War Is Insane

My teacher once said that a good argument for the existence of rebirth is the fact that we still have war. War is so obviously stupid, unproductive, and contrary to human happiness that you would think one war would be enough for people to stop and say, “Okay, let’s never do that again.”

But that's not what happens. Instead, greed, hatred, and delusion get reborn, in new bodies and new eras, and people start to forget.

Greed starts speaking: maybe war will be good for the economy. Hatred says: it's more important to destroy a government than care for its people. Delusion says: there’s no other choice. Sometimes delusion even pretends to be sensitivity, as if questioning war were insensitive, while supporting it is the empathetic thing to do.

And so every generation — or lately, every few months — some major newspaper publishes an editorial making a “case” for bombing one country or another.

Some people think war is an inevitable part of human nature, and in one sense they're right: war is a function of the human tendency to dissociate from the consequences of our actions. The Buddha called this recycling of forgetting samsara.

But we are not just beings who forget. We can also remember. We can remember with joy the preciousness of human life. We can remember with grief the pain we have caused ourselves and others. And we can remember that every war contains within itself another war, and another.

War is insane. Beneath the language of strategy and “last resorts” there is something very primitive: a child who cannot tolerate frustration and knocks his blocks to the floor. Freud called it the death drive. The Buddha spoke of samsara. But the blocks of human interdependence still remain, waiting to be rebuilt, moment after moment, lifetime after lifetime.

Umberto Boccioni, "Charge Of The Lancers" (1915)