Probably he didn’t recall Napoleon’s invocation ‘Gentlemen we are introducing the Egyptians to civilisation’ during the battle of the Pyramids in 1798, just before a French cannonball ripped through the nose of the Sphinx. Napoleon brought with him 200 savants – professors and intellectuals whose task was to map out the country intellectually. ‘Donkeys and professors to the rear,’ the command went out whenever the advancing French columns were attacked by the Mameluk horsemen en route to Cairo. Civilisation was a word that had only recently been coined. Behind the very concept, wrote Bernard Williams, lay the general spirit of the Enlightenment; it carried a moral purpose which was quite new: history as the story of Progress. And civilisation from the very beginning has been associated with two other concepts: barbarism and war. Taming the barbarians has been one of civilisation’s many tasks.

If only we had that epigram and nothing else of Tacitus’ work, it would be worth it even if we did not know the context. It is one of the best things ever said about war, and it took Tacitus to say it so directly and unforgettably. The words are put in the mouth of a British chieftain and for him there is no philosophy to extract from it, but there is for us. Peace is the promise of civilisation and pacification is a form of peace, but it can end up being self-sustaining.

Of course, we should not expect any real sympathy in Tacitus’s work for the ‘lesser breeds beneath the law’. He is really addressing his own countrymen’s vices. As always his warning is addressed to his readers – all of them Romans, not barbarians. He is also employing a typical rhetorical device: inversion. In revealing their own ferocitas (ferocity) and a complementary lack of humanitas (humanity) he is claiming that the Romans had ceased to be ‘civilised.’ His history, after all, shows Romans preying on each other; barbarism, we learn, begins at home.

In fact, war and civilisation (like war and humanity) have been conjoined from the very beginning – war far from being ‘barbarous’ is part of the ‘civilising process.’ ‘In the beginning’ is the opening line of the Old Testament: the act of creation is the plucking of order from the chaos of life. For us it means the birth of civilisation around 5000BC. Palaeontologists have spent years telling us that pre-history has a history just as fascinating; the historians of ‘deep history’ go even further back to our remote past. But civilisation is what we admire the most, and we cannot think about it without thinking about war. History is the story of decline and fall. War is cause and effect: the reason why some civilisations rise and all of them eventually fall. They decline if they are too bellicose or not bellicose enough and I regret to add that civilisation has not finished with war quite yet.

If Homer is the great poet of war; the great poet of civilisation is Hesiod, the author of an epic poem called Work and Days. Hesiod was doing what – according to Nietzsche – came naturally to the Greeks: they organised the chaos.’ What is distinctive about Hesiod’s world view is the importance he attached to pro-social values. Values become more ‘sociable’ through the division of labour: hence the value Hesiod attached to work. A man is only worth as much as he achieves through sweat and effort. And because there is justice in the world which there is not in Homer’s where the Gods are completely capricious, it is worth working (or we might as well give up). A just man is one who works his whole life and satisfies both his own needs and those of others, even though the work may be unrelenting. “The Gods have given work to men,” he tells his lazy brother, Perses. It is not a punishment; it is innate in the human condition. Those who like his brother live off other people are like ‘stingless drones’ which waste the honey gathered by the productive hive.

What Hesiod ignored was that even war has its specialist workers. In The Odyssey Odysseus confesses that he never loved working the land, nor managing a household, even though both provide for splendid children, “but I always loved oared ships and war and polished spears and arrows, baneful things at which others shudder. But I love those things which a god placed in my heart, for different men rejoice at different work”.

Hesiod offers his readers an even more important insight. The division of labour is a form of domestication, and we know that domestication made possible the rise of ranked societies which preceded hereditary chiefdoms and monarchies. But the domestication of people is different in character from that of other animals. Men are not sheep. Shepherds look after their flocks, see off predators and keep them warm. As a result, domesticated animals developed smaller brains (wolves, for example, are cleverer than dogs at hunting). Domestication also led us to breed out aggression (dogs have become less pack-like over time). Cattle were also emasculated – they became ‘bovine’ (more dull-witted). Bovine is not a word of praise when used of a man, especially a warrior- Shakespeare calls Ajax ‘beef-witted’ in Troilus and Cressida.

In other words, writes the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, civilisation should not be regarded as Freud did, in one of his last books, Civilisation and its Discontents, as a tool for repressing instincts; instead, we should think of it as a tool which replaces instinctual abilities and channels aggression into more useful social ends. Our moral sensibilities and cultural instincts may even be the way by which we have limited the degenerative effects of our own domestication.

Mark Pagel describes this process as the domestication of our talents. Specialisation cultivates the talents, in both senses of the term – it at once fosters and restrains them (the talents it promotes tend to be pro-social, used on behalf of others). All domestication promotes this. Dog breeds are genetic varieties that have been selected for and maintained by us. We employ those breeds for different purposes, especially hunting or guarding property (but hunting dogs are not ideal guard dogs).

Similarly, specialisation in war allowed our societies to thrive. In his EssayOn Civil Society Adam Ferguson told the story of an American ‘redskin chief’ addressing the (British) governor of Jamaica at the beginning of a war with Spain. The chief was astonished that the civilians in the colony, especially the merchants, had not been enlisted. The governor explained to him that the merchants took no part in war. “When I go to war, I leave nobody at home but the women” the chief replied. Here Ferguson assumed the moral high ground of the civilised man and explained that the ‘simple warrior’ didn’t realise that in a sophisticated nation war and commerce were not distinct. In civilised societies “the character of the warlike and the commercial are variously combined; they are formed in different degrees by the influence of circumstances”.

More recently, specialisation has been aided by our interface with technology and technology has continued to domesticate us at the same time. The question we should ask, writes Kevin Kelly, is what do technology and civilisation still want of us? Well, war has been becoming more and more specialised in one critical respect: human input is decreasing. But we should also remember that the civilising process, from the first, reduced the labour involved in killing. And weapons made all the difference. It takes on average 20 minutes for two or three chimpanzees to kill another; it takes a matter of minutes for a man to kill another with a spear or an arrow.

And then chemical power replaced muscle power around the 15th century. Compare the years of training it took for an English longbow man (the years it took to hone his physique to draw a longbow) with the less physical labour required to fire a flintlock musket.

The physical labour of war has been diminishing for some time now and will soon be reduced even further; in the near future even the ‘grunts’ will have their skills enhanced by exoskeletons and possibly performance enhancing drugs. As Kelly claims, specialisation is continuing to domesticate us; at the cutting edge war continues to demand what Pagel in his book Wired for Culture calls “a more domesticated set of abilities.” By ‘domesticated’ both writers mean more cerebral. The ‘analytical warrior’ is in the process of replacing the stereotypes of old. Mental agility, communication skills and multi-tasking are the virtues required of tomorrow’s warriors.

If cyberwarfare is the most cerebral form ever invented, it is only part of that larger cybernetic world in which we are locking the warriors of tomorrow. Science fiction has anticipated this for some time. Take Ender’s Game a novel which is on the syllabus of the Marine Corps University at Quantico. It is about a young cadet who takes part in a simulated battle sequence against an alien species called the Formics, only to discover at the end of the book that the battle is not a game; it is for real. There is a sobering remark halfway through the novel. “Ender Wiggins isn’t a killer. He just wins – thoroughly”. And this is the main challenge. Wiggins is a striking example of what the poet, T.S. Eliot in a very different context called the ‘dissociation of sensibility’.

Our minds from very early on in our prehistory have fostered social intelligence as Plato was the first to recognise in The Republic (just as he was the first to recognise that women could engage in war too; what civilisation had gendered it could de-gender as it now has). The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey describes cultivating plants as a ‘conversation’ similar to a mother talking to a two month old child; both are attuned respectively to the ‘emergent properties’ of a plant or a child. Indeed, he surmises that many of our most prized technological discourses from agriculture to chemistry may have had their origins in the fortunate misapplication of social intelligence. But in privileging the new specialised cognitive domain of technical intelligence will we be moving into a less socially intelligent world one in which warriors may become more self-absorbed and certainly more self-regarding?

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Neuroscientists tell us that the primitive pain centre in the brain activates almost immediately when pain is recalled but the ability to empathise with the prolonged suffering of others unfolds more slowly; it takes time to understand the moral dimension of a situation and this is largely communicated though reflection. Dissociation, in other words, is not just an attitude of mind; it is a function of changes in the brain, and the digital world may already be beginning to change the architecture of the human brain itself and, therefore, what it means to be human.

Civilisation taught us – and it is the great break with our hunter-gatherer past – that we are human only to the extent that others recognise their humanity in us. Well, that is the story that western societies have been telling themselves for some time and it may be difficult to persist with it when soldiers and robots start sharing the battle space together. And since 2007 the US military has been trying to program the next generation of machines with a ‘conscience’ (an ethical governor is the scientific term – a set of computer algorithms in place of the moral heuristics that are hard-wired into us by natural selection). In the not too distant future robots may be able to evaluate the consequences of their own actions. Indeed, the ability to reach value judgements will be part of the program. The fact that empathy and compassion will be beyond their ‘emotional range’ will hardly matter, we are told, since both will be ‘offset’ by what really counts: consistency of behaviour. Robots won’t have prejudices, personal or generic, and they won’t misbehave under stress. The reduction of inhumanity will ‘offset’ the loss of humanity; the result may be a fighting force that is more humane than an all-human one. “I will stand my artificial intelligence over your humanity any day of the week,” a key American military commentator remarked recently, “and tell you that my AI will … create fewer ethical lapses than a human being”.

By then the real game changer is what civilisation will still want of us. Robots may enable us to replace human rationality with logic – cold, calculating and utterly relentless, like the Categorical Imperatives of Immanuel Kant (which are instantiated in Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics). It was Kant who told us that we should never lie. If we offer a friend refuge from the police we are obliged, if asked, to tell them where he is hiding even though most of us might think it would be morally impermissible to do so. In real life we are not consistent; even the state is sometimes willing to suspend the law so that justice can be better served. Even scientists suspect logical reasoning. As the nuclear physicist Niels Bohr once rebuked a student: “Stop being so bloody logical, and start thinking”.

If this is indeed the direction in which we are heading it would have surprised Clausewitz, if not appalled him. In his great work On War he argued that it was a “fallacy to conceive of war as ridding itself of human passion. The result, if one could, would be war by algebra”. But that is what may be on the horizon, and it should give us a cause to worry – not because robots will be unable to perform the tasks we give them but because war is not algorithmic. Nevertheless, we may have reached the end of the first phase of war – what Thucydides called ‘the human thing’, the only definition he was willing to venture. The civilising process may not eliminate war; instead, it may help us overcome (Aufhebung or overcoming in a Hegelian sense) our own fallibility as a species. And what would this represent if not the final ‘triumph’ of civilisation?