As a few of you will have noticed, I already had posted something on this topic about at the beginning of this month. After having read it over a few times, I came to the conclusion that it did not adequately convey what I was trying to say. In fact, I want to start over without reference to the current conflicts that are taking place all over the world. I don't want to spend time talking about why we have wars or offer some vague sense of how we can avoid them, apart from understanding them in terms of being an existential crisis and the epitome of humanity's moral failure on a global scale. How something that is so irrational, so inhumane, and so evil became considered a right and a moral mandate owed to the people of a nation or tribe that justifies wreaking havoc and death on a perceived perpetrator because they perceived a right and a moral mandate that justified them to wreak havoc and death on their enemy is beyond rational comprehension.
There is no point in tracing the lineage of war. Every war in every place is connected even if they took place thousands of years and thousand of miles apart from each other are memetic. The trauma, the anger, the hatred, the fear of another perceived to be different from one's tribe or nation are transferable. As people spread across the planet they carried with them their memetic trauma of war wherever they went. It has become so embedded in our collective memory and cultural history that war has been and remains a way of life. Wars beget wars. Just as humans are capable of creating climate change that can destroy life on this planet, we are more so the creators of war, which have the capacity to destroy life on the planet in the matter of a few hours or even minute. If we can stop contributing to climate change, we can stop going to war.
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As mentioned above, I do not pretend to know how to make war obsolete. As in my two previous posts I didn't pretend to know how to develop a moneyless economic system or establish world peace through world governance, I believe these three topics are interrelated; in that, a world economic system and world governance are key to bringing about the obsolescence of war. Am I talking about establishing some sort of utopian world, in which everyone and everything is on equal footing and everyone will naturally get along? Not at all. Utopianism had never accomplished anything except to get us to focus on how dystopian we can become. To save the world from human greed and envy by providing for a just world in which war is never considered an answer to our differences is going to take a lot of time, a lot of commitment, a lot of hard work, and a great deal of patience amidst the inevitable setbacks in order to engrain forgiveness as the ultimate goal of diplomacy and justice which when established will better defang the terrorism of the one or of the many than to perpetuate retaliation.
I do not expect to see such an accomplishment in our life-time or the lifetimes of our children or even our children's children. Rather my purpose in bringing it to the attention of whoever reads these posts of its possibility and potential. If something is not said, nothing will happen. The first order of creating a new world is to speak it into existence. The end of war is possible. Lasting peace is possible. Saving the planet is possible. Healing the sickness is possible. Eliminating poverty is possible. All is possible should we collectively and sincerely desire it. It is both as simple as that and as difficult as that. To accomplish such an Herculean feat is to accept with equanimity the paradoxes of life.
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We humans tend to underestimate ourselves; especially, in our capacity to do good without doing harm amidst the chaos of life. In our diversity lies the untapped source of our vitality. If we have learned anything over the centuries it is that diversity is an outcome of our creativity; that at the core of our being we are the same. The differences we experience are largely perceptual than actual. Take away sight and sound and one cannot perceive difference. The cultural differences we see and hear should be celebrated and embraced. We should learn from each other to see the immense richness in the human resource that every human possesses.
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Making war obsolete, should be an existential mandate adopted by the people of every nation on this planet. We can never be truly free until we are free of the self-made horrors of war. By war I do not only mean the global conflicts between nations or internecine war within nations but also the wars waged by individuals against other individuals. Violence and cruelty by humans against humans can never be adequately quelled by condemning a perpetrator to the same.
I realize that saying this appears irrational. Having worked my entire adult life within state run mental health institutions, I have personally witnessed extreme violent and cruel behavior. In fact having worked in such state run facilities, it dawned on me that I was working in a microcosm of all the dysfunction found outside of such institution's walls.
The world as we experience it is easily recognizable as one large mad house where human unpredictability reigns supreme. To make wars obsolete is not about making humans more predictable, but honing the ability to see the person in the problem. I know what it is to be alone in a room with someone so unpredictable, whose impulsive behavior could lead to be personally attacked and viciously harmed; especially, in role as a human rights specialist, an advocate for individuals who felt in some way or other mistreated or misunderstood.
The most important aspect of my job was to find the person in the patient and understand, to the best of my ability, what it was the patient was saying regardless of the inappropriate and often violent behaviors the patient was engaging in. Once the person in the patient understood that I was trying to understand the person, the dynamics of the situation changed from dealing with a highly unpredictable patient to having a personal conversation with another human being. This was nothing more than the art of diplomacy on a personal level.
Having worked in such a microcosm of human behaviors, both the surprisingly good and the horrifically bad, I found hope in the human potential. Wars of any sort can be and should be understood as both a global and civil illness. We humans have a heightened sense of self-preservation that can act preemptively before understanding a situation. That we have become comfortable with viewing war as inevitable as death itself should prompt us to change our perspective of it. While medical science is constantly searching for better means to cure and treat disease, politicians are constantly seeking ways to make better weapons of war as a means to deter war. To prepare for war is to ensure its inevitable occurrence.
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Religion has done little to discourage the idea that war is an inevitability. Even Jesus talked about wars and rumors of wars as if war was an inevitable facet of human existence. In fact, every religion use the language of war; as in, fighting the forces of evil in the world, even when it comes to being good as in Paul's exhorting early Christians to "fight the good fight." The language of war is so embedded in Christian hymnody, for example, that everything good is a matter of having had to fight for it.
The simple fact of the matter is that we humans have created war. And if we have created war, it is within our capacity to put an end to it without having to destroy our world in the process.
In a world where we see the terrible effects of war over the internet and news media, we should not allow ourselves to be mere observers of someone else's suffering as if we are immune from what we see and hear. And see it we must for war will inevitably come to us, wherever we are. We must consider the pain, the taste of destruction, the smell of death, the toll of fear, and to lose sleep over those who have lost the warmth of their beds and feel the pain of hunger with those who scrounge for food to eat and feed their loved ones.
We must learn to see our face in the face of the homeless, the hungry, and the fearful. Unless we see the person in the victim of war and human violence we will not address and treat the cause. If human life and life on this planet is to be preserved, then the obsolescence of war must be an existential mandate embraced by all humans.
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Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
