but often not.

Over and over and over, one country conquers its neighbors, sometimes forming large empires but often small ones almost lost to history. Then a new one arises and bursts the bubble of the first. This is instinctual as a dog peeing on a hydrant.

We see this now. The United States has no need for an empire of perhaps eight hundred military bases around the globe or to fight constant and exhausting wars for places it doesn’t need or even like. America has no need of Afghanistan, for example, and is there only to keep China out–that is, from the instinct for empire. Again, peeing on hydrants.

The lack of empathy usual in conservatives, in soldiers, appears all through military history, from the practice of putting cities to the sword to today’s indiscriminate bombing. It results from the tribal instinct. A fighter pilot will in time of peace be a good citizen, perhaps a good father, obey the laws and, should an earthquake occur, work tirelessly to save the trapped. Yet order him to bomb a crowded city in a country that has done nothing to deserve it–Baghdad, for example–and he will do it and pride himself on having done it.

The behavior is innate and immutable, unchanged over the millennia, but today we seem to need to pretend to decency. Militaries and “intelligence” agencies, the chief vessels of brutal behavior, have become very sensitive to revelations of what we now call “atrocities.” Actually atrocities are what militaries normally do. The norm now is to employ euphemistms–collateral damage-and to insist that atrocities are “isolated incidents.” Today governments, to maintain public support for the wars, or as least to discourage attention, carefully censors photos of disemboweled children or the CIA’s torture chambers. But the butchery continues as it did among stone-age savages. Pilots still bomb cities. The CIA tortures and probably enjoys it. Plus ca change, plus ca doesn’t.

There is a slight difference. Militaries now know they are doing wrong, This is why soldiers become furious when persistently asked about atrocities. They would rather you not know. Yet the bombing continues and from the less politically careful conservatives come cries of, “Untie the hands of our soldiers,” and “Let the military do its job.”

It is innate. We do what we do because it is how we are.

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javelin
javelin

Fred–your labeling is demeaning. Also, many of your presumptions thrown in as if they are fact is like the Fake News we are barraged with.

“Consider conservatives, as they are more relevant to the fighting of wars.” Except it was the “democrats” and “progressives” that have gotten America involved in almost every war in our nation’s history prior to the year 2000. ( Wilson, Kennedy, FDR etc) and almost all Conservatives I know are more isolationists and have long been sick of the US acting as world police, Europe’s de facto military or the defenders of Japan, Israel, South Korea ad nauseum……..

Also of note, conservatives are FAR more charitable than progressives. There is a preponderance of evidence showing that conservatives give freely of time and money directly to causes where the “liberals” tend to believe that social programs should be done by the government through forced taxation and redistribution ( after taking a large cut and setting up an ineffective and expensive beauracracy.)

unit472/
unit472/

I’ve had just about enough from the ex pat who made his living writing for ‘Soldier of Fortune’ magazine and lives in a country whose leading exports are illegal narcotics and sawed off beaners!

Anonymous
Anonymous

Unibrow472, I resemble that remark. I’m 4’8″ you have a problem with that?

bigfoot was here
bigfoot was here

Wow, Fred, you should get out more. The Senate, House, and the Presidency have been chock full of warmongers for at least the last hundred years. To now point at one faction over another as more responsible is just ignorant. I mean you don’t think the Clintons, for one example, love the military-industrial complex and the “honor” of taking out bad guys in the Middle East? And what about all the “progressive” voters who love their Clintons? The system is appalling and you take sides and you believe that helps in some way?

James the Wanderer

“If you tell me that you oppose abortion, with confidence I can predict that you fit the description above of a conservative.”
Your confidence is unwarranted.

kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product
kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product

Disagree – his confidence is warranted. If you are an outlier, don’t apply to the general.

kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product
kokoda - AZEK (Deck Boards) doesn't stand behind its product

Plus ca change, plus ca doesn’t.
?????????????????????????????????

“America has no need of Afghanistan, for example, and is there only to keep China out…”
True – most people wouldn’t know.

Gayle
Gayle

I guess Fred missed the day Chuckie Schumer gave a first thumbs up to Donald Trump, telling him that he was at last acting presidential – the day he did that stupid Syria bombing. Fred’s full of shit.

Anonymous
Anonymous

I gave up long ago trying to fit people into categories. It’s just not that simple. Maybe it never was.

Penforce

It never was. The day I figured it out I just decided to hate everyone that wasn’t me. Guilty until proven innocent in my kingdom.

DRUD
DRUD

The political labels are unnecessary and distracting from a solid overall thesis, and not a dissimilar one from Uncola’s Experimenter essay.
Historically, hordes of men try to kill hordes of men because their political masters say they must – we call this war and it is indeed a fixture of the human race. Interesting, however, that in the waning days of the American Empire that the women are getting involved, both at the foot-soldier level and at the political level–I mean find me a bigger warmonger than Nikki Haley.

javelin
javelin

Agreed– I thought the basic premise had merit, it was only when he started grouping people and pasting labels on everyone’s foreheads that I thought he was full of chitt

Solus
Solus

This column has more philosophical depth than Fred’s usual “My Mexicans can whip your Yankee asses” routine. He’s saying something about the human condition.

The trouble is, he attaches the human condition essentially to one group, those that fall under the general heading of conservatives. There are crazy war lovers whose overall values can be described as rightist; there are other war hounds whose values can be described as Israel.

Likewise, there are paranoid ideas of threats, and there are actual threats.

Our job, insofar as we are thinking people, is to examine the basis of our beliefs and at least investigate what those with other beliefs claim and why. Plus, not be too quick to categorize, unlike Fred here.

Left Handed Penguin
Left Handed Penguin

Plus ca change, plus ca doesn’t.

???
Penguin confused.

MMinLamesa
MMinLamesa

Maybe we don’t need 800 overseas military bases but the world is a mean motherfucker. And yeah, it’s populated by mean motherfucking men that would just as soon cut your throat & piss down your neck then look at you. Just take a look at the “testing” that our adversaries have done the past 8 years while Kommander Feckless was menstruating.

I would rather error on the side of caution and if that means incinerating “millions of kindergarteners” instead of seeing Seattle or San Fran radiated,
then so be it.

OutLookingIn
OutLookingIn

“American’s love war. We’re a war like people. We like war because we’re good at it.
Do you know why we’re good at it? Because we get a lot of practice”.
-George Carlin 1992

“Why does the world look to the most stupid, vile, arrogant, corrupt and murderous government on the planet for leadership? War is the only destination to which Washington can lead”.
-Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, October 06, 2016

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