Edward Rothstein, who writes a terrific culture column for the Times called "Connections,"  yesterday grappled with the same question that’s been absorbing me and my “War and Human Nature” students at Stevens.

In “Out of Epic Wars, Another Epic Is Born, the One Called Civilization,” Rothstein dwells on a new translation of Virgil’s epic tale The Aeneid, which tells the story of the Trojan warrior who flees the Greeks sack of Troy and goes on to found the city-state of Rome. The Aeneid, Rothstein suggests, exposes the awful paradox that civilization depends on savagery. Aeneas’s greatness, similarly, stems both from his decency and his ruthlessness. Rothstein asks:

But can the sword ever be put aside, even with civilization’s triumph? Aeneas’s own frailties suggest that it cannot: he can “break the proud” but not always “spare the defeated.” The “works and ways of peace” are always vulnerable. Jove himself, envisioning a Rome in which the Gates of War are welded shut, portrays the “frenzy of civil strife” as a live being, shackled, “monstrously roaring out from his bloody jaws.” Even when all intentions are good, there will be that persistent roar: misunderstandings, flaws, eruptions of desire, assertions of power — the mischief of the gods and the treachery of the heart.

In their final essays, some--not all--of my students vehemently rejected this fatalism, arguing that we can defeat war by supporting democracy in other countries, bolstering the U.N.’s peacekeeping efforts, fighting poverty and improving education, inculcating tolerance for other cultures in children, giving women more of a role in government.

Chris, a dreadlocked skateboarder who wants to work in aeronautics, declares: “A trend is developing and it’s slowly removing war from the human experience. I believe this peaceful movement can be made permanent. Achieving peace on a global level will not be easy, but things already seem to be moving in the right direction. Humanity’s best shot at ending war is now.”

Charmy, a dark-haired Indian-born pre-med student, writes: “Imagine a future in which the children ask their mothers, 'What were wars?', in which old men talk about the 'horrible old days,' and you will find in that world a place where every child, men and women have enough to eat, to cover themselves, access to a school, and a clean and beautiful environment, regardless of their religion or nationality. Just imagine other infinite possibilities available to humans with their resources, their intellect, and most importantly, their creativity!”

Their hope gives me hope.

Comments

[James McWilliams]

"Things already seem to be moving in the right direction?"

:/ are they?
I'm afraid I don't see this trend your student talks about. I wish I did.

[nc]

To end war, you take away the causes of war. Weapons are symptoms, so you can't end war by simple disarmament (although you might modify the way the war is fought, and make it more likely, longer in duration and far more savage, by disarming your own side of high-tech weapons).

The underlying causes of war are no more accidental than due to weapons. The assassination of Archiduke Ferdinand was no more the cause of WWI than the ignition key is the source of the power for your car!

You have to get rid of ethnic, social, religious, and other divisions, jealousies, injustices, and so on, to end war. Otherwise people will still want war, and will resort to terrorism or other violence to get war.

The 'great pacifists' in history made capital on false, simplistic, idealistic ideas of ending war: disarmament, education, etc. The cause of war is underlying resentments in ethnic and religious and other groups of societies.

You can't get rid of those.

[nc]

People are still in a tribal mentality and will continue to associate with tribes. War is the extension of tribal politics.

[James McWilliams]

cannot argue with that, nc. :D

[Andrei Kirilyuk]

Bingo, Nigel! Your conclusion about “tribal mentality” is exact, I totally agree. The point is that people start noting and discussing it when it appears in such “really bad” events as wars, but if you look honestly at the dominating level of so-called “peaceful life”, you will easily see its “tribal” level, also in the most “developed” countries. It is the level of consciousness that matters, not its particular, necessary varying manifestations.

We do have a wave of anti-war attitude in US today, but why it emerges on that scale ONLY NOW, when bad consequences of war return back to the country, but not at that “heroic” period when “our” brave guys created uncounted “casualties” just by directing laser bombs to some “unfortunate” houses and people gatherings looking “suspicious” at a many-mile observation distance? Where were they then, today's massive and “good” protesters against the war, seeing it all every day on TV at that time? They were and they remain tribal humans reacting only to practically emerging, directly influencing them events. I often spontaneously ask myself how those killer pilots and their chiefs are feeling themselves now, in their “peaceful”, “civilised”, polite life, surrounded by their nice, prosperous families (having the same right to live as those innocent ones they killed unnecessarily elsewhere). We know the answer: they just live as everyone else, taking all pleasures of their convenient, “peaceful” life (and additionally, peacefully profiting from their innocent victims because they were rather well paid for their participation in war). No, it's not the difference between explicit war and peace that matters, it's the permanent, intrinsic level of consciousness.

There is, however, a deeper aspect of the same problem, apparently escaping John's students but certainly not their wise teacher, the author of the “End of Science”. In that book one finds e.g. a reference to Francis Fukuyama's suspicion that even in a golden age of material prosperity dominating everywhere, there is a danger of wars simply as a means to avoid inevitable social “boredom”: “Without great ideological struggles to occupy us, we humans might manufacture wars simply to give ourselves something to do.” And today that “manufactured wars” idea doesn't seem to be very far from reality... As Fukuyama has been professionally close to top (right) political circles, such practical confirmation of his theory looks particularly interesting... And maybe Rothstein's article evokes a similar origin of military fight, which is not really different from the “tribal mentality” conclusion.

But let's be optimistic, of course. Let's imagine that previous and recent experience still PRACTICALLY pushes that tribal humanity towards problem solutions without wars (that's actually the dominating John students' hope). Of course, the decisive and absolutely indispensable step to it is to give world-wide and national power to us, scientists (we should push the idea through!). So, under our wise leadership, the grateful humanity goes to... so where can it go to, that tribal crowd of fools? The same problem inevitably reappears under the most optimistic assumption: one should be able to SPECIFY a really great, truly interesting, unifying “peaceful” purpose; those funny student fantasies about “creative” and “intelligent” humans (we know, in science, how “creative” they are, even the most “intelligent” of them!) are not so inspiring in reality because they do not readily suppose a forthcoming progress of intelligence... Moreover, real humans should be able to massively, naturally follow the designated great purpose. Because if they can't (or the purpose is absent), then another danger will inevitably replace the danger of wars, that of a deep mental (and social) degradation (also suspiciously close to modern TV pictures...).

Hence, a theorem: either a superior level of consciousness starts really emerging (now!), or else humanity of modern level (the same as thousands of years before) is doomed to a war-driven or peace-driven, essential degradation. For purists, there is even a mathematically rigorous version, http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0509234 .

Anyway, John, are you going to tell the truth to the kids, I mean, the real truth? You course may become dangerous then... (any real truth is dangerous, you know). But on the other hand, there is no change for better without that unreduced, biting truth (you can believe to a perestroika veteran). Are you ready for that kind of truth, all of you, prosperous and happy with your comfortable lies? Because you know what, that superior consciousness only starts with that kind of truth, nothing less than this...