War and Rumors of War

End-Times believ­ers in Chris­tian­ity (and pre­sum­ably Judaism and Islam as well) see the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the insta­bil­ity in Pak­istan and the Mid­dle East as proof the world is becom­ing more vio­lent in prepa­ra­tion for the Apocalypse.

Well, they would be wrong:

The 21st cen­tury could rep­re­sent the end of war as we know it, writes polit­i­cal sci­en­tist John Mueller in a new paper for Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Quar­terly. He notes that there have been no wars between devel­oped nations since 1945, and that other inter­na­tional wars that fit the clas­sic def­i­n­i­tion — the vio­lent res­o­lu­tion of a dis­pute between two or more nations — have become exceed­ingly rare. (See here and here as well.)

The mis­con­cep­tion that the world is becom­ing more vio­lent, I must admit, is the fault of the media. Jour­nal­ists, as well as the pub­lic in gen­eral, rarely under­stand how much power and influ­ence they hold in society.

Here is an exam­ple. I have never been to Mon­go­lia. I have never met any Mon­go­lians. I do not per­son­ally know that the coun­try exists. Any­thing and every­thing I know about Mon­go­lia comes from the media. The media is respon­si­ble for every­thing I know and believe about the coun­try — as well as count­less other subjects.

As the media has become more sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic (partly as a result of increased com­pe­ti­tion due to the Inter­net), a greater share of the daily news is focus­ing on crime, con­flict, and other issues that make peo­ple more fear­ful of the world around them. Per­cep­tion cre­ates a person’s sense of reality.

How­ever, just because the num­ber of offi­cial wars is declines does not mean con­flict as a whole will dis­ap­pear. As the cited post states, war is defined as “the vio­lent res­o­lu­tion of a dis­pute between two or more nations.” As I noted in prior posts here and here, the influ­ence of nation-states is wan­ing while, per­haps para­dox­i­cally, those of glob­al­iza­tion and local­iza­tion are increasing.

As a result, fewer coun­tries are declar­ing war and lin­ing troops oppo­site each other on a bat­tle­field. Part of the rea­son is that the world’s economies are inter­twined. Pic­ture a sup­ply chain of com­puter parts that stretches from idea-creation in Japan to pro­duc­tion in Tai­wan to assem­bly in China to sales in the United States. If any of these coun­tries were to declare war on another, the sup­ply chain would be affected — and the economies of every­one would suf­fer. Of course, this is only one exam­ple of the ben­e­fits of glob­al­iza­tion.

But while fewer coun­tries are wag­ing war, extrem­ist indi­vid­u­als and groups — from Osama bin Ladin to the Tal­iban — can eas­ily insti­gate inter­na­tional con­flict them­selves. Thomas Fried­man calls them “super-empowered indi­vid­u­als” who can har­ness the power of the Inter­net for destruc­tive ends. While offi­cial war may be declin­ing — there will not be an end to con­flict in gen­eral. So we can con­tinue to expect end-times extrem­ists to point to these occur­rences as proof that the Apoc­a­lypse is coming.