That John Horgan fellow — he’s always going on and on about the end of something or other. This time, it’s about the end of war. There’s a little bit of “duh” about it — modern science can end war, all it has to do is end scarcity, or as it says, “Given adequate food, fuel, and gender equality, mass conflict just might disappear” — but also a good question. Are people intrinsically warlike by nature, or will they favor peace if given the opportunity?
I’m inclined to agree that people would rather avoid war, and that ending resource scarcity (which I’m not convinced that science can do) would reduce the incidence of war, but I think the article ignores one central source of conflict: ideology. Baboons and bonobos don’t seem to have it, but we do, and it can trigger wars for that other resource, human minds. We want people on our side. The Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, the Cold War … were those fought because one side wanted the other side’s food or land or minerals? Or over the spread of ideas that weren’t satisfied by science?
I have a suspicion that if we had a world of peace and plenty, where everyone was brought up to abhor war, and in which there was no biological imperative for conflict, we’d still have people coming up with ideas they’d be willing to die for … and we’d conjure up new tribes out of the contented hordes and set them to battling with one another.
The most important thing is that such a strategy is not a stable evolutionary strategy.
an end to warfare among most would only lead to an opportunity to exploit it.
“where everyone was brought up to abhor war”
To get all the parents in the world to do that requires a war for human minds.
Too many people support war. There’s no way to convince most of them otherwise, and resources are not their concern in that respect.
I’m reminded of Hector Avalos’ observation that religion is rather good at creating artificial scarcity. The same could be said for ideology in general.
Surely the American Civil War was, in fact, a fight over resources. Southerners wanted the free (or cheap) labor source that slavery represented and thought that it was an economic boon to them, and were willing to use violent means (as they always had been) to maintain access to that source. Northerners, on the other hand, were no longer content to let their fellow Americans be violently exploited in this fashion. It’s a classic resource war.
I’m not so sure.
The “Contented hordes” factor may be one of the reasons why our fundamentalists tend to live like regular people but for voting for idiots and yelling at gays on the internet, while middle-eastern fundamentalists tend to blow themselves up, despite the disturbing similarities in their ideologies.
Sure, you’ll hear a lot of “internet tough-guy” talk from NAmerican fundamentalists about wanting to take over America and put the gays and secular humanists in a camp, or deport them, but at the end of the day the little house in the suburbs, 2.1 kids, and a half-decent job seems to deflate the final get-of-your-butt-factor when it comes to such Left Behind-ian urges.
Actually, it was more a conflict over access to the resources in the territories that were created out of the Laousiana Purchase.
Northerners who were opposed to slavery in principle but not sufficiently to go to war over it, didn’t want slavery in the territories because it made for unfair competition. (I believe although I may be wrong that one or more of the territories banned free blacks as well as slaves for this reason.)
The southerners for their part, wanted to take their slaves with them to the territories and, for that matter, to the northern free states.
Lincoln didn’t so much campaign against the moral evil of slavery in the south (although he clearly did think slavery was evil) as against the “slave power” that was supposedly plotting to extend slavery throughout the Union in order to drive down white wages.
If someone is exploited, there will be an eventual insurrection. It is like a retroactive Dr. Moreau theme that continues due to the defense of caste systems. Becker and Otto Rank got it right.
Err, the American Civil War was definitely fought over resources, despite the fact that we like to pretend we were fighting to free the slaves. I think the problem with religious ideology isn’t that it makes us go to war, it’s that it makes it so EASY for us to go to war.
As long as there’s profit in it, those who stand to rake it in will always figure out some way to convince those of us who do the actual dying to go do so.
Glen (#4): except, of course, that the Northerners did not really care about Southern slavery. All they cared about was protecting their developing industries from foreign competition.
Meanwhile, southern states, agricultural as they were, wanted free trade to sell their cheap goods (cotton comes to mind) to European countries, such as the UK, and import the finished products they cared about.
The American Civil War was fought for purely economic reasons. Lincoln may have been the exception in the United States at the time.
“I have a suspicion that if we had a world of peace and plenty, where everyone was brought up to abhor war, and in which there was no biological imperative for conflict, we’d still have people coming up with ideas they’d be willing to die for … and we’d conjure up new tribes out of the contented hordes and set them to battling with one another.”
This has already been invented: it is called “soccer”!
> wanting to take over America and put the gays and secular humanists in a camp, or deport them, but at the end of the day the little house in the suburbs
True, they would never actively go out and do it. But if ever someone should come along and gain power with exactly that sort of thing in mind, these lazy fundies wouldn’t bat an eye.
They had the same situation in Europe regarding Jews before WW2, no? There was no overt violence or institutionalized intolerance. But there was this millenia-old undercurrent of “Jews just aren’t like us” that could be, and was, exploited to the hilt. To the point that when the Nuremberg laws were passed, or when a party based largely on explicit and violent anti-semitism rose to power, there was little or no public opposition.
Picture that suburban warrior for god hearing a politician propose a law to herd all us “Enemies of Christ” into camps. Can you imagine him opposing it with any vigor? Or would he just passively support it with nary a twinge of guilt?
That’s what worries me most about the great majority of True Believers. Not that they’ll actively string me up from the nearest tree, but that they’ll just sit there while someone else does.
modern science can end war, all it has to do is end scarcity, or as it says, “Given adequate food, fuel, and gender equality, mass conflict just might disappear”
I’m skeptical that modern science could do any of that given the method of funding and the way that research if guided. We as a society spend crap-tons of money on science that is not working towards those goals or anything nearly as noble as those goals. The scientific establishment is not free from the corrupting influence of war mongering and is in fact a major part of the military-industrial complex.
Maybe if more scientists refused to do work for the military we would have less war.
It does seem like it’s all about the money (in its many forms), but your comments on people may indicate why some believe in Original Sin.
We individuals, alarmed at the nastiness inside our own heads that can lead to the conflicts mentioned, want to blame something. Anything but ourselves.
The idea that we all have these inclinations, and that individuals can control them without resorting to coercive invisible beings, is something inconceivable to a lot of religious folk. Atheists can’t be moral.
It’s the same basic premise behind Intelligent Design –
– I can’t understand how it happened, so it had to be magical. And you can’t understand it either.
– I can’t control my actions without resorting to Magic Sky Daddy. And you can’t control your actions either.
More than this, humans also often fight, not necessarily for resources, but to maintain a difference in access to resources between themselves and another group. When we talk about “balance of power politics” or “furthering the interests” of a state this is often what we mean. The interventions by the United States in Central America often had less to do with gaining access to resources and more to do with insuring the cheapness or exclusivity of that access. The Crimean War was fought, by the English, to deny Russia a warm-water harbor thereby keeping them a landlocked power, and by the Russian, fought just as much to gain that port as to express their dominance over the Ottomans.
The colonial struggles of Spain, Portugal, England, France, Scotland and the Netherlands all had similar causes, as did the continued thwarting of Germany’s continued attempts to gain colonial possessions throughout the 1800’s. In fact, the reigning economic theory of the time, Mercantilism, was little more than a direct statement of this thinking; that there are only so many resources in the world, and it is in the best interests of a nation to deny resources to other states, even if they do not gain resources by doing so. Hence the continued British support after the Revolutionary War for native resistance to the expansion of the United States, hence their maintenance of forts in the Ohio and Mississippi watersheds after losing the population they were built to protect.
Yeah, every group has some deluded vi user.
Emacs FTW!
I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately.Would the popularity of combat sports,both among paticipants and spectators,not suggest that we have an innate propensity for fighting with each other.Isn’t war just an extension of this?It makes me a bit sad to think that there is probably no way for us to avoid doing harm to each other.
I don’t see how any American can look at the current mess our country is in and believe that we’ll stop having wars simply because they’re unnecessary.
Baboons may act like that, but humans–at least in this country–are stuck with leaders who recognize that if they declare war–any war–they can pull practically endless treasure out of a formerly rich nation, enabled by a C-in-C who thinks war is “romantic,” and has no more regard for the lives of real soldiers than if he’d wasted them in a video game.
I think soccer is indeed an excellent counter-example — do soccer hooligans commit violence due to lack of resources? Or because, in general, there is a tendency in human behaviour toward tribalism?
Well you ask: “What’s the purpose of war–
All the bombs, and the bullets, and gore?”
Though we all know it’s wrong
We’ve been at it so long
We’ve forgotten just what it is for.
One answer that’s there on the table,
Though I’m fully aware that it’s fable:
As descendents of Cain
We make war, in the main,
Just because we can’t stop–we’re not Abel.
Or, perhaps, it is all in our genes,
Although no one knows quite what that means
Is the dominant trait
Disposition to hate,
Or a fondness for noisy machines?
Are we programmed for war in our head?
Is it just that we’re easily led?
I think we should strive
To find out, while alive,
Cos it’s surely too late once we’re dead.
Can we change predilection for fighting
For something else, just as exciting?
The next border dispute,
Try an alternate route–
Say, competitive limerick writing!
http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2008/03/limerickwar.html
I haven’t done any scientific research or anything like that, but I’m pretty sure that at least some people enjoy violence for violence’s sake. Whether they enjoy mass violence is another thing, but I think with just a tiny bit of ideology you can convince those people to kill each other. There is something about unnecessary bloodlust that persists in many cultures, probably most of them. Just look at how big and “respected” is still the “tradition” of bullfighting in modern Spain, and in Latin America as well. Some sports, as mentioned, are another example.
The evidence certainly suggests that violence is one of mankind’s favorite pastimes.
This TED talk by Stephen Pinker is pretty cool:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163
it’s about the rate at which violence has been dropping through human history.
Of course, a dozen generations of selective breeding and we could probably go a long way toward clearing it up. We can breed “peaceful” breeds of dogs…
I have to remember to never, ever mention the Civil War again, because every time everyone starts arguing that that war wasn’t about slavery.
Of course there were economic interests involved. But the war was about slavery. There was also economic conflict between Maine and Massachusetts, but you didn’t see them going to war over it. There was conflict over new territories to the west, but the argument wasn’t that Virginians couldn’t exploit the land, while Ohioans could…it was over the export of an ugly labor practice. Slavery was the dividing line.
The problem is that even if only a few bullies tend toward violence, how can the rest of us stop them without using violence?
They had the same situation in Europe regarding Jews before WW2, no? There was no overt violence or institutionalized intolerance.
What?! I suppose the massive slaughters of jews that took place during the Spanish Inquisition were just done over-enthusiastic soccer hooligans? And the frequent pogroms in Russia – were those simply too much vodka and a bit of wealth redistribution? How about the way the crusaders started off _inside_ _germany_ by sometimes slaughtering a bunch of jews on their way to the holy land? (where, everyone who wasn’t basically white and european got slaughtered equally when Jerusalem was conquered…)
This is the future of warfare.
writerdd hits it on the head:
The problem is that even if only a few bullies tend toward violence, how can the rest of us stop them without using violence?
Well, if the non-violent people simply choose to die nobly in their tracks, then the violence is rewarded and the next generation of humans will be more likely to be violent.
Humans are violent because violence is a successful survival strategy. It has been ever since one organism innovated and ate another.
>> The next border dispute,
>> Try an alternate route–
>> Say, competitive limerick writing!
What, and concede all future conflicts to Cuttlefish?
No way! :-)
Hmmm… I think it needs slightly more than eliminating scarcity – you also need practical space travel. Iain M. Banks makes an interesting argument (in A Few Notes on the Culture) that once you have practical space travel, hegemony becomes impractical at least, if not outright impossible. It’s simply to easy for the entities you’re trying to control to bugger off somewhere else.
The Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, the Cold War … were those fought because one side wanted the other side’s food or land or minerals?
Economics.
The Thirty Years’ War was fought over the potentially huge loss of revenue the Catholic Church would suffer if Protestantism was allowed to continue. Spain had holdings near Germany. France was heavily Catholic and was even being run by a Cardinal, and in spite of this, France entered the war on the “Protestant” side. Their motivations were clearly not religious.
The economic origins of the American Civil War have already been mentioned…
The Cold War seems to have accomplished almost nothing except the growth of the American military-industrial complex.
Humans are violent because violence is a successful survival strategy. It has been ever since one organism innovated and ate another.
It is entirely possible for people to be violent with culture alone. Not to say there aren’t biological imperatives, but those are always molded by our cultural upbringing. To say that animals eat other animals and therefore humans will always have war is a bit of a cop out. We organize ourselves in ways that encourage war. We build hierarchies that discourage dissent and questioning and we use those hierarchies to control people. And those hierarchies clash, that is war.
I don’t see why it isn’t possible to alter our methods of organization such that the propensity for mass violence is decreased dramatically. I’m no pie in the sky idealist grasping for utopia, but it seems pretty damn obvious that we can do a hell of a lot better than we are now. And blaming biology helps not one bit.
Even if science is able to relieve us of scarcity of energy resources (including food) over a short period of time, the abundance most assuredly will lead to an increase in hording and excessive consumption by some that will make those resources scarce for others. There are haves and have-nots precisely because the haves want it that way. If everybody is a have, then who can one dominate?
I’m reading PZ’s post, thinking of the biological ramifications of war, trying to organize my own thoughts and, then; Cuttlefish, one hour after the post, has a stacked limerical response.
Darn you, Cuttlefish! Darn you to heck!
writerdd smartly said: The problem is that even if only a few bullies tend toward violence, how can the rest of us stop them without using violence?
Yep. War and violence are “imposed games” — patterns of interaction in which the imposee has only two choices, to play the game, or to lose the game.
This being the case, imposee nations, if they are serious about not wanting to play the game of war, have to see imposition itself as an attack, far more egregious than the deaths, damages and injuries of the specific attack.
Why so? Because of the huge, unnecessary waste and expense and forced change of focus of being drawn into the game of war.
Imposee nations’ best response would be IMHO swift retaliation, and shaming and ostracism of imposer nations’ ruling elite.
Of course this requires that the ostracizers be of one accord, and stronger than the imposers, and also aware that the imposition is itself an attack. With the deflating of the US Macy’s parade balloon of wealth and influence, this is becoming more likely, I hope.
Noni
As long as war is portrayed as glorious, and we are carefully shielded from the sights and sounds of it, there will be little reason to stop.
We need to start understanding war as tragic waste and probably ineffective as well. Where would the human race be if we could concentrate on the real enemies of mankind; disease, ignorance, scarcity? But Fox News goes on with its 24-hour drumbeat…
Cold war: since Communism is an economic theory dealing with a more equitable distribution of wealth, the cold war was clearly motivated by economic considerations. More accurately, if the Russian economy had been better-run to begin with, there would not have been a discontented underclass; no underclass, no revolution; no revolution, no cold war. Totalitarian states do not arise when everyone is pretty happy with the way things are.
The Irish have an appropriate saying in this regard:
“If everyone in Ireland were atheist, there would still be Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists.”
Since the time when we were all hunter/gatherers, humans have had “in” groups that oppose “outside” groups. Ideology is probably only a tool that perpetuates this primeval urge, and is not the reason for it.
Without addressing PZ’s point directly, one might remember that the American Revolutionary War was declared and fought because of economic reasons at least as much as because of ideological reasons. The crown was levying exorbitant taxes on the relatively wealthy colonies to pay for its expansive imperial adventures in India and around the globe. In essence, the crown was milking the American colonies for its resources.
Obviously, the colonialists didn’t much care for that, preferring to keep them for themselves. Since protests went unheeded, and indeed were often brutally suppressed, a critical mass of colonialists became revolutionaries. A declaration of independence was issued that listed each of their grievances and war was begun.
Does this mean that there would have been no revolution had not the British crown not coveted America’s resources for itself? The answer is debatable, but a strong argument could be made that there would have been no revolution.
Slightly off topic, but still related…
The Iraq War is costing the US alone about $12 billion per day. The population of Iraq is around 24 million. Proposed settlement: give every person in Iraq $500/day for the next year and tell them to work it out themselves. This would not work because…?
Ugh. There are one too many “nots” in the second to last sentence above. Feel free to mentally remove one. Either one, your pick.
I think your statement might be more true if written this way…:
…we’d still have people coming up with ideas they’d be willing to kill for …
One “solution” to ending war which is often put forth is — ironically — religion. IF you can get everyone to follow a pacifist religion which either has God frowning on all violent conflict — or which has God promising to revenge Himself satisfactorily on wrongdoers (but ONLY if you refuse to do so yourself) — THEN you will be able to end all war.
This sort of reasoning is behind some of the attacks against the so-called New Atheism. Atheists are ignoring the only sure path to peace! Belief in God is the ultimate motivator — use it for good, instead of evil. How naive of atheists to neglect the obvious.
One big problem with this scenario, of course, is that it is simply impossible to get everyone to follow just one religion, let alone a pacifist religion which demands a high level of self-discipline and self-control. If you think that finding a common ground to reason your way to ending conflict is hard, try finding a common ground to “choosing faith” in one particular deity out of an infinite set of possibilities. You’ve got both tasks, now — reason your way to deciding in favor of non-violence, and then “discover” that God wants the same thing. Now make everyone else do that.
This is where the religious pacifists are forced to fall back on belief in miracles: you could only get a joint consensus on God if there really is a God to magically convert people’s hearts.
But there isn’t. Which is why the whole “TRUE religion as our only sure path to peace” solution is doomed to fail. At least Horgan’s solution can be discussed rationally, and whether it is practical or not doesn’t implicitly rely on magic.
An early draft of the Eisenhower farewell speech where he first used the term ‘the military industrial complex’ had an expanded version: ‘the military industrial scientific complex.’
I dearly dislike getting into a Civil War discussion, but Lincoln said (paraphrase- I haven’t googled the exact quote): “If I could preserve the union and keep slavery I would. . .” This is the important snipit, the meaning of the whole quote was that his goal was to preserve the union at virtually any cost.
Violence- or at least dominance posturing I’m sure is hard wired into the human species. The earth shall inherit the meek still seems to be an underlying theme in practice of most cultures.
I think it’s safe to say that economic differences are everywhere. We’re not going to war over them all. The argument being made is that a great deal of the ones we do pick are based on ideology. I’d say the other wars are triggered off of nationalism, creating the “other” through the use of arbitrary borders. No one is stating that economics don’t play a role, and going on about the economic status of every war ever misses the point. The question is why do we war over these particular differences?
The argument is that without ideology (religious or otherwise) it will be a good deal harder to justify violently taking resources, or inflicting damage to another group for its own end. If we could also get over ourselves regarding our different geographical distribution and melanin levels we’d really have a hard time not warring for anything other than personal greed. Something would come up surely, but this isn’t to diminish the possibility that much violence could be avoided, at least not IMHO.
Malthusian theories on fecundity inspired Darwin, you know. So, even if through GMO and BioTech we eliminate food scarcity, it will only be a time. Like gas, living populations expand to fill the available volume and then push to exceed the available volume.
There can never be a time when there is no scarcity no matter what fantastic feats of technology that science leads us to. If there is food, we will breed.
For example, several years ago the state of Minnesota started feeding wild deer in a harsh winter. Guess what happened within the next two years? Lots of Bambi’s got thumped by automobiles cause there were just so darned many of the cute little thangs.
See? Nothing about the Civil War.
(Damned reb traitors.)
The Thirty Years War, the American Civil War, the Cold War … were those fought because one side wanted the other side’s food or land or minerals? Or over the spread of ideas that weren’t satisfied by science?
30 years War: Started by a resource conflict in Germany. Lutherans vs. Catholics sure, but over wether Lutherans or Catholics got the land.
American Civil War: “Other than the obvious conflict between abolitionists and anti-abolitionists, economic factors such as…”
“Just say slavery.”
“Slavery it is sir!”
Cold War: Communism vs. Capitalism… it doesn’t get much more resource oriented than that.
Perhaps if we united against a common enemy, such as global warming or environmental damage, and for giving everyone a fair share of food, water, and land, we could have the moral and logistic equivalent of a just war. It would surely absorb resources that are currently thrown away in war. If the U.S. gun manfacturers who depend on small wars and border conflicts to sell their arms switched over to making pumps to rebuild and raise or relocate New Orleans, and did the work that was paid for would that satisfy?
I don’t necessarily agree with PZ on this one. Although ideology can alone lead to war, often times, it’s scarcity that leads to ideologies that can polarize people and result in war. The American Civil War could very well have had its roots in the fact that the South was in control of all the agricultural wealth of the US. In the North, it wasn’t like they were completely moral and anti-slavery, their economy was not built on slavery, but had to deal and compete with the ramifications that the South’s was. That didn’t make slavery moral at all, but did result in the diverging ideologies that lead to the ultimate war. Further, although it can be argued that the Cold War was communist ideology, it was more a result of a competition for resources in an ever globalizing world. “Which political entity can snatch up the most mineral and economic wealth?”
There are many things that drive ideology: arrogance, paranoia, and plain old ignorance, to name but a few.
Myself, I’ve been unable to look beyond the fact that in just about any case, ideology is nonethless driven, sustained, supported, and justified by a materialistic need, namely the general need for comfort.
Granted, comfort is not a simple need, as there are many facets as to what provides one comfort. Money? A nice bed? A big screen TV? Yet studies show that once that basic comforts (food, shelter, warmth, etc.) are met, happiness does not appreciably increase when other materialistic desires are met. Thus, Warren Buffet is not necessarily any happier than the $20-an-hour dock worker who lives in a two-room apartment with his wife and two kids.
Arguably, science could conceivably provide for all of the basic human needs as well as most of the peripheral ones. Once they’re effectively met, there could be a shift in the overarching materialistic perspective, effectively collapsing many of the more destructive ideologies.
Than again, I could be completely full of crap.
#25; Marcus Ranum
Um, I meant immediately prior to the Nazi rise to power. Like, the 1920’s. Obviously there was a long history of naked cruelty to European Jews. That’s my point. That even though it had cooled to “no overt violence or institutionalized intolerance”, that whole history of ideology-based hatred was still there just below the surface.
The population at large may have been lazy when it came to attacking the enemy demographic du jour, but they were equally lazy at defending them as well. And I assert that that is the residue of a millenia-old hatred and distrust, which _at best_ results in apathy when “those people” start getting disappeared in the night.
And yes, there’s a very good case to be made that soccer riots and simply a sports-oriented version of any other pogrom.
Thanks Marcus, I will try to make time to look at that.
I’m a great fan of statistics (as in substantiated observations) and the interesting subjects of some TED talks, and this talk of Hans Rosling on the global datamining program Gapminder gives food for thoughts. See, I’ve heard something like Pinker’s assertion somewhere, but coupled to the near history of democracy. (And I have no reference unfortunately.) The concomitant factor was supposed to be free trade.
But Rosling points out:
1) The earlier bimodal distribution in poor and rich nations has (IIRC) coalesced.
2) Even nations with controlled trade/border trade ends up on roughly the same economic vs health correlation. (Not all scarcity is caused by economics, but it is the overall constraint of course.) Though they might reverse the order and have a good health status before achieving comparable economy.
So this raises some doubt in my mind that market economics is a necessary factor in the trend towards either less warfare or more resources. But I’ve also heard (again, unsubstantiated) that nations with free markets diminishes poverty among the always existing distribution tail the fastest – less large scale politic meddling means less suffering.
Though I’ve no longer any doubt that economics have elasticity enough and beneficial synergies for point efforts of help – not all resources must be reinvested in primary production. I’m living in a nation that, again according to statistics of late, seems to get away with a lot of those actions while remaining economically successful.
Googling Rosling’s talk I notice that he has a follow up with “new insights”. Exciting!
Thanks Marcus, I will try to make time to look at that.
I’m a great fan of statistics (as in substantiated observations) and the interesting subjects of some TED talks, and this talk of Hans Rosling on the global datamining program Gapminder gives food for thoughts. See, I’ve heard something like Pinker’s assertion somewhere, but coupled to the near history of democracy. (And I have no reference unfortunately.) The concomitant factor was supposed to be free trade.
But Rosling points out:
1) The earlier bimodal distribution in poor and rich nations has (IIRC) coalesced.
2) Even nations with controlled trade/border trade ends up on roughly the same economic vs health correlation. (Not all scarcity is caused by economics, but it is the overall constraint of course.) Though they might reverse the order and have a good health status before achieving comparable economy.
So this raises some doubt in my mind that market economics is a necessary factor in the trend towards either less warfare or more resources. But I’ve also heard (again, unsubstantiated) that nations with free markets diminishes poverty among the always existing distribution tail the fastest – less large scale politic meddling means less suffering.
Though I’ve no longer any doubt that economics have elasticity enough and beneficial synergies for point efforts of help – not all resources must be reinvested in primary production. I’m living in a nation that, again according to statistics of late, seems to get away with a lot of those actions while remaining economically successful.
Googling Rosling’s talk I notice that he has a follow up with “new insights”. Exciting!
…which is why Dunc (@29) is right in saying the end to war also requires cheap, easy space travel, which would effectively make the “available volume” infinitely expandable.
Then again, general human cussedness might motivate us to continue fighting over particular pieces of real estate even in the face of an infinite number of other plots.
Has someone posted this already?
“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.” — Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
Um, according to statistics the world population doesn’t live in a malthusian regime AFAIU. The population will level of and possibly even shrink way before we exhaust immediate land or energy resources.
If you want to argue that it will probably be at an unsustainable level (for some definitions of sustainability) I don’t think you will see any argument there. For example, the current extinction rate will mean that we can’t sustain biological diversity unless our biological footprint decrease drastically. And ever improved technology can only do so much on a specific but irreplaceable scarcity, diminishing returns and all that.
Um, according to statistics the world population doesn’t live in a malthusian regime AFAIU. The population will level of and possibly even shrink way before we exhaust immediate land or energy resources.
If you want to argue that it will probably be at an unsustainable level (for some definitions of sustainability) I don’t think you will see any argument there. For example, the current extinction rate will mean that we can’t sustain biological diversity unless our biological footprint decrease drastically. And ever improved technology can only do so much on a specific but irreplaceable scarcity, diminishing returns and all that.
Okay, strike that last sentence in the previous comment, it doesn’t work that way. Still, some types of unsustainable processes will be hard to avoid at projected population levels, or even if they eventually go down somewhat.
Okay, strike that last sentence in the previous comment, it doesn’t work that way. Still, some types of unsustainable processes will be hard to avoid at projected population levels, or even if they eventually go down somewhat.
The problem isn’t volume, it is volume of resources. Empty space doesn’t have much in the way of resources, and if one is living in empty space, resources are much more critical than living on a ball of metals and organics orbiting an energy source.
War has been on my mind the last couple days. (We didn’t have lunch today because I’m not feeling well–I regret it, too.)
We may not be able to rid ourselves of war. But, because of the tremendous destructive technologies humans have developed, we’d better figure out a fucking way to make it even less attractive.
For all of those arguing that the civil war wasn’t about slavery in some fashion, read Shelby Foote’s series on the civil war. It is, by everyone’s admission, the best scholarship on the issue, and it will explain to you how wrong you are.
“modern science can end war, all it has to do is end scarcity, or as it says, ‘Given adequate food, fuel, and gender equality, mass conflict just might disappear'”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t it generally been the case that, when food and other resources increase, populations that consume said resources also increase?
And when humans come up with new ways of increasing our resources — such as agriculture — hasn’t the result been an increase in our population?
My point: In the absence of cheap, safe, legal, easily available, widely available, socially sanctioned birth control, trying to improve the lot of humankind simply by increasing the amount of food and other resources isn’t going to do the trick. You can’t end scarcity — and wars over scarce resources — just by increasing the amount of those resources.
#58
Pretty much. There were economic reasons for secession, but they all stemmed from slavery. There were political reasons as well, but they also stemmed from slavery.
There’s an excellent side-by-side comparison of the Constitutions of the USA and CSA. Largely a carbon-copy, any differences are either trival, demolish the whole “states rights” bullshit, or relate to slavery.
http://www.filibustercartoons.com/CSA.htm
PZ Myers (#23):
It is better to make the denailists come out where you can shoot them down, then to let them lurk, spreading their poison unimpeded.
Oh yeah, it also establishes the CSA as a God-favored nation. I guess they decided the Almighty wanted them to own people.
Sigh. Hedges was right. PZ’s just another starry-eyed New Atheist utopian war-monger. o_O
and we’d conjure up new tribes out of the contented hordes and set them to battling with one another.
50 Quatloos on the newcomer!
…modern science can end war, all it has to do is end scarcity,…
now if it could only end greed…
Tulse:
I don’t mean to turn this thread into an SF convention panel discussion, but I didn’t really mean “volume” literally. I only used the word at all to continue the metaphor of the post I was replying to. A better term might have been the domain of humankind.
First, as I indicated with the rest of my post, I’m not really convinced that conflict over scarce resources really is the root cause of war, but to the extent that it is, space (by which I mean that portion of the Solar System that we might be able to reach and settle within a reasonably foreseeable future) is chock full of resources, just not (obviously) in the “emptiness” of interplanetary space. Even if you just look at our moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and the Jovian moons (and that’s the domain most commonly depicted in SF that involves colonization of the SS), there’s plenty of both resources and lebensraum.
Mind you, it’s hard to imagine a space transportation system that would allow us to move any significant fraction of humankind offworld quickly enough to relieve population pressure in terms of absolute numbers… but offworld colonies could certainly provide some elbow room for cultural groups that can’t (or don’t want to) work and play well with others. Want an Islamic theocracy governed according to strict Sharia law? Fine, there’s some lovely real estate available on Ganymede!
#59
Thanks for the link to the CSA Constitution. It’s always useful to have an easy and quick-to-access source that doesn’t require me tracking down and flipping through one massive tome or another.
Bill Dauphin: There’s always another New World, eh? I still chuckle over Garrison Keillor’s line: “My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived in the United States in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under the English law at that time.”
What next? The Imams of Titan? :-)
“What next? The Imams of Titan?”
Love it! Think you can find a publisher?
Of course, take a warning from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. If we send all the assholes to another planet, it may be great short term, but what if we end up with a whole moon full of them? Better make all the travel technology self-destruct when they arrive!
#67: I seem to recall reading some SF where Muslims traveling or living off-Earth carried around a little computer that would tell them which direction Earth (and therefore Mecca) was, relative to wherever they happened to be at the time. (It may have been C.S. Friedman’s _This Alien Shore_, which also had the idea of offworld-born Muslims attempting the hajj. Which is a good example of artificial scarcity – no matter how nice Ganymede is, you still have to go to Mecca, which there is only one of.)
It’s not a calculation I’d want to try to do in my head five times a day, that’s for sure. It’s actually simpler if you go interstellar, because then you just have to aim at Sol and take into account the rotation of whatever body you’re on; someplace like Mars or the asteroid belt you also have to account for relative orbital motions.
Of course, it’s easiest of all on the Moon; there it’s a fixed location, just like it is on Earth.
i have an hypothesis as to how one could remove resource scarcity, but you would have to find a way to convert mater into energy without using a lot of energy in the process, then you have to find a way to convert that energy into another type of mater. neither of which i have any idea how to do…but it seems concievable. and if the energy converted is greater than the energy used to convert it, it also works as a reactor (skipping the last step) which would make for some nice recycling such that mining or other removal of resources would not be needed.
possible, probably not likely any time in the concievable future.
also human tribalism i think is just part of human nature, in all levels of society you tend to see examples of tribalism (esspecialy if you remember back to school. the various groups or clicks grouping together often united against some other group) the “us and them” mentality is pretty prevalent. (another good example is places where law enforcement is low to non-existant. such as ghettos or slums, basically demiliterized zones which have local tribes battling other tribes for access to some resource (drugs, territory, etc) territory is a noticable “resource” that people will always fight over, the desire to possess as much territory as possible is not only inherent to humans but most all animals. i recall seeing a thing where they compared the walking style of a street “thug” or however you want to refer to them, and compared it to the walking style of a gorilla and the major thing was the showing of the area that the person takes up in their stride, whereby the movements, when compared to a normal person, takes up at least twice the overall area. the natural instinct is to occupy as much space around you as you can, to show your mastery of that area, something most people would call their “personal space” the more egotistical the wider that space is the more upset one becomes if someone invades that territory.
since a lot of the urban tribes opporate more on instinct (what “feels” good, your brain rewards you for being true to your instincts) you can notice a lot of the arm flailing, screaming, chest beating, and shows of power from conflicts between them than from conflicts, for instance, between two people in the office over the best kind of toner..
but territory is important to the individual and it becomes more important to the tribe and more important the bigger the tribe.
so territory is one of those resources that will never go away, even if you had the infinite expanses of space in which to fill, there would still be conflict over territory.
and religion fights over the human resources, the most people to sucker into believing what they do. conflicts exist between religious factions usualy for no reason, it creates the “us and them” mentality sepperating people, who often are nearly identical, into different groups who fight for dominance. it creates tribalism by creating a difference (tribalism only works if they can point to something different about them, they look different, talk different, dress different, act different, there must be some kind of notable difference between them to say “this=us that=them” and when two groups are part of the same culture, look decently alike, act decently alike, etc…religion gives them something to be different about…so they can work on removing these differences…at knife point.
but in many ways irreligion is the same, its an ideal, and its one again which works to sepperate one group from another, while atheists are less likely to go to blows about it..you cant say that for EVERY atheist, it still makes the us and them mentality which can drive crazy people to do crazy things to people who other wise may not have been the target of their crazy.
ideals of any sort cary within them the seeds of their misuse.
i’ll end with this:
to end all war you must end all conflict, since conflict by nature tends to escalate, given time and enough people, into war. and in some cases just into more local violence. and while most end nicely, ultimately conflict will tend to incite powerful emotions and those of lesser control will act on them in a violent way. given the power of a nation and these tendancy from there springs war.
but a world without conflict is a world that is dead. conflict is a must, conflict drives progress, conflict makes drama, makes life interesting..the down side is it can also lead to war and violence and hate. with the good comes the bad.
Don’t forget Northern Ireland
War is a complex problem, and I believe a commenter already said something like, for every complex problem there is a simple, easy, wrong solution. I’m not saying that eliminating world hunger and energy, and providing gender equality will solve the problems of war completely but it would solve a large portion of the reasons for war. However, there are countless reasons for war, speaking of ideologies (religions, governments)that would still need to be addressed. Also, I don’t think that spreading out through space will solve anything, that seems a lot like we’d be running away from our problems. Eventually, we’d run into each other at some point and fight it out again. I think that if we really want to end war, as a species, we have to rationalize past war. Modern science applications cannot solve even the energy or food shortages we will experience in the near future; although, i hope science will improve in the future, presently it won’t end any of these problems. In the mean time, shouldn’t we focus on educating humanity to not abhor war, but to see its flaws (there are so many) and develop ways/techniques to rationalize past them?
Just reading these posts, I see so much conflict erupting, but I ask: could we focus on developing ways to rationalize past war (educating the masses, maybe) and not focus on if one initiative or another will completely eliminate war? If we don’t set goals and objectives and take small steps, we will never get anywhere, we will just be spinning our wheels.
In short: lets concentrate on what might work and make it a reality, and let’s start by brainstorming with what might work (shooting down ideas because they don’t fully cover the problem won’t get us anywhere). Complex problems don’t have simple solutions.
“… we’d conjure up new tribes out of the contented hordes and set them to battling with one another.”
Thanks PZ! I’ve been saying this for years. This is part of the reason we can never “win” the “War on Terror”… you can’t kill an idea. And as long as human beings are afforded freedom of thought, there will always be ideas people are willing to die, and kill, for. Just another fact of life we need to accept.
There once was a lass named Lenore
who had oft watched the waves pound the shore.
She had liked fishing the bay with her nets.
Till one day she was straffed by some jets.
Then bombs rained down on her once peaceful dunes
And over the beach crawled invading platoons.
killing her in cold blood, just because she was there.
She was the enemy, they’d been taught not to care.
“Mission accomplished” the great leader claimed.
for our misfortune, someone had to be blamed.
So now on the beach lie the bones of Lenore
Begging Poe’s forgiveness, please, Nevermore!
Yeah, okay, I don’t think so. The taxes were by no means “exorbitant” except in the minds of people who thought there shouldn’t be any, and the British Crown certainly wasn’t levying taxes for military action in India: India was a self-financing operation by and large and a net money-maker. The British Empire really didn’t come into being until after the US Revolution, so it wasn’t about expansion. And the tax being raised was, among other things, being used to pay for the army (used to defend the colonies from the French, until the Seven Years War) and for the Royal Navy that was critical to guaranteeing American foreign trade.
Sure, the Crown was skimming their cut off the top, but it was nowhere near as bad as American mythology portrays it. The American Revolution is a classic case of an upper class and upper middle class chafing at the rules and so whipping up the mob with the appropriate language and claims of injustices to kick the old bastards out so the new bastards could claim what they thought they were owed.
The main difference was that in this case, some of the leaders actually believed what they were saying and did right by the people, and some quite remarkable men didn’t succumb to the will to power. The main thing that’s exceptional about American history isn’t rights or freedoms or rule of law or any of the other things that gets bandied about (some of us in other countries have that stuff too), it’s that it had a violent revolution that didn’t fall into dictatorship. That is truly remarkable.
As an occasional visitor to the U.S., it seems to me that old habits of racism are very much the unmentioned elephant in the room.
Without getting into the particulars of the various wars cited, or the logistics of some future colonization of space, I’d like to take a stab at answering the questions that PZ posed.
“Are people warlike?” To the extent that they are competitive and tribal, yes. Part of the moral sense involves creating an ingroup/outgroup dynamic that rewards loyalty and punishes nonconformity. Relative isolation, cultural myths like ‘exceptionalism’, and religious fervor can all fan the flame of irrational patriotism. At the extreme, other nations and cultures are viewed as impure and profane, are stereotyped and dehumanized, and made easy targets for aggression.
What mechanisms should be used to create ever-expanding circles of empathy and cooperation? Education about different cultures, travel, trade, and the empowerment of women (economic, political) are good places to look. Civil rights, independent judiciaries, independent election commissions, and the rule of law are probably necessary too. (Behaving like bonobos is unworkable at the moment, but might prove fun!)
With American hegemony on the wane, and a tri-polar political economy (America, Europe, China) emerging and competing for alliances and resources worldwide, we should probably temper our optimism.
“Can we put an end to scarcity?” Likelihood approaching nil. In economic terms, lack of scarcity of any resource, product, or service means a complete circumvention of market mechanisms to drive the price to zero. A good would have to be as ubiquitous as air to achieve this result.
Take the example of water (simple enough). For water to have no price would entail the complete worldwide socialization of production (desalinization, purification, well digging) and distribution (canals, pipelines, bottling, transport), at an astronomical cost to the public. The diversion of resources would produce price inflation for other goods. We would have to produce so much ‘free’ water that no one, anywhere, would demand a drop more. The project would take decades, and an unprecedented level of international cooperation, especially in light of the current drought conditions in China, SW USA, and Africa. Taxpayers might support some subsidies, but this is not the same as eliminating scarcity.
Now project the single example above onto all the other things we would like to exempt from scarcity: land/housing, energy, transportation and infrastructure, communication/media/entertainment, education/information. Yep, looks like we’ll have scarcity for quite a while yet.
And one last thing. There is no ‘shortage’ of food or energy. We could feed every famine victim and create huge surpluses of electricity right now. The issue is price and poverty and market forces. But to socialize everything that people demand would require such an increase in productive capacity (and technology) that only a Leviathan of intelligent robot slaves could handle the task. So in the meantime, support charities that provide portable water purification systems, microloans to women, and birth control to adolescents and young adults in poor countries. It’s a start.
Oh come on, I’ve read enough space opera to know that the only way to end all war among human tribes is for us to be faced with a menacing alien threat, uniting us all against a common non-human enemy.
Then, of course, we have to win.
And it’s only a temporary solution, we’ll need another one to come along fairly regularly to keep us from turning back against each other…
(Rest in peace, Mr. Clarke).
Now, if only Bug-eyed Monsters were causing global warming, we’d throw our backs into preventing it!
PZ, I have to disagree with you on one minor point. You said that in an ideal world, one without lack, ” we’d still have people coming up with ideas they’d be willing to die for … ”
IMHO, the people who are willing to die for their particualr ideas aren’t 1/2 the trouble that those willing to KILL for their ideas are…
I skimmed the comments (I didn’t read it *all*) — I don’t believe anyone has mentioned books like The Third Side (William Ury). Subtitle “Why we fight and how we can stop”. I’ve just read this book, after hearing him on the radio a couple of months ago. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is interested in whether war can end, or how. The book includes many different strategies for conflict resolution, and the author clearly has *lots* of relevant experience, from dispute resolution for everyday folks to international negotiations. Although most of the examples are fascinating, I found ESPECIALLY fascinating some examples taken from studies of highly cooperative tribes. There are 2 groups that he cites several times that have very complex community systems for resolving conflicts, along with policies that promote a peaceful community life. There are tons of other kinds of examples, for those who prefer something more familiar — from nations, schools, work situations, families, and so on.
He certainly doesn’t propose that given adequate food, fuel, and gender equality war will disappear — that is more like one of many things that could all work together. In a chart, the author lists these 10 reasons why conflict escalates: frustrated needs, poor skills, weak relationships, conflicting interests, disputed rights, unequal power, injured relationships, no attention, no limitation, no protection. Each of these 10 has a chapter about the skills and roles that can remedy this area. The first 3 are together grouped as “prevent” (violence), the next 4 are “resolve”, and the last 3 “contain”.
There may be other books as good but this is one good starting place anyhow, for anyone interested.
Coathangarrr said:
Sure there is a way, it’s called Mutual Assured Destruction
Marcus had it right, humans are just animals, the same survival impulses that governs other organisms also govern the human ape.