Sat 3 Oct 2009
Last spring, a reporter for the terrific NPR show “Radio Lab” followed me from Stevens down to Washington Street, the main drag of Hoboken, and recorded me asking random pedestrians: Will humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all? NPR put my survey together with interviews of Robert Sapolsky and Richard Wrangham, two of the most prominent scientific investigators of primate violence (whose work I featured in a recent article for Discover). The “Radio Lab” show is called “The New Normal,” and it’s really cool.
Also on the war and media front, the crack audio-visual folks at Stevens just posted video of security expert Peter W. Singer’s presentation last week at Stevens on “Wired for War,” which explored the military’s growing use of robots. If you missed the event, now you can check it out in the comfort of your home.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
I think you’re asking the wrong question to start off. The first question is whether wars are – on balance – good and valuable, or not. If the answer is yes, people will continue war. I think that most people would agree that something worse than war would be to give a free hand to terrorists, rogue nations, dictatorships, genocidal regimes, etc. Better to fight against evil than to have a “peace” in which thugs are allowed to terrorise you.
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:44 pm
OK, I listened to all of the 20 mins of the baboon discussion. I’m not surprised that the Foreign Affairs article was ignored. Of course behaviour can be changed. So what? The question that’s interesting is not: “Can we change attitudes to avoid war?” The question anyone with two brain cells asks is instead: “Is war an advantage or not?”
In the case of WWII, yes; Vietnam War, no. It depends on what you have to gain/lose if you surrender compared to what you can win if you fight. That’s obvious. If you have some mad Hitler-like terrorist dictatorship threatening to terrorize your nation, you might have to fight even if the cost is relatively high, just to regain stability. Likewise, if you’re an ethnic minority and some thugs want to slaughter you, the risks of war might be less than the gains of fighting for survival.
The pacifist case asks all the wrong questions, or it assumes that wars are all a giant misunderstanding and that something short of physically hurting evil thugs, like chatting to them or trading with them, will avert war. Nope. That was tried with Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, etc. It’s obvious why war can’t be averted: power corrupts, so you’re always going to get dictators threatening/hurting others.
October 3rd, 2009 at 10:14 pm
At least seven billion rounds of ammunition will be sold in the US between November 2008 and November 2009. This is called participatory democracy. If anybody wishes to take my vote from me, “Μολών λαβέ!” (”Molon labe!” if the Greek does not come through.)
October 4th, 2009 at 8:17 am
“Will humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all?” No, they won’t, because this kind of “humans” will simply stop soon enough, including all its miserable fuss, be it a “bad” war or a “good” science (always with the same result: ultimate destruction of everything). This planet needs now another, genuine and truly intelligent, intelligence-driven humanity for its real, sustainable progress. The current domination of tricky money changers everywhere (knowledge including) is worse than war because it produces more ordinary victims and one overwhelming victim, humanity as a whole, in its nontrivial, intellectually and spiritually progressing version. As a matter of fact, it is quickly transformed back to Baboons, as desired. How many of us should die, physically and mentally, in order for the few of you to have your unconditionally “high-standard” life, irrespective of who can and does what and where it all goes as a result? Call it fair competition, call it goodness, call it peace and love, in Hoboken…
October 4th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
“How many of us should die, physically and mentally, in order for the few of you to have your unconditionally “high-standard” life, irrespective of who can and does what and where it all goes as a result?” – Andrei Kirilyuk
I think the “unconditionally high standard” life idea is mythical. Example: my country (England) is on the road to ruin in the long term, due to the national debt increasing from £100 billion (due to the Gordon Brown’s reckless public spending over the last decade as Chancellor and Prime Minister) to over £1 trillion due to national government bail-outs for failed banks like Northern Rock (hit by the recession, with defaults on mortgages). That is an immense debt per person (60 million population). Somehow that national debt will need to be paid back, and even servicing the interest will require heavy increases in tax, which will close more businesses and cause more suffering, so they will have to cut back and the motorways, railways, etc., will in a few years be in a ruin. This coming national poverty will affect everyone, rich and poor alike, because all will feel a proportionate increase in tax and the effects on society (more crime, beggars, businesses closing, etc.). America also has massive unemployment now due to the recession, and the government there has had to bail out parts of the auto industry.
I don’t know exactly who are the few you blame for the world’s problems (maybe the rich bankers who made money for a while by lending recklessly to high-risk people?).
October 5th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
My goodness, seven billion rounds of ammo sold in the U.S. and I only have maybe 7,000. I only purchased about 60 rounds this year because some calibers are hard to find, which is understandable given all that terrific demand. But I banged off about 700 rds at the range, which leaves me slipping backwards, dear, dear!
Nevertheless, it is nice to have a manual skill. Why,when the Brits were good at the long bow they subdued France handily! Then they got good at building seaworthy ships out of oak and fashioning brass cannon for them and they ended up dominating the most economically progressive parts of the world for several centuries because then you can make things like telegraph wire and locomotives and with a little encouragement the heathen nations will end up buying those products.
For the life of me I don’t know what either Britain or the USA make anymore that someone else can’t make better, for less. Russia doesn’t even try to make anything, because they have more natural resources than God, but none-the-less the Russian Energia rocket is so good that NASA may have to use it to get to Mars. So, Russians can build something world-class other than the AK-47 after all.
Now Obama could just quit the fight in Afghanistan but then all the Afghan women who have taken up wearing eye shadow and getting educated will be beaten down, if not murdered. Also anyone who dared to vote for someone Taliban doesn’t like or who maybe has recklessly gotten their own page on Facebook or some other blatant Westernization.
Yep, just quit the fight. Eight years of George W. Bush’s mess is enough. Pull ‘em out and go home. No consequences either, at least not until Obama’s second term, maybe deep in his second term.
Nearing retirement, I am becoming ever so much more inclined to pacifism. And why not? Too old to fight, too old to make love, too old even to care much when some stupid injustice is performed right in my presence, almost as if daring me to become once more a man of action rather than a mere shadow-man of reflection.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
The interesting question that started the show was not whether the conditions that drive war now will continue — which some of the commenters seem to be addressing — but whether war will continue. Some thoughts on that here, in response:
http://www.futureatlas.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/16/an-end-to-war/