Unlearnable Lessons from the Bronze Age

Homer's Iliad was our civilisation's first proper set of pointers towards the abiding dilemmas of human conflict. e.g.

1) Communities which embark on a war hoping to recover something they believe they have lost, will inevitably propagate a whole new chain of losses, with restitution becoming ever more partial the longer the fighting lasts.

2) A key consequence of the mortal human condition is that while some losses are finite i.e. recoverable, many others are infinite, unrecoverable.

The dynamic of conflict and the related pool of emotions are very much driven by the interplay of these two kinds of loss, and by the participants' perceptions of the balance between them, usually mistaken.

3) Even those who have read their Homer and understand points 1) and 2) above, will often still feel compelled to go to war, reluctant at any stage to take a step 'back' and reassess the situation.

Sometimes the imperatives are cultural, a sense of honour for example. But warfare often occurs as a kind of narrative process with the instigating incidents having already created a loss of stasis before anyone takes up arms.

Thus there is no way to recover that dissipating 'peace' simply by pretending it is still there, intact.

Indeed, the conflict typically has to play out in order to restore an equivalent or novel situation, no matter how many additional losses, finite and infinite, occur along the way.