I cannot help but wonder if the common desire amongst scientists such as Einstein, Pauling, and others to strive for peace is blighted by a failure to completely understand why we find ourselves at war to begin with. It is easy to frame war as a completely contingent decision we have made, having been given it as a free choice, and then to deride this choice as the one that leads us to chaos, squanders resources, and sabotages our greatest intellectual, artistic, and social endeavors. This is almost undeniable.

But things are never so simple as being given the choice to either go to war or abstain from it, as though it were the decision to indulge in a vice or resign from an ambition. We can so easily frame this phenomena as though it were an individual free choice that falls into the ideology of freedom and individuality that emerges from the Enlightenment. And indeed, on philosophical matters Einstein, and many others, confesses to being unabashedly embedded in the Enlightenment when looking at these issues.

I am skeptical that we know why we go to war. There are all too many proposals and theories. None of the interesting ones posit war as the consequence of a willful decision. Going even back to Hobbs, we are faced with the now mathematically clear Game Theoretic reality that aggression often arises not out of an inherent desire for blood but as a defense against ambiguity and complexity.

If we want to escape war, it seems that we have to go beyond the Enlightenment belief that it is the wrong decision and start to consider the possibility that it has been the right decision to the wrong problem, and we have to address its underlying causes far more than implore humanity to simply abstain from it.