With this post, I begin to ponder the concept of mutual self destruction and the pursuit of peace. In this posts I will speculate on why there appears to be a strong connection between fear and peace in the human mind.
MUTUAL SELF DESTRUCTION AND WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT OUR SPECIES
I remember being in grade school in the late 1950's and early 60's and having to participate in atomic bomb drills, by climbing under our desks and hunkering down. These were, of course, acts of futility should we have been under a real atomic attack as anyone from Japan would have told us. I suspect the drills served another purpose; to bring the reality of mutual self-destruction home to the average U.S. citizen and provide some sense of hope about surviving an attack by doing something. I also remember the television commercials about building fallout shelters which my family couldn't have afforded. I grew up feeling that disaster was upon us at any given moment. I didn't obsess about it, but it was always there, ready to pop up into my awareness.
Since that time, our ability to destroy each other has vastly improved; with larger nuclear, chemical, and biological arsenals at our disposal. Deterrence is the foundation upon which modern defense is built. A relative sense of world peace is maintained by the fact that an all out global war involving any or all of these weapons would ensure the annihilation of life on this planet. We have witnessed their effectiveness on a small scale in Japan, Iraq, and Syria.
This fear has kept us from all out war for nearly three quarters of a century, but it has become an increasingly tenuous deterrent as the rise of nationalism amongst first world nations is evident and the treatise that they agreed on are being questioned.
Peace based on the fear of mutual self destruction is porous.
This foundation holds only on the assurance that those who possess such weapons will not use them and keep them from those who would. This worked as long as the knowledge and technology needed to make such weapons could be withheld, however, knowledge is fluid and eventually is leaked. The only thing staving off world-wide proliferation is control of the materials needed to make such weapons.
This is where philosophy becomes pragmatic. Science can tell us how to make such destructive weapons but it cannot prevent us from using them. As I have mentioned in other posts, there is a tendency in the field of science to "do it" if something is thought to be theoretically possible; that if your side doesn't "do it" another side will. This has been born out in the development of nuclear and other weapons. It is that reality that has pushed us towards making a philosophical solution that is rooted in the ethical mandate to refrain from doing that which one wouldn't want done.
It is no longer a question of refraining from doing to others what one doesn't want done to oneself. It is an imperative of not doing it at all because doing it is suicide.
What the concept of mutual destruction demonstrates is that fear remains the most potent motivation in the human drive for survival. While most would say that peace is what we desire most, our desire for peace, by itself, is not potent or visceral enough to prevent us from self destruction whereas the fear of it is. Fear produces a tangible feeling that peace does not. We can gauge fear better than peace and there may be a reason for that.
PREDATORY FEAR
Fear is a predatory instinct related to environmental factors. When factors that contribute to fear are present they can be measured by the intensity of the fear we feel. Peace, on the other hand, is largely an absence of these factors which then results in a feeling of safety and wellbeing. We experience a momentary sense of relief in the removal of that which we feared. A sense of peace quickly evaporates into the mundane, however, as the absence of the factors that led to fear is sustained. This can eventually lead to a numbing of the fear factor, something we are witnessing in the world today.
Predation as an instinctual motive for species survival is not prone to maintaining peace. What has prevented us from killing ourselves off as a species millennia ago has been the recognition that we are the only species on this planet capable of doing so. I believe that warfare evolved as an attempt to curb the predatory instinct and define it in terms of conquest rather than annihilation. The crusades are an example of the papacy trying to maintain peace in Christendom by directing and expending the nobility's war prone tendencies to annihilate each other on freeing the Holy Land from the Arab domination through conquest.
War was largely thought of in terms of military game theory throughout most of warfare's history. Civilian populations were largely left out of the fray of military battle, but that changed drastically in the First World War when towns and cities became deliberate targets for indiscriminate aerial bombing. World War Two saw cities firebombed for no other purpose than to bring a nation to its knees by terrorizing its population and destroying its infrastructure. The war with Japan ended with the near total destruction of Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's civilian population by two atomic bombs as a way of securing the end of that war and establishing peace. It exacted a terrible price and led to an arms race that ensured mutual self destruction. No amount of rationalization can explain away this gargantuan leap by our species towards self annihilation.
The real victims of war are the civilians in modern warfare. In the past, armies were defeated and populations conquered and enslaved. Today cities are destroyed and civilian centers targeted in which hundreds of thousands civilians perish or are forced from their homes while military losses are relatively minor in comparison.
In our narrowing world, conquest is an anachronism that risks annihilation.
Nationalism is a fundamentalism that the world cannot sustain.
A PROFOUND EMBARRASSMENT
We have come to a point in our existence as a species where we hold the keys to our own mass extinction.
So while we can, let's ponder how profoundly embarrassing that is. Seriously!
Here we are the most intelligent animals on the planet who managed to survived any number of obstacles, who are on the verge of human space exploration while continuing to rely on what basically amounts to a primeval fear of the predator in order to ensure world peace.
Grant it there are layers of diplomatic rationale in which this fear is couched, but the core upon which world peace is maintained is the looming reality of mutual self destruction which brings me to wonder about the evolution of human intelligence and the role it plays in the pursuit of peace.
We have outsmarted every other species, including the annihilation of many of them along our ascent to the top of the food chain. As Yuval Harari explained in his book, "Sapiens," this included the probable annihilation of our closest hominid relatives more than twenty thousand years ago.
But what is it that continues to make us fear ourselves and, in turn, requires such an enormous intellectual effort to prevent us from self annihilation?
Why do we continue to prey on our own kind?
While we hold the keys to our self destruction are we capable of forging the keys to lasting peace?
These are and should be uncomfortable questions for us to ponder. Evolution perhaps holds an answer that, ironically, may not be totally related to evolution itself.
Allow me to speculate, since I really don't know:
THE INTELLECT
From what little I know of evolution, I have surmised that human intelligence/consciousness developed faster than evolution should have allowed. In fact, we are still accelerating in this intellectual development by evolutionary standards. What actually clues me to this seeming acceleration is the fact that we have not lost our pre-intellectual instincts. Intelligence does not appear to have necessarily evolved from our instincts or by having opposable thumbs and the ability to manipulate our environment manually.
We have retained our basic predatory survival instincts in spite of being intellectually aware or conscious. Our instincts remain intact and as I have indicated they are very operative in the pursuit of peace. We have, however, subdued them intellectually to the extent that we no longer think of them in terms of instincts and have largely intellectualized them as emotions.
So if intelligence is not a direct product of evolution, what is it?
Is learning evolutionary or is it something else?
For instance, I have been pondering in recent past posts the fact that we get ahead of ourselves intellectually before we can fully process the ramifications of our intellectual endeavors in terms of what it means to our survival. Of course, we have no sure way of knowing what our intellectual pursuits will result in causing. It has been only in the last century that we have begun to explore and understand the scientific basis for human intelligence.
It is the intelligent mind that appears to be using our instinctual fears to prevent us from self destruction by seeing a need for the other of our species as necessary to our survival. This was probably not an a-ha moment, but a gradual awareness preceding from repetitive experiences of seeing the mutual benefit of working with the other.
Nevertheless, our own kind poses a challenge to us and is why we ended up with warring clans, tribes, and nations. We have yet to rid ourselves of the notion that race and ethnicity pose a threat.
It's embarrassing that we possess such great intellectual abilities, but find them hostage to a primal fear of the other, even though the other is much the same as oneself.
Intelligence requires a great deal of energy on a personal level. As a species we have mitigated this expenditure by the process of consensus. [I'm taking a giant leap forward in the story intellectual development.] The ability to communicate ideas and perceptions have made us the masters of our own reality. We have been able to convert, corral, and conceptualize our fears into ideologies, moral codes, and laws that minimize the amount of intellectual energy needed by an individual to process or convert our fears in a constructive way.
We have banked on the fear of a more powerful other in order to establish behaviors that preserve our species and maintains our sense of reality. In other words, we became civilized.
This, in my opinion, was not evolutionary in the sense of a natural, organic evolution. There was a seismic leap to intellect that bypassed instinct while leaving instinct intact. What probably contributed the most to this shift was our ability to communicate discrete information.
One can speculate that the homo sapiens brain's response to this relatively sudden shift was to shrink in size. Why?
Shared communicative thought processes requires less space and energy. Our brains became leaner and more efficient as a result of processing information in a communicative manner rather than solely relying on figuring things out by themselves.
According to anthropologists, Neanderthal brains were larger than the brains of homo sapiens. What this may indicate is higher reliance on the Neanderthal self to process information; that Neanderthals lacked the discreet communicative skills of homo sapiens that gave our species the edge on survival.
ABSTRACTION
Much of what we communicate is conceptually abstract. We don't think of it as such because much of what is abstract is treated concretely because of its common and regular usage. Where our ability for abstraction came from is anyone's guess, but it is indicative of the intellectual mind. The intellectual mind is a creative mind, it seeks a tomorrow, whereas the instinctual mind is not and lives for the day.
As such, human beings are of two minds that function simultaneously. If I were to provide an analogy, I would liken this two minded approach to two tectonic plates colliding with each other with the instinctual mind being subducted under the intellectual mind. What we see is largely the intellectual mind at work, but what we feel remains largely instinctual.
Sticking with this geological analogy, peace is an abstract concept that rides above the subducted predatory impulse that gives rise to fear which periodically emerges into our intellectual consciousness when environmental conditions draw our instinctual drives to the surface. On the surface of intellectual consciousness, we feel fear that is rooted in our subducted instinctual mind and desire peace as means to ease our collective tremors.
In my next post, I will offer a brief review of the role fear and pursuit of peace has played in defining civilization and religion.
Until next time, stay faithful.
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