Suppose it were to be established, through a scientific study (soundly based), that there was no genetically transmitted impulse disposing human parents to abandon their children, when they had children, or to treat them cruelly. I don't imagine such a finding would startle many people, since the belief would be widespread that impulses of a contrary kind are common within our species; but bear with me until you see where I'm going with this line of speculation.
Would that encouraging finding mean that societies which put a high value on the security and well-being of children need take no measures, have in place no institutions or practices, for rescuing abandoned or cruelly treated children who had come to grief anyway at the hands of their parents? It wouldn't. The finding wouldn't have this implication if, despite the absence of a genetic predisposition towards the abandonment or cruel treatment of children, some parents did abandon or cruelly treat their children, for whatever combination of causes, and the absence of a general tendency to do so within human nature notwithstanding. Though most people were not naturally inclined to mistreat their children, a 'safety net' would still be required so long as some people were induced to mistreat them for one bad reason or another.
The thought experiment is by way of preamble to a couple of items featuring the views of John Horgan on war. War, Horgan insists, is not a biological impulse but, rather, a cultural innovation, and it emerged quite late in human history.
It happened after - well after - the invention of complex tools, the invention of cooking, after we see evidence for religion, after the emergence of art and music. War came after all those things, so in no way is it something that's an instinct or really deeply embedded in us. It's a very recent cultural innovation and it's not something that then became permanent in all human societies.
This fact, he also says, undercuts the notion of war being 'deeply engrained biological behavior'. Now, my first reaction to the proposition that war isn't deeply laid within our nature as human beings is that, whoever else might be surprised by this, I'm not. I'm not surprised, on the basis of the simple observation that countless numbers of people pass their entire lives without ever killing anybody at all. That would be odd if we were by nature a warmongering species. My second reaction, however, is that to speak of war as simply a cultural phenomenon understates the difficulty of getting rid of it.
This is because, though cultural phenomena can be both deep and tenacious, it is also possible to think of them as alterable by education, in the broadest sense of that word. But the different causes of war are not all simply reducible to people having the wrong attitudes. Horgan shows himself aware of this by the analogy he is reported to have used in this connection:
Horgan uses a very simple example to illustrate how war is a culturally infectious virus: Imagine your neighbor is a violent psychopath who is out for blood and land. You, on the other hand, are [a] person who wants peace. You would have few options but to embrace the ways of war for defense. So essentially your neighbor has infected you with war.
Put differently, if some people become warlike, even despite war not being a general human disposition, other people may have to go to war to defend themselves. But this simple analogy points to a much broader difficulty: namely, that wars may be entered upon for a number of reasons that have primarily to do neither with innate human aggression nor with culturally transmitted attitudes of a bloodthirsty kind; they may arise out of conflicts of economic interest, national or ethnic hatreds, competing territorial claims, religious or other ideological beliefs concerning the superiority of one's own people and the inferiority of others, the yearning to be free from foreign or even domestic oppression, the desire to defend one's country against invaders, and so on.
I do not say that the elimination of war is impossible. I don't know that; like Horgan, I hope it is possible. But the complexity of war's causes isn't well captured by calling it either a cultural innovation or a virus.
Incidentally, I have featured Horgan's views here once before when I took him to task for overlooking one of the major benefits of World War II.