different sides of the front-lines! Although tolerance, friendship and love are indispensable values they are not enough. We must also teach our children critical thinking and an analytical world view. We must help them to see through political propaganda and peace rhetoric. And most important we must understand and help our children to understand that large groups of people behave differently from single persons. States don't start to fight because they don't like each other. You cannot use psychology to explain the behaviour of states or tribes or companies or religious communities because such organisations are composed of many individuals with different psychologies, different world views, different interests and a very limited knowledge of what the other members of the group are up to. The behaviour of the group is determined by the behaviour of all its members, but the outcome may be completely different from anything any single member of the group has been trying to achieve. As an example I wrote this story.
Report to the Council of the United Solar Systems sums up all of the themes, and maybe it is what the blue boy discovered during the years he studied the blue planet, while gazing through the telescope.
Yer is Turkish and means Earth. Nin is Jpanese and means person. Wojna is Polish and means of course war.
It was at the same workshop in the Oetz valley that I wrote the first drafts of this story. The children were encouraged to ask me for stories, and one girl, who coincidentally shares my last name and whose first name is Nina, brought me a note that said, “Martin, please tell me why there are wars.” The story is based, among other things, on the research of Lewis Mumford (The Myth of the Machine), but naturally also on my own reflections.
I used to think that there had been a time when humankind did not know war. When I read Jane Goodall’s account of a war between chimpanzees, I had to revise this opinion. Even in the age of the hunters and gatherers it was possible that one band had to find new hunting grounds and in the process got into a conflict with another band. But after the other band had been driven away, the war was over. Wars could happen, but they were not a critical component of the culture. It was not until the advent of agriculture, with plant cultivation and domesticated livestock, that people were able to store supplies and so even had time for military campaigns. As for the vanquished, these supplies were something that could be stolen without necessarily destroying those who had been robbed. War became a permanent institution because it was a means to gather together the surpluses of smaller groups of people and to invest them in strategies that resulted in an increase in productivity, i.e., in the production of even more surpluses that again could be invested in progress. And this was a far more effective means of subsistence than negotiations or free confederations would have been. The motivations of the individuals in power or of the warriors were less important. In nature, characteristics like horns, for example, arise by means of chance mutations. Whether the horns remain or disappear depends on whether they give their bearer a reproductive advantage or are a hindrance. A tribal chief might start a war out of hatred of his neighbor, for reasons of prestige, for religious reasons, because of pure arrogance, because of built-up aggression, because of sexual frustration, whatever. But war is able to persist as a permanent institution because of several factors: first, it promotes the congregation of people in large empires, and thus it makes gathering surpluses possible. Secondly, because it takes away more surpluses from a large portion of these people than they would be willing to invest in the common cause or in the future. And finally war persists because it promotes “progress” in the form of increased productivity of human labor. An advantage to society does not, however, have to be an advantage to the individual. A community of 500 free farming families would have been happier than an army of 100,000 farming families under the rule of a warrior chief. But only the empire of a warrior chief could afford a capital city with temples and schools for priests where the movements of the stars are studied.
The aggression that humans are capable of is certainly a precondition for wars being waged in the first place, but it is not the cause. Were the young men in Austria-Hungary more aggressive in 1914 than say in 1880? Or did the Kaiser become more aggressive in his later years? Often people’s aggressiveness and hatred of their neighbors must be stirred up in order for them to be ready to go to war or let their children go. Often though, the aggressiveness of soldiers has to be curbed. Whereas, on the one hand, some humans are trained for special units to be fiends, as for example the Green Berets in Vietnam, a modern army needs foremost people who are disciplined and who function reliably; that is, people who let themselves be governed by emotions as little as possible. The human being’s capacity for coolly objective and dispassionate action is, perhaps, even more dangerous than his capacity for aggression. As important as are all the pedagogical efforts that serve to reduce aggression, promote understanding of foreign cultures, teach the ability to solve personal conflicts peacefully, none of these measures can eliminate the causes of war. The industrial market economy that today controls the social structure on our planet is concerned (as no previous social structure has been) with increasing productivity, with producing ever more goods requiring ever less work, and investing the surpluses immediately in increased production and productivity. This not only leads to the fact that we will soon be reaching the limit of what the planet can stand ecologically. Here also lies the root of new wars. It is said that the wars of the future could be fought over ever decreasing resources, e.g., water. That is conceivable. But it is just as conceivable that future wars will be waged between the giant multi-national economic conglomerations, and that they will be about who may sell what to whom.
The important difference is this: A conflict about resources can be resolved. Let us say, the conflict is about water. Such a conflict can be resolved in different ways: One of the competing parties may conquer the resource for themselves and leave the others to starve or to flee. Or they may destroy the other party more or less completely by direct violence. Or the war reduces the population on both sides until the combined population is small enough for the existing water supply. But the conflict can also be resolved if new sources of water can be found, for instance by digging deeper wells, by desalinating sea water; or by inventing methods to save water and reduce its consumption. Conflicts about resources can be the cause of the most terrible, most cruel wars, even of genocide. But conflicts about resources are finite. And it is always possible to at least think of a peaceful way to resolve a conflict about resources. Whereas the war that is caused by the necessity - not the wish, the necessity - to expand the empire, to acquire new markets, to concentrate more surplus, is inherent in the structure of exploitative societies and is infinite.
To avoid future wars, six billion – and soon it will be seven and eight billion – people will have to agree on new economies and social structures. Only when they know something about one another and act with each other in mind, can people avoid increasing the harm to all by seeking only their own advantage. No longer can the goal be to constantly raise productivity – to produce ever more goods with ever less work; the exchange of things should not be the main content of interpersonal affairs. The fact that things can be produced with less and less labor should not lead to ever more things being produced. Instead it should lead to people being able to use the freed-up time to exchange social services with each other: art, entertainment, care giving, healing, education, research, sports, philosophy …
For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, “of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods;” if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.
Aristotle
Don’t you think we have reached that point?
###
Liked the book? Why don’t you post a review on:
About
the Author
Martin Auer was born in 1951 in Vienna, Austria. He attended university but never really studied anything there. He was an actor, a musician, a singer-songwriter, a teacher, a journalist, a stage magician, a copy-writer for public relations agencies. His first book was published in 1986, and since then he has been a free lance writer. By now he has published over 40 books, among them childrens books which have won various awards and have been translated into several different languages. “For his services to the republic of Austria” he was made an honorary professor in 2005.
Martin Auer is the father of a grown up daughter, grandfather of two somewhat younger children and the father of a little daughter. He lives in Vienna and has no pets.
Martin Auer’s homepage:
https://www.martinauer.net/
Martin Auer on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/martin.auer
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends