Can the Human Race Outgrow War?

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Monday, January 25, 2010 by The Boston Globe
Can the Human Race Outgrow War?

by James Carroll


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.’’ ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/25-8

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

1. As long as people have the instinct to survive and resources are limited...

The Human race will never be free from wars.

For those that technology can triumph over nature...
It doesn't help when Religion and Political Theory are accepted causes "to die for" as well.

[sarge43]

2. I'd only add: As long as resources are unequally distributed. n/t

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

4. The problem is resource supply, not necessarily resource distribution.

As with anything in nature and ecology, the environment can only tolerate a certain threshold of population density indefinitely. Overpopulation is really going to be at the center of most economic and environmental problems in the coming decades.

Although you are also correct - In a system with adequate resources, greed is definitely a cause of war.

[Igel]

13. Nah, not the main problem.

The main problem is people, not stuff.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122864641 points towards the problem. It's not "racism," racism is just a particular kind of tribalism.

The problem is complexity. Another thread asks why, when there's so much information available people are so stupid. After all, anybody could research the HCR and come to the same conclusion as that poster. Perhaps, but to really look at all the info would require reading the Senate's and House's HCR bill, Obama's pronouncements, and then punditry, relative statutes, regulations, and case law to figure exactly what the law means, and then a fair amount of economic and social theory to figure out whether the prediction are reasonable and come up with one's own predictions. Stupid is easy. Having something akin to an opinion is easy. Being well informed? Not so easy.

It's the same with experts, with critical thinking, with US politics. It's too complex to get your mind around. You can't think critically without facts, you can't trust experts unless you evaluate their claims and for that you need facts and critical thinking, plus more information than you can process in a given week.

Same for social groups. We can handle groups up to a certain size, depending on how cohesive they are. The less cohesive, the small they have to be. Having outside threats helps instill cohesion, real or imagined. Kids (per NPR per the book cited) have to categorize. The world is too complex without it. That person next door: I have to decide how much to trust him. And the one beside him, across the street, around the block; the kids on my kid's schoolbus; the teachers and administrators, and people in restaurants, on the street, and on those rare occasions I'm in a mall. So I have a certain level of trust and good will, and how do I parcel it out? I can use race, I can use class, I can use accent, I can use ideology, I can use citizenship, I can use language or accent, or dress or some other proxy. But I will use something. Then I'm in a group, and as a primate will seek to help my group, those I empathize with and find support from. That means I'll sacrifice perks for other groups. I'll complain bitterly when others sacrifice my perks for their own good, or when they sacrifice perks for groups I'm sort of in for groups I'm not in and don't expect or want to be in.

From that, violence of one kind or another. Remove that, all wars are accidents--but then only possible if there's no enough good will.

There are kludges. Find a more inclusive proxy, like the US and nation-states did. Islam's serving as a proxy for many. Remake human nature so we stop striving for more, so we honestly don't care about the perquisites of group membership.

As for whether that'll help the species survive in the long run or not, can't know. So that may be an evolutionary mis-step. Or not.

[zipplewrath]

3. In one sense yes

I've actually studied this a bit over the decades. Man is clearly "out growing" war. However, that's not exactly the pacifist dream that one might imagine. We are learning to exert pressure on each other, quite violently, without whole nation states having to formally go to war.

We are probably a good 200, maybe 300 years away from anything approaching a "war free" world. But even then, there will be much violence and much of it may be, as we are seeing now, conducted predominately by "nonstate actors". However, as it is now, states will have something to do with it, even as indirectly as it may be.

[FiveGoodMen]

5. Not unless some terrible plague wipes out all of the Americans.

[Rebubula]

10. Dumbest post ever...

Do you think that no wars occur without the advent of America?

Did the world exist in peace and harmony until 1776?

Seriously....do you even listen to yourself?

[proteus_lives]

16. Wow, what a stupid post.

Ever even been in the same room as a history book?

[endless october]

6. i hope so. nt

[On the Road]

7. Compared to a Century or Two Ago,

look how far we've already come. Despite numerous regional conflicts since WWII, war is not a fact of life or a daily threat for the overwhelming majority of people today.

[tsstranger]

8. Can the Human Race Outgrow War?

Not until Man outgrows his infantile need for a god and religion.

Religion is, by far, the greatest cause of suffering, death and destruction in the history of Humanity.

[ccinamon]

9. Never - greed will always be around

and that is the basis for owning/controlling food, water, and land.

[certainot]

11. it's not human nature but a simple choice, according to this alien

who reports here the results of thousands of years of alien research on earth-

my favorite youtube vid (2min)-- hello earth, this is ron...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85ILt3c3S8A

[Butch350]

12. Sure! Yes!

...just as soon as 1 of the last 2 people on earth die.

[NorthCarolina]

14. Not as long as war = $$$. eom

[MisterP]

15. Goodall's primatology and anthropology have done much to undo the ideas of both

a society "outgrowing" something--a 18th-century and Victorian notion of perpetual ascent and forward movement that's quaint at best and poisonous at worst--and the idea of "Man's warlike nature"

Douglas P. Fry's "The Human Potential for Peace" is the strongest antidote to "Progress," Hobbes, the "manful striving" of Teddy Roosevelt, the Social Darwinists, and pre-WWI militarists and jingoists, Konrad Lorentz's perpetual warfare producing the Ten Commandments as an evolutionary adaptation, Robert Ardrey's "biological" call for preparedness against inevitable aggression, or the sociobiologists' glib and unfounded assumptions

the idea of an activity being "outdated" is itself outdated: time doesn't automatically bring a series of data that inexorably debunks Bad Views. Wars have targeted and butchered civilians in astonishing numbers since the Thirty Years' War

[Demeter]

17. Right After It Outgrows Stupid

or, when science perfects parthenogenisis for humans and men are eliminated...