And end to war?

Posted on | July 17, 2009 |

Human beings like war. We must do, because we’re always doing it.

So let’s ask the obvious question: what is it we like about it. Like a dangerous drug, if we can discover exactly why people use it we can sort out a way to encourage them to stop using it.

I think I may have an answer. Many people, when in a place of danger or excitement (read; fear) actually feel themselves to be more alive, more ‘in the moment’ than during the rest of their lives. Ask anyone who’s ever been in any sort of fight, and you may hear something similar. If, as Ram Dass said, the task of life is to ‘be here now’, then being frightened, hyper-alert, and divorced from all the usual rules of society is a ghastly version of being ‘present’. And many, many people have reported that after experiencing military service and combat they felt truly ‘alive’. Civilians don’t feel it, but civilians don’t perpetrate armed conflict. They get killed or maimed.

The task therefore may be simpler than we realize. If we can encourage people to be present and in the moment without having to resort to violence, merely by opening their hearts, we could perhaps give them the same ‘experience’ within a saner context.

Warfare appeals. It has done for millenia. But it appeals in the same way as a craving for a destructive substance does - one that replaces a positive feeling with a negative one. It is like the substitution of mindless sex for love. It offers the illusion of something vital but without the valuable, real, content.

There is a way, possibly, to end war. It’ll require us all to think differently, though. We’ll stop doing it when we don’t have to get out thrills that way. The horse and buggy went out when the car arrived; it simply didn’t give us what we wanted any more. War could go the same way.

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