Jane Goodall once compared the aggression she witnessed in chimpanzees to their anthropological cousins, human primates. If you’ll excuse my paraphrase, I believe she said their manner of aggression was very similar to ours. I’ve thought a lot about her comment, but not so much in the context of the individual human, but in its application to nations. You see, the individual chimpanzee will usually flee danger, but Goodall was specifically addressing their inclination to ban together with familiars to conduct violent raids on neighboring tribes of chimpanzees. The purpose of these group acts of aggression was either to establish territorial control or to conserve food resources for themselves. Now we humans, primates all, don’t normally raid our neighbor’s house for food or property rights. But, banned together as a group, we can become quite a threat to others. The last 100 years have given testimony to such group violence as genocide, world wars, racial “cleansing,” religious persecution, sexual slave trade, forced child warriors, and so forth.

Have we in the West not come to believe ourselves enlightened? We’ve thrown off the suppressions of theocracy, feudalism, and various tyrannies to form freer societies governed by law. We citizens of America accept our constitutional obligations as free men and women “to promote the general welfare.” But does our government demonstrate the same commitment to other nations? How do we square the invasions of Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the moral code we generally apply to ourselves as individuals? Except for the first Iraq war, these were all preemptive wars against sovereign states. The America we love has also overthrown governments, assassinated foreign leaders, executed drone attacks in nations with whom we have never declared war while killing innocent civilians caught in our line of fire. At this very moment we are planning an attack on Syria. What I find surprising about our nation’s lack of moral standing in these instances is its conformity to the logic of international conduct. Nations have always acted in this manner. In fact, if a nation failed to be aggressive when its self-interest was at stake, it would find its resources pilfered by other nations, its people subject to foreign hegemony or rule, and/or its share of the world’s bounty restricted by competing forces. What makes national aggression so particularly grievous is the harm it afflicts on individuals. Sometimes this harm is waived aside as “collateral” damage—an incredibly duplicitous pseudonym for it implies lack of intent. Our President and Congress are set to deter Syria’s gas attack on innocent civilians by killing more innocents. In terms of the history of nations, this act would be justified and most likely lauded as a legitimate defense of the internationally recognized ban on the use of chemical weapons. The irony is that we are the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons against a civilian population. Of course, President Truman’s intent was to end the war and save American lives. Could anyone say he did not intend to kill over 100,000 innocent civilians, really? But he was only using the logic of war and exercising the same code that seems to govern international affairs. And that code may be the norm, but it is not moral.

What can I conclude from this dichotomy between what is considered acceptable behavior amongst individuals and what is the norm between nations? As individuals, we believe we should be governed by common moral precepts that simply don’t apply to nation states. The enlargement of our frontal lobes may have allowed us to evolve beyond our chimpanzee ancestors. But the world in which we find ourselves is still governed by primate rules. The lesson I draw from this circumstance is that our species has not evolved far from its roots. As individuals, we seem to recognize what is right and wrong. But as nation states, it’s still a jungle out there. We fought major “wars of liberation” in Vietnam and again in Iraq. Our intent seemed laudable. But at the conclusion of these wars, South Vietnam fell under the control of North Vietnam and the Sunni tyrant of Iraq was replaced by a Shia tyrant. The cost in lives was enormous, not just to our soldiers, but to the innocent civilians victimized as mere collateral damage: of the one million killed in Vietnam and the 100,000+ killed in Iraq, the vast majorities were civilians. If America were to truly lead the community of nations into a more humane and peaceful coexistence, if it were to effectively model the principles of its own foundation, then it would have to find more compassionately creative and diplomatic ways to solve the problems between nations than by the point of a gun. The problem with this type of idealism is the double bind it creates for America. Without the use of its military power and economic hegemony, America would lose its leverage to effect change in the world. With its exercise of power, however, it assures the world will not change its self-destructive ways. We as a nation merely sustain the insanity that governs the world of nation states. Unless we citizens of the world gain this awareness in mass, we can never hope to change the world or evolve into a truly enlightened species. Until then, primate logic still rules.