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Can the Human Race Outgrow War?
We scoured the woods for the perfect Y-shaped stick - each of its finger-branches similarly stout, the main shaft able to fit snuggly into a closed fist. Attach to the Y-ends a set of rubber bands braided around a leather patch and you had a sling shot.
Then we discovered the lethal virtue of black rubber strips cut from discarded inner tubes. Our projectile supply escalated from pebbles to marbles to ball bearings. A squad of three or four, we were best friends, roaming the woods for rabbits - and, in our minds, for Chi-com soldiers our uncles were fighting in Korea.
How naturally such play came to us. As boys, we seemed born to look for weapons, and to make them ever more lethal. From swamp reeds we fashioned foot-long pea-shooters, perfectly shaped for paper spit-balls, which, unlike ball bearings, we aimed at each other. Spit balls could surprisingly sting, but otherwise were harmless, which soon enough seemed a disadvantage. We figured out how to mold moistened paper around a cotter pin, transforming our pea-shooters into dart blowers. One day, I was walking to the blackboard. Before I took up the piece of chalk I heard the faint thupp of someone firing, felt the mildest of pinches on my right temple, ignored it, and proceeded to my blackboard task. Only the stunned expressions of my classmates told me something was wrong: the spit-ball dart was wedged in my head, sticking there. As I recall it, that was the end of pea shooters in our circle. I know I never blew through one again.
But the conviction that the impulse to weaponize is inbred, among males at least, survived. Child’s play had its equivalent in the work of statecraft. We knew our country was great because of its wars and weapons. Our Korean War hero was General Douglas MacArthur, whose entire life embodied the hard human necessity of outgunning enemies - matching their pebbles, in effect, with ball bearings. “Although the abolition of war has been the dream of man for centuries,’’ he said once, “every proposition to that end has been promptly discarded as impossible and fantastic.’’
MacArthur wanted to use the atomic bomb against the Communists in Korea. For that, and other things, he was fired by Truman, but his martial esprit survived, and American power ever since has been based on the supremacy of weaponry. Humans are ontologically condemned to war with one another. Therefore, it is proper and right to do what is necessary to win the war.
As the play of uninstructed boys turning inner tubes into ever more lethal slings suggests, the rules of nature do not change. Or do they? MacArthur, having said war is inevitable, corrected himself, “But that was before the science of the past decade made mass destruction a reality. . .The tremendous evolution of nuclear and other potentials of destruction has suddenly taken the problem away from its primary consideration as a moral and spiritual question and brought it abreast of scientific realism.’’ The old general, speaking a decade after Korea, was ignored.
The natural law of war abides - spitballs into darts forever. Washington’s defense spending, therefore, continues to surge. (The Project of Defense Alternatives reported last week that the Obama administration’s planned allocation of more than $5 trillion to the Pentagon over the next eight years surpasses any eight-year figure, in constant dollars, since 1946 - “a period encompassing Korea, Vietnam, and Cold Wars.’’)
The fantasy that Pentagon spending might be checked was obliterated by last week’s other news - the Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate funding of political campaign ads. Defense contractors will spend billions reinforcing the natural law of war.
But is it true? Among individuals, even male aggression is tamed by time. Boys grow up. They see what darts can do, and stop shooting them. Can the human race, by analogy, come of age? Roaming the woods to kill, we Chi-com hunters could not have imagined it, but here is the later General MacArthur’s final answer: “The abolition of war. . .is no longer an ethical question to be pondered solely by learned philosophers and ecclesiastics, but a hard-core one for the decision of the masses whose survival is the issue.’’ The masses whose survival is the issue - that would be us.
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"Can the Human Race Outgrow War?" As individuals yes, as a race, 3,000 to 4,000 years of recorded human history would indicate no.
"Boys grow up"?
Unfortunately, some of them don't. Some of them remain self-centered, egotistical, spoiled brats for life. Some of them retain their me-first-screw-everyone-else attitude forever. Some will always think themselves priviledged by birth-right. Some will always believe that might makes right and some will always live by the shoot first, ask questions later rule.
And unfortunately for us, too many of those types will make their way into congress and the pentagon.
Can the Human Race Outgrow War?
NO, It's too profitable!! And too much fun!
Jeevee
Let's each of us individual humans struggle in the grear game to replace PEACE and LOVE and TRUTH instead of the brutish impulses in each of our individual psyches. Then planet Earth will have a chance to survive!
Jeevee
Let's each of us individual humans struggle in the grear game to replace PEACE and LOVE and TRUTH instead of the brutish impulses in each of our individual psyches. Then planet Earth will have a chance to survive!
Can we outgrow Oligarchy? Can we outgrow Male Supremacy and Gender Slavery? Can we outgrow War? Three Yes's and we get to live. Three "No's" and the species dies.
Mr. Carroll and I (along with some here) came from a generation in which ALL little boys were WARRIORS or they were Pansies, Sissy Boys, and Faggots. Our games were war training, our sports were supposed to instill the "Killer Instinct" so we could be #1 - losers are lunch. We ran in Packs on search and destroy missions against Pansies, Sissy Boys, and Faggots on the Pack on the next block - all to prepare us for a life of Exclusion and Constant War.
Aggression is "Natural". Empathy is "Natural". Sharing is also "Natural". Socialization decides where when and who.
According to our nobel laureate president. That answer would be "no".
Because he believes in the innately flawed nature (otherwise known as original sin) of human beings. And stated such in Copenhagen.
Sarah Palin announced her approval the same day.
It is beyond me how intelligent people can not grasp that the predominance of war is because of human nature, not just historical, political, and economic reasons. To call the denial of this Utopian is to slur Sir Thomas More -- it is frankly addlebrained. Haven't just the last 100 years taught us all that war is universal? Plainly not from some posts here.
Gary
"Founder of Archetypal Psychology, Hillman is thus prepared to lead us into “war’s deepest mind”, to that place in our inmost depths where the individual psyche is embedded in the collective. Hillman urges us past the conventional explanations of the sources of psychic dysfunction associated with our personal histories [birth trauma, bad parents etc.] to reach the basic layer of the mind, the transpersonal realm of myth, poetry, the home of the gods. As our guide in this psychic underworld, he offers a package of readings, relevant reflections on the nature of war by military generals, philosophers, writers like Twain and Tolstoy. He tells us that if we are to tame the beast that is war ours must be a work of imagination, a full engagement with the ubiquitous god of war, the god of many names –Mars, Ares, Indra, Thor, the “Inhuman” as the divinity who “rages, strikes death, stirs panic, driving individual humans mad and collective societies blind.”"
-- Review of a Terrible Love of War, by Gwen Nowak, published in Books in Canada, November 2004
I've been hoping to run across a Carroll article, and was glad to see this and especially the D.M. quote in his last paragraph. In his "The Hope For Liberation in World Religions" Miguel de la Torre examines various world spiritual traditions as they regard things like poverty and war. In the chapter on Judaism (for which I checked out the book trying to understand how on earth the Israelis having so decried the horrors of the holocaust could turn around and promote the genocide of the Palestinians in the occupied territories) Marc Ellis writes about a "Constantinian Judaism" and how the various "Constantinian" theologies (Christian and Muslim militarist fundamentalism so clearly having it out on the world stage these days) have turned the basic tenets of decency & brotherly love on their heads and poisoned political discourse currently.... in much the same way as James Carroll's outstanding dvd, "Constantine's Sword" illustrates in its analysis the attempts to evangelize Air Force cadets in Colorado Springs.
The trouble is, indeed, that domination imperative that seems so prevalent and has outlived any of its debatable usefulness or sanity in the excess and waste we see today. But how do we... the masses... act upon our 'hard core' decision to eschew the seductions of violence when up against the volume of such monstrous militarist (fed by corporate) behemoths that seemingly seek to control every aspect of our lives? The powers that be seem mightily busy trying to secure their advantage and hardpressed to maintain the myth of democracy or 'greatness' as their corrupt shenanigans keep betraying their baser aims. The orthodox inside-the-box thinking of the bankers, beltway lobbyists and too many beltway enthusiasts for the Ayn Rand styled 'invisible hand' seems to be teetering on the brink of sanity or insanity as ever.
To teeter toward sanity I'd say would be facilitated by developing an empathic intelligence so as to viscerally feel our interbeing with the homeless beggar on the street, the Haitians awaiting amputation as 'security measures' are debated, the Gazans denied the basics needed for survival, the 'illegals' or, come to think of it anyone not wealthy denied health care in the US, plus by learning to live within our means, to share and to become stewards of soil and seed and water and air and each other like we have never before. The popularity of 'Avatar' testifies to a recognition of the truth that we are living lives horrifically out of balance. Just imagine if the proceeds from that one blockbuster could go, not for the marketing of plastic blue people or videogames or other product spinoffs, but to counter the enormous money spent on warmaking, corporate lobbying and the overall trickle-up (or torrenting upwards, actually) economics in place?
But infotainment or reliance upon George Clooney's band of motivated millionaires is not enough. Nader's book, "Only the Super Rich Can Save Us" should end with a !!!!?????????... The homeless, the refugees, the oppressed and enslaved--- they also are a part of 'us' with gumption and heart and intelligence and a voice that should and sometimes can be heard with respect. How do we even begin to have a public discourse about the insanity of our globalized economic system's inherent violence with everything growing more privatized by the minute? Can we stop feeding the ravenous wolf of fear, dominance, greed, hate and violence? Can we stop seeing each other as commodities and pay attention to the suffering of the moment and deal with that to the best of our imperfect abilities? Can our religion.... like the Dalai Lama has said his is... ever simply be "kindness"?
Sioux Rose
MATANGITA: Profound and moving post. Much that you relate in the way of martial force and self-interest resonates with the archetype of Mars, and it's housed in the human ego and sense of self (as separate entity). However, there is a bona fide antithesis in the form of Venus that resonates with our urge for communion, our capacity to love, our wish for fairness and sharing the health and well-being of others in our communities and beyond. I often relate the ways that our society inflames and feeds the fires of Mars, while decimating the power and beauty of Venus. Pornography's popularity as it desecrates the female and turns sex away from a holy communion into something far more twisted, is an apt example, one of many. The "decision" to spend endless sums on war, while treating human health as an elective topic, with funds only to be gingerly passed around is another.
So the way to starve the beast is by feeding its antithesis. That means every act of kindness, of love, every work of beauty or art, every movement away from conflict towards peaceful reconciliation... all of these feed the Venus deficit. It is difficult to fight a thing. The war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on illiteracy are some examples of where that crippled strategy ends up. The I Ching says that instead of doing battle with what we perceive as evil, or our enemy, if we were to take the energy and instead direct it towards what already works, then this good thing would become empowered. It's the human behavioral equivalent of watching how water blocked in one channel finds a new tributary to run down.
I could, of course, elaborate in far greater detail, but I think I have presented the outline of "my case."
Can the Human Race Outgrow War?
No, it cannot. That's why war has persisted to this day. It is the foremost expression of the death wish. Were humans truly rational beings, war would have disappeared as a form of human endeavor ages ago.
Wars haven't disappeared because the war-makers haven't been marginalized. ...and who's fault is that?
That's only a partial explanation, however, Ghandighost. Part of the explanation is also due to the fact that, with all the talk about "being civilized", the human race, generally, is not civilized.
"Humans are ontologically condemned to war with one another."
Bullshit.
"Weapons need wars and wars need excuses."
Blame the fear-makers. They have names. They're living in our neighborhoods and they're in high office. Their numbers are few but it's the silence of the compassionate, the decent, the human, that gives them power and sullies the human reputation.
Read "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster" by Rebecca Solnit
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021075/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
Sioux Rose
GHANDI GHOST: I agree with your post except that those who object do protest, but their voices are marginalized. Remember, in the run-up to the latest Iraqi invasion mostly paid military pundits were used as "experts" prominently positioned on all the mainstream news shows to help manufacture consent. If the 4th estate is kept from doing its intended job, the public becomes the equivalent of one of Pavlov's dogs taught to respond to erroneous cues.
Agreed. But we must all say with one voice in the same manner as "an unjust law should not be followed", an "illegitimate press has no authority." "We don't want your brand of coverage." The corrupt, the criminals, the liars, the thieves, are in no moral position to marginalize anyone.
They can marginalize us in the eyes of their dupes, but not in the eyes of truth. If we are to be killed, we must stand and die on our feet. Not on our knees. Why? Because the dupes are watching.
It's not a question of what we're all willing to kill for, but a question of what we're willing TO BE KILLED for, if necessary. Figuratively or literally.
"Can the human race outgrow war ?
Not in Kali Yuga.
In this age of destruction [Kali yuga], It is the dissolution of the physical manifest universe that resolves all issues. It is the force of destruction that removes the obstruction of conflicting objects to the peace of the un- manifest universe that is already present.
"The art of war is winning without fighting."
Sun Tzu
My grandfather, born a few after the Civil War, was too old to fight in WWI. He had two sons drafted, one for WWII and one for Korea. He was not an educated man, but demonstrated great wisdom in a statement I heard him make more than once: There will never be an end of war so long as there is a profit in it for someone. He went to his rest at age 86. I now have 17 years left to match his longevity, but have already seen my nation through WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Barbados, Desert Shield, Kosovo, Somalia, Iraq II (current), Afganistan (current)and fully expect to see more war in Pakistan, Yemen, and Lord knows where else. There have probably been a few wars that we were never told about. I estimate that some very rich and powerful men (and women) have made Trillions of dollars on all this bloodlust. The difference between my grandfather's time and mine, is that now the wars are more numerous and profitable.
Can the human species outgrow war?
Look deep into the eyes of the Bushes, the Cheneys, the Rumsfelds, and their kindred spirits around the world. What do you think?
But when we look into the mirror, into our own eyes, we see 'nice' people, people who care, pacifists - and there are more of us than there are of them. We're young yet, rebellious adoloscents who want to know all their choices and preferably try as many as possible. What I think is that evolution is (usually) gradual, but if we survive at all, we WILL progress.
"War is a racket" - USMC Major-General Smedley Butler.
As long as war is highly profitable to, and advances the greedy interests of, the sociopaths in the ruling class, and their propagandistic corporate media continues to present it as thrilling and exciting and heroic and gadget-filled in movies, TV, and video/Internet games while never showing the actual costs in flesh and blood and body parts, populations will be easily brainwashed to patriotically "support our troops" as they make the world safe for corporate empire.
And as long as our taxes are automatically deducted from our paychecks and pensions to pay for this bloody, immoral racket, we will have little chance to stop it.
Can the human species outgrow war?
I don't know but I can think of no more worthy endeavor than to spend one's life trying to make the answer, "yes".
For us "humans", the most murderous of all the simians, maybe war is a way to get rid of "surplus" males.
It seems it's always the old silverbacks who are plotting to eliminate the yong competition.
Indeed.
{Article quote}: "Among individuals, even male aggression is tamed by time."
I'm not so sure. My father is 86 and he is as aggressive now as he has ever been. His anger, always easily triggered, shows more quickly and more violently with each passing month.
He was in WW2 and, as with most soldiers, says that he hates wars but supports the soldiers. Hopefully, anyone who posts here can see the absurdity of such a statement. Where there are soldiers, there will be conflict - conflict between men and agression perpetrated upon women!
His time as a soldier served, temporarily, as an outlet for his anger. In the long term, however, he did not receive psychological help after his service - meaning that he had even more anger, and no outlet and no self-awareness to help him just 'be with' the intensity of the anger.
There are millions of men like my father - men whose agression hasn't been tamed by time. Men whose aggression has become worse with time. And with every successive war, the human race - world-wide - is creating more men like my father. And these men are passing their agressive behaviours to their sons.
I see the pattern in my father, in his sons (my brothers) and now in my nephews (two of whom are military enrollees - much to my father's satisfaction).
This wheel of male agression keeps spinning. As a female, I don't know what can be done to stop it. Men, it's got to start with YOU! I only thank god that I didn't bring any children into this human mess.
How is it that all these aggressive males are able to get married and reproduce? What do women see in them? Aren't these women thinking of their children's future?
In the sixties, these kinds of guys wouldn't be able to find a woman.
Ghandighost: Excellent questions. I have looked to my mother, my aunts and sisters-in-law to try to figure out why they married men like my father.
My sisters-in-law (especially) and my aunts are very intelligent and could easily take care of themselves. Both of my sisters-in-law started and ran their own successful businesses prior to marrying and staying at home to raise the kids.
And so I wonder why they married angry men instead of trusting themselves (and the Goddess) to find other men more worthy of them. The conclusion that I keep coming back to? They married because they were afraid of being unmarried. And you may understandably ask again: Why be afraid of being unmarried? Especially when the benefits of marriage accrue mostly to the man! To this, I've no answer. Anyone else out there?
>>In the sixties, these kinds of guys wouldn't be able to find a woman.<< Oh? bikers did alright. So did Charles Manson.
As for marriage... Have you any idea how much domestic abuse actually takes place in this country? Approximately 95% of the victims of domestic violence are women. Every 9 seconds in the United States a woman is assaulted and beaten. 4,000,000 women a year are assaulted by their partners. In the United States, a woman is more likely to be assaulted, injured, raped, or killed by a male partner than by any other type of assailant. Every day, 4 women are murdered by boyfriends or husbands.
In gentle England 1:4 women and 1:6 men will suffer domestic violence in their lifetime with women at greater risk of repeat victimisation and serious injury; and domestic abuse is the largest cause of morbidity worldwide in women aged 19-44, greater than war, cancer or motor vehicle accidents.
Gary
"Domestic violence causes far more pain than the visible marks of bruises and scars. It is devastating to be abused by someone that you love and thinks loves you in return." It is estimated that approximately 3 million incidents of domestic violence are reported each year in the United States."
-- Dianne Feinstein
This post is about PTSD and you and us. It is about the recipients of a abuse from our fathers. First they learned about being jaded (Duty, Country, Honor). Then each father learned about meanness, rage and hostility. Every story I heard was a mental tirade (which i had to attend to) coupled with a duplicitious angry lecture about betrayal and lonliness. When my father went to war he returned with the idea that the earth is a terrible placefull of hobgoblins, demons and devils who gobble flesh, eat young (like Goya's "Saturn")and make millions of $$ as in Alfred Nobel who morphed his money into an actual Peace Prize. Go figue.
I identified with your article.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Can the human race outgrow war? Yes, if the following three goals can be achieved:
(1) Humane population reduction with the PRIMARY, SCIENTIFIC goal of harmonizing human, animal and plant populations in a sustainable way with regional habitats and their available resources. Objective environmentally sustainable, survival-necessary economic considerations would be SECONDARY. Subjective environmentally sustainable economic considerations would be TERTIARY. Subjective political considerations would be in fourth place because if the first three main considerations are effectively employed, then all remaining political considerations would be subjective--including the primitive desire for war.
(2) A scientific, democratic and global method of data gathering & geographic information system planning for population level determinations and survival-needs-based resource allocation must be developed and implemented to most efficiently attain and maintain goal #1.
(3) The subjective aspects of capitalism whereby avaricious desires for wealth subvert and subsume more important considerations like environmental sustainability and peaceful civilization must be ended by a MODIFIED form of Participatory Economics (Parecon) that recognizes that capitalism has always existed in one form or another--even as black markets--within every form of government and economy, including socialism and large scale attempts at communism. The form of modified Parecon that I envision would have the following characteristics:
(A) The only legal investments in the stock market will be in goods, products and services that either do not inflict lasting damage to the natural environment or which improve the environmentally sustainable relationship between human beings and the rest of the biosphere. These investment opportunities will be encompass environmentally sustainable housing construction, business real estate construction, food production and distribution, clothing and other textile manufacturing, medicine, education, private and private/public energy generation and distribution, environmental rehabilitation technologies, endangered species/habitat recovery technologies, and some transportation technologies and systems.
(B) Every citizen at birth will be given a portfolio of environmentally sustainable investments as a "starter stake" in being part of and encouraging future participation in a new commitment to a peaceful, environmentally sustainable civilization. Just as there will be a more fair minimum wage reflecting real cost of living increases, so there will also be a maximum annual income limit with any surplus reinvested in the public interest for the common good in education, scientific and artistic R&D grants and health care delivery. The annual upper income limit will be determined by members of the lower, middle and upper-classes in an equally balanced democratic method. I suggest $7 million dollars as the upper limit.
(C) Human beings will be globally taught from birth that corporations and governments exist to serve human beings; human beings do not exist to serve corporations and governments. Because of this, workers in any type of regular working environment, agricultural, industrial or otherwise (that is not a highly specialized professional field such as neurosurgery, tax law, etc.) will be periodically trained and rotated to work at every position within said business enterprise--from entry level to management--for some significant period of time so that they might all have some opportunity to contribute meaningfully to said enterprise by contributing their personality and experience. [for more on the whys and wherefores of this read up on Parecon workplace environments.]
(D) In terms of mediums of exchange there will be two parallel economies: One based on a heavily regulated, constantly reviewed and fully transparent form of capitalism complete with investment opportunities for the purpose of stimulating innovation in science, the arts and environmentally sustainable job creation, and the other based on a global system of altruism credits obtained by hours worked at one's regular job combined with volunteer hours worked on a variety of community improvement and related social projects. The level of altruism credits one earns will also help determine whether or not (along with scientifically determined regional/habitat human population goals) a couple can have one child of their own or two. Artificial insemination will be globally outlawed and parents who cannot bear children of their own will be eligible to adopt children from a global adopt-a-child program whereby unwanted children from the "3rd World" will be provided to barren parents in the "1st World" in exchange for government subsidized environmentally sustainable technologies and medicines--until the economy is gradually globally optimized under the new modified Parecon system and there are no more vast wealth disparities left to create such distinctions as "3rd World" and "1st World."
Wars in our era are fought because of corporatist and nationalist greed-based competition over available resources and pressures fed into such confrontations by regional over-population. The end to war in such an era calls for objective scientific, democratic world resource/population management that effectively minimizes and restrains the purely subjective desires of capitalists, their economists and their politicians.
Metal - copyright 2010
I agree that the Market exists in whatever political system one has, but is capitalism even in the tamed version you advocate, really necessary? Can we have a Fair Market without "Capitalism [which] knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it." (~- Thomas Sowell)? I believe we can but I haven't a nicely edited plan to post at this time (or rather I do, but it's huge and my website is down).
Now. about money...
Gary
"The forces in a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer."
~- Jawaharlal Nehru
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
I believe the process of trade between buyer and seller with both sides seeking to get as much value from the exchange as possible is an ineradicable drive in the human psyche. I think the negative tendencies of capitalism can be greatly reduced if not completely eliminated by carefully limiting what things can be invested in or traded. Money markets and currency exchanges would also have to be carefully limited. The goal here would be to maintain an environmentally supportive capitalist market capability to provide large scale investments (made by workers and capitalists) in research & development in innovative, environmentally sustainable technologies, goods and related services while outlawing the ability of capitalists & workers to invest in environmentally, economically or politically harmful things.
Because of what I've observed in recent years combined with my studies of history I no longer think large or multinational corporations should be privately owned--including, for example, banks that are "too large to fail," oil companies whose executives attend secret energy policy meetings with war profiteering vice presidents rolling out maps of foreign oil fields they seek to plunder by means of unprovoked warfare, or auto makers who--over several decades--repeatedly seek government bailouts to protect their anti-competitive, obsolete & environmentally harmful business practices, or weapons manufacturers selling projectiles coated with toxic depleted uranium that can contaminate civilian areas for decades if not centuries, etc., etc., the list can go on for pages. Many of the technologies and goods these giant corporations trade in have become too dangerous in terms of economic policy, foreign policy and environmental harmfulness to America and other nations to remain in private hands. They require far more rigorous and continual oversight on behalf of the public by State and Federal legislatures and courts. Large holding companies should be shorn of their hundreds (in some cases thousands) of subsidiaries with the goal of converting as many of the former subsidiaries into small privately owned businesses as possible.
I think small private business ownership should be preserved because it fulfills many positive & natural human psychological and material needs: The desire to achieve basic economic independence and self-sufficiency; pride in one's and one's own family's products and services; the positive societal benefits of building deep familial and economic community roots.
I think a formula needs to be devised to determine how large a medium-sized business can become under private ownership before it becomes too big for its political & economic britches and needs to be broken into smaller privately owned businesses or taken over by the government as a part of a new public interest commons/economic sector whose operation may be subject to annual democratic referenda or publicly voted initiatives (on the State level).
Advocates of orthodox Participatory Economics (Parecon) claim that neither money nor investment markets are necessary for an environmentally sustainable technological society but their theory is short on nuts and bolts examples of how to achieve let alone maintain this. They do not differentiate significantly enough from orthodox socialism to support a large scale society that can preserve its vitality for any length of time. I think such a society would be exceedingly inefficient compared to the one I propose and would provide less psychological incentive to participate in or innovate for that society.
I believe history has shown that a balanced mix of socialist policies with carefully regulated capitalism has, so far, produced the best results. I think the next step to improve upon that (still overly subjective) balancing act is to reduce as much as possible the subjective decision making inputs from economists and politicians in favor of objective scientifically determined civilization optimization goals that will require a new global level of democratic, scientific and humane population & resources management.
Competition among capitalists and worker/investors to innovate in the research & development of technologies, goods and services that create and/or improve harmonious relations between human beings and between humans and the other animal and plant species and habitats that share our biosphere is the best aspect of what should be preserved of capitalism.
A sophisticated enough computer modeling system that can accurately reflect the real world biosphere and take into account accurate and continually updated information on resource extraction and usage vs. human population levels, regional species and habitat health, etc., could conceivably also be used to calculate and transact resource and commodity trades including assigning its own internal exchange values using a variety of criterion besides money and interest rates. This would be a super sophisticated bartering mechanism on a global scale that seeks to maintain an environmentally sustainable economy and biosphere. Even so, I believe certain human transacted markets in various innovative areas of technology, energy systems, goods and services should remain in human hands using traditional market-related returns on investments. But I also believe that the concept of "wealth acquisition" needs to be re-cast in terms of acquiring wealth for the purposes of re-investing in things that will benefit society as opposed to concentrating wealth merely for the ability to compile private mountains of material goodies or manipulating political systems out of spurious and amoral self-gratification or malice.
Metal - copyright 2010
Just logically war will always exist, because the side that chooses war can always win against the side that refuses. Natural Selection is not on my side.
That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Be careful what you hope for...
There are vastly more people in the world who refuse war. The war-makers are out numbered.
War must be taught to people. People have to be taught to hate. Wars are sold to people like products.
But don't worry, if the peace-makers choose suicide by staying silent or giving up, the war-makers will gladly accommodate, because that's what we do when we don't marginalize psychopaths (war-makers).
Freedom isn't free.
I sympathize (I really do) with those that want to believe that war is not bred into the human psyche, especially the males, but the evidence seems to the contrary. Tribes co-existing without some sort of war -- perhaps highly ritualized -- hardly predominate in anthropology. Quite the reverse. Apes wage war. Brothers wage "war" upon one another. Even ants wage war and they are little more than organic robots.
War, however, can be taught AGAINST. It's tendency can be stunted and coursed elsewhere. Love can replace the urges for war.
But to do so, to teach love not war successfully, we have to see the human critter as he and she actually are -- not how we'd LIKE to think of ourselves -- the bloody and brutal reality.
Gary
"Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity."
-- Xun Zi (Hsün Tzu)
It's not a belief, it's science.
Here's the evidence:
Right-wingers throughout history often use apes and ants as justification for inhuman behavior. Apes and ants are supposed to wage war. However, the human race is not an ape and is not an ant.
"Those who don't believe in evolution, never experienced it." - some human (S.H.)
And furthermore. Humans project their own psychology onto animal behaviour.
Original sin is a *myth*! Human beings are not innately evil, or killers. It is time we grow up and reconsider the very nature of human nature itself.
It really is a matter of evolution. We *can* do better. Because we are innately constructive. If the universe were not imbued with cooperation nothing would exist!
And human beings are, in fact, part of the universal design. There is no way out of it!
Yes! And "Freedom" = responsibility. People who accept War - hate freedom, because they never take responsibility for their behavior. They say, "that's just the way the world is."
Well, we make the world what it is, everyday.
Ghandighost, I spent most of the last evening thinking about what you said, and I think you are very right. Even if I were to be correct it would be better to act as if you were correct on the chance that any war was preventable. Fake it until you make it.
Thank you for your insightful reply.
Thanks bandwidthoracle. And to take it a step further, as far as I'm concerned, if the decent people are going to be killed by madmen in this country (ex. Pentagon disciples), I'd rather die on my feet then live kneeling before a madman. It's not what we're willing to kill for, but what we're willing to BE KILLED FOR, if necessary. That's the difference between them and us.
Luckylefty, Ghandighost, Siouxrose, lowalrish, & CD friends:
Thoughtful posts.
Militarism is all about male sex role-based socialization. Tinkering around with increasingly lethal weaponry, running in xenophobic, heirarchical packs, and/or killing fellow human beings is no more "normal" "inbred" male behavior than committing forcible sexual assault, arson, or cannibalism is "normal" "inbred" socially acceptable behavior. What any given culture glorifies, or what it unequivocally condemns as a taboo, defines what is normal or abnormal, moral or immoral, for that society.
I disagree with John Carroll's assertion that "Humans (ie., males at least) are ontologically condemned to war with one another." Engaging in violent acts of aggression to the point of homicide, and organizing collectively into groups in order to carry out homicide upon a grandiose scale, is the product of cultural conditioning, of rewards versus punishment. Civilians have to be trained in order to become efficient soldier-killers. Some little boys simply are more malleable and susceptible to focusing their aggressive impulses than are others.
What in many ways is most ominous about the evolution of the American way of warfare in the 21st Century (beyond the omnipresent risk of nuclear holocaust, a threat even Douglas MacArthur recognized) is the shift into hi tech robotics. The modern war machine can use machines to make mass conscription a thing of the distant past. Fewer human beings, with far fewer casualties to their own tribe, can kill more human beings with ever increasing efficiency, filtered and sanitized with video game-like technology.
Parallel to that weaponry trend, we have the conscious blurring beyond recognition of the difference between soldier and civilian and spies-with-a-license-to-kill. Think back for a moment on those great credits to the movie "Patton", with George C. Scott pacing in full braided regalia in front of a giant American flag. The crusty old General pontificates about how the whole point of being a good soldier is not to lay down your life for your country, but rather to get the other damn fool to lay down his life for his country.
Osama bin Laden, and a lot of innocent people on the receiving end of Predator drone Grim Reaper technology, might well respond, "Well, let's bring it on....."
Bill from Saginaw
Sioux Rose
BILL: Bingo! You are a truly enlightened male. I could not agree more! This is why I often expose the degree to which the "Mars archetype" depicted by Hollywood in the form of the sexually provocative handsome detective, rough and tumble good guy police man with a vendetta to fulfill (all in the service of "the people") while expertly utilizing firearms, or the soldiers ridding the world of those evil terrorists, added to numerous other plot devices seduce the public into seeing FORCE as a GOOD thing. What most upsets me is the use of religious rhetoric IN SUPPORT of war, conflict, and the killing fields.
You have made the case I often try to make, that 90% of violence is socialized, and the socialization process borrows from Hollywood, the national anthem and its ethos of patriotism masked behind a demand for allegience to wars of conquest, competition taught in schools, and too many religious groupings treating spiritual faith like allegiance to an exclusive team, rules and all, outsiders be damned.
Great post! Bravo!
Great points!
A case could also be made that the fact that they're moving towards robotics could prove that either the military is losing it's lust for getting their hands bloody (dare I say becoming more human) or the turn to robotics is an indication that they're recognizing that masses of people are becoming tired of seeing people being violent against other people. While the violence hasn't stopped, the turn toward robotics could be a start... if looked at it from this way. The longer soldiers are removed from up-close violence, the harder it will be to re-train them to kill "the old way".
Maybe one day the way to end all war, will simply be to just "pull the plug".
It's a possibility at least.
The idea that male children (and hence adults) are naturally inclined towards war and agression is being debated with new neurological studies. In one, Blue Brains, Pink Brains (sorry, forgot the author's name)the neurologist and her team found that for the first year of a child's life there was absolutely no difference in neural pathways. The changes became more apparent through socialization after this initial infancy. That is, after one year old, children became more gender identified through parenting and peer association as well as other outside influences such as daycare.
It is very much the development of the neural pathways that obtain gendered variances - the more a "path" was exercised, the better at certain functions the children were in those capacities such as spacial orientation, maths, empathy, etc.
Coaches use this knowledge about developing neural pathways when training their young atheletes to overcome difficult manoeuvres, especially in gymnastics.
We could try making war revenue-neutral and see how that would come out...
It is not just hippies, Quakers and left-wing college professors who asked for war abolition. Douglas MacArthur did, too.
See these excerpts from General MacArthur’s 1951 speech to the US Congress:
“I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.”…. "Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, our Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence, an improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh."
This world is on the verge of peace, permanent and universal.
Of course it is a matter of evolution. Humans will eventually give up war. The conservatives will strive for a master race, and the liberals will strive to create universal justice. The conservatives will strive to maintain the tribal, national divisions of the status quo and the liberals will try move the culture more toward universal values.
When some incarnation of the Unitarian Universalist view of the world dominates the thinking of the human species war will become extinct.