The Problem of War, Part 5

People dug foxholes in their backyards and stocked them with food to survive long enough to answer to an apocalypse that would provide no way to respond.

The Problem of War, Part 5

By George Templeton

Gazette Blog Columnist

Editor's note: This is the last in a 5-part series by Gazette Blog Columnist George Templeton entitled "The Problem of War."

In Part 4, I wrote about Christian theories of war.  They rely on assumptions.  Wars are not just good or bad.  It all depends.

Blaise Pascal invented the theory of probability in the 17th century.  His wager was a cost benefit analysis.  Acting as if God existed outweighed the risk of eternal damnation.   We have a similar situation with respect to nuclear war.  In part 5, I write about this.

Our digital watch cannot display 12:80 am, but old-fashioned watches with hour and minute hands help us understand even though we don’t realize it.  We have a judgment about it, much as we judge war, without even thinking about it.  

We could think about our situation in terms of mathematical expectation.  The value of a risky policy is the linear combination of its probability multiplied by the “value” of what is at stake.

To correctly apply this reasoning, the outcomes have to be mutually exclusive and independent of each other.  What outcomes?  When?  What values?  What probability?  We have to choose between flights of fantasy and pure conjecture.  We have to decide.

End Times

There is a thing called the Doomsday Clock.  If you compress 5 billion years of the earth’s history into a single year, humans would not be on the scene until 30 minutes before New Year’s Eve.  We are now only 100 seconds from Armageddon.  Thermonuclear bombs are much more powerful, effective, and easy to use than conventional weapons.  They don’t require a large army.  They don't require cooperation.  Their rewards are an immediate solution for every diplomatic dilemma.

In the fifties, elementary school children were taught to "duck and cover".  We sat under our desks, away from the windows and the glass that would shatter, slicing us into pieces.  We could hear the distinctive drone of our giant B-36 bombers as they flew overhead.  H-bombs were big in those days.

In the sixties, public service designated locations where people could hide to escape a nuclear blast.  In the eighties, people dug foxholes in their backyards.  They stocked them with food to survive long enough to answer to an apocalypse that would provide no way to respond.  Today, New York public service instructed the city to go inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.

We built most of our nuclear warheads in the eighties.  Will they still work?  We have a responsibility to assure our allies that we can destroy their enemies.   It would be immoral for us to let them down, to not honor the promises we have made.  We spend 15 billion dollars annually to operate our National Ignition Test Facility.  Located in California, it is larger than a sports stadium.  

A nuclear war could starve two-thirds of the world's population to death.  It was an asteroid that killed 76 percent of the life on earth, including the dinosaurs because the sun could not shine through the cloud enveloping the earth.  Ten thermonuclear bombs are enough to destroy the entire world.  Mankind has more than ten thousand.  We love winners.  It is the nation with the most H-bombs.  If you have the most, your neighbor has to meet your amount or better yet exceed it.

But is a winner a better person?  Is he proud?  Is pride the opposite of shame?  Is it the opposite of humility?  Do you enjoy being wrong when it is in your favor?  There are circumstances involved in every moral judgment.

Fear is not a matter of feelings.  We have them because of what could happen.  Truth is not necessary.  Exaggeration makes everyone worry.  It requires a reaction before thinking about the situation and coming to understand it.  When everyone is rattling their sabers, the chance of an accident increases.  Things get out of control easily.

The Solution

Jared Diamond explained it in his 2005 book, Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Common problems included the failure to anticipate, a lack of perception, rationalized bad behavior, and disastrous values.  When they are commonplace, understanding becomes no one’s job and everybody else’s job.  We try to escape from a world that has become too difficult, and too complicated.  We join a politics of emotion.

Our penchant for the sensational has fractured our intellect.  Primitive, unthinking, hard-wired emotional contagion chants "USA, USA".  Its intentional patriotism goes no deeper.  Aren’t your emotions more subtle than just “Hooray” or “Boo”?

 This is our emotion, rooted in the world.  It is not just in your mind.  We do not feel responsible when our emotions are only excuses.  It makes it easy to become fanatical and violent, to join that crowd of supposed “like-minded” people.

We have lost our common foundational values.  Diversity and interdependence have not promoted mutual understanding.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks about a house built on sand.  The moral of his story is that things lacking a strong or proper basis will be likely to fail or come to an end.

The conscious person tries to understand and evaluate prejudice, war, religion, and politics.  They are more than just our friends.  We can strive for authenticity, to be true to ourselves, our hearts, and our nation.

Since the Civil War, America’s wars have been foreign.  We were lucky.  Since the Vietnam War, there has been no military draft.  When there is no “skin in the game”, war becomes easier to choose.  When there is no war tax, we add its costs to the deficit.  Future generations must pay.  Now we wage a war for truth in an interdependent yet divided and unstable world.  But prosperity depends on stability.

In industry, projects have a business plan, a spending plan, and measurable objectives periodically evaluated by company leaders.  They are not about friendship.  They want results.  Business turns on a dime.  That is competition, capitalism, and Adam Smith's unseen hand.

Statesmen led our country during the placid decade of the fifties.  They would not join the partisan fray.  They knew that “the people” lack the expertise to know how things work.  Their job was to accurately inform the public so it could make the best decision for “all the people”, not just those of any one political party.  They were not overly concerned with job security.  There was always something else to do.  The world needed their expertise.  They knew that the idea was more powerful than the bomb.

Democracy is the form of government most consistent with valuing everyone and celebrating their differences.  When things don’t work out, we get another chance.  We can’t save civilization unless we agree to compromise.  We think that democracy, with its free press and election system, will make it easier.   But now we are coasting on our celebrity.