We are a loving species
04/20/2010

A few weeks ago I had the serendipitous fortune to meet former Army Captain and West Point graduate Paul Chappell, who served in Iraq and who, upon his discharge, wrote a recently published little book, "Will War Ever End?  A Soldier's Vision for Peace in the 21st Century."

Chappell draws on the work of Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, whose book “On Killing” is required reading at institutions as diverse as the FBI Academy, the peace studies programs at UC Berkeley and Quaker and Mennonite colleges, West Point, and the U.S. Marine Corps Commandant's "Required Reading List."  Grossman’s research reveals that killing traumatizes 98% of soldiers.  The only 2% it DOESN’T traumatize is those who were already traumatized by their life experiences.  If war and violence were human nature, killing would not traumatize us.

Chappell draws a distinction between fury and rage.  Rage is mindless; it easily escalates into violence.  He likens fury, however, to the roar of a bear or the rattle of a rattlesnake: it’s meant as a warning to prevent further harm.  (Grossman calls this behavior "posturing.")  It is activated when our loved ones are (or we believe they are) threatened, but it is satisfied when the perceived threat is withdrawn.  Unfortunately, we are too easily manipulated by our leaders into believing that our loved ones (our “interests”) are threatened, when more likely it is THEIR (financial or political) interests that are threatened.  George Orwell, who was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, said that “One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariable from people who are not fighting.” 

As Chappell cautions, the problem with believing that violence is human nature is that we are not then likely to view war “as a disaster that we are powerful enough to prevent; instead it is seen as an integral part of life that we are helpless to stop.”  But Gen. Omar Bradley, a veteran of WWII, was convinced that “Wars can be prevented just as surely as they are provoked, and therefore we who fail to prevent them share in guilt for the dead.”

We need to stop saying that war is inevitable because we are a violent species.  We need to say instead that war is as barbaric and outmoded an institution as slavery was, because we are an intelligent species, a cooperative species, a loving species, a species that will even give our lives for others.  Or, in the words of former Commander in Chief Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intelligent and decent purpose ...[because] every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  The cost of one modern [sic] heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.  It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000.  It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.  We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people.  ...This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.  Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Consciousness is causal.  Now that we know, we know we can do better.