Military History and the Behavioural Sciences

MILITARY HISTORY AND THE BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCES Gregory Hanlon 2015 Military history and the behavioural sciences Peter Hamish Wilson, one of the foremost scholars of the Thirty Years’ War, reviewing the literature and the historiographical trends speaks to the New Military History of the late 20th century, and the directions scholars might go in order to deepen our understanding of that war in particular, and military history in general. Microhistory was one way, where historians seize on a specific event to study and depict the war as an interrelationship of actions, events and structures shaped by violence. This would introduce the world of emotion and sentiment. He recommends the application of “new cultural history” to “new military history”. This is NOT what I will discuss today: rather, invite people to think about “post-cultural” history, the traits of human behaviour that transcend time and place. The middle decades of the Twentieth Century witnessed a flourishing of popular Marxism. As the belief in the looming Revolution waned, intellectuals intrigued by the multitude of social models switched their focus to culture. People and societies were products of their experiences, and were therefore quite malleable. With the right amount of suggestion and coercion, they could be fashioned into more ideal subjects and society would progress. Most people today probably no longer believe in the Utopian thought of 1970, and now suspect that people and societies are not as malleable as was once thought. Starting in the late 1970s there was a shift in ways of thinking about human behaviour. No single author can claim paternity to the trend, but certainly Edward O Wilson and Richard Dawkins are salient members of a small group of pioneers, who would include the European ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Robert Hinde, Ireneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and a few more, who harked back to some of the behavioural observations of Charles Darwin regarding the behaviour of many kinds of animals, including homo sapiens. These social scientists were struck not so much by the infinite diversity of human practices, but by the uncanny similarities from place to place and over the long duration, and the existence of similar practices among the higher primates who lack language. At first, these ideas met with considerable hostility, but, reinforced by a generation of psychologists, anthropologists and a few sociologists, the early objections to this approach gradually fell away and these ideas have moved into the mainstream of the social sciences. There was a measurable shift towards their ideas over the course of the 1990s when popularizers like Matt Ridley, Robert Wright and Steven Pinker divulgated the general principles to the general public. One of the key books of these years was the anthropologist Donald Brown’s “Human Universals” from 1991, which contained the beginning of an inventory of universal features of human behaviour. This list is gradually being expanded as social scientists change focus from cultural diversity to human unity. One human universal is war, a practice surely older than humanity itself, for some primates in the wild raid and kill their conspecifics in order to seize resources and females. War was much more common in the past than today, but this is not because we have evolved beyond it: after long pauses, war breaks out again, usually for the same ensemble of reasons and motivations. Wars are institutionally sanctioned activities with wide social participation, even when the combattants are relatively small in number. It’s a serious measure, subject to fairly strong oversight. We should be able to study war objectively, as value-free as possible, as anthropologists do. If warfare and killing other humans is a universal potential, then it must be selected for over many generations. It is easy to imagine that a totally submissive society would disappear in short order, overwhelmed by predators. Men participate in wars because as individuals they stand to gain by winning: it is a male reproductive strategy. Before them, chimpanzees co-operated to be disciplined warriors and raiders, taking risks and making sacrifices. Historians and anthropologists have not failed to note the deep chords military competition strikes in boys and men, who learned instinctively to play-fight as children, and who in adulthood bond with each other in anticipation of the danger. (Ghiglieri) The evolutionary psychologists Tooby and Cosmides outlined the specialized cognitive programmes governing the coalitional behaviour that underlies war, but also all co-operation: it is dangerous and costly, but also sought, prized and glorified by many. First and foremost, there is a risk contract by which participants agree to rewards in relation to risks and contributions. The contract must be enforced to dissuade cheaters, however. This contract is governed by the theory of reciprocal altruism, whereby non-kin will take risks on the understanding that the others will reciprocate in future, because both will have some ongoing relationship. (Trivers) Underlying it is some kind of score-keeping, the ability to recognize associates and to remember their actions, which is widespread in a whole range of social animals. (Dugatkin) These psychological mechanisms, which evolved over millions of years, seem to be permanent. (Tby & Cos) “Man is a thinking animal in whom the intellect directs the urge to hunt and the ability to kill.”, writes John Keegan. This war-making ability is made possible by co-operation with other men, something called male bonding. (Tiger) It is a biological propensity, both biologically transmitted and socially learned with each new generation. It existed in pre-hominids just as it exists today, facilitated by a dominance hierarchy, itself a human universal. Primitive bonding is most efficient, among bands of local people or ethnic units. Young males seek validation, and have ‘significant others’ who they need to impress. This whole phenomenon was long ignored by anthropologists until Napoleon Chagnon began to establish a demography of prehistoric Amazonian natives, the Yanomamo, where war pervades every moment and every aspect of existence. In prehistoric societies, material things counted much less than blood kin, which was the basic political institution that gave access to women. The number of able-bodied killers in a group was its expression of importance, the means to protect its women and its chosen territory. Wars sometimes began over the women themselves, but most often they were the result of numerous cumulative grievances, often not very important, expressed in small challenges which escalated into murder. Blood revenge plays a huge role in establishing credibility, in a tribal society with no trace of egalitarianism. Killing paid off: 45% of living adult males participated in at least one killing, and some killed multiple times. They accrued not merely prestige: the killers had twice to three times as many offspring as their more pacific neighbours. Cultural evolution does not innovate so much as to build on a deep core of innate human propensities. (Gat) The psychological mechanisms underlying war expressed by the Yanomamo continue today in recognizable ways. Where there are no higher authorities, revenge and riposte are good strategies, although they may be pushed beyond reason. It is not that there is not enough morality: most violence springs from a sense of justification. Revenge is emotionally very satisfying, not only for those who mete it out, but the groups that identify with the initial victim. We have too much morality (Pinker). We speak of mechanisms in the abstract, but they offer aspects which can be studied empirically. Neurologists have situated aggression in the lower brain, the primitive limbic system, but it is amenable to control by the higher brain through hormones and chemicals which leave traces in the blood. Testosterone plays a role but the hormonal effects tend to be moderated by context, and calculations of risk offset the aggressive instinct. There are moderating influences in parts of the brain that enable fight or flight. The best way of observing it is through the discipline of ethology, rather than anthropology. The first textbook of Human Ethology, that of Eibl-Eibesfeldt dates only from 1986, in English from 1989. Observing animals show us that submissive displays can switch off the winner’s aggression, which helps maintain peace in groups, while allowing for periodic challenges to the status hierarchy. Aggression is an innate disposition, but so are submission and pacification. (De Waal) We also recognize that there are considerable individual differences in aggression, depending upon base levels of serotonin and adrenaline, and that some people, mostly males, are hyper-aggressive. In these predispositions, humans resemble many other social animals. What makes humans a particular species, is in the ability to build coalitions helping kin, friends and neighbours in their conflicts, on the understanding that they will reciprocate. Therefore it is important to build a reputation, an honour indicating ability and reliability to help or to harm others. In these confrontations, combat represents the failure of intimidation and so it is fairly rare. (Costa) Humans also follow near-universal conventions that facilitate the end of hostilities and avoid the total annihilation of the weaker group. Psychologists assume that the mechanisms of mind are basically identical in humans everywhere: and what must be common across space must have been common throughout historical time, dating back to the emergence of homo sapiens. It would be a banner date in the social sciences if it were possible to locate a human population without a set of emotions and motivations obtaining everywhere else. For example, all primate species form status hierarchies, and members compete for high position within them. Younger men are everywhere quicker to arouse, but also have a shorter time preference governing their actions. (Although it might well be possible to BREED humans to reinforce particular traits, like animal husbandry has done for millenia.) Historians have always emphasized how much conscious thought dominated human activity, but non-conscious factors exist too and these promote action over thought. Moreover, we have a set of inherited predispositions, including the ability to infer intentions in other humans – both from their facial expressions and from their behaviour - and to make our plans accordingly. (Cite Costa’s 6 dispositions) Why people should choose to fight is an interesting problem in psychology, for it is a strong experience that leaves traces. The gender aspect is crucial; women have assisted the fighters always, but they do not fight, and they never fight men. Anthropologists know of no society where females raid and abduct men for husbands, no do women give their brothers away in marriage. Armies can take young men, who are fairly malleable, and immerse them into military values that highlight their emotions, and the power of the group. They do not fight for abstract causes, as a rule, but for their own self-respect and under considerable peer pressure. They prove willing to undergo extreme training that sets them apart from other people. Some men will reveal themselves in combat to be natural fighters, who show both mental poise and muscle control, and they will derive prestige from it. However, everyone has a certain threshold at which they quit or refuse the risk. Rethinking Military Experience Why not begin with the reflections of a salient figure in 1970, Michel Foucault, whose writings on the Disciplinary Society shaped a whole generation. Foucault postulated that people’s behaviour was shaped by a set of assumptions expressed widely in the literature of the time: the Discourse. This is rooted in the Humanist Tradition wherein people are blank slates who absorb experiences and ideas like ink on a white blotter. In the 17th and 18th centuries, government and the church learned how to apply pressure on people to make them conform to idealized programmes. The body was one object and target of power, which applied empirical and calculated methods for controlling it, through time management and corporal punishment. This micro-physics of power reached into multiple domains between the end of the Middle Ages and the modern era. Soldiers were something fabricated out of a formless clay, tiny cogs in a machine constructed to obey commands: a ‘dressage’. Foucault’s impact on literary scholars was immense, in part because it gave pride of place to literature, but also because it was not rooted in empirical investigation. He is famous for never having examined in detail the archives of the institutions that he wrote about. Foucault never asked himself why men would volunteer to fight, not only in the absence of higher ideals, but even in the absence of decent pay and a chance for advancement. In part, because he fell victim to the myth of the average man. Some of the real progress in the social sciences can be traced back to research that established the existence of a variety of stable personalities. (mention Jerome Kagan at Harvard). Among the pioneers, the Germano-British psychologist Hans Eysenck. And Marvin Zuckerman, who first established sensation-seeking as a psychological construct in 1964, a heritable trait. Zuckerman is one of those theorists who believe that basic personality traits have their roots in genes and biological mechanisms, and their persisting interactions with the environment. These psychologists study animals as well as humans to determine variations in boldness or explorativeness, which is related to dominance and aggressiveness. The biological origin of these traits is manifest, for castration reduces these activities in male animals. Men with low testosterone levels have low levels of sensation-seeking. (Zuckerman) High sensation-seekers cannot abide boredom and avoid people who are not exciting or interesting. They want novel experiences, and seek intensity. Risk appraisal is a subjective matter for the individual, but men score higher on most scales, peaking in late adolescence and then declining with age. Women judge risks as higher than do men, for many things. The men are also very susceptible to peer behaviour. Engaging in the risky behaviour actually lowers the perceived risk, but there is nevertheless a point of withdrawal, where the anxiety is greater than the appeal of the reward. (Jackass) This trait has enormous importance in military vocations, and many men volunteer for combat to find some exhilaration. Similarly the high-risk corps award status among peers far beyond the material rewards. (Zuckerman) One thick textbook by Italian psychologist Marco Costa begins with the ethological underpinnings of violence and war, to discuss the demands of war on officers and men. There are certain psychological attributes of military leaders armies seek out: extraversion, intelligence, a certain physicality, but also loyalty, sense of duty, respect, obedience, sense of honour and integrity, courage and self-control. The ability to read others’ emotions is also important, for officers must be able to motivate their underlings, who wish to do well, but who also wish to be challenged. (Costa 127) The soldiers themselves should have personality characteristics which will help them thrive, while others must be weeded out as a negative influence. (Costa 295) The soldiers themselves tend to broadcast their identity, striking dominant poses. The soldiering trade however submits them to periods of great stress of multiple kinds, particularly casualties, which increase symptoms of fatigue and demoralization, a sense of vulnerability and neglect. What helps the men cope is a clear hierarchy that reduces tension, internecine quarrelling, and increases the awareness of responsibility at every level. Pity that Foucault never read the writings of a remarkable infantry officer, Charles Ardant du Picq, contemporary of Charles Darwin. Ardant du Picq’s interest in the anthropology of violence was channelled by close observation of men in combat, which he saw as a set of instincts that did not change over time, but that were always expressed within a specific context. He places fear at the centre of his analysis, and how the task of the officer is to understand how to motivate the men to control it with an objective in mind. His questions about combat from Antiquity to his own era are still very relevant today. For him, the combattant who has no individuality or personal motivation is an abstraction of the “homme de cabinet”. Passions and instincts, especially that of self-preservation, have remained throughout time even as weaponry has evolved. Discipline can focus the men upon the enemy for a certain time, but fear eventually takes over and it is central to combat. (Ardant du Picq, 46) The melee of the crowd is the work of painters and poets, for men refuse to lose their order. There is never a shock of two great hordes of men, who engage in combat much more tentatively. The men must follow clear orders, but most of all they watch each other and depend on each other for their survival. They reason too: they know that the more they advance as a group, the likelier it is that the enemy will retreat. Even little gestures of the defenders showing resolve will discourage their attackers from advancing further into danger. Battle is the confrontation of two groups of men but there are never, ever two equal resolutions face to face. Ardant du Picq became the point of departure for military psychology in the late 20th century. The most controversial of those figures is Sam Marshall, part of a Senior Observors board in 1944-1945, studying tactics and firing systems by direct witness, followed by interviews. Only a minority of men in the front line put up any kind of fight, he claimed. Most of the killing was done not by individual soldiers, but by men serving on teams of heavy weapons under close supervision. The technical problem was to involve the soldiers to support their fellow combatants. Battle subjected the soldiers to a roller-coaster of violent emotions: steadiness was not a steady current, but an oscillating wave subject to accidents. Fear and courage were both contagious, especially if the soldiers knew each other well. The men were subject to a number of natural predispositions. First, they had to be told incessantly to spread out, not to bunch together for moral support. Officers had to order soldiers to fire their weapons, but the latter would quickly stop once the officer moved away, just as they would naturally drift rearward if not given active direction. Success itself is disarming, for troops relax after a success and have a sense of extreme well-being wherein laxness sets in. This is called a “parasympathetic backlash”. Marshall claimed to discover that less than 25% of the men used their own weapons in the line, a very surprising finding. In fact, the statistical studies were not part of his book on “Men under Fire”. There is increasing suspicion that he just made them up. The insights of Ardant du Picq and Marshall have since been taken up by Dave Grossman, a Marines psychologist entrepreneur who has published two small but very influential books, “On Killing” and “On Combat”. The first purports to show the existence of a powerful, innate resistance toward killing members of one’s own species, and then discusses the psychological mechanisms that have been deployed over the centuries to overcome that resistance. With the proper conditioning and in the right circumstances, it appears that almost anyone can kill. In the past, the majority of the men on the battlefield avoided killing the enemy, even at the risk of their own life. Like animals, humans deploy posturing actions that are almost always harmless. If posturing fails, the options are fight, flight or submission: and even once fighting is engaged without weapons, the fight is almost never to the death. Submission is a surprisingly common response. Posturing, mock battle and submission are vital to the survival of the species, especially for young males. Most of the participants in the contests are interested in status, display, profit and damage reduction. He says that there is compelling data that this reluctance to kill other men has existed throughout history, especially in face-to-face confrontations, but that traditional history and poetry has concealed this with distortion and lies. Only about 2 percent of men are “natural born killers” who can kill without remorse. It becomes much easier to kill at a distance, however, and over time, team weapons fired from ever farther away inflict an increasing portion of the carnage. But then, if the enemy should turn tail and run away, the inhibitions vanish, triggering the victors’ bloodlust. The carnage in so many battles comes not from the exchange of fire or in face to face encounters, but in the massacre of men fleeing the field. “On Combat” studies the phobias triggered by interpersonal human aggression. The combat encounter very often leads to a loss of bowel and bladder control, but this is only the tip of the iceberg of the physiological and psychological sensations. The body goes through several phases of alertness and mobilization during periods of stress, although good training alleviates that to some extent. Combat introduces auditory and visual distortions of some magnitude, like tunnel vision, where the brain screens out much awareness. Frightening situations shut down forebrain processing, so soldiers sink to the level of their training, which overwhelms the instinct for self-preservation or other emotions like remorse or compassion – for a while. For unless they are following direct orders, soldiers may not shoot to kill. This may not be essential, for posturing is critical to warfare, trying to get the other side to flee, for once the adversary is undermined by fear, recovery is very difficult. (Grossman Combat) Louis Crocq addresses the issue of the psychological trauma of war, which is now front-page news, but which existed in the past as well. It was attested already in the 18th century as “nostalgia”, the psychological suffering of young recruits, often forcibly impressed, who yearned to go home. Napoleonic army surgeons coined the term “syndrome du vent du boulet”, a trauma inflicted by a near-brush with death. (Crocq 36) There were lasting effects of emotional trauma among those whose task was to recover the wounded. These syndromes were discussed increasingly in the 20th century, as pathologies which are a normal reaction to abnormal situations. From the 1950s onward, we speak of stress, a healthy tension that can transform into a crippling pathological reaction. Stress incites us to action, it mobilizes tremendous psychic and physical energy. (Description p.73-74) There are situations of extreme violence whereby men are struck by paralysis, unable to use their weapons, go deaf for minutes, even hours, or let themselves be slaughtered without resisting. The situation can also lead to panicked flight, violent and aimless, where the men are unresponsive to orders or appeals. Most of these hysterical reactions take place just after the fight when the soldier is safe, but most of them cease and rarely last beyond a week. (Crocq) A key prevention of PTSD is the debriefing session, talking about the experience in order to lower the emotional charge. New Military History Military history is a pretty conservative place, whose practitioners sometimes fear committing sociology. Modern social history embraced the military field in the 1960s with the seminal work of André Corvisier – a conservative Catholic. About the same time the German business historian Fritz Redlich published a pair of important books on the economic organization of early modern warfare. Geoffrey Parker launched the first full-blown study of strategic logistics a few years later, which was the first of many path-breaking studies. Most of the academic military history practised since then has been dominated by organization, logistics and finance, aided by an abundance of archives. Battle history, open to the social sciences, emerged soon after. Perhaps the first of the genre was Georges Duby’s Bouvines (1973); one of France’s leading medievalists and a forerunner of the generation of historians focused on Representations. He drew from anthropology to analyze one of the rare big battles fought by an army of French knights under King Philippe. Most of the knights practised the joust for reasons of prestige. Normally war was a vast but morally justified plunder exercise, but armies could consent to fight a battle, fought like a duel on ground of mutual choosing. The heavily armoured knights hoped above all to capture their opposite numbers, protected by their heavy armour. Medieval sources focused on the leaders, however, the passes d’armes and other key events, leaving most of the real fighting in the background. Battles were rare, but they mattered. King Philippe’s grateful knights ransomed hundreds of noble captives in the aftermath of the fight, while the monarch reaped a bountiful store of prestige which made it easier for him to govern. John Keegan’s “Face of Battle” marks the onset of a new era after 1976. Traditional military history focused on generals or on peacetime institutions. Battle history is as old as Herotodus, and the conventions governing it are very powerful. But few books spent much time discussing the prosaic matters of daily campaigning, and almost nobody tried to reconstruct the predicaments of the soldiers committed to the fighting. For the period before the late 19th century, the principal problem is one of sources, for soldiers were not often literate, and generally did not write descriptive letters home in any numbers. Therefore, much of what we know is derived from the men who commanded them. Keegan also derives many of his ideas from American psychologists and sociologists like Marshall, as well as Ardant du Picq before them. To gain a better view of the military experience, we must write military history as a value-free event. The Face of Battle also revealed some passing familiarity with studies of aggression, revealed in the pages discussing the ferocity of fighting in enclosed spaces, but the posturing that tended to dominate elsewhere. Keegan gradually advanced down the path of the behavioural sciences in his later writings, seeing humans as evolved animals packed with instincts that deploy in particular circumstances for an abundance of good reasons. An article sought to elucidate combat motivation, wherein people who voluntarily joined armies must still be induced and coerced to go into battle, and that this coercion must be enforced not only by the officers, but the other men too, for their own survival depends upon the honest participation of their peers. Men are animated by self-preservation, but also self-interest, pride and covetousness too. Combat mobilizes fear, but also cruelty, frenzy and fantasy. Some individuals flourish in combat and their action can be contagious, and they will derive great prestige among the other members of the tribe: for armies consciously inculcate tribalism in its members. This opening to the behavioural sciences has become more common in the United States where there is a large industry of writing on the Civil War, when soldiers did write letters home. Edward J Coss has written a book on the experience of British soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, emphasizing how the basic element was the small group of messmates who were reliant upon each other for their survival. They rewarded helpful behaviour with friendship, but punished selfishness or cowardice with ostracism. He infers from the morale of the soldiers the ebbing and flowing of adrenaline, which created excitement and arousal and fostered a sense of control: or the sense of helplessness fed by surges of cortisol, akin to clinical depression. There were good reasons to sign up in the army for proletarians and farmhands; winter quarters were relatively comfortable, and the food tolerable. The morbidity and mortality of the soldiers was directly related to their nutrition, whose calorie count he tabulates from the regulations: worse than Spanish galley slaves! Poor and insufficient food forced the soldiers to maraud and purloin provisions from civilians, and then share their windfalls with each other. Armies contained a small number of reprobates who committed the most mischief, for most soldiers spurned wanton cruelty. One of the most remarkable books describing the experience of battle has been written by a master’s student in Montpellier, Dorothée Malfoy-Noel, who describes the experience of French soldiers and officers in the gruelling War of the Spanish Succession. It emphasizes the physical setting of the battlefield, the trampled harvests, the diverse vegetation, the effect of the heat and the dust, the thickness of the smoke, the amplification of the sound of drums and horses hooves on dry ground. Finally, war and armies cause morbidity and mortality on a vast scale, among both soldiers and civilians. One of the few studies of the former that explore this in depth is Padraig Lenihan’s article on the catastrophic collapse of the Orangist army in Ireland in 1689, which was devastated by bacillary dysentery on the one hand, and typhus on the other, a traditional affliction in camps. Nor was there any sense of urgency to bury the dead, which is something requiring more attention. There I learned that the first book on cleanliness in camps dates from a Neapolitan physician in Hungary in 1685 who deplored the laxism of soldiers and officers alike. The late 17th century seems to have marked the onset of a slow prise de conscience, although rapid progress would have to await the Pasteurian revolution. Finally, some German paleontologists and archaeologists are exploiting the accidental discovery of skeletal remains of battlefield victims. Forensic examination of these skeletons reveals the kinds of wounds most prominent among these anonymous unfortunates. These remains also permit us to determine the sex, the height, and the age of the soldiers – and isotope analysis will determine also where they came from, given that company rosters of individual soldiers were extremely rare before the 18th century. Battlefield archaeology is barely developed. If we could equip an army of re-enactors with sounding rods and metal detectors and disperse them over the district of an ancient battle, we would probably learn a great deal in a hurry. 14