Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.

Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War by Barbara Ehrenreich (New York: Henry Holt and Co, Metropolitan Books, 1997); 252 pp.; $14,95 paper,

War is the only sport of kings in which the common man is allowed to participate." So intoned the narrator's voice over scenes of eighteenth-century military mayhem at the beginning of the old Gerard Philippe comedy Fan-Fan le Tulipe. A far more sophisticated examination of the phenomenon of organized violence is presented by social critic, author, scientist, and American Humanist Association 1998 Humanist of the Year Barbara Ehrenreich in her remarkable, important book Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.

Ehrenreich's penetrating analysis, with 250 bibliographical entries, discounts the notion that war is the result of some basic flaw in the human psyche or simply caused by excessive testosterone levels. Darwinian explanations are the key. Natural selection favors defensive solidarity over individual fight or flight. Moreover, humans evolved from being the prey of carnivores into predators of both other animals and their own kind--apparently a unique reversal in evolutionary history--and that contributed in a major way toward our tendency to kill. The human penchant for organized violence is shaped by both biology and culture. Humans are not born with an innate fear of predation but with a capacity to acquire that fear and to act on it.

Ehrenreich relates the early history of war to religious sacrifice rituals and beliefs. Much killing and less-than-lethal bloodletting has occurred to appease deities, and early warfare was often aimed at capturing enemies for human sacrifice. She also comments trenchantly on the "sacralization" of war. And while there has generally been a gender division of labor in organized violence, women as well as men have long shared participation in warfare.

Ehrenreich traces the rise of warrior elites, such as the knights in Europe and samurai in Japan, who eventually gave way to the "democratization" of war following the spreading use of bows and arrows, the invention of firearms, and the rise of nationalism in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. While not disparaging the Enlightenment, Ehrenreich nonetheless sees the rise of nationalism as a counter to it that raised human predation to unprecedented levels. While only 15 percent of the deaths in World War I were civilians, that figure rose to 65 percent: in World War II and to 90 percent in post-war "low intensity conflicts."

She concludes by citing the view of biologist Richard Dawkins that there are cultural analogs to genes that he calls memes--self-replicating "units of culture." War, Ehrenreich writes:

   is not the only self-replicating social institution. The familiar
   hierarchies of race, gender, and class are also endowed with a certain
   ability to reproduce themselves ....

   Someday, perhaps, social theory will be in a position to understand human
   culture as a medium--a primeval soup, as it were--within which abstract
   entities like war and possibly also capitalism, religion, and science, not
   only "live" and reproduce but also interact .... War, for example, has for
   millennia existed in a symbiotic relationship with male domination, both
   drawing strength from and giving nourishment to it ....

   War is first, in an economic sense, a parasite on human cultures--draining
   them of the funds and resources, talent and personnel, that could be used
   to advance the cause of human life and culture. But "parasitism" is too
   mild a term for a relationship predicated on the periodic killing of large
   numbers of human beings. If war is a "living" thing, it is a kind of
   creature that, by its very nature, devours us. To look at war ... is to see
   the face of the predator over which we thought we had triumphed long ago.

She further writes that we will need leaders, "networks of committed activists ... strategies and cunning" to oppose force "with numbers, and passion with forbearance and reason .... What have all the millennia of warfare prepared us for if not this Armageddon fought, once more, against a predator beast?"

Blood Rites merits a large readership.

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association and the editor of the recently published book, Timely and Timeless: The Wisdom of E. Burdette Backus (Humanist Press).