is war necessary? (now: liberty vs. world peace).

Bruno · September 10, 2008, 12:26pm

[center][size=200][color=#666666]hi there! this be even ouchier subject[/color][/size]
[color=#333333]please be so kind to still keep a casual, over-a-glass-in-a-pub tone
and to still assume others are doing just the same 8)[/color][/center]

cool. so lets get this over with! your post marks the end of this topic’s original purpose. as far as “is war inevitable?” goes, you’ve pretty much nailed it: peace at the cost of freedom is possible, thank-you. therefore some sort of freedom is possible — therefore war isn’t inevitable. this topic isn’t concerned with the ethics involved, so the fact that whatever peace is possible comes at the price of liberty was a non-issue up to here. but in order to keep the discussion, we need a new question.

"but first:

"][/size][spoiler]so lets see. topic starts, i ask whether war is necessary or not and propose that people ask themselves whether or not its human nature. some people reply that no, war ain’t human nature (the case of pacifists works as counter-example) but can emerge from certain drives (will to power) and social values (greed). so we flip the topic, and the question of necessity of war becomes the question of possibility of peace — if peace is possible, then war ain’t necessary, and vice-versa.

as an extreme case, i propose that people consider peace to be possible only when there is not a single person that’s not a pacifist. at this point things get a little bit confusing, as some people who are arguing for pacifism could (arguably) have their arguments reduce ad absurdum as somewhat fascist eugeny ideals, but it might just be that they’re not expressing themselves correctly. you come along to clear it up: nope, they are expressing themselves right. but how come?

what you do is, you come along and propose that, first, there are two kinds of peace — lets call them natural peace and synthetic peace. natural peace emerges when, for whatever reason, all humans realise they don’t want war. it is trivially proved impossible. all things considered, physical power is still the only kind of power that’s common to all groups of human beings, from tribes to multinational oligopolies. so give it enough time and there always will be at least one player for whom the use of physical power is the best/only shot. natural peace, then, becomes an unfortunate reminder of the inevitability of the next war.

as for synthetic peace, it requires that a single player outpowers everyone else by so much that it becomes uninteresting for all other players to even consider physical power. (man, this is starting to sound like rational choice and game theory). since it’s almost commonsense today that hard power (military, economic) outpowers soft power (ideology, propaganda), any stable form of synthetic peace must be achieved by military and economic means. at which point you bring us to the realisation that synthetic peace comes at the cost of liberty.[/spoiler]

now we start on a new, and possibly more interesting aspect of the whole subject: the question of whether or not war is desirable in the light of the fact that peace comes at the cost of liberty. “say what?” up to now, if we were to discuss whether or not war is desirable, everyone would chant in unison: “war isn’t desirable because war is bad” — and that would be a hell of a boring non-discussion. now, we’re faced with a different choice: “liberty, world peace: choose one” (or, conversely: “war, subjection: choose at least one”). hey, that’s a philosophical topic worth discussing!

anyone being rational about this question will ask themselves, in the first place: “is liberty possible?” and “in what sense can we be free in a world where peace isn’t assured?”. after all, we know in what sense peace is possible, and at what cost — allowing an overpowering agent of peace to exist, subjecting yourself to it by will or force. but we didn’t discuss freedom in this topic. what’s it really like? in a world where there’s no assured peace, is there also no assured freedom or is it possible? in what sense?

provided that liberty is possible, we need criteria for making our minds on which is more desirable: we’re so accostumed to ranking peace and liberty among the highest values that establishing them as mutually exclusive ought to be quite baffling for most people. simply put, we were not raised to choose between freedom and liberty. so we need to make up for it and find out reasonable criteria for choosing between one and the other. (at this point, i suggest people who were initially against war go read their own posts — there are some quite relevant premises you might not have noticed you were working with).

oh no no, you can’t fool me like that! i know you wrote it because it’s part of your right-wing conspiracy to subliminally brainwash us lefties into your praxis. but you won’t! i will not succumb!

/me starts running around in circles, crying noises.