Life is similar to a sine wave (like many other things in the universe, although not a sine, obviously - but you get my point), good and bad. Just as there is light, there is dark. If there was only good, then there would be no bad, and good would no longer be good. It would just be. So, world peace? Unless you want to live in a one dimensional world as a straight linear line, it's not going to happen.
Sorry but that this is not really a sound argument.
It's like saying that if there weren't very short people the very tall people wouldn't know to be very tall. Yet this would not change the fact that they could still reach branches better and walk and run faster.
You don't need a contrasting (almost teathrical) "bad" in order to have "good" because we should not measure "good" according to what is "bad" but according to its situational positive outcome. I don't believe there's a bad. Badness is for those who practice it justified. I guess we all know how the theatrical "villain" laugh in an evil manner and claim "it's so good to be evil!"
This never happens in the real world. Every kind of person who does something we consider "bad" is actually believing to do something "good". In order to understand the false dichotomy between good and evil we should just remember this saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"
In the extermination of native people in America, all the coliniers believed they were doing what was the right thing to do. Thomas Will was clearly believing to do the right thing when he was curing "mental-illsennes" by chaining and torturing his patients.
So did Johan Reil when he would promote wipping the mental retarded. Probably Benjamin Rush believed to be a good hero in treating patients through the cauterization of the spinal cord and paralization of the arms not to mention forced bleeding almost to the point of death. Julius Wagner-Jauregg believed to be right and a kind person in injecting the malaria virus to all his patients. Freeman and Moniz I'm sure believed in their good consciousness to do the right thing in lobotomizing people. Galton I guess believed that acknowledging how the weak and inferior people, races and populations needed not to be helped but to die quicky to advance the strong races was a good almost morally superior concept. Ernst Ruding too was probably not in the mood for "evilness" when he promoted to stop curing the sick and the weak. James Neel too probably had a clean consciousness when he recently killed and tortured Amazonian Natives in order to prove his biosociological speculations and Cyril Bart I'm pretty sure believed it was for the "good" to fake hundreds of scientific data about non-existing identical twins to promote his psycho-biological determinist agenda. Third reich, sovietic regime, stalinism and bombing Hiroshima are all facts that the people involved rationalized and justified pretty well to themselves as "for the good".
If there's something that history teaches us is exactly that what we consider evilness comes from what we consider inhernetly good and positive. There's no evil essence and no black and white, those who consider themselves good people and love to judge the evilness in others are probably those with the highest potential for cruel just self-justified acts. And that's probably the point. Good and evil are just foggy extremes of the same spectrum all human actions and thoughts belong to. The degrees of this spectrum are universal potential moved by circumstances.
But we were talking about War ad there's something very naive in considering War a product of natural human "badness", not just naive but egocentric and ethnocentric too.
War is first of all brainwashing from a small elite of people seeking power and convincing others it's in their interest too (the history of Africa is full of examples like this)
War is neither the product of human "badness" nor is it the manifenstation of "evilness" versus "goodness" working as a contrast to emphasize the goodness.
War is a political game, justified in the same way all the examples above have been; it is the potential of economical and political interest not the broad manifenstation of human spirit.
Eugenic, aka Biosociology, aka Evolutionary Psychology, aka bioreductivism is not only an asisine pseudoscience hiding a biased mechanist and reductionist meta-phylosophy which tries to justify the status quo as inherently intrinsic to our nature (hence unchangeable) but it is also generally always wrong about its data.
Wilson and Pinker claims that War is intrinsic in our genes. Since they can't really use genetic evidence (since no gene-war has ever been isolated or showed to trigger aggressivity and domination, and this applies to all kind of genes from homosexuality genes to shiness genes and creativity genes, they're nothing more than fairy tales) they resort to archeological evidence showing that War has always existed in human history. The archeological evidence actually (Keeley et al) shows that there are isolated instances of what appears to be violent death. There is no abundant evidence for the claim that violent death and War has always been a common aspect of human culture/nature. According to the anthropologist Brian Ferguson a serious analysis of archeological evidence shows that War is a product of the last 9.000 years. As I said peaceful non-violent populations do exist. In fact it just takes a slip from the ethnocentric point of view to refute whatever ideological claim of sociobiology. For example the natural male predomination contradicted by matriarchal societies comprised of people with the same genetic baggage we have. The mapping of the genome has actually showed that we have just a little more genes than a worm and the same amount of genes of corn, which is an incredible low amount and that actually there's often more genetical correspondance between two people of different "race" and "nationality" than people within the same "race" and "nationality". In fact genetic evidence is pretty clear about the fact that genetic human races don't exist.
What is really hypocritical is how followers of the biological determinism cult have actually genes as their god while real genetists with real knowledge of genetic refute the genes argument (Richard Lewontin - Not in your Genes)
Lewontin provides also a good argument as to why all-inclusive arrogant and yet ignorant pseudo-sciences like sociobiology not only thrive but have a good amount of faithful followers:
This materialist philosophy that drives modern science is held
with an absolutist dogmatism, that is more befitting a totalitarian dictatorship or a fundamentalist religion than a science. That is; it's not any requirement of the scientific method that drives modern science materialism, but rather modern scientists' personal materialist philosophy that drives modern science. Modern science has a primary committment to materialist philosophy, not science's original committment to
following the evidence wherever it leads.Bioreductionivism fakes evidence and ignore counterevidence to suit a personal phylosophy into what want to be an all-inclusive science getting rid of other interpretation and other sciences or modes of knowledge. Comical sentences like "New Synthesis of Reality" "The Only Souce of Truth" "Explaining Everything" "The Sole Paradigm" are common and shows the ideological attempt to not just get right of everything which doesn't fit the all-inclusive reductionist and flawed paradigm (ethics, aestethic, arts, creativity, intuition, trascendent, relational, cultural) but actually tries to inglobate them and reduce them to meaningless figment of the universal paradigm in spite of obviously unscientific and plain unreal and contradictory conclusions.
Only biosocialist blockheads can really believe that we're done with contemplating and analyzing or wondering about dualism, consciousness, self, ethics, relationships, meanings, purpose, life, spirituality, culture and relevant especially to this forum: arts.
That we are done in other words with real intellectual insight reduced to a figment of bioreductivism; ironically this bioreductivist argument would logically negate the bioreductivism itself. As Marjorie Grene says "A theory which, at its very root, invalidates itself is always wrong" The tragedy is that biosociologists may be expert in their field (biology, entomology, psychology, cosmology) but they're blatantly retarded as logicians, rationalists, connoisseurs, philosophers, historicians and ironically as socialists!
What opus10no2 says about the good of "War" is not scientific and not even evolutionary or darwinian. He clearly needs to see the difference between science and scientism, immanent empiricism and metaphysical extrapolation, facts and ideologies.
He is committing the same pseudo-scientific and flawed reasoning of Galton and Ruding and the same basic logic flaws of all pseudo-scientific and ideological biodeterminism, trying to extrapolate far-fetched conclusions from a limited amount of incomplete and restricted data about what we know as natural adaptation of organism to the environment putting in the mix what we absolutely don't know and what is being speculated in spite of counterevidence and unscientific premises.
Thinking about a world without War doesn't mean detroying the circumstantial spectrum of potential behavior we all have. It's not about removing those circumstances of greed, presumption, egotism, egocentrism we all have from time to time, it's about thinking of a world where political ideologies of few are not inoculated on the brainwashed masses to create huge conflicts and destruction. (Neri & Hardt - Empire)
Topic: World Peace