War Needs Good People

Everyone knows what causes war. Hatred causes war. Cruelty, greed, the mob, the tyrant, the broken man with something to prove. Blame the worst of us, and the arithmetic seems to work.It does not work. A cruel man acting alone can ruin a street. To ruin a country you need thousands of people who show up on time, keep their promises, share their rations, refuse to abandon one another, and go on doing all of this when running away would be the sensible course. War does not run on our vices. It runs on loyalty, courage, self-sacrifice, and trust - the very qualities we teach our children and praise at funerals.Peter Kriger follows that uncomfortable observation wherever it leads: into the evolutionary record, where generosity toward one's own group and hostility toward outsiders appear to have grown from a single root; into the research on soldiers who fight not for a flag but for the eleven men beside them; into the archives of ordinary policemen who did unspeakable things without any detectable hatred; and into the strange discovery that war has spent ten thousand years selecting human societies for their capacity to cooperate, making us kinder and more dangerous by the same stroke.The conclusion is not that virtue is a fraud. It is that virtue has a fence around it, and that the fence - not the virtue - is the thing that kills. Nations do not manufacture good people; they inherit them. What they manufacture is the boundary at which goodness switches off, and they do it through language, schooling, memory, uniform, and map, until every line a person could be divided along falls neatly on top of every other line. When the circles stop crossing and start nesting, a society becomes capable of moving as one body - and a body that moves as one can be aimed.Written with wit, unsentimental clarity, and a refusal to flatter anyone, this is a book about the most disturbing possibility in the study of violence: that the problem was never a shortage of good people, and that fixing it will require something harder than making more of them.Keywords: war, cooperation, human nature, evolution, group identity, violence, social psychology

Everyone knows what causes war. Hatred causes war. Cruelty, greed, the mob, the tyrant, the broken man with something to prove. Blame the worst of us, and the arithmetic seems to work.It does not work. A cruel man acting alone can ruin a street. To ruin a country you need thousands of people who show up on time, keep their promises, share their rations, refuse to abandon one another, and go on doing all of this when running away would be the sensible course. War does not run on our vices. It runs on loyalty, courage, self-sacrifice, and trust - the very qualities we teach our children and praise at funerals.Peter Kriger follows that uncomfortable observation wherever it leads: into the evolutionary record, where generosity toward one's own group and hostility toward outsiders appear to have grown from a single root; into the research on soldiers who fight not for a flag but for the eleven men beside them; into the archives of ordinary policemen who did unspeakable things without any detectable hatred; and into the strange discovery that war has spent ten thousand years selecting human societies for their capacity to cooperate, making us kinder and more dangerous by the same stroke.The conclusion is not that virtue is a fraud. It is that virtue has a fence around it, and that the fence - not the virtue - is the thing that kills. Nations do not manufacture good people; they inherit them. What they manufacture is the boundary at which goodness switches off, and they do it through language, schooling, memory, uniform, and map, until every line a person could be divided along falls neatly on top of every other line. When the circles stop crossing and start nesting, a society becomes capable of moving as one body - and a body that moves as one can be aimed.Written with wit, unsentimental clarity, and a refusal to flatter anyone, this is a book about the most disturbing possibility in the study of violence: that the problem was never a shortage of good people, and that fixing it will require something harder than making more of them.Keywords: war, cooperation, human nature, evolution, group identity, violence, social psychology