Why war is good

Morris' conclusion combines caution and hope. He sees the world's powerful societies created by thousands of years of war as agents of peace and prosperity. As an example, although American power in the last decades contributed to global disruption and violence, overall, Morris argues, the United States promoted a steady world order.

Following on his theory that unity equals stability, Morris argues that the waning presence of major imperial nation-states could result in a "major shift in wealth and power," and an accompanying "massive amount of violence.

Given the unprecedented capacity for destruction of modern military technology, Morris says a surge of violence "could potentially mean the end of humanity altogether. His prognostication, then, remains uncertain. As the Leviathans fall and deadly weapons proliferate, will war's ends still outweigh its means?

There is no clear answer, but Morris' historical research suggests a strange truth. Nate Sloan is a doctoral candidate in musicology at Stanford. For more news about the humanities at Stanford, visit the Human Experience. Corrie Goldman, director of humanities communication: , corrieg stanford. Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: , dstober stanford.

A publication of Stanford's Office of University Communications. Stanford , California Copyright Complaints Trademark Notice. The Cuban revolution of the s saw the government overthrown in a coup designed to bring about a fairer society. Certainly, the idea of Communism brought hope that people could be treated equally. Sadly, the war just brought chaos, which allowed dictator Fidel Castro to seize power - but it all began in the pursuit of freedom.

If someone tried to move into your house without your permission, you'd probably be angry. If the same person kicked your door down, attacked you and threw your family out of your house, you'd probably fight back. In a lot of ways, war is just a large-scale version of these personal emotions and reactions. It was a large number of city-states, which often fought against each other.

These included Athens, Sparta, Delphi and many more. It was a complicated environment, very different to our idea of how a country works. Citizens of Sparta thought of themselves as both Spartans and Greeks. Citizens of Athens thought of Spartans as both brothers and enemies. When the Persian Empire which was keen to expand and saw the Greeks as an easy target attempted to invade Greece, the Greek city-states banded together, resisted, fought and won - defeating the Persians in many battles and eventually driving off the invaders.

WWII is another example - the background to the war is highly complex, but in part it was self-defence against the aggressive Nazi movement in Germany. Germany's actions before and during the war put its own interests ahead of those of any other country or group of people, and these actions were not only a direct threat to many but also a moral threat to us all. By going to war, the world was removing a threat to its own social existence.

War seems to be a catalyst - it makes us think harder, move faster and accept more change than anything else. It could be argued that the First World War paved the way for gender equality and women's rights.

As more and more men were sent off to fight, women were required to leave the home and work in the jobs that men had left behind, including in factories and on farms. After the war, many women were reluctant to return to their old lives and campaigned for greater rights and freedoms.

It can certainly be said that WWII sped up the development of antibiotics, gave us air travel, introduced Radar a technology which eventually led to Satnav and kick-started computing and where would you be without your phone? Wars have also reduced the amount of suffering in the world - by acting against Germany in WWII, the allies prevented more and more oppression of Jewish people, travellers, gay people, the mentally ill and anyone else the Nazi movement considered sub-human.

It takes lives from all sides. It can displace millions and leave children without their parents, wives without their husbands, brothers without their sisters. There are suicide bombers, creating mass graves of innocent victims. International efforts to keep the peace resulting in the deaths of innocent men and women. The resounding truth of war is, quite simply, that people always suffer and lives will always be lost.

You decide. Which war caused one of the biggest oil spills in history, wasting vital resources and resulting in long-term damage to the environment? Which war freed Peru from the control of the Spanish, whose rule they had been under for over years? Which war led to huge numbers of people in Japan experiencing radiation sickness and also caused birth defects in thousands of newborn babies?

Which war helped to end slavery in the United States, but was also responsible for the formation of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan? Violations of human rights can always be found in nations that other nations wish to bomb, just as they can be found in nations whose dictators are being funded and propped up by the very same humanitarian crusaders, and just as they can be found within those warrior nations themselves.

But there are two major problems with bombing a nation to expand its respect for human rights. First, it tends not to work. Second, the right not to be killed or injured or traumatized by war ought to be considered a human right worthy of respect as well. Again, a hypocrisy check is useful: How many people would want their own town bombed in the name of expanding human rights? Wars and militarism and other disastrous policies can generate crises that could benefit from outside assistance, be it in the form of nonviolent peaceworkers and human shields or in the form of police.

But twisting the argument that Rwanda needed police into the argument that Rwanda should have been bombed, or that some other nation should be bombed, is a gross distortion. Contrary to some mythical views, suffering has not been minimized in recent wars. War cannot be civilized or cleaned up.

There is no guarantee that any war can be controlled or ended once begun. The damage usually lasts much longer than the war. Wars do not end with victory, which cannot even be defined. War can be imagined as a tool for enforcing the rule of law, including laws against war, only by ignoring the hypocrisy and the historical record of failure.

War actually violates the most basic principles of law and encourages their further violation. The sovereignty of states and the requirement that diplomacy be conducted without violence fall before the hammer of war. The Kellogg-Briand Pact, the U. Charter, and domestic laws on murder and on the decision to go to war are violated when wars are launched and escalated and continued. This is part of why war is such a failure at the task of providing security.

Organizing a group of nations, such as NATO, to jointly fight a war does not make the war one iota more legal or beneficial; it simply employs a criminal gang.

War and war preparations drain and weaken an economy. The myth that war enriches a nation that wages it, as opposed to enriching a small number of influential profiteers, is not supported by evidence. A further myth holds that, even if war impoverishes the war making nation, it can nonetheless be enriching it more substantially by facilitating the exploitation of other nations.

According to this myth, only war can allow that supposedly important and desirable imbalance to continue. There is a reason why this argument is rarely articulated by those in power and plays only a minor role in war propaganda. Of course, Leviathan can periodically be worse than the less organized societies it conquers. But remember, Morris is writing about grand patterns throughout the entire sweep of history, and therefore his generalizations cannot, by definition, be perfect.

He admits that "theorizing about how war works over a timescale of millennia would surely have seemed like a cruel joke" to the real people being killed in armed conflicts as far back as antiquity, so that the "moral implications" of his thesis are, perforce, "unsettling.

Moreover, the march toward a more peaceful humanity from the Stone Age to the 20th century has not been steady but full of wild zigzags.

In particular, Morris calls the anarchy of the Middle Ages the culmination of a millennium of "counterproductive wars that followed the breakdown of the ancient empires. Hitler's attempt at imperialism burnt out after a few years because of his very extremism, whereas Rome, ancient Persia, Venice, Holland, France, Great Britain and America have all fostered, more or less, human development through various kinds of imperialist or imperial-like enterprises.

And they have all done so in significant measure through war. Imperialism has led ultimately to what Morris calls a "globocop," a role that the United States has played, however imperfectly, since the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

America may get into Middle Eastern quagmires, but its Navy and Air Force, not to mention the reputation of its land forces and intelligence apparatus, project power sufficiently throughout the world so as to reduce the level of conflict and so far eliminate major interstate war. The United States, for its part, has become the complex and productive society it is largely thanks to the rigors it has passed through in planning for armed conflict, especially World War II and the Cold War.

Morris might have added to his text that mass college education, the explosion of suburban life and civil rights for minorities were all expressions of the further democratization of American life that would have been hard to imagine without the national unity enforced by having to fight the Nazis and the Japanese.

Morris explores various scenarios for future warfare, from guerrilla insurgencies to robotic warriors to missiles in space. He tends to be optimistic, believing that humanity after millennia of war may reach a culmination point, in which the number of humans killed by other humans continues to drop dramatically. In this, he is in league with Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which also sees a continuation in the decline of human violence.