Why Young Men Go to War

> "The male response to war is an evolutionary adaptation that clearly works for our species."

> "It's a left-wing version of the Christian right rejecting the theory of evolution," he says. "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane."

The left wing, whatever it's worth, is certainly not rejecting the theory of evolution. Just because men are evolutionarily predisposed to go to war doesn't mean that not wanting them to go to war is rejecting the theory of evolution. Evolution only shows us what is. (In the case of evo-psych, it's usually more like what may have been.) Meanwhile, it's our job to figure out what ought to be, and to defer to evolution on that point is nothing but intellectual laziness.

Just because men choose to go to war doesn't mean that they are not also victims of a social order that glorifies war and gives them a warped idea of what it means to be male. These can both be true. Politics always takes advantage of pre-existing psychological propensities, but it also reinforces them and reshapes them to its advantage over many generations. In fact, most questions in the form of "did X cause Y or vice versa?" in politics and sociology can be answered as "duh, it's a feedback loop."

Humans are subject to evolutionary pressures like any other life form. But one of the major differences between us and other animals is that we can recognize when our biology predisposes us to participate in evil, and counter it with our intelligence and strength of will.

If evolution is taking us places where we don't want to go, we have the intelligence and technology to give the middle finger to evolution and shape our own destinies. That includes telling young men that they no longer need to kill other men in order to be acknowledged as upstanding members of our society.

EDIT: An earlier version of this comment included the following rant, which was meant as an aside. But too many people seemed to think that it was my main point, so I'm moving it to the end.

> "I don’t put any political agenda into my work. I think the right wing tends to idolize soldiers—you can't talk about them critically in any way. The left wing went from vilifying them in Vietnam to seeing them as victims of a military-industrial complex." He laughs over the phone. "Both views of soldiers are just absurd."

It's funny how every time I hear someone say they have no political agenda, or that they are neutral, they almost always go on to devote the vast majority of their effort to criticizing the left wing. Maybe they secretly endorse the right wing, or maybe they think the right wing is not even worth criticizing. In either case, I find this fascinating.

I went in the army because at the time, I had big dreams and no clear path to them. I thought joining the army and doing a hard training would teach me something about achieving goals.

I went to war because I was in the army and wondered what was the point of being in the army if you don't go to war. After doing my training, deploying in Afghanistan was the logical follow up. Why train so hard just to stay home.

After the mission, I left the army. Partly because life back into garrison was boring as hell, partly because I felt I had lived all that was to live in the army and it was time for the next phase in my life.

At least my original goal is sort of achieved. The army and all the things I lived at that time have equipped me with a confidence that has since helped me achieve milestones toward my life goals. In retrospect, the three decisions I enumerated were sound and being my young self again, I would do the same.

The rejection is not in not wanting men to go to war, or in favouring any particular social order, but in denying innate sex differences.

According to Junger, these theories are strongly rooted in academia, and particularly the social sciences.

“I have friends who are anthropologists and primatologists and evolutionary psychologists … [who are under] an enormous amount of pressure to generate data that shows that all gender differences are cultural.”

Because young man don't have enough experience to understand the world and they cannot see that war is a good business made by rich men. Rich men who would never send their children to war, of course.

I think he is alluding to the military forced by the left wing to attempt to have equal number of both sexes in every part of the military, when as a result of evolution, males are physically stronger and will be more suitable for some roles in the military than females and should therefore form the majority in some roles, and in others where only the strongest are selected, all of the roles, because the strongest males are stronger than the strongest females.

I think that's what he meant by "I mean the far left is also now rejecting the theory of evolution, which is just insane.".