Can men live without war? (1956)

Fascinating article...written not that long after it looked like men or anybody else could never live with war again.

But, those fretting about the necessity of war need not have worried, as subsequent events proved. War between nuclear powers doesn't happen any more, but instead we've had endless proxy wars. Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine....

Interesting thoughts but I feel it is the wrong level of analysis. Maybe we will reach some sci-fi utopia but personally I see war as a kind of law of nature.

Think about a petri dish and how bacteria grow on it until they saturate the entire surface area and then the resources run out, unless half of the bacteria destroy the other half, and then they can survive longer. War is the result of humans fighting over the metaphorical petri dish of land, resources, and also power. From this high level perspective, humans go through periods of growth, tension, war, and then the winner gets to continue surviving, only to repeat the cycle eventually.

Unless we discover infinite energy and resources somehow, we are going to be forced to clash in this way, and the ultimate way to resolve these conflicts is war. That said, we can have long periods without it because we discover new technologies that alleviate these tensions for some time, but I think a great war will be inevitable, the question is how long will our current peace streak last?

>deep yearning among all peoples for peace.

>the glamour of war is gone

>Peace is indeed in sight if we are wise.

Times have changed. The horrors of war are forgotten or far away.

War is entertainment and many people have their favorite team.

Why should you be wise when warmongering serves your career?

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Did not know: William James was a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Imperialist_Leag...

It’s funny how most of the discussions below have as a basis that people will always behave rationally. As if the threat of total destruction will always stop a particular cause of action.

Putting the fate on mankind in this basic premise is the flaw behind the entire building of such bombs in the first place.

Nothing short of idiocy.

The 1953 sci-fi novel Limbo touches on these concepts and references the Moral Equivalent of War essay heavily. Must have been something in the air at the time.

In the novel's far future time of 1990 it's effectively a religious text and all the young men are volunteering to have their limbs removed as a protest against wars that were fought with those limbs.

It gets a bit philosophical, and takes a very 1950s detour into the philosophy of rape, but is overall a very interesting read, sci-fi catch-22 in many ways.

with the power of hindsight, that aged like milk.

i wonder how much of our current views be seen this way another 50 years from now.

however i think some things will most likely be for certain, like how there are key parties who economically depend on war or planning for it. there have been countless seeds of conflicts sown around the time when this article and the essay it refers to were written. they are still being played out and i won't be surprised if they still influence some things decades from now.

another think i find repeating from the past into the future is the nature of aliances switching over time. predicting one major conflict between two currently strong allies in my bingo card.

our brains remain wired like the tribes that fought for survival. one might continue to find "us vs them" problems when there exists none.

It seems like the barriers for becoming an expat are lower now than what they were in the 20th century.

There are plenty of online expat communities. You can find maps, living arrangements, and machine translation all online

In general, the internet has made it so that people are a lot less dependent on their immediate community. So in the future, if the government starts making a bunch of hostile demands and tries to draft people, I'm not sure if that will be as effective as what it once was historically

A depressing example of Betteridge's law of headlines.

The whole thing is assuming that men drive progress and war drives progress, and both of those things are debatable.

The thing is without force your stuff gets taken. We haven't got a good way around this. Our current peace is heavily based on nuclear weapons and the implied threat of force.

Don't like the status quo? Use force to try to change it.

Do like the status quo? Use force to try to keep it that way.

We don't have a stable equiliubrium where no force exists in the system. Many in this thread effectively say "You can do what you like, but I am above using force".

They can say that because their existence is secured by the force of others. There are enough people willing to take by force that if you have no force your stuff and land get taken.

This was how the world worked for all of human history until 1945. The only thing that changed it was nukes, the ultimate force.

In theory you could have a global government with a monopoly on force that enforced no more war. But that still depends on force.

Is there any convincing argument for getting out of this equilibrium?

I can. Can’t say for all the others.

No we cannot. A small percentage of humans are wired with a strong territorial mind and/or a greedy personality. It's in the gene. Some of them eventually become leaders.

In an ideal future, firearms would be banned worldwide.

A body like interpol would investigate the entire world, to surveil if anybody is trying to make firearms.

People would make bows and spears, but it would be more difficult to conduct war.

It would not make war and violence impossible, but it would certainly be a better world.

EDIT: lots of pedants:

obviously there would be an joint army answering to an international body whose only mission is to seize and destroy weapons.

firearms includes bombs and other lethal ammunition, of course. Not knives.

Mergers and acquisitions have taken the place of war in the modern era.

When a child is born there is nothing remotely resembling large scale warfare inscribed in its genes and the discretional cultural path that must be travelled before such detrimental collective phenomena come to be seen as innate and inevitable is enormous.

Our predicament in relation to our war "habit" is similar to many other challenges we are facing: malignant social patterns that got established before a succession of dramatic technological recolutions are now mutating into existential risks.

It is anybody's guess how things will play out. Cultural evolution is our superpower but we are not exactly in control of it. We still in a transition zone where old moralities feel secure in their "it was ever thus" denial.

It is conceivable that we'll outgrow this phase and survive. A pacified humanity is not utopic, its the only solution to a long term sustainable existence. We thus might work backwards from what we know is the only meaningful endgame and see what it takes to get there.

But we might also implode before we solve that.

Three billion human lives ended on August 29, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the Machines