TRIGGERnometry - Dr Mike Martin： Why We Fight

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.

00:00:08.520 And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet

00:00:12.340 over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts,

00:00:18.040 we ask the experts. Our absolutely fantastic guest this week is a veteran of the war in

00:00:23.180 Afghanistan. He's a research fellow at King's College London researching war studies and he

00:00:28.640 is the author of this brilliant book why we fight dr mike martin welcome to trigonometry hey how

00:00:34.140 you doing and i got your name right as i didn't before i didn't off camera yeah sorry just for

00:00:40.260 anyone who's watching this we're recording this the day after the election so i'm incredibly hung

00:00:44.800 over francis is incredibly disappointed that ukip didn't win yeah um so i've had two hours sleep

00:00:50.340 so we're all going to be stumbling around but listen man your book is absolutely incredible

00:00:56.400 absolutely fascinating talking about why people fight but before we get into that

00:01:00.200 tell us a little bit about who are you how are you where you are what has been your journey through

00:01:06.040 life um a bridge version yeah uh so i did biology when i was at university first and i thought

00:01:15.540 maybe i'll become a research scientist um i thought that for about 10 minutes until i looked

00:01:21.540 the lives that research scientists had and then I went traveling for three years I lived in South

00:01:27.620 America I sailed across the South Atlantic and then I joined the army and I was in the army for

00:01:35.520 six years I learned push to which is the language in southern Afghanistan I'm in Helmand where the

00:01:42.200 British were and I spent two years in Helmand working as a political officer in fact I was

00:01:46.960 the first political officer for the british army so i developed that whole um i sort of pioneered

00:01:51.860 and developed that role for the british military um and then after that i've done various jobs but

00:01:58.320 remaining in conflicts i've worked in uh in somalia lived and worked in somalia also in

00:02:03.760 in myanmar um worked on other conflicts and um all good tourist destinations

00:02:09.520 mate i don't understand why you went to somalia if you wanted conflict just go into croydon on a

00:02:16.360 Friday night yeah but I so I I worked in Somali land right which is the what was the old British

00:02:22.480 protectorate and southern Mogadishu was the Italian bit yeah and I live in Stepney in East

00:02:29.500 London and I put the Somali interest office into Google because they're not they've declared

00:02:35.520 themselves a state but they're not actually a state nor recognises them but I needed a visa

00:02:40.540 to go and work there.

00:02:41.440 I lived in a flat in Hargesa.

00:02:44.660 And I realised that the visa office for Somaliland

00:02:50.040 was above my Tesco's metro in Stepney

00:02:52.380 because there's a huge community of Somalis in Whitechapel

00:02:55.680 and all the Somalis in the UK are in the port cities

00:02:58.900 because they joined the British Merchant Navy in the 1800s

00:03:02.820 when the Somaliland Protectorate was, you know, British Protectorate.

00:03:06.560 And then they settled in all the port cities.

00:03:08.060 They did their 20 years and then just got off the boat and settled wherever they got to.

00:03:12.140 So the first mosque in Cardiff, the first mosque in the UK was in Cardiff,

00:03:17.220 and it was a Somali mosque in Cardiff.

00:03:19.140 So you see these links that started hundreds of years ago, created diaspora in the UK,

00:03:25.860 and then these conflicts are still ongoing, and there are these huge links to any number.

00:03:31.140 I mean, that's just one example I've given you.

00:03:32.680 But actually you see it in any number of countries around the world,

00:03:36.240 where Britain or France also has this,

00:03:38.320 has these continuing links to conflicts,

00:03:40.280 often that we're not aware of.

00:03:42.940 Like if I asked your average person in the UK...

00:03:46.280 Francis.

00:03:47.320 Francis, were you aware of that, Francis?

00:03:50.000 No, I wasn't.

00:03:51.640 So you go to Somaliland and they're all aware of it.

00:03:53.720 Yeah, of course, because to them it's a huge part of the history.

00:03:56.420 But anyway, sorry, I interrupted you just to make a little joke.

00:03:58.500 So you went to work there and you've travelled, obviously, incredibly widely.

00:04:03.800 And now you're a research fellow at King's College London,

00:04:06.240 the War Studies Department, and your book really talks about why it is that we have conflict,

00:04:11.460 why it is that human beings fight. But you yourself served in Afghanistan. Tell us about

00:04:16.340 that. What was that like? So there's this official narrative of the war in Afghanistan,

00:04:22.720 which is, and you still see it on the media today, and it's, you know, very broadly, it's a kind of

00:04:27.360 black-white narrative. There's a government that, you know, is legitimate to elections,

00:04:32.500 all that kind of stuff. You know, UN supports it. And the West, the coalition of America

00:04:37.740 and its allies are supporting that legitimate government. And then against them is this

00:04:42.500 movement called the Taliban who are evil and girls' rights and they sell drugs. And, you

00:04:47.280 know, so it's a kind of good, bad, very simplistic dichotomy. But actually, when you get to places

00:04:52.480 like Helmand or, you know, Helmand is just a good example because it's an extreme case

00:04:56.000 in Afghanistan, but the rest of Afghanistan is the same stuff. It's not that dichotomy.

00:05:01.500 it's not a black-white conflict it's a kind of multi-focal civil war between different tribes

00:05:08.280 and families and different drugs militias or landowners and actually what drives the conflict

00:05:16.320 on the ground level where you know why does somebody pull the trigger of a Kalashnikov

00:05:23.220 at that level it's land it's water it's feuds between grandparents that have echoed down the

00:05:30.940 generations it's tribal power blocks vying for control of the drug trade that's what's driving

00:05:36.880 the conflict it's not these big ideological this ideological schism that we understand from the

00:05:42.040 media and actually often groups both on the government side so people in the police for

00:05:47.500 instance or militias that are attached to the government and on you know the taliban side

00:05:50.880 change sides all the time so on monday they will be on the government side and the anti-government

00:05:56.300 side and and what that what that tells us is that aid survival is most important as you would expect

00:06:00.420 after 40 years of war, but it also tells us that people are out to ensure that they protect

00:06:10.280 the family's land or the money they make from the drugs crop, and the selection of ideological

00:06:15.220 labels are merely conveniences to help them achieve those much more important, pragmatic aims.

00:06:22.320 So why is it that we're fed this narrative then? Why is it that a public service broadcaster

00:06:28.160 like the BBC, puts forward a narrative which you're saying is false.

00:06:32.680 It's really interesting.

00:06:33.520 So after I left the army, I did quite a lot of journalism

00:06:39.040 or working with journalists, writing articles about Afghanistan.

00:06:41.820 And something used to consistently come up,

00:06:44.260 which was that the journalists living and working in Afghanistan

00:06:47.580 or very close to studying the conflict understood this.

00:06:50.480 They might not have had as much detail as I had.

00:06:52.400 I wrote my PhD on it and I spoke push-to,

00:06:54.840 But they understood that it wasn't this black-white narrative.

00:07:00.140 But when they submitted their 700 words to Newspaper X or spoke with their editors for Broadcaster Y, without fail, the editor would say, no, that doesn't fit the narrative of the conflict.

00:07:13.960 Because in the UK particularly, there's only so much foreign news that is going to get into the news cycle.

00:07:21.760 and there's only enough there might be one afghan story a day right for example when the conflict

00:07:28.040 was its height in 2012 we had 10 000 british troops there probably if at lucky one afghan

00:07:35.140 story a day and if a british trooper died that would be that story yeah right and apart from

00:07:42.080 that there were only a few narratives so there was the kind of drugs crop narrative there was

00:07:47.420 kind of the girls' education narrative, which actually was probably the thing that was the

00:07:52.760 most successful about the Western intervention in Afghanistan. And so there were a number of

00:07:57.880 sort of almost cliched narratives that editors had as their filter, because how complex can you get

00:08:05.540 in 700 words? And yes, people did long form and so on and so forth, but not many people read long

00:08:13.000 form. The main news narratives had this very simplistic filter because people spend four

00:08:20.380 minutes a day on average on UK politics, let alone a war in another country that people don't really

00:08:25.660 understand why we're there. So people are saying that we shouldn't have got involved in Afghanistan

00:08:31.640 and it created the wave of terrorism that we see nowadays. Is that true? Not really, no. I think

00:08:40.500 when the

00:08:44.820 Afghan Mujahideen were fighting

00:08:46.820 the Russians in the 1980s

00:08:49.720 that attracted

00:08:51.600 quite a lot of international volunteers

00:08:53.120 from say Egypt or whatever

00:08:54.320 and once the

00:08:56.640 Gulf states

00:08:57.900 and that jihadi

00:09:00.480 both people came there and funding

00:09:02.820 from the CIA

00:09:04.120 as well from absolutely

00:09:06.040 but also from the Gulf states

00:09:07.220 and what happened when the Russians left

00:09:09.820 There's a lot of those volunteers went back to Chechnya, Bosnia, Algeria.

00:09:16.060 And so in the early 90s, you see a number of Islamist inspired, either kind of governments falling or, you know, rebellions or, you know, so that that was an earlier stage of the Afghan conflict.

00:09:29.520 And it's the same conflict. These are not separate conflicts. Afghanistan has been experiencing a civil war since 1978, at least.

00:09:35.580 right um so the west intervening in 2001 absolutely didn't create that wave of terrorism

00:09:44.140 and then your other question was should we got involved i think i think again if you look in

00:09:49.300 more detail at the afghan conflict there were there were two decisions about the level of

00:09:55.560 three decisions about the level of western involvement in afghanistan one was do we go

00:10:00.220 in after the Twin Towers. And I think broadly, most people accept that that was justified

00:10:05.400 because the, you know, Osama bin Laden was being given shelter by the Taliban, et cetera,

00:10:11.420 et cetera. I think the evidence was overwhelming that Osama bin Laden was involved and the

00:10:14.820 Americans warned them. And I think most people accept that that was probably justified.

00:10:19.960 Mistake number one was in sort of 2004, five was deciding rather than...

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00:10:55.220 I don't know, either handing it over to a UN management of the country.

00:11:00.060 They decided that NATO was going to get involved and spread troops, garrison troops around the country.

00:11:04.720 And that was a terrible idea.

00:11:07.360 And particularly, you know, one of the worst aspects of that was putting the British in Helmand.

00:11:11.900 The British have got history in Helmand.

00:11:15.260 It's pretty much like everywhere else in the world.

00:11:17.800 So if you think about the south of Afghanistan, the road through Helmand,

00:11:22.420 So on the east of Helmand is Kandahar

00:11:25.520 And on the west of Helmand is Herat

00:11:27.460 And that road runs from Iran

00:11:29.280 Down to the subcontinent

00:11:30.880 And that was the same in the 1800s

00:11:32.980 So when the British invaded in the 1840s

00:11:35.160 And in the 1880s

00:11:36.240 They did a two-pronged push into Afghanistan

00:11:38.400 Once over the Khyber Pass to Kabul

00:11:41.520 And once over the pass

00:11:43.120 Just south of Kandahar to take Kandahar

00:11:45.440 And when you take Kandahar

00:11:46.920 To defend Kandahar

00:11:48.160 The easy way to defend Kandahar

00:11:49.360 Is to stick troops in Goresh

00:11:51.280 which is what we did both times.

00:11:52.720 Goreshk is the main city in Helmand.

00:11:55.820 And the reason you put them in Goreshk is because that's the only fair weather crossing of the river Helmand.

00:12:00.140 So that is how you hold that entire line from Iran to India,

00:12:07.940 what was British India then, what is now Pakistan.

00:12:10.220 So we put troops in there.

00:12:12.420 There were tribal rebellions in Helmand.

00:12:15.220 The Battle of Maywand was just fought outside Helmand.

00:12:18.200 I mean, everyone says, oh, that's a great Afghan victory.

00:12:20.040 No, it wasn't.

00:12:20.780 That was a victory of the Alazai and the Norzai, two of the three biggest tribes in Helmand.

00:12:26.760 And when we came back to Helmand in 2006 and said, we're coming here for reconstruction, the Alazai and the Norzai said, that doesn't work.

00:12:38.080 And because they have, you know, Helmandias are mostly illiterate.

00:12:44.300 It's about 10% literacy at the beginning of the, you know, in 2001.

00:12:49.000 8% literacy, half a percent for women.

00:12:51.340 They have an oral history culture.

00:12:53.360 And it's what my first book, An Intimate War, was about.

00:12:56.280 And not only did they have those narratives of we, the Al-Azai and the Nozai stood up,

00:13:01.780 they also knew who the leaders of those rebellions were.

00:13:04.040 So Abu Bakr Khan was the Al-Azai leader.

00:13:06.580 His great-great-grandchildren were still Hans up in the north of Helmand-Sumland, became resistance commanders against the British.

00:13:18.600 That was a catastrophic, catastrophic mistake.

00:13:23.720 And it comes from a complete misreading of our own history.

00:13:27.580 And the irony is that we have the British Library with 14 million books in it.

00:13:33.420 And all the records of all the political officers, British political officers, 1700s, 1800s, nobody read any of that.

00:13:39.620 And the illiterate Helmandias, who had their oral history culture, were well aware, much more aware of our own history than us.

00:13:46.160 Yeah, that's fascinating stuff.

00:13:48.140 But let's move on to talk about why we fight.

00:13:51.960 Because what you talk about in the book is a much broader look at conflict and why human beings engage in warfare and conflict more generally.

00:14:01.540 Why do we fight?

00:14:02.580 why do we engage in conflict so humans have evolved like every other animal on the planet

00:14:11.760 right we are part of the animal kingdom and we've evolved to increase our chances of surviving and

00:14:20.900 reproducing more right this is kind of standard stuff and so the question you have to answer when

00:14:26.480 people are fighting wars is what's the evolutionary advantage of fighting wars because there's a huge

00:14:31.500 death rates and huge death rates i mean let me give you an example of how big the death rates

00:14:36.180 are in the first world war the french the cohort of french men that fought so say 16 to about 35

00:14:46.300 a third of them died a third that is that in any other world would be known as a negative

00:14:56.200 selection pressure yeah okay so why does war exist and actually that death rate is is probably

00:15:03.400 compares favorably to what the death rates were like from conflict in say the stone age

00:15:07.900 even higher and so what you've got to do is look for mechanisms that humans have that drive them

00:15:16.240 to do things that are of an evolutionary advantage but then unfortunately also um result in war and

00:15:23.480 and there are two really obvious contenders one of them is the pursuit of social status and the

00:15:28.620 other one is this need to belong and the pursuit of social status particularly for men has a huge

00:15:36.180 evolutionary advantage um uh humans have been you know we're mostly monogamous now but actually in

00:15:44.500 our history there was much much much more polygamy and so good old days as i like to call it

00:15:50.460 I thought you were the UKIP vote.

00:15:56.400 Actually, if you know, it's UKIP voters as social conservatives, Michael.

00:15:59.760 Yeah, absolutely, mate.

00:16:00.480 And therefore they don't believe in polygamy.

00:16:03.300 Anyway, carry on.

00:16:04.440 We'll ignore your prejudice.

00:16:06.800 You're bigotry against social conservatives.

00:16:09.240 You are a gammonet.

00:16:10.580 Yes, absolutely.

00:16:11.460 That's absolutely clear.

00:16:12.620 A wee little gammon.

00:16:14.140 So, yeah, think about polygamy like this, okay?

00:16:18.280 the higher up the social

00:16:22.120 rank you get as a man

00:16:23.980 this is the pecking order. The more action you get

00:16:26.540 the more action you get and the more children you have

00:16:28.320 so if the top 50% of men have two wives

00:16:30.840 the bottom 50% have none

00:16:32.400 so there's a massive evolutionary

00:16:34.600 selection pressure to get in

00:16:36.080 We had Geoffrey Miller the evolutionary

00:16:38.680 psychologist on the show making precisely

00:16:40.760 this point

00:16:41.340 so the competition for social status

00:16:44.640 essentially for men in an evolutionary

00:16:46.680 race it's actually worth it

00:16:48.260 even if there's a 30% chance of being killed because the bounty that you get, potentially at least, is so great.

00:16:57.240 Evolution can never tell us what effect will it have on that individual.

00:17:02.660 What evolution tells us is across thousands of generations and across millions of people, what the averages will be.

00:17:11.340 And if, say, the average death rate from war because of the drive towards social status,

00:17:15.880 And I'm plucking these figures out of the air, but just to give an example, you know, if the death rate is three out of 10 from war, but the advantages of that same mechanism that drives social status are four out of 10, then that mechanism will remain in the gene pool.

00:17:28.000 Yes. Yeah. And it's the same with belonging. Right.

00:17:30.480 there's a huge that was the most interesting part of the book because i think most people will be

00:17:35.000 aware of the first thing that we've talked about but the idea that people fight and are prepared

00:17:39.800 to go to war and be killed and maimed in order to belong to to some kind of tribe is fascinating to

00:17:46.240 me tell us more about that so whilst while social status is a positive thing you're trying to

00:17:50.660 attain you know the higher you have your social status the more as you said the more action you

00:17:55.300 get right but belonging is actually the opposite so you've got to think back to where humans did

00:18:01.940 most of their cognitive evolution which was on the african savannah basically um between about

00:18:08.140 80 and 50 000 years ago there was a huge burst of cognitive evolution and about 50 000 years ago

00:18:14.380 it was called the cultural explosion so artwork and all that stuff starts up here and in that

00:18:19.580 environment humans lived in groups of less than 30 kinship related maybe a few non-kin members but

00:18:28.000 that was the that was the group right and these bands were fighting each other and they were

00:18:33.660 surviving in the environment that had lots of wild animals and in that environment um not having a

00:18:40.820 social group to belong to was an almost immediate death sentence yeah okay and so these feelings

00:18:47.320 that we have towards belonging to something whether it's a tribe you know chiefdom an ancient

00:18:54.160 empire a modern nation state a political party a football team a choir these are all triggered by

00:19:00.040 the same mechanism which forces us to seek out a social group something to belong to and and we do

00:19:07.820 that you know as i said because to not have a social group in in evolutionary terms and don't

00:19:12.980 forget we're still stuck now in 2020 with these mechanisms um that we evolved that we've evolved

00:19:19.380 over the last you know two million years as hominids to not to not belong um and was a death

00:19:25.160 sentence and if you look at how that mechanism evolved it it gives you a real insight into both

00:19:32.300 politics and war so think about it this way if you have this mechanism which causes you to seek

00:19:38.700 belonging yeah to to find people to um um come together to co-join with that only works if as

00:19:48.960 well as creating a drive towards an in group if it creates an out group at the same time you can't

00:19:54.980 have one without the other and why well because if if the mechanism evolved that said trust everyone

00:20:01.200 pull everyone towards you make everyone part of your group then another genotype would arise in

00:20:08.140 the population that said take advantage of those people who are trusting all the time so the only

00:20:12.220 way you can have a mechanism that says trust other people is if you say trust the in group

00:20:17.320 and don't trust the out group and this mechanism which you know has a hormonal pathway which is

00:20:22.920 regulated by a hormone called oxytocin and status is regulated by testosterone but this hormonal

00:20:28.040 pathway um does two things it creates feelings of empathy and trust within the in group at the same

00:20:35.760 time that it that it derogatizes an out group and creates distrust and what you know it has

00:20:42.200 all sorts of other effects like you can see heterogeneity within the in group but you

00:20:46.460 homogenize the out group what we might call othering in social science yeah you know these

00:20:50.760 are very basic um mostly subconscious evolutionary mechanisms that we've evolved for very good

00:20:56.840 reasons both status and belonging but that have the side effects of driving us towards group

00:21:04.880 conflict it's a fascinating explanation of why francis is racist

00:21:08.520 but um sorry i know it's fine it did i did i just can't believe a russian is calling me racist

00:21:16.620 i mean bloody hell anyway well you see i'm just proud of it whereas you you have to hide it yeah

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00:22:16.400 so what was what i found very interesting good touching on the hormone oxytocin

00:22:22.720 is essentially we're not even aware that we're being driven like that so every time we

00:22:29.500 join a choir we wear a football shirt we we sing together national anthem you hear the national

00:22:34.220 anthem it's almost like we're getting a hormonal rush which drives us to to create these bonds and

00:22:40.080 these groups have either of you two had the experience in you know singing in a choir

00:22:43.640 football match whatever where you get a tingle down your spine yeah yeah well that that is that

00:22:49.520 pathway yeah that's that's you feeling a sense of belonging and it triggers the oxytocin pathway

00:22:55.440 it then triggers a bunch of positive hormones um that then give you those feelings of of pleasure

00:23:02.820 so by that logic if somebody doesn't get as big a hit from that as other people they wouldn't feel

00:23:09.880 as as inclined to be part of a group right right and and you know it's amazing the degree to which

00:23:16.880 very simple things that biologists have understood for say 50 years haven't translated into our

00:23:23.220 study of politics so for instance um you know most traits um how how tall you are so that's a

00:23:33.540 physical trait or a behavioral trait whether you feel this sense of belonging um they tend to fall

00:23:39.920 on a kind of bell curve right so most people are in the median they you know they're about

00:23:45.480 five and a half foot or six foot or whatever the average height is and they feel a kind of

00:23:49.320 medium sense of belonging but of course you get extremes you get some people who can't feel a

00:23:54.540 sense of belonging at all and you get some who are you know mega passionate and these are the

00:23:58.700 kind of political activists for a political party for instance um and another thing that you know

00:24:06.220 another aspect of biology that's sort of well understood in biology that doesn't translate at

00:24:10.040 all into public debate is this idea that every trait whether it's physical or behavioral is as

00:24:18.320 a result of your genetic inheritance multiplied by environmental factors this nature nurture

00:24:25.480 argument is is nonsense it's both every single trait has both and some have slightly more

00:24:32.340 heritability so genetic component some have slightly more environmental but they are

00:24:36.880 but both involved both genes and environment involved in behavioral traits and in physical

00:24:42.160 traits so you're saying that some people essentially might have a genetic predisposition

00:24:46.360 to extremism of one sort or another.

00:24:49.900 I think that, okay, so...

00:24:52.380 Stop trying to justify it, mate.

00:24:53.500 No, no, no, because this is a debate that is not aired.

00:24:59.020 Yeah.

00:24:59.400 Okay, because, and the reason it's not aired,

00:25:02.960 and, you know, the gender debate is another example of it.

00:25:07.660 I was going to come to that, yeah, absolutely.

00:25:09.460 So this is not aired,

00:25:11.340 and there's a very good reason why it's not aired, okay?

00:25:13.680 after the sort of eugenics movement in the 30s

00:25:18.800 and you know that peaking with Nazism effectively

00:25:21.980 there was a backlash within scholarship

00:25:25.720 because you've got these two views right

00:25:27.840 it's either genetically determined

00:25:28.980 the extremes the views are it's genetically determined

00:25:31.120 or it's all social imprinting

00:25:32.880 we're born as a blank slate

00:25:34.320 and then everything is kind of social imprinting right

00:25:36.500 and as a reaction against eugenics

00:25:40.480 and the Nazi movement

00:25:42.120 scholarship moved right onto this tabula rasa blank slate view of humankind but it's not that

00:25:49.160 you know as i've said it was an overcorrection essentially it was an overcorrection and

00:25:53.600 it's back to your question about you know is there a genetic heritability

00:25:58.600 involved in terrorism okay so i'm not aware of any data that supports that view okay but that's

00:26:06.660 probably because people haven't asked that question because it's hard to ask that question

00:26:13.400 because of the reason i've just articulated but and it is it is you know in science you have to

00:26:20.680 get funding you have to write research proposals all that kind of stuff right so there's a degree

00:26:25.620 of you know as with everything there's a degree of self-censorship so people only ask you know

00:26:32.400 scientists are only going to spend their time writing research you know funding proposals for

00:26:36.980 things they think are going to get funding right it takes a tremendous amount of time so there's a

00:26:39.980 bit of that and there's probably some of it being turned down because it's it's a hot potato yeah

00:26:44.620 but you know it's it's 20 it's almost 2020 right in a couple of weeks it'll be 2020 and over the

00:26:54.040 last if you look over the last say 10 years or 15 years the amount of knowledge and science that's

00:27:03.500 been done into cognition psychology how our brains work um is extraordinary i mean it's moved on so

00:27:13.880 much and to not use that knowledge to our own advantage seems to me to be crazy i mean something

00:27:22.980 you said earlier was to what degree are we aware of this you know there's two bits to our brain

00:27:28.860 there's the unconscious bit and there's the conscious bit and in politics we all think it's

00:27:35.140 about the conscious bit or the you know the the policies the what's the logically right thing to

00:27:41.840 do but actually as in war you know politics and war are the same thing right they're just

00:27:47.620 they're on the same spectrum you're just using violence as a means of communication rather than

00:27:51.440 using words. And it's the old Clausewitzian, you know, war is a continuation of politics by other

00:27:58.180 means. We think that politics and war can be understood rationally by, you know, doing studies

00:28:06.180 of ideology and all that kind of stuff. But actually, the argument in why we fight and the

00:28:11.040 argument of, you know, the evidence that's come out in the last 10 years of how our brains work

00:28:15.440 is actually that we're driven by unconscious things. We're not aware of them. And later on,

00:28:20.420 our conscious brain comes and fits a narrative a logical conscious narrative to that already

00:28:27.960 made decision that that subconscious drive that's already pushed us in that direction

00:28:32.920 sounds like what's going to happen uh today after the election what that is what you've just

00:28:38.520 described uh michael is facebook yeah pretty much yeah pretty much uh but so but but actually i

00:28:44.960 mean in terms of the genetic heritability of something like the predilection for extremism

00:28:49.820 I mean, every other human behavior is, to some extent, driven by our genes.

00:28:54.120 So it would be extraordinary if there was not a genetic component towards being a suicide bomber.

00:29:02.560 Yeah. Well, that makes perfect sense.

00:29:05.980 And I suppose the ethical consideration there is, well, if we invent some way of telling who's a terrorist,

00:29:12.200 are we going to start putting them in camps or whatever?

00:29:15.160 And for other criminals as well.

00:29:17.660 Absolutely. That's it. Absolutely.

00:29:19.160 And that's something I'm personally massively in favor of, of course.

00:29:23.200 But let me ask you this, because you mentioned the gender thing.

00:29:26.300 And I think one of the most misunderstood and also fundamentally unhealthy concepts that has emerged in recent years is this idea of toxic masculinity.

00:29:38.680 The idea that men are trained by society to be violent, to rape, to behave in all of these ways, right?

00:29:51.440 But based on what you're talking about is fundamentally men from an evolutionary perspective evolved to engage in violence in certain contexts, right?

00:30:02.480 So what do you make of this idea that kind of the nurture of the way that we nurture men in society is wrong and bad and that's why, you know, we're all toxic and evil?

00:30:14.920 So I want to be really clear that what I'm about to say is not kind of going, well, that's the way it is, you know, okay?

00:30:25.000 And, you know, men, that's how men are.

00:30:28.000 He's about to say that's the way it is, isn't he?

00:30:30.760 As he rips his shell.

00:30:32.480 you know i'm a i'm a liberal with a small l right and

00:30:38.420 so what is okay let's let's go back to you know we've spoken about testosterone right yeah

00:30:46.600 and we've also spoken about how everything is genes times environment yeah behavioral

00:30:52.980 physical traits okay so testosterone the average man has 20 times the level of testosterone

00:31:01.720 own as the average woman okay that's that's a fact we have an overwhelming weight of evidence

00:31:09.460 that demonstrates that is that not due to the patriarchy and um now of course you know those

00:31:17.020 bell curves that we spoke about the male and the female bell curves will overlap yeah of course

00:31:20.580 which is where this discussion comes up about trans athletes in sports and trans trans women

00:31:26.460 in sport so yeah okay but the you'll see two very clear peaks if those are the overlapping

00:31:31.860 bell curves you'll see two very clear peaks okay 20 times may have 20 times yeah and so what does

00:31:38.400 testosterone do well most people think our testosterone um the sort of common misconception

00:31:41.940 is that testosterone makes you uh violent and aggressive okay that's not actually what

00:31:49.320 testosterone does testosterone causes you to seek status it's a status seeking hormone now

00:31:54.440 It turns out that being aggressive and violent a certain percentage of the time works to help you get status.

00:32:02.580 So that's why there's a common misconception.

00:32:05.400 But what it does is it causes you to seek status.

00:32:08.080 And why do men have 20 times the testosterone in women?

00:32:10.880 Because having a higher social status because of polygamy pays off for men more than it does for women.

00:32:18.640 one man, many wives

00:32:21.540 is much more common than one wife, many men

00:32:23.760 and has been throughout our evolutionary history

00:32:25.620 so there's a much higher

00:32:27.760 status payoff

00:32:29.100 for men in reproductive terms than there are for women

00:32:31.860 the reason for that by the way is because women

00:32:33.620 are taken out of the reproduction game

00:32:35.840 for nine months

00:32:37.140 and men are taken out of the reproduction game

00:32:39.420 for ten seconds

00:32:40.340 in terms of your sex ratio

00:32:43.020 you need a nap afterwards

00:32:44.160 in terms of your sex ratio

00:32:46.320 women are the rare of sex

00:32:48.360 So that's why men, sick status more, have higher levels of testosterone.

00:32:52.980 So, you know, I'm not telling you anything you don't know.

00:32:56.600 Everybody knows that men, particularly when they're 17 to 25, are chest puffing.

00:33:03.940 That's what they do.

00:33:05.460 They peacock.

00:33:07.000 And that's not a, well, it is a social cliche.

00:33:09.880 And the reason it's a social cliche is because there's a hormonal basis for it.

00:33:12.280 Yeah. So is that to say that there are no aspects of, say, misogynistic behavior that aren't learnt?

00:33:21.480 No, of course, there are aspects of misogynistic behavior that are learnt.

00:33:25.420 But there is also, you know, genes, times, environment.

00:33:28.600 There's also a herited component and an inherited component of this for the vast, vast, vast majority of males on the planet.

00:33:37.200 OK, now come back to this other idea of like unconscious versus conscious.

00:33:41.400 Right. That's a tussle within our brains. And of course, you can bring up boys, for example, in a way that recognizes that they have 20 times on average levels of testosterone that girls do, which means they will chest puff and they will peacock and all of those things.

00:34:04.080 And so you can bring boys up with that knowledge. And this, you know, this is why men are risk takers, for instance. And I just think, you know, to come back to this idea of why aren't we talking about this in politics?

00:34:16.080 It's not helpful to say toxic masculinity is a learned behavior and we all need to bring up our children in a gender neutral way.

00:34:27.740 Right. Which I don't pass any comment on. I'm just saying that's one of the arguments where actually I think it would be much more beneficial to say, OK, there are actually these differences between men and women.

00:34:38.740 And so we can we can construct our society in a very clever way that gets to the ultimate goal.

00:34:45.400 If we agree that we all want to get to complete equality between the sexes, I find it would be a much better way to get to that eventual goal if we say these are the differences and therefore we're going to construct our society to get to that point rather than saying, no, there are no differences.

00:34:59.520 It's all, you know, to know to get to where you want to get to, you have to know where you are.

00:35:04.440 Yeah. Yeah. And if you think you're in the wrong place, you're not going to get to where you get to where you want to get to.

00:35:09.740 And one part of the book that I found particularly fascinating

00:35:13.580 was how you were saying that a lot of fights are caused by

00:35:16.280 a perceived loss of status between the two combatants.

00:35:21.380 So, you know, if they walk away from the fight,

00:35:23.660 they've somehow lost status, their status is diminished,

00:35:26.360 and therefore they have become, in inverted commas, weaker.

00:35:29.360 Yeah, I mean, the statistics on this are stark, okay?

00:35:35.240 So in criminology, 95% of murders are committed by men, of which about two-thirds of those are what are called trivial altercations is what the criminology category is.

00:35:57.460 And what a trivial altercation is, is a fight over a pool table or, and the beauty about this is this goes through time.

00:36:07.380 So we have records from the 1200s in England where people started fights over games of chess or mistresses in taverns and stuff.

00:36:14.920 You see the same pattern throughout, you know, England has 800 years of murder statistics and stories and judgments.

00:36:21.960 So we have this long, long skew of data to look at it.

00:36:25.380 and um that that is the reason that um men commit and they're also the victims as well as the

00:36:41.320 perpetrators of the vast majority of murders because they are the ones that seek status over

00:36:47.420 each other because and this is where if you drill down in statistics you find that not only is it

00:36:52.660 men but the vast majority of those men who commit murders are between the ages of 17 and 30

00:36:56.400 and they're from lower rungs lower social status so they're sort of unemployed maybe they're

00:37:02.160 illiterate or poorly educated they don't have a job they live in deprived areas and that's because

00:37:09.840 effectively what's been triggered in their brain is i'm in a low part of the social rung so i need

00:37:15.340 to climb up it and so you see higher levels of violence and you know there's so much evidence

00:37:21.440 for this in in china when they introduced the one child policy they did it region by region so they

00:37:25.900 didn't do it all at the same time and of course what the one child policy does is it creates

00:37:30.140 female infanticide because there's a preference for sons that skews the sex ratio so where you

00:37:35.440 have the one child policy coming in you get uh more men and lower women right which means that

00:37:41.780 the men when they get to 20 are competing for a smaller that cohort when it becomes marriage age

00:37:46.820 they're competing for a smaller number of women and what you see is um a very very small change

00:37:53.800 like nought point i don't have a statistics like off the top of my head but you know nought point

00:37:57.060 one's nought point three percent change in the sex ratio leads to kind of five percent more violent

00:38:01.380 crime and murder when that birth cohort reaches um reaches marriage you know reproduction age

00:38:08.260 that makes so much sense that makes so much sense i mean this is obvious stuff it should be shouldn't

00:38:13.100 I mean, all of the stuff you're saying, it should be part of how we talk about these things,

00:38:18.600 because it's just a very logical and simple explanation.

00:38:23.420 And we've instead invented all these complicated concepts that are not necessarily all that helpful, are they?

00:38:32.220 There's something called Occam's razor, right?

00:38:34.240 Yeah.

00:38:34.560 Which is when you're trying to study a problem, you'll come up with loads of competing theories.

00:38:39.520 it's more often than not the most simplistic solution

00:38:43.780 or the one that has the fewest assumption leaps in it

00:38:47.500 is the one that will turn out to be true.

00:38:49.760 And when we're doing stuff like, I don't know, the patriarchy

00:38:53.920 or like international relations or theories about war,

00:38:58.420 why people fight wars,

00:39:00.620 when the social science tries to unpick these things,

00:39:02.980 because when social science tries to unpick these things,

00:39:04.900 when you're starting with a kind of rational actor model,

00:39:06.860 The people are rational actors that make decisions that are the best decisions for them in irrational terms.

00:39:14.240 They benefit the most from those decisions.

00:39:18.060 You have to construct quite elaborate social models about population level movements and forces and all that kind of stuff.

00:39:30.140 And it's very hard to test those models empirically and to gather data.

00:39:35.740 It's very hard in social science to gather data because effectively what you're trying to do is, let's say you're trying to measure the degree to which an ideology penetrates in a population, right?

00:39:46.300 Does ideology drive violence?

00:39:47.780 Let's say we're trying to test that, right?

00:39:49.880 The answer that you get to that question will depend entirely on how you define ideology.

00:39:56.860 Are we going to do a questionnaire?

00:39:58.400 Are we going to speak to it?

00:39:59.140 How are we going to define that?

00:40:00.540 And how I define that will give me the answer.

00:40:03.020 but in biology for instance like there's not many ways i can define testosterone level

00:40:09.500 like that's it i'll take a blood sample and i'll do that to 20 000 people and then i'll come up

00:40:15.420 with you know 10 000 men 10 000 women i'll come up with you know two bell curves that overlap but

00:40:21.300 have different medians for the levels of testosterone like it's it's i don't wish to

00:40:31.060 disparage the social sciences but I think there are some questions where we could

00:40:37.480 to a much greater degree there's much more explanatory power in things like psychology

00:40:43.820 and biology and you know I was invited to give the annual lecture at King's College London

00:40:51.200 this year at the War Studies Department which was very kind of them frankly it was a great honor

00:40:56.640 And that was exactly the argument that I advanced, which is that there are all sorts of fields, scholarship, disciplines that we can bring to bear on the study of war and international relations that will give us a much greater explanation of what's going on rather than these models that we construct that rely on our own definitions of things that are hard to kind of pin down in empirical models.

00:41:26.640 And you were talking about war and conflict there. And one of the things that I found fascinating in Why We Fight, your book, you talk about the fact that when we construct these complex theories about why there's conflict, why we do these things, we think of nations as fighting.

00:41:46.000 We think of nations as making decisions, whereas in fact, it's a few, usually men, who are making these decisions right at the top.

00:41:55.140 And typically they are competing for status between each other.

00:41:58.840 And frequently the wars are essentially caused by chest puffing from these guys.

00:42:04.340 Right, right. So so and this is where I think it will go next.

00:42:08.580 right if if if we let's say that we kind of look at these social phenomena for an individual level

00:42:16.880 right because the moment we're trying to study them at a societal level and that's you know

00:42:20.340 from reach the limits of what we can explain so let's say we go actually we're going to look at

00:42:24.140 it from a from an individual level you know i don't know we're going to measure hormones or

00:42:28.780 we're going to whatever we're going to do right like you say to try and identify this sort of

00:42:31.780 status um you know chest puffing then the the next challenge after that is right and we haven't even

00:42:38.220 got there yet but i the next challenge after that is once you've understood the individual basis for

00:42:42.840 this stuff how do you then abstract that to the population level because you've got effectively

00:42:48.180 you've got a relationship between leaders who pursue belonging but mostly pursue status right

00:42:54.820 that's the drive that drives leaders obviously right and you have followers who pursue status

00:43:03.380 a bit but mostly pursue belonging right so you have this tension between leaders and followers

00:43:08.680 and between the drive for status and belonging and what followers give leaders is they fulfill

00:43:13.500 their need for status right because they create the group that the leader can lead and um what

00:43:19.520 leaders do for followers is they create the sense of belonging by articulating a framework and a

00:43:24.240 narrative for that group which helps people belong to a group so there's a there's a you know these

00:43:30.640 these ideas about you know elites and and how they are you know just controlling the masses and all

00:43:36.720 that kind of stuff now there's a tension between the two like human society always has this tension

00:43:41.420 and it's it comes out in politics and it comes out in war and so the real challenge is once we've

00:43:48.760 rerouted ourself in the individual how we then abstract that and try and understand

00:43:52.760 population level how population level dynamics abstract from the individual yeah all right

00:43:59.220 We've got time for basically our final question, man.

00:44:01.840 Oh, is it?

00:44:02.220 We've got, hold on, is that what I absolutely zipped through?

00:44:05.000 Yeah, we've got to let Mike go because he's running late

00:44:07.860 because we started late because of the fucking election.

00:44:09.780 We stayed up until 4 a.m. last night.

00:44:11.660 I'm having lunch with my godmother, so I can't be late.

00:44:14.760 Yeah, exactly, so we've got to let him go.

00:44:16.540 Okay, cool.

00:44:17.300 So the question that we always end our show is,

00:44:20.200 what's the one thing that we're talking about,

00:44:22.040 that we're not talking about as a society,

00:44:24.040 that we really should be talking about?

00:44:25.580 um within national politics within international relations within the study of war within conflict

00:44:37.200 reduction within terrorism all of those fields would benefit greatly from bringing in what we've

00:44:48.520 been talking about understanding how evolution how hormonal levels how unconscious drives

00:44:57.380 actually shape all of that stuff much more than the rational actor model that we've hitherto

00:45:03.680 used to explain those phenomena and that has huge implications from societal change around

00:45:11.460 gender debate it has huge implications for you know the world's getting

00:45:16.260 unsafe and we might be heading into a global war. So understanding how those drives

00:45:21.960 drive conflict. And it has huge implications for things like understanding the impact of social

00:45:30.340 media on disrupting our politics and perhaps destabilizing political systems, which obviously

00:45:35.720 has concurrent knock-on effects to leading into conflict. So we've really got to get our politics

00:45:43.820 up to speed with the last 10 years of cognitive research fantastic well i i think it's absolutely

00:45:52.400 brilliant what you're what you're doing what you wrote about and what you've said today is just

00:45:56.440 it's such an obvious and simple explanations to explanation to many very complex problems right

00:46:03.920 but the the explanation is very simple if we were just willing to look reality in the face

00:46:09.140 although it doesn't stop you from being deeply problematic

00:46:12.000 well I'm deeply problematic

00:46:13.480 we've given up on not being problematic

00:46:16.000 on this show

00:46:16.660 guys make sure you get this book

00:46:18.220 it's absolutely fascinating

00:46:19.320 as you can see Mike is a brilliant guy

00:46:21.100 and very interesting

00:46:21.660 thank you so much for coming on the show

00:46:23.320 if people want to follow you

00:46:24.820 are you on Twitter or anywhere like that?

00:46:26.300 yep yep

00:46:26.740 threshedthought.com

00:46:28.040 perfect

00:46:28.520 we'll put that in the links

00:46:29.640 and we will see you with another brilliant episode

00:46:32.020 in a week's time

00:46:32.680 take care guys

00:46:33.540 see you next week

00:46:39.140 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - February 03, 2020

Dr Mike Martin： Why We Fight

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