What is war good for? As Edwin Starr's 1970 Motown hit "War"[1] says, "absolutely nothing." Vietnam veteran and novelist Tim O'Brien has written that "war is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead."[2] In his four-part argument, Ian Morris (Stanford Univ.) claims that war has created larger, better organized societies that have reduced the risk of violent death; that, while terrible, war has created more peaceful societies; that, in creating more peaceful societies, war has made us richer; and that, having brought these boons, war is now making further war impossible (7–10, 208–9, 334, 393). By the 2040s, Morris believes, the population of planet Earth will at last enjoy tranquillity and peace (389).

All this is a great deal to ponder over. Morris tackles his subject in a densely packed, wide-ranging discussion of war from earliest times up to today and tomorrow. To make the nature of war comprehensible to a wide audience, as he has done, is most laudable. His ideas and interpretations are engaging and expressed in clear and vigorous prose. The emphasis, however, on war as the essential unifying human activity is too reductive (what of trade and commerce, religious belief, etc.?) and calls to mind Archilochus's famous adage: "the fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog one—but a big one."[3]

More troubling is the underlying elitist, "WEIRD" (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) perspective (320), which offers fortune to too many hostages. Few who have lost someone in war will easily accept a "war is good" thesis. This applies to warriors and soldiers as well as to their families and friends. The consequences of witnessing death vitiate any "good" one might imagine coming from war. And, too, considerations of the personal voice and the testimony of survivors of war and violence are omitted here, as are issues of remembrance and memorialization. Morris contends that such things, which might constrain his thesis, answer "only part of the question of what war is good for [since] war is about more than what it feels like to live through it" (21). Of course, historians select the evidence to support their arguments, but to assert that "war is good" and then elide the voices of survivors is prejudicial and reflects the judgment of one who writes about war but does not really know it.[4]

In chapter 1, "The Wasteland? War and Peace in Ancient Rome," Morris focuses on the apparent order and peace that Roman rule brought to the Mediterranean world. There were (rarely audible) dissenters like the British chieftain Calgacus, who uttered the famous verdict: "The Romans make a desert and call it peace."[5] But the ruling elite, like Cicero in letters to his brother, claimed that Roman rule brought security and prosperity. Similar sentiments have echoed through time in the rationales for the British Raj and the Pax Americana. Many in the Roman world did enjoy prosperity, as Morris assures us (42–43), but, on the other side of the ledger, he takes little notice of the plight of millions of destitute urban poor or slaves suffering in the fields, mines, mills, and arenas of the empire. The brutality of Roman rule was on full display in the Jewish War (AD 66–73), as Morris duly notes (38), but he does not mention that it inspired the hatred behind the German uprising that destroyed three legions[6] in the Teutoburg Forest (AD 9). Nor does he cite the famous "Asian Vespers" (88–87 BC), when an uprising orchestrated by Mithradates VI ended in the slaughter of many thousands of Italians[7] living in the Aegean region.

Morris tacks on to his discussion of ancient Rome an appraisal of native life in the South Pacific and South America, based on the work of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Napoleon Chagnon, respectively. His purpose is to develop his argument that in the era before civilization produced Leviathan, or "Big Government," violence was much more prevalent, taking a higher percentage of lives than did even the twentieth century's World Wars (58–59). But this argument is tenuous and there are contrary positions.[8]

Chapter 2, "Caging the Beast: The Productive Way of War," examines ancient Roman, Chinese, and other empires that grew and flourished in the so-called "Lucky Latitudes."[9] Here Morris adds the ideas of "circumscription" or "caging," developed by social scientists R. Carneiro and M. Mann in the 1970s and 80s; these concern the response societies must make in the face of more powerful enemies: to stand, fight, and die, seek the protection of others, or run away (78–81). He concludes that war and empire have together made "humanity safer and richer" (93), while reducing violent deaths to something between the 10–20 percent of the prehistoric era and the 1–2 percent of modern times (109).

Although Morris admits that the statistics he cites for hunter-gatherer cultures are often guess work (87, 103, 109), he yet remains confident that civilization has made the world gentler and kinder and will continue to do so. But the percentages he suggests for pre-civilized humankind are just short of meaningless in the absence of hard data.[10] Percentages for "civilized" times are hardly more useful. To say that "only" 1–2 percent of the world's population died as a result of war in the twentieth century (100–200 million of 2.5 billion) is misleading. A more relevant figure would be the percent of participants who died in those wars (8).[11] I would argue it is more likely that civilization has enabled human beings to become much more efficient killers.[12]

Chapter 3, "The Barbarian Strikes Back," ranges broadly—and breathlessly—across time and place: it considers the travails of Romans repelling barbarian assaults from Britain to the Eurasian steppes, Muslim raiding parties everywhere from France to Pakistan, Charlemagne's Carolingian empire fending off Vikings and Magyars, the Crusading era, and conflicts in Africa, Japan, and the New World! Morris is reduced to making generalizations about, for instance, overall patterns in history (132–33) and the influence of feudalism.[13]

In chapter 4, "The Five Hundred Years' War: Europe (Almost) Conquers the World, 1415–1914," the author acknowledges that "as always, the defeated fared less well than the victors, and in many places colonial conquest had devastating consequences" (168), but sees a silver lining in the European conquerors' suppression of local wars, banditry, and piracy, which made their subjects' lives safer and richer. Mahatma Gandhi's famous assessment of western civilization, then—that it would be a good idea—seems a surprising verdict.

Chapter 5, "Storm of Steel: The War for Europe, 1914–1980s," treats the causes and means of European self-destruction in the twentieth century. The very analytic discussion here often veers into highly dubious political theory. Morris too readily assumes, for example, the rationality of the ideas and ambitions of Adolf Hitler.[14]

Chapter 6, "Red in Tooth and Claw: Why the Chimps of Gombe Went to War," revisits themes touched on earlier, especially the underlying nature of human beings, as revealed by our nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees. The chapter begins with an astute anthropological survey of human origins, in which, however, "war" does not figure much. Strikingly absent is any reference to the seminal work of anthropologist Robin Dunbar, whose identification of the "Dunbar Number" linked the size of the first settled communities to the size of the human neocortex.[15]

In chapter 7, "Last Best Hope on Earth: American Empire, 1989–?," Morris summarizes his arguments and theories, with a stress on both war and geopolitics.[16] Several of his historiographic assumptions about "the future of war in history" are unsatisfactory.[17] The claim that "history repeats itself" (339, 364) is the sort of bromide one expects to find in popular accounts of the past, not in a work of scholarship; and the idea that history is at all concerned with the future is groundless. As historian Richard Evans has noted, "it is always a mistake for a historian to predict the future";[18] his reminder that life is full of surprises baldly understates the case. In this instance, Morris is writing journalistic political science, and his theory of history is no more viable than any other.

Morris concludes with a cheery prediction that, by the decade of the 2040s, all will be well in the world: "war has made the planet peaceful and prosperous; so peaceful and prosperous … that war has almost, but not quite, put itself out of business" (389). The West has heard this before. In 1899, Warsaw financier I.S. Bloch argued in detail in his Is War Now Impossible? that a general European war amounted to suicide and was impossible to conceive.[19] In 1914, that forecast would have seemed premature; in 1918, a prescient though tragic joke. Civilized life comes easily in times of plenty, but what happens in a world of shrinking resources and growing populations, when the income gap between haves and have-nots, as in the United States today, threatens to become insupportable? Civilization's veneer is frightfully thin. Modern evolutionary biology and psychology reveal the truth of Thucydides's observation that "war is a violent teacher" (3.82.2) in his classic account of the civil strife that wracked Corcyra, a prosperous community transformed by war.

In a time of ISIS and ISIS-inspired beheadings, suicide bombings, and the killing of civilians from Syria and Iraq to the West Bank and Gaza, Mexico, much of Africa, and Ferguson, Missouri, when violence seems to inspire only retribution, it is passing hard to imagine that the 2040s will see the triumph of civilization and the eclipse of war and violence among humankind.