The Fig, the Olive and the Peaceful Land: Stories from Cananga Tree (6)

"In his court, the judge asked the defendant, 'You say that you had pulled the gun on him yet you didn't fire. Why?'
'Well your honor,' replied the accused, 'when I pointed my gun at him, he said, 'How much do you want for that gun?
Now, I ask you, your honor, could I kill a man when he was offering business?'"

"Defining war is as much about what it excludes as what it includes. War is a form of violence, but there are many forms of violence not commonly classed as war. War is a specific form of violence defined first by its political nature. It can be an existential challenge for a political community, even if only a fraction of society fights or directs the war effort," Cananga went on while looking at the Twilight at the horizon, the time between day and night. After sunset, there is a period in which the sky gradually darkens.

"War occurs when the threat or use of armed force against opponents is met by an armed response. It is a socially sanctioned activity, even if what justifies the resort to war has changed over time and is accepted (at least by those who wage it) as a legitimate activity, even though much of what is done in war violates social norms in peacetime. War is usually distinguished from everyday lifetimes of peace–though what differentiates the two has changed over history and it requires significant social
coordination in terms of organization and planning, even if confusion and disorganization have been a hallmark of conflict throughout history. War is mass murder, says Ian Morris, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer. War is hell, but—again, over the long run—the alternatives would have been worse. It sounds like a controversial claim, but Morris explains.

By fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently. This observation rests on one of the major findings of archaeologists and anthropologists over the last century, that Stone Age societies were typically tiny. Chiefly because of the challenges of finding food, people lived in bands of a few dozen, villages of a few hundred, or (very occasionally) towns of a few thousand members. These communities did not need much in the way of internal organization and tended to live on terms of suspicion or even hostility with outsiders.
People generally worked out their differences peacefully, but if someone decided to use force, there were far fewer constraints on him—or, occasionally, her—than the citizens of modern states are used to. Most of the killing was on a small scale, in vendettas and incessant raiding, although once in a while violence might disrupt an entire band or village so badly that disease and starvation wiped all its members out. But because populations were also small, the steady drip of low-level violence took an appalling toll. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone Age societies died at the hands of other humans.

The twentieth century forms a sharp contrast. It saw two world wars, a string of genocides, and multiple government-induced famines, killing a staggering total of somewhere between 100 million and 200 million people. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 150,000 people—probably more people than had lived in the entire world in 50,000 B.C. But in 1945, there were about 2.5 billion people on earth, and over the twentieth century, roughly 10 billion lives were lived—meaning that the century’s 100–200 million war-related deaths added up to just 1 to 2 percent of our planet’s population. If you were lucky enough to be born in the industrialized twentieth century, you were on average ten times less likely to die violently (or from violence’s consequences) than if you were born in a Stone Age society.
This may be a surprising statistic, but the explanation for it is more surprising still. What has made the world so much safer is war itself. It began about ten thousand years ago in some parts of the world, then spreading across the planet, the winners of wars incorporated the losers into larger societies. The only way to make these larger societies work was for their rulers to develop stronger governments, and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence within the society.

The men who ran these governments hardly ever pursued policies of peacemaking purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They cracked down on killing because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. The unintended consequence, though, was that rates of violent death fell by 90 percent between Stone Age times and the twentieth century.
The process was not pretty. Whether it was the Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacifiers could be just as brutal as the savagery they stamped out. Nor was the process smooth: for short periods in particular places, violent death could spike back up to Stone Age levels. Between 1914 and 1918, for instance, nearly one Serb in six died from violence, disease, or starvation. And, of course, not all governments were equally good at delivering peace. Democracies may be messy, but they rarely devour their children; dictatorships get things done, but they tend to shoot, starve, and gas a lot of people. And yet despite all the variations, qualifications, and exceptions, over the ten-thousand-year-long run, war made the the state, and the state made peace.
While war is the worst imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the only way humans have found. There isn’t a better way. If the Roman Empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls and Greeks, if the United States, says Morris, could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans—in these cases and countless others, if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity could have had the benefits of larger societies without paying such a high cost. But that did not happen. It is a depressing thought, but the evidence again seems clear. People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

As well as making people safer, Morris suggests, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long run—made us richer. Peace created the conditions for economic growth and rising living standards. This process too has been messy and uneven: the winners of wars regularly go on rampages of rape and plunder, selling thousands of survivors into slavery and stealing their land. The losers may be left impoverished for generations. It is a terrible, ugly business. And yet, with time—maybe decades, maybe centuries—the creation of a bigger society tends to make everyone, the descendants of victors and vanquished alike, better off. The long-term pattern is again unmistakable. By creating larger societies, stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the world.
So, war has produced, Morris argues, bigger societies, ruled by stronger governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for prosperity. Ten thousand years ago, there were only about six million people on earth. On average, they lived about thirty years and supported themselves on the equivalent of less than two modern American dollars per day. Now there are more than a thousand times as many of us (seven billion, in fact), living more than twice as long (the global average is sixty-seven years) and earning more than a dozen times as much (today the global average is $25 per day).

Morris added that war, then, has been good for something—so good that war is now putting itself out of business. For millennia, war (over the long run) has created peace, and destruction has created wealth, but in our age, humanity has gotten so good at fighting—our weapons so destructive, our organizations so efficient—that war is beginning to make further war of this kind impossible.
We humans have proved remarkably good at adapting to our changing environment. We fought countless wars in the past because fighting paid off, but in the twentieth century, as the returns to violence declined, we found ways to solve our problems without bringing on Armageddon. There are no guarantees, of course, Morris suggests, but there are nevertheless tends to reward paradoxical conduct while defeating straightforwardly logical action, yielding ironical results.
Everything about war is paradoxical. In war, paradox goes all the way down. According to Basil Liddell Hart, one of the founding fathers of twentieth-century tank tactics, the bottom line is that 'war is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.' Out of war comes peace; out of loss, gain. War takes us through the looking glass, into a topsy-turvy world where nothing is quite what it seems. Morris's argument is a lesser-evil proposition, one of the classic forms of paradox. It is easy to list all the things that war is bad for, with killing coming at the top of the table. And yet war remains the lesser evil because history shows that it has not been as bad as the alternative—constant, Stone Age-type everyday violence, bleeding away lives and leaving us in poverty.

According to Francis Bacon, three novelties brought modernity in their wake: gunpowder, ocean navigation, and the printing press. And if the ﬁrst of these was directly related to war, the other two aﬀected it no less decisively. Historians of technology and economy, says Azar Gat, have revealed the steady improvement in agricultural technique, horse harnessing, ironwork, and mining, the advent and spread of the watermill and windmill, the compass, and the lateen, triangular sail, and advances in water damming and canal building—all resulting in a continuous growth in productivity and population throughout the landmass.
Military power is a key component of state power. Yet for all the attention statesmen, soldiers, and scholars give to military power, it remains a loose concept, says John A. Gentry. An actor has military power if the actor, firstly, accurately identifies exploitable vulnerabilities in a targeted adversary in any dimension, and secondly, successfully exploits one or more of the target’s critical vulnerabilities, leading to physical military defeat or disruption of power production processes, leading to a decision to forego or to stop fighting, which concedes the point of contention.

Wealth is usually needed to underpin military power, and military power is usually needed to acquire and protect wealth, says Paul Kennedy. If, however, too large a proportion of the state’s resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is likely to lead to a weakening of national power over the longer term. In the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically—by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars—it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all—a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline. The history of the rise and later fall of the leading countries in the Great Power system since the advance of Western Europe in the sixteenth century—that is, of nations such as Spain, the Netherlands, France, the British Empire, and currently the United States—shows a very significant correlation over the longer term between productive and revenue-raising capacities on the one hand and military strength on the other.
According to Kennedy, the relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs that bring a greater advantage to one society than to another. For example, the coming of the long-range gunned sailing ship and the rise of the Atlantic trades after 1500 was not uniformly beneficial to all the states of Europe—it boosted some much more than others. In the same way, the later development of steam power and the coal and metal resources upon which it relied massively increased the relative power of certain nations and thereby decreased the relative power of others. Once their productive capacity was enhanced, countries would normally find it easier to sustain the burdens of paying for large-scale armaments in peacetime and of maintaining and supplying large armies and fleets in wartime.

Let's finish our discussion about War, in the next episode, we will continue with the topic of the Islamic Calendar, bi 'idhnillah."

Afterwards, Cananga then sang,

Oh! There is fire in the air that I'm breathing
There is blood where the battles rage
These are faces I will not remember
Will I fight for the Queen or the Slave?
A treacherous part to play with our heart of courage *)