Can the Sword be Broken?

I have been obsessed with the question of whether or not the homo sapien will ever give up the attractions of war and find surrogates in a world of perpetual peace. As William James asked, “Can we have a moral equivalent for war?” Is the tug of the reptilian brain we all inherit from our evolutionary past just too strong? Or can we someday have the courage to change deeply within ourselves?

Frederick Nietzsche’s vision is powerful and especially relevant for our current world, as we live in a nation that while the richest in history also spends more on war and the military than all the rest of the world combined and is by far the largest arms dealer the universe has ever known…..

And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifice for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, “we break the sword,” and will smash its military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one has been the best armed, out of a height of feeling – that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared – this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth too.

From The Wanderer and His Shadow

...more later

Merle

Mars and Eros

Reflecting on his experiences as a soldier in W.W. II, Glenn Gray wrote:*

How deeply is this impulse to destroy rooted and persistent in human nature? Are the imaginative visions of Empedocles and Freud true in conceiving that the destructive element in man and nature is as strong and recurrent as the conserving, erotic element? Or can our delight in destruction be channeled into other activities than he traditional one of warfare? We are not far advanced on the way to these answers. We do not know whether a peaceful society can be made attractive enough to wean men away from the appeals of battle. Today we are seeking to make war so horrible that men will be frightened away from it. But this is hardly likely to be more fruitful in the future than it has been in the past.

Gray then, somewhat naively, speculated that: More productive will certainly be our efforts to eliminate the social, economic, and political injustices that are always the immediate occasion of hostilities. Even then, we shall be confronted with the spiritual emptiness and inner hunger that impel many men toward combat.

He then soberly noted that: Our society has not begun to wrestle with this problem of how to provide fulfillment to human life, to which war is so often an illusory path. (first written in 1959)

*Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, University of Nebraska Press, 1998. pp. 57f.

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Since these wise words we have had our wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq and the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, to mention only a few. Will we ever find an erotic passion greater than war for the future of our species?

Merle