Conflict is Good 

Article by Alex Martin. Edited by Liam Geoghegan. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard. 

After excitedly reading my own article on history and the media in the fantastic New Histories online magazine, I started to read over the other articles. Firstly I read the lead article written by Brogan Campbell, aptly and simply titled ‘Conflict’, the basic gist of which is: conflict has caused human kind great harm and is the cause of racism, war and political manipulation. Which angered me greatly; as I firmly believe that conflict is the cure for all these evils and not the cause, it is an indispensible tool for allies of the Enlightenment and enemies of irrationality. I intend to argue the basic thesis proposed by Campbell is fraught with contradictions, non sequiturs and factual inaccuracies whilst also affirming that conflict is a beneficial thing for mankind using both corrections and augmentations of the examples cited by Campbell and examples of my own. 

First of all, I want to qualify what I mean by conflict. Physical conflict is rarely the most ethical action available, however, social conflict is necessary, cultural conflict is good, and intellectual conflict is damn great. And Campbell argues that conflict in itself is a bad thing. 

Intellectual and social progress comes from conflict; the Enlightenment attempted to take a world that was once dark, and through rational thought and discourse make it a little less dimmer, with each attempt to find more truth the world became a lighter place to live, and the dialectic is the best way to generate new ideas or shed light on old ones. This challenging of the old ways of life has always led to new ways of life; if conflict didn’t occur, between the parent and the child, the student and the teacher, the establishment and the contrarian, the state and the dissident, as a species we would be far less developed. Good art takes social norms and challenges them; without conflict there would be no change. What if Galileo chose not to study the arrangement of our solar system as it might rock the boat? What if Darwin was too scared of conflicting with the established doctrines and chose not to write ‘on the origin of the species’? Where would we be? 

But a lack of conflict can be so much more damaging than simply retarding intellectual movements, far more sinister consequences can arise when we shy away from a conflict. For example, American Slavery is, in no small part, the direct cause of an individual shying away from conflict for convenience; whilst redrafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was deftly persuaded to write out a passage against the trade and practice, (he did this against the wishes of great contrarians Thomas Paine and Benjamin Rush) to avoid the embarrassment of ‘northern merchants’. Ducking the issue left it unresolved for ninety-four years (in which innumerable slaves were deprived of their liberty) and helped cause the American Civil War, a conflict that had more American casualties than any other war in history. An even more disturbing example of a lack of conflict would be the rise of fascism in the 1920s. 

Fascism is a doctrine that in its very tenets rejects all conflict apart from that which it could physically direct at its enemies. It praised conformity and vilified independent thought, it negated the individual and put it in the collective, it praised those who didn’t ask questions and imprisoned those who did. 

As for Campbell’s article; Apartheid, the relationship between India and Pakistan, World War One, and the Falkland’s conflict, are all cited as dark events in the past caused by conflict, but in fact are caused by the lack of conflict, by doctrines that promote uniformity and look down upon dissent. Racism, as has been conclusively proven, is a false science, and hence only exists as social and cultural constructs, when these constructs are left unchallenged, the backwards regressive notion can take hold of a society, as it did in South Africa. The long standing issues between India and Pakistan are the result of conflicting ideologies which promote uniformity; such as nationalism mixed with religious hatred. World War One was, again, the result of doctrines of uniformity, hyper patriotism, nationalism, imperialism, ethnocentrism etc. In respect to the Falkland’s conflict, as Campbell points out, it was Thatcher’s appeal to the Imperial remnant of British culture that led to widespread support of the conflict in Britain, and a declining fascistic Argentine dictatorship that wanted to distract its population from a real economic crisis and the government’s repressive policy of disappearing people. Furthermore, it was not just the lack of conflict that caused these dark moments in history to occur, it was conflict that, in some cases, ended them – the iconic Nelson Mandela was head of the armed wing of the African National Congress. 

Anyone who has seen Harry Lime’s speech atop the Reisenad in the classic film The Third Man will know that ‘in Italy for 30 years under the Borgia they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ But anyone who knows their clock history (does anyone know their clock history?) will know that Switzerland didn’t even invent the Cuckoo Clock.* There is a much better metaphor to sum up my opinion. The light bulb, the universal symbol for an idea, generates more light than heat, which leaves me to conclude that heat is not the antithesis of light, but rather the source of it. 

* Incidentally, anyone with an understanding of Renaissance Italy will also know that Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance were all “produced” in areas outside of Borgia rule.

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