My mother is the youngest of 13 children, 6 boys, 7 girls. When her siblings would fight, her mother would set two hardback chairs facing each other a few feet apart and tie the miscreants to the seats. Then she left the room, and the antagonists had no option but to sit and stare at each other until they worked out an amicable solution. My mother claims this was hugely successful, often culminating with the siblings laughing together at how ridiculous they looked. Perhaps they ought to try this at the UN. Let's tie Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a couple of chairs and let them stare at each other until they laugh. It may take awhile, but how long have we tried sanctions and peace talks?
Benjamin Britten may have agreed with me (I can't be certain as I am not skilled in communicating with the dead). Britten was born in 1913 in England and saw firsthand the devastating effects of war. In 1961 he was commissioned to compose a work for the dedication of the Coventry Cathedral, rebuilt after being destroyed in the bombings of World War II. He composed the War Requiem, a massive piece for choir, boys choir, orchestra, chamber orchestra, and soloists. For the text he used the traditional Latin text interspersed with poems by Wilfred Owen. Owen was a soldier and poet in World War I. He was killed by a sniper one week before the war's end. With lines such as "Out there, we've walked quite friendly up to death, sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland" Owen paints a clear picture of the tragedy of war, the cost of so much life left on the battlefield. Britten's musical and textual choices reveal his pacifist leanings and his moral objection to war. Listen to the Dies Irae ("this day of wrath"). The insistent, aggressive brass motives, the percussive singing, all portray a bleak picture of war's devastation.
So the question remains; War, what is it good for? As Edwin Starr sings it, "Absolutely nothin'!" I think that's a little extreme. War appears to be necessary for stopping the occasional megalomaniac, like Hitler, perhaps. However, humankind can put man on the moon and robots on Mars. We can genetically alter crops, treat diseases that were fatal 50 years ago, save infants born 10 weeks prematurely, build skyscrapers, electric cars, ever faster and smaller computers, create symphonies, poems, and paintings, and yet we cannot stop killing each other. There has to be a better way. It's time to follow my Grandmother's example. Who's got a couple of chairs?
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| Benjamin Britten |
As defined by one think tank or another, war is a complex activity involving forces of more than 1,000, in which people are killed violently. Believe it or not, there were fewer wars thus defined per year during the Cold War than afterward. On a large scale, war has many benefits and advantages including (depending on the time period in question) the development of useful ideas or technology and the acquisition of more land, resources and even women for the stronger party. Not only that, but many gain in honor and reputation through their battlefield exploits. The camaraderie and entrainment of troops in the practice of war and its preparations provide lifelong relationships and habits that can be advantageous to the soldier. Death, of course, is a drawback for the individual, but massive loss of life has not proven to be so bad for the human race as a whole. Even after losing millions upon millions during the 20th century, demographers argue that the population growth on the planet was not significantly retarded. The survivors, however, tend to be haunted spiritually and emotionally by their experience in war, and who can tabulate the true costs of war in terms of domestic abuse, suicide, alcoholism, depression, criminal violence, and the night terrors that ring down through the generations because of the individual experiences with war? To answer the question of why we continue to engage in wars, I think there are two interrelated answers. We wage war because the men in leadership positions continue to see war as a viable tool for accomplishing their objectives. And we wage war because we are biologically impelled to agree to go and fight when our leaders decree it necessary, no matter how intellectually or morally opposed we might be as a society to that war. We fight wars because no one seems to not want to fight wars.
ReplyDeleteWell said. As I was preparing this blog my son said, "Mom, wars are good for economic growth and just think of all the cool stuff the military builds." He wants to be an aeronautical engineer and design fighter jets. I would like to have the benefits without the death. Hugh Nibley said many times that wars are fought so that someone can get rich, and wherever there is war, someone is making a pile of money. I agree with you, for some reason human beings like to fight. That at least explains football ;)
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