Editor's note: Today begins a 5-part series by Gazette Blog Columnist George Templeton entitled "The Problem of War."
Who is George Templeton?
I became the man of the house at age twelve, and was 100% on my own by the second semester of my first year, working my way through college. I studied electronics and physics. In college, I lived in a religious monastery. I met my wife when I was the sound engineer for a campus coffee house. It was love at first sight. America’s fear of the Russians founded my life in power electronics. I am guilty of destroying jobs and creating new ones through automation and overseas relocation. I ran the department of “arcs and sparks”. During my career I was a project manager and a scientist supporting international business. I experienced the evolution of computer math. I was one of two engineers starting a small company in America. I am an introvert, don’t like crowds, and I never participated in a demonstration. Now, my favorite recreation is watching the squirrels run up and down the tree.
The Problem of War, Part 1
By George Templeton
Gazette Columnist
My grandfather was a commander in the Veterans of Foreign Wars and an MP in the Philippine War. Imbued with the ethos of Teddy Roosevelt, he knew what it was to be a man. My father, an officer and aircraft mechanic, fought in Italy against Mussolini. His generation gave us international responsibility. I was unintended collateral damage. My mother died giving birth to me because antibiotics were going to the war front. My generation believed in the Emerald City, in Walt Disney’s future land, and that science, math, and an industrialized America could solve the world’s problems. Today many worship self-interest and fundamentalist religion that didn’t use to be political. They did not experience the military draft. But their war will be nuclear, an atrocity beyond the scale of comprehension. If we don’t change the game, it will eventually happen.
The Land of Oz extends far beyond the Emerald City. Our minds can revel further than the thing itself. It can be rewarding. I search for a pragmatic conception. Reference: Humanity, Jonathan Glover, 1999.
Morality
A professor of business ethics explained that the morality of an action depends on how things turn out! At the very least it seems to move judgment into the future. Do your things turn out because of their purpose or mechanism? How do you measure “right”? Rationality is more than math and logic. It also requires caring about the right things. Do you measure your goodness by how much others envy you? Do you grovel before majesty, hoping to ride its coattails?
Regardless, you have to choose. There isn’t anyone or anything that can help you with that. How you choose will shape the reality of your world and in some measure the reality of everyone else’s world.
We don’t have any choice about our history, our particular society, and our time. When we do not live authentically, we take all of these for granted. We accept without question momentarily popular conventions. But no choice is a choice. By default we select the kind of life we will lead and what our life’s meaning will be.
We have to pick carefully because our lives are limited. We have to pick goals that are achievable, not everything simultaneously. The chorus sings out, “That won’t fix things”. But every social problem must be solved one small step at a time. There is too much inertia for it to be otherwise.
Mental health professionals are working overtime to deal with hurricane damage. What will happen when nuclear Armageddon comes to our homeland?
Unpleasant things do not upset us when we look away. We have sympathy for those people, but not empathy. We can’t, don’t want to, feel their pain. What is more important, peace of mind or living a passionate life?
The news warned me to look away. It wanted to protect us from disturbing emotions. It showed war deaths. It did not warn me about the video of starving babies in Somalia. When we see the crimes of others we argue that our role was harmless. We excuse wicked heroes.
Does it have anything to do with democracy, war, sustainability, or the myth of “liberal progress”? Mankind’s history has been full of massacres, torture, and every imaginable cruelty. Our struggle for the right to exist goes beyond morality. The “Holy Spirit” may be present in man, but his saga exposes the fragility of civilized behavior.
Martin Puchner’s book, The Written World, credited the Communist Manifesto with shaping people, history, and civilization. Since the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Soviet regime has killed over 60 million people who disagreed. Centralized control required people to be the same and think the same. Hitler agreed, but he hated and feared the communists.
The Nazis wanted to exterminate “diseased” people so they could take their country back. The extinction of inferior people was just as moral as being “pro-life”. To restore Germany to a land of wild forest creatures having blue eyes, blond hair, and huge frames, they dehumanized Jews, promoted forced sterilization, and euthanatized mentally defective people. Their Aryan lineage showed that Jesus, who was a Jew, did not suffer from the common defects of his race. How could this happen?
The criterion of demarcation has been race, religion, politics, and sovereign nationalism. Never mind that physical chemistry has proven the inevitability of the force of diffusion. It exists between regions of higher and lower concentration. It exists socially because of communication, travel, commerce, and the discovery of alternative solutions to the challenge of life.
It traces back to the Council of Nicea in the year 325 C.E. Instead of simplifying the theory of Jesus, Christians made him into God. Then they blamed the Jews for killing him. Rome viewed them as being against nature itself and hating the whole human race. The Romans thought they were stronger and nobler than everyone.
What did the Jews do to deserve the simmering resentment of the world? They had to do something wrong to be forgiven! They were not. They were different. They needed the suppressed envy of the community they lived within to foster its hatred and self-abasement. Shaming proved Jewish rightness. Up became down. You see, Christianity won. The word was more powerful than the bomb, greater than self-interest.
Eugenics, the unproven pseudo-science of the time, held that dark skin, dark hair, and short skulls were aboriginal, not advanced in intellectual and social instinct like those of the godlike race, the Aryans.
The Egyptian bondage corrupted the Hebrews. They had guilt and “thou shalt not “as their ethos. They were cowards instead of conquerors. But they believed in the sanctity of human life, personal responsibility, marriage, and compassion for others. They were “soft”.
The meek would not inherit the earth. It would go to those having strong flavor, vigor, and curiosity. Good people had a “privileged aristocratic soul”. They were rich, noble, powerful, high-stationed masters, and high-minded commanders. They were heroes, unlike the mediocre, work-slave common man. They were not plebian and low. They defined themselves as “good” and that was proper, decent, and right-thinking, not merely useful. But that did not agree with the Judo-Christians who advocated universal human dignity including rascals, good-for-nothings, the poor, and the downtrodden.
The morality of the rise of the bomb and fall of the word traces back to Nietzsche’s 1887 Genealogy of Morals. It inspired Ann Rand’s 1964 Virtue of Selfishness motivating those in the business world who disregarded the concept of “win-win” and the fact that “The Worm Turns”.
There is no truth value in normative ethics. They are cultural and written by men. But the Judo-Christian ethos is the only bookish religion, dating back to the primeval period in 4000 B.C. God blesses the wretched, the suffering, and the deprived. It made the master race sick.
God’s Old Testament covenant was with the Jews. They became successful. The stage was set for envy’s primacy. The German public came to resent the Jews and finally took revenge. Eugenic pseudo-science said Jews were not so human. The world did not want them. They could not escape. There was enough blame to go around following the war to end all wars. It was easy for Hitler to scapegoat the Jews. Germany industrialized murder to exterminate six million of them as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t be the only genocide.
In 1949, Mao started the Chinese Great Leap Forward. He planned to create an idealistic socialistic economy that would eliminate poverty, improve health, liberate women, and educate his people. Between 1958 and 1962 it killed 30 million people. Mercy to the enemy was cruelty to the people.
Utopian societies and moral theories never seem to work out. Stephen Toulmin, the author of the 2001 book, Return to Reason, understood that abstract theory was never reasonable even when it was useful. We have to temper our theories with awareness of human consequences. How could hope replace our doubts?
No creature in nature has been so brutal. What is our excuse? Does our species have the latent morality necessary to overcome the evil lurking within us?
Is it limited to internal things like character, virtue, and individual actions which are the foundation of social responsibility and laws? Christ’s ethic was individualistic as was his culture. But the Bible speaks of the “Kingdom of God”, made “right” by the second coming, won by warfare with unwilling people.
Today, we rest upon a tipping point. Its sharpness comes from our clash of values, whether our neighbor is inherently good or bad, distrust, control by force, an unsustainable climate, economic sanctions, modern user-friendly nuclear bombs, and artificial intelligence. Some people want to save the world, but others insist that they will hurt the world. We believe in the “survival of the fittest”. We accept “me first and mostly me”. They are our justification. Bringing out and nourishing the worst in humanity becomes heroic when it is consonant with group identity.
Aren’t foreign affairs different than friendship between dictators? Aren’t countries different from people? Policy is not the same as loyalty. Things which are harmful to the individual can be moral and beneficial to society. Laws are necessary for people to live in groups.
Somehow, God gets into it all. It starts with philosophy, goes to science, to social conflict, and then to moral war theory.
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