I'm agreeing with you that the roots of conflict are generally economic. The original source was scarcity of resources. Now it's other economic pressures or opportunities or whatever it is that somebody wants to gain. Once the conditions make it possible for more people to benefit without conflict, my expectation is that the urge to fight will abate. There will always be sociopaths, call them big men, dictators, villainous corporate bosses, or whatever they may be. They will always pursue their own narrow interests at the expense of others. But, as the vast majority of people gain an element of security without being tied to a sociopath, those people will have less impact on the well being of others, and will no longer be able to conjure up the resources for the kinds of conflicts that are still common in some parts of the world.
We're not too far apart in our views. The main difference I would have from this post is that, in my view, I wouldn't assume that a protagonist in a conflict must be a "sociopath." That implies that, in order to pursue a conflict strategy, someone must have something "wrong" with them, and they must somehow be irrational and unhealthy. Now, certainly, we could find some characters who thrive in conflict environments who do fit that bill. But most moral systems in most societies through history don't automatically assume violence in itself is automatically a bad thing that only a morally delinquent person would turn to, the way the modern west does: only improper, unauthorized, or dishonorable violence. As long as it's pursued by certain kinds of people within the rules of the game society allows, it's accepted and even expected. Violence appears as a rational and valid strategy in such a society. It only becomes possible to understand a conflict, and reduce or eliminate violence, if we resist the temptation to dismiss its practitioners as madmen and analyze the rationale to their activity.
I'd never agree to barring people from proliferating very unpopular - even despicable - ideas like that (not saying that was what you were advocating). However, as a culture, we need to apply some critical thinking to the world around us and quit with this idea that all opinions are equally valid. I'm staunchly in the camp that not everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. You are only entitled to the opinions which you can cogently defend. Ken Ham's thoughts about evolution are not different but equivalent with respect to Richard Dawkin's thoughts on evolution. Jenny McCarthy's brain farts about vaccination are not equivalent to the countless medical and biology peer-reviewed journal articles that have failed to find a causal link between vaccination and autism. The Truthers aren't on equal intellectual footing as the physicists and engineers who have provided solid evidence that the towers came down because planes were flown into them.
I have an easy answer for this, but no simple solution for its execution. The population has to become critical thinkers and sophisticated consumers of information. In America, how many "public intellectuals" do we have? We have Cornell West and Noam Chomsky...maybe we could include Neil Degrasse Tyson in that list. That's three. The rest are just ideological pundits masquerading as intellectuals. Perhaps I'm cynical, but Hofstadter is correct. We have a hegemony of anti-intellectualism in America. Is it something that is period or cohort specific or is it something that's always been there? I don't know. But I do know that it's a bad thing.
+1000.
When I was in college back in the 80s, we had a big debate over "hate speech" episodes. The college president at the time laid out a principle that I've held ever since: The only proper response to bad ideas is better ideas. Create an authority that tries to control or forbid ideas, then 1) what happens if bad ideas become orthodoxy for that authority, and 2) bad ideas go underground rather than circulating in open society where they can be examined, discussed, and shown false for the public.
Totally agree about our dearth of public intellectuals. That's a troubling factor. I think it's related to the tendency of people to huddle up in fringe tribes online that I talked about earlier, but also is a longer-standing issues in American society. The question I wonder about is why we have this gap. Is it because academic turned in on itself and stopped addressing the public? Or is it more that the public media turned its back on intellectuals, perhaps as TV shrank our attention span and made us prefer soundbites to detailed discussions?
Many Middle Eastern leaders have been antagonistic towards the US for over 65 years, this has nothing to do with their viewpoint of any current or past president. Ever since Israel became an independent nation, in fact. That was under Truman who was hardly weak--he had dropped two nuclear bombs just a few years prior. Tensions continued under Eisenhower, again certainly not a weak man by any means. The oil embargo of the early 70's? Under Nixon, who was a hawk. The Iranian embassy takeover, under Carter...well okay, he did seem weak though he tried to attempt a rescue. (Reagan ended the embassy crisis by an under-the-table deal...) Of course, a few years later-still under Reagan, there was the bombing of the American marine barracks in Lebanon. Iraq's first Gulf war, that began under Bush Sr who had been head of the CIA and certainly he was no dove. The attack on the USS Cole, that was Clinton, but 9/11 was Bush Jr.--so no one President is beyond their hatred. And since today's military spending in the US still is more than the next ten countries combined, it's hard to call our military weak.
The Cold War, in combination with decolonization, is also a huge factor that we tend to forget about. After WWII, many areas of the world that were part of European colonial empires (including much of the Middle East) struggled for independence. The US may have been sympathetic, but was reluctant to help a fight against its own wartime allies (England and France), who were the main colonial powers, so they often got assistance from the USSR instead. This was the case in Iraq, Syria, Egypt. Fearing that the area would fall under communist control, the US channeled money and weapons to any friendly figure we could find - the Israelis, the Saudis, the Shah in Iran. Both sides in the Cold War were propping up military dictators who were neither democratic nor communist nor particularly Islamic. Iran, of course, blew up in our face in '79, but the breakup of the Soviet Union created a chance to "buy out" some of their pawns on the board.
Meanwhile, the masses suffering under these oppressive regimes understood full well who was propping them up, so you get anti-western resentment, and people looking for alternatives, which some found in radical Islamism. With the end of the Cold War, the rationale to supporting them becomes obsolete, and everyone starts wondering (and worrying), "What's next?" That may help explain Saddam Hussein's miscalculation in invading Kuwait in 1990; he may have been trying to establish his power on a more independent basis by seizing oil revenues, and calculating post-cold-war leaders abroad wouldn't have the political will to go to war with him. The military regimes, at any rate, became more and more fragile until the Arab Spring swept several of them away. But their ways of ruling had inhibited the formation of any kind of civil society in their "countries." Rather than a "nation," what you turn out to have in a place like Iraq or Syria is a patchwork of religious factions and local tribal groupings and no larger sense of common identity or common good.
And as far as Rome's fall, one view is that Rome's military overreach helped bankrupt their economy. It's relatively easy to conquer foreign nations, but far more challenging to occupy them. Rome's empire was built on successive conquests but eventually they ran out of lands within reach of conquest.
While that's generally a valid principle, of all conquerors in history the Romans were the ones who met the challenge. Rome's conquests were largely complete and its frontiers established by the year 100 AD, with occasional fluctuations after that; it would be nearly 400 years before the empire broke up. That's a heck of a long time to successfully occupy conquered territory. The provinces became thoroughly Romanized - that's why most of their inhabitants to this day speak Romance languages rather than some form of Gaelic. When they did break up, it was not oppressed provincials rebelling against their government, nor was it external invaders. It was factions within the empire's military, all proudly calling themselves "Romans," but rivals with each other and fighting each other for their own interests, from their own power bases in different regions of the empire. This had happened pretty regularly through Rome's history, since the civil wars of the first century BC that had ended the Republic. What was different this time was that nobody won. The provinces were so well Romanized, and the armies so deeply rooted in provincial society through centuries of being recruited and stationed out there, that you no longer needed to control Rome, and the faction that did control Rome didn't have any particular leverage over his rivals elsewhere. Italy was just one more province among many. In fact, ironically, it was the Romanized provinces of the west that broke up. The eastern Roman Empire, where Roman culture had never really prevailed over Greek culture, remained united and intact and calling itself "the Roman Empire" (historians usually call them "Byzantines") kept right on going another 1000 years till 1453 AD. In the west, the warlords hunkered down in their various territories and started relying on the title of "king" that carried authority among their federate barbarian troops, and so what used to be provinces of the Roman Empire morphed into the kingdoms of medieval Europe.
There was indeed economic decline in the backdrop of all this. Most (but not all) of the archaeology points that way. The army was very large and very expensive, taxes were crushing, and there were environmental factors as well. But I've yet to see a study that persuasively connects the dots to show how, in the west in particular, declining economy led to political breakup. Everybody was getting poorer together. That's related to my earlier point to Gaolee: in a factionalized political culture that rewards conflict, factions will fight regardless of whether resources are scarce or plentiful; whatever resources exist, the factions will fight over them.
