War & Peace Quote by Arthur Keith

Keith’s sentence performs a neat, unsettling pivot: it condemns war as unethical, then immediately treats it as a kind of social technology. The first clause is a moral throat-clearing, a signal that the author knows the civilized stance expected of him. The second clause quietly overrides that stance with an “evolutionary” rationale, smuggling in the idea that brutality can be not just expedient but functional - even, in a cold-blooded sense, adaptive.

The key word is “weld.” It’s industrial, not political: people are raw material, heat and pressure do the joining, and “force, terror, and propaganda” become the torch. Calling the result a “tribal whole” frames modern Germans as reverting (or being pushed) into a primordial unit, a move that flatters the scientist’s explanatory ambition while also reducing a complex society to an anthropological cliché. “Tribal” here does double work: it pathologizes mass politics as atavism while implying that such atavism is a predictable product of selection pressures.

Context matters. Keith was a prominent British anatomist and anthropologist shaped by early 20th-century evolutionary thinking, when “race,” “tribe,” and national character were often treated as quasi-biological facts. Read against the rise of Nazism and the propaganda state, the line tries to make sense of modern total war by fitting it into an evolutionary story of cohesion-through-violence. The subtext is bracing: ethics is a luxury category; in moments of perceived existential competition, societies fuse by manufacturing fear and unanimity. It’s analysis that risks becoming alibi - the kind of explanation that can sound like diagnosis while normalizing the disease.