WAR AND PEACE -- AS SOCIAL SYSTEMS
WE HAVE DEALT only sketchily with proposed disarmament scenarios
and economic analyses, but the reason r for our seemingly casual
dismissal of so much serious and sophisticated work lies in no
disrespect for its competence. It is rather a question of
relevance. To put it plainly, all these programs, however detailed
and well developed, are abstractions. The most carefully reasoned
disarmament sequence inevitably reads more like the rules of a
game or a classroom exercise in logic than like a prognosis of
real events in the real world. This is as true of today's complex
proposals as it was of the Abbe do St. Pierre's "Plan for
Perpetual Peace in Europe 250 years ago.
Some essential element has clearly been lacking in all these
schemes. One of our first tasks was to try to bring this missing
quality into definable focus, and we believe we have succeeded in
doing so. We find that at the heart of every peace study we have
examined--from the modest technological proposal (e.g., to convert
a poison gas plant to the production of 'socially useful
equivalents) to the most elaborate scenario for universal peace in
our time--lies one common fundamental misconception. It is the
source of the miasma of unreality surrounding such plans. It is
the incorrect assumption that war, as an institution, is
subordinate to the social systems it is believed to serve.
This misconception, although profound and far-reaching, is
entirely comprehensible. Few social clichés are so unquestioningly
accepted as the notion that war is an extension of diplomacy (or
of politics, or of the pursuit of economic objectives ) . If this
were true, it would be wholly appropriate for economists and
political theorists to look on the problems of transition to peace
as essentially mechanical or procedural--as indeed they do,
treating them as logistic corollaries of the settlement of
national conflicts of interest. If this were true, there would be
no real substance to the difficulties of transition. For it is
evident that even in today's world there exists no conceivable
conflict of interest, real or imaginary, between nations or
between social forces within nations, that can-not be resolved
without recourse to war--if such resolution were assigned a
priority of social value. And if this were true, the economic
analyses and disarmament proposals we have referred to, plausible
and well conceived as they may be, would not inspire, as they do,
an inescapable sense of indirection.
The point is that the cliché is not true, and the problems of
transition are indeed substantive rather than merely procedural.
Although war is "used" as an instrument of national and social
policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of
readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure.
War itself is the basic social system, within which other
secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is
the system which has governed most human societies of record, as
it is today.
Once this is correctly understood, the true magnitude of the
problems entailed in a transition to peace--itself a social
system, but without precedent except in a few simple preindustrial
societies--becomes apparent. At the same time, some of the
puzzling superficial contradictions of modern societies can then
be readily rationalized. The "unnecessary" size and power of the
world war industry; the preeminence of the military establishment
in every society, whether open or concealed; the exemption of
military or paramilitary institutions from the accepted social and
legal standards of behavior required elsewhere in the society; the
successful operation of the armed forces and the armaments
producers entirely outside the frame-work of each nation's
economic ground rules: these and other ambiguities closely
associated with the relationship of war to society are easily
clarified, once the priority of war-making potential as the
principal structuring force in society is accepted. Economic
systems, political philosophies, and corpora jures serve and
extend the war system, not vice versa.
It must be emphasized that the precedence of a society's war-
making potential over its other characteristics is not the result
of the "threat" presumed to exist at any one time from other
societies. This is the reverse of the basic situation; "threats"
against the "national interest" are usually created or accelerated
to meet the changing needs of the war system. Only in
comparatively recent times has it been considered politically
expedient to euphemize war budgets as "defense" requirements. The
necessity for governments to distinguish between "aggression"
(bad) and "defense" (good) has been a by-product of rising
literacy and rapid communication. The distinction is tactical
only, a concession to the growing inadequacy of ancient war-
organizing political rationales. Wars are not "caused" by
international conflicts of interest. Proper logical sequence would
make it more often accurate to say that war-making societies
require and thus bring about--such conflicts. The capacity of a
nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can
exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life
and death on the greatest scale subject to social control. It
should therefore hardly be surprising that the military
institutions in each society claim its highest priorities.
We find further that most of the confusion surrounding the myth
that war-
making is a tool of state policy stems from a general
misapprehension of the functions of war. In general, these are
conceived as: to defend a nation from military attack by another,
or to deter such an attack; to defend or advance a "national
interest"-- economic, political, ideological; to maintain or
increase a nation's military power for its own sake. These are the
visible, or ostensible, functions of war. If there were no others,
the importance of the war establishment in each society might in
fact decline to the subordinate level it is believed to occupy.
And the elimination of war would indeed be the procedural matter
that the disarmament scenarios suggest.
But there are other, broader, more profoundly felt functions of
war in modern societies. It is these invisible, or implied,
functions that maintain war-
readiness as the dominant force in our societies. And it is the
unwillingness or inability of the writers of disarmament scenarios
and re conversion plans to take them into account that has so
reduced the usefulness of their work, and that has made it seem
unrelated to the world we know.
SECTION 5
THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR
AS WE HAVE INDICATED, the preeminence of the concept of war as the
principal organizing force in most societies has been
insufficiently appreciated. This is also true of its extensive
effects throughout the many nonmilitary activities of society.
These effects are less apparent in complex industrial societies
like our own than in primitive cultures, the activities of which
can be more easily and fully comprehended.
We propose in this section to examine these nonmilitary, implied,
and usually invisible functions of war, to the extent that they
bear on the problems of transition to peace for our society. The
military, or ostensible, function of the war system requires no
elaboration; it serves simply to defend or advance the "national
interest" by means of organized violence. It is often necessary
for a national military establishment to create a need for its
unique powers to maintain the franchise, so to speak. And a
healthy military apparatus requires regular "exercise," by
whatever rationale seems expedient, to prevent its atrophy.
The nonmilitary functions of the war system are more basic. They
exist not merely to justify themselves but to serve broader social
purposes. If and when war is eliminated, the military functions it
has served will end with it. But its nonmilitary functions will
not. It is essential, therefore, that we understand their
significance before we can reasonably expect to evaluate whatever
institutions may be proposed to replace them.
Economic
The production of weapons of mass destruction has always been
associated with economic "waste." The term is pejorative, since it
implies a failure of function. But no human activity can properly
be considered wasteful if it achieves its contextual objective.
The phrase "wasteful but necessary," applied not only to war
expenditures but to most of the "unproductive" commercial
activities of our society, is a contradiction in terms. ". . . The
attacks that have since the time of Samuel's criticism of King
Saul been leveled against military expenditures as waste may well
have concealed or misunderstood the point that some kinds of waste
may have a larger social utility."
In the case of military "waste," there is indeed a larger social
utility. It derives from the fact that the "wastefulness" of war
production is exercised entirely outside the framework of the
economy of supply and demand. As such, it provides the only
critically large segment of the total economy that is subject to
complete and arbitrary central control. If modem industrial
societies can be defined as those which have developed the
capacity to produce more than is required for their economic
survival (regardless of the equities of distribution of goods
within them), military spending can be said to furnish the only
balance wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the advance of
their economies. The fact that war is "wasteful" is what enables
it to serve this function. And the faster the economy advances,
the heavier this balance wheel must be.
This function is often viewed, over-simply, as a device for the
control of surpluses. One writer on the subject puts it this way:
"Why is war so wonderful? Because it creates artificial demand . .
. the only kind of artificial demand, moreover, that does not
raise any political issues: war, and only war, solves the problem
of inventory." The reference here is to shooting war, but it
applies equally to the general war economy as well. "It is
generally agreed," concludes, more cautiously, the report of a
panel set up by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,
"that the greatly expanded public sector since World War 11,
resulting from heavy defense expenditures, has provided additional
protection against depressions, since this sector is not
responsive to contraction in the private sector and has provided a
sort of buffer o balance wheel in the economy."
The principal economic function of war, in our view, that it
provides just such a flywheel. It is not to be confused in
function with the various forms of fiscal control, none of which
directly engages vast numbers of men and units of production. It
is not to be confused with massive government expenditures in
social welfare programs; once initiated, such programs normally
become .Integral parts of the general economy and are no longer
subject to arbitrary control.
But even in the context of the general civilian economy war cannot
be considered wholly "wasteful." Without a long-established war
economy, and without its frequent eruption into large-scale
shooting war, most of the major industrial advances known to
history, beginning with the development of iron, could never have
taken place. Weapons technology structures the economy.
According to the writer cited above, "Nothing is more ironic or
revealing about our society than the fact that hugely destructive
war is a very progressive force in it. . . . War production is
progressive because it is production that would not otherwise have
taken place. (It is not so widely appreciated, for example, that
the civilian standard of living rose during World War II.)" This
is not "ironic or revealing," but essentially a simple statement
of fact.
It should also be noted that war production has a dependably
stimulating effect outside itself. Far from constituting a
"wasteful" drain on the economy, war spending, considered
pragmatically, has been a consistently positive factor in the rise
of gross national product and of individual productivity. A former
Secretary of the Army has carefully phrased it for public
consumption thus: "If there is, as I suspect there is, a direct
relation between the stimulus of large defense spending and a
substantially increased rate of growth of gross national product,
it quite simply follows that defense spending per se might be
countenanced on economic grounds alone [emphasis added] as a
stimulator of the national metabolism." Actually, the fundamental
nonmilitary utility of war in the economy is far more widely
acknowledged than the scarcity of such affirmations as that quoted
above would suggest.
But negatively phrased public recognitions of the importance of
war to the general economy abound. The most familiar example is
the effect of "peace threats" on the stock market, e.g., "Wall
Street was shaken yesterday by news of an apparent peace feeler
from North Vietnam, but swiftly recovered its composure after
about an hour of sometimes indiscriminate selling."' Savings banks
solicit deposits with similar cautionary slogans, e.g., "If peace
breaks out, will you be ready for it?" A more subtle case in point
was the recent refusal of the Department of Defense to permit the
West German government to substitute nonmilitary goods for
unwanted armaments in its purchase commitments from the United
States; the decisive consideration was that the German purchases
should not affect the general (nonmilitary) economy. Other
incidental examples are to be found in the pressures brought to
bear on the Department when it announces plans to close down an
obsolete facility (as a "wasteful" form of "waste"), and in the
usual coordination of stepped-up military activities (as in
Vietnam in 1965) with dangerously rising unemployment rates.
Although we do not imply that a substitute for war in the economy
cannot be devised, no combination of techniques for controlling
employment, production, and consumption has yet been tested that
can remotely compare to it in effectiveness. It is, and has been,
the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies.
Political
The political functions of war have been up to now even more
critical to social stability. It is not surprising nevertheless,
that discussions of economic conversion for peace tend to fall
silent on the matter of political implementation, and that
disarmament scenarios, often sophisticated in their weighing of
international political factors, tend to disregard the political
functions of the war system within individual societies.
These functions are essentially organizational. First of all, the
existence of a society as a political "nation" requires as part of
its definition an attitude of relationship toward other "nations."
This is what we usually call foreign policy. But a nation's
foreign policy can have I substance if it lacks the means of
enforcing its attitude toward other nations. It can do this in a
credible manner only if it implies the threat of maximum political
organization for this purpose; which is to say that it is
organized to some degree for war. War, then, as we have defined it
to include all national activities that recognize the possibility
of armed conflict, is itself the defining element of any nation's
existence vis-à-vis any other nation. Since it is historically
axiomatic that the existence of any form of weaponry insures its
use, we have used the word "peace" as virtually synonymous with
disarmament. By the same token, "war" is virtually synonymous with
nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable
elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-
state .
The war system not only has been essential to the existence of
nations as independent political entities, but has been equally
indispensable to their stable internal political structure.
Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain
acquiescence in its "legitimacy," or right to rule its society.
The possibility of war provides the sense of eternal necessity
without which no government can long remain in power. The
historical record reveals one instance after another where the
failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat
led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, of
reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative
elements. The organization of a society for the possibility of war
is its principal political stabilizer. It is ironic that this
primary function of war has been generally recognized by
historians only where it has been expressly acknowledged--in the
pirate societies of the great conquerors.
The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in
its war powers. (There is, in fact, good reason to believe that
codified law had its origins in the rules of conduct established
by military victors for dealing with the defeated enemy, which
were later adapted to apply to all subject populations.7) On a
day-to-day basis, it is represented by the institution of police,
armed organizations charged expressly with dealing with "internal
enemies" in a military manner. Like the conventional "external"
military, the police are also substantially exempt from many
civilian legal restraints on their social behavior. In some
countries, the artificial distinction between police and other
military forces does not exist. On the long-term basis, a
government's emergency war powers --inherent in the structure of
even the most libertarian of nations--define the most significant
aspect of the relation between state and citizen.
In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system has
provided political leaders with another political-economic
function of increasing importance: it has served as the last great
safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes. As
economic productivity increases to a level further and further
above that of minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more
difficult for a society to maintain distribution patterns insuring
the existence of "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The
further progress of automation can be expected to differentiate
still more sharply between "superior" workers and what Ricardo
called "menials," while simultaneously aggravating the problem of
maintaining an unskilled labor supply.
The arbitrary nature of war expenditures and of other military
activities make them ideally suited to control these essential
class relationships. Obviously, if the war system were to be
discarded, new political machinery would be needed at once to
serve this vital sub function. Until it is developed, the
continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other
reason, among others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree
of poverty a society requires as an incentive, as well as to
maintain the stability of its internal organization of power.
Sociological
Under this heading, we will examine a nexus of functions served by
the war system that affect human behavior in society. In general,
they are broader in application and less susceptible to direct
observation than the economic and political factors previously
considered.
The most obvious of these functions is the time-honored use of
military institutions to provide antisocial elements with an
acceptable role in the social structure. The disintegrative,
unstable social movements loosely described as "fascist" have
traditionally taken root in societies that have lacked adequate
military or paramilitary outlets to meet the needs of these
elements. This function has been critical in periods of rapid
change. The danger signals are easy to recognize, even though the
stigmata bear different names at different times. The current
euphemistic clichés "juvenile delinquency" and "alienation"--
have had their counterparts in every age. In earlier days these
conditions were dealt with directly by the military without the
complications of due process, usually through press gangs or
outright enslavement. But, it is not hard to visualize, for
example, the degree of social disruption that might have taken
place in the United States during the last two decades if the
problem of the socially disaffected of the post-World War II
period had not been foreseen and effectively met The younger, and
more dangerous, of these hostile social
groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service
System.
This system and its analogues elsewhere finish remarkably clear
examples of disguised military utility. Informed persons in this
country have never accepted the official rationale for a peacetime
draft--military necessity, preparedness, etc.--as worthy of
serious consideration. But what has gained credence among
thoughtful men is the rarely voiced, less easily refuted,
proposition that the institution of military service has a
"patriotic" priority in our society that must be maintained for
its own sake. Ironically, the simplistic official justification
for selective service comes closer to the mark, once the non-
military functions of military institutions are understood. As a
control device over the hostile, nihilistic, and potentially
unsettling elements of a society in transition, the draft can
again be defended, and quite convincingly, as a "military"
necessity.
Nor can it be considered a coincidence that overt military
activity, and thus the level of draft calls, tend to follow the
major fluctuations in the unemployment rate in the lower age
groups. This rate, in turn, is a time-tested herald of social
discontent. It must be noted also, that the armed forces in every
civilization have provided the principal state-supported haven for
what we now call the "unemployable." The typical European standing
army (of fifty years ago) consisted of "... troops unfit for
employment in commerce, industry, or agriculture, led by officers
unfit to practice any legitimate profession or to conduct a
business enterprise."8 This is still largely true, if less
apparent. In a sense, this function of the military as the
custodian of the economically or culturally deprived was the
forerunner of most contemporary civilian social-
welfare programs, from the W.P.A. to various forms of "socialized"
medicine and social security. It is interesting that liberal
sociologists currently proposing to use the Selective Service
System as a medium of cultural upgrading of the poor consider this
a novel application of military practice.
Although it cannot be said absolutely that such critical measures
of social control as the draft require a military rationale, no
modern society has yet been willing to risk experimentation with
any other kind. Even during such periods of comparatively simple
social crisis as the so-called Great Depression of the l930s, it
was deemed prudent by the government to invest minor make-work
projects, like the "Civilian" Conservation Corps, with a military
character, and to place the more ambitious National Recovery
Administration under the direction of a professional army officer
at its inception. Today, at least one small Northern
European country, plagued with uncontrollable unrest among its
"alienated youth," is considering the expansion of its armed
forces, despite the problem of making credible the expansion of a
non-existent external threat.
Sporadic efforts have been made to promote general recognition of
broad national values free of military connotation, but they have
been ineffective. For example, to enlist public support of even
such modest programs of social adjustment as "fighting inflation"
or "maintaining physical fitness" it has been necessary for the
government to utilize a patriotic ( i.e., military ) incentive. It
sells "defense bonds and it equates health with military
preparedness. This is not surprising; since the concept of
"nationhood' implies readiness for war, a "national" program must
do likewise.
In general, the war system provides the basic motivation for
primary social organization. In so doing, it reflects on the
societal level the incentives of individual human behavior. The
most important of these, for social purposes, is the individual
psychological rationale for allegiance to a society and its
values. Allegiance requires a cause; a cause requires an enemy.
This much is obvious; the critical point is that the enemy that
defines the cause must seem genuinely formidable. Roughly
speaking, the presumed power of the "enemy" sufficient to warrant
an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be
proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of
course, that power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and
frightfulness.
It follows, from the patterns of human behavior, that the
credibility of a social "enemy demands similarly a readiness of
response in proportion to its menace. In a broad social context,
"an eye for an eye" still characterizes the only acceptable
attitude toward a presumed great of aggression, despite contrary
religious and moral precepts governing personal conduct. The
remoteness of personal decision from social consequence in a
modern society makes it easy for its members to maintain this
attitude without being aware of it. A recent example is the war in
Vietnam; a less recent one was the bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.9 In each case, the extent and gratuitousness of the
slaughter were abstracted into political formulae by most
Americans, once the proposition that the victims were "enemies"
was established. The war system makes such an abstracted response
possible in nonmilitary contexts as well. A conventional example
of this mechanism is the inability of most people to connect, let
us say, the starvation of millions in India with their own past
conscious political decision-making. Yet the sequential logic
linking a decision to restrict grain production in America with an
eventual famine in Asia is obvious, unambiguous, and unconcealed.
What gives the war system its preeminent role in social
organization, as elsewhere, is its unmatched authority over life
and death. It must be emphasized again that the war system is not
a mere social extension of the presumed need for individual human
violence, but itself in turn serves to rationalize most
nonmilitary killing. It also provides the precedent for the
collective willingness of members of a society to pay a blood
price for institutions far less central to social organization
than war. To take a handy example, ". . . rather than accept
speed I limits of twenty miles an hour we prefer to let
automobiles kill forty thousand people a year."l0 A Rand I analyst
puts it in more general terms and less rhetorically: "I am sure
that there is, in effect, a desirable level of automobile
accidents--desirable, that is, from a broad point of view; in the
sense that it is a necessary concomitant of things of greater
value to society." The point may seem too obvious for iteration,
but it is essential to an understanding of the important
motivational function of war as a model for collective sacrifice.
A brief look at some defunct premodern societies is instructive.
One of the most noteworthy features common to the larger, more
complex, and more successful of ancient civilizations was their
widespread use of the blood sacrifice. If one were to limit
consideration to those cultures whose regional hegemony was so
complete that the prospect of "war" had become virtually
inconceivable --as was the case with several of the great pre-
Columbian societies of the Western Hemispheric it would be found
that some form of ritual killing occupied a position of paramount
social importance in each. Invariably, the ritual was invested
with mythic or religious significance; as with all religious and
totemic practice, however, the ritual masked a broader and more
important social function.
In these societies, the blood sacrifice served the purpose of
maintaining a vestigial "earnest" of the society's capability and
willingness to make war-i.e., kill and be killed in the event that
some mystical--i.e., unforeseen --circumstance were to give rise
to the possibility. That the "earnest" was not an adequate
substitute for genuine military organization when the unthinkable
enemy, such as the Spanish conquistadors, actually appeared on the
scene in no way negates the function of the ritual. It was
primarily, if not exclusively, a symbolic reminder that war had
once been the central organizing force of the society, and that
this condition might recur.
It does not follow that a transition to total peace in modern
societies would require the use of this model, even in less
"barbaric" guise. But the historical analogy serves as a reminder
that a viable substitute for war as a social system cannot be a
mere symbolic charade. It must involve real risk of real personal
destruction, and on a scale consistent with the size and
complexity of modern social systems. Credibility is the key.
Whether the substitute is ritual in nature or functionally
substantive, unless it provides a believable life-and-death threat
it will not serve the socially organizing function of war.
The existence of an accepted external menace, then, is essential
to social cohesiveness as well as to the acceptance of political
authority. The menace must be believable, it must be of a
magnitude consistent with the complexity of the society
threatened, and it must appear, at least, to affect the entire
society.
Ecological
Man, like all other animals, is subject to the continuing process
of adapting to the limitations of his environment. But the
principal mechanism he has utilized for this purpose is unique
among living creatures. To forestall the inevitable historical
cycles of inadequate food supply, post-Neolithic man destroys
surplus members of his own species by organized warfare.
Ethologistsl2 have often observed that the organized slaughter of
members of their own species is virtually unknown among other
animals. Man's special propensity to kill his own kind (shared to
a limited degree with rats) may be attributed to his inability to
adapt anachronistic patterns of survival (like primitive hunting)
to his development of "civilizations" in which these patterns
cannot be effectively sublimated. It may be attributed to other
causes that have been suggested, such as a maladapted "territorial
instinct," etc. Nevertheless, it exists and its social expression
in war constitutes a biological control of his relationship to his
natural environment that is peculiar to man alone.
War has served to help assure the survival of the human species.
But as an evolutionary device to improve it, war is almost
unbelievably inefficient. With few exceptions, the selective
processes of other living creatures promote both specific survival
and genetic improvement. When a conventionally adaptive animal
faces one of its periodic crises of insufficiency, it is the
"inferior" members of the species that normally disappear. An
animal's social response to such a crisis may take the form of a
mass migration, during which the weak fall by the wayside. Or it
may follow the dramatic and more efficient pattern of lemming
societies, in which the weaker members voluntarily disperse,
leaving available food supplies for the stronger. In either case,
the strong survive and the weak fall. In human societies, those
who fight and die in wars for survival are in general its
biologically stronger members. This is natural selection in
reverse
The regressive genetic effect of war has been often notedl3 and
equally often deplored, even when it confuses biological and
cultural factors.l3 The disproportionate loss of the biologically
stronger remains inherent in traditional warfare. It serves to
underscore the fact that survival of the species, rather than its
improvement, is the fundamental purpose of natural selection, if
it can be said to have a purpose, just as it is the basic premise
of this study.
But as the polemologist Gaston Bouthoull5 has pointed out, other
institutions that were developed to serve this ecological function
have proved even less satisfactory. (They include such established
forms as these: infanticide, practiced chiefly in ancient and
primitive societies; sexual mutilation; monasticism; forced
emigration; extensive capital punishment, as in old China and
eighteenth century England; and other similar, usually localized,
practices.)
Man's ability to increase his productivity of the essentials of
physical life suggests that the need for protection against
cyclical famine may be nearly obsolete." It has thus tended to
reduce the apparent importance of the basic ecological function of
war, which is generally disregarded by peace theorists. Two
aspects of it remain especially relevant, however. The first is
obvious: current rates of population growth, compounded by
environmental threat of chemical and other contaminants, may well
bring about a new crisis of insufficiency. If so, it is likely to
be one of unprecedented global magnitude, not merely regional or
temporary. Conventional methods of warfare would almost surely
prove inadequate, in this event, to reduce the consuming
population to a level consistent with survival of the species.
The second relevant factor is the efficiency of modern methods of
mass destruction. Even if their use is not required to meet a
world population crisis, they offer, perhaps paradoxically, the
first opportunity in the history I of man to halt the regressive
genetic effects of natural selection by war. Nuclear weapons are
indiscriminate. Their application would bring to an end the
disproportionate destruction of the physically stronger members of
the species (the "warriors") in periods of war. Whether this
prospect of genetic gain would offset the unfavorable mutations
anticipated from post nuclear radioactivity we have not yet
determined. What gives the question a bearing on our study is the
possibility that the determination may yet have to be made.
Another secondary ecological trend bearing on projected population
growth is the regressive effect of certain medical advances.
Pestilence, for example, is no longer an important factor in
population control. The problem of increased life expectancy has
been aggravated. These advances also pose a potentially more
sinister problem, in that undesirable genetic traits that were
formerly self-
liquidating are now medically maintained.
Many diseases that were once fatal at preprocreational ages are
now cured; the effect of this development is to perpetuate
undesirable susceptibilities and mutations. It seems clear that a
new quasi-eugenic function of war is now in process of formation
that will have to be taken into account in any transition plan.
For the time being, the Department of Defense appears to have
recognized such factors, as has been demonstrated by the planning
under way by the Rand Corporation to cope with the breakdown in
the ecological balance anticipated after a thermonuclear war. The
Department has also begun to stockpile birds, for example,
against the expected proliferation of radiation-
resistant insects, etc.
Cultural and Scientific
The declared order of values in modern societies gives a high
place to the so-called "creative" activities, and an even higher
one to those associated with the advance of scientific knowledge.
Widely held social values can be translated into political
equivalents, which in turn may bear on the nature of a transition
to peace. The attitudes of those who hold these values must be
taken into account in the planning of the transition. The
dependence, therefore, of cultural and scientific achievement on
the I war system would be an important consideration in a
transition plan even if such achievement had no inherently
necessary social function.
Of all the countless dichotomies invented by scholars to account
for the major differences in art styles and cycles, only one has
been consistently unambiguous in its application to a variety of
forms and cultures. However it may be verbalized, the basic
distinction is this: I Is the work war-oriented or is it not?
Among primitive
peoples, the war dance is the most important art form. I
Elsewhere, literature, music, painting, sculpture, and
architecture that has won lasting acceptance has invariably dealt
with a theme of war, expressly or implicitly, and has expressed
the centricity of war to society. The war in question may be
national conflict, as in Shakespeare plays, Beethoven's music, or
Goya's paintings, or it may be reflected in the form of religious,
social, or moral struggle, as in the work of Dante, Rembrandt, and
Bach. Art that cannot be classified as war-oriented is usually
described as "sterile," "decadent," and so on. Application of the
"war standard" to works of art may often leave room for debate in
individual cases, but there is no question of its role as the
fundamental determinant of cultural values. Aesthetic and moral
standards have a common anthropological origin, in the exaltation
of bravery, the willingness to kill and risk death in tribal
warfare.
It is also instructive to note that the character of a society's
culture has borne a close relationship to its I war-making
potential, in the context of its times. It is no accident that
the current "cultural explosion" in the United States is taking
place during an era marked by an unusually rapid advance in
weaponry. This relation ship is more generally recognized than
the literature on the subject would suggest. For example, many
artists and writers are now beginning to express concern over I
the limited creative options they envisage in the warless world
they think, or hope, may be soon upon us. They are currently
preparing for this possibility by unprecedented experimentation
with meaningless forms; their interest in recent years has been
increasingly engaged by the abstract pattern, the gratuitous
emotion, the random happening, and the unrelated sequence.
The relationship of war to scientific research and discovery is
more explicit. War is the principal motivational force for the
development of science at every level, from the abstractly
conceptual to the narrowly technological. Modern society places a
high value on "pure" science, but it is historically inescapable
that all the significant discoveries that have been made about the
natural world have been inspired by the real or imaginary military
necessities of their epochs. The consequences of the discoveries
have indeed gone far afield, but war has always provided the basic
incentive.
Beginning with the development of iron and steel, and proceeding
through the discoveries of the laws of motion and thermodynamics
to the age of the atomic particle, the synthetic polymer, and the
space capsule, no important scientific advance has not been at
least indirectly initiated by an implicit requirement of weaponry.
More prosaic examples include the transistor radio (an outgrowth
of military communications requirements ), the assembly line (
from Civil War firearms needs ), the steel-frame building (from
the steel battleship), the canal lock, and so on. A typical
adaptation can be seen in a device as modest as the common
lawnmower; it developed from the revolving scythe devised by
Leonardo da Vinci to precede a horse-powered vehicle into enemy
ranks.
The most direct relationship can be found in medical technology.
For example, a giant "walking machine," an amplifier of body
motions invented for military use in difficult terrain, is now
making it possible for many previously confined to wheelchairs to
walk. The Vietnam war alone has led to spectacular improvements in
amputation procedures, blood-handling techniques, and surgical
logistics. It has stimulated new large-scale research on malaria
and other tropical parasite diseases; it is hard to estimate how
long this work would otherwise have been delayed, despite its
enormous nonmilitary importance to nearly half the world's
population.
Other
We have elected to omit from our discussion of the nonmilitary
functions of war those we do not consider critical to a transition
program. This is not to say they are I unimportant, however, but
only that they appear to present no special problems for the
organization of a I peace-oriented social system. They include the
following:
War as a general social release. This is a psycho social function,
serving the same purpose for a society as do the holiday, the
celebration, and the orgy for the individual-- the release and
redistribution of undifferentiated tensions. War provides for the
periodic necessary readjustment of standards of social behavior (
the "moral climate") and for the dissipation of general boredom,
one of the most consistently undervalued and unrecognized of
social phenomena.
War as a generational stabilizer. This psychological function,
served by other behavior patterns in other animals, enables the
physically deteriorating older generation to maintain its control
of the younger, destroying it if necessary.
War as an ideological clarifier. The dualism that characterizes
the traditional dialectic of all branches of philosophy and of
stable political relationships stems from war as the prototype of
conflict. Except for secondary considerations, there cannot be, to
put it as simply as possible, more than two sides to a question
because there cannot be more than two sides to a war.
War as the basis for international understanding. Before the
development of modern communications, the strategic requirements
of war provided the only substantial incentive for the enrichment
of one national culture with the achievements of another. Although
this is still the case in many international relationships, the
function is obsolescent.
We have also forgone extended characterization of those functions
we assume to be widely and explicitly recognized. An obvious
example is the role of war as controller of the quality and degree
of unemployment. This is more than an economic and political sub
function; its sociological, cultural, and ecological aspects are
also important, although often teleonomic. But none affect the
general problem of substitution. The same is true of certain other
functions; those we have included are sufficient to define the
scope of the problem.
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