Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Malcolm Potts

Author:Malcolm Potts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781935251842
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Civilians and Combatants

Sometimes, the ingroup mentality of honor and chivalry we encountered in chapter 3 tempers the outgroup dehumanization of the enemy. In 690 B.C., after capturing Jerusalem, the Babylonian king Sennacherib records how he “killed the officials and patricians who had committed the crime [of resisting the Babylonian attack] and hung their bodies on poles outside the city.”389 Those guilty of lesser crimes were imprisoned, but Sennacherib eschewed broader vengeance and released the rest. The Hindu Book of Manu, written in the fourth century B.C., prohibited killing those who were asleep, naked, disarmed, grievously wounded, or fleeing “with hair flying.” In De Officiis, the great Roman orator Cicero wrote, “we must also ensure protection of those who lay down their arms and throw themselves upon the mercy of generals, even though the battering ram has hammered at their walls.”390 Even before The Truce of God, a series of Church decrees in the late ninth and early tenth centuries A.D., collectively called The Peace of God, prohibited attacks on churches, fruit trees, and animals, and decreed excommunication for soldiers who attacked women, merchants, pilgrims, clerics, and even shepherds.391 All these laws, decrees, and opinions did not stop rape, murder, theft, and vengeance in warfare, of course, but the impulse to limit these normal excesses of war clearly has deep roots.

The success or failure of efforts to separate civilians from combatants is also partially linked to the technology used in killing. At the Battle of Gettysburg, there were over 50,000 casualties, but only one woman was killed. When firing muskets and cannons, you can select your enemy. By contrast, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs could not distinguish between the sexes or between military and purely domestic targets, and no such selectivity was possible. (Obviously, there is also a choice of whether to target civilians or not, and the important fact that Gettysburg was a battle between armies composed entirely of men.) The development of smart, or guided, bombs, which are extraordinarily expensive, was of course driven mainly by the need for more accurate destruction of specific targets. But the desire for pinpoint destruction was also in no small part focused on reducing civilian casualties. Whether the ultimate motivation was to avoid negative public perceptions or not, it represented a step toward more ethical conduct of war and away from the ape-like impulse to seek revenge, and to destroy everything in our path.

Capturing enemy soldiers rather than killing them became more common as modern warfare developed. But its roots likely go back all the way to the rules of ape ingroup dominance struggles. The archetypal surrender posture, in which a man walks forward with his hands in the air, may well derive from patterns of submission found among other species of social animals. In a pack of wolves, the submissive animal will roll on its back to expose its vulnerable belly as a sign of submission. Hyenas, which like wolves live in matriarchal groups, exhibit an even more extreme show of

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