The Future of War: A Farewell to Arms?

Are we hard-wired for war? Two experts discuss where war has been and where it's headed.

By PT Staff, published on November 01, 1997 - last reviewed on September 29, 2009

FRIEDMAN: Look at Nazi Germany. In that specific case, to refuse to fight a war is more evil than fighting, I think. The man who hates war more than he hates the Nazis is a wicked man. One reason I took it down to the question of a particular war is that when you speak about war in the universal, rather than war against this country or that person, I think you make it easy on yourself.

LANIER: I think that the Nazis represented a unique instance in this century--there was an adversary who clearly was evil. I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree with you that fighting the Nazis was a good thing. To me, again, the metaphor is with cancer. Chemotherapy is a good thing even though it kills healthy cells. But we still hope for something better. We'd like to prevent cancer in the first place.

FRIEDMAN: It seems to me that unless you believe that wickedness can be eliminated altogether...

LANIER: Eliminating wickedness is a different project from eliminating violence. Eliminating violence--the destruction associated with wickedness--is a practical program that I'm very willing to pursue.

FRIEDMAN: One definition of the wicked is that they will resort to whatever means are necessary to achieve their ends. Therefore, if those who oppose wickedness don't learn the art of war, they will be helpless. The question then becomes, so what do you do in Serbia? I see no connection between your moral stance and any practical question that a statesman is going to ask.

LANIER: It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction. One thing that I have been trying to do is bring together in places like Bosnia technologists who create ever-more destructive land mines [and convince them not to build more dangerous mines]. And that has actually worked.

FRIEDMAN: But you're evading the question. Is war pathological? Does it require a cure? To me that's simply not clear. I'm still back at the question --even before "Is war good or bad?"--of "Why do human beings engage in this action?" My problem is that each explanation is plausible and yet I know I'm missing something.

LANIER: I haven't heard you endorse war, but I also haven't heard you endorse a program to try to rid the world of it. That's my concern.

FRIEDMAN: How can I endorse a program to rid the world of something that I don't know is bad?

LANIER: I knew that's what you were going to say.

PT: What if we study the possible causes and find that each one is insufficient by itself but eliminating a few of them is enough to avert or ameliorate a war?

FRIEDMAN: What if you decide not to fight a war and morally it should have been fought?

LANIER: Right now, in 1997, there is. . .

FRIEDMAN: ...no need for war. 1998 and beyond is my question. I think there are worse things than war. For example, injustice. We cannot anticipate the moral circumstances under which we will live. And therefore [I refuse] to say that I will not live in a moral circumstance that requires violence.

LANIER: It depends on where you decide to center your sense of morality. You choose to center it in one place and I choose to center it in a different place. I think mine is based on a sense of hope, and also maybe on statistical accuracy, because humans have also demonstrated a great capacity for peace.

LANIER: I'd like to mention another idea. In history, in most cultures, and at most points in time, if you want to find the most advanced technologies, you can look principally in two places. One is weapons and the other is musical instruments. My hypothesis is that instruments are usually ahead of weapons. In fact, I think you can find many examples of instruments being predecessors of weapons and very few in the reverse.

PT: Give us an example.

LANIER: Canons started out as bells that were turned on their sides. The first virtual reality-like device was the theremin, an early electronic musical instrument. The first flight simulator was built by a pipe-organ builder.

Also, the most common archeological opinion right now is that musical bows preceded bows and arrows, although that's certainly not certain.

There are some other examples.

FRIEDMAN: That's neat. I've never thought of it.

LANIER: I would argue that among musicians who work in technology today, the level of technological sophistication probably exceeds that of military programs, to be blunt. They are just really smart people attracted to making strange new sounds.

In the Sixties, the hippies said "Make love, not war," and that was naive. But it might be less naive to say "Make music, not war," in the sense that the people who create musical instruments are the same people who make up new weapons. If I were perhaps one percent different, I would be over at Los Alamos designing some incredible fusion thing.

FRIEDMAN: In a way, we can have a much easier discussion about the future of technology than we can about why a young man kills another man in a war. My frustration is...

LANIER: Yeah, but you hang out with philosophers. You should be hanging out with neurologists and biologists now.

FRIEDMAN: To me the moral question is fundamental. The importance of the question and the availability of an answer are two different things. I'm not willing to state that because the question is fundamental, therefore I possess the answer. And I'm certainly not willing to say that since I don't possess the answer, I'll pretend that I do.