The Human Potential for Peace

Notes summarizing Douglas Fry’s book The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Anthropology provides special information and insights into the subjects of war and peace through its evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives. It challenges the dominant Western cultural belief that war is an ancient, natural, immutable, and inevitable manifestation of human nature. Naturalizing violence and war can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the evidence does not sustain the Hobbesian view. There are numerous examples in the archaeological and ethnological record of societies without war and with a minimum of other kinds of violence which focus on nonviolent conflict resolution (e.g., Semai), whole peace systems among societies (Xingu), and cases where a warlike society has become peaceful almost overnight (e.g. Waorani). There is a continuum from low to high levels of conflict and everything in between, but peace rather than war predominates in the human experience throughout history and prehistory.

Among the many different types of nonviolent conflict resolution are avoidance, toleration, negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and adjudication. Nonviolence and peace are not rare, they are just rarely recognized and studied. Fry provides a detailed discussion of five ethnographic cases of simple hunter-gatherers to demonstrate the human potential for peace. He notes that disputes are usually between individuals rather than groups. This may involve interpersonal violence, but it can hardly be honestly characterized as warfare.

Some cross-cultural researchers on the distribution of warfare such as Carol Ember have exaggerated its extent by confusing almost any kind of lethal aggression with warfare and by failing to distinguish between simple and complex hunter-gatherer societies.

Some primatologists, such as Richard Wrangham and Michael Ghiglieri, have exaggerated the frequency of aggression among common chimpanzees while ignoring the possible distortion of their behavior introduced by provisioning to bring them closer for observation, especially at the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania. They have tended to ignore the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobos which are mostly nonviolent and peaceful.

Some palaeontologists and archaeologists, such as Raymond Dart and Lawrence Keeley, have exhibited a Hobbesian bias in their interpretation of the prehistoric evidence for aggression and warfare when alternative interpretations have been proposed such as in the case of Australian aboriginal rock art. They have also confused interpersonal violence as warfare. While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, nevertheless, the relative lack of evidence for warfare during most of human prehistory may be taken as reflecting the absence to rarity of warfare as the most parsimonious scientific explanation. Australia may have had little if any warfare for tens of thousands of years among the aboriginal hunter-gatherers. Fry argues that the past has been “warified” rather than pacified, contrary to Lawrence Keeley and other “apologists for war” [my label].

Fry challenges what he calls the Pervasive Intergroup Hostility Model of these “apologists for war” by exposing their underlying hidden assumptions as problematic if not simply fallacious while noting that they just don’t fit the available evidence. For instance, simple hunter-gatherer bands are not male dominated closed groups living in a world of hostile neighbors barely surviving because of scarce resources.

Fry takes on the case of the most famous, now infamous, example of the Yanomami as “the fierce people.” He exposes spurious correlations in Chagnon’s data and problematic interpretations regarding his unokai argument that males who commit homicide more often have more wives and therefore more children and higher reproductive fitness. Fry asserts that this may simply be a correlate of greater age in the individuals cited by Chagnon. Fry also notes that the “fiercer” males are more likely to be killed and thus their net reproductive fitness is actually reduced. Fry also argues that as sedentary horticulturalists the Yanomami are not the most appropriate exemplar of human prehistory and evolution compared to simple hunter-gartherers.

He is not a postmodern extremist. He does not reject science, evolution, and biological approaches such as sociobiology or evolutionary psychology. Instead, he applies science, evolutionary theory, and related matters to argue that nonviolence and cooperation may be selected for while competition and violence may be selected against. Aggression, including warfare, is just one option for trying to resolve disputes, but it is not some genetically based inevitability. A great deal depends on the specific details of the particular circumstances of the situation and most of all on culture.

Fry observes that researchers in animal behavior, including comparative psychologists and ethologists, have recognized that most intraspecific aggression is highly ritualized and nonlethal.

He concludes that war is not ubiquitous; that is, it is not found in all societies everywhere in all times. Instead, nonviolence and peace prevail in most societies most of the time. Authors who call themselves objective scientists and scholars have often been blinded by their Western cultural beliefs and biases in the Hobbesian view of human nature, or what Fry calls the Pervasive Intergroup Hostility Model. But critical scrutiny of their evidence, interpretations, assumptions, and arguments demonstrates that they are seriously flawed.

In the concluding chapter, Fry argues that war is rapidly becoming an obsolete social institution because it is so costly and dangerous in so many respects. Humans through cultural evolution and their enormous cultural diversity, exhibit tremendous behavioral and social plasticity or flexibility. Humans have the potential to be peace makers instead of war makers.

Paths to world peace include greatly increasing cross-cutting ties, interdependence and cooperation, values, attitudes, and beliefs, overarching authority, and conflict management mechanisms all aimed at promoting nonviolence and peace. Fry asserts that abolishing war in the 21st century is not only a possibility, but a necessity for human survival and well being.

Fry develops an extended argument for peace, and against war, as a natural manifestation of human nature. He applies critical scrutiny to the evidence from biology and evolution as well as from the subfields of anthropology including primatology. If he might be faulted for anything, it is repetition and tedious detail in some sections, his neglect of cases from world history, and his limited attention to ecology. However, the “apologist for war” can only ignore the serious challenge of Fry’s book if they are disingenuous scientists and scholars.