Monday, April 24, 2006
A Favorite Recurrent Thought
Did you ever stop to think how much happens around the world, or even across the universe, during a single second when nothing much seems to change and maybe you're just spacing out (or contemplating some "deep thought")?
On Making Killing Unthinkable
No, it hasn't been a month and a half since my last shower. I've probably let some good blog entries go by without translating from brain to blog or any other recorded medium, which I regret...
A recent issue of Rolling Stone featured a piece on the making of soldiers, pointing that the human inhibition against killing is quite strong. And so the military goes to great lengths to control soldiers' very thought process and reduce the inhibition, while simultaneously depersonalizing the act of killing. The latter is accomplished for example by referring to "neutralizing targets" rather than "killing human beings", and by using technology to maximize the physical distance between killer and killed. Inhibitions are reduced by such activities as war games.
Introspectively and statistically (for although there is too much killing in the world, most people do not kill, and most who do do so rarely), it seems true that on the whole, human beings are loathe to kill. But the fear of death, and perhaps especially of murder, invests those who are willing to kill with a certain amount of power, whether it be a lone killer or a military force. Still, this power may be neutralizable in many people simply through the exercise of logic and self-examination.
Say that you are a young person thinking of joining the military. You probably have a variety of motives, some of which may be idealistic (i.e. to defend your country), others which may be in a sense "selfish" but which are certainly understandable (you need a job and a future, and the military promises good training and benefits). You probably do not want to kill anyone, certainly not for the money involved and certainly not unnecessarily. You know at some level killing (or dying) may nevertheless become an issue, but you believe that will only happen because it is necessary for the greater good, such as defense of country or perhaps order in the world. Note that this is a balancing equation; untimely death on either side is a bad thing, but the greater good may outweigh it.
But also note that military training and role playing is aimed at desensitizing you to the death side of the equation, and along with physical distance from the "target" human beings, that side has become minimized in your mind, so that someone else can command death and you will simply react. Life and death in which you directly participate become somebody else's call. Just like you, that someone else has also been desensitized by training, plus they gain additional distance by the fact that you are carrying out the killing for them. Everybody is minimizing death in their minds, as much as possible, and so that side of the equation is not given proper consideration, even though it is entirely obvious that it is happening.
But if you do not wish to live in a comic book reality, the truth remains the truth. When you fire a weapon and it squarely hits someone, the usual outcome is that that person's guts are ripped to shreds. People who are not killed are maimed, or lose family. If they are not of your nationality, that is only an accident of birth; their pain is the same as yours would be. Or you could be the victim as well. That is reality. I wish to inflict no guilt on those who have felt they were doing their duty in war. I am just saying if we are to be reasonable about trying to avoid unnecessary wars, we must face the reality of what war is.
War is a horrible phenomena for most people affected by it. I would also argue that violence is a very blunt instrument, and rarely the most effective means to accomplish anything. Either one of these reasons should be sufficient to say that if war and/or killing are ever necessary, they must be an absolute last resort.
A budding young soldier, thinking this over, may nevertheless choose to serve in the military, believing, for example, claims by the President that the current war is indeed a last resort, and that all other options have indeed been exhausted before the war was launched. It is natural for young and old alike to defer to higher authorites simply by virtue of their position (and, for the young, also by virtue of their age). Let older and more powerful people decide these things; after all, don't they know best?
But the first six years of the Presidency of George W. Bush should have made it quite clear by now that wealth and power, even the power of the most powerful man in the world, do not make for wisdom. In fact, lately it's beginning to look quite the opposite way. The word "cronyism" has recently become commonplace, but it's just another word for an old idea: you scratch the back of the most powerful man in the world, and he will scratch yours. The rest of the world be damned. Resources and fellow human beings are to be looted, pillaged and killed for the short term enrichment of a few.
We are at war for the wrong reasons, and we must face the fact that not only Americans are being killed. Americans are being made to kill, and Iraqis are killing each other as well as killing Americans. It is without any disrespect to those soldiers who believed or still believe they are doing the right to thing that we must face the fact that people, not "targets", are being killed and for causes that are entirely wrong, the cause of enriching and rewarding the President's cronies, the cause of controlling oil when we should be getting away from its use, and the cause of allowing the President to gain as absolute control of his own people -- whom he is supposed to be serving -- as is possible. War is killing; if there is ever a right time for war, it must be done with the consciousness that it is killing, the most awful thing that humans ever could have to do to each other, no matter how much one sanitizes the language. If we deny this, the equation goes out of balance, and the odds are that not only are we killing, we are killing wrongly and unnecessarily because we have shut out the truth.
I also happen to personally believe that if we face the truth, there is always another way, that Gandhi, Jesus, and Dr. Martin Luther King (who was influenced by Gandhi and who believed in Jesus) have lessons to teach us about the nature of power. Arguments can be made for the necessity of fighting of World War II; I would hope other ways could still be discovered, even in retrospect, to have averted that tragedy. But Iraq is most certainly a bad argument for war, for killing human beings.
A recent issue of Rolling Stone featured a piece on the making of soldiers, pointing that the human inhibition against killing is quite strong. And so the military goes to great lengths to control soldiers' very thought process and reduce the inhibition, while simultaneously depersonalizing the act of killing. The latter is accomplished for example by referring to "neutralizing targets" rather than "killing human beings", and by using technology to maximize the physical distance between killer and killed. Inhibitions are reduced by such activities as war games.
Introspectively and statistically (for although there is too much killing in the world, most people do not kill, and most who do do so rarely), it seems true that on the whole, human beings are loathe to kill. But the fear of death, and perhaps especially of murder, invests those who are willing to kill with a certain amount of power, whether it be a lone killer or a military force. Still, this power may be neutralizable in many people simply through the exercise of logic and self-examination.
Say that you are a young person thinking of joining the military. You probably have a variety of motives, some of which may be idealistic (i.e. to defend your country), others which may be in a sense "selfish" but which are certainly understandable (you need a job and a future, and the military promises good training and benefits). You probably do not want to kill anyone, certainly not for the money involved and certainly not unnecessarily. You know at some level killing (or dying) may nevertheless become an issue, but you believe that will only happen because it is necessary for the greater good, such as defense of country or perhaps order in the world. Note that this is a balancing equation; untimely death on either side is a bad thing, but the greater good may outweigh it.
But also note that military training and role playing is aimed at desensitizing you to the death side of the equation, and along with physical distance from the "target" human beings, that side has become minimized in your mind, so that someone else can command death and you will simply react. Life and death in which you directly participate become somebody else's call. Just like you, that someone else has also been desensitized by training, plus they gain additional distance by the fact that you are carrying out the killing for them. Everybody is minimizing death in their minds, as much as possible, and so that side of the equation is not given proper consideration, even though it is entirely obvious that it is happening.
But if you do not wish to live in a comic book reality, the truth remains the truth. When you fire a weapon and it squarely hits someone, the usual outcome is that that person's guts are ripped to shreds. People who are not killed are maimed, or lose family. If they are not of your nationality, that is only an accident of birth; their pain is the same as yours would be. Or you could be the victim as well. That is reality. I wish to inflict no guilt on those who have felt they were doing their duty in war. I am just saying if we are to be reasonable about trying to avoid unnecessary wars, we must face the reality of what war is.
War is a horrible phenomena for most people affected by it. I would also argue that violence is a very blunt instrument, and rarely the most effective means to accomplish anything. Either one of these reasons should be sufficient to say that if war and/or killing are ever necessary, they must be an absolute last resort.
A budding young soldier, thinking this over, may nevertheless choose to serve in the military, believing, for example, claims by the President that the current war is indeed a last resort, and that all other options have indeed been exhausted before the war was launched. It is natural for young and old alike to defer to higher authorites simply by virtue of their position (and, for the young, also by virtue of their age). Let older and more powerful people decide these things; after all, don't they know best?
But the first six years of the Presidency of George W. Bush should have made it quite clear by now that wealth and power, even the power of the most powerful man in the world, do not make for wisdom. In fact, lately it's beginning to look quite the opposite way. The word "cronyism" has recently become commonplace, but it's just another word for an old idea: you scratch the back of the most powerful man in the world, and he will scratch yours. The rest of the world be damned. Resources and fellow human beings are to be looted, pillaged and killed for the short term enrichment of a few.
We are at war for the wrong reasons, and we must face the fact that not only Americans are being killed. Americans are being made to kill, and Iraqis are killing each other as well as killing Americans. It is without any disrespect to those soldiers who believed or still believe they are doing the right to thing that we must face the fact that people, not "targets", are being killed and for causes that are entirely wrong, the cause of enriching and rewarding the President's cronies, the cause of controlling oil when we should be getting away from its use, and the cause of allowing the President to gain as absolute control of his own people -- whom he is supposed to be serving -- as is possible. War is killing; if there is ever a right time for war, it must be done with the consciousness that it is killing, the most awful thing that humans ever could have to do to each other, no matter how much one sanitizes the language. If we deny this, the equation goes out of balance, and the odds are that not only are we killing, we are killing wrongly and unnecessarily because we have shut out the truth.
I also happen to personally believe that if we face the truth, there is always another way, that Gandhi, Jesus, and Dr. Martin Luther King (who was influenced by Gandhi and who believed in Jesus) have lessons to teach us about the nature of power. Arguments can be made for the necessity of fighting of World War II; I would hope other ways could still be discovered, even in retrospect, to have averted that tragedy. But Iraq is most certainly a bad argument for war, for killing human beings.
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