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War: It's Human Nature only if Collective Suicide is Natural

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So why does it exist as a concept? Because there are purposes it has tried to serve. I can think of two, which might be called the normative and the excusatory. By normative I mean the habit some people have had of declaring that anything most people do should be done by everyone. If it's normal for people to care for their children then everyone should care for their children. That sounds harmless enough. But what if it's normal in Indiana to be heterosexual? What if it's normal to hit kids or burn gasoline or eat dogs or sacrifice virgins? Why in the world should something's being common make it good? On the contrary, whatever is good we should work to make common.

By excusatory I mean to refer to what has probably been the most frequent use of the concept "human nature" over the years, namely as a means to excuse horrible actions. Am I supporting something cruel and unfair, brutal and destructive? Do I hit or humiliate people? Do I exploit the weak? Do I steal and cheat? Do I participate in the large-scale murder of foreigners or the destruction of the natural world? Well, that's OK. It's "human nature," so I'm powerless to stop. Stopping would require that I transform into some other species. Of course thousands of other people I know of don't do the evil thing I'm doing, and they're humans, but in my position they would do it too because it's "human nature" -- meaning no more and no less than it's what I happen to be doing at the moment. If we don't do it, supporters of continuing the slave trade argued in Parliament, other nations will do it. But other nations didn't. If we don't garrison the planet, says the Pentagon, others will. Of course, they might or might not, but this won't be determined by their sharing "human nature," only by their sharing Pentagon nature.

"Human nature" has got to be the grandest term for the most mundane concept ever created. Have you ever heard of anyone doing something good and announcing that it wasn't human nature? When a dog does something unusual, do the other dogs, or even the humans around chastise the dog for violating dog nature? Why does the human species alone get to drag around this bizarre concept of a "nature" that is both just whatever somebody happens to be doing and something very vaguely more than that?

Last October, Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore took out an advertisement in the National Catholic Reporter that read: "CRUSADES, INQUISITION, SLAVERY, TORTURE, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, WAR: Over many centuries, Church leaders and theologians justified each of these evils as consistent with the will of God. Only one of them retains that position in official Church teaching today. We believe it's time for the Catholic Church to reject 'just war' as inconsistent with the teaching and example of Jesus and to become a Just Peace Church."

Not a bad statement, huh?

Do you know what people who don't have special access to the "will of God" called and still call slavery, torture, capital punishment, and numerous other evils? That's right, "human nature." And if two people disagree about the will of god or the content of human nature they can appeal to exactly the same evidence to settle their dispute, namely nothing whatsoever -- except either an agreement to disagree or the violent removal of the person disagreeing with one's claim.

We've reached a point, of course, at which continuing with war risks the existence of humanity. The twin dangers of nuclear apocalypse and climate chaos are advanced more by war than anything else. The primary way in which war kills is by diverting massive resources away from where they could do good, including the good of environmental protection. In addition war is, in some ways, our top destroyer of the environment. On top of which wars are fought for the fuels that we use to destroy the environment. And in addition, the proliferation of nuclear energy and weaponry and the increasing ease of robotic war increases dramatically the risk of war destroying us all before the climate can.

Now, I'm not a professor of logic but I think we have arrived at something that qualifies as a logical proof.

If war is "human nature," collective suicide is "human nature." In other words, the nature of humanity is to cease to be.

But everybody from Aristotle to Bill O'Reilly would agree that the nature of something cannot be its absence.

Therefore, whether "human nature" means anything or not, it isn't war.

Q.E.D.

Because "human nature" is an excuse for war, you'll hear it most in the places that most frequently make war. And this of course leads to the humorous situation of the people who make war appealing to all the people who don't to justify their war-making. The United States is far and away the world's leading supplier of war weapons, buyer of war weapons, user or war weapons and all around facilitator of war. Ninety five percent of humanity is governed by governments that don't have anything remotely like the U.S. investment in war. Many countries invest between 0 and 5 percent what the United States does in war. But if you ask an American why they can't reduce the militarism a bit, they'll tell you it's "human nature." See, the other 95% of humanity is not really part of "human nature." "Human nature" turns out to be American nature. You find this same phenomenon across issues. No other country destroys the natural environment, at least on a per capita basis, remotely like the United States. But the waste and consumption are defended or accepted as "human nature."

The United States spends over a trillion dollars a year on war preparations, about $1.3 trillion in fact, which is exactly what U.S. students and former students owe in total accumulated student debt which is understood to be an outrageous and massive crisis, yet it's what Congress spends on war preparations each year - year after year -- without comment, discussion, or debate. U.S. military spending has doubled since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, yet the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget this year proposed to cut it by a grand total of 1 percent and didn't even mention that in any of its statements about its budget. The rest of the world spends about another trillion dollars all together. So the average among about 200 other countries is about a half a percent of what the U.S. spends. If the United States, for whatever cockamamie reason, felt obliged to comply with a "human nature" that included the rest of the, you know, humans, it would be compelled to reduce its military by 99.5 percent. And if it did that, I'd be glad to let it defend its behavior with whatever language it wanted.

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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