Burke outlines a number of seemingly never ending regional conflicts, causing no end of misery and death among local populations: Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to name the more frequently profiled ones. Often these conflicts follow boundaries that divide clans or castes, not necessarily countries. They lie along frontiers between ethnic or sectarian communities:

In fact, if we look around the world at all its many conflicts, and if we define these wars more broadly, then we see front lines everywhere, each with its own no man’s land strewn with casualties. In Mexico, Brazil, South Africa or the Philippines, there is huge violence associated with criminality and the efforts (by states) to stamp it out .

And so the article goes on to analyze a number of these protracted conflicts in order to get a sense of what lies at the heart of them, in particular as to their history and the seeming inability to get them resolved.

The reasons are clearly many and varied – and to say that they are complex is perhaps an understatement. But as to any kind of overall “why”, the only common element appears to be the persistent inability of our species to get out from underneath the quagmire of basic instincts and desires that appear to feed  the negative human characteristic  we are all too familiar with, such as greed, selfishness,  bullying  and the exploitation and oppression of others,  to name just a few, and all them typically leading to conflict. This as opposed to being guided by more enlightened qualities of human endeavor such as being able to compromise, mediate, cooperate  and share with the realization that all human interests are best served by them.

In the meantime there remains the question of how to address the current states of affairs as outlined in the Guardian article. Essentially, though, they appear unsolvable, except by more of the same, and unless the conflicting parties agree to sit down to discuss a solution beyond trying to kill each other, there is not much left on the table but to continue the mutual bloodshed.

If these conflicts are evidence of something, it is that evolutionary pressures are operation at all levels of existence, and that includes the competition between ideas about what kind of societies we should structure for ourselves, and the principles that underpin them, i.e., social-economically, politically, morally. At the bottom of this struggle we find the Might is Right conundrum, and essentially the Law of the Jungle, bequeathed to us courtesy of our animal past in our participation in the Survival of the Fittest contest and obviously still very much a part of our way of dealing with the world.

When reason – that feature of the human cortex most recently required as a result of an evolutionary upgrade – is subjugated to instinct, the Law of the Jungle continues to prevail and becomes even more destructive, if not to the point of self-destruction, as in the case of potentially trying to annihilate ourselves by throwing nuclear bombs at each other.

The issue here of course is why we would allow reason to be overruled by instinct and  in particular when there are clear reason to believe that in a particular case this would not be in our interest. But the first response here would be to say that these are not matters of black and white, and that we might well confuse the one for the other.

As well, the ability to apply reason is a skill that must be learned – and just because you have the capacity for it in the cerebral  hardware department, all that means is that you have the prerequisites  for being able to act rationally.

However, it should be clear that even after minimal observation of human behavior and the current state of the world that the application of reason  requires training, as well as the insight into what benefits our species in the long term, and I like to think that this would be about more than the fact of our mere  survival. To act instinctively, however, is something we are born with, and built into the biology of our species,  from the very first phases of existence as a distinct organism that needed to be able to look after itself  to ensure its survival.

And so not much is likely to change in the world with respect to these kinds of conflicts until such time that we change our ways and wake up to the fact that we are not the creature that we think we are, i.e., that we must be the creature as defined by our past, and our bloodstained, war-torn history.

Instead we need to respond to the call of what it means to be a rational human being, or at least have the imagination and courage to try to find out what that might be all about without the need to kill each other. And this would mean redefining ourselves in terms of our future, and what we may be able to accomplish as a species motivated by the more enlightened principles of empathy and compassion, as well as the spirit of mutual cooperation  between nations with the realization that the shared stewardship of the earth resources is the only way to guarantee our peaceful coexistence  on this planet.

How we will get to that point is anyone’s guess – and if our species  is actually capable of that much common sense  I don’t know.  Given the state of the world today – and the quality of the leadership that appears to be in charge of the world’s most powerful nations – I am not hopeful that any of this will happen anytime soon.

“Until it begins, war is a matter of choice. After that, it’s shaped by forces and realities which dwarf the individuals who participate.”  (Joshua Rothman writes in the New Yorker in December of 2017 , reviewing Victor Davis Hanson’s “The Second World Wars”)