and welcome to the program dr barbara ehrenreich and barbara ehrenreich is an author who i had said off camera has marshalled the language as well as winston churchill in the cause of many many interesting and important understanding of the human condition and so forth and barbara ehrenreich walk were very much the cover so she'd like to be here and back to new york yeah you are now you you've written you know so well for falling in this sort of thing and things you've written your reputation procedure for me say so but you've written more recently in this we want to talk about his blood rights the book on the origins of the passions of war and we want to talk about the book particularly but i wonder if you could could you share with us a little of your own your own background and then just to sort of anchor it as it were here and  to talk about the book specific wanted a little bit embarrassing because that's a patchwork background revise and i had intended to be a scientist and actually ended up getting a ph d in biology in new see spending the rest of my lives that fourteen hours a day at the bench as we used to say in the laboratory and i wanted to be more quote socially relevant and what i was doing and that just led to one thing or another eventual a to  journalism to writing a lot about health care issues initially health care issues in new york city from either to class system of health care and so on here and i don't know one thing led to another but in this book i can come back in some ways those original concerns one is war and the other is certain certain sort of biological questions you know which you inevitably you have to confront when you talk about something so ancient and so  nearly universal and human experience you know or and you take you take a really beautiful you long historical biologically is storable perspective on the human condition and so well museum only and only a non historian would dare do this  really well if you're a historian you've got your field it's ancient or it's middle age writing something modern and you know i just the whole thing i don't i'm not constrained by some kind of disciplinary barriers i can  i used a lot used to say it is appropriate as we move into an information environment we have so much information that we can recognize patterns we have a capability of doing that and that the comprehensive is or let's say to use a loaded phrase the generalist is a legitimate prime thing and i ask you know the question is what gets me going and i don't care where i'm taken to by that question whether it's called anthropology or called zoology or history you know i'll have to i'll have to learn a lot of have to do a lot of catch catching up in some of those areas but here i think some of my habits as a journalist helped too because when i be going into an area like in researching this book which took many years question or i want to know how this fits in with so and so right so and so is work or what do you think of this and almost universally these people were very nice very forthcoming and really you know freely added to my education and what thinking thinking is the challenging part writing once you've got a thought out it just it comes very quickly on to the page so i did in this book i said i'm giving myself a break i'm not even i'm not going to worry about how it sounds there's so much research i want to on their own can go and find something that they're really interested in like on the hunt in a certain sense it makes the whole human experience much more interesting i think as far as what education is about yeah you know i mean my i always have some big question  a private investigator investigating whatever it is ok and then you do the journals i know you write for time magazine is of what's good now the book when did you get the idea writing it when did it come from blood rights and if i may let me show if i could maybe right here if they could maybe bring it up let's see people how would it look in the in the in the bookstore it's called blood rites and it's called the origins and hilter and history of the passions of war and it's in the book stands now and when did write it was called the hearts of men still in print and you know as because i had written that book i was invited to write a forward to a fascinating book which was being translated from the german into into called male fantasies which was about german warriors about the german officer elite and basically between the two world wars i and i got fascinated by this and fact i started reading more and more books in order to feel confident enough to even write the forward and pretty soon i found that you know i was sort of confronting myself here i had opposed wars in any war that had come along in my own life time after you know as a grown up per have now more and so on and yet i had really never thought about it intellectually you know always just seem like a turbo surprise oh my god people are killing each other you know and i think we all have a little bit of that we know that the activities that go on in war that is the actual killing looting maiming are all illegal acts and wrong normal society that they're all immoral illegal acts yet when you do those acts in large numbers and call it a war not only is it not illegal but it's seen as something very honorable and wonderful and glorious more so those of glory and i thought you know i began to see the that there was a big question i actually enjoyed reading about the whole so rightly and i was and i guess another kind of fascination here is that this is not an area that a lot of women go into there are not a lot of women to read it it's almost all by men and this is just an area which is historically been people of the human spirit is motivated in order to you know have some sort of a for the come up against seems to be that seems to be part of what human beings seem to need is to have some sort of an enemy if that's the right term or dialectic it's something against which they can pit their their good feelings about what it is they're doing that's something that seems to be inherent in the human condition perhaps i don't move well i so i sort of started out thinking as i think most people do that the passions of war that the dealings i go into wars are all hatred and aggression and cruelty and so forth so the very st surprise which takes place in about a page six of the booking is know that the feelings people express about war warriors as well as noncombatants who are very enthusiastic about hatred or wanting to kill and maim and there are their feelings of self sacrifice willingness to sacrifice for some great cause or your nation their feelings of generosity altruism camaraderie camaraderie i mean it it's a book that it is sadly i would say but through war that we often find that that fondness to others that solidarity of what biological purpose or human purpose is and it's interesting in the end of the book you come to some sort of a notion that we might be able to marshal those forces against war itself we have an interesting sort of turn of phrase and thoughts of what but you also go into this and you say that you know normally we will be in a marxist dialectic or something will say it's a argumentation over markets or it's economic this and that you cannot make interest and border clashes and that sort of thing but you go right into biological roots to go way back in the age yeah st the you know a bit about religion here because you know i'm not throwing out class or with some yeah throwing out marks or anybody else who has written about human motivations or going to war it was actually more lennon i would guess but  said war is a rational undertaking it's something nation states do when they've exhausted all of the live diplomacy so the way to study wars through looking at international relations or political science and so on an extension of a diploma of ritual in between wars we treated as a very holy thing we have our special we're related holidays in our rituals like parades and so on and so i think i said i'm going to look at it not in the conventional sort of economic way i'm going to look at it here as a blood right related to the most enchant form of religion or form of religious practice which is so blood sacrifice interesting and that seems to go way way back goes yeah you know you know i mean because if you know what i was thinking of these thinking how can we sacral lies how can we take something as you know evil has i think war is well all the ancient religions had as they are central right an act of blood sacrifice either of animals or humans you look at the old testament yes indeed you have much of the old testament is is  instance struction son or what animal gets sacrificed of what way you know as a peace offering as in offering whatever ancient hinduism the ancient greeks those religions were absolutely centered on blood sacrifice but it's a it's a relating to the people's relationship to the environment to the other four in a very you bring that up in a large cats in africa and that a good deal of our evolutionary experience goes before history far before history we've been you know in a relationship to the other biologicals in a way different than perhaps we see ourselves now yeah well the the blood sacrificial rights of gays and religions began interests me because here is a sort of an analogue to war in that you have an act of killing which is turned into something sacred by the way it is interpreted and there the interesting thing and i don't i don't know how this is ever been noted before and it's controversial but it seems forgotten by the critics pretty well is that again and again in those blood sacrifices the deity that the secretary speaking offered to is imagined to be actually eating or consuming in some way the sacrifice of his offer a good offer to him know there's a sort of a carnal interest on his part too so that that began to lead me into a the whole set of questions about evolution and why why do we do these things what is that what what is this human fascination with violence that would mean that is you know as recently as four thousand years ago most religious practice on earth certainly in the more populated parts of earth consisted of living animals throat or killing a human publicly what what is it between our species and the whole subject of violence then big subject yeah yes so when you read the the evolutionary theory on that it was you you run into what has been the conventional wisdom i think since the sixty's or even earlier and that is it's the man the hunter theory you know that humans are i've always been predators that we were always hunters that that's our our  defining activity that distinguishes us from the other primates and so on and of course we have wars we're just killers we have a killer instinct we used to eat what we killed now we just stack the bodies or something robert our gray yeah  right but i i was suspicious perhaps just intuitively suspicious that one thing that was always being left out it seemed to me was how did we get from being a fairly cowering creature to being the lord of the savannah now we've made a big jump there and i'm not sure we've gone into that before but let's see if i may it seems that the mitochondrial d n a studies seem to give us  beginning of homo sapiens sapiens maybe one hundred thousand years ago one hundred maybe two hundred thousand years ago out of africa are all it's interesting in and of itself we're all descendants of a common ancestor ols and close on to six billion of us now out of africa and that you bring up in the book that throughout the bulk of that period of time the human species we were very ill equipped relative to some of the the other cats in the world we couldn't we had not plausible a tiger we couldn't run like an animal and  out of that out of the trees into the savannah picked up a sharpened stick and then pretty soon we were in charge of the malays and you know we have a lot of disadvantages you mentioned we don't have clauses for we don't have sharp teeth we don't run very fast our babies are born in a yeah still are to certain well perhaps as i grew up that's another issue yeah so the big question then was what then it was occurring to me just following my my trail of thought was that how did we overcome that how did we get to the point where we were the leading predators on the planet and how did we go from being this frightened cowering creature and the answer that comes from primatology from the study of primates in the wild is that very interesting thing to me that was such a clue right there you know you had such a point if i may had such a poignant line in there about some primates where one is slightly wounded in order to keep up with the tribes moving along they baboons and they will do anything to keep up with have learned as a species to to stick pretty close together and that seems to be in some of the other primates too i mean the level and others in there your lessons that apply to us that probably apply to other i wonder if these are generalized principles that apply to biological evolution i don't know as well as that is what they're formative thing in our in our evolution i think it's really good you've called this up because most people i probably we have been since what i don't know how long how many generations back it is that we began to take dominion over the earth as it were and got agriculture  civilization and now animals we think of them as pets or something and we have a very different kind of attitude to it but it's probably good for us to try and think that through and i don't think it's been written enough that we were in this very very vulnerable stage through the vast majority  percent of our tenure on earth and that had to have had genetic or genetic or psychological you know all the rhythms as you put it down the learned and that should be understood perhaps better than that than we do in terms of understanding human behavior the still has application maybe the deep psychological oh i think that opens up so much like oh and i wish i would like to see people who really know the field so you know psychiatry and so on to talk about the implications for things like anxiety or depression sure which is very much a prey like response to your environment but the the the key thing here in relation to war was that we probably fought that st war that is against the primate the not the primate and the big cats through this mechanism of collective defense and my speculation here is that there is an excitement to banding together against a common stick with the group around and you know with through that stamping and yelling and everything you were more likely to preserve the life of your child you know so your grandchild you know that would be so that your genes and go would go on because it seems to me that it's something that is like that that is activated in a us in the excitement of a war in the excitement of nationalism that we have there's an outside enemy somewhere and that we are to band together and get all pumped up about this way we're bonding to fight that yeah and i'm saying that my speculation is that it is it's evolutionary roots in the very necessary defense of our species and that necessary defense also of a soldier unit that made it possible with this long of you know to your family unit but then that would be augmented by there being a social in that we could become to be comfortable and associated with and very much need and very very much need in order to in order to survive this is built so that's not well enough understood or anything you know it's there in such so much from mid year mythology for example you know skipping from a study of say primates in the wild it's very striking how much of  mythology has to do with confronting the beast that is you know raging through the area at the caves are you know you're right that the the great heroes of greek mythology are the ones who who ward off a li always appearing in mythology and i think the psychiatric explanation has been that's just something projection from our imaginations of this terrible beast i'm saying maybe we should take it a little more literally you know that what they were dealing with  was a threat that was not so far behind them and if you consider that in an ancient greece which was it you know time people had metal weapons lived in cities pretty self confident speed by then they would post at the gates of the city a an image of a predator a wolf or a lion usually and they said the function of that was to repel the actual animal so even for people living in cities that recently say four million five thousand years ago there was a danger danger to the herds but also a danger to the individual who was to who would stray off into the countryside you know to warn them again against that and this this this this this attitude is one that seems to appear we can find well there was a great deal of that going on and you had a very interesting bird or section in there where you spoke about the the finding of human remains where the the skull and the the let the leopards teeth just met very they said to those must been caused by other humans because the tendency is so much has been anyway so much against seeing ourselves our own species as prey or items you know we have to always be the guys on top right so they said this look early he intelligence came along just in the one thousand nine hundred and eighty s and he measured those puncture wounds very carefully in the hominid skulls and showed that they were the distance between them was exactly the same as the gap between the stabbing teeth of the leopard the ancient and the modern leopardess that happens so rather than quote man being always this predator with this killer instinct a very different picture emerges i think if you throw in the factor of yeah you know if we look at mankind in they they do that so they would have banded together and perhaps even lauded those who good scare off or frighten off or make go away a leopard some of that was a danger to them but when it we war war is a process of where we begin to take that kind of an attitude toward our own kind is what is war fit in in terms of the biological evolution of other species and so forth this quality of attacking one's own kind and when did that fit in or how do you think that fit in in this long palea to logical kind of view of things do you think there was a warning going on or were you recent the the archaeological evidence we have of war begins the st evidence of massacres and there's evidence of homicide that goes way back individuals with their skulls bashed in but when you only begin to find whole groups of people killed round twelve thousand years and so it's a bit pretty recent that that these that we went from fighting animals both as hunters and as defending our communities and to fighting each other you don't think we have records i mean of different human like primates at a certain point how come only one came out at the end right kind of unnerving to think about that but the the i mean the theory that i offer and this is not the point of my book it's not something that original with me but i i discuss the controversy about how do wars themselves begin and the the view that i think is is interesting is that what happens around twelve thousand b c is that in many many parts of the world begin seriously running out of dame animals and of course the predators that hunt the game animals and this means that those humans probably males who had  a specialized in being hunters and defenders of their communities suddenly didn't have as much to do not suddenly it's right over a long long time dr wright and the speculation which is not original to me is that  that war begins almost as a protection racket and these guys don't have the same amount to do there isn't you know there aren't lions that they're constantly fighting off to protect the sheep or something something they're there and and that's hunting because of this great shortage of animals that is happening then and so they're able to say hey look there's some really rough guys down the river and so we were you have to continue to just feed us and let us liar around here because we're the only protection  against them that was the beginning of civilization civilization used in the city dwelling and began to have the wood full used to write on the oriental of the source of dust which is in the oriental need to organize well i got you know agricultural irrigation system you need to organize people in the larger groups so you begin to have a warrior you know we don't know yeah but even a speculation that that the reason people began to live in towns was because of war really you know that it was well i mean are there would have been there could have been also predacious pressures from animals but but that you know by the time you have a thickly walled city like jericho from about seven thousand c very likely or earlier than that you know the fear is of other bands of humans so it may be that people were being pushed into concentrations by the threat  and that that that was sort of a began to be the source of war i wonder that begins in the ring is into some more contemporary notions of war as being let's go get that grain that those guys have and you know and begin to develop the idea aggression within what can be understood as economic interests and that sort of thing begins to have more application in turn as we get closer to our own time or probably there was a tendency to sacral eyes war going way way back and this is a again somewhat speculative but one of they were earliest ways of sacral wising war i mean maybe all you want is the grain yeah in the next town you've got to make it noble you have to make a noble here when you say you're doing is you're going to get attacked may i capture victims for human sacrifice to say you you that you have you're going to eat you have to feed the god you have to appease the god if you want to have the grain right so you that that's what you're really doing and i knew that and then that early on and it's it's amazing how many of these things live into the modern times was in thing you wrote on naziism and how they went back to ancient rights of you know the area in roots and that sort of thing and that they go back to these roots and they draw upon those in an emotional way mystique i mean look there's all these people that like to reenact civil war battles on a cruise or there was a general patton who believed that in previous on incarnations he had fought in the civil war and possibly many other wars and you know warriors do have this sense often or that were more i don't know whether to say more deluded ones or the more reflective ones and i have the sense that all the way back to a killie's there is some kind of lineage of noble warriors which of i wonder i did some things robbie bach at one time and he had a thing where he saw there's certain kinds of human beings or there's certain you know they're different x specs and one of them there seems to be a group of warriors and there have been warrior classes there have been intellectuals there been that he's got it into people who are a quiz a tours or acquisitive in terms of material things of what the masses and so i do think that there are some people within the human population that have appro toward thinking in quote warrior terms and then does that begin to get translated into things like sports and activities and competition and different kinds of of ways of thinking that maybe the induced spillover into well sociological patterns or than true that it's men who have done the fighting you know have been the warriors but it's not universal i mean there are also enough exceptions so we know it's not if it's like a logically or physically impossible like just even since this book was written they've dug up a grave site somewhere in russia of young women warriors young women teenage women vary between two and three thousand years b c b c buried with their weapons and with wound marks in their bones and so there's no question or there's very little question and they were fighters in and probably full time warriors and it's true and if you look at small scale societies women may not have been allowed to bear weapons but they were certainly given some pretty nasty tasks like a often the job of going around the battlefield after the battle and killing the enemy wounded or torturing the enemy wounded or whatever i mean it's not this i don't think there's a big psychological barrier for women to be violent or probably some people to exception to that well but you know another another would say really i don't i don't know and i think there may be a difference men may be more aggressive in general but i don't know what whether aggression in the individual has a whole lot to do with the war yeah it's interesting also many a time when brute strength would have been a particular important and then with the increase of technology you can shoot a deer you can be at some distance from the object you don't have to wrestle the thing to the ground so the muscle and so what and now we're getting down into the modern experience where it's a matter of the brains of being able to work a computer to run a missile or something so the it's getting more and more divorced from the questions of brute strength that might have been relevant in the early stages do you think you have you ever you know i mean if you're fighting you know in close good judgment so any kinds of reasons for women not being fighters have long since been eliminated and now they're going into the virginia military institute and i don't want everybody wants to i don't know you're i don't understand why  but that is a question but again back to the fact that it has these roots that go back in and we understand the biological evolution you know that it's all contained within us isn't that the evolution i mean the the the reptilian core and so forth in the evolution is all contained within us evolutionary process and do you see and you talk of august comp and so forth that that there's been a progression then that there is a but biological evolutionary process on this planet and we have seen mankind in a certain as apexing that purpose some people do some people say you know i you know anything at this at the at the at the head of the evolutionary process in terms of having some linear purpose that people try to perceive in terms of biological evolution we've got g principle coming as it were there's an interlocking of all the species and systems and so forth but people have gotten a sense of human purpose in terms of we are top of the food chain we're head of the heap we're in that kind of a position you find anything in this research as you've done that would cause us to see it differently or how would you see human purpose in terms of the broader biological evolutionary purpose as it relates to these questions of aggression and wars even manifest are there i asked you before is it a unique thing for ial enemies we have and if it we wanted to get you know serious about our biological destiny on earth we have to say we're not out of the woods you know we do have an enemy many many enemies  you know all of these things to the increasingly drug resistant strains of tuberculosis and so many other things let us fight this anime you know with some of the kinds of ingenuity and dedication that we again and again brought to bear against species is unique truly been able to a certain sense extend their consciousness if that's what technology is in a certain sense into the robin birds make nests and they create an environment other than that which in the eating the exits is given to them as a species but we have taken that to an extreme degree in terms of being able to change the environment and i don't know biologically if we have changed that much since cro magnon i i don't know genetically and so what but the technology in the mill you within which we int relate has changed tremendously and now is picking up and changing at almost more than exponential patterns with that with the microprocessor in these kind of things that we're coming into some sort of we have a unique capability in order to influence the environment do you think that i would ring of our consciousness is in a certain sense any kind of an expression of a of a i don't know to reach for some sort of a poetic metaphors or it's sort of like a an extension outward of consciousness whether that's an aggressive quality in biological aggressive aspect to our nature i mean certainly there are individuals who are dangerous because they're too aggressive and they're pathological extremes of that but i think the the tendency has been to think that since war is so widespread and so ancient it must be that there's some original sin and a something that's really really wrong with us if you're gotten it into the realty yeah i mean that is him well yeah but i mean also one pacifist and you think about war that's right how do we become a kinder gentler sweet a sweeter better natured species and stop doing this and i'm saying what i come out of this research saying is no i don't think there is that flaw in us i don't think it's testosterone i meant here i am i'm a solidarity that i was talking about and then at the beginning but we have you know we have to direct those passions in another way you know war once it gets started on us and this is in a way why the origins are not that is ultimately whether the people you know round the societies around it are warlike and so we had let loose something where the earth about fifteen thousand years ago which almost has this life of its own i don't you know i don't i no longer feel angry at people who are worriers who are in the military because i see that that is part of a system which is very hard for us as a species to break with but i do i do feel better about our species and when i started out good because i don't feel there's that terrible aggressiveness and i think what we have to start doing is seeing that this pattern of warring this war system that has become our enemy maybe it was once you know how we you know it as a roots and how we actually dealt with a non human anime but it has become our enemy that is the predator and we should marshal all of our forces of warmaking solidarity and so forth against the cause of the war itself exactly turn the thing out here it's beautiful that's the way you end the yeah the book on that thing is really a good idea and that idea i was reading up before that idea that the that the evolution of the extension of technology  in a certain sense like if you there was a consciousness before there was homo sapiens sapiens there was also the scene and there was so in there's something in the evolutionary process i don't want to say august compt or progress or some sort of a notion of that and we understand the bug the bacteriological root of it all and so forth but that there you don't see you don't see a pattern of purpose behind evolution or design some people are trying  there's a man baby who says that he sees a pattern of design behind this some people do but you don't see it to a purpose to where there was a consciousness before homo sapiens save it we may be coming to some relationship to the to the broader cosmic events that is in a certain sense transcended to what we've been throughout the human experience or use the line of rich but james joyce that history is a nightmare from which were attempting to awaken that we may come to a time of something that makes an environmental situation that is possible for human beings to safely and with security be able to be a kinder gentler kind of people and concentrate on say the arts and the things that are really important rather than the destructive hounds of wars of the scourges of war th and other institutions that have to try and move us beyond maybe our technological success we're getting to a point where the conditions are different than what they had been throughout the historical experience i don't like i don't know if there's a purpose or any direction to evolution i'm i'm not you know i'm not i don't think the evidence of that ok and you know you we do see the negative examples the terrifying examples of the people say who who lived on easter island y  physical resources fought over the few things that remained and made them so extinct and that is one possible scenario for our entire species is that way keep putting more and more of our resources into and preparations for war and we don't have the resources as a result to fight against disease or hunger or whatever the other threats are right and we go we all go the way of easter island yeah yeah and then there's of course a mental critique of that that can come in and we ought to be you know thoughtful in terms of the broader system which we are a part that principal guy is lovelock and some of these people begin to to begin to come to that kind of  a kind of a situation do you do you do you think that's a major problem than that in a remarks in analysis or other analysis where you begin to get to war they begin to talk about that war is an extension of diplomacy but but there's a competition for scarce resources or if you go to zero sum thinking in terms of business organization or other things or other situations that if you're in a scarce if there's a scarcity that you're going to be competition for that which there's not enough of an order for the object or the entity to survive but if you begin to subside or overcome scarcity within a situation the psychological attitude toward the resource base alters do you think there's any possibility that we're beginning to move beyond  some of the ironclad laws of scarcity that have been the context within which human institutions evolve including particular the happy ability for silicon and other kinds of ephemeral ization doing more with less and more ecologically friendly kind of patterns of technological sophistication nano technology and so forth might make it possible that we're going to supersede on a planetary scale scarcity and that there is a relationship between a competing for scar resources or do you think that doesn't relate that's a traditional way of thinking about the causes of war that is fighting over scarce resources and survival of the fittest i mean that that i should just underscore that that's not what i'm attempting to do  fits was more why the feelings that go with them you know and i was not though convinced i spent a lot of time following up precisely that kind of why a thought is it can is there something we can boil war all down to like scarce resources and it doesn't it doesn't easily work i mean once once the war has started it like the st world war you know you know you can have all so many theories there was no glaring shortage of research resources that the the nations of europe were fighting over its you know it after the fact it becomes an enormous model and even when you can point to some resource and say oil and the u s gulf war the us is involved in the gulf war it's a well there was scarce resource we had to do it you could do that also begin sometimes looks like an after the fact rationalization but more importantly you can always say well maybe oil was at stake was war the answer i mean is there anything no matter how great you can give say is the propagate provocation afterwards is there any provocation that is equal to the moral weight of killing large numbers of human particularly when you get to the super weapons yeah you know you get into t fifteen percent were civilian casualties by the time we get to the nd world war it was something like eight thousand five hundred and sixty five percent were civilians so that war began to have a all out nature there was something very disquieting in that some of these civil strife some of these ethnic things that gets up to ninety percent yeah the way women and children is a war they are right on out of bosnia percent civilians areas no protection in not you know being a civilian might as well have everybody have a gun which is what has been happening you know we see child soldiers in africa yeah used to me right there and when all the young men would go out in the meadow and fight it out you know or something but now it's not like that increasingly in the modern experience alterman you come down and out of this book are you is a tri question but didn't expect it but i came out with a greater respect for my own species for one thing i don't think there is any other species at least none that i have been able to discover which made such a leap up the food chain as our kind did that was that serious mission run that is the most uplifting thing we know war has supplied that need for many many people over thousands of years now i'd like us to put that same need into the business of ending war  trying to get at some sort of an idea is there any purpose i mean we're here on the rd planet in this time of the you know and there's a biological evolutionary pattern is there any purpose to it against which we could measure what we're here about  anti introverted function the biological evolutionary was he used to hold it was apex by humanity and that we're coming to where we understand our position in a conscious awake kind of way with knowledge in terms of cosmic patterns you know or that gets to be in a big pattern that would be a large pattern against which would get some idea of what our purpose is because behind a lot of this it does have to do with human purpose in the sense of what human purposes among us we have a psychological need or need to have an appreciation of that i yes which is a self or sort of self reproducing biological entity and it's you know there's i i wouldn't you know i would have to wait till this gets a little bit more firmed up but i was just basically saying we needed we need a better way of thinking about things like war where we get into what we create institution you know at one point there was no war humans start doing it it sort of runs away with itself and appears not to be very much in our control i mean the generals are right when they say hey we can't disarm somebody might attack us and of course they're not right in the sense that we're constantly arming yeah those people who might attack innocent never mind that but you know that there is a defensive rationale comes into play once you have let that institution a war loose on the planet and it has a certain life of its own we have to understand that as a pattern as a pattern we can understand so we can maybe better to combat it and you may be right right i want to have the mentality about war that we would have about any enemy yeah like a human enemy right or an animal enemy right how do we operate this from our lives and how do we fight it in all and how do we fight in every possible front which it is encroaching upon us we we had the war on poverty we had the war and all kinds of we have the war on war and that sort of thing well you've done a beautiful job with the book nobody believes you really very much on it and it's been your pleasure let's let people see again see how it looks in the bookstore ors and it's got it's barbara ehrenreich pleased to unable to welcome to the program blood writes and it subtitled again origins of the history and history of the passions of war robert thank you really very much for coming into town and it's been a great pleasure and we in conversations invited children will be coming back again next week  amazing the passions that are raised by that yeah i kind of thing that you know so then they were very much like that the nationalist passions of war and so that was the connection or like a music music yeah jazz music where people are playing and that's one of things i was kind of like for a zero something's you're playing music and you're playing with somebody music you really don't want some zero something where you're going to do better by the other person doing not well you want the other person to do very well right and music is really important to the constant confrontations with predators and you know the thought the stamping the the sort of rhythmic activities which are partly aimed at convincing that predator that you are not just a collection of weak individuals friend you are in one big beast yeah a resonating something that better answer to right yeah well there's probably some of this a good deal probably to be said for that