Does Warfare Make Societies More Complex?

[ramonmercado]

Does war have it's sunnier side? Might there even be a silver lining in a mushroom cloud?

Does warfare make societies more complex? Controversial study says yes

Archaeological analysis suggests an arms race in ironworking and cavalry spurred bureaucracy and bigger populations

28 JUN 20225:25 PMBYMICHAEL PRICE

War is hell. It breaks apart families, destroys natural resources, and drives humans to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Yet according to a new analysis of human history, war may also prod the evolution of certain kinds of complex societies. The twin developments of agriculture and military technology—especially cavalries and iron weapons—have predicted the rise of empires.

“I think they make a convincing case,” says Robert Drennan, an archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh who wasn’t involved in the work. Yet he and others argue the study offers a rather limited look into how exactly these factors might have shaped societies.

Scholars largely agree that agriculture was one of the major drivers of increasingly complex societies by allowing for bigger, more sedentary populations and divisions of labor. More contentious has been the role of strife.

“The majority of archaeologists are against the warfare theory,” says Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the new study’s lead author. “Nobody likes this ugly idea because obviously warfare is a horrible thing, and we don’t like to think it can have any positive effects.”

The scholarship in this area hinges on how one measures and defines social complexity. For the new study, Turchin and colleagues chose three quantifiable metrics: the size of a society and its territory, the complexity of its ruling hierarchy, and how specialized its government is, from the presence of professional soldiers, priests, and bureaucrats to the intricacy of its legal codes and court systems. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...ies-more-complex-controversial-study-says-yes

 

[SimonBurchell]

I have a book in my Kindle collection, War Before Civilization by Lawrence H Keeley, about which I remember very little except that it argued along similar lines. Increased military sophistication and cultural development/political sophistication go hand in hand. It's a bit of a chicken or egg situation though.

 

[Tunn11]

Being pedantic are they considering chariots as cavalry? Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite and early Greek cultures used chariots because horses were too small to take riders effectively. Battle of Qadesh 1274 bc for instance, required warriors, charioteers and presumably grooms, and a mechanism for feeding horses and army. Sort of tied in to agriculture as well.

 

[AmStramGram]

I think we can consider war as a "crisis event", in line with the original medical meaning of the word, which is : "decisive turning point during an illness". In other words : a moment when survival or destruction is decided. In the long run, it can go both ways.

If it almost always brings destruction in the short run, war can also spur deep reorganisations in human groups, because it forces them to adapt to new conditions. For instance, the first and second world wars perhaps favoured increased gender equality, encouraging women to take the men's jobs while they were on the front line [please note that this is simply an obvious example / I am not myself a great supporter of the so-called "gender studies"].

In some cases, war indeed increases social complexities : Genghis Khan's rise to power in the steppe went along the promotion of a new code of law & conduct, the Yassa, and to a change from a fractured political landscape to an organized and multicultural empire. And if it wasn't for Harald Faihair's (Harfager) quest for power, viking Norway perhaps wouldn't have evolved into a unitary kingdom. The former local aristocracy wouldn't have fled to Iceland and developped their early middle ages vaguely democratic system.

In other cases, we see that war hastens the crumbling of a civilisation. According to some hypotheses, several medio-american native cultures like the Mayas ended in civil wars, which led to a transition from densely populated urban civilisations to sparse rural cultures. We can suspect the same phenomenon in Mycenian Greece.

So it goes both ways, and war does appear to play a decisive role in many cases. But there are other causes to change, and I believe a society can evolve significantly without wars. The industrial revolutions, for instance, massively changed our societies. And they basically were not bellicose events. New technologies simply caused a great leap forward (not in the Mao Zedong sense, fortunately).

 

[SimonBurchell]

I think we can consider war as a "crisis event", in line with the original medical meaning of the word, which is : "decisive turning point during an illness". In other words : a moment when survival or destruction is decided. In the long run, it can go both ways.

If it almost always brings destruction in the short run, war can also spur deep reorganisations in human groups, because it forces them to adapt to new conditions. For instance, the first and second world wars perhaps favoured increased gender equality, encouraging women to take the men's jobs while they were on the front line [please note that this is simply an obvious example / I am not myself a great supporter of the so-called "gender studies"].

In some cases, war indeed increases social complexities : Genghis Khan's rise to power in the steppe went along the promotion of a new code of law & conduct, the Yassa, and to a change from a fractured political landscape to an organized and multicultural empire. And if it wasn't for Harald Faihair's (Harfager) quest for power, viking Norway perhaps wouldn't have evolved into a unitary kingdom. The former local aristocracy wouldn't have fled to Iceland and developped their early middle ages vaguely democratic system.

In other cases, we see that war hastens the crumbling of a civilisation. According to some hypotheses, several medio-american native cultures like the Mayas ended in civil wars, which led to a transition from densely populated urban civilisations to sparse rural cultures. We can suspect the same phenomenon in Mycenian Greece.

So it goes both ways, and war does appear to play a decisive role in many cases. But there are other causes to change, and I believe a society can evolve significantly without wars. The industrial revolutions, for instance, massively changed our societies. And they basically were not bellicose events. New technologies simply caused a great leap forward (not in the Mao Zedong sense, fortunately).

As far as the Classic period Maya go, they were never unified into a single empire, so it couldn't properly be called a civil war, although there were extended alliance networks, overlordships etc. For a time two great cities in the central Maya lowlands developed into the leading powers of their time, Tikal and Calakmul, now in Guatemala and Mexico, respectively. For centuries they struggled against each other, with smaller cities switching allegiances according to the flow of fortune and intrigue. Something changed in the early 9th century AD when, instead of leaving invaded cities intact, cities were abandoned. This appears to have started in the Petexbatun region in northern Guatemala, provoking a flood of refugees towards the Peten Lakes region to the east, probably exceeding the carrying capacity of the land and causing further political chaos. Warfare swept across the region, and most major cities were abandoned. This was not the end of the Maya Civilization, since the collapse in the central lowlands did not affect the Maya Highlands of Guatemala, or the northern lowlands of Yucatan. Some highland Maya groups in Guatemala have migration myths linking back to the lowland collapse, indicating that some refugee groups reached the highlands and settled there, mixing with preestablished Maya kingdoms, although this undoubtedly must have thrown some political instability into the mix. I could go on, but will stop myself there.

 

[charliebrown]

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the world that the military-industrial complex will take over the world if not keeped in checked and would be a threat to democracy.