“In spite of the dangers evident in modern forms of war, a revolt from boredom has had much to do with the fact that it is possible to launch these wars. Man was designed by nature to hunt, to struggle, to endure, and to achieve on a personal physical plane; all his glands and hormones are integrated for such dangerous and exciting affairs. It is not normal for the creature to immolate himself for eight or ten hours a day, five or six days a week, in the acrid din of factories, where he is fairly secure but where he does the same one thing forever.”
Philip Wylie, “Generation of Vipers” 1942

This quote found its way into my journals in 1963, and I have often referred to it and thought about its implications for my country and my countrymen during the past 55 years. History is nothing if not repetitive, as evidenced in George Santayana’s well known observation: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” As Donald Trump threatens to launch wars our country does not need, cannot justify and that a significant number of its more patriotic and thoughtful citizens neither want nor support, it is worth remembering these words of Philip Wylie’s. (It is also worth emphasizing that patriotism is not the purview of only the hawk, the flag waver and the overly obeisant.)
“In spite of the dangers of modern forms of war…” These words were written in 1942, when the technology of waging war was far less dangerous (though no less brutal) than the weapons of ‘modern’ warfare. But they are timeless words that could have been uttered in 30,000 BC, when man the hunter was developing the first primitive bow, in 8000 BC when the walls of Jericho were built to protect the city from marauders, or in 3000 BC when the Romans began using oval shields in war and in Mesopotania where the first helmets for warriors were made of copper, arsenic and bronze. Mesopotania is often referred to as the cradle of the first known human ‘civilization,’ as evidenced by the fact that those helmets of war were padded. Interestingly enough, the cradle of the first civilization encompassed what is now the country of Iraq.
Things change but the dangers of modern war are only different in scale from what they were in the cradle of civilization in 3000 BC. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a war is a war is a war.
“…a revolt from boredom has had much to do with the fact that it is possible to launch these wars.” Think of lives so empty that a revolt from boredom into the barbarity that is war is seen as a viable option, keeping in mind that wars are always launched by old men and women and fought by young ones. Old men and women using young ones as weapons and cannon fodder are the practical mechanics of war. The young men who flew the planes of 9/11 were put there by old ones, just as the youth who will die in the next conflict will be put there by the aged. To revolt against boredom is, of course, healthy and honorable, but to replace boredom with war is unconscionable and really unimaginative. The next war will be fought neither by the old men who will launch it nor, for the most part, by their children, but, rather, by someone else’s children. That, too, makes it easier to launch a war.
“Man was designed by nature to hunt, to struggle, to endure, and to achieve on a personal physical plane……” That man is deeply out of touch with nature’s designs, including his own, is evidenced in the state of the world’s environment and man’s cities, obesity rates in the U.S. and malnutrition rates in all too much of the rest of the world, the rates of antidepressant and opioid use in the developed nations, escalating species extinctions and ozone holes in the southern hemisphere and acid rain the northern hemisphere, among other things.
“It is not normal for the creature to immolate himself for eight or ten hours a day, five or six days a week, in the acrid din of factories, where he is fairly secure…..” It is not normal, but many people who live such a ‘normal’ life and many more who have lost it are all too willing to march (and fly and sail and sit before small screens in tiny offices eight or ten hours a day guiding drones half a world away that drop bombs on defenseless citizens) according to the orders of those old men and women, most of whom have never been to war.
War should be a last resort, not a precautionary slaughter.
In his Noble Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2002 former President Jimmy Carter observed, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.”
If war is never a good, always an evil, sometimes a necessary evil, what does that make an unnecessary war? What does it reveal about old men and women who would launch such a war? What does it divulge about young citizens so bored with normal life that they would trade it in for the dangerous and exciting affair that is war?