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Published online 23 November 2007 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2007.274
Column: Muse
War is not an exact science
General theories of why we go to war are interesting, says Philip Ball. But they'll never tell the whole story.
Why are we always fighting wars? That's the sort of question expected from naïve peaceniks, to which historians will wearily reply, “well, it’s complicated”.
But according to a paper by an international, interdisciplinary team, it isn’t that complicated.
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The pendulum swings yet again. During some time, we scientists believe we can explain complex systems resorting to analysis of a few factors which would drive the system. When we find that only "partial" success can be obtained with "classical" statistical approaches, some other scientists come forward by claiming that no factor can be an explanation and that exceptions drive the systems. It has been like this for ecology (my field of interest) and it appears it is like this in some quarters of the social sciences. Because "intelligent" humans are involved, it may seem easier (and flattering) to believe people create, lead and end wars. For me at least it is clear that a midpoint is needed: history, like evolution and ecology, deal with complex, multifactorial systems that are AT THE SAME TIME lead by a few important factors and by idiosyncrasies of organisms, evolutionary steps, or people. So cold can lead to food shortages which can lead to wars. Not all wars, of course, but many. We cannot tell the whole story based on cold spells, but I think it is the best way to start - understand generality first, then the special cases. I don't see how historians could proceed without integrating both approaches - the wall is down, forget Marx was a commie and dig out what was useful from his ideas, drop the rest.
Miss the forest for a tree: When you look at trees in the forest, you can see the details of some particular trees (idiographic conception). When you look at trees from a helicopter, you can have a bird view of the whole forest (nomothetic conception). Although the object observed is the same, there can come two totally different observations. Which observation is more valid and valuable? There should be no answer because the two observations just represent the different facets of the same object. They compliment each other in unfolding the actual world. We fell sorry that there are some misunderstandings and misleading towards our study entitled "Global climate change, war and population decline in recent human history", which is published in PNAS (1). Dr. Ball's comments on our study that are published online in Nature News on 23rd Nov. 2007 (2) are mainly hinged on the belief in the supremacy of idiographic conception. Such conception is not new and we have discussed it with many social scientists. Anyway, we would like to take this chance to clarify some of the misunderstandings and misleading. Our research approach is trying to find the general temporal and spatial patterns of all recorded wars (nomothetic conception), not particular wars (idiographic conception). We used various historical data sets to verify quantitatively the macro-historical war-peace, demographic, and economic cycles in recent history, concluding that these cycles (not particular incidents) were mainly driven by climate variations. Therefore, the temporal and spatial patterns of war are truly scientific matters. It seems that Dr. Ball tells the readers that our paper is a study on the causes of wars. Indeed, our study discussed the temporal and spatial patterns of war, not the causes of wars. They are different things. Besides, he merely based on a few cases to challenge our findings that are derived from thousands of war cases. It is very easy for someone to find some cases outlying major trend. For example, global warming has lead to glacial retreat worldwide, but there are still glacial advancements in some places. Besides, we have already indicated clearly that our research scope is delimited to pre-industrial societies because a focus on particular socio-economic formation is necessary if any progress is made. That’s why our analysis stops at 1900. We have not studied the war patterns in the industrial society. However, in our implication section, we concluded that what we can learn from our study is that resource shortage is a major cause of war. This conclusion may also apply to the industrial societies and future. Our main proposition has already been summarized as: "Our approach has not been to examine causes of individual wars, but to investigate the frequency of all wars during a specific period of human history and find out when, where and why the war-peace cycles occurred. Our results not only answered when and where most of wars occurred, but also imply that relative food scarcity was a fundamental cause of war outbreaks according to our quantitative analysis on various physical and social components and in different geographical regions. Such a resource scarcity manifested itself in two causal pathways: a direct cause, in which resource-oriented wars erupted as most of the world’s population still struggle to satisfy the lower levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (3); and an indirect cause, as constrained food resources and economic difficulties stemming from that intensified different social contradictions, that increased the likelihood of war outbreaks." Form this quotation, we accentuate that wars were not primary consequence but secondary or tertiary consequences of long-term climate change. Our hypothesis is not new as scholars have long mentioned the linkage between long-term climate change and war (4). However, our research is the first study providing quantitative and scientific evidences to justify that war peaked in a cold climate in population saturated pre-industrial societies. Besides, this approach is totally different from the one adopted by historians, whose goal is to explain why particular events happened. Thereby, it will be illogical to evaluate our study by using historians' thinking. Of course, not all food shortages lead to war. Our paper also showed that many wars in our data sets happened in a mild climate when most areas might have a good harvest during the time. What we discuss is the general trend of climate-war relationship. However, some people (including Dr. Ball) tend to quote a few examples to refute the observed general climate-war relationship. They might miss the whole forest for a tree. Moreover, social scientists and historians have never reached any definite conclusions among themselves regarding the causes of those quoted examples. We also disagree with Dr. Ball's view that the social unrest caused by famine only triggered civil war, not the conflict of nation-states. Lastly, Dr. Ball told the readers about our paper: "On the other hand, it is outrageous: wars, it says, have little to do with ideology, political ambition or sheer greed, but are driven primarily by the weather." Dr. Ball simply puts the words in our mouths. We never used such words or similar sentences to describe our findings in our paper. Instead, in the implication section and SI of our manuscript we mentioned: "All theories about war told us much about the causes of war. Some of these theories may explain certain wars, and some of the theories may even explain sizable classes of wars, but none of them can explain the temporal and spatial patterns of warfare presented in our research." POSTED ON BEHALF OF David D. Zhang and Harry F. Lee