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| An ISIS fighter celebrates the conquest of Mosul, Iraq, June 23, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer. |
How the tribal warfare of our ancestors explains the Islamic State. By Luke Glowacki. Washington Post, March 24, 2016.
Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpanzee Model. By Richard W. Wrangham and Luke Glowacki. Human Nature, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 2012).
The Role of Rewards in Motivating Participation in Simple Warfare. By Luke Glowacki and Richard W. Wrangham. Human Nature, Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 2013).
Warfare and reproductive success in a tribal population. By Luke Glowacki and Richard Wrangham. PNAS, Vol. 112, No. 2 (January 13, 2015).
Glowacki:
Luke Glowacki is a postdoctoral fellow in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.
From
Brussels to Paris to San Bernardino to Syria, the world appears to be erupting
in violence. In this war, the targets can be anyone and anywhere. While
attackers take inspiration from Islamic State leadership, in many cases they
seem to act on their own initiative. In Syria, the Islamic State carefully
stages theatrical acts of barbarity to create terror and awe around the world.
Is this a new kind of war?
Only
through the short view of modern history does this type of war look new. Public
displays of brutality have long been used to terrorize and subdue populations
around the globe. The theatrics of the Islamic State pale in comparison to
those seen in Europe just a few centuries ago. Burning alive, drawing and
quartering, drowning, garroting, disemboweling or breaking on the wheel were
all common methods of dispatching criminals, enemies and those who ended up on
the wrong side of a theological debate.
Even in
the United States, executions were historically public affairs. At one of the
last public executions in the United States, in 1936, at least 20,000 people
turned up to watch. The city of Owensboro, Ky., built a gallows 25 feet tall.
Bars were packed while “merrymakers rollicked all night” and many homes had
“hanging parties.” The New York Times reported that when the body fell,
“souvenir hunters rushed forward . . . and
tore the black hood . . . off
his head before he had been pronounced dead.”
Where
does this capacity for horrific violence come from? My colleagues and I have
been studying the origins of war through systematic analysis of chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers and modern conflicts. We have learned that lethal violence
against out-groups is found, in one form or another, at all scales of society,
including among our closest relatives, the chimpanzees.
In a
pattern that disturbingly resembles human warfare, chimpanzees across East
Africa regularly kill members of neighboring groups, including infants and
females. Sometimes these attacks cause the extermination of entire communities,
a phenomenon akin to genocide in human society. When this happens, the
successful group takes over the territory of the defeated group, gaining access
to valuable resources.
What
about the traditional human societies, such as hunter-gatherers, that best
represent our prehistoric past? Using ethnographic and historical documents, my
Harvard colleague Richard Wrangham and I found that for most of human history,
societies generally carried on some form of war with neighboring groups, even
when the people spoke the same language and looked like them. Although there
are well-documented cases of hunter-gatherers living peacefully with their
neighbors, these are the exception rather than the rule. Such groups usually
gave up violence after coming into contact with more powerful neighbors.
Like
the terrorist attacks of today, these conflicts generally targeted members of a
perceived enemy group, commonly including women and children. The bodies of
victims were frequently mutilated with a creativity that the Islamic State
would find astonishing. Entire populations and ethnic groups were wiped out.
This type of violence stretches deep into our prehistory. Evidence of the first
prehistoric massacre dates to more than 13,000 years ago, well before the invention of agriculture.
What
explains how people can commit such violent acts? One answer lies in our
psychology. Humans are hard-wired to adopt their communities’ norms, and these
norms can include rules for how to treat others — including whether to tolerate
differences or attack outsiders. When norms provide status, material rewards or
membership in a privileged group, they become even more potent.
Cultures
are able to hijack this psychology for violent ends by providing status,
promises of an afterlife and a sense of meaning. People belonging to
communities that advocate violence will adopt norms of violence, whether those
communities are tribal societies, neighbors and family, or Facebook friends.
Cross-cultural research I’ve conducted shows that the most important predictor
of warfare in a society is a cultural system that awards warriors with social
benefits.
In East
Africa, where groups battle each other for livestock, access to grazing lands
and water, conflicts are fought with modern weapons such as AK-47s but occur
along tribal borders and resemble the dynamics of ancestral warfare in
important ways. Access to resources such as livestock and water can be critical
for a group’s survival, and so these cultures award status and livestock to
successful warriors. Such warriors are able to marry more wives and have more
children than other men. Half a world away, in the Venezuelan Amazon,
researchers found that warriors also ended up better off than non-warriors.
Over the time scales at which humans and cultures evolve, benefits such as
these may have had profound significance in the development of human behavior.
Such
incentives help explain how people can be lured into supporting the Islamic
State. The group promises its recruits prestige, a sense of community and the
possibility of glory — the same types of incentives that cultures across the
globe have historically used to motivate youth to take up arms.
The
difference between tribal societies and the modern world is that now social
media makes it possible for isolated individuals to adopt the values of a
movement halfway around the world. A Detroit teenager can be more connected to
his Twitter followers in the Levant than to his peers at school. If his peers
overseas advocate violent jihad, it is not surprising if he eventually
considers it, especially if it comes with promises of fame and glory.
There
is nothing historically unique about the type of war the Islamic State is
waging, but the diffuseness of contemporary social networks presents a new
challenge. What is clear is that countering the Islamic State will require
creating cultural values that can compete with the community, glory and meaning
the Islamic State offers its recruits. Can we engineer an alternative that
makes supporting democratic values and tolerance of others as alluring?
