I think he's more right about this than the evangelical crazies who believe the hostilities in progress in the Middle East are auguries of Armageddon. More right, yet not completely right. For one, he seems to think the wars are mainly due to mankind's aggressive spirit, a sort of original sin, and that religious belief can cure or at least ameliorate this. It's not so much a third world war as a state of perpetual war, which I believe is ultimately caused by a rapidly escalating fight for a share of very rapidly shrinking resources.
In a week's time I will be 88 years old. I became aware of events in the world around me by the early 1930s. From then until now there has not been a single day on which people somewhere in the world were not engaged in a fight to the death against adversaries. In the early and middle 1930s it was Japanese incursions against the Chinese; Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia; and the Spanish Civil War. Then came the 1939-1945 war, a.k.a. World War II. This didn't end in August 1945 when the Japanese surrendered: the civil war in Greece, a proxy war aimed at expanding the Soviet empire, began before then and continued for a year or more, by which time there were colonial wars of liberation from European powers in French Indo-China which became Vietnam, and the Dutch East Indies which became Indonesia. Colonial wars in Africa began before those two Oriental wars ended and some of these African wars have smouldered on ever since, with occasional brief respites and a few genocides. As well as wars of liberation from colonial overlords, there have been wars launched by mad dictators, ideological wars, wars arising from coups d'etat, and the seemingly never-ending series of wars between Israel and neighbouring states, ultimately caused I suppose by the belief that God gave the Jews a piece of land in that part of the world. I'm not happy with that simplistic classification.
Stand farther back and all these wars, indeed almost all wars everywhere and throughout human history, can be seen in clearer perspective. They happen because a tribe, a nation, or a group of people defined some other way perceive a need for more territory, more resources, to ensure their survival. Robert Ardrey called it the territorial instinct: it defined the region a group perceived as essential to ensure survival. Ardrey's reasoning and the evidence he marshalled - really as much anecdotes as evidence - were flimsy, but his conclusion may have been rather sound. 'Instinct' is the wrong word for it. It's more accurately described as a biological imperative. This could even explain the otherwise irrational, irresponsible war that George W Bush launched against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the war that continues today with the nascent Islamic State pitted against a loose coalition of states led by the USA.
The present human predicament is that well over 7 billion humans are striving to stay comfortably alive in a finite world in which there are essential resources required for sustainable longterm survival of a much smaller population than this, I think at least an order of magnitude smaller, i.e. about 700 million humans could probably survive comfortably. The predatory manner in which resources are currently being squandered means that the number able to live comfortably on the world's available resources is inexorably shrinking. It may be 700 million now, but in another generation it could well be 500 million or less.
The outlook doesn't encourage optimism, and is likely to be made much worse by global climate change, other environmental stresses, and escalating resource depletion. I feel uneasy about prospects for my grandchildren.
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