War And Peace, Life, And The Apocalypse

ObbeObbe Regular
edited July 2010 in Spurious Generalities
Some thought provoking quotes on the subject:
For those of us who enjoy such things, the twentieth century has, in its unfolding, presented mankind with an array of behavioral paradoxes and moral conundrums hitherto unimagined and perhaps unimaginable. Science, traditional enemy of mysticism and religion, has taken on a growing understanding that the model of the universe suggested by quantum physics differs very little from the universe that Taoists and other mystics have existed for centuries. Large numbers of young people, raised in rigidly structured and industrially oriented cultures, violently reject industrialism and seek instead some modified version of the agricultural lifestyle that their forebears (debatably) enjoyed, including extended communal families and in some instances a barter economy in miniature. Children starve while boots costing many thousands of dollars leave their mark upon the surface of the moon. We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.

It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace. This dichotomy is not an invention of the twentieth century, yet it is this century that the most striking examples of this phenomena have appeared. Never before has man pursued global harmony more vocally while amassing stockpiles of weapons so devastating in their effect. The second world war - we were told - was The Was To End Wars. The development of the atomic bomb is the Weapon To End Wars.

And yet wars continue. Currently, no nation on this planet is not involved in some form of armed struggle, if not against its neighbors then against internal forces. Furthermore, as ever-escalating amounts of money are poured into the pursuit of the specific weapon or conflict that will bring lasting peace, the drain on economies creates a rundown urban landscape where crime flourishes and people are concerned less with national security than with the simple personal security needed to stop at the store late at night for a quart of milk without being mugged. The places we struggled so viciously to keep safe are becoming increasingly dangerous. The wars to end wars, the weapons to end weapons, these things have failed us.

- Watchmen
Now I suppose if we looked at ourselves from that microscopic point of view, all these funny creatures that are running around us that don't look like people, would if you got used to them seem like people. And they would be having their problems. They've got all sorts of fights going on, and collaborations and conspiracies and so on. But if they weren't doing that, we wouldn't be healthy. If the various corpuscles and cells in our blood stream weren't fighting each other, we would drop dead. And that's a sobering thought, that war at one level of being can bring peace and health at another.

- Alan Watts

Thoughts?

Comments

  • HippieTrippieHippieTrippie Regular
    edited July 2010
    Well, I have to disagree with Mr. Watts there. I think the best system has no conflicts, but conflicts bring excitement and depth to a conscious level of life.
  • ObbeObbe Regular
    edited July 2010
  • TransienceTransience Acolyte
    edited July 2010
    I guess the next natural question to ask is, what is the function of the system that consists of us? From the inside it all looks chaotic, its hard to imagine some kind of harmony present on a larger scale.

    I don't know if that analogy really works with the present state of the world, I could understand if someone made that claim about nature. All the animals, plants, fungi and other organisms struggling for the dominance of a niche manage to create a natural balance. But I don't see that with human societies at all.

    This reminds me of the Law of Eristic Escalation, which states: Imposition of order = escalation of chaos. Perhaps the reason the world is so chaotic is because we keep trying to enforce order, whereas in nature nobody has the ability to impose order, and so it occurs spontaneously out of the chaos.
  • CaesarCaesar Regular
    edited July 2010
    Conflict and order could be seen as an evolutionary nessesity in itself. Human history could be what gets us to a certain point of technological and information density quickest, and now the next step is either to let individuals retake the reins of evolution away from ideologies or bureaucracy, or it could be that we become a collective hive-mind we are already teetering on at the moment.

    Evolution is all about increasing levels or novelty and maybe the quickest rout to that is 4000-8000 years of imposed order and bloodshed. In any larger sense I would say we have only the bare illusion of order anyway.
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