These thoughts came to me as I was reading a fascinating novel from last year, ‘The Son of Man’ by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, which was a very thought-provoking fiction for me.
First let’s think about humans in their primitive state. Humans are omnivorous animals which means they often eat meat. Besides eating fruits and vegetables, the human males killed animals to provide food for their families. Sometimes the men had to fight other men in order to get the food they needed. Since humans are social animals, they formed tribes. The men in one tribe often fought the men in another tribe over land and hunting rights. So men were aggressive animals capable of many kinds of obtrusive behavior and misbehavior.
Human females were more closely tied to perpetuating the human race, thus were a more civilizing influence. However the women did appreciate their mates’ aggressive behavior since it provided for their family.
Later these battles between tribes escalated into wars between nations which were a frequent occurrence throughout history.
Now we will jump to 1945 which was a pivotal year in human history. That was the year the German concentration camps were fully exposed. We found out the full extent of the depravity of which human aggression was capable. That was also the year of the whole-city-destroying atomic bombs which soon led to the even more devastating hydrogen bombs.
As long as humans remembered the terrible events of World War II, they tried to curb their primitive aggressiveness to prevent World War III. For eighty years, they were largely successful.
Now today it is 2025, and World War II is a distant memory. A lot of that pent-up male aggression is coming back. Leaders like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are aggressive in their behavior and their misbehavior, and many of the people in their countries admire them for that. This aggressiveness is likely to lead to another major war, but we now have faint memories of that last major war.
Tony's Book World 
Posted by This Reading Life on February 28, 2025 at 3:20 AM
I fear your final words will prove to be prophetic. It seems we never learn from our shared history, but are doomed to keep repeating it, cycle after cycle after cycle.
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Posted by Anokatony on February 28, 2025 at 3:29 AM
Hi This Reading Life,
Yes, that old primitive especially-male aggressiveness keeps coming back no matter how dangerous and destructive war has become.
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Posted by Rach on February 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Ahh, have you read the Buried Giant by Kuzuo Ishiguro? It has a very similar theme, but it cites the opposite, rather that it is memory that causes us to go to war – not of the horrific things that occurred and but that race and the damage dealt to our fathers, mothers and other ancestors can send a whole new generation to war…
Having read your post, I think both are probably true… war occurs because of memory and past wrongdoings, but without memory of the levels of destruction, the next war could be devastating :(
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Posted by Anokatony on February 28, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Hi Rach,
I did read ‘The Buried Giant’, but I hadn’t made the connection you made. That novel speaks of the continuing wars across generations between the Britons and the Saxons. New wars broke out between the two groups because they remembered past atrocities that one group did to the other before. Long-standing hostilities, revenge. I think unethical leaders do use these long-standing hostilities to rile their people up so they will go to war for them. Sometimes these unethical leaders are only interested in their own power and personal gain.
i believe you are correct. Both remembering long-standing hostilities and forgetting how terrible the previous wars were play a role in the next wars.
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