I posted the following in the Charlotte Philosophy Discussion Group (after our discussion on war):
I believe that, in order to eliminate war, we have to understand it in a far more basic way than generally occurs.
More specifically, it is just one manifestation of a very basic component of our basic animal nature.
By "basic animal nature" I mean simply all of those characteristics of ourselves that are also found in other species, such as eating, drinking, elimination, mutual pleasuring, nurturing, playing, etc.
And one of those characteristics is our tendency to engage in patterns of interaction that can be labeled "dominance/submission," and that form the basis for social hierarchy as a group animal.
And one of the most obvious examples of that interaction is that set of interactions called "fighting." The primary motivational state involved in this pattern is "anger." Behavior motivated by anger is often called "hostile behavior."
So as a species, we are presented with the fact that evolution has built into us the strong tendency to fight, right along with the strong tendency to manifest attachment, affection, mutual pleasuring, cooperation, nurturing, etc.
Evolution is based upon behavioral tendencies that foster survival of the species, and pain and suffering are important motivations in producing such behavioral tendencies. So evolution has not found pain and suffering to be detrimental in any way. However, we know that the more pain and suffering that we have in our lives, the worse we consider our lives to be.
We humans have acquired the ability, through our language, and now our science and technology, to understand these things about ourselves and to learn how to inhibit certain aspects of our basic animal nature, and promote others, such that we can drastically reduce our pain and suffering and have much more joy, contentment, and appreciation. We certainly could consider this to be a far better way of life.
So what this means is that we have to understand at a very basic level that our tendencies toward engaging in dominance/submission are tendencies that have to be considerably inhibited, and replaced by other tendencies that actually make things better. This means that we have to be able to recognize the tendencies that we want to inhibit not just when they are manifesting themselves in obvious ways, but also when they are manifesting themselves in very sophisticated, and even disguised, ways.
So all of this means to me that it is not just war that needs to be inhibited, but fighting in general, and that this also means inhibiting the motivational state that motivates fighting, namely, anger. And even if anger is present, the tendency for the anger to motivate hostile behavior must be inhibited. So this means that in order to stop having extreme examples of fighting (war), we have to learn how to inhibit hostile behavior and even anger.
This means that we have to use our ability to understand very complicated things such as to understand ourselves and how to bring about change in ourselves. This would mean that we need to learn how to refrain from hostile behavior, even in its most sophisticated forms (facial expressions, clever use of demeaning and pejorative adjectives, etc.), and that we need to learn how to view situations such as to reduce or eliminate anger that would more normally and naturally occur.
So that would mean, for instance, that we need to learn how to talk with each other about our differences of opinion without experiencing anger and without engaging in hostile behavior designed to dominate the other and coerce the other to agree. (This seldom works, anyway, as we well know. What we do instead is just change the subject or proclaim the other person as hopelessly misguided, or during our postmodern era, developing "tolerance" with the conflict-reducing statement, "Well, what is true for you may not be true for me.")
With regard to war, the alternative has to be sitting around the conference table and listening to each other in order to see what it is like to be the other, with the social contract that we will continue to try to make life good for all of us and come to ultimate agreement that is genuine and benevolent, and always open to revision.
But this is a difficult and complicated skill, and really requires lifelong effort to become good at it.
And actually, we are still quite primitive. Most of us strongly believe in fighting in various ways, and in fact much of our entertainment involves participating in or at least observing complicated ways of rule-modified fighting. And our language is replete with examples of using words derived from the realm of fighting to describe activities that actually are not an example of fighting.
And probably the majority of people would say that anger is good, in that it motivates us to solve problems, the actual truth being that the anger, while indeed indicating that a problem exists, motivates us to do things that actually tend to make the situation worse, and it is our "ethical sense" (the motivation to do something because we believe it is the right thing to do) that motivates us to figure out ways of solving a problem that are most likely to be successful.
