Thorin: “Farewell, good thief. I wish to part in friendship, and would take back my words at the Gate.”
Bilbo: “There are many words I would take back also.”
Thorin: “And does it take this to make us see each other?…. I was wrong. You did understand war. It was I who did not, until now.”
Bilbo: “Farewell, King under the Mountain!”
Thorin: “Child of the kindly West, I have come to know, if more of us valued your ways: food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!”
If you ever get close to a human And human behavior Be ready, be ready to get confused … They’re terribly, terribly, terribly moody … And there is no map And a compass wouldn’t help at all (Bjork, Human Behaviour , 1993)
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This semester I tried something new in my undergraduate class on anthropology and war. Briefly, the class has two parts: in the first half of the semester we explore cooperation, conflict, and war from an anthropological perspective. In the second half, we look at various ways that wars affect health and become embodied, or get “under the skin.”
When writing the syllabus back in early January, I thought about delving deeper into what’s going on in people’s minds when they feel violence is warranted, a topic I’ve written about before:
determining when violence (lethal and non-lethal) is morally justifiable can be a gray zone, with people positioning themselves on a continuum between completely nonviolent “doves” to hyper-aggressive “hawks.” While many people hold nonviolence as an ideal; living up to that ideal perfectly has proven difficult to almost impossible. The question is where people draw their line.
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For the class exercise, I gave students a survey. On a scale of 0 to 100, I asked them to rate how justifiable it would be to use violence under 28 different scenarios. For a bit more background, I picked some scenarios that were hypothetical (ex. Gandhi’s famous example of using violence to “dispatch” a man in the act of committing mass murder with a sword), while others were based on real-world events. I did not tell students which scenarios were hypothetical or not ahead of time, but did so after compiling results, which they then discussed in groups. A few scenarios involved variations on a theme to find where people drew their lines. Some scenarios were about the behavior of other people, while others were about how students themselves might respond. And some involved lethal violence, others sub-lethal, and still others pertained to threats of violence (therefore, the numeric results aren’t all directly comparable).
Together with my brilliant colleagues Delaney Glass (UToronto) and Meredith Reiches (UMass Boston), we recently published our article “Coming of age in war: Early life adversity, age at menarche, and mental health” in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
This was a special issue on forced migration and physiology, guest edited by Lee Gettler (Notre Dame) and Jelena Jankovic-Rankovic (University of South Carolina), and I think we probably compiled one of the most comprehensive reviews to date about armed conflict and menarche (first menstruation).
There are a couple of hypotheses about how child and adolescent bodies respond to early stressors: one is that bodies should mature quicker in times of uncertainty to increase one’s chances of reaching reproductive maturity. (The literature suggests that this does seem to happen under certain circumstances and types of stressors). The other is that maturation would be delayed, possibly due to energetic constraints.
We identified 36 samples from 29 studies in the literature that looked at armed conflict and menarche, with a range of methods and populations from around the globe. Here’s some of what we found…
Locations of samples on conflict and menarche we identified from the literature.
After seeing a flurry of recent examples (early August 2024), I decided to start a running tally of people calling for, or alluding to, a coming civil war in the U.S.
I first wrote about this topic five years ago with the essay “Red States versus Blue States: Who Would Win a Civil War in the U.S?”Unfortunately, it is the most read thing on this site, by far. That isn’t because the essay is brilliant (really, I think I can do better). Instead, I think it’s because some Americans are anxious or even eager about the prospect of widespread political violence. The essay happens to show up in Internet search results, which brings people here.
The upshot of the essay was that we should reframe the question away from who would “win” a war. By deriving lessons from wars around the world, the one thing that we can be absolutely certain of is that a second civil war here would be devastating for everyone. Whatever resentments people feel – and we all have them – it is an understatement to say that war and political violence are not only unethical, but stupid and impractical, and something best avoided.
For that reason, it is highly irresponsible for politicians, authority figures, and celebrities to encourage the idea or throw it around recklessly. I think we need to confront the fact that people keep vocalizing this fantasy because there is an established pattern that dangerous speechand incitement like this can lead to actual violence. I’ll keep adding to the list as new examples arise. There will likely be more to follow. I may even go back in time to dig up older examples, though I know that will be an exhausting task.
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●June 15, 2024 Steve Bannon asked a conservative crowd “Are we at war?,” adding “Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield in 2024? It’s very simple: victory or death!”
●July 3, 2024 Referring to plans to overhaul the federal government, The Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
The co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Heidi Beirich, said Roberts’ comments were “a bit terrifying but also elucidating.”
●July 22, 2024 At a political rally in Middletown Ohio, state Senator George Lang said civil war would be necessary if Donald Trump loses the election in November:
“I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s J.D. Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind.”
●August 5, 2024 (Honorable mention, UK version) Self-proclaimed expert on everything, Elon Musk wrote on X/Twitter that “civil war is inevitable” in the UK, following widespread rightwing riots. Prime Minister Keir Starmerreplied that there was “no justification” Musk’s comments.
●August 6, 2024 Actor Jon Voight stopped chewing on his pencil long enough to post a video on X/Twitter titled “Civil War”
“This is the war of our lifetime now. We the people are in trouble if this nation picks Kamala Harris. We must stop this crime that is happening. It’s a war crime that Obama’s directing and Kamala Harris will be the cackling hyena that just listens and repeats.”
“How careful should we be, that we do not mistake the impressions of gloom and melancholy, for the dictates of reason and truth. How careful, lest borne away by a torrent of passion, we make shipwreck of conscience.”
“We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you,” the young woman threatened the Bakersfield City Council. “The entire nation is coming for you. And we will stop, at no end, until you are in the ground. You’re a traitor to this nation,” said the man’s voicemail left for the Arizona Secretary of State. “I hope they kill your children,” shouted the murdered child’s relative at their alleged killer in a Houston courtroom. Gay people should be “lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head,” preached the Texan pastor. “Yes I do, I support genocide. I support killing all you guys, how about that?” the campus safety officer told a group of protesters at CUNY.
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I’ve been thinking for a while about how people determine when violence is acceptable. For that reason certain news stories jump out to me, particularly those close to home in the increasingly angry United States. I don’t have all the answers, but I think that within many (or most?) of us is a something akin to a black box of violence, when anger reaches a point that people feel compelled to threaten, harm, or even kill. As Lincoln wrote: “Blood grows hot, and blood is spilled.” Yet how this all operates under the hood is somewhat nebulous, and I think people have their own idiosyncratic formula for what makes their blood “hot” and what they decide to do about it. The hope is that bringing these subconscious inclinations closer to the surface might give us a better understanding, and possibly control, over them.
“I know what I’m talking about when I talk about war, and it’s the most disgusting thing that you could ever think of. And I’ve also noticed with every single war, it’s been declared by men who were too old to go, and it’s made me suspicious.”
“There never was a good war or a bad peace.” – Ben Franklin
It is a blessing and a curse of being a social animal that we are often aware of what the other social animals around us are thinking. If online activity is any indication of what people are thinking, then things are not great. Every day for the past year, I have found that the most viewed essay on this site, by far, has been something I wrote in 2019 aboutwho would win a second civil war in the United States.
Perhaps I am giving this too much attention. But maybe not. A significant percentage of Americans have been deeply worried and/or angry for a while. In anOctober 2020 poll,61% of people agreed with the statement: “I’m concerned that the U.S. could be on the verge of another Civil War.” Another Yougov poll from the same time found that 56% felt that the country would see “an increase in violence as a result of the election.” A smallerpollfrom December reported that 71% of Trump voters and 40% of Biden voters believed “we are headed into a civil war or significant upheaval.” (Upheaval and civil war were not defined, however).
When I play the scenario out in my head, I think the possibility of another civil war is remote, at least not in the sense of replicating the original one. Although there has been chatter about secession in a few states(Texas, Wyoming), this has little momentum. And while there are certainly regional political differences, they do not fall along neat boundaries akin to northern and southern states. There is no Mason-Dixon line. Rather, the main divide seems to be urban-rural, within states rather than between them.
Yet even within states and within counties, there is plenty of political variation. While many counties voted overwhelmingly for either Biden or Trump in 2020, most were not very lopsided. According toone analysis, fewer than 600 out of roughly 3,000 counties (excluding Alaska, for some reason) voted over 80% for either candidate.
Alternative ways of looking at the 2020 political divide in the US. On the left, the percentage of the vote for Biden and Trump by county. On the right, results by population size. While there are regional differences, they do not break down into simple “red and blue” states. Source.
“You plant a demon seed. You raise a flower of fire.” – Paul Hewson
The number of views on my site have dropped off noticeably in the final three weeks of 2020, and I am relieved. Perhaps that doesn’t make much sense at first. Who doesn’t want people to read their stuff? Let me explain.
This year was not a good one – the pandemic raged across the world, and divisions in the U.S. were tense and palpable. I saw this indirectly on this blog. In 2020, the most read essays on this site, by far, pertained to the topic of another civil war in the U.S. These were the five most read posts in 2020, along with the year I wrote them, and the number of views:
So, that’s three posts related to civil war, one about keeping our baser impulses in check, and one about sex and love. Go figure. Two were older essays, and the other three were written in the last two years. And, unlike previous years when some of my essays were shared on social media, this year the vast majority of my visitors arrived on their own via Internet search engines.
This is a small blog with a funny name, and it doesn’t get much traffic. To see a post that I wrote last year skyrocket above the others, it made me notice. In fact, the “Red States versus Blue States” post is already the fifth most read essay on this site, even though it is just a year old and I started this blog in 2010. The graph below shows how it compared in terms of views with other popular posts in their first two years. As you can see, most started with a little flurry of activity, and then trail off. “Red States vs. Blue States” did something different. Few people read it in 2019, and then it took off a year later, mid-2020.
I noticed that the spike in views were tightly linked with current events. From the George Floyd protests in the summer, the North Carolinapolice officercaught on tape saying that he could not wait for another civil war and a chance to kill Black people, thekillingsof Aaron Danielson and Michael Reinoehl in late August, the people shot and killed by Kyle Rittenhouse, Trump’srefusalto commit to a peaceful transfer of power in September, Trump telling militia groups to “stand back and stand by,” the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, the actual election itself, the pushing of the false narrative that the election was stolen. The site views ebbed and flowed, almost perfectly along with the national news.Continue reading →
I learned a few days ago thatEmile Bruneauhadpassed away. I did not know Dr. Bruneau personally, but I knew of his work in conflict resolution. I previously referred to some of his research in apost on dangerous speech and dehumanization. It is also clear from thetributesto him on social media that in addition to his valuable research, the world has lost a really wonderful human being.
Having lost my ownbrotheras a young adult, premature deaths like Dr. Bruneau’s (orChadwick Boseman’s) resonate with me. They remind me of how fragile our lives are. His wife shared something that Dr. Bruneau wrote that made me a little emotional, both for its bravery and optimism in the face of something as potentially terrifying as one’s impending mortality, and because it reminded me of something that occurred to me too when I contemplated my brother’s death: that a part of us really does live on in the minds of others. He wrote:
“I just had a thought: I learned in physics that our physical mass never actually touches another – the outer electrons of each repel, giving us the illusion of touch. As a neuroscientist, I learned that our brains don’t really see the world, they just interpret it. So losing my body is not really a loss after all! What I am to you is really a reflection of your own mind. I am, and always was, there, in you.”
I’d like to share a few more of his words, to help keep his image reflecting in my mind, and perhaps yours as well. Not just for the sake of sharing, but because he really did have some important things to say.
I’ve had this quotation from primatologist Frans deWaal in my head for a long time. Sadly, I think it’s relevant now for life in the United States:
“Humans have something of the bonobo and the chimpanzee in them, which makes them bipolar in character. Most of the time, actually, we like to have a peaceful relationship with everybody around us. But at the same time we can be aroused to a point, under certain circumstances – either by political leaders, or by an invasion, or by some traumatic event – that we start killing, and not killing on a small scale like chimpanzees do, but genocide… When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are better and more altruistic than any primate that I know. ” — Frans de Waal, primatologist (source)
The two pieces of this passage that mean the most to me are that: (1) peaceful relations are our default preference, and (2) mass acts of violence require being goaded or aroused by some external push factor.
Patrick F. Clarkin, Ph.D. 