I finished All Quiet on the Western Front today. War stories always stay with me. On the battlefield and off it, the most beautiful things and the ugliest things always bloom at the same time, but in the end all of it passes.

The history of war may be longer than the history of humanity. Look at the ancient apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey: no sooner had they learned to use a bone as a tool than they started killing each other with it. A tool, after all, if it is not used to create something, will surely be used to destroy. The "high-EQ" answer is that destruction is a means and creation is still the end, and that is one hundred percent correct. Things are not created out of nothing; matter and energy are conserved, and to build something you have to break something. The two are simply two sides of one coin, things passing from one pattern to another, the ordinary flow of all things, nothing to marvel at.

But this is plainly the view of a detached onlooker, one that doesn't put people first and has no feeling in it. Once anything enters a human heart, nothing escapes a value judgment. Take the "three views" people in China often talk about: a view of the universe, a view of life and a view of values. The first is how we understand the world and the second how we understand ourselves; both seem to step back and look at things in themselves. Only the third brings in human nature and motive. What is good and what is bad: in a given situation (the universe), how do I, as myself (life), choose (values)?

People make choices all the time: what to have for lunch today, whether this plan is better or that one, where to travel once the pandemic is over, whom to have kids with. Choosing is judging value. Value is an abstraction people arrive at by weighing things; without a human point of view it doesn't really exist, and the world would not end because of that (a worldview might). The question is: if value doesn't have to exist in nature, why did we evolve to think about it every day? Anyone who took high school biology will find this a silly question. Natural selection: life puts the continuation of the species first, and the pressure of the environment pushes living things to seek benefit and avoid harm, to get the best chance of carrying on. So the reason is biological. Humans have it, animals have it, even covid-19 has it. Humans really aren't that special; we are no different from a salted fish, just surviving (just putting food on the table).

At this point someone may jump out and say: you traitor to humankind, talking nonsense with your eyes wide open, have you forgotten Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Eating and surviving are only the most basic physiological and safety needs. We also have belonging, esteem and self-actualization, and that is human nature rising above biology.

Yes. Not wanting to be a traitor to humankind just yet, I too hope that some higher values shine within human nature, the ones that get humans classed as higher animals. Then here is the problem. In a world where all beings are equal and only survival counts, we can put everything we do down to our need to survive. To survive, people can pick up a bowl and eat, or throw the bowl at someone; to survive, people can build spaceships, or clubs; to survive, people can farm and herd, and can also kill any plant, animal or non-living thing they want to kill, including people, of course. If there is anything we haven't killed, it can only be because we can't kill it yet, or because it has nothing to do with survival. If survival is the only value, then taking someone else's survival for your own survival makes a world that is cruel yet fair, and surviving in it is justice.

Now say we do have values beyond survival: the ground under that justice starts to shake. Because now there is another possibility: taking someone else's survival for a value other than your own survival. Remember that the levels of Maslow's pyramid mean something. The lower the level, the more basic the need and the more it must be met first; the need to survive, for example, ranks above self-actualization. If a person A takes B's survival for A's own self-actualization, do you think B would find that fair? Many religions draw a sharp line between killing to survive and killing for pleasure (These violent delights have violent ends), perhaps also to keep a fairness that treats people, and other living things, alike.

Fairness comes from a single standard. For A, unless A rearranges the pyramid and puts some other need above survival, that is, unless A is ready to give up life for righteousness, A cannot justify putting A's other needs above someone else's need to survive, because that would be a double standard.

Giving up life for righteousness (舍生取义, an idiom from Mencius) is, in the low-EQ version, suicidal behavior (which suddenly reminds me that many religions also forbid suicide). The "righteousness" (义) here usually stands for needs that answer to values beyond the individual: the values of a group, of a society.

The word "righteousness" in the idiom already shows that people see this behavior in a positive light, for these reasons:

  1. These "people" belong to the group and benefit, directly or indirectly, from the act, so they feel its value most. It should also be easy to find a measure showing that it pays: for example, sacrificing one person costs 5 points and saving a thousand people earns 1,000.
  2. Breaking the natural priority of the hierarchy of needs is itself extremely hard. Acts like this mark the edges of human nature and have aesthetic value, and that value holds both inside and outside the group: two armies at war whose heroes admire each other is no rare story.

Ah, I'm tired of writing, so I'll stop here for now. A few things I think are worth thinking about further:

  1. Going from the individual to the group, this is reasonable within one group, but across several groups the argument is back where it started. And because groups are involved, hatred forms chains, so war becomes something that never ends
  2. Whether my own standard (my priority of needs) can be imposed on others. This probably touches on the definition of freedom
  3. Where does the value of war really lie?
  4. How are the justice and injustice of a war actually measured?
  5. People in war: smallness, alienation and not being understood, and the good parts such as comradeship --> in fact this part, along with my discontent with this imperfect world, is what I most wanted to get off my chest when I had just finished the book
  6. How can war be avoided?

P.S. Starting from the gloom I felt after finishing one book, I have really dug myself a huge hole. As a science person, I feel rather unschooled in all this.

Douban: All Quiet on the Western Front