How war brings peace

Imagine if Leo Tolstoy’s great novel were to be called just War. Would it have had the same impact if it left out Peace? What about the Mahabharata? Merely keeping a copy at home is supposed to bring in domestic discord, so thoroughly jinxed is the reputation of this book associated with epic bloodshed.

Yet, this celebrated book of the Great War proclaims peace and not war to be the supreme duty of humankind: Ahimsa paramo dharma, says Sage Vyasa. Now does that sound like a paradox? Only if you look superficially, says Stanford historian Ian Morris in his forthcoming book, War! What is it Good For?“War has made the world a safer and richer place,” he argues.

Over the last 15,000 years, even though wars became ever more destructive, internal pacification has lowered the overall rate of violent death from 10-20% in agricultural societies to just 1-2% in the industrialised world. The central paradox in the evolution of war, Morris adds, is that war itself has caused the decline in violence, which has been amply documented by social scientists.

The same paradox comes up at the end of Gurcharan Das’ collection of essays on the Mahabharata, On the Difficulty of Being Good, “(Despite) its dark and chaotic themes, the epic snatches a victory on behalf of its‘un-hero’, Yudhisthira,” Das writes.

“(The Prince) shows that it’s possible for good to triumph even in times of cosmic destruction unleashed on the killing fields of Kurukshetra.” But it’s not the peace of the weak or of the dead. To survive, virtue needs strength.