More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle (384 -
322 bce), in his classic NICHMACHEAN ETHICS, states
uncharacteristically as if it were self-evident and not
in need of logical demonstration, that we prepare for, and
wage war in order to achieve peace,
and for no other reason. I disagree. War and
Peace are not contraries, not opposites; they are in my
view utterly unrelated, in the same way that what we think
of as ‘evil’ and ‘good’ are also unrelated and not opposites.
The metaphysics behind these thoughts is important. For, if
we believe that war is inevitable, and that we therefore must
prepare for it, then the thought itself becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy and hence one of the primary causes of all the future
wars that this way of thinking sees as inevitable, and so on.
And on, and on.
Projecting evil out into the world as an actual independent
force out to do us in, say as the Lucifer of Dante’s Inferno,
also leads, in my view, to equally imbalanced ways of thinking.
This might be easier to see if we think for a moment on music.
Now, we performers make mistakes. It happens all the time,
and to the best of us. Now imagine that if we, every time we
erred——that is, strayed from the good, the right, the beautiful
—simply said, “Lucifer made me do it!” That would not get
us very far, would it? Because we would be looking for the
source of our mistakes——in other words, the ‘evil’ that has
befallen us——somewhere outside of ourselves, which is, of
course, absurd.
Well, my contention is that with War and Peace it is no different.
In other words, war is not a means to peace; it is simply a mistake.
A very grave mistake, indeed, one which has become in a way the
world’s most serious fatal habit or illness. After all, it is clearly
irrational in the extreme to devote half of the world’s resources
to the slaughter of one another in greater and greater numbers
and by ever-more scientific and efficient means.
This, I think, is clearly an ethical problem. Not a religious one.
And not a political one. Why? Because it is a problem of the
heart, of compassion. And, in my view, as an ethical problem
it even trumps Climate Change because the waste generated
by the machinery of war is itself a primary cause of anthropogenic
climate change, AND, is at the same time totally unproductive!
[Somebody please do the numbers here because
I have no doubt that they are surely horrifying.]
And the economy? Unpayable mountains of debt? Well,
“it’s the war, stupid.” Preparations for war in even a healthy
economy will tend to drive that economy towards collapse,
because war preparations are by far the greatest destroyer
of wealth, even when your industries still produce more than
just weapons, and even when you have not borrowed
your way into a debt so deep in order to finance those
war preparations that it will take generations of hard work
to clean up the mess.
So, why is this not a theme of political debates? Because, as
the brilliant Marilyn Warring says in Terre Nash’s documentary,
Sex, Lies and Global Economies (1998), “The cost of a single
new nuclear submarine equals the annual education budget
of 23 developing countries with 160 million school-age
children. This is war. War is marketable. War pays, literally.”
That’s why.