"Why We Fight
By Christopher Blattman
Viking, 388 pages, $32
On July 30, 1932, exactly 6 months
before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Albert Einstein sent a despairing
letter to Sigmund Freud. "Dear Professor Freud," Einstein wrote.
"Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is
common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come
to mean a matter of life and death for civilisation as we know it."
Rulers and their arms-merchant
cronies manipulate public opinion, Einstein reflected. But "how is it
possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to
lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions?"
Propaganda had to be part of any explanation. The government "has the
schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb," he wrote.
"This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and
makes its tool of them." But as a rationalist, Einstein was still baffled.
"How is it these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild
enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives?" Is it down to human nature, he
wondered? Perhaps "man has within him a lust for hatred and
destruction."
In his response, Freud wrote that
men, like all male animals, are programmed to settle conflicts by fighting.
"Violent compulsions" may sometimes be counterbalanced by "ties
of sentiment," but only within narrow bounds.
In "Why We Fight: The Roots of
War and the Paths to Peace," Christopher Blattman, an economist and
political scientist at the University of Chicago, draws on recent economic
theories to address the great questions of war and peace that have been debated
for millennia.
Mr. Blattman agrees with Freud that
male aggression is easily aroused and that all sorts of intergroup violence
follow a similar pattern. "When I say war, I don't just mean countries
duking it out," Mr. Blattman writes. "I mean any kind of prolonged,
violent struggle between groups. That includes villages, clans, gangs, ethnic
groups, religious sects, political factions, and nations. Wildly different as
these may be, their origins have much in common."
Mr. Blattman offers a string of
anecdotes about feuding gangs in Chicago and in Medellin, Colombia. But scale
matters. Gang wars, punch-ups between two lots of sports fans, even medieval
sieges (among the author's other examples) are very different in many important
ways from the total wars of the modern world. As Mr. Blattman observes, wars
between nations are less common now than ever before precisely because the
consequences are so terrifying. And there is another critical difference:
National governments can, in theory, control violence within their boundaries;
but there is no international government that can put an end to wars between
nations.
Perhaps men are indeed easily roused
to martial fervor, but it is up to the leaders of nations to make decisions
about war and peace. "In my view, there are no good or bad leaders,"
Mr. Blattman writes. "There are only constrained and unconstrained
ones." Democratic leaders have to take their voters into account. The
media ask hard questions. The system imposes checks on executive power. And so,
for nearly a century now, democracies have not gone to war against other
democracies.
Autocrats, meanwhile -- particularly
if they run resource-rich economies -- find it easier to let their soldiers and
civilians bear the costs of war while they indulge their own ambitions and
fantasies. Consequently, Mr. Blattman writes, "it's the places ruled by
strongmen with few checks that appear to be the most warlike with
neighbors."
Some autocrats may go to war to
distract the population from more immediate concerns. Others are out for
vengeance or glory, or are committed to some religious crusade. These are but a
few examples of what economists call the agency problem. (You expect your agent
to act in your interests, but he has interests of his own.)
As an economist, Mr. Blattman
assumes that, leaving aside the occasional madman, leaders -- democratically
elected or otherwise -- weigh their options and seek to make optimal choices.
Game theory, the science of strategy, "works out how one side will behave
based on what it believes its opponent will do." Applied to the study of
auctions and bargaining by John Nash, winning him a Nobel Prize in economics in
1994, game theory lays down strategies for predicting and countering your
opponent's moves in any negotiation, helping you decide when to push your luck,
when to bluff and when to fold. Most leaders don't know anything about the
arcane models of economics, but experience has taught them the logic of
deal-making.
Game theory assumes, among other
things, that "both groups have the same information and agree on the
probabilities" of outcomes. As Mr. Blattman points out, however, "the
world is seldom so stable, transparent, or easy to assess." Negotiators
often operate in semidarkness, where crucial information is lacking or
potentially misleading. When much is uncertain, judgments are more likely to be
impulsive, directed by habit, emotion and prejudices. Confirmation bias takes
over, along with other cognitive shortcuts. Groupthink rules.
To understand decision-making under
these conditions, Mr. Blattman turns to the writings of Daniel Kahneman, who
won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on how people make decisions
in the real world. "Humans are not well described by the rational-agent
model," Mr. Kahneman observed in his 2011 bestseller, "Thinking, Fast
and Slow." We are all sometimes less than rational. Every cool Dr. Jekyll
is liable to turn into a hot Mr. Hyde, particularly when pressed for time and
operating with partial and conflicting information. The slow thinker in us is
logical, respectful of evidence, ready to consider objections. The fast thinker
is impulsive and passionate. And, of course, the fast thinker is more likely to
make a catastrophic misjudgment.
The cause of peace is best served,
Mr. Blattman concludes, through a mix of institutional constraints and slow
thinking: "interdependence, checks and balances, rules and enforcement,
and interventions." Both Einstein and Freud looked forward, more in hope
than expectation, to an effective role for international bodies. Mr. Blattman
accepts that these institutions may have moral influence, but it is seldom
decisive. Economic interdependence raises the cost of conflict and gives
negotiators bargaining tools, but leaders who control oil and gas fields are
largely unaccountable to their citizens. Financial punishment will sometimes
bring vulnerable governments to the negotiating table, but sanctions are leaky,
and it is hard to target only the right people. Mediators may build trust and
facilitate discreet communication, yet they can only give a helping hand." [1]
