Clearly Pacifist, Clearly Credible

Clearly Pacifist, Clearly Credible

Many people tend to think war is a part of life that mankind will never be able to rid itself of. This comes from the assumption that war is one of the basic needs of mankind. However, Margaret Mead does not make this assumption. In fact, she denies its credibility in her essay “Warfare is Only an Invention – Not a Biological Necessity.” In this essay, Margaret Mead combines a great deal of logos and ethos with limited pathos to support her pacifist claim that warfare is merely an invention of man, and not a need found in the very nature of man. While Mead’s claim does not agree with the most common beliefs about warfare, its mixture of logos and ethos is as strong as the bricks and mortar of a brick wall.

Margaret Mead begins her essay with a subtle strength. The subtlety comes from discussing other, more popular, views of warfare that do not agree with Mead’s pacifist view. This helps the audience view Mead as an honest person who is willing to acknowledge others even though she does not agree with their opinions. The appearance this introduction gives the audience serves as a strong way of opening the essay because right away she is able to get into the ethos part of her argument without seeming too intrusive. In fact, even when she introduces her own argument she does not seem at all intrusive or aggressive. This makes her audience more willing to listen and more receptive to what she has to say.

After first acknowledging other perspectives, Margaret Mead explicitly defines the main purpose of her essay. She clearly states her main claim which says “that warfare . . . is an invention like any other of the inventions in terms of which we order our lives, such as writin...

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...ent tightly. She says, “we can take comfort from the fact that a poor invention will usually give place to a better invention” (Mead 5). This offers just a shade of hope, which may be just what the audience needs to fully accept her ideas.

Though Margaret Mead possesses a view of war that many people do not agree with, she builds a strong support for her argument. While the logos Mead presents functions as the bricks of a wall, the ethos she incorporates acts as the mortar, which holds the bricks together. This makes the logos, which many people find convincing in an argument, even more appealing because the ethos lets her audience know that she has put a great amount of thought and research into her view and essay. The combination of logos and ethos gives Mead’s essay the ability to stand on its own even though many people disagree with what it has to say.