Book Review - The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War by David Livingstone Smith - Page 2

Another aspect Smith obviously suspects will make some readers uneasy is the fact that he neither has combat experience, nor relies much on interviews of military personnel returning from battle. Here, too, he feels compelled to offer preemptive justifications. Though scientific in nature, in that the argument is rooted in evolutionary biology, this is not a difficult read, technically. It is merely difficult because so dark, so ugly, so horrific an aspect of human nature is discussed.

Smith begins the body of the book with an image the Western media chose not to air in its gruesome detail. "Like many terrible things," he writes, "it is something that we do not want to think about too much if we can help it." Here is the description of the decapitation of Eugene Armstrong by four Islamic militants in Iraq on September 20, 2004:

The long knife sliced through Armstrong's flesh. He screamed. Blood gushed from his neck. His body shuddered and became limp. The executioner placed the dripping, severed head on the back of Armstrong's lifeless body.

Though very disturbing, Smith believes it would perhaps have been better for our media to show it, rather than stopping short before any blood was drawn. "Armstrong's execution was an act of war, and war is terrible." These images we reserve for our video games and action movies instead. Smith returns, as part of his argument, to these contradictory facts — we do not want to see the horrific details of war, whether perpetrated by us or on one of us by 'them', yet can hardly get enough of war imagery, in all its gruesome detail, through games and movies. Many young men, he writes, chose to join the Marines during the Vietnam war under the influence of John Wayne films. And indicative of the power of propaganda and film is the story of the sixty U.S. soldiers who died within the first four months of the war trying to outdraw one another, as they had seen done in cowboy movies. Though the cosmetic transformation of war is nothing new, Hollywood movie versions paint a picture that is not only way off the mark, but dangerous. Most filmmakers steer well clear of the true horrors of war. Apparently, according to General Sir John Hackett, quoted by Smith, there are certain conventions to be followed on the screen:

Men blown up by high explosives in real war...are often torn apart quite hideously; in films there is a big bang and bodies, intact, fly through the air with the greatest of ease. If they are shot...they fall down like children in a game, to lie motionless. The most harrowing thing in real battle is that they usually don't lie still; only the lucky ones are killed outright.

Throughout the book, Smith brings up uncomfortable and shocking realities. Though chapter one opens with an image from the current war in Iraq, that is not what the book is about. It is not about any specific war. It is not an anti-war book, per se. It is about war in general, about the roots of war in human nature. He points to many gruesome and shocking events, reaching back to screams of war victims evident in prehistoric burial sites, up to the present, where "a million other brutalities join them in a tortured chorus that echoes through history, but to which we turn a deaf ear," facts that are an embarrassment, facts that "deflate our pretensions to moral superiority, our conception of ourselves as standing at the pinnacle of creation." Though we prefer fairy tales, "turning truth on its head to keep the truth at a reassuringly safe distance," he will not let his reader off the hook.

Article Author: Abram Bergen

Abram Bergen is a logophile, thinker, reader, and writer. His research/writing interests include gender and sexuality issues, hybridity and identity politics, secular ethics, and ecosensitive technologies and lifestyles. …

Visit Abram Bergen's author page — Abram Bergen's Blog