i really should get a hold of myself. ;p
i’m not sure, man, i’m not at all sure. first because it’s a bit tendencious to both put tribes in the past as if they were no longer, and to on top of that say that they only fought for territory and honour. honour is another western-european concept, i’ve studied many societies — some still alive and out there — that do not have a code of honour or any system similar to it. as for territory… hell, most tribes i’ve seen or studied fight for their gods. we inherited that, ourselves — some people might put us to fight for their interests, but the discourse is always one of fighting “for the absolute good”, “for god” and the recently fashionable “for democracy”.
/me deletes a big paragraph in which he had traced this back to the biblical god.
at any rate, i don’t get your criterion. values worth fighting for? based on what morals, and more importantly, what does this say about the inevitability of war? if war is shown to be inevitable, all-too-human, the values don’t really matter. put it another way: the real value is somewhere else. for instance: wars have winners and losers, so the act of war could be based around the value of winning, not that of, say, democracy. wars would be demonstrations of power, and if Nietzsche’s thesis is right and the fundamental principle of human behaviour is the will to power, then war is not just natural, but actually healthy of people who have physical power and need to demonstrate it in order to feel whole.
(the fact that war is a demonstration of physical and technological power only is quite relevant here — it might be a key to arguing for the possibility of peace. consider for a moment who’s the most powerful, or the bravest: the contemporary tibetan monk who fights authorities by use of guns, or the tibetan monks who, during the Viet Nam war, set themselves on fire and burnt to death in silent protest? who is more powerful: the pacifist who dies but refuses to lose, or the fighter who plays a bet against the devil in the vain hope that they will win, investing all their lives in whatever technical skill they happen to have, running away from death at all times?)
what’s more, i think you might be actually arguing against yourself. in your argument, you imply that there are some arguably valid reasons to go to war, such as defending your territory or your honour. but when you say this, you put yourself in check mate: if i were to accept that, i would have to accept that war is, at the end of the day, necessary, inevitable. think about it.