Is Peace a Pipe Dream?

Dec 6

*Photo of woman murdered by U.S. troops during My Lai massacre, Vietnam, 1968.* *From Wikipedia*.

HOBOKEN, DECEMBER 6, 2025. Last month physicist Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend invited me to give a zoom talk with the title above to “Elders for Disarmament and the Cultures of Peace.” Here, more or less, is what I said. – John Horgan

Ending war is the great challenge of our time. And the biggest obstacle to ending war is the widespread belief that it’s impossible.

I’ve surveyed thousands of people over the past two decades, old and young, left and right. The vast majority believe war is a permanent part of the human condition. This fatalistic belief is self-fulfilling. If peace is a pipe dream, why pursue it? Why not stick to the deadly delusion “peace through strength”?

Here in the U.S., our culture nudges us to see our capacity for mass slaughter in a positive light. The armed forces sponsor jet flyovers and honor guards at football games. The Pentagon helps produce war-mongering films and video games like Top Gun and Call of Duty. [See Postscript.]

Prominent intellectuals serve up pro-war messages. Economist Tyler Cowan and historian Ian Morris argue that war promotes innovation, economic growth and prosperity. Yes, war is good for us.

Then there is the demonic-males theory, which says war, defined as lethal group violence, is natural, ancient and innate, in our genes. War dates back millions of years to our common ancestor with chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, who carry out deadly raids against each other.

In his 1996 book Demonic Males, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that natural selection, and sexual selection, favor males with a propensity for violence. Females mate with bullies, thus propagating their demonic genes. The demonic-males theory of war has been touted by the bestselling scholars Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Edward Wilson and Francis Fukuyama.

In my book The End of War, I show that the demonic-males theory isn’t even true of chimpanzees. Wrangham himself concedes that lethal group violence among chimpanzees is “rare,” and it has never been observed among the chimps known as bonobos.

Evidence for human group violence dates back only about 12,000 years, to the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East. And since then war has been sporadic, it comes and goes in ways that can’t be accounted for by biology.

Scholars have proposed many non-biological theories of war, including variations on Malthus and Marx. War is blamed on resource scarcity, population density, class differences, inequality, patriarchy, racism, religion and so on. None of these theories can account for all wars.

British mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson, in his book Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, analyzed wars occurring from the early 19th century through World War II. He found that wars break out in a pattern resembling that of natural disasters like earthquakes and storms.

The implication is that war isn’t something we do, it’s something that happens to us. I reject that fatalistic conclusion, which is contradicted by societies like Sweden and Switzerland, which have chosen to refrain from wars.

My favorite theory of war is Margaret Mead’s. In her 1940 essay “Warfare Is Only an Invention--Not a Biological Necessity,” Mead depicts war as a bad cultural habit that can infect any society, from the simplest to the most complex.

Once war breaks out in a region, it often becomes self-perpetuating, spreading to societies that don’t want it. Because what can you do if your neighbor attacks you? You can flee, surrender or fight back. War begets war.

Mead’s theory has been corroborated by military historian John Keegan, who says the major cause of war is militarism, the vast web of cultural values, customs and institutions dedicated to war.

Mead’s theory is corroborated by Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments. Truly demonic males, who relish killing, are rare. Most men fight in wars because they’re sheep, not wolves. We do what our leaders tell us to do.

Seeing war as a deadly meme has a positive implication: To get rid of war, you don’t have to get rid of resource scarcity, overpopulation, nationalism, capitalism, inequality, patriarchy or other alleged causes of war. You don’t have to eliminate human aggression and greed; that truly would be impossible.

To get rid of war, you just have to get rid of militarism, the part of our culture that promotes war. If you can do that, solving other problems will be much easier, because war is a meta-problem that exacerbates poverty, pollution, patriarchy and other forms of injustice. Demilitarized nations will have far more resources for education, health care, housing and clean energy.

Some social activists say: “No Justice, No Peace” That slogan should be flipped on its head: “No Peace, No Justice.” There can be no justice in a militarized world. Human-rights activists, feminists, environmentalists—everyone working to make the world a better place should be an antiwar activist. Those protesting wars waged by the U.S., Israel and Russia should oppose all war, not just particular wars.

It’s hard to imagine a peaceful world now, as wars rage in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere. Other problems include the rise of authoritarian bullies like Trump. The surge in global military spending to more than $2.7 trillion. The global arms race in weaponized AI.

The U.S. is the single biggest obstacle to a de-militarized world. The U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year on arms and armies, more than twice as much as China and Russia combined. The U.S. is the biggest innovator, maker and seller of weapons. And the U.S. routinely uses force to get its way, giving a moral pass to Russia and other warlike nations.

If the U.S. is the problem, it can also be the solution. The U.S. can initiate global talks on how all nations can move beyond war and militarism. For this to happen, we need a global, grassroots, antiwar movement that rejects fatalism and demands an end to war between nations. This movement would include people on the left and right, progressives, religious conservatives, capitalists, socialists, libertarians, everyone!

Big questions spring to mind: How can nations downsize their militaries safely, so no nation is tempted to take advantage of disarmed adversaries? How can disarmament treaties be verified? How can nuclear weapons be eradicated?

Would individual nations, or perhaps the United Nations, maintain a minimal military force as protection against, say, violent apocalyptic cults? These problems are difficult, but we can surely solve them if we have the will to do so.

It’s hard being an optimist in the U.S. now, when the future of democracy is in doubt. I take comfort in historical events like the collapse of the Soviet Union and of South African’s apartheid state. No one thought those tyrannical regimes would yield their power without a bloodbath, until they did.

Ending war is not a pipe dream. It is absolutely necessary, for moral and practical reasons. The first step toward ending war is believing it’s possible.

Postscript: I am indebted to my student Luke Giangrande for finding these sources on the Pentagon’s support of violent films and games:

https://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/intersect/article/view/2509

https://news.usni.org/2022/05/27/will-top-gun-maverick-boost-navy-recruiting-history-says-probably-not

Further Reading:

The website of World Beyond War has lots of info on the costs of war.

I make the case for a world without war in my book The End of War and in these columns:

Anthropologist Demolishes Claim That War Is in Our Genes

To Abolish Nukes, We Must Abolish War

Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War

Judith Butler on Nonviolence: A Critique

Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!, Is Killing Children Ever Justified?

The Statistics of Lovers’ Quarrels