Man, The Belligerent Animal

Why cannot Man learn from the past and live together in peace with his brothers without erupting into the lethal violence of a cataclysmic war every now and then? Should not Man make use of his reason and discuss thorny matters with his opponents in a context of persuasive rationality by sitting down at a table before beating on the war drum? (Now read the footnote at the end of this post.) There are some elementary reasons related to the lack of socio-economic essentials and socio-cultural privileges that are suffered by one group of men that leads them to wage war over another. For example, if 500 men do not get enough to eat and are surrounded by 10,000 who gorge themselves every night, it is highly probable that the former will be antagonised against the latter, and will launch into some sort of warfare sooner or later.

More generally, however, Men go to war against one another because there are two states of socio-political existence that they cannot endure : one is that of Too Much Difference (TMD) and the other is that of Too Much Similarity (TMS).

When some Men realise that there are people at their frontiers who are very different from them in social habits and behaviour, cultural practices, economic dealings, and religious customs, this knowledge of radical difference fills them with a deep anxiety, and fuelled by this insecurity of TMD they are propelled to initiate a campaign of war against their neighbours. This is done so as to obliterate the perceived differences and bring their defeated ('uncivilised') opponents and themselves under the more stable ('civilised') canopy of beliefs and practices that will be, it is claimed, immediately transparent and recognisable to everyone. This is why Men will expend so much effort in ensuring that there is nobody in their midst who bears any resemblance, physiologically or culturally, to the foreigners across the boundaries, and if any such people do exist will demand of them that they make an explicit denial of any supposed connections with their hated outsiders.

This does not mean, however, that with the annihilation of all differences, significant or niggling, Men can thereafter live together in a condition of Arcadian peace, for the removal of distinguishing marks only seizes Men with a new sort of anxiety, this time that of TMS. Men simply cannot live together in a state where they find themselves too similar to one another, and indeed so tiresome and insipid this drab homogeneity becomes for them that they will rather stir up some trouble with one another than linger on with their monotonous existence. In this manner, one thing, as we say, will lead to another, and before we are aware of it, some Men will have come together to form an alliance against the others in their own midst, and the conditions will then be ripe for the outbreak of another conflagration of war. In other words, even when there are no genuine irreconciliable differences among themselves, Men will ingenuously invent them (or excavate them from the forgotten past) with the belief that they are doing this in order to spice up their lives for Saturday evening gossip, not realising that there is a slippery slope that may drag them down from their desire for a bit of weekend jousting to their justification for a full-scale war.

(Footnote : I write here specifically about Men, and whether or not this analysis applies to Women is for you to say.)