Information is Beautiful/David McCandless
One of the accounts I eagerly follow on Twitter is from Information Is Beautiful. David McCandless truly does make information beautiful, crafting elegantly simple graphics out of nearly incomprehensible data sets. Bravo to him. What, you may be asking, does that have to do with a blog about religion in the media?
It’s not just the subheading on the Guardian blog to which he contributes which states that “Facts Are Sacred”. Rather, there’s a recent post that examines visually some of the data around military spending. One of the mainstays of Christian Pacifism has long been the critique that the United States’ military spending is a runaway cost completely out of proportion with the threat (real or imagined) of any other nation. McCandless shows that this may not be completely true.
If we cannot make an argument rooted in the economically outrageous nature of U.S. military spending, and it seems we cannot from this data, then we need stronger but still riskier grounds to oppose this expenditure. The gross amount of military spending in the U.S. is unparalleled across the globe: that much is not in dispute. However, the appeals to fiscal conservatives don’t hold so well when we understand that U.S. military spending is only 4% of our GDP, ranking us 8th worldwide behind Kyrgyzstan, Burundi and Oman.
I am not sure that this poses an insurmountable ethical issue for the peace movement. We still have other grounds on which to oppose war and militarism in general. What it does do is change the nature of the conversation. Common wisdom in U.S. politics holds that you want to quote the most conservative support for your opinion that you can find. McCandless illustrates that we need to find some different kind of economic argument against war.
Of course, these numbers leave out the human and ecological costs of warfare. The psychological trauma of either participating in or surviving conflict is only beginning to be understood. Perhaps we need to factor the post-conflict costs into the calculus of war. Perhaps we just need to abandon economic justifications or refutations of military engagement all together. I’ll leave it to you to debate in the comments.
