War in History — On the Causes of Banding Together and Its Results

Hardly an epoch in the life of suffering man is free of a period over which death hangs and destruction, torment, and homelessness spread. As though it were written for man to shed a tear with every smile and heave a sigh with every melody — when, had he willed it, he could have made of his life bliss, of his misery happiness, of his funerals weddings and feasts. But such is man — that strange man who searches out happiness only to dissolve it in sorrow, and rest only to set it in a frame of anxiety; it is as though his happiness lay in this long, perpetual struggle between happiness and misery, rest and toil, thirst and quenching, hunger and satiety.

What, then, is the cause — and why war?

A riddle that has occupied the thought of humanity from the day man came into being, and occupies it still, without his being granted any solution to it or furnished any justification for it. No sooner does he devise solutions and remedies for it than out of these spring causes that had never crossed his mind, reaching to that pent-up dam until it bursts and sweeps everything before it — even man himself. The disease is in his own soul, yet he searches for it outside; did he but know, he would find it within himself and destroy it forever.

Strange! Can the seed of war lie in man, and he not root it out? It is in his soul like the bramble in the garden: if he neglects it, turning to the rose and the jasmine, lavishing on them all his care and all his effort, it grows and spreads and strangles the rose and the jasmine and everything else. How well he would do to destroy the bramble and turn to the rose to nurture it, and to the jasmine to strengthen it.

The First Stage of the Idea of War

The first man came into being and refused to die: in him is a desire for life, because he is life; and for a life sovereign and respected, because he is man. His existence disclosed to him a first truth: if you would endure, think of yourself and of every way that guarantees your endurance. So his feeling began to sense, his mind to manage, and his hands to execute; and reality led him to confront nature, and his philosophy to resist man and beast with everything his mind and his hands could produce. Thus he crossed two stages of life: survival, which is a natural desire; and sovereign survival, which is an invented one.

The desire for survival is a natural phenomenon, imposed upon man by his natural condition and the necessity of laboring to confront it in nature's violent forces — hurricanes, earthquakes, beasts of prey striving, like man, driven only by an insistent desire to survive. At this stage man stands in one rank with his brother man, both gathered under one banner by a common struggle for a common goal and against a common foe. Efforts are unified, forces, wills, and methods are massed, and man emerges from the battle of annihilation — the battle of death or life — with the banners of victory fluttering above his head and wreaths of laurel on his brow. And behold: the animal runs in his train, obedient and submissive, on its lips the smile of contentment, pride, and swagger. And behold: nature yields to his palm and his forearm, casts down the staff of obedience before his mind, and opens to his feeling and imagination a wide field for contemplation and thought — so that a cast of melancholy, awe, and questioning spreads over his face, and his lips close in the set of concern and perplexity. He tries to penetrate to the depths of nature and existence and their secret, and is bewildered. He looks upon what his mind has planned and his hands have built within his domain: he is the creator of this building for warding off storms, the tamer of the animal for his service, the maker of the sword, the knife, the axe — all these are of his making. But this maker — who is he, and what is his secret? And this mighty nature that has spent his strength — whose making is she, and what is her secret? Why did nature come to exist — and why did he?

Many insistent questions, born of his contemplation and his thinking upon existence and nature, that must be answered. And behold: man thinks of a power above his power, a will above his will, a director beyond the reach of his mind — and for the first time man thinks of the Creator, and strives to understand Him and to reach Him as his feeling and imagination suggest Him, and as his mind sets Him forth to the people around him.

As for the desire for mastery, it is a second stage; for survival is not the first and last goal of man, who stops at no limit, and who solves no problem and satisfies no desire without thinking of another — as though his very survival lay in this perpetual struggle between sufficiency and increase, contentment and greed. The kind of survival, and its manner, are thus essential to his survival.

And behold: a desire for mastery overwhelms his mind

and his conscience, carrying him out of a brotherhood imposed by natural reality and the common foe into schism and selfishness — into a struggle between man and his brother man for the mastery of the one over the other, after together they had mastered the animals and together subdued the mighty forces of nature.

When the desire for mastery, and for disposing of what belongs to others for his own benefit and not for theirs, had overwhelmed his mind and conscience, his concern turned to thinking of himself alone, and of the ways that would give him power over others and over their goods and lands. So the groups that at first had worked as one began to fight one another and to band together, some against others, in petty states and great ones.

It remains for us to consider here the causes of banding together and its results, and we may gather them under four heads:

1 – The natural factor.
2 – The historical factor.
3 – The social factor.
4 – The military factor.

The military factor. The deep sense of danger and fear, and the insistent desire for survival and mastery, are two primary factors which set the groups before an inescapable military truth, if they wished to remain alive and in some measure of freedom and safety. This drove them to perpetual vigilance and continuous labor to strengthen themselves — for defense against any sudden aggression from without, and for attack whenever they were forced to it or saw in it a necessity for their safety and their life. They were driven likewise to band together and to make alliances so as to complete their strength: for in their banding is a fusing of forces that, taken singly and working each alone, are simple and limited compared with others, but great and mighty if gathered into a single crucible, becoming a match for any outside power which greed and the lust for mastery might drive to attack them for the sake of their goods.

But a union of this kind does not act by its mere banding — or at least does not last long — if there are no firm general bonds and common conditions to gather them all upon one plane. Naturally, banding together would not have been lasting and possible were it not for those bonds whose ties grew firm with the days in the souls of the groups, and which made their aims and interests common aims and interests, carrying them out of isolation and the philosophy of self-sufficiency. Indeed this military truth is itself only a result of these bonds, and endures only by them.

These bonds gather into three:

The geographic bond, or the geographic reality

which unites the groups spread through a homeland within clear natural borders at its edges — the sea, the mountain, the desert. The effect of these borders is double, embracing both the military and the moral sides of those groups, and distinguishing their conduct, customs, and morals from the nations across the borders. This geographic reality places them, militarily, in safety, since it gives them a natural line of defense and a barrier hard for enemies to cross — above all in the earliest ages, when man possessed no means of communication to overcome the breadth of the desert and its heat, the expanse of the sea and its unruliness, the mountains with their jungles, their beasts, and the ruggedness of their paths, or to go beyond his bodily powers and his primitive roads. A condition that makes them feel a mutual attraction among themselves for the warding off of danger, and a need for unity of condition and of destiny.

The social and historical realities

And since these natural barriers were hard to cross, they made mixing between peoples impossible, or at the least very difficult, and stamped the homeland within them with a particular climate and geographic situation, which issued in a particular character and a particular cast for certain groups inhabiting a certain homeland, differing from every other in geographic situation and in the effects of that situation upon man.

From this condition it followed that the groups within the one homeland and the one borders were compelled to band together, to cooperate, and to face events united, for their survival, their ease, and whatever was for their good. So over the passage of the generations they achieved a firm inner unity of morals, customs, methods, and interests, as the result of the one history, the one events, and the one borders.

But it was not long before man, by his mind and his patience, overcame these stubborn natural barriers with the machines he produced, which crossed sea and mountain and desert, so that mixing became possible and easy, and direct, constant contact across the borders a natural thing. Thus the borders vanished in practice; but those national and moral traces they had left in the peoples over the generations did not vanish with them. They remained a fixed natural mark of the different nations in the different homelands — ready for exchange and cooperation, yet fiercely jealous of that inherited national feeling.

Thus, in his historical evolution, man formed an idea that was, and remains, dominant to this very day — but on a wider scale, and in an atmosphere of wretched, stubborn attempts to reconcile the general good with this national heritage the generations have created, and to secure a lasting peace for all peoples, great and small, rich and poor.

The American University of Beirut — Wadih al-Ashqar