|
SECTION 4
War and Peace as Social Systems
We
have dealt only sketchily with proposed disarmament scenarios and economic
analyses, but the reason for our seemingly casual dismissal of so much serious
and sophisticated work lies in no
disrespect for its competence.
It
is rather a question of relevance.
To
put it plainly, all these program, however detailed and well developed, are
abstractions. The most carefully reasoned disarmament sequence inevitably
reads more like the rules of a game or a classroom exercise in logic than
like a prognosis of real events in the real world. This is as true of today’s
complex proposals as it was of the Abbe de St. Pierre’s "Plan for
Perpetual Peace in Europe" 250 years ago.
Some essential element has clearly been lacking in all these schemes. One of
our first tasks was to try to bring this missing quality into definable
focus, and we believe we have succeeded in doing so. We find that at the
heart of every peace study we have examined - from the modest technological
proposal (e.g., to convert a poison gas plant to the production of
"socially useful" equivalents) to the most elaborate scenario for
universal peace in our time - lies one common fundamental misconception. It
is the source of the miasma of unreality surrounding such plans. It is the
incorrect assumption that war, as an institution, is subordinate to the
social systems it is believed to serve.
This misconception, although profound and far-reaching, is entirely
comprehensible. Few social cliches are so unquestioningly accepted as the
notion that war is an extension of diplomacy (or of politics, or of the
pursuit of economic objectives).
If
this were true, it would be wholly appropriate for economists and political
theorists to look on the problems of transition to peace as essentially
mechanical or procedural - as indeed they do, treating them as logistic
corollaries of the settlement of national conflicts of interest. If this were
true, there would be no real substance to the difficulties of transition.
For
it is evident that even in today’s world there exists no conceivable conflict
of interest, real or imaginary, between nations or between social forces
within nation, that cannot be resolved without recourse to war - if such
resolution were assigned a priority of social value. And if this were true,
the economic analyses and disarmament proposals we have referred to,
plausible and well conceived as they may be, would not inspire, as they do,
an inescapable sense of indirection.
The point is that the cliché is not true, and the problems of transition are
indeed substantive rather than merely procedural.
Although
war is "used" as an instrument of national and social policy, the
fact that a society is organized for any degree of readiness for war
supersedes its political and economic structure. War itself is the basic
social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization
conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human
societies of record, as it is today.
Once this is correctly understood, the true magnitude of the problems
entailed in a transition to peace - itself a social system, but without
precedent except in a few simple preindustrial societies - becomes apparent.
At
the same time, some of the puzzling superficial contradictions of modern
societies can then be readily rationalized.
· the
"unnecessary" size and power of the world war industry
· the
preeminence of the military establishment in every society, whether open or
concealed
· the
exemption of military or paramilitary institutions from the accepted social
and legal standards for behavior required elsewhere in the society
· the
successful operation of the armed forces and the armaments producers entirely
outside the framework of each nation’s economic ground rules
· these
and other ambiguities closely associated with the relationship of war to
society are easily clarified, once the priority of war-making potential as
the principal structuring force in society is accepted
Economic
systems, political philosophies, and corpora jures serve and extend the war
system, not vice versa.
It must be emphasized that the precedence of a society’s war-making potential
over its other characteristics is not the result of the "threat"
presumed to exist at any one time from other societies. This is the reverse
of the basic situation; "threats" against the "national
interest" are usually created or accelerated to meet the changing needs
of the war system.
Only
in comparatively recent times has it been considered politically expedient to
euphemize war budgets as "defense" requirements.
The
necessity for governments to distinguish between "aggression" (bad)
and "defense" (good) has been a by-product of rising literacy and
rapid communication. The distinction is tactical only, a concession to the
growing inadequacy of ancient war-organizing political rationales.
Wars are not "caused" by international conflicts of interest.
Proper logical sequence would make it more often accurate to say that
war-making societies require - and thus bring about - such conflicts.
The
capacity of a nation to make war expresses the greatest social power it can
exercise; war-making, active or contemplated, is a matter of life and death
on the greatest scale subject to social control. It should therefore hardly
be surprising that the military institutions in each society claim its
highest priorities.
We find further that most of the confusion surrounding the myth that
war-making is a tool of state policy stems from a general misapprehension of
the functions of war. In general, these are conceived as: to defend a nation
from military attack by another, or to deter such an attack; to defend or
advance a "national interest" - economic, political, ideological;
to maintain or increase a nation’s military power for its own sake.
These
are the visible, or ostensible, functions of war. If there were no others,
the importance of the war establishment in each society might in fact decline
to the subordinate level it is believed to occupy. And the elimination of war
would indeed be the procedural matter that the disarmament scenarios suggest.
But there are other, broader, more profoundly felt functions of war in modern
societies. It is these invisible, or implied, functions that maintain
war-readiness as the dominant force in our societies.
And
it is the unwillingness or inability of the writers of disarmament scenarios
and reconversion plans to take them into account that has so reduced the
usefulness of their work, and that has made it seem unrelated to the world we
know.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment