Is it Possible to Prosper in Peace?
 

I've been debating this in my head, and find myself unable to come up with a concrete answer. Progress and growth have always been most abundant in times of conflict. Whether it be combating a desease, or another country, the end result is a better understanding and advancement in technology. Times of peace are ultimate goal, for me at least; I cannot begin to describe how much I would enjoy a peaceful society. On the other hand you have to consider the price of peace (apathy, and absence of growth in many cases). The only way I can see flourishment in times of peace is if we change our concept of what our enemy is. What do you guys think?

Interesting thought experiment.

There are many cases in speculative fiction (Sci Fi) where thedecadent unchallenged society stagnates and fails to prosper.

It is clear that in the absence of challenges it is only the need of a single individual (or small goup) to develop new ideas - for personal fame or intilectual vanity.

Where the entire society gets behind a project and devil the expense is the collective attitude things take great leaps forward.

Take a look at space flight.
In the 50s and 60s it was felt that the USA may be destroyed uness they got into space quickly. From it's first inception to a man on the moon took a small handfull of years (the Apollo project).

Look to now.

There is no Russian Bear pawing at the threshold and NASA want to return to the moon (the Orion project)- they are talking about the first test launch of their new design of rocket bing in seven years, and the man on the moon another 5-10 later.

The Apollo programme went from not existing to landing on the moon to mothballs in les time than the development phase of the Orion project.

Look at ship design - the British navy advanced ship design more trough warship developments than anyone did purely for trade.

Same with the biological sciences and the fight against diseases.

So I feel that it is probably true that challenges to be overcome lead to collective effort and advancement.

Advancement does seem to come from adversity, but adversity doesn't necessarily mean a lack of peace.

Taking into account the wider definition of peace, I do see what you're saying. Maybe the next step, after we clean up our various messes, is to learn that the mother of invention doesn't have to be necessity. Inspiration doesn't have to come under duress. While I can work under stress, I'd rather work on my own time table and without pressure. Who needs the stress?

this question reminds me of one of my favorite film lines.
it's from the third man.
harry lime says it in an amusement park:

There are two things that could happen if we concentrated on a successful state of peace. One, we fail. There are no more enemies to fight, energy is no longer a problem, so we can keep to ourselves. Living out our days in peace, we slowly sink into a motionless state, a philosophical stalemate. Because we assume peace means "an end to struggle" the country becomes a vegetable.
The second, we change our line of thought. Instead of conceptualizing our enemies as other people, we battle against inate ignorance, the causes and "why" of what surrounds us. Instead of striving for power over other people, we strive for the power of knowledge and mastery over adaptation to our environment. Concentration can be set on study, and intellectual challenge. We have many built-in thoughts on what our enemy is. If you think about the word right now I'd imagine most of you would atomatically think of another person, or an antagonist of some kind presenting itself in the form of a physical danger. If we can change our focus to see our antithesis as our lack of understanding, then maybe that would be enough to stay sharp. Debating, like this forum, can instigate our growth. In order for this to work we need to apply our knowledge, and actually do what we are willing to. "While walking or resting, sitting or lying, while talking or remaining quiet, while eating or drinking, do not allow yourself to be indolent, but be in most arduous search of "this." If we strive hard enough for something, then it will be. There is always a possibility, because defeat and despair are nothing but states of mind. Once you accept defeat, you are defeated; not a moment before.

I think human beings need conflict to grow. If you are down with not growing, then you should be looking for peace.

While not a true enemy I feel exploration of the unknown could provide more than enough challenge for humanity to keep itself busy vs being hellbent on destroying itself.

The fact remains just by sheer numbers there will be a day the Earth can no longer support them amount of people that inhabit it. Hopefully at some point in the next generation they get their act together and get a handle on space.

A question I ask myself is: is it primative for a country to have a desire to be the first country from Earth to place a flag on an extraterrestrial body? Is it primative to finish a speech makeing a statement like God bless "whomever". vs the rest of Earth population.

I think it is possible, not probable.

Not to be pessemistic, but I can almost guarantee that we will not "get a handle on space" for at least 500-1000 years. Which is a shame, because I would love to visit Mars or Europa. If we lived in my second idea, then maybe 100-200 years. If a privately wealthy man can create a ship able to enter orbit for 1.3 million, imagine what that $8,536,406,705,780.94 with cooperation between countries could do. Its within our grasp, but so long as greed and pride are an inherent quality of power, it just won't happen. If there is one thing that upsets me the most, its that our current world leaders are either too stupid or blinded by their own ambition to see two inches past their own faces.

I was thinking about this yesterday as well. But with the concept of, if tastes in music, design and architecture don't change, people will not change and buy new things. I think we might be getting to that point. My Saturn car with the plastic panels looks as good today as it did 11 years ago. It could easily look the same 20 years from now. Car companies want change and make money with change. Clothing companies make money when all of your clothes are out of style.

You will always need energy and food, so they will to be created somehow. Someone will have to work.

There will need to be no hate, crime, or terrorism. There will always be poor people and rich people.

I just don't see how the perfect peaceful state can ever be achieved in the US. (Unless they put happy drugs in the water and food)

War and the quest for sex are the two things that improve the economy a lot. Without those and the innovations that they cause, you are left to medical research, technology and space exploration in peacetime. You could have advancements in those fields during peacetime that would cause prosperity.

People will always want things they can't afford and will work hard for them, if there are jobs that they can do.

Don't want to get your thread off target - but have you considered the technology growth that is a direct result of porn ? Think of how this has driven the development of photography, video encoding, compression algorithms, bandwidth expansion, search algorithms, etc. Kind of interesting if we oversimplify to the carnal desires of man: To be in control and sex....

Pretty sure there were other incentives for improving on those technologies, and my initial post talking about "growth" was a blanket statement for almost everything. Weird point...but ok. :thumbsup:

Ok, then replace porn with war. War drives invention... see all the cool shit we have due to WWII?

I think the 500-1000 year estimate is WAY off. Technology is exponential. We will be doing things people haven't even dreamed of 50 years from now.

I believe we saw the prospect of non-war based prosperity during the dotcom explosion of the late '90's. Innovation of any kind with rational expectations vs the "get rich quick" schemes of that period, could very well replace the "military/industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us of.

There are so many immediate challenges that we face as a nation, and opportunities for innovation that could have global value. My doubt lies in the resistance that the folks invested in the status quo would bring to bear.

Necessity is the mother of all inventions. And I would agree that porn has had a huge impact in the desire to get better electronics and bigger hard drives in the past 10 years. I have over a terabyte of hard drive space in the room I am sitting in. I have a TiVo, two computers, a backup hard drive and a USB hard drive. I also have a mp3 player with a hard drive in it. In 1996, my computer had a 810MB hard drive. I have tons of files that are at least that size.

Space exploration also drives some advancement in technology. Namely because the things they need have not been created.

War and military spending also help drive advancement, and it has both a positive effect on the economy and a negative effect. The years right after a war end is probably the best time to for prosperity.

Our space program is neglected and expensive. They can hardly get a man to Mar's, even if they tried (which they don't because of the reasons above). My point was that "getting a handle on space", which to me means being able to travel between planets & colonize them, will not be a priority for quite some time. When it finally does become a priority it will still take an even longer amount of time to reach that state. You have to take into consideration the fact that we will have to switch from being an oil based society to a more ecologically-sound-renewable-energy based society. This change will be abrupt and will set us back. Seeing as how things are currently going, we aren't going to get it right the second time. The leaders of the US right now are idiots, so they probably won't realize what's going on until two years after the last drop of oil burns up. With that in mind, I see us reaching planetary colonization at the speed of litigation and political disputes. Austrailia is looking promising with their recent breakthroughs in solar power, but they don't have much of a space program; 500-1000 years seems reasonable to me.

I see many logical fallacies in that, but you've made up your mind so I won't continue.

I'm currently reading a book about the effect climate has had on civilization. It deals with how people have adapted to changing climates and how this led to innovation in the social aspects of society. It contributed to fragmented groups coalescing into rudimentary cities and then into civilizations with all the advancement in administration this entailed. The author argues this change was partly due to the need for more efficient farming methods. Society’s struggle against the environment leads to greater prosperity and general progress. This is not to say that war does not lead to progress. I guess what is common in both cases is that there is a struggle of some sort. The struggle to survive is used as an argument for the necessity of the space program i.e. that we will have to colonize other planets eventually if we are to survive as a race.

As for progress and thought on topics that do not lead to immediate benefits, I should know all about that as I do study mathematics. Of course we do eventually see profound progress due to the broad base of knowledge this creates. That is not the reason many people choose to study these things though, they see it as mentally enlightening and in some aspect beautiful.

So here are two things that lead to progress without the need for warfare. They both, however, still entail some form of struggle. This struggle originates either from the necessity of survival or from an artificial source from within the mind. I do see your point that in times of peace there may be a tendency for philosophical stalemate. The other option that you put forward is however present today. For it to exist, however, society must be in a relatively robust and stable state.

Peace isn't really the issue, competition is the issue.

War is the ultimate form of competition, and as such people will strain themselves to the limit in order to out do the other side, losing is unthinkable. This is why war seems so good for innovation, people feel a burning NEED to succeed, there is no room for laziness.

Competition need not be in war. Economic competition creates motivated self interest. By figuring out the better way, you can succeed economically. If you take away that incentive things slow down, why spend years and years perfecting a new concept if it doesn't help you? I'd rather be drinking beer.

This is why good companies see to it that employees are rewarded for such work. Who would you rather work for you or your boss? Who are you going to work harder for?

It is possible to prosper for periods of time in "relative" peace. But total peace will never happen so long as there is more then one human being walking the face of the earth.

I disagree, total peace is possible, just not with happiness.

The police state brings peace of a sort, a global police state would bring global peace at the expense of happiness.

Don't police states require constant displays of voilence to maintain fear?I don't call that peace.

Reminds me of Rome's 1000 years of peace through conquering others.

Depends on what you mean by peace. If by peace you mean a lack of all conflict, then I would say no. We need some conflict to spur us into action in order to prosper. If we had absolutely no conflict at all then we would fall into a state of perpetual contentedness and never achieve anything more. Then again if there was absolutely no conflict then that might not matter.

However, if you mean conflict in the traditional physical sense then I would say yes. First, there we can turn our contentiousness inward and focus on progressing against things like hunger, poverty, or even death or time itself. Second and more persuasive, I feel that there will always be conflict of some kind. To be biblical about it, we are imperfect beings and in many ways our existence is disruptive to the natural order of things. This is a dual edged sword as it allows us to progress by spiraling upwards fighting the conflicts that beset us while at the same time cursing us to perpetually conflict (this applies to both conflicts we create and conflicts involving our discontentedness with nature.

The peace I'm talking about is freedom from civil disorder, freedom from disturbance; quiet and tranquillity, and the cessation of war and violence.

The possibility is directly proportional to the effort, and struggle for this ideal.

Could be more Brave New World-ian. :)

Just because we adopt peace as a philosophy doesnt mean there is an end to war. There will always be someone who for greed or insanity breaks the peace. We would just be fighting genocide in Africa and other conflicts that we can sell as humanitarian and keep the war machine rolling enough to pump some dollars into the economy.

If it can be done it should be done. How does bloodshed amount to motivation? We definitely need more lebensraum, and I apologize for the use of the german. But if this species is to grow and really change (and maybe therefore become more peaceful) we have to realize the abundant riches of our solar system, and beyond, and figure out how to get to them and use them. Surely we've had enough trouble being selfish and conservative? Does anybody want to move beyond capitalism? I can't figure out a better way than money, but there has to be one.

It kind of depends exactly what you mean by conflict. For instance NASA/the space program has generated a lot of advances and that comes from exploration. So if you mean can we progress without conflict amongst ourselves? Then hell yes.

Unless you mean any kind of conflict. Like it could be viewed as being in conflict with nature. And in that case, without any conflict whatsoever then I don't think we could progress much. It's just not our nature.

But really that is a somewhat moot point since we'll pretty much always be in conflict with the physical universe and our own death.

I don't think we need a police state to have global peace, we only need to "grow up" so to speak. 94% of the human race is basically infantile.

Where there is great advances in times of conflict. There is also great regression. Where one or several countries may be advancing in the time of conflict, at the same time, they are pretty much sending other countries back to the stone age. Destroying their technology, economy, governments, killing large amounts of their population. In the end making other countries have to start over.

In time of peace there may be less motivation for advancement. But that doesn't have to be true in my mind. There are other ways for advances at times of peace. The sharing of information, and resources would allow faster advances. It would also allow for less overlapping. Though the overlapping is good for some research, it also slows down advancement in other areas.

Instead of wars, companies would run their development departments in different manners. Take NASA for example. When they develop software, they have a team of people that attempt to hack the software and another team that attempts to prevent it. It adds a sort of competition, and allows for a faster and more stable release in the end.

Though in the current state of the world, the human race has a long ways to go before we will ever be able to have true peace. In the end, we are nothing more than a tiny spec in the universe, and we are completely oblivious to if and what else is out there. At our current rate we'll kill ourselfs long before we'll be able to figure out what else there is out there.

In the case of a society centrally controlled, those that control society are at risk if things change.

If things change, they could lose control.

With competition, those in control fear losing control if things do not change, because someone else might overpower them.

Wars and other forms of social conflict that obviously endangered those in control of socieity thus provided a reason for those in control to act rashly, and encourage development and change.

Now, it is claimed that most advancement comes from war -- but take a look at the pace of technological change right now.

It isn't being driven by war. Yet we have computers technology developing at a ridiculously exponential rate, materials science developing at a ridiculously exponential rate, microscopic sensing developing at a ridiculously exponential rate...

We are currently only a few orders of magnatude away from having materials good enough and cheap enough to build a space elevator. We are currently only a few orders of magnatude away from computers capable of simulating every inter-neuron connection in the human brain. We are currently only a few orders of magnatude away from being able to read neuron interneuron activity in real time at synaptic resolutions.

Now, massive progress can cause war. When the entrenched powers that be feel threatened by new powers, and new powers want to be recognized as the powers they are, one can easily fall into a spiral of violence.

But we seem to be progressing quite fine without war, thank you very much.

That NASA comparison -- have you compared the goals for the next mission to the Apollo mission? NASA doesn't want to repeat Apollo, they want to do better. Not just step foot on the moon and take some pebbles home -- but set up shop, and head on to Mars.

Ridiculously exponential rates is very true. Does it end, though? I guess that since it hasn't yet it isn't going to. I can't wait until I have a GPS/Cell Phone/PDA implanted behind my ear, that also controls the nanobots patrolling my body for illness, when I'm 200! I long to see you all in the year 2160? It never hurts to dream; the science I don't feel qualified to comment upon.

Excellent. Do we have enough time left?:D