No, according to evolutionary biologist David Barash. First he distinguishes between violence and war:
Violence is widespread and, sadly, deeply human, just as the adaptation for violence under certain circumstances is similarly ingrained in many other species. But war is something else. It is a capacity, and involves group-oriented lethal violence. Thus it deserves to be distinguished from rivalry, anger, ‘crimes of passion’ or revenge, or other forms of homicide. …
In his justly admired book The Better Angels of our Nature (2011), the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker made a powerful case that human violence — interpersonal as well as warring — has diminished substantially in recent times. But in his eagerness to emphasise the ameliorating effects of historically recent social norms, Pinker exaggerated our pre-existing ‘natural’ level of war-proneness, claiming that ‘chronic raiding and feuding characterised life in a state of nature’.
The truth is otherwise. As recent studies by the anthropologist Douglas Fry and others have shown, the overwhelmingly predominant way of life for most of our evolutionary history — in fact, pretty much the only one prior to the Neolithic revolution — was that of nomadic hunter-gatherers. And although such people engage in their share of interpersonal violence, warfare in the sense of group-based lethal violence directed at other groups is almost non-existent, having emerged only with early agricultural surpluses and the elaboration of larger-scale, tribal organisation, complete with a warrior ethos and proto-military leadership.
A roundup of Dish posts on the debate over Pinker’s Better Angels here. On a related note, Michael Kazin describes how the current war-weariness over Syria “keeps faith with American tradition”:
The Democrats focused their 1900 campaign on opposition to the ongoing war of conquest in the Philippines. In early 1917, the public’s desire to stay out of World War I was so widespread that peace activists demanded a popular referendum on the question which they thought they had a decent chance to win. Until Charles Lindbergh started accusing Jews of seeking to pull the U.S. into World War II, his America First Committee was an ideologically diverse group with some 800,000 paid members. The throngs which railed against the wars in Indochina and forced an end to the draft belonged to the most successful of all the peace movements. If hundreds of thousands of protesters had not flocked to the Mall starting in 1965, Lyndon Johnson would likely have been elected to a second term, and Richard Nixon might never have had a first one.
The only wars Americans have almost universally supported have been those which began with an attack on the nation: Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And by the time Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan ended in mid-2012, half the public wanted him to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Even brief offensives like the Army’s “punitive expedition” in Mexico that Woodrow Wilson ordered in 1916 and Ronald Reagan’s proxy wars in Central America in the 1980s stirred mass demonstrations and outrage in Congress.
The Dish 