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Human
Nature
and the
Causes
of War
JOHN DAVID ORME
Human Nature and the Causes of War
John David Orme
Human Nature
and the Causes
of War
John David Orme
Oglethorpe University
Brookhaven, GA, USA
v
Contents
vii
viii Contents
Appendix 287
Index 289
Human Nature, the Regime and War
Man, being more than a natural creature, is not interested merely in phys-
ical survival but in prestige and social approval. … Possessing a darkly
unconscious sense of his insignificance in the total scheme of things, he
seeks to compensate for his insignificance by pretensions of pride. The
conflicts between men are thus never conflicts between competing survival
impulses. …Since the very possession of power and prestige always involves
some encroachment on the prestige and power of others, this conflict is
by its very nature a more stubborn and difficult one than the competition
between the various survival impulses of nature.27
These longings are all too easily displaced from the individual to the
collective level, where they become much more dangerous. Modern
societies, Morgenthau contends, frown upon one man’s naked grasping
for power, but “what the individual is not allowed to want for himself,
he is encouraged to seek for the legal fiction called the state.” Power
seeking is redirected but exacerbated and the moral limits on its pur-
suit and employment attenuated.28 Niebuhr reasons similarly. The most
obvious route to honor, he notes, is through individual achievement,
but this path is open only to a few gifted or fortunate individuals. For
most people, identification with a collectivity provides a greater sense of
worth. The “frustrations of the average man, who can never realize the
power and the glory which his imagination sets as the ideal,” he says,
“gain a measure of satisfaction in the power and the aggrandizement of
his nation.” Nationalism has been the predominant form of the collec-
tive pursuit of honor in the modern era. Sadly, he observes, “patriotism
transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism.”29 Niebuhr’s
conclusion is pessimistic. Because the desire for distinction is so deeply
ingrained, conflict is ineradicable and the state of nature remains a
state of war.30
8 J. D. Orme
B. NATURFERNE.
Ist der Bezirk der Naturnähe durch die naturalistischen — oder
realistischen — künstlerischen Gestaltungen durchaus erschöpft, so
teilt sich, wie wir gesehen haben, der naturferne Bezirk in drei
wesentlich unterscheidbare Teilgebiete: in das der naturalistischen
Permutation, in das des Idealismus und in das des Expressionismus.
1. Naturalistische Permutation.