Notes
[Sunday 4 September 2011 - Saturday 10 September 2011]
[Notebook: DB 71 Israel]
Sunday 4 September 2011
Monday 5 September 2011
Tuesday 6 September 2011
Wednesday 7 September 2011
[page 55]
Thursday 8 September 2011
I learnt history as a series of battles, and it seems true that wars are the salient points in human history, much more obvious than the millions of lesser events that make up human life, from cyclones to changing nappies and beyond.
To me the most amazing thing about battle is that although it is unspeakably horrible, people do it. The top end of our dynamic range is expressed in the phrase 'do or die'. For younger people highly aroused, this may seem reasonable, but I have always stuck to my father's advice which was (based on his experience in WWII) never become involved in a war. Evolution explains this human trait. It is reasonable to die fighting to preserve or increase one's resources if the alternative is to starve to death. At come point violence becomes prudent. On the assumption that all survivors are essentially prudent (maximum productivity, minimum action), the only way to prevent
[page 56]
war is to arrange things so that people are not required to turn to violence to survive. Here we see the fundamental error of government by force, since the more pressure you put on people the more violently they will react because you have brought them to a position where they have nothing to lose by revolting.
This project started as a reaction to a vivid understanding of the consequences of global nuclear war, a threat that left us around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin Wall - Wikipedia The aim then, and now, it to produce an understanding of the world so vivid and so peacefully created that it will vanquish the need for war. A theology, in other words that puts the 'human condition' clearly into the context of the Universe that created us in the first place and has stamped its image upon us, even if we as yet see it indistinctly.
