How likely is another world war?

[Gusington]

Thank you Kev and LB, you put words towards my initial thoughts better than i could have. I 'll add that war is not a natural condition for us to live in, however we define it, like LB says above. Was my running and screaming through the streets of Manhattan for two days on 9/11 my own personal experience of war? I don't know. I do know that if every day of my life was like 9/11 I would not be able to carry on.

[SirAndrewD]

I don't believe that war is our natural condition either.  However, I do think that war is essentially unavoidable in tribal/nation-state society.  There will always be a time when one tribe's interests clash with another, and when that happens, violence all too often the preferred route to achieve conflicting aims. 

I don't foresee peace ever truly existing as long as humans live in tribes and have conflicting needs and opinions. 

[Gusington]

And in the end, we agree. War is not natural but unfortunately unavoidable and part of the human condition.

[BanzaiCat]

I think the word "war" is pretty open to interpretation, like the word "beta" is (which JH recently espoused upon in a thread dealing with GCIII).

No doubt you're going to get a long explanation in a modern dictionary - there's just too many uses for it. From a dictionary dated 1900, though, I'd be very curious to see it's definition of 'war' just to compare it with what it's been forced to become.

It's ultimately all about perception of course. In my mind, 'war' is an all-out conflict between two or more countries. The term 'war on terror' never sat well with me, probably mainly because the news uses it as a buzzword to beat dead horses with, much like they loved using 'information superhighway' back in the day (shudder).

Also, I agree that pure peace is an impossible standard to hold on to, given the number of bloodthirsty idiots in the world that wrap themselves in all manner of guises, including religion, to make themselves sleep better at night/manipulate their underlings into bleeding and dying for them.

[JasonPratt]

Hm... I would say destructive conflict between rational creatures, which after a certain scale-up relative to the society becomes war, is only a natural state, though not the only natural state: a certain amount of peace, even if only micro-peace, is necessary for there to be much of anything for people (or even non-rational creatures) to fight over (not merely play over in friendly competition). As peace has grown, so has war in proportion, naturally enough.

But natural states of existence aren't the only states of existence. Or rather, the best and ultimately only assurance for ultimate peace between persons in a universe of entropy, is if the ground of all reality itself is an active union of fair-togetherness between persons.

Which gets into a very particular kind of philosophical and even religious belief, though one which is not (or at least should not be) particular about the positive value of all rational creatures -- even where they don't share such belief.

Not that would argue for such a philosophy (and religion) being true by appealing to it as a ground of hope beyond war and the conflict of rational creatures, since after all at best that route would be a hypothetical appeal.

But it does give an idea of the issues at stake in affirming or refuting the truth of a belief compared to other beliefs.


Anyway, philosophy aside: inductively (estimating likelihoods from past experience) another world war is practically certain, if not deductively certain. The factors and the rationales for projecting destructive conflict remain the same (though restricted somewhat by the fear of mutually assured destruction in past decades); and I don't see those factors and rationales changing substantially anytime soon. If our technology for projecting power somehow globally drops, that will obviously remove certain possibilities for the global extent of a war, but the tech would have to globally drop back beyond that available for, say, the Napoleonic Wars, or even the Seven Years War prior to the American Revolution. But war will continue on occasion because destructive human conflict will continue.