Haaretz carries an interview with John Horgan, presented by them as the author of a new book in which he argues against the idea that humankind is just stuck for all time with the periodic recurrence of war. There is no inevitability about it.
Yet an odd tension emerges in Horgan's answers to the interviewer's questions. War is stupid and absurd, he says, and he wants to convince people that it's wrong to think war will always be with us. Now, who could quarrel with the age-old dream of human beings living in peace? But if the thought may have crossed your mind by this point that getting rid of war could also yield some problems, don't worry, because it's crossed Horgan's mind too.
At various times in my life, I've called myself a pacifist. But the more I talked to real pacifists and read classic pacifist literature, the more I realized I'm not. Because there are times when some kind of force is not only justified, but actually morally required. You need to use force to stop a greater kind of violence. I would use force to defend myself, or defend my family.
Might a people do the same, to throw off an oppressive tyranny? Or might a nation, to repel a rapacious invader? Another issue, in other words, than whether humankind could abolish war is whether war may not have to be held in reserve, so to speak, in case it were one day needed (again). It would be good if there were no prisons; but if you don't know the means of getting rid of violent crime, prisons may continue to serve a justified purpose.
Horgan's gesture towards resolving the tension in his thinking - for a gesture is all it is - is to say: 'My hope would be that in a world without war, justice will come more quickly'. A world without injustice would, of course, get rid of the need for wars, uprisings, revolutions, etc to rectify injustice, but a just world is a tall order in itself.
Incidentally, Horgan also commits an oversight when he says:
If there's any benefit of World Wars I and II, these massive, industrial-scale slaughterhouses, it's that they have dispelled to some extent those romantic illusions we had about war as the ultimate game.
I can think of one other, rather big, benefit of World War II than that of helping to dispel romantic illusions. Anybody?