War and Meaning
August 2, 2004
Hank Stone
hstone@rochester.rr.com
WAR! (Ughhh!) What is it good for?
“Absolutely nothing!” answers the 1960’s song. Which of course isn’t true. Under the right circumstances, war could protect our country from the invading hoards, if there were any left.
President Eisenhower’s “Military-Industrial Complex” provides great power to politicians, extraordinary profits military industries, and job security to researchers, designers, manufacturers, suppliers, bureaucrats, and soldiers. You can’t spend $400 billion annually on anything without creating a juggernaut, powered and protected by its beneficiaries in every congressional district.
At a personal level, military service has been a rite of passage for young men, teaching discipline and personal responsibility, camaraderie and teamwork. The military has offered many a haven from racism and a path out of poverty.
But more than that, militarism and war are part of American culture. War underscores the stories we tell ourselves about our rugged individualism, and the importance of our national sovereignty. Waving the Stars and Stripes can bring out our patriotic feelings and recall the past we share, often proudly. Militarism and nationalism help answer basic questions of who we are and what our lives mean.
Feelings of nationalism have often been linked to religious ideas, such as Manifest Destiny. God has chosen our country for greatness! So if human meaning weren’t enough, we are also fulfilling God’s will when we conquer someone else’s land.
War is our tradition, gives us feelings of patriotism and unity, connects us with the divine, matures our young people, delivers profits, confers political power, provides jobs, stimulates the economy, and gives our lives meaning. And, in the right circumstances, war can protect our country!
But war has become obsolete. It has to go.
Once nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles were invented, ALL war stopped being a good idea. And as world population doubled and doubled again in the last century, poverty increased. Some people lacking enough food, fresh water, education and jobs turned to terrorism—poor people’s warfare.
The world is overpopulated, running out of oil and fresh water, and facing ecological damage and disruption of the climate. We have been carried away by an economic system based on growth. Our success has brought us to excess. And in this interconnected, heavily armed world, we wave our weapons and long for another war so we can again feel in control. But foreigners are not the problem and violence is not the cure.
The question is, if war is to be ended, what will give out lives equivalent meaning?
At an economic level, we are consumers. Our culture is built around over-stimulated material “needs,” that power capitalism and the production of goods and services. Consuming makes us comfortable, but doesn’t answer our human need for meaning. Are we no different from the rest of the plants and animals, all of which consume?
Religions try to supply our lives with context and meaning. But in this interconnected world, our major religions are weakened by their disagreements on key points. For example, Christians and Muslims have fought each other at the urging of their one (loving, merciful) God. Hindus have many gods, but Buddhists have none.
Also, religious dogma tends to enshrine obsolete understandings of nature and the physical world. Religions did not anticipate the Earth orbiting the Sun, or the stars being distant suns, or the discovery of 100 billion galaxies besides our Milky Way. Where truth comes from historical revelations, and faith is a virtue, religions struggle to adjust to scientific discoveries.
Patriotism has codified our animal instincts to trust those within our tribe, but distrust foreigners. Patriotism supports our psychological prejudice that we are more important than other people. And patriotism reinforces the idea of Darwinian survival of the fittest.
If we are in competition for scarce goods and services, we want to be able to defeat our opponents. This is the way of nature.
But nature doesn’t care if the lion catches the gazelle. And nature did not prevent the extinction of the dinosaurs. And nature doesn’t care whether our country, or indeed the human race, wins the competition to survive.
We humans have demonstrated more cleverness than the other animals. We read and write, and create complex cultures, including advanced science and technology. Why not develop equally creative social arrangements that serve the interests of us humans, rather than of nature?
In particular, why assume competition among human societies? Suppose there were enough of everything to go around, so that no one had to go without? We have to get beyond a model of competition for scarce resources. We can no longer afford scarcity itself. In a world of abundance, the case for war would be very hard to make.
Suppose that we offered incentives and disincentives for people everywhere to have fewer, healthier, better-loved, better-educated children? Over time, this would raise the resource levels per capita enough that every person could have good food, clean water, education, health care, and meaningful work as an adult. This would be an “unnatural” state of affairs, but so what?
Competition over scarce resources is damaging to our interests, but it is familiar. It is the devil we know. Pollution, poverty, famine, plague and war aren’t good, but to embrace them we don’t need to change what we think, and who we are. Renouncing the struggle of humanity against itself would be a change so profound—we wouldn’t know where we stand. The solid ground of tradition would be pulled out from under us.
If we are not our country, who are we? If we are not our wealth and privilege, who are we? If we are not better than people elsewhere in the world, are we second best?
Would peace squander the sacrifice of our relatives and fathers and sons who died in wars? If we are not struggling to survive, what gives our lives meaning?
These questions are so basic, we cannot yet even consider electing leaders who will ask them. Such is our tradition. Such is our denial, and ultimately our cowardice. But our human nature does not require us to be traditional, or to preside over the failure of the human experiment.
If we can reinterpret our proper human role, if we can devise a new story for humanity, we can eliminate war and live in peace.
Children born in this future would grow up in a world where peace and plenty, cooperation and tolerance were the norm. They would be taught in school that there used to be wars, and prejudice, and widespread poverty. But technology made war obsolete, and communications made global unity possible. And pioneers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King dreamed of a new story, a new meaning. And so began the technology of peace.