Book Review - The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War by David Livingstone Smith - Page 4

There is much in this book to make people uncomfortable. Hardly a stone is left unturned in the quest to discover the roots of war in human nature. Not even cornerstones. To those who see science as the source of evil, the source of war, he counters that "if we were an essentially kind and peaceful species, it would not occur to us to use this tool for destructive purposes. We exploit science to make war because we are warlike creatures." And to those who would believe that religion is the solution, the source of all that is good, that institution without which humanity would be but brute beasts, devoid of morality, he has this to say: "Not only is there no evidence that religion makes people morally responsible, but history confronts us with a long, bloody record of wars, genocides, and other atrocities inspired by religious devotion and often executed by religious institutions." He follows this up with examples from various cultural and religious traditions.

Much of The Most Dangerous Animal is very dark and depressing. Indeed most of it is. Our track record is horrible almost beyond imagining. Here's an example, in numbers, sparing the gruesome details:

...around 87 million people have been killed in wars over the last century. If we add the victims of democide we get, at a conservative estimate, around 170 million deaths in the twentieth century alone... an average of 1.7 million a year, 4,630 a day, 193 an hour and 3 a minute. In the 1990s alone, around 2 million were killed in Afghanistan, 1.5 million in Sudan, almost 1 million in Rwanda, 500,000 in Angola, 250,000 in Bosnia and the same in Burundi, 200,000 in Guatemala, 150,000 in Liberia, and 75,000 in Algeria.

Among forty-one modern nations, Russia and the United Kingdom have been the worst offenders, with 3.6 and 5.9 wars per generation (and 49.3 and 48.3 years of conflict per century respectively), followed by France, Spain, Turkey, and Italy.

Though Smith's discussion is ultimately rooted in evolutionary biology, he is very good at breaking down complex theories and systems into very understandable, digestible parts, putting it well within reach of the intelligent, non-specialist, reader. Evolution, for example, he says is very easy to grasp. And when he explains it, it is. "It consists of three phases, which spiral through time in an endlessly recurring pattern of variation, selection, and reproduction.... Nature brings forth a huge number of slightly different organisms, makes each one run the gauntlet of life, discards the failures, and retains the successful models for further tinkering." Another wonderfully simple scientific explanation pertains to consciousness: "it is a mistake to imagine that there is something in the brain corresponding to our notion of consciousness. Consciousness is not a thing inside the brain... [it] is something that the brain does." Just as one cannot find washingness among the parts of a washing machine; it is something that it does.

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. …

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