A pompous, bigoted, self serving, atheist political tirade with nothing new to add to the debate, save a sophomoric level of inept 'scholarship' in service of a transparent sham of propaganda and sophistry.
In his sad excuse for recycling the propaganda of the radical leftist / gender feminist / homosex lobby, malignantly narcissistic pseudo-pundit David Smith spends far more time telling his readers how objective he intends to be, than actually engaging in any sort of open minded investigation. In doing so, he provides no new insights in to his alleged subject of war, but does open a window on the preening self aggrandizing egoism that fuels the Thought Police in the pathetic farce that passes itself as 'higher' education; and particularly the rigidly narrow and dogmatic agenda of conformity in 'Academentia' better known as the "Pander or Perish / Cannibal Soup" social engineering pogrom.
Consider the following bizarre statement from his book - in regard to his strange mix of Intentional Propagandizing with Factual Misrepresentation in service of Anti-Religious Bigotry, when he purports to discuss the Atheist / Technocrat - National Socialist movement from the book "Mein Kampf" - without mentioning that it was written by a syphilitic coprophile / homo-anal prostitute named Hitler: "The Nazi's built the final solution on Christian foundations..."
Anyone who wants to do a little independent fact checking of this disgraceful pretense of 'scholarship' should check out a copy of "The Pink Swastika" by Abrahms & Lively (provided your library censors haven't burned it), then try watching the History Channel program "Night of the Long Knives", if only to see just how much of the inconvenient truth Smith has Censored.
In fact, while Smith relies on the Nazis (and Spartans / modern Jihadis) for many references, he studiously avoids any discussion of the Homosex nature of these and similar War Mongering Cults, in which EPHEBOPHILIA - the Rape of Boys, was a common feature. This is clearly shown by the fact that the Nazi movement was started by such Homosex "Chicken Hawks" as Ernst Rohm - Leader of the "Sturm Abteilung" (Brown Shirt - Storm Troopers), and particularly because of the Homosex Relations that led Rohm's to hiring a professional 'joy boy' named Hitler as his protege.
At least Smith is correct in stating that: "The human brain did not evolve primarily to discover truth" - at least as concerns his own writings, but then Smith doesn't even do the reader the courtesy of explaining his own manifest political biases, before presenting them as unquestionable truth.
Beyond such pathetic excuses for 'objective' scholarship,Smith uses much of his book to promote his own bizarre brand of pseudo-scientific Absolutist Faith - Atheism. For example, He Firmly and Unambiguously asserts that Humans Have No Souls - End of Discussion!
He then goes on to state that Debate on the matter is simply Not Allowed, because this is an "Exhaustive" finding of a certified academic, and only those in the grip of "Ism-Obia" would dare dissent. Of course he then spoils the spoiled child certainty of his positions by admitting massive ignorance of just about everything else about the nature of existence / eternity / infinity... Still, like a true modern 'liberal'
academic, he doesn't let little things like eternity / infinity to interfere with his righteous trashing of people who believe in God.
In the end - Smith's book only serves to show us the craven and malignant narcissism that is the 'soul' of modern Academentia, and how they have become their own gods - even if nobody else believes in them
Ohso
Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. George Orwell - 1984 On the Thought Police
I want to avoid being too negative here since this is the best book on the incredibly important issue of humanity and war that is available today, in my opinion having read at least 85% of them. I have a paper very much along the lines of this book which both myself and the author regret his having found only after he finished writing it. What complaints I have are not that I disagree with the contents generally but more a frustration with the little errors which are inevitable when covering this much ground and with the lost chance to go further than he does.
In general philosophers tend to do poorly when they turn their hands to evolutionary psychology, but he mostly pulls it off. However, there are notable weaknesses. He does not know enough about evolutionary biology to avoid believing, and repeating, some dumb and illogical ideas heard elsewhere and he does not manage to present speculative notions in a scientific manner, carefully framed. Instead we get statements presented as fact which one can dismiss with a few minutes thought. These will leave his work vulnerable to attack by all of those with far weaker and more illogical, and more ideological, ideas about humanity and war, unfortunately.
A few examples then. When discussing chimpanzees and bonobos, their peaceful cousins, he states that "A lot hangs on whether the trunk from which the two branches grew was chimpanzee-like or bonobo-like....if the prehistoric ape that gave rise to the human and chimpanzee-bonobo lines was more like the sensual, affable bonobo than the violent, patriarchal chimpanzee, this might indicate that the heart of human nature is more gentle than truculent."
There is no logic to this assertion. If the common ancestor was peaceful, still we see that chimpanzees evolved in these five million years to not be peaceful anymore and there is no reason not to think that humans could not also do so. It also may be that the common ancestor was unlike all three of it's descendants in terms of these behaviors. Sussman makes this same error in Man the Hunted asserting that what our ancestors were like behaviorally millions of years ago is of some import to the question of what we are like now. We are talking about creatures with brains a third as large as our weighing up to 60lbs when adults. We are different from them in hundreds of other ways and there is no reason to an asserion that this trait must have remained fixed despite so many other changes.
Late in the book he asserts a connection between exposure to unfamiliar germs and xenophobia, saying that "When human beings lived in small isolated groups, encounters with strangers were potentially threatening because you might not have acquired a resistance to the germs carried by the outsider." There is a lot wrong here. First, our ancestors were not so isolated as he seems to imagine and second, we are pretty welcoming of strangers. It is the known outsiders who are in danger. Anthropologists have wandered into thousands of isolated societies without being killed most of the time. In fact we are attracted most to those whose immune systems differ from our own to the greatest extent, and some reproduction with outsiders is needed to maintain the genetic health of a human group. Furthermore, cultural exchange with outsiders is known to be important to maintain and advance the group culture and knowledge. Highly isolated groups are known to lose their knowledge of various technology over time.
There are other examples but the general issue is that some things he did not think through for himself and there are lots of others out there quite happy to lead you astray, and they did.
Still he gets a lot right including things that trip up most others, dismissing the connection between hunting and aggression for example. And as far as he goes his general argument is sound and in my view correct.
He sees the paterns of labelling enemies as threat animals and so on and rightly concludes that this helps us justify killing them psychologically, not a hugely novel insight but he does go the next step to say that there is an evolved component to this. In my work I assert that this is because we are using our evolved altruism to compel each other to go to war, he stops simply with the view that this helps us not see the other we kill as human and become repulsed by our own actions.
He also never mentions the quite commonly expressed sentiment that soldiers volunteer for war for nation and ideals but once there they fight for each other and nothing else. They form very strong bonds with each other and they kill to keep their brothers in arms from being killed.
Finally I was puzzled by his failure to mention those who die to save others in combat. These actions also seem to indicate a strong altruistic component to the psychology of war, in my view.
A good effort and I do recommend this book. The philosophy side is very strong and there was much there I had not found. But those of you with an interest should not stop here. If you want my own fairly similar take on it (the author said "What a usefull paper!") then you can find it here http://theroadtopeace.blogspot.com/
