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0 pointscoldtea7y ago0 comments

>Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price?

Depends on two things:

1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (and to the continuance of the country itself and its state and way of life etc., which in some cases might be totally obliterated by decline, e.g. Rome).

2) The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.

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retsibsi7y ago· 1 in thread

> The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.

Sure; if you can convince me that any given war will avert more harm than it causes, I'll (intellectually at least) agree that it's justified. But at large temporal and geographical scales, with insanely complicated and only vaguely understood systems at work, you need an extremely strong argument to justify an action that will definitely lead to terrible consequences in the near term.

The comment we're discussing falls far short of such an argument. In fact it doesn't even seem to aim at making one -- and not just in the sense that it's (understandably) very abstract and lacking any kind of detail. As far as I can tell it is motivated by nationalism, and certainly not by any desire to prevent greater suffering. Its idea of failure sounds more like a (relatively) peaceful transition:

> You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries.

> And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".

scottLobster7y ago

You ignore the line: "Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country..."

Emphasis on "as sad as it is to imagine". That doesn't sound all that nationalistic to me in the traditional sense. More like admitting that terrible sacrifices are sometimes necessary to preserve a country's strength. You may see a technically "peaceful" (without open war) transition as preferable, but it's an equally coherent opinion that in such a transition the violence simply takes different forms and in aggregate is no less destructive, and perhaps even more damaging.

Essentially it's the age-old argument of what's worse? Negative/unjust peace or war? Automatically calling arguments for the latter "nationalist" sounds like an attempt at dismissive guilt-by-association, depending on how specifically you define the word.

It's a natural assumption, I think in the aftermath of the excesses of 20th century warfare Western society (assuming you live in the west) at large overcompensated with an "all physical violence is bad, anyone who suggests using it is wrong" message permeating everything, particularly the educational systems, which has produced a broad cultural bias that should be accounted for in discussions like this.

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