Protesting war useless against biology

AUSTIN, Texas -- Do you enjoy holding up colorful signs with catchy slogans like "An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind," or "Give Peace a Chance?" Do you spend a good deal of your time worrying about the innocent Afghan civilians whose lives are destroyed by U.S. bombs? Do you harbor a grand hope that someday your efforts will bring about world peace? Stop.

Go home and drink a beer, because your actions are as effective as trying to stop a tank with a toothpick. As a great man once said, "If we could just get everyone to close their eyes and visualize world peace for an hour, imagine how serene and quiet it would be until the looting started."

There will never be world peace. The concept exists on the same cognitive level as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and Pegasus. Not once in the past 3.8 billion year history of life on this planet has the world been at peace. There have been brief periods of less fighting, but never peace.

Conflict is essential to organic life -- from the first bacteria that devoured its neighbor for the valuable nutrients within, to packs of velociraptors slashing at the soft underbellies of their prey, to birds fighting each other for territory and mating privileges, all the way to Homo sapiens fighting over the conflict du jour.

The nature and complexity of our strife matches our nature as a highly intelligent and adaptable species. What need have we of claws and fangs when swords and F-16s do so much more damage? We have never left the jungle; it just changes form along with us. So long as people breathe, they will fight.

Peace is only possible between relative power equals who have something substantial to gain from each other by abstaining from conflict. We form our alliances based on mutual self-interest; when this ceases to hold, conflict arises. When the relationship of power is severely asymmetrical, it is in the interest of the stronger to conquer the weaker. The lion will never lie down with the lambs.

We will continue to bomb Afghanistan until it is no longer in our interest to do so. We will conquer the Taliban and attempt to set up a pro-U.S. government that will give us an additional strategic position in an area that is our jugular, through which flows oil -- our lifeblood.

Though we will eventually take out bin Laden's organization, we will never wipe out "terrorism." It is a tactic that has been used for thousands of years in various forms and guises.

We will, however, take vengeance upon those who dared to assault us. When your enemy has destroyed your sight in one eye, do you really wish to let him see out of two? We will not only blind those governments who harbor filth, we will have them drawn and quartered. Mercy is not an option.

And yes, some civilians will die. This is war. Victory is our objective, not sportsmanship. We will continue to take out military targets. If civilians happen to be in the way, well, too bad for them. Every war has civilian casualties, and the Afghan citizens in this war have it easier than many others. We no longer sack cities old-school style, with our warriors pillaging and raping everything in sight. We do not enslave the conquered populace, nor sacrifice them to our gods. Though the areas around our smart bombs will be devastated, the cities won't be razed.

War in the Middle East/Central Asia has been no stranger to atrocities. In one of the early Crusades, the streets of Jerusalem literally ran knee deep with Arab and Jewish blood, and the Mongols would pile the severed heads of their defeated enemies outside the gates of cities they conquered. Comparatively, our conduct in this war has been extremely civilized.

So, put down your signs, you're just wasting your time. You may as well protest the law of gravity. So long as there are limited resources, there will be strife. Cooperation is a viable strategy, but only when there is greater advantage to be realized by working together. We have nothing to gain from the Taliban and the insects that swarm under their rule, and much to lose if they are not squashed. Nations will never beat their swords into plowshares and men will learn war forevermore.

Here, quite literally, is an ultimate statist argument. It has always been, so it will always be.

It is odd that you would say that, for those who believe in the perfectability of Man, as you apparently do, are always the statists in a society. That's because it is not possible to get human beings to approach perfection without using force. Those who instinctively know in which direction humans must "evolve" in order to become perfect are always the ones agitating for a larger state, for it is only through state power that the Anointed Ones can force their fellow citizens in the direction of perfection. The non-smoking, tofu-eating, recycler who always follows the guidance of his betters is not a product of evolution, but of force majeure. So was Communist Man, who still hadn't appeared after 50 years of whip-cracking and option removal at the hands of people who thought they were engineering Utopia.

By contrast, political conservatives usually start from an assumption that is much more humble, a belief that while we are remarkable creatures, we are not equipped to comprehend extremely complex systems like societies and economies. We can tinker on the margins, but any large-scale attempt to "re-invent society" or to choose the direction of human evolution is likely to produce more grief than good, for the simple reason that we really don't know what we're doing. People who start with this assumption are inherently suspicious of state power, for it is often used by people who think otherwise to institute various programs and pogroms to make things "better," if not perfect. These schemes invariably end up turning into Southeast Los Angeles or Cabrini Green, if not Stalin's Russia or Pol Pot's Cambodia.

Most conservatives would view your statement here that we can be changed into peaceful philosophers as a form of hubris... a playing at being God that could only be the height of foolishness. We "know," in a way that you know otherwise, that we humans lack the capacity to understand and engineer large chaotic social systems. We can barely comprehend three dimensions; four is out of the question for most people, and ten or eleven is impossible for even the Einsteins and the Hawkings. Social systems involve dozens or even hundreds of dimensions. Tinkering with two or three in the hopes of producing a desired result is almost certain to create massive amounts of unintended consequence, which in fact is what we see when would-be social engineers are allowed to practice their craft in even limited ways.

In following some of your posts, it is my observation that you do not understand what your fundamental assumptions are that lead you to the conclusions you reach. The note I'm responding to is a perfect example of you doing that.

I think that if you read either Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions or Vision of the Anointed, you would gain greater understanding of where you fit in the political continuum. Once you gain that, I think you will come to the conclusion that your participation here is likely to be a continuously frustrating, almost maddening experience for you, and that there are other forums out there where you would not be quite so out of place.

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