The real cause of war

In this episode we explore the obscenity of war, and the real causes that so often underlie it…

For this episode I’d aimed to do a piece on economics again, and the perverse-incentives that so often cause so many lethal distortions in the way the whole thing works. (Or doesn’t work, rather…) But with war literally looming on the horizon in some parts of the world right now, it seemed perhaps more important to put the perverse-incentives problem off to one side for the moment, and instead take a look at the similarly-perverse underpinnings of war itself - the real causes of war. And to make it as apolitical as possible, I’ll do this through the medium of fiction.

I’m currently working on a series of stories that are set in an alternative-history storyworld, called ‘The Viner Codex‘. The story-fragment that I’ll quote below is from ‘The Viner Dimension‘, a sort-of-novel that’s currently being serialised on WattPad, and that comes from a different part of the same overall storyworld.

The story of ‘The Viner Dimension’ is set in our own timeline, somewhere in south-east England, somewhen around the mid-2010s. In this story-fragment, the narrator/protagonist Alan is reviewing some of the records that he’d found in his deceased aunt’s house, describing a seemingly-real version of the 1650s English Commonwealth, still extant in a dimension both parallel to our own world, yet also somehow intersecting with our own timeline too. Here he’s come across an item that links the ‘weird politics’ of the Commonwealth with another theme he’s already seen, about ‘weird battles where nobody dies’ – identifying what the people of the Commonwealth saw as the real cause of war, and what they needed to do about it. Anyway, over to the story…

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Massacre at Drogheda (public-domain via Wikipedia)

There’s that other theme that keeps coming up so often in so many of Aunt Kat’s papers – the pacifist stuff.

Not sure that ‘pacifist’ is quite the right word: more, the phrase that I keep finding there is ‘War is a breach of the peace’. That not just making war, but even preparing for war, is itself a crime – ‘conspiracy to cause a breach of the peace’, we’d call it now.

In our timeline, we have different laws for peace and war. For example, the idea that murder, mayhem and maiming others are all major crimes in normal times, but somehow are not only okay but a ‘good thing’ when someone arbitrarily decides that what’s going on can be called ‘war’.

Which is crazy, when we stop to think about it.

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Unlike us, the Commonwealth seems to have seen that having different laws for peace and war is crazy. Instead, use the same law, always, everywhere.

Fighting in any form is a breach of the peace. Which means that war is a breach of the peace. It’s a crime. So stop it. Don’t condone the crime, stop it any way we can.

They seem to have made that work.

They seem to have made it work even though everyone else amongst the ‘Great Powers’ around them wanted war – and lots of it. When everyone around you wants war, it’s kind of hard not to get dragged into that mess.

How they avoided that mess seems kind of important.

Why they did so seems kind of important too.

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In some ways the ‘Why’ about the no-war thing seems pretty straightforward. They set up the Commonwealth in the aftermath of a particularly bloody civil war. Brother against brother and all that. Some so-called glory for some, somewhere in the middle, maybe, but the kind that too easily switches from glory to gory in an instant. Not so fun.

After that kind of mess, they must have wanted it to be ‘the war that ends all wars’. But unlike everyone else, then or since, they seem to have looked more carefully at the real causes of the mess. The causes, not just the symptoms.

And the way they looked at the causes seems to have been through a simple pairing of questions.

What are the benefits to be gained from war? Who gains those benefits?

What are the risks of war? Who takes those risks?

What are the penalties of war? Who pays those penalties?

Where it gets interesting is when the ‘Who’ on each side of those pairings are not the same…

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If they’re the same people in each case, then the ones who might gain from a fight would also take the risks and suffer the pain.

Dissuading that kind of fight is fairly straightforward. The underlying driver in each case is usually some form of what religious folks would call ‘personal sin’ – rage, avarice, greed, lust and all that. And those sins are manageable, through social custom and social means such as the law: the main problem is in dissuading others from joining in to any fight from misguided loyalty and the like.

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But if they’re not the same people – in particular, if the people who ‘win’ from war are not the ones who take the risks or suffer the pain – then we face a very different challenge.

Follow the money…

For the ‘winners’, there’s a huge incentive to keep on starting wars from which they will benefit but that someone else will have to fight. Especially where conscription and suchlike only apply to other people. That age-old game of “let’s you and him fight”, where the only ones who ‘win’ are the chickenhawks, the scavengers and the weapons-makers who pick up all of the spoils but keep well out of the fight itself.

What Aunt Kat’s Commonwealth seems to have realised is that we can’t use the usual law to dissuade the ‘winner’-types from doing that: that kind of law isn’t much good at dealing with ‘third-party’ manipulation and the like. The only way to stop it is to make sure that no-one can ‘win’ from other people’s fighting, or other people’s wars.

And the way to do that is to get rid of the whole idea of ‘winning’. Especially if ‘making money’ from the war is part of the ‘winning’…

No more rich. No more poor.

No more rich because no more poor.

And no more ‘the poor’, because no more ‘the rich’.

Ending inequality is itself what stops the fight.

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The overall milieu of the real mid-17th century underpins perhaps one of the most dynamic periods in English history, providing some surprising parallels to our own present-day. There was a huge upsurge of exploration of ideas, beliefs, technical and scientific development, and much, much more. All of this was driven by new information-technologies such as the coffee-houses of London and other other cities; the rapid rise of literacy; much-reduced restrictions on printing and the press; and fast, reliable, relatively-inexpensive mail-services that had become much more available for the general public. If you’re interested in that period, I’d strongly recommend exploring the BCW Project website, ‘British Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Protectorate 1638-1660’: it’s an encyclopaedic resource that I used extensively to guide my development of that part of the Viner Codex storyworld.

(For another example of a fictional story that explores some of the same themes, see the novel Jingo, by the English fantasy-writer Terry Pratchett. In the story, police-chief Commander Vimes stops a war by arresting two entire armies for ‘conspiracy to breach the peace’.)