War in Human Civilization Quotes

“Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as ‘bugs’ or ‘viruses’ in, or ‘mis-activations’ of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“From the evolutionary perspective, revenge is retaliation that is intended either to destroy an enemy or to foster deterrence against him, as well as against third parties. This, of course, applies to non-physical and non-violent, as well as to physical and violent, action.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Scientists have found that its presence begins to structure the male as different from the female right from the start, from the very beginning of the fetus’s evolution in the uterus (biologically, the original form is the female). Male and female differences in identity are already largely shaped at birth, and behavioral differences between the sexes are recorded very early, before social conditioning can play an effective role. Crudely put, baby girls are more interested in people, whereas baby boys are more interested in things.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“However, contrary to the fashion in much of the gender studies, cultural norms play, and diverge, along a scale set by our inborn dispositions. (Needless to say, the subject is extremely complex and, as we see later, it becomes even more complex with the new opportunities, interactions, and tensions created by accelerated cultural evolution.) The fact remains that among hunter-gatherers, in the 'human state of nature’, women’s participation in warfare was extremely marginal. Even more tan hunting in which women also marginally engaged in a few societies, fighting was a male preserve and the most marked sex difference.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Humans have far longer memories than do animals and, thus revenge -the social settling of accounts with those who offended them- assumes a wholly new level with them.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Indeed, want and hunger were not the only reasons for fighting. Plenty and scarcity are relative not only to the number of mouths to be fed but also to the potentially ever-expanding and insatiable range of humans needs and desires. It is as if, paradoxically, human competition increases with abundance, as well as with deficiency, taking more complex forms and expressions, widening social gaps and enhancing stratification.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“...more wealth is desired even though above a certain level it has ceased to translate into greater reproduction; with effective contraception much the same applies to sexual success; power, status, honor, and fame -connected to the above- are still hotly pursued even though their reproductive significance has become ambivalent. It is the evolution-shaped proximate mechanisms -the web of desire- that dominate human behavior, even where much of their original adaptive rationale has weakened.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Again, as young males have always been the most aggressive element in society whereas older men were traditionally associated with a counsel of moderation and compromise, it has been suggested that the decline in young men’s relative numbers may contribute to the pacificity of developed societies while explaining the greater belligerency of developing ones, particularly those of Islam.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“To avoid a misconception, it must be clarified that a world of steadily increasing wealth by no means ends human competition, and certainly does not bring about ‘brotherly love’ on earth. It is true that, when the most pressing human needs, the basic levels of what one author has described as the ‘pyramid of needs’, are met at a comfortable enough level -even more of less guaranteed- the impulse to use aggression to satisfy them weakens considerably. Studies indicate that people become more risk averse. Yet, as already explained in this book, human desires are open-ended, because people struggle to improve their relative position vis-à-vis others even in a situation of growing plenty.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Still, connecting others to the world economy -voluntarily, by pressure, and even by force- constituted, in principle, their only road to sustained real growth and away from the material deprivation, stagnation, zero-sum competition, and high mortality of ‘agraria’.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“In any case, in all cultures war on earth was customarily paralleled by war in and from the heavens, as rival communal and national gods were enlisted to back their respective peoples. Similar to a superior and capricious ally, the gods constantly had to be pampered, wooed, and appeased, lest in their wrath they deserted or even worked against their people’s cause.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Nevertheless, my contention is precisely that Homo sapiens sapiens possesses an innate, omnipresent, evolution-shaped predisposition for ordering its world, which among other things extends to form the foundation of mythology, metaphysics, and science. As with all other adaptive predispositions, this human propensity to construct interpretative mental frameworks of the world expresses itself as a powerful urge, a profound emotional need, which humans simply cannot help or do without. We are compulsive meaning seekers. It is this propensity -intertwined as it is with the evolution of symbolic representation and generalized conceptual thought- that is responsible for our species' remarkable career.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Cognitive studies, aided by brain scanning, have revealed that men and women in fact use different parts of their brains in coping with various cognitive tasks. Furthermore, whereas the right and left hemispheres of a man's brain are much more specialized, those of women operate in greater co-operation, and the corpus callosum connecting them is larger. Not only are the bodies of women and men structured somewhat differently but also that particular organ of their bodies, the brain, and hence their minds.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The expansion of the state thus had the effect of gradually diminishing tribal and local boundaries within the same ethnos, and of reducing the differences between separate -ethnies- in multi-ethnic states and empires, subsuming them within supra-ethnic identities, even to the point of creating new, transformed, and larger ethnic identities.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Forms of power flow and translate into each other, or, to put it in a less reified matter, possessors of power move to expand and guard it, among other things by gaining hold and tightening their grip on the various levers of power. No effective state power can maintain control, defend its realm against outsiders, or safeguard against usurpation without a substantial underpinning of force.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“No formal criterion or 'definition' should obscure the fact that the early state did not emerge full blown and in a clear-cut form. Its formation was a process rather than a one-time event, which regularly took generations and centuries to unfold.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Cognitive studies, aided by brain scanning, have revealed that men and women in fact use different parts of their brains in coping with various cognitive tasks. Furthermore, whereas the right and left hemispheres of a man's brain are much more specialized, those of won1en operate in greater co-operation, and the corpus callosum connecting them is larger. Not only are the bodies of women and men structured somewhat differently but also that particular organ of their bodies, the brain, and hence their minds.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Both the capabilities and evolutionary strategies of men and women, capabilities and strategies that were of course interconnected and mutually reinforcing, made men much more predisposed to fighting than women.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Theory and mythology, natural and supernatural, science and magic are dichotomies shaped by later human reasoning. In fact, all of them are rooted in the search for the underlying forces behind the phenomena and the quest to enlist them on one's side.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“The first obvious and generally controversy-free, fighting-related difference between men and women is that of physical strength. Men are considerably stronger than women, on average, of course, and all the following data are on average. To begin with, men are bigger than women. They are about nine percent taller and proportionately heavier. Even these facts do not tell the whole story, because in muscle and bone mass men's advantage is bigger still. Relative to body weight, men are more muscular and bony, with the main difference concentrated in the arms, chest and shoulders. Fat comprises only 15 per cent of their body weight, compared with 27 per cent in women.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Perpetration of serious violence and crime is in fact the most distinctive sex difference there is, cross-culturally.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“It has been found that so called tomboy behavior in girls correlated closely with higher levels of testosterone. On the other side, low testosterone levels in males result in unassertive and ‘feminine’ behavior, whereas the highest levels of testosterone to which men are exposed during adolescence result in extra aggressiveness.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Even if some women were physically and mentally capable of participating in a warrior's group, this very rarely happened.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Trophy heads served much the same social purpose for primitive warriors as medals, decorations, or marks of fallen enemy aircraft do for modern ones.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Revenge has probably been the most regular and prominent cause of fighting cited in anthropological accounts of pre-state societies. Violence was activated to avenge injuries to honour, property, women, and kin. If life was taken, revenge reached its peak, often leading to a vicious circle of death and counter-death.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“In communities in which spiritual life was permeated -as it invariably was- with supernatural beliefs, sacred cults and rituals, and the practice of magic, this was a potent force. All known hunter-gatherer societies -as with any other human society- exhibit the universal human quest for ordering and manipulating the cosmos.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“As Thomas Malthus pointed out, a new equilibrium between resource volume and population numbers would eventually be reached, recreating the same tenuous ratio of subsistence that has been the fate of most pre-industrial societies throughout human history.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“...the evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers in their evolutionary natural environment and evolutionary natural way of life, shaped in humankind's evolutionary history over millions of years, widely engaged in fighting among themselves. In this sense, rather than being a late cultural 'invention', fighting would seem to be, if not 'natural', then certainly not 'unnatural' to humans.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“...deadly aggression is a major, evolution-shaped, innate potential that, given the right conditions, has always been easily triggered. However, its ocurrence and prevalence are subject to wide fluctuations, depending on the prominence of these conditions.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization