“War and Human Nature”, So the Cannon Keeps Thundering

In recent years, many of us Europeans have enjoyed a great privilege: that of distancing war from the confines of our existence. We are, in fact, among the rare generations in world history not to have experienced conflicts on our territories and we have almost been able to persuade ourselves that war was an obsolete legacy, something to be relegated to books or film sequences. However, war, this monstrous and devastating entity that has accompanied humanity since ancient times, has continued to rage in many regions of the Earth and then arrived, in recent times, at our doorstep. Willingly or unwillingly, we have noticed that fighting and dying in battle remain events of terrible actuality, even if for now – but are we sure forever? – these events occur beyond the confines of our safety.

Thousands of years ago, the Bible wrote: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Millennia later, the word is still in arms and perhaps the time has come to reflect on this phenomenon that has always accompanied us human beings, freeing us from some preconceptions that probably help us to feel better, but do not serve to prepare us for the global disorder we are experiencing.

This is the proposal of Gianluca Sadun Bordoni, full professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Teramo, contained in the essay Guerra e natura umana (Il Mulino, 2025, pp. 300, also e-book). Bordoni starts from two simple observations. The first is almost banal: the winds of war that have returned to threaten Europe, rekindling the conflict even between the great powers, have once again called into question the idea that humanity was now capable of overcoming the horror of great conflicts forever, and that violence was in irreversible decline. In the meantime, the revolution underway in the biological and anthropological sciences seems to radically change the knowledge of the origins and evolution of our species, increasingly recognizing in war a behavior with deep roots in our natural history. Proof of this is the many findings that testify to how war was "invented" by our ancestors in very distant times, in the most archaic prehistory, in an era, that is, preceding the development of organized and hierarchical civilizations as we understand them today.

Seen in this light, war ceases to be a disastrous cultural invention, devoid of evolutionary foundations, nor are there objective historical trends that move towards its overcoming in the civil history of humanity. In short, human progress is not enough to free us from the scourge of war, as demonstrated by the entire history of the twentieth century and what has been happening in recent years. This does not mean that war is innate in our species or that human beings are intrinsically evil or amoral. Human beings undertake war with the belief that they can gain an advantage from it.

We are neither 'noble savages', as Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed in the eighteenth century, nor 'killer apes', according to the theory of Robert Ardrey exposed in "African Genesis" in 1961, who attributed to our nature a genetic predisposition to violence. The truth is that we are opportunists, both as individuals and as communities; sometimes with valid motivations, more often wrong. In simple terms: when a community perceives that it has an advantage over its neighbors, it is led to pursue its ambitions and impose its decisions. If it cannot do so through peaceful means, it may decide to adopt military force. In this case, the adversary is forced to defend itself, in turn, by resorting to armed resources. Offensive war is therefore an opportunistic act, while defensive war is a necessity: any organized society cannot refuse to face an external attack.

This awareness requires a radical change of paradigm, anthropological-political, which requires an exploration without preconceptions, capable of addressing with adequate awareness the political and intellectual challenges we face. Expelling war from our way of thinking, as happens in the West, can, in fact, lead us to get into trouble. Removing a problem does not equate to solving it; it only means being unprepared when it becomes so serious and looming that it cannot be relegated to the margins of our thinking and actions. It is necessary, today more than ever, to think about war in order to limit it, to prevent it from turning into a nightmare capable of destroying our society and our way of life.