War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris Page B

Lands of beasts and noble savages: locations outside the Roman Empire discussed in this chapter
    â€œAs the dawn begins to fall,” Mead wrote in her anthropological classic Coming of Age in Samoa, “lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place.”
    Pigs’ heads hold no terrors on Samoa. “As the sun rises higher in the sky, the shadows deepen under thatched roofs … Families who will cook today are hard at work; the taro, yams and bananas have already been broughtfrom inland; the children are scuttling back and forth, fetching sea water, or leaves to stuff the pig.” The families gather in the evening to share their feast in peace and contentment. “Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests till dawn …
    â€œSamoa,” Mead concluded, “is a place where no one plays for very high stakes, no one pays very heavy prices, no one suffers for his convictions or fights to the death for special ends.” On Samoa, the Beast is not close at all.
    Golding and Mead both saw violence as a sickness, but they disagreed on its diagnosis. As Golding saw things, violence was a genetic condition, inherited from our forebears. Civilization was the only medication, but even civilization could only suppress the symptoms, not cure the disease. Mead drew the opposite conclusion. For her, the South Seas showed that violence was just a contagion, and civilization was its source, not its cure. Calgacus and Agricola fought two thousand years ago because their warlike cultures made them do it, and people carried on fighting in the twentieth century because warlike cultures were still making them do it.
    In 1940, as France fell to Hitler, bombs rained down on London, and trenches filled up with murdered Polish Jews, Mead found a new metaphor. “Warfare,” she argued, “is just an invention.” Certainly, she conceded, war is “an invention known to the majority of human societies,” but even so, “if we despair over the way in which war seems such an ingrained habit of most of the human race, we can take comfort from the fact that a poor invention will usually give place to a better invention.”
    Mead was not the only champion of this view, but she rapidly became the most influential. By 1969, when she retired from her position at the American Museum of Natural History, she was the most famous social scientist in the world and had proved, to the satisfaction of millions of readers, that humans’ natural state was one of peace. Swayed by the consensus, anthropologist after anthropologist came back from the field reporting that their people were peaceful too (anthropologists have a habit of calling the group among whom they do fieldwork “my people”). This was the age of “War,” love-ins, and peace protesters promising to levitate the Pentagon; it was only to be expected that Rousseau would seem at long last to have won his bitter, centuries-old debate with Hobbes.
    This was what Napoleon Chagnon thought, at any rate, when he swapped graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the rain-forest borderlandsof Brazil and Venezuela in 1964. He fully expected the Yanomami people, 4 whose marriage patterns he planned to study, to live up to what he called “the image of ‘primitive man’ that I had conjured up in my mind before doing fieldwork, a kind of ‘Rousseauian’ view.” But the Yanomami had other ideas.
    â€œThe excitement of meeting my first Yanomamö was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled through the low passage [in the defensive perimeter] into the village clearing,” Chagnon wrote. Slimy with sweat, his hands and face swollen from bug bites, Chagnon
looked up and gasped when I saw a