Skip to content

The End of War

In a new book, John Horgan argues that humans didn’t begin to fight with each other until 10-12,000 years ago. Horgan seeks a scientific explanation for how humans became lethal through culture, not biology, and how we can choose to end it.   
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

What’s the Big Idea?

On September 11, 2001, John Horgan saw the smoke where the Twin Towers had once been visible in the New York skyline, and he wondered what he would tell his kids, aged 6 and 8. In 2012, Horgan has a powerful message: his children will live to see a world without war.

Horgan is no wild-eyed optimistic. True, his belief that the end of war is imminent was based on a moral conviction. But Horgan also points to a body of empirical evidence from scientific investigations of warfare. He writes in a new book called The End of War:

Evidence of lethal group violence dates back not to the emergence of the Homo genus millions of years ago, nor to the emergence of our species hundreds of thousands of years ago, but to less than thirteen thousand years ago, shortly before the dawn of civilization.

In other words, war is a cultural, not a biological phenomenon. 

Watch the video:

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Related
Up Next
Personal Growth
Piercing the Romantic Illusion
Many thoughtful, sensitive people are mature enough to have pierced the romantic illusion and seen through its “promise of perfection” for themselves. The question is, are we spiritually mature enough yet to accept the implications of what we have already seen?