Has war advanced, or hurt civilization?
They say necessity is the mother of invention.
In wartime, many advancements have been made in technology.
Advancements that may not have occurred otherwise.
On the flip side. Many people die in wartime. How many of those dead may have cured cancer one day, or crafted life saving vaccines, or built a better world?
In your opinion, has war had an overall good or negative impact on society, and technology.
Remember, that radar was invented to see incoming bombers at night. But now saves countless lives predicting weather.
Nuclear technology was also funded heavily, due to its military application. But that technology is used for clean power,space travel and medical purposes also.
Obviously so many lives are negatively affected by war though. Through death , or trauma.
Would we be further advanced with or without war?
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@MrGrimm888 “Has war advanced, or hurt civilization?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
“Would we be further advanced with or without war?”
This is a rather different question than the title question, but one that I still think is a bit malformed. It is unlikely that war profoundly changed the overall rate of advancement so much as it changed the areas in which we advanced and the direction that advancement took. There’s not just one path from “not advanced” to “advanced,” after all. Nor is there only one way of being “advanced.” A world without a history of war would be noticeably different, but it does not follow from this that such a world would be any more or less “advanced” overall.
That said, personal preferences would most likely lead people to different conclusions about which world they considered more “advanced.”
War is a massive extension of the “broken windows fallacy” in economics. No, it has not advanced civilization, and as you note it has impeded it in uncounted – indeed, “uncountable” ways.
As Frédéric Bastiat demonstrated through his excellent writings, in economics there is the seen and the unseen. This is the heart of the broken windows fallacy. Some economists – still, even today! – see the economic activity driven by a vandal’s breaking of a shop window as some kind of uptick in a market economy. The glazier gets a new order for glass; the contractor gets a new order to install the glass; the sign painter gets a new order to paint the shop window on the glass, and so forth. “Economic activity for the win!” they exclaim.
The fallacy is that the shopkeeper’s money could have been better spent on new goods, on a new employee, or on a modernization of the shop. That is “the unseen” that demonstrates the fallacy of the belief.
War is that on a massive scale.
@SavoirFaire , always a pleasure.
The question was meant to have a duality. You kind of have to pick a side. But I think the real answer is of course less black and white.
In a hypothetical world without war, would we be better off, or worse. Considering the technological advances through the mass amounts of money, and resources that wartime research gets,compared to real problems.
Consider the billions spent on the USA F-22, and F -35. THEY could lead to advancementsin space exploration. Or, could we have already got a cure for cancer, or have better spent the money on alternate fuels.
There are many variables at play. Money , life, research, death, displacement of refugees etc.
The only good thing war has ever taught us is that it is fucking horrible and we should avoid it.
Also, some classic works of arts were inspired by war, or consequences of it.
That’s it.
War. War never changes.
The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower.
But war never changes.
In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons: Petroleum and Uranium. For these resources, China would invade Alaska, the US would annex Canada, and the European Commonwealth would dissolve into quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth.
In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.
Stepping back to a non-military, non-capitalist perspective, I think war moves many things in dangerous directions. As @SavoirFaire pointed out, there is no one definition or measure for advancement.
Wars, especially large-scale wars, and especially post-industrial wars, have unfortunately molded much thinking into models of survival, competition, war, destruction, scarcity, industry for the sake of overpowering others, and so on. It seems to me that those are some pretty dangerous, wasteful, destructive, violent, hostile ways to think, which are not logically necessary but permeate modern thinking, probably largely due to wars and military (and economic) theory.
So by contrast, if we had had fewer wars, our thinking might not be so slanted in the ways it is. It might not seem so necessary for corporations to be trying to dominate politics and the world’s resources, leading to our own likely extinction at our own hands.
Paradox: man who would have cured cancer dies in war – technology that would have enabled him to cure cancer would not have been developed without that war.
@CWOTUS
But by that same token could not the glazier, the sign painter and the contractor use that money on new goods, to modernize their business or to hire a new employee?
I think there are pros and cons to each. Totally moot with no clear answer.
Well, of course they will, @Darth_Algar. And that’s why the fallacy. Because by that logic, obviously every shop window in town should be broken, right? Better yet, let’s burn the town to the ground.
Just to play the devil’s advocate . . .
Is equality of the sexes an advance? Where would women’s rights be without war? Consider the advances in women’s rights in the aftermaths of the world wars, due at least in part to the necessity of women doing what had been thought to be “men’s work” during the wars. Centuries earlier, Aristotle observed the greater freedom of Spartan women compared to other Greek women, because they had to run things while the Spartan men were constantly at war or preparing for it.
@CWOTUS
However the glazier, in using the money gained from repairing the shopkeeper’s window, may invest in new technology and develop a more shatter-resistant window.
@Darth_Algar if you think this is really such a great idea then you should be burning down your house instead of arguing with me.
Consider when ape man first took a rock or femur bone to the side of the head of an enemy, to the advent of more lethal weapons such as axes, spears, long bows and arrows…to the advent of gun powder long guns and machine guns…howitzers and aerial bombs…then nuclear weapons that Trump all other weapons previously devised. The past tides of countries sovereignty have shifted quite violently due to weaponry at hand for better or for worse and depending on which side of the sharp edge of the sword you are on.
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