Why War Is Not Inevitable
By World Beyond War
If
war were inevitable, there would be little point in trying to end it.
If war were inevitable, a moral case might be made for trying to lessen
its damage while it continued. And numerous parochial cases could be
made for being prepared to win inevitable wars for this side or that
side.
Developing ways to avoid generating conflicts is part of the
answer, but some occurrence of conflict (or major disagreement) is
inevitable, which is why we must use more effective and less
destructive tools to
resolve conflicts and to achieve security. But there is nothing
inevitable about war. It is not made necessary by our genes, by other
inevitable forces in our culture, or by crises beyond our control.
Our Genes:
War has only been around for the most recent fraction of the
existence of our species. We did not evolve with it.During this most
recent 10,000 years, war has been sporadic. Some societies have not
known war. Some have known it and then abandoned it.Just as some of us
find it hard to imagine a world without war or murder, some human
societies have found it hard to imagine a world with those things. A man
in Malaysia, asked why he wouldn’t shoot an arrow at slave raiders,
replied “Because it would kill them.” He was unable to comprehend that
anyone could choose to kill. It’s easy to suspect him of lacking
imagination, but how easy is it for us to imagine a culture in which
virtually nobody would ever choose to kill and war would be unknown?
Whether easy or hard to imagine, or to create, this is decidedly a
matter of culture and not of DNA.
According to myth, war is “natural.”
Yet a great deal of conditioning is needed to prepare most people to
take part in war, and a great deal of mental suffering is common among
those who have taken part. In contrast, not a single person is known to
have suffered deep moral regret or post-traumatic stress disorder from
war deprivation.
In some societies women have been virtually excluded from war making for centuries and then included. Clearly, this is a question of culture, not of genetic makeup. War is optional, not inevitable, for women and men alike.
Some nations invest much more heavily in militarism than most and
take part in many more wars. Some nations, under coercion, play minor
parts in the wars of others. Some nations have completely abandoned war.
Some have not attacked another country for centuries. Some have put
their military in a museum.
Forces in Our Culture:
War long predates capitalism, and surely Switzerland is a type of
capitalist nation just as the United States is.
But there is a
widespread belief that a culture of capitalism — or of a particular type
and degree of greed and destruction and short-sightedness —
necessitates war. One answer to this concern is the following: any
feature of a society that necessitates war can be changed and is not
itself inevitable. The military-industrial complex is not an eternal and
invincible force. Environmental destructiveness and economic structures
based on greed are not immutable.
There is a sense in which this is unimportant; namely, we need to
halt environmental destruction and reform corrupt government just as we
need to end war, regardless of whether any of these changes depends on
the others to succeed. Moreover, by uniting such campaigns into a
comprehensive movement for change, strength in numbers will make each
more likely to succeed.
But there is another sense in which this is important; namely, we
need to understand war as the cultural creation that it is and stop
imagining it as something imposed on us by forces beyond our control. In
that sense it is important to recognize that no law of physics or
sociology requires us to have war because we have some other
institution. In fact, war is not required by a particular lifestyle or
standard of living because any lifestyle can be changed, because
unsustainable practices must end by definition with or without war, and
because war actually impoverishes societies that use it.
Crises Beyond Our Control:
War in human history up to this point has not correlated with population density or resource scarcity. The idea that climate change and the resulting catastrophes will inevitably generate wars could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is not a prediction based on facts.
The growing and looming climate crisis is a good reason for us to
outgrow our culture of war, so that we are prepared to handle crises by
other, less destructive means. And redirecting some
or all of the vast sums of money and energy that go into war and war
preparation to the urgent work of protecting the climate could make a
significant difference, both by ending one of our mostenvironmentally destructive activities and by funding a transition to sustainable practices.
In contrast, the mistaken belief that wars must follow climate chaos
will encourage investment in military preparedness, thus exacerbating
the climate crisis and making more likely the compounding of one type of
catastrophe with another.
Ending War Is Possible:
Human societies have been known to abolish institutions that were
widely considered permanent. These have included human sacrifice, blood
feuds, duelling, slavery, the death penalty, and many others. In some
societies some of these practices have been largely eradicated, but
remain illicitly in the shadows and on the margins. Those exceptions
don’t tend to convince most people that complete eradication is
impossible, only that it hasn’t yet been achieved in that society. The
idea of eliminating hunger from the globe was once considered ludicrous.
Now it is widely understood that hunger could be abolished — and for a
tiny fraction of what is spent on war. While nuclear weapons have not
all been dismantled and eliminated, there exists a popular movement
working to do just that.
Ending all war is an idea that has found great acceptance in various
times and places. It was more popular in the United States, for example,
in the 1920s and 1930s. In recent decades, the notion has been
propogated that war is permanent. That notion is new, radical, and
without basis in fact.
David Swansons wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
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David Swansons wants you to declare peace at http://WorldBeyondWar.org His new book is War No More: The Case for Abolition. He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.
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