Hi Spirits, I used to write with my students, then I had a blog hosted on the Portland Maine Walking Tours website, and cowrote some magazine articles. A lot of that material is in my Google Drive taking up storage space. Putting it here so I can delete it there might just be an egotistical exercise; however, there have been occasions when I searched for information and found that my own writing was linked. So there may be a benefit to someone else.
Here’s one written in 2018. These days it seems overly optimistic:
Is War Inevitable?
Perhaps humankind is doomed to always live with war. Certainly when one reads Cicero’s claim that settling a dispute by discussion is civilized, while using physical force is characteristic of “the brute,” then ruminates on the slaughter of the crusades, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the atrocities in Darfur, etc., etc. ad nauseum, one cannot help but fear that war is an inevitable element of the human condition.
However, just as Margaret Mead pointed out the replacement of ordeal and trial by combat with increasingly sophisticated and civilized “social inventions,” we can see progress in our own time within our own culture on other issues. Racism exists, but it is not considered inevitable, and we have elected a biracial President. Sexism exists, but more females than males are now pursuing post-secondary education, and several of our recent Secretaries of State have been women.
During the decades Nelson Mandela spent in prison, could anyone have predicted that one day Apartheid would end and he would serve as President in South Africa?
Recently in Burma the long-imprisoned political activist Ang San Suu Kyi was freed, and now leads the majority party after open elections.
The events of the recent “Arab Spring” have set much of the Middle East in a discussion pitting new social inventions against regressive, repressive, brutal ones.
Such events offer reason to hope.
Some might use the relatively stable (high of 26, low of 16) number of regional conflicts between 1990 and 2005 as evidence for the inevitability of war, but the data are simplistic, and do show a downward trend since 1998, perhaps more reason to hope.
I believe that as long as human beings consider war inevitable, there will be war; it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it is a philosophy of despair. “To take arms against a sea of troubles” (as Shakespeare wrote) is a solution leading only to more problems.
We need leaders with the imagination to see a different social invention, and the audacity to hope for the future. For years here in Maine, an organization called “Seeds of Peace” has been bringing young people from conflict zones together to work toward new social inventions for conflict resolution. This is a long-term strategy born of hope.
General Douglas MacArthur, who might be considered an authority on war pointed out that the elimination of war “would mean that the great roadblock now existing to the development of the human race would have been cleared.” Certainly that is a goal worth striving toward.
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