The Price of Limitlessness I

Why do we have wars? Why can’t we live in peace? Like many in the peace movement, I once thought the answer to these questions had to do with Bad People in High Places. We elect Bad People to the highest offices in our government. Bad People rise to the tops of big, powerful corporations. Bad People run the military. All these Bad People start wars and profit from them. If only we could replace all those Bad People with Good People, there would be no more wars and we could go on living our lives in peace and harmony.

It now seems to me that the “Bad People” theory of war is naïve and simplistic. While I do concur with Lord Acton that power corrupts, that’s only a small part of the story. As I now see it, war is the inevitable consequence of a society committed to limitless growth, consumption, progress, and development. In a finite world, the human species can’t keep on growing and expanding forever without bumping up against limits of one sort or another: ecological, social, political, economic limits. To sustain growth in our numbers and in our standard of living, we must continually transgress these limits, so we resort to war.¹ Thus we have wars over resources, wars over territory, wars over economic dominance, and perhaps soon wars over the “right” to use the Earth as a dumping ground for nuclear waste, greenhouse gases, and other forms of pollution. These wars allow us, for the time being, to continue to live our way of life.

The first and foremost responsibility of any political leader is to keep the economy running smoothly. Here in the U.S., this is no benign task, seeing as our huge, bloated economy has turned into a voracious behemoth. Though the U.S. represents less than 5% of the world’s population, we consume more than 25% of the world’s resources. That fundamental injustice is maintained by economic force in the short run but is in the end backed up by military force (or threat thereof), i.e. war. We are told that we go to war to fight fascism or communism or terrorism or some other evil, or, alternatively, to promote freedom, democracy, liberty, etc. (These ultra-elastic concepts have proved convenient for rallying the troops and whipping up war fever among the public at large.) At times we are told that we go to war to “defend American interests around the globe” or to “protect our way of life.” These latter reasons come a bit closer to the truth. We go to war, or threaten military action, to make sure that a disproportionate amount of the world’s goodies keeps flowing our way, and at the right price. “American interests” simply mean the interests of our economy.² And just who is responsible for the gargantuan size of our economy and its “interests,” which are now global in their dimensions? Why, we are: the consumers.

In short, we have wars not because of Bad People in High Places but because we—especially those of us in the overdeveloped nations—do not live within our means, within the limits of nature. We do not know what enough is. The notions of progress and development cannot accommodate enoughness. By definition, things have to keep getting bigger, faster, and better all the time. Progress inevitably means more energy, more resources, more technology, more stuff, and therefore more things to fight over. Moreover, we have seemingly infected the rest of the world with the growth/progress/ development virus. Nearly everybody wishes to be just like us and make the same colossal mistakes we have made—a physical impossibility, as it turns out. We would need as many as ten Earth-like planets to act as mines and dumps if the world’s population were to adopt the high-consumption lifestyle of the average American.³ (And where would we find enough Martians or other extra-terrestrials whose labor we’d need to exploit to support that way of life?)

Let me be concrete. If we wish to keep driving around in cars, keep flying around in planes, keep plugging endless appliances and gadgets into the wall, keep eating food grown anywhere on the globe, keep having as many babies as we want, keep buying stuff made anywhere under who-knows-what conditions, then we have to accept war as part of the price.⁴ Only war can secure the level of inputs needed to keep everything running—temporarily. As scarcity becomes more severe—as it must—so will war. Like it or not, we live off the spoils of war. We all profit from it. We are all part of the Empire, no matter what slogans we chant or write on our protest banners.

As I see it, it does no good to march at an anti-war protest in Washington, DC, shake our fists at the White House, and then spend a week’s vacation in the Bahamas or Paris or Rio. It does no good to stand shivering at a peace vigil in the dead of winter, proclaiming “No blood for oil,” and then to go home to eat a crisp California salad whose every ingredient is practically dripping with petroleum. It does no good to rail against nuclear, coal, or gas-fired electrical plants and then to go home and plug in our cell phone, our laptop, our ipod, our palm pilot, our BlackBerry to recharge all those batteries for tomorrow’s workday. Our actions speak far louder than our words. Friends, we have to take a good, long look in the mirror. If we are serious about avoiding war, we have to find another way to live.

To put it another way, if, by some miracle, we were suddenly to achieve genuine peace and justice worldwide, our entire economy as we know it would collapse overnight. 

Aaron Falbel

¹Even wars that, on the surface, seem to be about religious or continued ethnic conflicts often have an economic/ecological basis. They are about scarcity. People don’t suddenly wake up one day and decide to kill their neighbors because they look or act or worship differently. Under conditions of growth-induced scarcity, each group tries to secure an advantage for its own members, which inevitably leads to conflict. It seems almost always to be some version of we want something they have.

²Even Jimmy Carter, who, at least by contrast, is starting to look more and more like one of the Good People, stated in 1980, in what has become known as the Carter Doctrine, that he U.S. will use military force if necessary to protect its “vital .interests” in the Persian Gulf region.

³See, for example, Catton, Overshoot, p.52.

⁴Other inconveniences attached to that price tag are global warming and other forms of environmental degradation, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity—just to name a few.

Aaron is a friend of Lee Hoinacki and the late Ivan Illich.

Part II appeared in the June newsletter. (view part II)

Aaron Falbel

return to 6/07 CPF Newsletter