Can War Be Eliminated?

by Christopher Coker

(Polity, £9.99)

TO SAVE readers the bother of grappling with this engaging but poorly argued polemic in favour of war, I can reveal that Professor Coker’s answer to his question posed by the book’s title is “yes.”

His argument — if his collection of assertion and anecdote may be distinguished as such — is that war serves an evolutionary purpose and that attempts to eliminate it will cause greater havoc than accepting its inevitability.

War may be hell, he acknowledges, but it’s better than the alternative.

He quotes GK Chesterton’s saying: “War is not the best way of settling differences but it is the only way of preventing them being settled for you.”

Chesterton wrote that in 1915, when he could also joke that “marriage is an adventure, like war,” before the mounting casualty lists brought home to every British village the reality of industrialised slaughter.

Coker quotes too the 4th-century Roman historian Vegetius: “If you want peace, prepare for war,” ignoring the fact that WWI was at least partly a consequence of the preceding arms race, which set Europe’s royal cousins into fratricidal strife.

He describes Vegetius’s oxymoron as a dialectic.

Of course it is nothing of the sort, at least not in the sense that either Socrates or Marx used the term.

He also cites Thomas Hobbes, who described early human life as “nasty, brutish and short,” but in his Leviathan the 17th-century philosopher was predicting what would be the consequence of untrammelled democracy.

In repeating the popular misunderstanding of Hobbes’s Of The Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity And Misery, Prof Coker belies his own academic pretensions, for he must surely have realised that such misquotation serves neither rhyme nor reason.

His misuse of the term “dialectical” is his only — oblique — reference to the Marxist analysis of his subject and his approach is ahistorical as well as asynchronous.

He speaks frequently of evolution, misapplying the term in ways that make no reference to theories of natural selection.

But he makes no reference to social evolution, the way in which territorial conflicts in early times were a necessary outgrowth of agricultural surplus, as the hunter-gatherer collectives mutated into the earliest class societies.

One does not have to be a pacifist to throw down in disgust this farrago of poorly argued invective. It is an entertaining read, but in the end it’s “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare’s Macbeth knew more about war than this little book reveals.