Chapter 10.                              (continued) 

   

                                                     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 images of our once beautiful, blue-green planet, burned almost bare and wrapped in drifting clouds of smoke and ash.

On the other hand, we have to evolve. If we give up war, will we grow weak and sickly, then die out, like deer that have no predators because they’re isolated on an island? Experts have flat-out said so. War, they insist, is ugly but necessary. They’re ready to risk nuclear holocaust, even initiate it.²

However, there is evidence that supports the belief that humans may learn to live, multiply, and spread—that is, to remain vigorous—without constantly fighting one another. The strongest evidence may lie in how, in every society, there are some people who show a clear inclination toward settling apparently irreconcilable differences by negotiation rather than by violence. 

They are acknowledging implicitly that they do not believe that any single worldview or set of values (even the ones they learned as children) necessarily leads to the only appropriate, viable, “right” way of life. From a social sciences viewpoint, we could say the value systems of these more peaceful members of society assign a higher priority to the lives of other humans than to reducing the anxieties they experience when they see other humans living in ways that are alien to them.

                                                            Modern British secondary school students 

Another bit of evidence to note is the vigour evident in pluralistic societies, those that have succeeded in synthesizing (which, recall, is different from compromising) several cultures. A community formed by merging many ways of life can work. Britain is an excellent example. Celts, Iberians, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Danes, and more recently people from all countries of Britain’s former colonial empire have blended. Many who call themselves Brits these days show genetic and cultural features from several of these tribes and/or nations.

Furthermore, we can see that after a war, living patterns and values change in major, radical ways not only for the vanquished, but often for the victors as well, ways not anticipated by the planners on either side. When I was a boy in the 1950s in Edmonton, Alberta, there were two German delicatessens in my city, and sushi and dojo were just words in a novel. By the time I was a young man, German delicatessens and karate dojos could be found all over my town, one whose men had just won a war against Germany and Japan a few years before.

   

                                                            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. In retrospect, it seems so stupid that fifty-five million people had to die so 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 in the West 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 especially intermarriage. By peaceful coexistence and reason instead of bloodshed, in other words. This will be hard but not impossible. In this age of the Internet and the global village, it is getting easier by the day.