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Fight club: War throughout history
战斗俱乐部：历史中的战争
In 1931 the League of Nations offered Albert Einstein, a physicist and vocal pacifist, the chance to choose a correspondent on a subject of his choice. He opted for Sigmund Freud, an Austrian psychologist, as his partner.
1931年，国际联盟为阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦（物理学家和积极发声的和平主义者）提供了一个机会，让他选择一位通信者并就他选择的主题进行讨论。爱因斯坦选择了奥地利心理学家西格蒙德·弗洛伊德作为他的讨论搭档。
“Is there a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” was the question. Freud was not optimistic; he thought that in every human there was a “death drive”, an impulse to violence and destruction.
讨论的问题是“有没有一种方法可以把人类从战争的威胁中解救出来？”。弗洛伊德并不乐观，他认为每个人心中都有“死亡驱力”，这是一种倾向于暴力和破坏的冲动。
The slim pamphlet emerging from their exchange, “Why War?”, makes for heavy reading. Since then, at least five books with the same title have been published.
从两人之间的交流脱胎而来的是一本薄薄的小册子《为何有战争？》，但读起来却很沉重。自那以后，至少有五本同名书籍已出版。
Richard Overy, a British historian of the second world war, has now written a sixth, which skilfully draws together nearly 100 years of scientific and historical scholarship. His goal is to understand the mechanisms that have embedded warfare throughout human history.
理查德·奥弗里是研究第二次世界大战的英国历史学家，他现在写了第六本同标题的书，这本书巧妙地汇集了近100年的科学和历史学术研究。他的目标是理解让战争嵌入整个人类历史的机制。
Although the answers, he finds, have remained “contested, fractured and frustratingly elusive”, there is one undeniable constant: that human groups from the earliest times to the present have resorted to collective, lethal violence against other groups when prompted by ambition, fear, need or prejudice.
虽然他发现答案仍然是“有争议的、分裂的、令人沮丧地难以捉摸的”，但有一个不可否认的不变因素：从最初到现在，人类群体在野心、恐惧、需求或偏见的驱使下，会对其他人类群体采取集体的、致命的暴力行为。
To bring some shape to the debate, Mr Overy has split his critique of the academic literature into two sections. The first covers science: anthropology, biology, ecology and psychology.
为了使讨论更有条理，奥弗里将他对学术文献的评论分为两部分。第一部分涵盖了科学研究：人类学、生物学、生态学和心理学。
War can be explained as hard-wired into people through evolution (a Darwinian struggle for survival), determined by cultural norms or triggered by ecological pressures.
战争可以被解释为是通过进化（达尔文式的生存斗争）而先天根植于人类之中，或由文化规范所决定的，或由生态压力所引发的。
Accordingly, people can be the prisoner of their genes or try to create societies in which warfare is no longer seen as desirable or inevitable.
因此，人们可以成为基因的俘虏，也可以尝试创建这样的社会：在这个社会中，战争不再被视为是可取的或不可避免的。
The second section, which historians and many readers will favour, puts greater emphasis on human agency and mankind as the creator of cultures that sustain or even exalt warfare.
第二部分（历史学家和许多读者会更喜欢这部分内容）更加强调人类的能动性，以及人类作为维持战争，甚至崇尚战争的文化的创造者角色。
Mr Overy describes “four broad motivational categories”: belief (religion), power, resources and security. These were the forces behind modern wars and also, Mr Overy argues, much earlier conflicts between pre-state groups.
奥弗里描述了“四个动机大类”：信仰（宗教）、权力、资源和安全。这些是现代战争背后的驱动力，而且奥弗里认为，也是前国家集团之间的冲突的背后驱动力。
Early warfare was clearly different in scale from that waged by modern states. But Mr Overy shows that the causes and aims of early conflicts were frequently not dissimilar to those of later periods.
早期战争在规模上显然与现代国家发动的战争不同。但是奥弗里表明，早期冲突的原因和目标与后来冲突的原因和目标往往没有什么不同。
