The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life. All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Final Lecture
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Del curso dictado por Princeton University
Paradoxes of War
566 calificaciones
Conoce a los instructores
Miguel A. CentenoMusgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Sociology
So now it's time to try to summarize all that I had been trying to say.
To give you the five minute kernel of what this course was about.
For those of you who had made it this far my congratulations and my thanks.
I'm sure it has been somewhat of a heavy slog.
But I hope that this last five or ten minutes gives
you some sense of reward that puts all these various notions together.
So, what I want to do is to return to the basic questions about, from the course.
What we wanted to do was to study war as an event in and of itself.
Not to judge war.
Not to make a moral judgment in a sense about war,
but to actually understand war and to see what it involved.
How did it come about?
How was its practices?
What did it require of human beings?
We wanted to understand, in a sense, or at least that's my motivation.
This incomprehensible moment, at least for me,
of human beings rushing to their death.
Of human beings dying, most likely of
other human beings imposing huge amounts of violence on them.
How do we begin to understand this?
And we came to believe, and I hope
I have convinced you, that war involved two things.
both, a set of important human emotions of fundamental
hard-wiring, and a set of sociological and historical developments.
That is, that we cannot talk about only the nature of
war, nor can we talk about purely the nurture of war.
That we have to combine these two into some kind of coherent argument.
So, what about the human emotions?
We saw that human beings can be very afraid.
That this fear often leads to a kind of violence.
That the fear of the other, the fear
of the threat, the fear of possible deprivation.
Human beings also have the capacity to hate.
And that hate can be created, that hate can be created by images, for example,
such as this one which encourages to see the other, as somehow, less than human.
As somehow not legitimate.
This hate and this fear can be churned into political violence.
That is, we can take these raw emotions on an individual level,
and we can begin transforming them into this kind of collectivity.
This higher, in a sense, this more aggregated form of violence can
also satisfy a different set of emotions, which it helps to create.
For example, notions of honor, notions of duty, notions of patriotism.
Notions of obligations to a particular community.
So we have these raw emotions and we have ones in the sense that can be created
and that people are taught to love, in a sense.
War requires in this way, high, what we might
call high, and low emotions, for its emotional intensity.
But let us not forget, this emotional intensity.
That war, in the end, involves the existential
act of either perishing or destroying another human being.
And that cannot be reduced to gains, it cannot be reduced to resources.
It cannot be reduced to collective
interest, but must always keep that individual,
that individual at the tip of the spear in mind.
But we also learned that war required much more than these emotions.
That war could just not be understood in a sense, as a collective form of a fight.
Of the kinds of collective emotions that, we might look at.
That war required organization.
That war required, if you will,
an imposition of control over populations.
That war wasn't just about the exercise of some kind of
animal spirit, but the imposition of human order on other human beings.
United.
United we will win.
Think about all three of these concepts.
United, that means a community, a forming together by some kind of act.
The creation of a community of a win.
And then with the win, this idea that this community can
benefit through the destruction of some other.
These kinds of emotions, these
kinds of institutions are exactly what make war.
It is the combination of these institutions
and these emotions.
And they make, they transform war in one way or another.
So, I hope this is where the course takes you.
That, to understand that there is too much variation to speak of a genetic instinct
except in some of our most basic actions, this is not responsible for our actions.
This might be responsible for some of our instincts.
It might responsible for some of our physical responses,
but it's certainly not responsible for the kinds of organizations.
I want you to understand the historical contingency of this creation.
That war is produced by particular places and particular times.
That different places practice it in different ways.
And that what we saw over 500 years, is the victory of the last 500 years.
But ending in the 21st century, is the victory of a
particular kind of practice of this collective action.
I hope you understand the contradictions of many of our institutions.
How they can be, in a sense about both
the cohesion and the imposition of opposition towards another.
That institutions that we value and that might appear benign, also
may have consequences or origins that are less that benign.
I want you to appreciate the historical contingency of the distribution of power.
That power may not reflect, and usually
does not reflect any kind of generic superiority.
But rather reflects a historical moment when one form of exercise
of violence seems to be more efficient, or more effective than others.
I hope that you have come to appreciate, at least many of you who happen to be
living in peace, the luck that we all enjoy
who do not have to participate in this process.
Who can enjoy our daily life without this threat of violence.
I hope those of you who may have been watching
this course who have lived through this, have found some element
of truth in what I have to say and it has
helped you further understand your
possible your experiences.
I hope also you have gotten to read some wonderful books.
again, I realize that some of these books have been very expensive and
not be accessible and we're going to continue
trying to make more accessible resources available.
But I hope that along with the lectures, you have at least
delved in, into some of
the readings, and you have seen how the themes of the lecture
can be reflected in the specifics of the readings.
I want to thank you so much.
It has been an amazing experience to reach out to a true global audience.
A far larger number that has ever purchased any and all of my books.
It has been a real pleasure to
read your comments, to see your various perspectives.
And what I urge you to do, is
to continue talking, to continue thinking, to continue reading.
That the course has made you sociologically curious.
That it has encouraged your sociological imagination to think about
institutions, to think about human phenomena in a different way.
I also want to take this moment to
thank my colleagues who are participated in this.
Jeff, Ben, Lisa, Laura.
those, all the folks at the broadcast center
and at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.
But most importantly, to Lauren Curanen who has
been the assistant in much of this
process, who is responsible for finding these images,
who has helped me, keep me on task.
And has helped me deliver this course to you.
Thank you
very much.
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