I know that I have crammed together too many ideas here: Tolstoy, St. Francis, critical phenomena, thermodynamics, and more, – it is contrary to the rules of blog posts. But the centennial of the end of the Great War gave me the occasion to write about the nature of war. in 1914, the European states sleepwalked into the Great War just like we may be doing nowadays, blundering toward a new gigantic conflagration — a true “big one,” in terms of wars. If the Great War couldn’t end all wars as it was said to be able to do, the greater one that may be coming could actually do that, but in a very different way. The new war could lead to the extinction of humankind. So, what hope do we have? I don’t know, but the first step to solve a problem is to understand it. So far, humans so far haven”t learned anything much from the mistakes of the past but, who knows? Maybe one day they will.
The centennial of the end of the Great War is a good occasion to rethink a little about wars: why, how, and when wars occur and if there is any hope to stop blindly walking along a path taking us to the possibility of the complete annihilation of humankind.
It is a question that has been posed many times and never satisfactorily answered. Perhaps the first to try to answer it was Leon Tolstoy in his “War and Peace” novel, (1867), where he wondered how it could be possible that a single man named Napoleon could cause millions of men to move all together eastward with the purpose of killing other men whom they had never met and they had no reason to hate.
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