We maintain ourselves as a single species by maintaining gene flow continuously through space and time. That is, we remain capable of mutual inter-breeding ( the definition of a species) by practising mutual inter-breeding. As usual, practice makes perfect, and its absence would lead to splintering and decay.

We could segregate into pure races and eventually varieties by in-breeding, and these could in time become separate species no longer capable of coalescing back together. One shudders to think what that would do to domination and oppression structures, slavery and warfare. Somehow, fortunately or by an invisible hand, we have been driven to avoid this catastrophe, by our wandering and philandering nature.

Anthropologists still argue whether modern humans (I dislike the modifier “sapiens”, which is so prideful and presumptious, and probably misleading) originated in a single place (probably Africa, or even from a single woman) and diffused from there, or whether they originated in several places in parallel, almost simultaneously. The same question (single origination plus diffusion, versus multiple origination plus separate growth in place) can be asked about languages, about myths and fairy story themes, about religious ideas, and in fact about any cultural construct. As we have seen in the first paragraph, it applies to biological constructs as well.

One of these cultural constructs is war. It is obviously a cultural invention, not a natural condition, since animals do not have it. (There is aggression and violence among animals, though rather rarely against members of their own species; but it is never organized slaughter on a mass scale.) Was there a single original locus from which war spread to other parts of the world, or did war originate in several places at once by an independent development?

The latter would imply that war followed from certain social pre-conditions, such as the agricultural revolution which produced a surplus of food so that some people could specialize in other pursuits; and the introduction of metals, especially iron, from which more effective weapons could be made. Agriculture would give us possessions to defend or capture as well as a food surplus so that a class of professional warriors could arise. As William Eckhardt states (“Wars, Empires and Civilizations”), we had something to fight for and something to fight with (the new iron weapons).

In his long-range study of war, Claudio Cioffi-Revila concludes that war originated independently in three locations: Middle East, Far East, and Meso-America. These places were not in touch with each other in the remote past, but underwent similar cultural development in parallel. (This is somewhat similar to convergent evolution: different classes of animals developing similar adaptations to the same environments, even though their evolutionary origin differs.) Separate loci of origin do not necessarily contradict Eckhardt’s theory on how war originated from socio-economic conditions, since agriculture and iron metallurgy existed in all three of these places. However, these conditions also existed in some other places which did not sprout war. In other words, agricultural surplus and iron weapons are necessary, but not sufficient to give rise to the phenomenon of war. However, once invented in these three places, the war habit diffused everywhere, until it became a universal human practice

Now we are faced with the task of abandoning this institution of war, because it has become too destructive by the invention of technologies way beyond iron metallurgy. Even hard-headed cost-benefit analysis indicates that defending or capturing possessions is not worth the price of total destruction. But unfortunately holy wars for religious or ideological reasons do not follow the rules of rational cost-benefit analysis. On the other hand, humanitarian and moral considerations are not totally absent from human thinking either, and some of these flow from these same religious and ideological systems. It will be of vital importance to see which of the Janus-like streams of religious thought humanity will follow.

Will the abolition of war (if that is the shape of the future) come from a single place or crucial event (some say a super-serious crisis or a good scare), or will it arise spontaneously in parallel in several places, or even, by some kind of a “Hundredth Monkey” mechanism, all over at once like a super-contagion? At this time (1989-1993) of very rapid changes in world political conditions, anything seems suddenly possible.

Bruce Russett’s and Kenneth Boulding’s idea of zones of stable peace, as well as Karl Deutsch’s concept of a security community (reminiscent of the Palme Report phrase “common security”) points to several locations from which war abolition might diffuse: Western Europe, Scandinavia, North America, Australia-New Zealand; these are the industrialized countries of the “North”, even though A. and NZ are hardly North geographically. By no means has the abolition of war spread all over, for we still have zones of stable war (“shatterbelts”) along which war can spread and where war is endemic; along the continuous chain of contiguous nations (called “the Fuse” by A. and H. Newcombe) which runs like a giant political earthquake fault from Southern through Eastern Africa through the Middle East and South Asia to Southeast Asia. The end of the cold war in the North has not abolished war in the South, only somewhat re-arranged it.

It is impossible to predict or even perceive the direction of historical development while we are in the midst of it. The habit of nonviolent people power is certainly diffusing, from Gandhi’s India to Norway and Denmark under Nazi rule to Black America and M.L King to Prague under Soviet occupation to Poland and Solidarity to Iran’s overthrow of the Shah to the Philippines overthow of Marcos, then in rapid succession to the fall of the Berlin wall and the East European revolutions (most of them “velvet” except Romania) of November-December 1989 and the failed Soviet coup of 1991. Diffusion can be much more rapid now than ever, since we live in an age of almost instant global communication. The human species is united now by more than just gene flow; also by the “bit flow” of techno-communications and the “meme flow” of ideas.

In the world unification direction (the other major model of permanent peace besides principled nonviolence), the U.N. is growing stronger, but perhaps coming under U.S. domination and becoming more war-like in its peace-keeping. (We hear daily of Somalian civilians killed by U.N. peace-keepers, as well as vice versa.) While universal and regional supranational agencies grow in number and stature (quantitative growth), they are lagging in the benefits they confer on the world and the effectiveness of their performance (qualitative deficit). There is a “democratic deficit” as well – the world’s people have no direct output through elections to a world body.

Also, there are trends in the opposite direction: (1) the splintering of previously unified national federations, such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps soon Canada (the latter two, fortunately, being “velvet” or nonviolent); and (2) separatist movements in many other places: the Kurds, the Basques, the native peoples and aborigines in the Americas and Australia, the Siberian peoples of Russia.

It is not entirely clear if all the globalizing movements are good and all the splintering movements are bad. Trading blocs like Maastricht and NAFTA may be mixed blessings, and splintering of nations is part of the movement toward democracy (which is associated with peace) as well as of nationalism (which is associated with war). Pehaps both movements, up or down the size scale of socio-political units, are only steps in the gradual abolition of nation-states – a development that would certainly prove beneficial, since wars have been traditionally waged by states.

How can we, deliberately and consciously, and also rationally if possible, promote and speed up this historical development toward the abolition of war? There are several indications: (1) Eckhardt would say by eliminating oppression, domination, exploitation, inequality and imperialism, since the development of all these tendencies accompanied the origination of war in the dim distant past. (2) By widening the regions of stable peace and shrinking the areas of stable war; but that is more easily said than done, for these have developed by some kind of quasi-natural, probably semi-chaotic process whose dynamics are not yet understood. (3) By promoting the spread of nonviolent people-power and civil society – though these could sometimes be used counterproductively (like any power), e.g. for racist ends. (4) By improving the peaceful qualities and effectiveness of international organizations, while still adding a few more to the quantity, such as a U.N. People’s Chamber, an International Criminal Court, and an environmental agency with real power. (5) Eventually these must be coordinated by some kind of a rationally organized world government, responsible to the world’s people in a democratic way.

What sings in my head is the old church hymn that we sang while joining hands as we walked from the inter-faith service to the annual peace walk in Hamilton, Ontario: “Peace is flowing like a river, flowing through you and me, peace is flowing like a river, setting all the captives free.”