It is rows upon rows of headstones standing as witnesses on one of the most prominent, tragic events that changed the world, as we know it. I can only imagine that walking in that graveyard, with nothing but the howls of wind and the quilt of tree leaves crawling on the ground, you can distantly hear the screams, the pain, and the agony of the nearly 12,000 soldiers who are buried here, in Tyne Cot, near Ypres in Belgium, the largest British Commonwealth cemetery in the world. It is the aftermath of the “Great War” that took place around 100 years ago; the World War I.
It is the war that changed the face of the world; it created new nations, built and destroyed borders, knocked out and appointed head of states, started new concepts of war. And on top of all that, it was the reason that led between 5-20 million souls to their graves.
No matter how horrible and ugly the face of war is, we humans seem to never get enough of it. The history of mankind is nothing but a series of wars and bloody confrontations. Sometimes, it feels like we are addicted to it, something deep in our psyches, or embroidered in our DNA. In times, there seem to be circumstances that deem such confrontations mandatory, and in a lot others, it is only us trying to justify the shot of that bullet, the launch of that missile, the lost lives of the others, the different!
With the chaos engulfing this region for years; from war to war, from turmoil to another, we cannot escape thinking that there must be something deeper that makes wars and violence more acceptable to people in this part of the world. The gory images of blood and dead corpses became the usual, the normal footages nobody frown upon in our daily doses of violence in the news; they shake no hearts, bring tears to no eyes.
Evolutionary psychologists say it is natural for human groups to engage in wars against each other. It is in our genes to seek resources in order to survive and to protect ourselves from those threatening our existence. There is the biological need to feel supremacy and power especially in men, where testosterone is usually linked to aggression and violent tendencies. Such view of war exists in our culture. Toughness and knowing your way around a weapon is an evidence of manhood. It is a tactic used to call that primitive instinct deep within us, mix it with a religious or patriotic argument, and you got yourself a dangerous fighter ready to conquer the world to prove his manhood, his courage. Evan Thomas once wrote in the Newsweek “War has been, for almost all peoples and all times, the purest test of manhood.”
Such explanations of war has been disputed and called “simplistic” by later psychologists. William James, whose essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910) is considered by many as a pioneering work to understand war and its psychology, has suggested that “warfare was so prevalent because of its positive psychological effects, both on the individual and on society as whole.” It brings people together, it incite unity, and regenerate patriotism. It takes people away from the routine of their daily lives and invites them to behave in an unselfish and an honorable way. It provides meaning and goal to the group and to the individual. Bush and his administration played on that chord on their war on terrorism, and it was played in most of the events that this region of the world witnessed.
There are other logical explanations that try to make sense of wars and deadly confrontations; Steve Taylor in his book “Back to Sanity” enlists the desire to increase power and wealth as one of the major causes of wars.
War might be a necessity sometimes, but with the world claiming to advance higher on the ladder of civilization such necessity should diminish rather than flourish. Aside from all such illusions of superiority and power, we seem to overlook how sacred the human soul is. In the time of nuclear powers and drones, human souls have become so cheap to the point that it is usually kept out of any war calculations.
As the smell of violence and wars stinks the air, we might need to go back and find our moral compass. We need to revise our understandings of holy wars and jihad, we need to understand, to appreciate, the value of life, and its holiness.
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@smaldosari
