This morning, as I tried to write a reflection based on recent observations of the world around me, little stood out beyond the weather except for the dominant headline of the past two weeks: the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel.
War.
In a profound way, war, or even the threat of it, has been the most feared force in every society throughout human history. War is brutal. It exacts a terrible toll not only on combatants, but more cruelly on civilians caught in its crosshairs. Anyone who has experienced war firsthand is scarred for life; the events exceed what the human psyche was ever meant to endure.
We hate war.
We value peace.
And yet…
Pause for a moment and consider the wars we have lived through. If, like me, you are over seventy, the list is exhaustive. Try writing it down: the Korean War, the Vietnam “Conflict,” the Six-Day War, Desert Storm, Afghanistan. Then add the wars in Africa—too numerous to count. Serbia. Somalia. Gaza. Ukraine. Some historians describe the period since the end of World War II as “The Long Peace,” but peace for whom? As I compiled my own list, I kept remembering conflict after conflict, many unresolved for generations.
We say we hate war, and yet the human species never stops making war.
Never.
Why?
Some argue war is used to achieve a higher purpose: to respond to grievances, defend national pride, or, most paradoxically, to secure peace. Perhaps it is economic based so we can secure oil or trade or the latest strategic mineral. Others portray war as a meaningless suffering imposed on ordinary people by forces far removed from the battlefield.
So, wars aren’t caused by people, but by systems. Really? Do I believe that?
Many will point to the billions invested in a war machine claiming its use becomes inevitable. A political necessity. A structural momentum. But who wrote the checks? And who pulled the triggers?
Others argue that war is driven by power and human nature, not morality. Convenient. That lets us off the hook. War, then, has nothing to do with ethics. The familiar defense echoes across generations: “It is a ‘just’ war.” I remain unconvinced that morality, or its absence, can be so easily removed from the equation.
Perhaps the explanation is that war persists not because of a single cause, but because it serves recurring human and political purposes: security, identity, power. In that view, war is simply too complex to prevent, too deeply embedded to control. Human flaws are resolved by political determination.
Human flaws? Doesn’t that sound suspiciously like a playground excuse? Political purpose? There’s that system argument again.
Here is a more unsettling idea: societies use war to manufacture collective purpose, identity, even moral clarity despite the destruction it causes.
Identity? Is this simply male ego run amok? Nationalism on steroids? It seems oddly comforting to imagine war as a search for moral clarity, where good and evil are cleanly divided and suffering is justified by narrative unless one lives in the Shire in Middle-Earth.
I wish I could claim some insight that resolves this plague on humanity. I cannot. I see no logical reason for war other than the imposition of belief onto another sometimes driven by ideology, sometimes by fear, and sometimes by a ruler who simply delights in bloodshed.
Justifications abound. They always do. But, for me, they collapse every time I see images of the aftermath, images that can be easily transposed onto my own family. In those moments, war produces only one outcome: heartbreak.
Perhaps the most unsettling conclusion is this:
War is who we are.
It arises from within human nature itself, stripped of moral restraint because no matter how moral we claim to be, there will always be a justification for war.