Peace (48 page)

Spiritual and Intellectual Attainment

The most elusive and yet most sought-after components of inner peace are probably spiritual and intellectual attainment. Religious imperatives of peace are related to but distinguished from spiritual imperatives. The former organize, systemize and make prescriptions of the latter only after the latter have been proven. The belief in karma as individual pursuits for peace made more achievable in social conditions insofar as the social reflects the prevalence of the individual rested on reincarnative peace, the idea that our peace or its absence in this life will continue in the next, shared by major monotheisms. The Buddhist Eightfold Path and Islamic Five Pillars are both passages to peace and its spiritual qua behavioral supports. Intellectuals such as Russell, Pauling and Forsberg were all eminent in their fields before becoming peacemakers, and peace writers throughout the ages have been able to articulate new ideas and principles inasmuch as they are versed in those of the past and present. This is not to say that everyone must have a PhD or be saintly for world peace to be actualized, but instead to suggest that striving for and reaching the spiritual and intellectual attainment within one's grasp is a stepping stone thereto more easily actualizable once the Pyramid's previous levels and items are met.

World Peace

The premise of world peace is to facilitate the Pyramid's previous peaces by aiding their adaptation to conditions and participants as circumstances require. Crucé's analogy between humanity and the human body, the organs of which are in such sympathy with each other that the sickness of one affects the other, takes on its full meanings in the levels below and culminates in world peace, not the other way around. No state or organization today has the expertise, authority or means to make world peace possible along the Pyramid's lines. UN agencies as a bettering expansion of the League of Nations' multi-pronged approach have been one of the few ways a global, centrally funded organizational approach to world peace
along the Pyramid's lines has ever been effectively enacted. But it may be undesirable that a single one does because doing so puts all the proverbial eggs of world peace in one basket. Another possibility is the recent emergence of independent, specialized agencies which have taken on limited tasks not explicitly for world peace, and professional peace researchers, advocates and activists who have, which cumulatively can circumvent barriers to world peace political imperatives on their own cannot. The point of the items in the Pyramid's level of world peace is thus not to show how the levels below can be accomplished on a global scale, which must be worked out within the levels themselves, but rather to suggest what can be done to help and sustain them in the meanwhile and afterwards.

Legitimacy and Law

Wolff's scientific fourfold allotment of laws as voluntary, natural, implicit, customary and explicit treaties are applicable throughout world history and have each been crucial to peace. The legitimacy of both those in power and their agents, and laws to regulate relations and define penalties for contraventions, were as crucial for the peace of early civilizations as they are today even if in strikingly different ways. At the heart of Ancient Chinese legalism was that the law itself not people who apply it is the source of all legitimate authority capable of making and maintaining peace, which in conjunction with Confucian traditionalism and meritocracy became the longest-running governmental form in history. The second, Roman Republicanism, must be taken with a big grain of salt because Augustus was an autocrat who upheld republican forms as a matter of convenience more than of conviction. The Pax Romana he inaugurated is a testament to the fact that for peace political functions do not always follow their forms. Solon's reforms in Ancient Athens were meant to allay the dangers of direct democracy such as demagoguery with isonomic principles of equality in law. Representative democracy today has the added danger of officials saying one thing to get elected then doing another, or doing what they said they would do like Hitler and the last leaders of Yugoslavia. For Machiavelli, war and peace are indifferent instruments to get and keep power, but no one can do so by force alone because they thereby lose their legitimacy, wherein lie the powers of laws and periodic or emergency elections in making peace when broken and maintaining or enhancing it when not.

Incentives and Deterrents

Deterrence, the prevention of aggression by threat of retaliation, was one of the uses of large teeth in primates. Their smaller size in humans,
a morphological modification providing the earliest evidence of peace, was made up for in the destructivity of our weapons from arrowheads to atomic bombs. Arms races that have always been part of the human race, then, have also always been peace races in part, a paradoxical absurdity fully exposed in the face of annihilation. Yet, for Spartans and Athenians as for Egyptians and Hittites, as for the Allies in the First and Second World Wars, as for NATO and the WPO, uniting to deter was an incentive to unite in peaces that may not have been feasible otherwise. Incentives go as far back as deterrence, from survival of the peaceful as a complement to survival of the fittest, to reciprocal tributary systems and non-military alliances, and to a certain extent the Monroe Doctrine and Open Door. Economic and political sanctions imposed bilaterally or multilaterally for policy change such as those imposed on Apartheid South Africa and Iran today, as well as food-forpeace programs, combine incentives and non-violent deterrents in ways that have yet to be fully explored. But the effectiveness of incentives and deterrents depends entirely on the capaciousness of the inflictors and inflicted, so that jeopardies of peace in sanctions may lie in self-deceitful self-defeat.

Ongoing Investigation and Critical Dialogue

The Pyramid's two topmost items are in some ways only practical when those below are met and in other ways need to be practiced for them to be met. Finding food is an investigation of some kind, and debating where to eat it is a form of critical dialogue, but these are only partial senses of how these items are taken here. Innovation, adaptation and perpetuation are the goals of ongoing investigation into, and critical dialogue about, what peaces are and how they are to be made, maintained and combined. The Socratic Method still stands as a model for investigation and critical dialogue, whether in impromptu teach-ins, diplomatic gatherings, court proceedings, parliamentary debates or around dinner tables. The complaints of Erasmus' personification of peace circle around replacing weapons with and expediting reconciliation through persuasion, and even bona fide Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant confirmed that criticism is the only way to prevent conflicting rationalities from going to war. Although the shadow of the figure of barbarians as a cultural other has with whom no peace is possible has loomed large, ongoing contact consistently fostered intercultural convergences permitting investigation and critical dialogue. Language as a barrier to peace is a pretext rather than an acceptable apology, and peace in all its senses can only be grasped multilingually in addition to its non-linguistic experiences.

Epilogue: The Puzzle of World Peace

Principles and practices of “one world, one peace” are fatally flawed because if the world history of peace teaches us anything it is that peace and peacemaking are contingent on conditions and participants that are perpetually evolving. If the world history of peace should teach us only one thing, it is this: like putting together a puzzle the design of which cannot be known because it is always already changing, actualizing world peace lies in continually configuring and reconfiguring the world's peaces into a dynamic whole rather than forcing all of them to fit into a static one. I undertook this book in the belief that coming closer to terms with how and why the world's peaces came or ceased to be what they are is a first, necessary step in renewed directions towards world peace – only to discover that, of necessity, there is no last.

Notes

Introduction: How Does Peace Have a World History?

1. Survival of the Peaceful: Prehistory to the First Civilizations