Strategy as Biology: Power, Violence, and the Evolutionary Wiring of War

Hierarchies establish a status quo by ritualizing inequalities. Two baboons encounter something good—say, a spot shaded from the sun. Without stable dominance relations, there's a potentially injurious fight. Likewise over the figs in a fruiting tree an hour later, and for the chance to be groomed by someone after that, etc. Instead, fights rarely occur, and if a subordinate forgets his status, a "threat yawn"—a ritualistic display of canines—from the dominant male usually suffices.

Fighting every contest to the bitter end is a poor strategy for an animal, because chances are its adversary has evolved to do the same thing. A fight is costly to the loser, because it will be injured or dead and hence worse off than if it had relinquished the prize from the start. It also can be costly to the victor because he may sustain injuries in the course of victory. Both parties would have done better if they had assessed who was likely to win beforehand and if the underdog simply conceded. So animals size each other up to see who's bigger, or brandish their weapons to see whose are more dangerous, or wrestle until it's clear who's stronger. Though only one animal wins, both walk away. The loser concedes because he can seek his fortunes elsewhere or bide his time until circumstances are more propitious. When animals size each other up, they evolve ways to exaggerate their size: ruffs, balloons, manes, bristling, rearing, and bellowing, whose low pitch shows off the size of the resonating cavity in the animal's body. If a fight is costly and a winner unpredictable, the faceoff may be decided by an arbitrary difference such as who arrived first, in the same way that human rivals may settle a dispute quickly by flipping a coin. If the animals are closely matched and the stakes are high enough (such as a harem), an all-out fight may ensue, sometimes to the death.

People everywhere strive for a ghostly substance called authority, cachet, dignity, dominance, eminence, esteem, face, position, preeminence, prestige, rank, regard, repute, respect, standing, stature, or status. People go hungry, risk their lives, and exhaust their wealth in pursuit of bits of ribbon and metal. The economist Thorstein Veblen noticed that people sacrificed so many necessities of life to impress one another that they appear to be responding to a "higher, spiritual need." Status and virtue are close in people's minds, as we see in words like chivalrous, classy, courtly, gentlemanly, honorable, noble , and their opposites ill-bred, low-class, low-rent, mean, nasty, rude, shabby , and shoddy . When it comes to the trifles of personal appearance, we express our admiration for the tasteful using ethical metaphors such as right, good, correct , and faultless , and censure the tacky with tones usually reserved for sin—an attitude that the art historian Quentin Bell dubbed "sartorial morality."

Is this any way to build an intelligent organism? Where do these powerful motives come from?

chest-thumping, having a chip on his shoulder, drawing a line in the sand, throwing down the gauntlet , and pissing contest all denote an action that is inherently meaningless but provokes a contest for dominance. That is a sign that we are dealing with a category that is very different from predatory, practical, or instrumental violence. Even though nothing tangible is at stake in contests for dominance, they are among the deadliest forms of human quarrel. At one end of the magnitude scale, we have seen that many wars in the Ages of Dynasties, Sovereignty, and Nationalism were fought over nebulous claims to national preeminence, including World War I. At the other end of the scale, the single largest motive for homicide is "altercations of relatively trivial origin; insult, curse, jostling, etc."

In their book on homicide, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson advise that "the participants in these 'trivial altercations' behave as if a great deal more is at issue than small change or access to a pool table, and their evaluations of what is at stake deserve our respectful consideration."

Two aspects of the decline of violence have profound implications for our understanding of human nature: (1) the violence; (2) the decline. The last six chapters have shown that human history is a cavalcade of bloodshed. We have seen tribal raiding and feuding that kills a majority of males, the disposal of newborns that kills a majority of females, the staging of torture for vengeance and pleasure, and killings of enough kinds of victims to fill a page of a rhyming dictionary: homicide, democide, genocide, ethnocide, politicide, regicide, infanticide, neonaticide, filicide, siblicide, gynecide, uxoricide, mariticide, and terrorism by suicide. Violence is found throughout the history and prehistory of our species, and shows no signs of having been invented in one place and spread to the others.

At the same time, those chapters contain five dozen graphs that plot violence over time and display a line that meanders from the top left to the bottom right. Not a single category of violence has been pinned to a fixed rate over the course of history. Whatever causes violence, it is not a perennial urge like hunger, sex, or the need to sleep.

The two triggers of the Civilizing Process—the Leviathan and gentle commerce—are related. The positive-sum cooperation of commerce flourishes best inside a big tent presided over by a Leviathan. Not only is a state well suited to provide the public goods that serve as infrastructure for economic cooperation, such as money and roads, but it can put a thumb on the scale on which players weigh the relative payoffs of raiding and trading. Suppose a knight can either plunder ten bushels of grain from his neighbor or, by expending the same amount of time and energy, raise the money to buy five bushels from him. The theft option looks pretty good. But if the knight anticipates that the state will fine him six bushels for the theft, he'd be left with only four, so he's better off with honest toil. Not only do the Leviathan's incentives make commerce more attractive, but commerce makes the job of the Leviathan easier. If the honest alternative of buying the grain hadn't been available, the state would have had to threaten to squeeze ten bushels out of the knight to deter him from plundering, which is harder to enforce than squeezing five bushels out of him. Of course, in reality the state's sanctions may be the threat of physical punishment rather than a fine, but the principle is the same: it's easier to deter people from crime if the lawful alternative is more appealing.

In contrast to the centuries of food fights among philosophers, contemporary Hobbes-versus-Rousseau is about actual data. Some of it is archaeological, where researchers have sought to determine the prevalence and antiquity of warfare from the archaeological record.

Predictably, half of each conference on the subject consists of definitional squabbles. Is "war" solely organized and sustained violence between groups? Does it require weapons? A standing army (even if only seasonally)? An army with hierarchy and chain of command? If fighting is mostly along lines of relatedness, is it a vendetta or clan feud instead of a war?

Fractured Bones For most archaeologists the operational definition has been streamlined to numerous people simultaneously meeting violent deaths. In 1996 the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois synthesized the existing literature in his highly influential War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage , ostensibly showing that the archaeological evidence for war is broad and ancient.

A similar conclusion comes in the 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined , by Harvard's Steven Pinker.

Even when there is extinction of an entire species after some extreme event, no big deal, it is part of the game. This is still evolution at work, as those species that survive are fittest and take over from the lost dinosaurs—evolution is not about a species, but at the service of the whole of nature.

But note that evolution likes randomness only up to some limit.

If a calamity completely kills life on the entire planet, the fittest will not survive. Likewise, if random mutations occur at too high a rate, then the fitness gain might not stick, might perhaps even reverse thanks to a new mutation: as I will keep repeating, nature is antifragile up to a point but such point is quite high—it can take a lot, a lot of shocks. Should a nuclear event eradicate most of life on earth, but not all life, some rat or bacteria will emerge out of nowhere, perhaps the bottom of the oceans, and the story will start again, without us, and without the members of the Office of Management and Budget, of course.

Is it easy to write on a Heathrow runway?—Try to get the Pope to ban your work—How to beat up an economist (but not too hard, just enough to go to jail)

My own domain dependence was revealed to me one day as I was sitting in the office of David Halpern, a U.K. government advisor and policy maker. He informed me—in response to the idea of antifragility—of a phenomenon called post-traumatic growth, the opposite of post-traumatic stress syndrome, by which people harmed by past events surpass themselves. I had never heard about it before, and, to my great shame, had never made the effort to think of its existence: there is a small literature but it is not advertised outside a narrow discipline. We hear about the more lurid post-traumatic disorder, not post-traumatic growth, in the intellectual and so-called learned vocabulary. But popular culture has an awareness of its equivalent, revealed in the expression "it builds character." So do the ancient Mediterranean classics, along with grandmothers.

Intellectuals tend to focus on negative responses from randomness (fragility) rather than the positive ones (antifragility). This is not just in psychology: it prevails across the board.

to navigate the Triad to see how the ideas of the book apply across domains. Simply, in a given subject, when you discuss an item or a policy, the task is to find in which category of the Triad one should put it and what to do in order to improve its condition. For example: the centralized nation-state is on the far left of the Triad, squarely in the fragile category, and a decentralized system of city-states on the far right, in the antifragile one. By getting the characteristics of the latter, we can move away from the undesirable fragility of the large state. Or look at errors. On the left, in the fragile category, the mistakes are rare and large when they occur, hence irreversible; to the right the mistakes are small and benign, even reversible and quickly overcome. They are also rich in information. So a certain system of tinkering and trial and error would have the attributes of antifragility. If you want to become antifragile, put yourself in the situation "loves mistakes"—to the right of "hates mistakes"—by making these numerous and small in harm. We will call this process and approach the "barbell" strategy.