Society is Built on War
With the real-time footage of Russia invading Ukraine breaking every now and again, Israel at war with the terrorist organisation Hamas, and conflict societies like Iran and Pakistan on the brink of economic and social collapse, it seems like the concept of war never really goes away from the human psyche. It’s always as if it is hardwired into our very DNA — the desire to kill, to domineer, to conquer, to overpower people we can, and that’s because we are. Our evolutionary ancestors, the chimpanzees, are one of the most voluntarily violent & vicious animals there are today, aside from orcas. You could say that war brings out a deeply hidden primaeval instinct — to be primitive, exclusionary, and tribalistic. I think we can all agree that war is generally relatively bad. The economy tanks, supply chains suffer, the disadvantaged are disproportionately disenfranchised, lots of lives are lost, properties destroyed — and then there’s the unquantifiable amounts of sorrow associated with the phenomenon of war such as PTSD experienced by the soldiers, the anguish experienced by their siblings, parents and friends, the experience of hunger by the unfortunate, the real cost of losing a limb in the war, and so on. War is bad, and there should be less of it…. or should it? Is there a side to war that contributes to society — a side of war that is beneficial?
Digging Deep
The first thing that has to come to mind when discussing war is the fact that we are the only species of our genus that persists. If we looked at any other animal and noticed that there is only one species left of their genus on the planet, we would be writing multiple journal articles on how to make sure that they do not go extinct by human causes. However, I digress. The point I want to bring to the fore is not the mere fact that we are the last and only surviving species of the hominids, but why. There are several theories, but the most accepted one is, in my opinion, the most harrowing one — war.
We have an inherent fear of foreign invasion that seeps into every fibre of our being. Let’s look at pop culture for example. Every alien movie ever made is about either the alien killing us or us trying to kill the alien. In the rather recently created Monsterverse, we’ve actually somehow managed to portray the terror-inspiring monster Godzilla as a saviour so that we can make other monsters look worse. That is some serious PR work that they’ve done. This fear of the unknown attacking us is evolutionarily inbuilt in us. This fear of the unknown is another common theme we use not just in the horror genre but even in the classic hero’s journey. The hero will have to face something that he has not had to face before. His weaknesses are exposed and he needs to reinvent himself, parallelly studying the enemy as well. They find the weakness of the enemy and use it against them and defeat them. This is why the enemy has to ideally be stronger than the hero — because the unknown is frightening. Whether it is B Rabbit from 8 Mile learning his enemy’s past to use it against him or Po learning the power of Chi and using it to defeat Kai in Kung Fu Panda 3, or fighting Death quite literally in Puss in Boots The Last Wish, essentially all heroes eventually succeed because they uncovered the unknown. It is so ingrained into our psyche that we cannot even write fictional stories without the characters having to be at war with a third party or if not an enemy, themselves.
The tendency to see the unknown as a threat is quite clearly a feature of evolution. I say evolution and not human evolution because all animals have this primaeval instinct to fear the unknown. Any animal that lives in the wild needs to always look out for itself for its survival, and though we haven’t been the prey of entire species before, evolution occurs over a time span of tens of thousands to millions of years. Besides, part of the reason why we still have that fear is because of our continued requirement for it. I digress again. We’ll get back on track.
The Reason for All War
The root cause of all war can be divided into two broad categories. The first one is a rather obvious one — resources. These were the wars that were waged in ancient times — disputes over fertile land, water, and human resources. Back in the day, there was no Geneva Convention — men and women who were unfortunate enough to be captured alive would be put into intense labour and forced upon. An example of such a war is the Battle of the Nile in 47 BCE between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra VII. The Nile Delta was one of the most fertile pieces of land in the ancient world. It was so important that controlling Egypt meant controlling a great deal of global commerce. Some of the main reasons why India was plundered and looted so many times was because of the immense wealth that India possessed in the form of gold, lapis lazuli, fertile land, and bronze age industrialization.
The second reason for war is the one that is a lot more sinister and frankly, a whole lot bloodier.
Tribalism.
Tribalism refers to the organisation of people into a ‘tribe’. Here’s an interesting tangent — the general public, especially people from India, associate the word tribal with forest-dwelling underdeveloped people. However, the word tribe is derived from the Latin word ‘tribus’. It referred to the administrative divisions and voting units of ancient Rome. The modern interpretation of the word began in the sixteenth century when Euro-American colonisers decided that they needed to be seen as superior and separate from the so-called ‘primitive’ indigenous population. They started associating the word tribal with the words ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’. This is where that epithet came from. Interestingly, there was rigorous academic discussion about this later on in the eighteenth century and the term was reverted to having the normal associational meaning. However, the term had already firmly rooted itself outside of academia, so much so that it became part of mainstream discourse. You can read more about it here.
The reason why I brought up the etymology of the term tribe is to show you that tribalism isn’t restricted to groups of people that are stereotypically linked to native cultures but is rather a universal phenomenon. Tribalism can be seen in multiple forms in everyday life. Nationhood is a tribal identity — you are part of a tribe that has a similar set of morals, traditions, and ethics. The religion you belong to, your political affiliation, what caste you are part of (if you believe in that), what zodiac sign you belong to, or even whether or not you believe in astrology in the first place — these are microscopic segmented tribal identities everyone has within themselves. When it comes to nations, all these tribal identities are superseded by the tribal identity of nationhood which binds the fabric of the country together. It is this identity that keeps people of different cultures, social stature, and religions together within a country or nation.
War begins when these identities are at odds with each other. To understand what I mean, allow me to set some context.
The Bharatiya civilizational ethos has historically been an extremely welcoming one, accommodating innumerable cultures and backgrounds as her own. From Caucasians to Nigerians, from Zoroastrians to people who follow the Baháʼí Faith, from the farmer to the pharaoh, India has seen and welcomed them all. This attitude of Bharat to foreign cultures was both its blessing and its curse. Polytheistic societies are generally much more open to new cultures and try to incorporate them into their own culture. The most famous example of that would be Megasthenes identifying Krishna as the Greek God Hercules because of the similarities between their stories. However, monotheistic religions are much more narrow in their approach to worship and are against the idea of integration. It may be argued that there was tribalism among the people of polytheistic religions too. There were people who were divided among themselves as to whose God was better. This led to the rise of henotheism, but the cultural identity of being part of the civilization still held them together. With the rise of Atenism, monotheism was born, and the problem with that is that it breeds fanaticism of the highest order. I have explained this in detail in a previous blog, which I will link below.
Now there were groups of fanatical groups that believed that there was only one God and that their God was the only true God. This polarisation is what led to some of the bloodiest wars in the world. Don’t get me wrong, communism has killed more people than the entire Second World War, but that too is a religion in the sense that there is a codified set of stringent laws that need to be devoutly followed by all the followers to the last letter, failure of which would be considered a direct threat to the established collective delusion of oneness that brings together of seemingly different backgrounds together. Dogma is powerful beyond the most powerful atomic bomb in that it envelopes everyone it touches in a negative way across generations. Propaganda perpetually propagates itself through these ideologues, which in large numbers leads to Orwellian authoritarian dystopias like China, the USSR, and other similar nations. This is what I meant when I said it’s not just religion — this level of tribalism transcends the boundaries of reason. It is an inherent evolutionary human tendency that can be successfully manipulated across social strata.
Tribalism isn’t Necessarily Bad
From what you might have read so far, you might have thought “Oh she hates tribalism”. While I do not condone having tribalistic tendencies towards every contentious issue out there, I don’t outright condemn having them either, because like I said, it is a basic human behaviour. It’s a mammalian instinct to stick together with people who agree with you. Kurzgesagt very recently posted this video that deals with the issue of why we have such tendencies and how it would be better if we all banded together under the banner of ‘humanity’.
As ‘Kumbaya’ as it sounds, this really isn’t possible in today’s politically charged environment. Gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion have become central talking points. People all over Europe are voting in increasingly right-wing governments and immigration has never been a bigger pain point in history, especially in light of active demographic changes that are taking place at the moment. Utopia is only possible when everyone is on board, and as far as I can see, there is no single solution to such a multi-faceted issue. Different governments will deal with their issues in vastly different ways according to the circumstances they are in and the ideas they believe in — it is simply a fact of life. As long as monotheism and the concept of a singular all-powerful entity exist, there will never be global oneness. This however not only applies to religion, but also to race, caste, gender, and ideology. There will always be groups of people who believe that they are superior to the rest. Look, I’m not a moral relativist. I do not believe that all cultures are equal. On the contrary, I believe that there are cultures that are objectively better than others. I see a culture that values women as lesser than men an inferior culture. I see a culture that kills homosexuals for the mere act of loving each other an inferior culture. I see a culture that strives to uplift people to a comfortable standard of living across social strata, religion, ethnicity, and race a superior one. Such cultures will always be at odds with each other, and I do not see anything wrong with that. It’s okay to disagree with each other as long as there is consensus on some basic ground rules. This article is going to be long as it is, I don’t want to keep going on tangents.
The Effects of War
War is bad in terms of human life, we can all agree on that. As I researched this topic further though, I realised that there are two sides to this as well. Sometimes, war can do so much good that it doesn’t even seem justified not to go to war. That sounds absurd, I know. However, I’m going to tell you a few stories that will make you seriously think about the dual nature of war.
The Fastest Commuter Vehicle Ever Made — The Jet Engine
The year is 1944. You are an American general flying your Lockheed P-38 Lightning at 440 kph when an enemy aircraft overtakes you making you feel like you’re “standing still”.
That was the first time the Allies had seen the true potential of a jet fighter in combat. It must’ve been a truly horrifying experience to have seen that, I would imagine. German physicist Hans von Ohain developed the first jet engine and with his mentor Ernst Heinkel, the world’s first jet plane, the Heinkel He 178, took flight on August 27, 1939.
The jet fighter is now a staple component of modern warfare, an indispensable element without which the opposing side would be sitting ducks. That’s what’s happening with Hamas at the moment. Compared to Israel’s incredible pedigree in military equipment manufacturing and superior engineering, Hamas’s relentless terrorist strikes and rocket fire, although effective at times, are pathetically primitive by scale. I digress. Let’s get back on track.
Before I digress too far from the topic, I want people to think about the fact that only two countries out of the total 190 or so countries in the world have independently engineered the jet engine — that’s Britain and Germany. That’s it. The Italians got it from the Germans and the Americans got it from the British, both in exchange for support in WWII, but they were never homegrown anywhere else. Now the idea behind a jet engine is fairly simple to understand: there are two fans, and the air between those two fans is heated up to extreme temperatures and pushed out on the other side, providing thrust. Practically every person who wants to know about this can get this far. However, the technical difficulty with creating indigenous jet engines turns out to be a material science & metallurgy issue. The components that constitute the fan and the combustion chamber need to be made of some alloy that can not only withstand extremely high temperatures but be able to do so for over 40 to 50 hours at a stretch. This is a jet engine we’re talking about, there is no room for error when it comes to national defence, which is why every country in the world spends immensely on their defence budget. Even the world’s most notorious copycats, the Chinese, have not been able to reverse engineer the materials used in a jet engine, and since they can’t make one with child-moldable plastic, they’ve been unsuccessful in recreating it so far. India has also tried its fair share with the Tejas project, but we too have been unsuccessful. This is especially depressing to me because Bharat, as a civilization, was the first to enter the Bronze Age. We used to have the most advanced metallurgy on the planet at one point in time. It is sad to see that we do not have more people working on this and would rather work in the service sector for another country than actually work for their own, but that’s a discussion for another time. Enough of the tangent. Let’s get back on track.
So after WWII, these jet engines needed a purpose, and the most natural thing for them to be used for was commercial airlines. Today, this is probably the only way we fly nowadays, especially when travelling abroad. If not for the Second World War, we would not have had the Messerschmitt Me 262, and if not for that, the British wouldn’t have fast-tracked their jet engine or shared it with the Allied Powers, resulting in the commercialization and commercial adoption of jet engines after the war. That would’ve been a massive dud, wouldn’t it?
Heaven, Hell & Earth — Cold War Shenanigans
Propaganda is part and parcel of war — that is irrefutable. It plays mind games with the masses and polarises people. The most recent and most culturally relevant case of mass propaganda is the Israel-Hamas war where both sides are fighting hard to get the world to swing their way and so far, Palestine has been winning (even though not on the war front). A bit before, it was the Ukraine-Russia war. People classify conflicts based on whether they believe Ukraine or Russia were right, Israel or Hamas are right (yes, people actually discuss this), and even more absurdly, whether Kashmir is an integral part of India. However, the most absurd classification that I’ve come across so far is the Three Worlds theory.
To see why this classification is so absurd, I want you to imagine the first thing that comes to mind when you think about a so-called First World country. You probably imagined something like this:
Now if I tell you to imagine a so-called Third World country, you would probably imagine something like this:
In short, we consider them to be vague representations of the economic stature of the respective countries.
That’s our traditional understanding of the First World and Third World. However, here’s my question — what’s the Second World? If you’ve completely blanked out, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I was confused about it, and the moment I looked into it, I realised that the classification of the First, Second and Third World aren’t meant to be arbitrary economic lines drawn to distinguish between countries, it’s actually something completely unrelated.
To understand this, we need to go back to the era of post-WWII. The Soviets, Brits, Americans, and Chinese had successfully downed the Axis Powers but there were just too many powerful countries now. There wasn’t a power vacuum, there was a power surplus, and that resulted in the same thing — war.
However, this war wasn’t fought by the sword, at least not in the traditional sense. This was a silent war fought on the sidelines through proxies. George Orwell predicted this and coined a term for this precarious situation which stuck — the Cold War. The Cold War wasn’t an actual war, but considering that it was between the biggest powers of the world, the entire world was unstable. Espionage became commonplace, there was a stockpiling of arms, research and development were being done to outcompete each other on every frontier (most famously the space race and nuclear weapons) and propaganda was rampant. The Sino-Soviet split happened, and with the Chinese out of the way, the Americans became hyper-focused on destroying the Soviet Union in every way possible. However, in the midst of all this, the one thing they all failed to realise was that there were other countries in the world.
And they were understandably not thrilled by the fact that the entire world was unstable.
There was no real solution for this except for one — take a stand. You either stand with the Americans and their allies, which was called the Western Bloc, or you stand with the USSR and its allies, which was called the Eastern Bloc. India looked at both of those sides and decided that they didn’t want anything to do with this war, and decided that we would be non-aligned, founding the Non-Aligned Movement along with Indonesia, Egypt, Ghana, and Yugoslavia.
Do you see where I’m going with this yet?
The Americans and the Western Bloc started being called the First World. This constituted all the countries that helped them in their own way during the Cold War — Canada, Japan, France, Italy, and of course, a large part of Europe such as the UK, Spain, Portugal, etc. The Soviets and their allies, the Eastern Bloc, became the Second World. This included both countries, in the vicinity of the USSR such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan; as well as other communist allies from around the world such as Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Laos, Mongolia, Cambodia, Cuba, Albania, East Germany, Poland and Romania. Mind you, this was all the creation of the West — the Russians didn’t classify themselves second anywhere. So, the people who stood against these Western imperialists got classified as the Third World. Split three ways for convenience to discriminate on different levels, what a Western thing to do.
To be fair, this was just the white man’s way of understanding the world. The last time a white man tried to draw a line, India got split in three. However, they did make a very American mistake — not knowing geography. See, the demarcations based on who stood by who would make for the temporary arbitrary white man line would have worked if not for the shoddy way it was carried out. By their definition of the First World, Western Sahara, Namibia, South Africa, and Mozambique should have been part of it too because they were either allied with or were colonies of Western countries during the Cold War. Similarly, Vietnam, Laos, Mongolia, Cambodia, and Cuba should be part of the Second World although they are widely regarded as Third World countries today. In another rather interesting turn of events, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Ireland and Finland had chosen to remain neutral in this war. That would make them part of the Third World. You can watch this video for more info, it’s pretty detailed.
In India’s case, though, it would have been a lose-lose situation anyway. Let’s say we did participate in the Cold War. In that case, we would have sided with Russia since we were already “strategic partners”, which I do not think is a bad thing by the way. Russia has been a better friend to India than India has been to Nepal, and we don’t even need a passport to go there. Anyway, if we had partnered with them, we would have been a direct threat in America’s eyes, especially because of our massive population. That would have put not just lives at risk, but also made us financially dependent on the Soviet Union, which as we know, wouldn’t have gone well for either of us. Instead, we decided to remain neutral. We took a stand against the conflict while also maintaining diplomatic relations with both powers. Just like how the word tribal started being associated with poverty and primitivity, the Third World began to be associated with the same exact connotation. The classification of the Second World sort of became obsolete because there was no need for it anymore after the Soviet Union collapsed.
This is not to say that we need to agree with whatever Russia has done. Anyone who has even remotely heard of Soviet-era Russia knows about the gulags. The gulags were the worst of the worst, literally Hell on Earth. You could literally get boiled alive in oil and be forced to work fourteen hours a day the very next day, and if you didn’t, you were beaten within an inch of your life. In the gulags, death was a blessing. The Nazi concentration camps were a bed of roses compared to the gulags behind the Iron Curtain. There were gang wars within the gulags too. Yeah, that’s right. The worst place in history could still get worse.
But that’s the story for another time.
Interestingly, India has recently been intentionally deprioritizing NAM conferences under the Modi government. That does not necessarily mean that India is trying to join NATO. I think it just means that we are looking for a multi-aligned relationship with the NATO nations rather than have a non-aligned stance, which I believe is the right thing to do in today’s day and age.
The Science Wars
Advancement of science and technology is amazing, sure, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise if we use it for, say, dropping a couple of nukes on a couple of enemy territories. Human beings aren’t inherently violent in nature, but when motivated, can do incredible damage to fellow human beings. From spears and axes from the Stone Age to the AK-47 used by Hamas to kill civilians on the 7/10 attack, there has been no shortage of innovative methods to kill people. We often overlook the impact science has had on warfare, mainly because countries co-opt a discovery or invention as their own and not as one of science. Although there are many famous wars out there, I want to focus on some technological innovations that were brought about just for the cause of war.
The Medieval War in the Modern World
I’m not sure how many Indians know about this, but India has lost a bit of land to the Chinese, mainly Aksai Chin and parts of Arunachal Pradesh. It is still a sore spot for Indians and understandably so — we’ve lost so much land already. However, after the ceasefire agreement, to prevent an all-out war between the two most populous countries in the world, they made a strict decision not to fire a gun on the LAC or the line of actual control.
However, what both sides realised was that there was a loophole that could be exploited. Nowhere in their terms and conditions is it mentioned that there could not be melee combat. So both sides started coming up with the most insane melee weapons known to humankind. Remember, firing a gun is the only thing that is not allowed — it is completely fine to beat your enemy to death with, say, a sledgehammer. The improvements are so mind-boggling that it is almost incomprehensible to think that there is research and development funded by both governments to precisely engineer something to kill your enemy within the framework of the agreement. There are cases where the Guan Dao, a long sword-like weapon was used by the Chinese, in response to which the Indian side came up with a Trishul (a trident) that can also electrocute the opponent. I can only imagine the sort of hardships our forces face at the border because of problems like this. Hats off to the men and women fighting on the frontlines over at the border.
You can read more about it here:
The Space Race
We all knew this was coming. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviets and the US were competing with each other on multiple fronts. However, the most famous one is arguably the space race. I’m pretty sure people who come across my page have a fairly decent idea of how that went down, so I’m not going to elaborate much further. However, there are a few things about it that I wanted to bring to light.
The Americans may have been the ones that won the space race eventually, but a great deal of inventions, equations we still use in calculations related to space travel, and experiments were actually pioneered by the Soviets. They genuinely have a lot of firsts — the first to reach orbit, the first animals in space, the first humans in space, the first spacewalk, and so many more. I don’t think they get enough credit for being the pioneers that they were.
That being said, the impact the space race had on human civilization is much more far-reaching than anything anyone could have imagined. If not for the space race, we wouldn’t have invented the ballpoint pen, double-sided tape, cordless power tools, CAT scans, ear thermometers — and so many more. The trickle-down effects of what the space race gave us is incredibly fascinating. However, if you step back and think about it, isn’t it rather remarkable that we went from figuring out how to fly using a machine to landing on the moon within the timeframe of a single human lifetime?
Necessity is the mother of invention. If scientists didn’t need a drill in the International Space Station, do you think that cordless power tools would even be invented? People would just say, “I can always plug my drill into the wall and have it work completely fine!” and that would’ve been the norm. Imagine not having that. Competition is everything.
Alchemy
This is something that only very nerdy science geeks would know. The Transfermium wars were essentially a race to synthesise new elements beyond what was conceived possible. We had found Uranium, which is the heaviest naturally occurring element (atomic mass-wise). In nuclear physics, there is a process that some heavy elements undergo called beta decay, where in that process, the element gains one proton and becomes more stable. Scientists realised that we could induce beta decay in heavier elements and essentially synthesise more elements. It really was like alchemy, and there really isn’t any other explainer out there except for this one video I found on YouTube that threads this complicated story into chronological order and with such good storytelling. I’m not even going to attempt to explain this story because there is way too much jargon and honestly, this video has everything rolled together in one.
So What Did We Learn?
Human beings are at a stage in history where people of all cultures and religions are intermingling. Of course, we have our usual tribal tensenvies in the short run, but I believe all of this will fade away over a short period of time. After a few thousand years, it is inevitable that we will be a space-faring civilization. At that point in time, we should set aside our differences and band together beyond our usual local tribe and look at the larger picture. A civilization that is built on the foundational ethics of pluralism, the economic prosperity of the free market, the liberty offered at a much greater standard than the current Free World, and with the entire universe at our disposal. For such an outcome, we must put our heads together just like during war times — but this time, not against each other, but rather for each other. The resourcefulness, resilience, and grit that humanity as a collective has is beyond the wildest imagination, and through our collective cooperation and collaboration, no mountain is too high, and no planet too difficult to terraform.
