When the term “tribal warfare” has come up, I have always thought of Africa for some reason. When I was traveling to subsaharan Africa almost forty years ago, I was surprised to learn about how much inter-tribe rivalry existed and what a storied history and debate there was about how prevalent it was in the context particularly of a continent beset with a turbulent colonial past and then as a source of the Western Hemisphere’s love affair with slavery. When this term gets applied specifically to African conflict, there’s an additional problem: the “tribal warfare is in African nature” framing has historically been used to naturalize and excuse the consequences of colonialism, to argue against intervention (“they’ve always fought each other”), and to deny African peoples the same historical analysis we’d apply to European religious wars or Asian dynastic conflicts. The European Wars of Religion (1524–1648) killed a larger share of Germany’s population than either World War. The Thirty Years War was essentially tribal warfare organized around religious identity. Nobody concludes from this that violence is specifically in the European nature, or that European conflicts are inherently different in kind from rational political calculation. The same analytical standard should apply everywhere…including Africa. The broader context in political philosophy, anthropology, and evolutionary biology about tribalism is whether violence is simply in man’s nature.
In terms of evolutionary biology, humans are a social primate, and our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, engage in organized inter-group lethal violence. Jane Goodall made long-term observations in which one chimpanzee community systematically exterminated another. Males form coalitions, patrol borders, and kill members of neighboring groups when they can do so with numerical advantage. This looks disturbingly like human warfare. The archaeological record also shows evidence for substantial prehistoric violence. Mass graves in Kenya (roughly 10,000 years old) show the skeletal remains of 27 people with traumatic injuries including bound hands, crushed skulls, embedded projectile points, all things consistent with a massacre. So, violence among humans appears to predate civilization.
Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature made the case that while modern war is horrific in absolute terms, the rate of death from violence per capita has actually declined dramatically over human history. Pre-state societies, he argues, had violent death rates of 10–60% of all deaths. Modern societies, even with world wars, are far less violent per capita. His implication: violence is natural but can be suppressed by institutions. Humans show robust in-group/out-group psychology. We categorize “us” vs. “them” rapidly and automatically, extend more empathy to in-group members, and dehumanize out-groups under stress. This psychological architecture appears universal across cultures and was almost certainly adaptive, coordinating within groups and competing between them. Sigh….
But the case against the inevitability of violence also exists. The Seville Statement on Violence (1986) is a declaration signed by leading scientists from multiple disciplines explicitly rejected the claim that war is biologically determined. Their core argument is that the fact that humans can make war does not mean they are programmed that way. Humans can also cooperate, and do so at extraordinary scale. The ethnographic record contains societies with extremely low levels of inter-group violence. There are tribes is Asia and Africa that have organized their social lives around conflict avoidance. If warfare were simply in human nature, these exceptions would be harder to explain. Other anthropologists have challenged the evidence for prehistoric warfare, arguing that organized inter-group violence became common only with the development of agriculture, sedentary settlement, and stored resources worth fighting over. Hunter-gatherer violence may be more individual than organized. Warfare in this view is a product of social conditions, not biology.
Bonobos are equally close relatives to humans as chimpanzees, and they resolve inter-group tension through sex, grooming, and food sharing rather than violence. We share the same evolutionary distance from both species. If we cite chimps as evidence for our violent nature, we must also cite bonobos as evidence for our peaceful nature.
Human behavior is extraordinarily “flexible” compared to other animals. The same species produced the Holocaust and the Danish rescue of Jews. The same Rwandan society that committed genocide in 1994 has achieved a level of ethnic reconciliation that surprised most observers. German and Japanese societies that were militaristic in 1940 became among the most pacifist in the world by 1970. This range of outcomes suggests that social conditions, institutions, and culture matter enormously.
Recently I have written about how much I admire Canada and Mark Carney, especially when comparing his comments about the world turmoil today versus the random, brash and bullying approach of Trump and his administration. That would make Canadians the bonobos in this story relative to the Trumpian chimps. But then I remember my time living in Canada and my surprise at the Canadian reaction to bilingualism. The Anglo/French animosity has existed for three centuries and the Quebecois “revolution” came to a head in the late 1960s and was “resolved” through the Official Languages Act in 1969, making English and French the official languages of Canada with equal status in all federal institutions. Problem solved, right? Not so fast, Abernathy… When I heard the Toronto crowd at the Sky Dome booing the Canadian National Anthem when it was sung in French, I realized that this discord was far from over.
We just had a crash of an Air Canada plane on the LaGuardia Airport runway. It is still not clear where the fault lies, but it doesn’t seem to be with Air Canada or the two deceased pilots. When the Air Canada CEO made his remarks at a ceremony to respect the loss of life from the incident, he made them in English, adding a polite “Bonjour” at the start and an equally polite “Merci” at the end. This long-time Air Canada veteran is not bilingual despite the location of the company’s headquarters in Quebec. Despite the severity of the incident and the tragic loss of life, the Quebec public got up in arms about the comments…not because of their content or sincerity, but because they were in English and not French. In a world where simultaneous live translation can be had through Apple AirPod-3 devices or from Google Translate on your phone, is the language barrier really that big of a deal? Apparently so in Quebec. As enlightened as Canadians seem in contrast to Americans these days, they too seem to have some of that trivial tribal nature still in their systems, defined not by different skin color or radically different ethnic heritage… but by language. These are two cultures (Anglo and Franco) that have fought since the Norman Conquest in 1066 and they seemed to have set aside their biggest rivalries in Europe over a century ago, but once again…not so fast, Abernathy…not in Canada.
The political philosopher Hobbes (an Englishman) famously argued that life in the “state of nature”, without political authority is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” and that the primary purpose of the state is to suppress the violent tendencies that would otherwise dominate. Rousseau (a Frenchman) took the opposite view: humans are naturally peaceful and cooperative, and it is civilization and inequality that produce violence. The evidence today suggests Hobbes and Rousseau were both partly right and partly wrong. Humans appear to have evolved capacities for both violence and cooperation and which tendency dominates depends heavily on circumstance, institutions, resource scarcity, group size, and political manipulation…all of which our buddy Trump wants to dominate in our lives…in this country and everywhere else.
I would ponder this trivial tribal issue some more this morning, except Buddy wants to play fight and even though that seems to be a case of my better angels giving into his primordial instincts, I’m gonna give him a tug-of-war run for his money.