4 February 2007: Clear skies, ice cold.

It’s not my line, but it sure is eye-catching. Wasted effect, probably, as reproduced for my own brief commentary on an article you may have already read in today’s New York Times. David Bell asserts, in a piece entitled “The Peace Paradox,” that “the idea that warfare might actually end ha[s] a paradoxical effect, for it destroy[s] any rationale for waging war with restraint.”

He notes historical instances in which war has been prematurely declared obsolete; thus the ensuing disillusion. Although Bell may not fully endorse it, his critique strikes at the very heart of “progress” by suggesting that perpetration of horrors like Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition is a natural extension of utopian thinking. This descent into irrational and unrestrained warfare, at least on the part of Western society, is an indirect result of the Enlightenment itself.

As Bell writes, the “Enlightenment creed of secular human progress” anticipated an age of reason in which war would become patently unnecessary as a means to ensure national security. What it also gave birth to, as the author notes, were utopian dreams of a single civilization, unified by Reason. What the Enlightenment made possible, and what I think most destructive, is the perverted logic that endorses monocultural domination of the globe in the interests of utopian “peace,” potent irony in light of similarities to religious fanaticism.

E. O. Wilson, listing seven distinguished categories of innate human aggression, describes aggression “in defense and conquest of territory” and as a “defensive counterattack against predators.” Neither seems to adequately explain the current state of affairs. Another, the “moralistic and disciplinary aggression used to enforce the rules of society,” is what best characterizes “war on terror” rhetoric and perhaps the underlying motivations as well.

Within a given society, the rules enforced through disciplinary aggression go unspoken; they are understood. But extensive aggressive actions abroad and regular violations of the international code of war cannot be justified by reference to internal value systems unless the aggressor believes itself supported by Reason. A universal extension/imposition of normative values precedes unrestrained warfare. Right makes Might right.

What is needed is a new, post-Enlightenment concept of “peace.” To seriously consider the absence of all international hostilities a possibility is unreasonable. Wilson might suggest interlinking political and cultural ties as closely as possible as a disincentive to aggression. I would agree with him that a tendency to aggression has biological roots, yet can be culturally tempered. It is the belief that human aggression can be bred out through determined application of Reason that must go.

“It’s a war on war. . . . You have to lose. You have to learn how to die.” – Wilco