War Is Not Sustainable

As some human societies became more prosperous, others came to steal. Often, those who came to steal decided to stay and implement tributary systems - settled systems of extortion - which then became the targets of other raiders. As wealth accumulated, possessors sought to defend it, and to maintain their tributary structures. Eventually the possessors of wealth so offended, and offend, their tributaries - the people - with cruelty, that they were and are forced to delegate some of their powers to others, to lords, to institutions like parliaments and courts, and even to contractual understandings with the people - constitutions and laws. Hence the modern political system is a cascading web, from the international order down to the communities in which people live, of strategic alliances between more wealthy-and-powerful, and those less wealthy-and-powerful stakeholders who can get to the table, to maintain peace and the conditions of prosperity for a functional balance of them. Those most empoverished are typically excluded from the deal-making, whether taken as poor nations or as poor groups (children and women) or poor interests (where to place a toxic waste dump). The use of force to maintain social and economic order and alliances, and to compell others to negotiate or yield, therefore is as old as the human mind. When the framers of the United States of American declared they would form a nation "of the people, by the people, for the people" (Lincoln), they were instituting a strategy to reverse the natural flow of power, in a dynamic system that they hoped would be both stable and self-correcting. Although flawed and corrupt, it approaches sustainability, except that it still resorts to the use of power to maintain unsustainable relationships, and is therefore not yet sustainable.

In a democracy, where in principle power is exercized at the consent of those upon whom and for whom the power is exercized, governmental institutions incarnate the community. Whatever a human community is, however it is defined, whatever it is supposed to acheive, in a democracy we seat the right to use force, police power and military power, in those institutions which we form under the aegis of law that is written by people that are elected by individuals. Since individuals must reside in and depend upon their communities, which in turn depend upon the good will of their residents, communities must protect individuals and inspire their loyalty, and individuals must seek the well being of their communities. Hence, the success of a democracy can be measured by the degree to which all persons have a stake in the well being of their communities, and to the extent that their loyalty to the community prevents them from harming others or disrupting the normal pursuit of self-care which occupies everyone everyday. Therefore crime that must be suppressed by the use of force implies that the community has not adequately cared for its members, or inspired their loyalty. This community is not yet sustainable.

Conversely, those arenas in which military force is required or is permitted are not governed by notions of an incarnated community, that is, by the democratic ideal that the community must care for all and that all must care for the community. When military force is used to stop violence, it is a police action, and can be employed to limit damage to the broader community and the community in which it is, thus enhancing the sustainability of those communities, as they move toward less use of force. When military force is used offensively against an otherwise passive society, to protect resources, power or an ideal, or in revenge, at the expense of those upon whom the force is dealt, it is the old, anti-democratic, anti-community use of force. It disrupts and destroys peoples lives, it alienates people so they cannot trust each other in cooperative arrangements, and it destroys valuable resources. War, because it consumes resources and produces nothing, is not sustainable. War is antithetical to sustainable human communities and a sustainable world.

Alternatives to violence and war exist, in the real world. Whether these alternatives have been exhausted is answered by asking one question:

From what choice does the least harm result?

When "least harm" is measured by considering the impact of the choices on the total system of relationships, lives, habitats and resources, and which of these choices enhances the sustainability of democratic community.

The workshop series called "Sustainability Awakening" that I am developing aims to answer the question, speculatively, "What does a sustainable world look like?". Although war obviously has environmental impacts, and is largely about resources and wealth, it is a social function, that is, it is about relationships, and can only be ended by developing sustainable relationships. Now that we live in a world in which our failure to cooperate can kill us, otherwise martial actors can be motivated to negotiate more sustainable relationships.

What is needed is a coherent theory of War that shows how the value lost in achieving victory is far greater than the value gained in booty, because even if there is enough booty to pay for the victory, cooperation and good relations are far more valuable, and lost in waging war, in our interconnected world.

Robert Axelrod pioneered the study of cooperation as a relative choice in the game-theory setting of The Prisoner's Dilemma. His research has been extended into the realm of international relations, to what profit I do not know, but it is taken quite seriously. In this construct, the question is asked in very crass terms, "Do I cooperate, or do I act selfishly?" In human history the answer has often been "selfishly" because the rewards for cooperation were too low, and rewards for war too high. But in our time, the rewards for war are decreasing for parties that would wage war, and being calculated in global terms besides, where they are seen as negative, while the rewards for cooperation are positive and increasing.

When it is pollution of the global commons that threatens our planet and our lives, a sustainable world is necessarily a world of cooperators. We must cooperate to minimize the threat to life on Earth. Hence war, which is so supremely antithetical to cooperation, is also antithetical to the sustainability of human life on Earth. Whatever the costs in wild-form habitats, in resources wasted, in human habitats polluted, the costs of war to human relationships is too high to pay. Without good relationships, we cannot address our shared problems. War, waged in the offensive intention to take or impose, simply cannot be allowed, any more.