I only half agree that we should do everything we can to avoid war. Although it involves atrocities and always tears down it’s participants, war serves a vital purpose for humanity.

Although ideally if all human beings were fully rational or reasonable, it would be possible to avoid war altogether, that clearly isn’t the case in reality. So war’s social implications become important to consider. Time to get all abstract on ya.

Just as cells come together to form animal bodies, humans come together to form societies. Although the society is made up of a number of somewhat chaotic individuals, the society as a whole is highly predictable and organized. It’s an entity, and like all entities that can self-replicate and mutate it evolves. And, like an animal, it can alter it’s behaviour and shape somewhat to suit it’s environment, but it’s still stuck within the innate limits of it’s design.

However, sometimes changes happen so deeply that they change that fundamental design, like an animal born with better genes. In the case of animals, this would be a nature change as opposed to a nurture change. In terms of societies, it would be adopting a new constitution, or a new ruling system.

However, just as animals want to preserve themselves, societies do too. Evolution doesn’t work too well without death to clear out the unwilling to die but unfit. War is a way to introduce death at the society level, and is capable of making societies evolve. Why stop at the first stable social order? War can destroy otherwise stable societies and trigger evolution at this level. It’s clear to me that almost all societies big and small are totally f***ed up in today’s world, but the smaller less stable socities that come and go tend to strike up on decency a lot more.

So basically, war is potentially good since it can attack socities/culture.