I can’t say I agree with you historically, but you have a point. Bear with me here.
In pre-industrial societies, the two ways to sustain more people were either to use the land more efficiently (agriculture in fertile areas, pastorage in marginal lands) or to have more land. Agriculture can only sustain so many people without modern tools, specialised crops, irrigation technology and so on. At some point, you reach the maximum of how many people the land can feed.
With a slowly growing population, that leaves you with a problem: more mouths to feed than food. Imagine you’re a young adult facing the fact that your father’s farm just can’t sustain both your family and your siblings’. You have the option to a) never have a family (= stay celibate because the contraception methods of the time weren’t quite as reliable as those today), b) fight your siblings over that farm or c) fight other people over their land.
Since a) most people like to bone and wanted to have a family, b) most people loved their family and didn’t wanna kill them or leave them to starvation, that really only leaves one option: war against other communities. Hey, it ain’t pretty, but better them than me, right?
Early war won’t have looked like the organised armies that emerged later, but more in the form of raids and ambushes, trying to make an area too dangerous for the others to live or cultivate. Later wars would have been more active efforts to expel or enslave the residents. Either you succeed in winning new land, or you got rid of your overpopulation. It would be quite macabre to call it a solution, but in any case, war served survival.
Obviously, it’s nice to have more than just “barely enough”. There is some prestige and respectability that comes with being a generous host, throwing feasts and sharing what you have with others, but you’ll need to have it in the first place. So even beyond survival, war becomes a means for prosperity.
With that in mind, it’s not hard to guess what people would expect from an effective leader: to secure their survival at least and ideally bring some prosperity too. From that, a form of military aristocracy arises, people whose authority derives from their ability to protect their community and lead them to prosperity.
That effect eventually gets out of hand as those aristocrats exploit their own people, but the general expectation of “good leader = good at war” remained, particularly within the hierarchy of these aristocrats. Where religion meets kingship, there is also an element of divine provenance: a good king has the gods’ favour (or, in the European middle ages, God’s favour). At this point, kings struggling to build legitimacy (perhaps because poor harvest pulls into question, whether they really have God’s favour) like to do war, both to demonstrate their military excellence and prove their divine favour, and to acquire land and riches to reward their nobles for loyal service and prove generous.
War, like many other activities, becomes a thing kings are expected to do, because all the good kings do it, and they’re good kings because they did it well. It’s somewhat circular, but essentially, war becomes a political performance (because the ones leading it generally don’t do the dying…) and also still a means for survival and prosperity. Emotions provide the cause, but the driving mechanism isn’t just wounded pride or anger.
Now, to circle back to my emphasis historically and specification of pre-industrial societies: at some point, new technologies provided new means to make land more fertile. Logistics made it possible to specialise on certain crops that would then be exported to other places while importing what wasn’t grown locally. Machines made planting and harvesting faster. Fertilisers, pesticides, new breeds of crops all improved the yield of land. You’ll be aware that there are tons of food being wasted: Modern, developed countries tend to have more land than they strictly need for survival.
So with the survival motivator being negligible, kings no longer needing to prove themselves, the factor that remains is prosperity, or more accurately, greed. Colonialism won’t need more than two sentences in this respect. Early settlers may have just been looking for a place to live, but the allure of exotic goods didn’t take long to draw nefarious attention. Trade could also obtain these things, but why bargain for what you could take by force?
And to make things worse, sometime in the 19th century, national sentiments began to crop up. Now we arrive at the point where pride and anger become a motivator. Suddenly, that plot of land isn’t just a matter of prosperity, but of possessiveness. Technically, it doesn’t matter much which government collects the taxes and which the import tariffs. Trade across the border would allow anyone to profit from it anyway, and generally, investing in the infrastructure of an area is more lucrative than war. But “I’ll be dammed if I let that other flag wave over our land” does become a factor.
Particularly after the world wars, we should have understood how devastating industrialised warfare is, and how much you pay for so little gain. In fact, I posit that war has generally become downright irrational. Trade and infrastructure could achieve so much more.
But we’re stuck with petty people and grand ambitions, driven not by survival, nor by desire for prosperity, nor by plausible greed: Today, more than ever, we fight over the pride, anger, jealousy, hate and other emotions that people couldn’t cope with in a healthy way.
War was never pretty, but whatever fig leaf of justification one might come up with has been torn away by mortar shrapnel and burned to a crisp by nuclear devastation.
I can’t say I agree with you historically, but you have a point. Bear with me here.
In pre-industrial societies, the two ways to sustain more people were either to use the land more efficiently (agriculture in fertile areas, pastorage in marginal lands) or to have more land. Agriculture can only sustain so many people without modern tools, specialised crops, irrigation technology and so on. At some point, you reach the maximum of how many people the land can feed.
With a slowly growing population, that leaves you with a problem: more mouths to feed than food. Imagine you’re a young adult facing the fact that your father’s farm just can’t sustain both your family and your siblings’. You have the option to a) never have a family (= stay celibate because the contraception methods of the time weren’t quite as reliable as those today), b) fight your siblings over that farm or c) fight other people over their land.
Since a) most people like to bone and wanted to have a family, b) most people loved their family and didn’t wanna kill them or leave them to starvation, that really only leaves one option: war against other communities. Hey, it ain’t pretty, but better them than me, right?
Early war won’t have looked like the organised armies that emerged later, but more in the form of raids and ambushes, trying to make an area too dangerous for the others to live or cultivate. Later wars would have been more active efforts to expel or enslave the residents. Either you succeed in winning new land, or you got rid of your overpopulation. It would be quite macabre to call it a solution, but in any case, war served survival.
Obviously, it’s nice to have more than just “barely enough”. There is some prestige and respectability that comes with being a generous host, throwing feasts and sharing what you have with others, but you’ll need to have it in the first place. So even beyond survival, war becomes a means for prosperity.
With that in mind, it’s not hard to guess what people would expect from an effective leader: to secure their survival at least and ideally bring some prosperity too. From that, a form of military aristocracy arises, people whose authority derives from their ability to protect their community and lead them to prosperity.
That effect eventually gets out of hand as those aristocrats exploit their own people, but the general expectation of “good leader = good at war” remained, particularly within the hierarchy of these aristocrats. Where religion meets kingship, there is also an element of divine provenance: a good king has the gods’ favour (or, in the European middle ages, God’s favour). At this point, kings struggling to build legitimacy (perhaps because poor harvest pulls into question, whether they really have God’s favour) like to do war, both to demonstrate their military excellence and prove their divine favour, and to acquire land and riches to reward their nobles for loyal service and prove generous.
War, like many other activities, becomes a thing kings are expected to do, because all the good kings do it, and they’re good kings because they did it well. It’s somewhat circular, but essentially, war becomes a political performance (because the ones leading it generally don’t do the dying…) and also still a means for survival and prosperity. Emotions provide the cause, but the driving mechanism isn’t just wounded pride or anger.
Now, to circle back to my emphasis historically and specification of pre-industrial societies: at some point, new technologies provided new means to make land more fertile. Logistics made it possible to specialise on certain crops that would then be exported to other places while importing what wasn’t grown locally. Machines made planting and harvesting faster. Fertilisers, pesticides, new breeds of crops all improved the yield of land. You’ll be aware that there are tons of food being wasted: Modern, developed countries tend to have more land than they strictly need for survival.
So with the survival motivator being negligible, kings no longer needing to prove themselves, the factor that remains is prosperity, or more accurately, greed. Colonialism won’t need more than two sentences in this respect. Early settlers may have just been looking for a place to live, but the allure of exotic goods didn’t take long to draw nefarious attention. Trade could also obtain these things, but why bargain for what you could take by force?
And to make things worse, sometime in the 19th century, national sentiments began to crop up. Now we arrive at the point where pride and anger become a motivator. Suddenly, that plot of land isn’t just a matter of prosperity, but of possessiveness. Technically, it doesn’t matter much which government collects the taxes and which the import tariffs. Trade across the border would allow anyone to profit from it anyway, and generally, investing in the infrastructure of an area is more lucrative than war. But “I’ll be dammed if I let that other flag wave over our land” does become a factor.
Particularly after the world wars, we should have understood how devastating industrialised warfare is, and how much you pay for so little gain. In fact, I posit that war has generally become downright irrational. Trade and infrastructure could achieve so much more.
But we’re stuck with petty people and grand ambitions, driven not by survival, nor by desire for prosperity, nor by plausible greed: Today, more than ever, we fight over the pride, anger, jealousy, hate and other emotions that people couldn’t cope with in a healthy way.
War was never pretty, but whatever fig leaf of justification one might come up with has been torn away by mortar shrapnel and burned to a crisp by nuclear devastation.
This is a great write up. Thank you for wiring it.