We Are All Human

Yesterday marked the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an act which proved to be the spark that set off the First World War. Four years of pointless, mechanized slaughter followed, in which over 65 million people died. The history of our civilization is rife with useless wars that accomplished next to nothing, but the First World War must surely rank as one of the most pointless conflicts we've ever engaged in. Worse than that, the conflict continues to affect our world in ways both numerous and negative. 

A crowd in London celebrate's Britain's declaration of war, 1914

Humanity seems to need little pretext to start to kill one another. We go to war over reasons both large and small, petty in both senses of the word. We battle each other over resources, territory, because our neighbors are a different ethnicity than us, because we quibble over the precise interpretation of a religious text, because we have a divine mandate to do so. We demonize the other side of a perceived divide and then launch into merciless conflict, when in fact we do not differ nearly as much as we pretend. Over the question of whether the communion wafer was literally the body of Christ, Catholics and Protestants attacked each other across Europe for over a century after Luther. A few centuries removed, most people would rightly view that as an absurd reason to fight and die. 

Surely, one might think, after the pain and suffering of war we might learn our lesson, we might try and find a better way? Yet it seems we quickly forget how horrible it all was, and launch right back into the next one. The First World War was called "the war to end all wars," with countless young men volunteering to participate in what they thought was their last chance to engage in the glory of battle. The century that followed the start of the war has instead proven to be one of the bloodiest in our history; the Great War was more the beginning of so many wars than the end of them.

There is more that unites us than divides us. We are all human, with a shared biology, a shared ancestry, and a shared planet. The differences that we allow to divide us are small ones compared with what we have in common. If we can remember that, if we can learn to see each other as truly human, we have the capability to create a better world than the one we live in now.