20240815|为何人类历史上战争不断

Culture

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War throughout history

历史中的战争

Fight club

战斗俱乐部

Why War? By Richard Overy.

《为何有战争？》理查德·奥弗里著。

In 1931 the League of Nations offered Albert Einstein, a physicist and vocal pacifist, the chance to choose a correspondent on a subject of his choice.

1931年，国际联盟为阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦（物理学家和积极发声的和平主义者）提供了一个机会，让他选择一位通信者并就他选择的主题进行讨论。

He opted for Sigmund Freud, an Austrian psychologist, as his partner.

爱因斯坦选择了奥地利心理学家西格蒙德·弗洛伊德作为他的讨论搭档。

"Is there a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?" was the question.

讨论的问题是“有没有一种方法可以使人类免受战争的威胁？”。

Freud was not optimistic; he thought that in every human there was a "death drive", an impulse to violence and destruction.

弗洛伊德并不乐观，他认为每个人心中都有“死亡驱力”，这是一种倾向于暴力和破坏的冲动。

The slim pamphlet emerging from their exchange, "Why War?", makes for heavy reading.

从两人之间的交流脱胎而来的是一本薄薄的小册子《为何有战争？》，但读起来却很沉重。

Since then, at least five books with the same title have been published.

自那以后，至少有五本同名书籍已出版。

Richard Overy, a British historian of the second world war, has now written a sixth, which skilfully draws together nearly 100 years of scientific and historical scholarship.

理查德·奥弗里是研究第二次世界大战的英国历史学家，他现在写了第六本同标题的书，这本书巧妙地汇集了近100年的科学和历史学术研究。

His goal is to understand the mechanisms that have embedded warfare throughout human history.

他的目标是理解让战争嵌入整个人类历史的机制。

Although the answers, he finds, have remained "contested, fractured and frustratingly elusive", there is one undeniable constant: that human groups from the earliest times to the present have resorted to collective, lethal violence against other groups when prompted by ambition, fear, need or prejudice.

虽然他发现答案仍然是“有争议的、分裂的、令人沮丧地难以捉摸的”，但有一个不可否认的不变因素：从最初到现在，人类群体在野心、恐惧、需求或偏见的驱使下，会对其他人类群体采取集体的、致命的暴力行为。

To bring some shape to the debate, Mr Overy has split his critique of the academic literature into two sections.

为了使辩论更有条理，奥弗里将他对学术文献的评论分为两部分。

The first covers science: anthropology, biology, ecology and psychology.

第一部分涵盖了科学研究：人类学、生物学、生态学和心理学。

War can be explained as hard-wired into people through evolution (a Darwinian struggle for survival), determined by cultural norms or triggered by ecological pressures.

战争可以被解释为是通过进化（达尔文式的生存斗争）而先天根植于人类之中，或由文化规范所决定的，或由生态压力所引发的。

Accordingly, people can be the prisoner of their genes or try to create societies in which warfare is no longer seen as desirable or inevitable.

因此，人们可以成为基因的俘虏，也可以尝试创建这样的社会：在这个社会中，战争不再被视为可取或不可避免的。

The second section, which historians and many readers will favour, puts greater emphasis on human agency and mankind as the creator of cultures that sustain or even exalt warfare.

第二部分（历史学家和许多读者会更喜欢这部分内容）更加强调人类的能动性，以及人类作为维持战争，甚至崇尚战争的文化的创造者角色。

Mr Overy describes "four broad motivational categories": belief (religion), power, resources and security.

奥弗里描述了“四大广义动机类别”：信仰（宗教）、权力、资源和安全。

These were the forces behind modern wars and also, Mr Overy argues, much earlier conflicts between pre-state groups.

这些是现代战争背后的驱动力，而且奥弗里认为，也是前国家集团之间冲突的背后驱动力。

From Neolithic times, across Europe and North America, sites of mass burials show unmistakable signs of violence: skulls with stone-axe injuries, arrowheads lodged in vertebrae and decapitations.

从新石器时代开始，在整个欧洲和北美，大规模墓葬遗址都显示出明确无误的暴力迹象：带有石斧伤痕的头骨、卡进脊椎中的箭头和斩首。

Weapons for killing other humans rather than just for hunting were common; cave paintings show men skirmishing.

用于杀害其他人类而非仅仅用于狩猎的武器很常见，洞穴壁画展示了男性的小规模战斗。

Early warfare was clearly different in scale from that waged by modern states.

早期战争在规模上显然与现代国家发动的战争不同。

But Mr Overy shows that the causes and aims of early conflicts were frequently not dissimilar to those of later periods.

但是奥弗里表明，早期冲突的原因和目标与后来的战争往往没有什么不同。

A different question is whether-as Steven Pinker, a Canadian cognitive psychologist, argued in 2011-people are actually becoming less violent than their ancestors and less inclined to wage war.

一个不同的问题是，正如加拿大认知心理学家史蒂文·平克在2011年所主张的那样，人们实际上是否比他们的祖先更少一些暴力倾向、更不愿意发动战争。

Although there has been no war between great powers since 1945, Mr Overy remains sceptical.

尽管自1945年以来大国之间没有发生过战争，但奥弗里先生仍然持怀疑态度。

The idea that modern men have developed an aversion to killing others is contradicted by the experience of the second world war when, after only brief spells of training, 100m ordinary men were persuaded "to bomb, shell, shoot and bayonet millions of their fellow species".

现代男性已经对杀戮产生厌恶的观点与第二次世界大战的经历相矛盾，当时，在经过短暂的训练后，1亿普通男性被说服去“轰炸、炮击、射击和刺杀数百万他们的同类”。

The prospect of a wider war in the Middle East combined with the renewed relevance of nuclear weapons, suggests that the stage is set for "the kinds of war for which there is a long historical pedigree".

中东地区战火蔓延的前景与核武器再次变得重要的情况相结合，表明为“那种具有悠久历史渊源的战争”所提供的舞台已经搭建好了。

Mr Overy ends with a conclusion that would surely have depressed Einstein and buttressed Freud: "If war has a very long human history, it also has a future.

奥弗里在结尾得出了一个结论，这个结论肯定会让爱因斯坦感到沮丧，而为弗洛伊德提供了支持：“如果说在漫长的人类历史中有战争，那么未来战争也会存在。”