Chapter 10.                                   Part D

                                             artist's conception of post nuclear war Moscow 

Today, however, war has made itself obsolete. Our species very likely would not survive another world war. Combining what we know of human history and of our war habit with what we know of our present levels of technology leads us to envision a worldwide bloom of huge mushroom clouds, followed within a decade by an image of our once beautiful, blue-green planet, burnt almost bare and covered over with drifting clouds of ash.

On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we give up war, will we grow weak and sickly, then die out, like the deer on the island that has no predators? There have been experts who said so, flat out. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They're ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it. (2.)       

 

However, there are some pieces of evidence which support the belief that humans may learn, by rational persuasion, to live, multiply, and spread, i.e. to remain vigorous without constantly fighting one another. One of the best lies in how, in every society, there are some people that show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiation rather than by violence. They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe any one world view or set of values (even the ones that they learned as children) necessarily leads to the only appropriate, viable, “right” way of life. From the view of the social sciences, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members that can be found in all societies assign a higher priority to the lives of other humans than to the reducing of the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that feel alien to them.

                                                                    modern British school-children 

Another bit of evidence to note is the vigor that is evident in pluralistic societies, ones that have succeeded in synthesizing (which is different than compromising, remember) several cultures. A community formed by merging many ways of life can work. Britain is an excellent example here. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Danes, and lately people from all of the countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. Who calls him or herself a “Brit” these days may show genetic, ethnic, and cultural features from any of these tribes/nations.

               

            Furthermore, we can see that after a war, people's living patterns and values change in major, radical ways, for the vanquished, of course, but often for the victors as well, ways not anticipated by the planners on either side.

       When I was a boy in the 1950's in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my town, and "sushi" and "dojo" were just words in a novel. By the time that I was a young man, these things could be found all over my town, one whose older men had won a war against Germany and Japan a few years before I was born. 

                                                modern public school students in the U.S.  

                                                       modern public school students in Canada 

            

         Today, Germany and Japan are two of the strongest economies in the world and Edmonton schools contain students from almost every culture on earth. It seems so stupid now that fifty-five million people had to die so that the Japanese could learn to open up to the ways of the gaijin, and I could learn to love and trust people named "Kobayashi". 

            We were the victors in that war yet today we have embraced many of the technologies and morés of the vanquished. Which proves that we can integrate. The trick in the future will be to bring about these changes on both sides by planned interactions in commerce, sport, science, art, and finally intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. Hard but not impossible. In this age of the internet and the global village, getting easier by the day.