War. What is it good for?

The psychologist, William James, and the economist, Adam Smith, gave reasons for everlasting conflict

William Blake reflects on the American War of Independence. Image: Yale Centre for British Art

Why people go to war is puzzling. Historians still debate the origins of the First World War, for example, no expert quite nailing the reasons that the great powers tipped the globe into industrialised catastrophe.

But how to understand the energy of enmity is again pressing. Conflicts in Europe and elsewhere show that default peace is a turn-of-the-millennium pipedream; everlasting wars are a seeming inevitability in the twenty-first century.

There are many factors that precipitate conflict which might be considered, but a couple stand out as they have do with idling; or more specifically, to recall the philosopher Blaise Pascal, “from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Outer events are always driven by a mix of inner imperatives such as revenge or pride, which we forget at our peril. Of all the moods that grip societies, the urge to deploy violence is one that peacetime politics – debate, campaign, protest – finds hardest to resist. You hear the looming threat in talk of “inevitable escalation”, or of “injury that cries for answer”. “Truth is the first casualty of war” is another telling expression, as that lodestar is discarded, all sides resorting to lies.

The aspects of belligerence that might be illuminated by a collective incapacity to idle play a role, too, and can be said to be twofold. One is a byproduct of the over-industriousness of the modern world. A second is a byproduct of the addictive nature of consumerism.

The economist Adam Smith can help us with the first. He reflected on the causes of war and feared that the burgeoning commerce he witnessed in the early capitalism of the eighteenth century makes warfare more likely. The potential for state-sanctioned violence grows in two ways.

First, modern society is marked by increases in wealth in conjunction with boosts to the money supply, through the availability of debt. This growth means that wars become easier to finance. No longer does a king have to persuade a resistant parliament to raise taxes; instead, a government borrows and issues bonds. Coupled to well-trained standing armies, which became features of state power in the early modern period as well, war becomes a much easier path to follow.

Second, Smith realised, modern warfare is intimately linked to global trade. Mercantilism can build bonds of friendship between countries. But Smith also saw that relationships which are dependent upon supply chains are vulnerable. If the mutual utility lessens or ceases, the friendship does too. Moreover, in a complex world, in which countries have relationships with many different trading partners, fear and jealousy become powerful forces in their own right. Should one party judge they are losing territory or being sidelined in new trade agreements, they will feel affronted and injured. Tensions rise which, unresolved, spark conflict.

Take the causes of the Seven Years War in the mid-eighteenth century, which Winston Churchill later described as the first truly worldwide war. Smith believed the bloodshed was caused, in part, by what he called the “invidious eye” of rival nations. “Commerce, which ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity,” he laments in The Wealth of Nations.

Further, he judges, the envious “monopolizing spirit” of merchants and manufacturers was proving more “fatal to the repose of Europe” than the “capricious ambition of kings and ministers.” Substitute “Europe” with “America and China” and the grounds for armed conflict based on industriousness and consumption remain.

The marginalisation of idling can also be linked to a second cause of war. This one is less structural, more psychological. It was spotted by the father of psychology, William James, and has to do with a paradox: consumerism is inclined to make life feel boring.

The American philosopher began by noticing that, remarkably, military action is often welcomed by the combatants, at least in the opening phases of hostility. “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us,” he wrote in an essay, The Moral Equivalent of War, adding: “The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars.”

James goes on to diagnose a “double personality” in nations: one part yearns for patriotic glory and heroic sacrifice; the other a life of ease and peace – the former regarding the latter as degenerate, the latter the former as madness.

James himself hoped for a third way, in which warfare is gradually consigned to the past as martial energy is redirected from military passion to social action. “Great indeed is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men’s spiritual energy.”

In other words, James hoped that civic aspirations might satisfy humanity’s need to feel that life has meaning, better than war: pursuing justice not dominance, equality not victory, progress not destruction. To put it another way, a consumer way of life is one intolerant of boredom, but the question is whether doing good is a better remedy than warfare: the satisfactions of sacrifice or the self-righteousness of moral clarity; the focus of beauty or the intensity of fear? Are admirable peacetime pursuits as exciting as martial ones?

Time will tell. But the darkness is worth pondering. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, at least in some measure. And maybe it helps tip the balance in favour of peace. Plus there is the real world value of idling to advocate and cheer.

This essay first appeared in my column in The Idler.