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(Best Syndication News) Quite a few people think it is essential to work out human conflicts by dictating to others what their behavior must be. This can be done through rules or laws with an enforcer seeing to it that the rules are followed. This can be done through customs with the whole community acting as the enforcer. It can also be done through institutionalized religion. The members of that religion must then act to enforce their will on the membership and in many cases everyone else in their society.

No society exists without some of these mechanisms coming into play eventually. Controlling how members of human societies behave is an element of every human group from the family out to the whole world full of humans. We are certainly all pretty intolerant of anyone who would build nuclear weapons and use them indiscriminately. Luckily most humans do not own nuclear weapons. The issue of tolerance becomes engaged at the point where the individual is in conflict with any group that dominates the territory in which they act out their life.

Tolerance is considerable in more liberal societies and less so in more conservative social groups. That seems to be because we were more tolerant of treating some members of our society badly in the past than we try to be today. The tribe is probably the oldest social unit outside of the clan and family. Tribes in many parts of the world are still quite powerful. Clans and families can also wield an amazing amount of power even in highly organized and complex huge modern societies.

What is broken in social systems like Afghanistan where the punishment for young girls can include killing them is very hard to understand for most of us. The fact that their tribe or clan or even their family can administer such punishment and quietly go home to dinner afterward complicates that difficult path to understanding. Unyielding authority is not a common part of our life here in this Democratic Republic. We seldom endorse handing power to anyone that can result in the death of a young person who acts in conflict with religion, law or custom.

There is a conflict between civilizations that goes beyond the forces of law, custom and religion in one society being in conflict with those values in another. It goes to the level of instinct and is administered at older levels of the brain. Protecting the young is a basic instinct that we evolved before we invented social discourse and organized events like religious gatherings and war. The idea that we might go to war over the murder of a young woman in some remote part of Asia or Africa, which are by the way distant continents, is unlikely but it does affect how we feel about that war. We abhor the destruction of human potential.

We are at war more with intolerance than we are with any religion at the moment. We are also at war with social systems which are destroying the young humans that they should be, by our lights, nurturing. That is the war we endorsed after the attack on our continent, our country, our state, our city. It was an attack founded in the hatred of those who will not tolerate our system of liberal social interactions.

What we are trying to preserve goes far beyond our own security, although that is important in the equation. It is the value of human life and the right of every human to live the life that they choose. The conflict about that is still going on here in our own nation. We have those who want to extend human rights to a fetus which then puts that fetus's rights in conflict with his mother's rights. We also have those who want to be able to cancel all human rights if they see a threat or potential threat to the peace in our society. Sometimes they are the same individual.

This is the oldest conflict in the human world. Its roots are not found in religion. Even so it can be expressed in religious laws or unwritten codes of clans and families. It can also be expressed in civil law and the constitutional basis of governments. This is the raw conflict of the humanity of every individual with the power of the social group. It is the raw conflict between the power of the strong and the need to protect the weak. It is a conflict where our chosen resolution allows human society to survive and humans to thrive. It is the unending conflict of the rights of the vulnerable with the power of the social system and those who establish and enforce its rules.

We are only strong in that conflict when we uphold our own rules, laws and social contracts founded in justice and tempered in mercy. This is the very same conflict that led to the revolution that founded our nation. This is the conflict that tore the nation apart and resulted in our civil war. This is the conflict that will define the future of humanity or even if humanity has a future. This war will not resolve it but it may move us closer to the day when a girl in Afghanistan can go to school without risking her life daily. This is the only war worth fighting.

By: Henri Reynard is an Author, Armchair Economist, Serial Entrepreneur, Science Buff and Political Junkie. Henri was born just before the beginning of this nation’s entry into WWII. He is politically to the right of Genghis Kahn and socially far to the left of Mao. His center is on the other side of the political circle from the people who are partisan by reflex. He has also claimed that he was raised by Foxes in the wild and now runs with Wolverines in preference to politicians. These facts are self evident in his writing.