“The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious in­terludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.”

Winston Churchill's summary of our species could be dismissed as the pessimism of a man who fought history's most awful war and was present at the birth of a cold war that could have destroyed humanity altogether. In fact it has sadly stood the test of time. Though the cold war is a memory, and hot wars between major nations are rare, we still do not have peace in the world. Even before the infamous year of 2001, with its horrific terrorist attacks on the United States and subsequent war in Afghanistan, the World Conflict List cata­logued sixty-eight areas of systematic violence, from Albania and Algeria through Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Churchill's speculation about prehistory has also been borne out. Modern foragers, who offer a glimpse of life in prehistoric societies, were once thought to engage only in ceremonial battles that were called to a halt as soon as the first man fell. Now they are known to kill one another at rates that dwarf the casu­alties from our world wars. The archaeological record is no happier. Buried in the ground and hidden in caves lie silent witnesses to a bloody prehistory stretching back hundreds of thousands of years. They include skeletons with scalping marks, ax-shaped dents, and arrowheads embedded in them; weapons like tomahawks and maces that are useless for hunting but specialized for homicide; fortification defenses such as palisades of sharpened sticks; and paintings from several continents showing men firing arrows, spears, or boomerangs at one another and being felled by these weapons. For decades, "anthropologists of peace" denied that any human group had ever practiced cannibalism, but evidence to the contrary has been piling up and now includes a smoking gun. In an 850-year-old site in the American Southwest, archaeolo­gists have found human bones that were hacked up like the bones of animals used for food. They also found traces of human myoglobin (a muscle protein) on pot shards, and—damningly—in a lump of fossilized human excrement. Members of Homo antecessor, relatives of the common ancestor of Neander­thals and modern humans, bashed and butchered one another too, suggesting that violence and cannibalism go back at least 800,000 years.

War is only one of the ways in which people kill other people. In much of the world, war shades into smaller-scale violence such as ethnic strife, turf bat­tles, blood feuds, and individual homicides. Here too, despite undeniable im­provements, we do not have anything like peace. Though Western societies have seen murder rates fall between tenfold and a hundredfold in the past mil­lennium, the United States lost a million people to homicide in the twentieth century, and an American man has about a one-half percent lifetime chance of being murdered.

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the reduction of violence on scales large and small is one of our greatest moral concerns. We ought to use every intellectual tool available to under­stand what it is about the human mind and human social arrangements that leads people to hurt and kill so much. But as with the other moral concerns ex­amined in this part of the book, the effort to figure out what is going on has been hijacked by an effort to legislate the correct answer. In the case of vio­lence, the correct answer is that violence has nothing to do with human nature but is a pathology inflicted by malign elements outside us. Violence is a behav­ior taught by the culture, or an infectious disease endemic to certain environ­ments.

This hypothesis has become the central dogma of a secular faith, repeat­edly avowed in public proclamations like a daily prayer or pledge of alle­giance. Recall Ashley Montagu's UNESCO resolution that biology supports an ethic of "universal brotherhood" and the anthropologists who believed that "nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human pre­history." In the 1980s, many social science organizations endorsed the Seville Statement, which declared that it is "scientifically incorrect" to say that hu­mans have a "violent brain" or have undergone selection for violence.⁸ "War is not an instinct but an invention," wrote Ortega y Gasset, paralleling his claim that man has no nature but only history. A recent United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women announced that "violence is part of an historical process, and is not natural or born of biological deter­minism." A 1999 ad by the National Funding Collaborative on Violence Pre­vention declared that "violence is learned behavior."

Another sign of this faith-based approach to violence is the averred cer­tainty that particular environmental explanations are correct. We know the causes of violence, it is repeatedly said, and we also know how to eliminate it. Only a failure of commitment has prevented us from doing so. Remember Lyndon Johnson saying that "all of us know" that the conditions that breed violence are ignorance, discrimination, poverty, and disease. A 1997 article on violence in a popular science magazine quoted a clinical geneticist who echoed LBJ:

We know what causes violence in our society: poverty, discrimination, the failure of our educational system. It's not the genes that cause vio­lence in our society. It's our social system.¹¹

The authors of the article, the historians Betty and Daniel Kevles, agreed:

We need better education, nutrition, and intervention in dysfunctional homes and in the lives of abused children, perhaps to the point of re­moving them from the control of their incompetent parents. But such responses would be expensive and socially controversial.