Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

516 J HOW THE MIND WORKSof battlefield strategy is to surround an enemy unit, making defeat lookcertain and causing panic and rout.Just as important is an equitable distribution of risk. A war party facesthe problem of altruism par excellence. Every member has an incentiveto cheat by keeping himself out of harm's way and exposing the others togreater risk. Just as benevolent cooperation cannot evolve unless thefavor-granter detects and punishes cheaters, aggressive cooperation cannotevolve unless the fighters detect and punish cowards or shirkers.Bravery and discipline are the obsessions of fighting men. They affecteverything from a soldier's sense of whom he wants in his foxhole to thecommand structure that coerces soldiers into assuming risk equitablyand that rewards bravery and punishes desertion. War is rare in the animalkingdom because animals, like humans, ought to be cowards unlessthey can enforce a multiparty contract to share the risks. Unlike ancestralhumans, they did not have the cognitive machinery from which anenforcement calculator could easily evolve.Here is another peculiarity of the logic and psychology of war. A manshould agree to stay in a coalition for as long as he does not know that heis about to die. He may know the odds, but he cannot know whether thespinner of death is slowing down at him. But at some point he may see itcoming. He may glimpse an archer who has him in his sights, or detectan impending ambush, or notice that he has been sent on a suicide mission.At that point everything changes, and the only rational move is todesert. Of course, if the uncertainty collapses only seconds before death,it's too late. The farther in advance a fighter can predict that he is aboutto become an unknown soldier, the more easily he can desert, and themore likely the coalition is to unravel. In a coalition of animals attackinganother coalition or an individual, an attacker has some warning if he isbeing picked out for a counterattack, and can flee before they give chase.For that reason a coalition of animals would be especially prone to unraveling.But humans have invented weapons, from spears and arrows tobullets and bombs, that make fate unknowable until the last second.Behind this veil of ignorance, men can be motivated to fight to the last.Decades before Tooby and Cosmides spelled out this logic, the psychologistAnatol Rapoport illustrated it with a paradox from World WarII. (He believed the scenario was true but was unable to verify it.) At abomber base in the Pacific, a flier had only a twenty-five percent chanceof surviving his quota of missions. Someone calculated that if the flierscarried twice as many bombs, a mission could be carried out with half as