https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comm ... -wbfhbfv9rAugust 11 2019, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
A peaceful, easy life hasn’t made us happy. Perhaps it’s time to give war a chance
Rod Liddle
Ι was wondering, idly, recently if maybe it was time for us to have another war with someone. I didn’t really care who, although I would prefer it if it were a war we might win, which removes only four or five countries out of the 197. Not a hi-tech war against impecunious Arabs, such as the Iraq war: an involving war, which impinges on us all.
The obvious candidate for an act of unprovoked aggression on our part is France — but it might be over too quickly for the beneficial side effects to take root. So China, maybe, using its bullying of Hong Kong as a pretext. My suspicion is that China’s military competence is gravely overstated.
If we had a war with the Chinese, we’d find out if I’m right, I suppose. If the only animated thing left in the country after hostilities is strontium-90, then I will have been proved errant and you can point this out in the letters page of whichever newspaper they have in the afterlife (almost certainly the bloody Guardian).
War increases social cohesion and integration (unless it’s a civil war, obvs) and the population becomes less deranged and self-indulgent. Madness diminishes and people are less inclined to top themselves. It also reduces personal dissatisfaction.
We now live in a country where everyone is dissatisfied, which has little social cohesion, where integration is a dirty word and a significant minority wishes to dismantle everything that has given us a comparatively comfortable existence. There seems to be a millennialist yearning for catastrophe. The best way to assuage that yearning is to give them one.
The Extinction Rebellion crowd recently demanded that London Fashion Week be scrapped and that instead we should convene “a people’s assembly of industry professionals and designers as a platform to declare a climate and ecological emergency”. That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Will this people’s assembly have to wear outré stuff while they’re debating our imminent demise? I’d like to see David Attenborough in an orange Perspex thong, or maybe channelling heroin chic.
To tell you the truth, I don’t have much time for the fashion business, but it generates more than £32bn a year for the UK, a vital contribution in a country that doesn’t make enough stuff any more. For the Extinction Rebellion crowd, this doesn’t matter. They have become monomaniacal — all that counts is this kind of biblical Armageddon, this annihilation, which is just around the corner. They cleave to this catastrophe more as an article of blind faith than a careful consideration of the science.
They are not alone. A growing number of greenish economists think we should reduce our GDP: they yearn for “degrowth”, as The Times reported on Friday. They wish us, then, to be poorer, in the mistaken belief that the world will benefit from our Lenten abstinence from industry. Much as New Zealand’s uniquely irritating and exponentially woke prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has asserted, they also believe that capitalism has conspicuously failed, forgetting the billions of people it has lifted out of poverty.
This self-abnegation is there, too, in the dim 12-watt-bulb sanctimony of our big box office royal couple. It is Harry and Meghan’s stated intention to have only two children because of over-population. And yet our birth rate is falling. (By contrast, it is rising in the poorest parts of the globe, where people have more pressing concerns than pretending, unconvincingly, that they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.)
In the social ranks below those two increasingly risible individuals, there is also a madness. More working days lost to stress, depression and fatigue than ever before. More money than ever spent on mental health, and still it is nowhere near enough. Where does this misery come from? Why is it only manifested now?
My argument is not that climate change is imaginary or that capitalism is perfect or that we should invade China. But one of the earliest social studies, published by Emile Durkheim in 1897, noted the beneficial social effects of war, and it still holds a few uncomfortable truths today. We have become softened and prone to be frit at everything, perpetually discombobulated in our pacific affluence and our ease, to the extent that we would throw it all away.
Summertime, then. And the living is, perhaps, too easy.
'War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.' Pindar (518 BC – 438 BC)
τι θεούλης είναι αυτός
I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war.
