I consider the question unhelpful because it forces the conversation into a limited frame of reference. And the solution, if there is one, to the problem of humanity’s propensity for violence, won’t be found within such a limited paradigm.
So yeah, it is a trick question, even if not consciously so. And if I haven’t answered it, that’s because I have never claimed to have all the answers to every question. Buy the older I get, the more I gravitate to the view that pacifism is the only morally consistent and philosophically coherent response to violence as a means of settling disputes between nations or peoples.
By coincidence, I read this passage this morning, about the death of brilliant young scientist Karl Swartzschild;
“Schwartzschild’s walk in the land of Einstein’s ideas, during a pause in fighting on the Eastern Front, among the corpses of young Germans and Russians slaughtered by the human stupidity that raged then as now (what can be more stupid than to die for a border), had resulted in the exact solution to the equations Einstein had just published.”*
To me that passage encapsulates the tragedy of a species capable of unraveling the mysteries of the universe, but incapable of resolving more immediate problems without industrialised violence.
* Carlo Rovelli, White Holes - Inside the Horizon
