The philosophy of war.

This always happens to me Fresco, but I grabbed one line and rolled it over in my mind. "a fated fact of the universe".

I heard a climatologist observe that when the weather is at extremes, that is when a nation become war-like.

If war were due to cosmic forces, all species would be at war and not just primates. Other animals kill for food and mates but do not wage ideological wars or attempt to exterminate other groups.

Personally, I think that wars are the result of an overabundance of testosterone in the individuals who start them. Women rarely organize their children into armies and send them into battle against their neighbors over imagined offenses.

rarely, but not unheard of; there is a culpability in not interfering with a process that one sees as 'wrong' which in law is frequently accompanied by the same penalty as that proscribed for the perpetrator.
In actual human impact from the effects of war, the female victims are frequently emotionally, far more severely 'damaged' than the males who lose only their lifes that they have demonstrated were relatively worthless to them anyway (if seen on a par with those of the 'enemy').

BoGoWo, are women culpable even if they had no power to stop wars?

I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier

Ten million soldiers to the war have gone,
Who may never return again.
Ten million mothers' hearts must break,
For the ones who died in vain.
Head bowed down in sorrow in her lonely years,
I heard a mother murmur through her tears:

Chorus:
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It's time to lay the sword and gun away,
There'd be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier.

What victory can cheer a mother's heart,
When she looks at her blighted home?
What victory can bring her back,
All she cared to call her own?
Let each mother answer in the year to be,
Remember that my boy belongs to me!

(Chorus)

Source: Al Pianadosi and Alfred Bryan, "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier," 1915

Terry, do you have children? Was that YOUR son in the 9/11 poem? (which was powerful, incidentally)

Letty, thank you, and yes, I have 2 kids. My son is now 23 and thankfully stayed in college instead of enlisting or being drafted. Thousands of mothers weren't so lucky.

Well, Terry, I guessed incorrectly, and I apologize for that. Nothing further need be said, and I am truly thankful that your son chose college.
The only exception that I can see in warrior women, was in the Sparta of long ago.

I still remember with clarity your "Woman in the Sunset".

As for the "philosophy" of war, Fresco, I only know what others have observed. Patton truly believed himself to be a reincarnated Spartan.

MacArthur was the consummate actor who was marvelous during reconstruction.

and now we have Kerry and Bush validating the military hero. What to do--what to think.

War
War is a human's necessity for satisfying envy and the ultimate desire for power and control. It is in our instincts, after food, flight, and sex.

Quote, ".... the males who lose only their lifes..." Is a mouth full to be sure. The "only" is the price we pay for being a man.

"War is Hell."

Thats one of the shortest quotes I know of, but one of the best. It says it all. Seems so short and simple, but it says so much.

I believe war is as close to Hell personified as can be created on earth.

Its Hell for everyone involved. Its Hell to watch it.

You want to see what Hell is like? Go sign up for the infantry in a raging war.

I don't know that it can be argued its a worse Hell for one person than another.

"I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine.
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard
the shrieks and groans of the wounded
who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.
War is hell." -William Sherman

You're right, extra medium. I think that's why Sherman used the scorched earth policy in the Civil War. What seemed so horrible at the time, was really a quickening. We have our own private battlefields, do we not?

Fresco is rather dilatory. Hope he didn't get drafted. <smile>

(I'll probably get flamed for this one, but just putting it out there as for food for thought as much as anything).

On the other hand, I do get a bit weary of females who seem to condescendingly sort of blame all war 100% on men, and seem to indicate its all men's fault and they even say stuff like "we women would never do something so barbaric." I used to possibly believe that, but now believe, given equal opportunity, women can equally, just as males be great high-achievers, great leaders, accomplished in every profession, etc; but they also have just as great potential for the dark side: war, violence, vengence, power-grabbing, war between society's classes, etc.

After 9/11 I witnessed this phenomenon of women sort of watching it on TV, grabbing their kids, looking at their husbands, and crying. Of course they were looking for love and emotional support, but included in all that, and not insignificantly they were looking for protection.

Who's going to protect them? Oh I don't know, anyone is okay, but no one from my family, please. That seems to be the message.

Society raises men to be the protectors, to give their lives up to protect. The first thing many women ask a man that they might be interested in is "What do you do for a living?" And often times that can be translated right into "How good of a warrior is this, that will help me & my future family win the battle of the (socio-economic) classes?" Then sometimes when men go do what must be done in some hellish situations like war, they are blamed as the violent idiot gender, or something. Which some of them do turn into.

But we can't have it both ways. Its almost analagous to "A Few Good Men" where the military leader gets pissed because all the rich liberals sort of go to their rich parties, where they so intellectually put down the "stupid military," who happen to be protecting them and making their high class intellectual parties possible. That kind of dichotomy.

Can't always expect men to be "the sensitive intellectual pacifist, but oh when we're attacked please strap on the machine gun and do the dirty work and go kill someone...its too abhorrent for me to think about. Better yet, go get some stupid male human-ape types to do it for us."

I realize I've overstated the case some, but there is some flavor like this out there in all this. Let's be peaceful & secure & intellectual, but please let someone else go protect the castle walls and do the nasty work so we can keep our superior pacificist lives, where we never hurt anyone.

Does the pacifist have blood on their hands too? Sometimes I think so. Especially if they did not do everything in their power to try to stop a war, it seems like the blood on is on their hands too. They don't like to admit that though. Its easier and nicer to feel superior.

Re: The philosophy of war.

If Gurdjieff meant by "machines gone mad" that humans are entirely determined (as posited by de la Mettrie, for instance), then why are they determined to go to war at some times and refrain from war at other times? There's no way to tell what they are determined to do except by viewing their actions ex post, rather than anticipating their actions ex ante. Such a theory has little explanatory power, even as an ex post explanation, since it would be little better than saying that "war happened because war happened."

On the other hand, if Gurdjieff blamed war on "cosmic forces," then his theory is, in a Popperian sense, unfalsifiable, and therefore worthless as a theory. When war happens it's the result of cosmic forces: when peace happens it's the result of cosmic forces. We might just as well pin the blame on pixie dust or the Easter bunny or mind rays from Atlantis as on "cosmic forces" -- the end result would be no different.

I think one of the most hideous aspects of war is its ability to steal the 'integrity' from those who participate in it; excepting the few psychopaths in the mix, the participants are fully aware that what they are doing is wrong, and cannot be justified by the threads of nationalism, and just cause, but they are forced to be a part of the unimaginable.
[I recognize mind you, that sometimes the alternative is also unthinkable.]

While the chain of command dampens the direct sense of responsibility it has become apparent, after the fact, that the greatest number of victims of war are the survivors!

Re: War
I don't agree. If it was a question of instincts, all human beings would kill each other in individual wars and the specie would be extinct.
Wars are decidided by politicians, not by soldiers.
War is not an human necessity. Is the necessity of some human beings, and that is very different. But I agree that for those politicians it's a matter of power and control.
There is a choice. A choice between Kant or Bismark, Popper or Hitler, Bertrand Russell or Stalin, me and you or Bush.
There is always a choice.

One of Gurdjieff's strengths was that he saw an individual as a microcosm of society. He asks us to examine observe ourselves and note the many contradictions. For example I might note in myself an intellectual rejection of say boxing or the death penalty, yet I might also recognise I myself an emotional attraction to watching the spectacle of boxing, or a potential killer instinct towards personal enemies. Gurdjieff claims that we have little or no control over the shifting dominances of these many aspects of our personality hence the word "machines". And as in the individual…so too in society…with lemming like followings across shifting quicksands.

So in answer to Joe ,we do not need to embrace Gurdjieff's particular esoteric cosmology with respect to its explanatory adequacy in order to appreciate its strength in descriptive adequacy with respect to human psychology. And it is perhaps only from a re-examination of "psychology" that the term "explanation" can be utilised at all.

If you want to know the why of war, then follow the money. $$$

Pre-money: follow the good hunting grounds or good tilling fields.

I think you have your metaphors mixed up there.


I've read this paragraph several times and I still have no idea what you're trying to say. If Gurdjieff's theory is descriptively adequate but not explanatorily adequate, then what's left of the description?