麻豆传媒

IN THE Peace Museum in Hiroshima there is a series of glass cases. In each is a smock, or a pair of trousers, or a shoe, torn and often burnt. Attached to each case is a vignette, giving the name of the wearer, his or her age (mostly teenagers), how far each was from ground zero at the moment of the explosion, and what he or she was doing just then. Some had died where they were. Others managed to crawl home but died that evening or the next day. Perhaps the most moving is the description of the child who was 2 years old when the bomb fell. She survived, and grew into a fine athletic girl. Ten years later radiation sickness crept up on her, and she died slowly over the following months. In accordance with a Japanese myth that if you make a thousand paper cranes your dearest wish will be granted, she made more than 500, believing that each one had to be perfect. Many of her exquisite creations are on display in the museum, some smaller than a little fingernail. The girl鈥檚 school friends made the rest for her after she died.

Seeing these tragic relics brought back memories of my own experiences in the second world war more vividly even than the before-and-after photographs of the obliterated city. The memories lingered in my mind as I read Michael White鈥檚 The Fruits of War, in which he argues that war stimulates scientific research, producing novel technologies that bring immense benefits to civilian life. While he does not explicitly say that war is a good thing, White seems blissfully unconscious of what war really means, writing that its 鈥渢echnological gains are an acceptable silver lining鈥�. I have difficulty seeing the silver lining around the horror of 6 August 1945, when one bomb killed 145,000 people by the end of that year, and tens of thousands more in the years that followed.

Nonetheless, White claims that the technologies that emerge from war are the positive offspring of human suffering, assuming that these technologies really do improve our lives. But if we were still 鈥渢ravelling in propeller-driven aircraft and steam trains鈥� would we be so much worse off? Do these and other innovations compensate for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo, for the horrors of the Japanese railway, for Bosnia, Rwanda and Palestine, for the genocides, for the countless refugees and displaced persons, for the long-term suffering of the bereaved? Would the world be so much poorer without polluting four-wheel drives or submarines? Do advances in rocketry outweigh the 9000 deaths and thousands of injuries wrought by the V1 and V2 rockets of the second world war, not to mention the slave labour exploited in their construction?

鈥淒o these innovations compensate for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bosnia, Rwanda and Palestine?鈥�

Of course, setting back the clock of history to see what might have been is not always a useful exercise, but these are the sorts of questions that Michael White should be asking. He does make sure to say that 鈥渘o war is justified by the technological innovations that it might bring鈥�, but the rest of the book makes it almost impossible for the reader to bear that reservation in mind. It becomes especially difficult to believe that White is not offering a justification when he claims that there can be no human progress in the absence of aggression. 鈥淥nly dreamers and wishful thinkers could ever suppose that mankind could ever achieve anything without our inherent aggression,鈥� he writes. White鈥檚 loose language implicitly equates aggression with all positive activities, so the argument is circular.

By focusing on the positive aspects of war, White makes it easier for all of us to avoid taking responsibility for its consequences. If we choose to look at the bright side of mass devastation, we avert our eyes from the search for solutions, from attempting to stop the violence and devastation from happening in the first place. Appealing to the silver lining of a tragic situation is a last resort, one that should be invoked when nothing else can be done, when tragedy is inevitable. But war is not inevitable. White assumes that 鈥渢here will be wars and conflict for a very long time to come鈥�. Conflict, probably, but war is not the only way to solve conflicts. Gandhi and Mandela found other means. A hundred years ago many people would have predicted that there would always be wars within Europe, but today war within most of Europe seems impossible. Pacts, alliances and nuclear-free zones in many parts of the world have been set up to reduce the incidence of violent conflict. Much more needs to be done before war becomes a rarity, but it is already happening. Perhaps most importantly, as White himself points out, 鈥渢he attitude of the public towards the horrors of war has changed immeasurably鈥�.

White鈥檚 false assumption that war is inevitable rests on another false assumption: that humans are aggressive by nature and that this aggression leads to war. This is doubly fallacious. Human beings do indeed have a propensity for aggression, but we also have a propensity for cooperative behaviour. Because the media incessantly report murders, muggings, rapes and robberies, violence can seem pervasive. But the media do not report the hundreds of kind, compassionate and loving experiences that each of us encounters every day. The balance between our potential for aggression and our potential for cooperation is largely a product of our experiences. Hundreds of studies in developmental psychology over the past 50 years show that appropriate experiences in infancy, childhood and adolescence can minimise a person鈥檚 propensity for violence.

But that鈥檚 nearly beside the point, because human aggression is insignificant as an initiator of war. Every war has its own set of complex causes, including poverty, the need for resources, racial and ethnic differences, and the ambition and ineptitude of leaders. War may be characterised by aggression, but not by individual aggression 鈥� certainly not the international wars on which this book鈥檚 argument depends. In reality, the direction of causation is mainly the other way round: war causes individuals to behave aggressively.

The Fruits of War will be seen by many as good popular history. White鈥檚 broad knowledge enables him to cover diverse fields and make links between them. Unfortunately, there are a number of factual errors, and the author鈥檚 faulty logic leads him to mistake correlation for causation. The data needed to support his contentious conclusions are often missing, and nearly every chapter of the book is influenced by his own wishful thinking. Here is just one example: 鈥淚n all likelihood,鈥� he writes, 鈥渢he first use for a boat was to carry out an act of aggression.鈥� A writer emphasising the silver lining of the untold horrors of war had better make sure his assumptions and his logic are impeccable, and provide data to support every conclusion.