Status Monkey: Of Men, Mankind, And The Social Evolution Of Violence
Status Monkey: Of Men, Mankind, And The Social Evolution Of Violence
A review of 'Why We Fight' by Mike Martin
Mike Martin, Why We Fight. C Hurst & Company, 2018. 278 pages.
“Fighting, when you and a small group of humans are trying to out-shoot and out-maneuver another group of humans, and they you, is the ultimate team sport,” Mike Martin writes. “War is exciting because our ancestors received an evolutionary benefit from it, and hence we are motivated to prosecute it.” Our modern conceit that ideology drives all warfare gets the true relationship backwards. “We are driven to fight because of these subconscious desires towards status and belonging,” Martin says, and the the act of war is “post-facto rationalised through conscious frameworks.”
In other words, first we fight over status, and then ideology is how we explain that fight to ourselves, to others, to history. An unconscious process happens first, followed by conscious acts of rational mind, in what Martin calls a “justificatory process” of cognition. Human males evolved to identify with our peers, kill in the interest of our peers, in order to raise our esteem among our peers, justifying ourselves in the eyes of our peers, all in that order. As Thucydides observed in ancient times, the explanations then vary among fear, power, and interest.
Like ideology, “supernatural religion is often why we say we fight—but that does not make it why we fight.” Instead, “group violence is emotive and subconscious, rather than the product of conscious reasoning,” Martin writes. It is also a very fast process, whereas cognition is slow, as it has evolved in us so that we can explain our impulses to our peers. “Morals, religion, and shared ideologies do not cause war, but rather help to build groups that fight one another, and help to justify such violence,” Martin says.
This understanding of war as a product of human biology, and more specifically male biology, challenges fashionable ideas about war and violence. They are supposed to be the result of someone, somewhere being greedy, or having wrong ideas about religion or politics or race. We are not supposed to notice that war is primarily a male sociological phenomenon.
As Martin observes, ideology and religion have exerted unifying influences, making it possible for millions or billions of people to share space and resources without war. Successful group-formation requires a number of heuristics, “rough rules of thumb that, more often than not, give the right evolutionary answer” to the five basic problems faced by every human society for the last 50,000 years: identity, hierarchy, trade, disease, and punishment.
To have an in-group identity, people need an out-group. Hierarchies set the order of access to resources within each group. Norms of fair dealing allow those resources to flow easily between group members. We are repelled by diseases, so social rules develop around avoidance of them. Justice systems exist to solve the problem of rule breaking. These heuristics overlap, so their workings are complex, and we are built to use the full arsenal of them before we ever actually even think about the decisions they make for us.
Vladimir Putin reportedly tried numerous plots to kill Volodymr Zelenskyy. As Martin explains, war leaders almost always personalize a conflict this way. Writing before the current hostilities, he mentions the examples of President George W. Bush targeting Saddam Hussein and Prime Minister David Cameron aiming for Muammar Gaddafi. Much of Zelenskyy’s trolling behavior is clearly aimed at getting into his enemy’s mind. All of them, Martin suggests, are enacting their leadership heuristic and then assigning a strategy to it.
Martin wrote before the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to consider the implications of his thesis in the context of what we know now. A disease heuristic of lockdowns, masking, and social distancing took effect in the moment of emergency, calling itself “science.” Actual science now recommends something different because data changes over time. Demand for continued school closures, masking, and social distancing is now confined to a cadre of people who gained new status on “social media” by championing the Covid heuristic. Contrary voices were consistently assigned to the out-group.
Reasoned argumentation is a side effect of this evolved mechanism of self-justification. In a sense, then, war is the heuristic that made humans able to debate issues and argue from evidence and reach accommodations outside of violence.
Reasons are the expression of our understanding of our own mental states, injected with a strong dose of social normativity—essentially, reasons are our desires and intuitions, but packaged for social consumption. From this insight, I argue that when humans talk about morals, religion, or ideology causing war, what they are actually doing is making a socially acceptable justification of their own subconscious desires.
“Because war is motivated by desires for belonging and status, the most socially acceptable way for humans to justify warmaking is by talking about the frameworks that solve” those five group-building problems of identity, hierarchy, trade, disease, and punishment, Martin explains.
Suicide bombers are trying to belong to a group, and have usually been love-bombed long before they carry out their attacks. Many self-recruited adherents of the Islamic State had gang backgrounds; as Martin notes, criminologists understand gangs to be a replacement for family, community, and the resources they provide. During his own work with jihadis in the hills of Afghanistan, Martin found that many fighters were defending a village, a clan, or a family under the rubric of defending Islam, and their local blood feuds were now entangled with a global counterterrorism campaign.
When we all lived in hunter-gatherer societies, it was “evolutionary suicide” to be shunned for not fighting, Martin says. Thus, “the brain has evolved to motivate fighting when others in the group are fighting, so as to maintain group membership.” Oxytocin, the social bonding hormone, creates solidarity in the group and reduces status competition within that group — the well-known “rally around the flag” effect.
Crowds cheering the outbreak of war in 1914 were doing what came naturally. As Robert Wohl established in his groundbreaking The Generation of 1914, a demographic boom of young men across Europe was eager to test itself. Social hierarchies were undergoing rapid transformation; inequality was at an all-time high, and national identities proved to be real, powerful heuristics, unlike theories of class solidarity.
Severe inequality of resources does lead to violence. As Martin explains, however, status is itself a resource to fight over.
Human homicides, for males at least, appear to be driven mostly by status disputes. That is men, most often kill other men over questions of who is higher than whom in the hierarchy. For women who kill, it is a different story: female homicide is most often driven by issues surrounding reproduction like competition for mates, protection of their offspring, and conflicts over resources needed for offspring.
Within the evolutionary heuristics of status, women are also a resource, and conflict history is replete with wars over women. War and sex difference are linked in human evolution. “Species with a greater difference in reproductive outcomes between male and female also mostly tend to have greater intramale competition, and so greater sexual dimorphism,” Martin writes.
Males between the ages of 12 and 25 have not developed the prefrontal cortex to manipulate their way to status nonviolently, nor have they lived long enough to accumulate much status. Yet adolescent testosterone makes them keenly aware of status, and therefore impulsive in pursuing it. The higher rate of risk-taking in adolescents, particularly males, corresponds with this period of intense status competition in the human life-cycle.
War is one way that young males have always taken risks in order to gain status. Another is crime. When homicide rates go up, the rate of female offenders stays the same; only the male offender rate increases. To ignore the public policy implications is folly.
Sweden took in many young, male refugees from the Middle East during the last decade. As they have no status to speak of, being immigrants, many of those young men have become gangsters. A rash of bombings around urban centers has led to right wing electoral backlash against a liberal government that denied the problem for too long. Everyone in this story has followed their heuristics. We can’t help it. We were born this way.