by Ian Hansen, PhD

A preamble on the logic of war and the logic of peace

There is a little-known statistic, hidden in an academic paper on another subject, relevant to the dangers of militarism. The statistic is that the more militarized a country is—the more of its population in the armed forces, the greater proportion of its GDP going to the military—the more refugees are likely to have fled that country, presumably in terror.  More militarized countries are also judged less free, in terms of civil liberties and political rights, by the organization Freedom House.  The same paper finds that the embrace of militarism, as a psychological proclivity, is so strongly correlated with the embrace of oppression and atrocity that the militarism-loving and oppression/atrocity-loving items form a single unified scale.  These findings together suggest that militaries tend to terrorize and traumatize people—sometimes foreign people, sometimes their own¹.

Even to the extent armed forces can be persuaded not to corrupt and betray civilian governance at home, adherence to Golden Rule morality still suggests that it is wrong to organize militaristic political economies.  Militaristic political economies tend to systematically impoverish and lie to some underclass of vulnerable young people and then, having seduced/coerced them, condition them to become more blasé about harming and killing other human beings en masse.  The world would do well to slough off such political economies, enlightened society by enlightened society. 

Nevertheless, too much attention to the evils of war can result in triggering deep-seated human intuitions that we need to wage our own organized violence to discourage, punish, or “manage” the war that’s already out there, or that might one day be.  Almost all nations and movements that inflict or prepare to inflict carnal, flesh-ripping war claim to be doing it for the sake of peace and/or justice.  Thus people—whether as ordinary individuals, commanding officers or heads of state—feel best about inflicting atrocities when they can plausibly assert the pretense that they are resisting or punishing other people’s atrocities.  The pattern that shows up repeatedly is (1) first we rage at the oppression and atrocity of others and then (2) we commit our own oppression and atrocity, rationalizing it as a justifiable excess to prevent/avenge excesses by the dreaded Them.  This pattern reflects an ensnarement in the logic of war.

To get caught up in the logic of peace instead, it helps to keep our eye on peace working, and not just on war being horror.  One place to look at long and hard if hoping to be caught up in a logic of peace is Kerala.  Kerala is a small, populous, and not nearly famous-enough state on the southwest tip of India. Peace there has arguably watered a soil in which more peace flourishes. Kerala, I will explore in subsequent posts, is living evidence that most, even all, the wars that humans have fought over the last hundred years have been murderously wasted effort.

Footnote

1. This was, in fact, a major reason that the Central American nation of Costa Rica abolished its own army in 1948—an example other nations, my own especially, would do well to follow.  Costa Rica is not the subject of this essay of course, but worth a mention in this context.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Behavioral Sciences Department at York College, City University of New York, with a research focus on social psychology, religion, ideology, tolerance, and support for peace and pluralism. His core research interest is investigating psychological “odd bedfellows” phenomena with regard to religion and ideology.  He is also an active member in Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and served as its 2017 president.