DISCLAIMER: Comments below that criticize this program and my interpretation of it have are convincing. I non longer stand by this blog post. I will not delete it so that what I wrote and the criticisms stay available online. I apologize. I want the combination ignorance and errors (on my part) and irresponsible reporting by PBS to stand intact so people can see for themselves how mistakes and misunderstandings can so easily arise.
PBS is airing an excellent four-part series called First Civilizations. The first episode is War. The other three are Religion, Cities and Trade. They are behind a paywall, so I can't link to anything one can play online without a PBS membership. I've listened to War and Religion so far.
The history of war is relevant to modern civilization and politics. The experts argue that all of the evidence, technology and analysis available so far point to the following narrative as (i) a likely path to modern civilization, and (ii) a basis to predict future events:
Before civilizations started, groups of nomadic humans competed with each other. They were hunter-gatherers. They sometimes fought and killed each other for food and other resources. Civilization started when agriculture started about 12,000 years ago. People settled down and stay put as long as the land and climate could support agriculture.
Evidence from early settlements that grew to significant size indicates that the most powerful tribes or clans took control of increasing areas of land. Those mini-civilizations (mini-civs) had their own customs and beliefs that tied them together. Sometimes terrain constrained a mini-civ, while others kept getting bigger. Eventually the bigger mini-civs attacked and either obliterated the smaller ones or subjugated them. These wars were to pro-actively protect what the mini-civ had and/or to expand the attacker's power and land mass.
Sometimes the winning mini-civ would adopt one or more of the customs, beliefs or technology of a defeated mini-civ. The War episode referred to this process of assimilating things from others as creative destruction on the path to modernity. The creative destruction was usually (always?) bloody and cruel. Assimilation was a necessary step. The experts then step back and look at archaeology and history from the time of mini-civs to today. They see the same pattern over and over. War leads to creative destruction and civilization often takes another step forward, or at least sideways.
In this context civilization refers to both advances in technology, including (i) advances in weapons and tactics of war, and (ii) changes in cultural customs and norms. The changes in customs and norms included creation of and advances in social institutions, governance and religion. In essence, the customs and norms were the social glue necessary for civilization to advance. The Religion episode argues that religion was a necessary component for social glue and thus for civilization to advance.
Why bring this up?
Multiple reasons. One is that human history is riddled with war. War is now seen by at least some experts as possibly unavoidable for civilization to advance. The problem with that is that humans can now obliterate modern civilization with nuclear weapons and maybe also with unrestrained climate change and/or overpopulation. If nothing else, complacency about the possibility of humans obliterating modernity and having to do a restart should not be taken as a remote possibility if past human history is a guide.
Another is that some comments here in the last week or two strenuously argued that the founding of America and its history was a tale of an evil, blood soaked death machine that inflicted vast death and misery on far too much of humanity. There is enough evidence to reasonably argue that. From that point of view, the Funding Fathers actually were Founding Genocidists or Founding Terrorists, none of whom should be venerated or respected. According to that line of reasoning, all US presidents were murdering war mongers or, at least in the case of indigenous American Indians, all were argued to literally be genocidists. In the context of the advance of civilization, it is arguable that whatever American was and did, it was an inevitable aspect of humans and just what they do.
In a post here yesterday, I mentioned Thomas Paine's argument for a democratic Republic in his 1776 Common Sense essay. There, he advocated for war against England to throw off the tyranny of monarchy and the British Crown. To a significant extent, his writings were seminal in the vision and articulation of what American eventually turned out to be. But once again, war led to an advance in governance and society, but this time there seemed to be less assimilation by a winning, less powerful civ and more spontaneous creation. Regardless, war probably was a necessary component. But in some ways America arguably was an anomaly.
A question all this raises is whether humans can progress without war. After listening to the War and Religion episodes, it just isn't clear. Are we destined to self-annihilate and restart if we don't go extinct, or can we do it without most or all of the blood and misery? Are what we seeing in increasingly bitter US politics two mini-civs, left and right, at an intractable impasse that will lead to either civil war or the dissolution of the Union as increasing numbers of conservatives say they want?
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