On the Philippine island of Mindanao, the Tasaday lived as food gatherers in a peaceful and non-aggressive society. Their culture did not even contain words for “weapon”, “hostility”, “anger”, or “war”. Even when colonisers brought new technologies, they refused to use spears and bows. They continued to distribute gathered food—sweet potatoes, fruit, berries, flowers, fish, crabs, frogs, and more—carefully and equally within the group.
In Papua New Guinea, by contrast, another small group of thirty people, the Fentou, were fierce warriors who fought continually with bows and arrows. Similar contradictions have appeared among Indigenous peoples in the Americas: “The Comanches and Apaches raised their children to become warriors, while the Hopis and Zunis raised—and continue to raise—their children to live peacefully.”
Philosophers have debated whether human nature is good or evil since antiquity, each side equipped with its own logic and “facts”. Historical records, however, suggest that human beings are born neither peace-loving nor warlike, neither naturally cooperative nor naturally aggressive. Human behaviour is determined not by genes alone, but by the ways of acting taught by the society in which people live.
Human nature is “a vast potentiality capable of taking many forms under social influence … Aggressiveness is not an innate or unchangeable human characteristic, but the product of a social environment that encourages aggression.”
For millions of years during the Paleolithic era, kin-based societies had strong reasons to cooperate. Human children remained dependent for six to eight years; populations were desperately small; and violent war could easily cost a community everything. With the agricultural revolution, productivity increased and populations exploded. Villages expanded into towns, towns into empires. There was more to compete for, and war became more frequent.
“By modern times, mass killing had become commonplace. In the First World War, 8.5 million military personnel and 10 million civilians died. In the Second World War, military and civilian deaths rose to 16.9 million and 34.3 million respectively. If a third world war occurs, the casualties will surely be still more staggering. In September 1985, the International Council of Scientific Unions, composed of scientists from thirty countries, reported that the blast and radiation effects of nuclear attacks would directly kill hundreds of millions of people, while between one and four billion of the world's five billion people would die of starvation. This famine would result from a ‘nuclear winter’, in which immense clouds formed by the black mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions would cover the Earth and deprive crops around the world of heat and sunlight.”
One important lesson from history is that nuclear war is not inevitable. War does not break out because of human nature—or a supposed fundamental defect in humanity—but because of human society. Society is made by people and can ultimately be remade by people.
Anthropologist Ashley Montagu summarised the question of human nature this way: “There is no doubt that we are born with the genetically endowed potential to behave in many different ways. But how those potentials become actual capacities depends on training and learning … What we truly inherit is the ability to shape and perfect ourselves, so that we need not become slaves, but can become masters of our fate.”