Our ancestors were mad. They thought war was a jolly good idea. It was a natural, divinely appointed order - a wholesome way of bringing out the best in people, preventing economic stagnation and promoting science and innovation. War was the ideal instrument for spreading the gospel and carrying forward the torch of civilisation; no wonder philosophers and poets extolled its virtues. According to Hegel, it is only through war that societies can escape "the corruption of perpetual peace". Machiavelli advised princes to have no other aim "but war and its organisation and discipline". It was not just the prospect of victory that attracted such figures but the activity itself, because it was thought that, by mobilising men's deepest resources for love, compassion, courage and self-sacrifice, wars brought out the best in individuals and communities.
Now that we are grown up, we think otherwise. Our horror of war, argues Anthony Stevens, is a 20th-century phenomenon. The bloodiest century in human history has taught us that wars also release our inherent capacities for hatred and xenophobia, brutality and sadism, destruction and revenge. Today, war and terrorism present the most formidable threat to the continued existence of our civilisation and our planet. War has become a "cosmic dilemma".
So how do we eliminate war? Conventional thinking does not offer much help. Theoreticians of war can be divided roughly into two groups: those who regard humanity as essentially rational but prone to aggression, cruelty and warfare; and those who consider man to be basically irrational, aggressive and prone to violence. Either way, belligerence is seen as intrinsic to human nature. Peace-loving, pacifist guys like me always finish last.
Stevens suggests we look elsewhere - to evolutionary psychology. Ostensibly, evolutionary psychology confirms the madness of our forefathers. It sees war as an "archetypal phenomenon". In other words, belligerence is a behavioural trait found in all human communities, irrespective of race, culture or historical epoch. Evolution, it transpires, has hard-wired us to be aggressive.
However, while evolution has equipped us with an innate capacity and insatiable appetite for war, it has also furnished us with an intrinsic capability for peace. Throughout history, cycles of war have been followed by peace. War has been with us since the beginning of time, but so has peace. This is the simple, but brilliant, twist in Stevens's argument: peace is as much an evolutionary impulse as war and is therefore also an archetypal phenomenon. We are hard-wired for peace as much as for killing.
Women in particular have evolutionary impulses for creating and sustaining life. Thus, the best way to temper the aggression of a man is to provide him with the love of a good woman. The further removed a man is from adoring women, the more belligerent he becomes. But you need to choose your women carefully. Avoid the likes of Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Margaret Thatcher, all of whom somehow bypassed evolution and happily marched us off to war.
Wars become state policies in societies where community has broken down, inequalities are rampant and love has become an elusive commodity. In such societies, eliminating the causes of war is not a viable solution. Men have an unfortunate knack of finding causes for waging war - as the Bush administration demonstrated so well in launching its campaign in Iraq. Archetypes are not the product of blind instincts; they are often rationalised as necessities.
Walter Laqueur provides a good example of this. For him, war is a one-way street. Muslims, who are divinely prone to violence and hatred, have launched a war against innocent and lovable America. Terrorists, who have been supported and given sanctuary by Europe in general and Britain in particular, are psychologically disturbed people, hell-bent on destroying the beacon of western civilisation. Today, it's the jihadis and al-Qaeda. Tomorrow, it will be India and central Asia. After that, it could be the "international brigade", a hotchpotch of the extreme right wing, the new left and the anti-globalisation mob. It is a matter of necessity for the US to defend itself and take the war to the terrorists.
Stevens would suggest that Laqueur, with his obnoxious moral superiority, is no less mad than our forefathers. The "war on terror" is a war that the US cannot win. It is a metaphysical war - like the wars on crime, drugs or poverty. One cannot bomb, defeat and annihilate an abstract noun. Proper wars end in victory when the enemy state surrenders. Terrorists do not constitute a state; they do not surrender. They withdraw to fight another day. Combating terrorism requires us to contain our archetypal aggression and realise that the only way to defeat terrorism, as the history of warfare shows, is through political process.
Terrorism, Philip Heymann tells us, is almost always the tactic of the voiceless and powerless. Actions designed to restrain terrorism, such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, actually increase resentment and make terrorists even more determined. Assassinating terrorist leaders may weaken their organisations temporarily, but by creating martyrs, it will also help recruitment. Every belligerent act by the US fuels terrorism. The experience of Israel carries lessons for us all. The use of the word "war" in our dealings with terrorism actually undermines our efforts, Heymann suggests.
But are we, the inhabitants of industrial democracies, so morally superior to terrorists, who kill innocent people? In the west, the tragedy of 11 September 2001 has been portrayed primarily in terms of the dark forces of Islamic global terrorism attacking the shining symbols of US capitalism. And yet, on that same fateful day, 23,000 people died of hunger. Each was as individual as the 3,000 who died in the twin towers. Why, asks Ted Honderich, is it that we find this reminder somehow tasteless?
The two categories of death do not exist for us in the same way. Deaths by famine and hunger - which often come about directly as a consequence of western (and particularly American) economic and foreign policies - are invisible to us. But deaths caused by terrorists are all too visible. We see inequalities as entrenched, but violence as a matter of choice. A suicide bomber can walk away. Moreover, inequalities are not seen as things we can change; we see them as the natural state of order. Terrorism, on the other hand, represents a state of disorder. Inequalities are a product of the law, but violence is illegal. Yet both categories of deaths exist in the same real way. To treat only one as real is morally perverted.
To have any hope of understanding terrorism, Honderich argues, we must adopt a broader per-spective. We have to look beyond the capacity of America to tap into its infinite reservoirs of innocence and moral superiority - demonstrated so well by Laqueur. Those who find terrorism repulsive need to ask serious questions.
Honderich, regarded as one of the foremost moral philosophers of the left, defines terrorism as political violence that injures, violates or destroys people or things, with a political and social intention. He begins his forensic analysis by citing some painful statistics. People born in Sierra Leone, for example, have an average life expectancy of 38 years. People born in the US and UK can expect to live to the age of 77. On average, therefore, people in Sierra Leone die before what is regarded as early middle age in Britain and America. Is it too much to say, Honderich asks, that this is also a product of terrorism?
The pain and the painful shortness of the lives of people in certain developing countries relate directly to our having the means to live in a very different way - a means acquired through political violence and monstrous injustice. Our insistence on upholding a lifestyle that condemns others to wretchedness is also an act of terrorism. Indeed, the distinction we make between wretchedness and terrorism is based solely on convenience. Wretchedness is something for other people; so we can safely ignore it. Terrorism is something that is happening to us; so we are quick to condemn it. We are always ready to pass moral judgement on terrorists but never on ourselves, or on our governments that perpetuate the wretchedness.
There is also the question of state terrorism. The United States, Honderich argues, practises state terrorism through its military interventions and through the diffuse and impersonal global economic forces that it controls. America has played a leading role in eliminating any distinction between combatants and non-combatants by legitimising the deliberate massacre of civilians. The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sustained aggression of the Vietnam war, illustrate how the US uses its terror-inducing weapons of destruction. More recently, it has developed weapons designed specifically to target civilians.
In A War on Terror, Paul Rogers cites the example of "area impact munitions" (AIMs) such as cluster bombs. Intended to cause destruction over the greatest area, these are used against "soft" targets such as trucks, camps and people. A typical cluster bomb is actually a canister that dispenses roughly 150 "bomblets", each of which detonates and spreads up to 2,000 high-velocity fragments of shrapnel, the whole bomb shredding anything or anyone within a couple of acres. Use of AIMs, especially from high altitude, is virtually certain to cause civilian casualties. How is this different from suicide bombers targeting innocent civilians? Terrorists and soldiers alike, Stevens suggests, are able to perpetrate horrendous acts of carnage only by dissociating their minds from the consequences of their actions.
Rogers sees American culture as one in which market fundamentalism and military power have combined to form a single world-view. The US functions as a war economy. Much of its scientific research is geared to "defence" and the development of new and terrifying weapons. The "war on terror" has provided a much-needed boost to the US economy, after the downturn in the stock market that followed the end of the dotcom boom. American interventions have as their aim the economic exploitation of targeted nations. By allowing more than 200 state-owned companies in Iraq to be privatised and sold to American corporations, the US has ensured that it will take huge sums of money out of that country, leaving Iraqis with little control over their infrastructure.
And the American public feasts continually on the spectacle of war. During the first Gulf war, Stevens points out, 100,000 people died on one side and 213 on the other. Such odds enable the great democratic public in the west to experience war on its television screens from the comfort of its homes without fear of retaliation. Never before had so many people been able to indulge in the ancient satisfaction of warfare at so little personal cost.
Except that now the terrorists are retaliating. Ted Honderich argues this response is legitimate both legally and morally. We must distinguish between violence aimed at securing the distribution of food which will make it possible for children to live, and state terrorism aimed at defending the aggression and lifestyles of a particular group. Terrorism can be directed towards undeniably good ends: the ANC campaign against apartheid in South Africa was an example. In a world where most of humanity is voiceless, it is sometimes justifiable to respond to state terrorism with violence. Those who engage in "terrorism for humanity" are right to respond to the charge that they do wrong with the retort that we do wrong as well. We may abhor terrorism, but it is more important that we change our ways than that the terrorists change theirs, because we do greater damage.
All of which leaves pacifists like me as marginalised as ever. Clearly, evolution and morality have no use for conscientious objectors.
Ziauddin Sardar's Desperately Seeking Paradise: journeys of a sceptical Muslim will be published by Granta this June
