April 10, 2009

Countering Students' Fatalism Toward War

By JOHN HORGAN

I taught "War and Human Nature" again this fall. The course ponders the question, as my syllabus puts it, "Is war inevitable, or are peace and even universal disarmament possible?" During the first class, I posed that question to my undergraduate students, most of them engineering and science majors. Thirteen said no, peace is not possible, and four said yes, it is. At least one of those yeses, I'm pretty sure, was telling the teacher what he wanted to hear.

That pessimistic response

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