Mesa Legend - ARCHIVES - Vol. 40, Issue 9


Volume 40, Issue 9. Today is .

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Volume 40, Issue 9.
February 4, 2003

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Legend's View

Utopia starts with you

We are on the brink of war, which usually is the final step in a long process of deliberation and critical thinking, exhausting any other possible options in the face of a greater evil.

It takes some very substantial reasoning to justify war and the time spent arguing and talking does not always prevent mass violence, but the communication definitely functions as a veil for war, often pawning it off as an authentically civilized action.

“But why do we do it, and
can we exist without war? . . .
we must start planning
a sustainable global structure
that has the ultimate goal
of allevating suffering and war.”

War is not civilized, not that anyone should have trouble realizing that the intentional killing of any human could become close to being considered a civil act.

But why do we do it, and can we exist without war?

There is the ever popular ideal that war and violence in general are an ingrained piece of our creature-hood and this assertion is used very often and is an almost effortless case to make.

Evolutionary scientists and anthropologists sometimes proclaim that innate violent tendencies have been the end result after years of competing within our environment for food, water and other resources.

With aggression, violence and war scathing the pages of human history, one could, with little cognition, wholeheartedly believe that war is inevitable. From the ancient wars of Greece to the days of our own country’s Civil War, mass violence has become a staple of humanity.

Jonathan Haas, anthropologist, points out that there is no evidence of warfare or organized violence during the first 10,000 years that people inhabited the North American continent. Maybe it is possible that war is not inevitable, granted that prehistoric times are so drastically different than modern civilization that there is little correlation.

But the idea that for 10,000 years there was no mass violence of any kind on this continent may shine some hope on the possibility of a war-less Earth. What if the draw to violence is a natural effect of being human and that any inequality of resources between nations and communities leads to aggression and eventually violence? If this is true we probably only have two choices; either follow the path to continued conflict and possibly lead to the annihilation of our own species by furthering our weapons capability to ridiculous proportions or perhaps it is time to go beyond our animal selves with some sort of ideological evolution.

Do not mistake this idea with any sort of straight pacifism because there is no way to just stop fighting any time in the near future, but we must start planning a sustainable global structure that has the ultimate goal of alleviating suffering and war.

Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic, became alarmed after seeing the first atomic bomb dropped and called for the need of a peaceable global plan.

It’s not to say that it is by any means easy to try to bring peace to the world and any type of reform would take centuries to enact but something must at least begin.

Scholars at in all areas from many nations could get together and come up with possibilities. Who knows what greatest minds of our time might come up with when they are all thrown together in one place?

As we advance down the road that Russell described decades ago, it is almost a challenge not to see the need for a more sustainable political technique than trying to just stave off the next act of global violence.

If this idea of a peaceful globe seems like a farfetched fantasy, which of course it very well may be, then the idea of humanity stretching far into the future may also be a fantasy.