The Possibility of Peace

You know, it's not that hard to get people to agree with the notion of world peace. Most of them already do, whether through unthinking agreement or calculated reflection. And were that many people all to agitate for peace, we could probably get something done!

Well, clearly we aren't getting that much done, despite the voices of everyone from the most die-hard of activists to the adolescent acting outraged over Twitter desperately trying to fill the air. We still go to war and we still play the old "my country's better than yours" game. So what's going wrong? If so many people want peace, why are we still fighting each other?

I'm not going to fault anyone speaking out on behalf of world peace, whether they're marching in the street or signing a petition, because at least they're speaking out. Actually, I'm not going to single out any particular person or group of people - I'm going to single out an idea, that of so-called realism.

As far as I can figure out, the biggest reason why ordinary people don't agitate for world peace isn't because they have a secret agenda for war - unlike capitalists and politicians, they stand to lose from fighting and dying. It's not because they're put off by activism, either, though negative stereotypes of activists certainly don't help. It's realism - the misplaced idea that one should only do what is realistic. As for what is actually realistic? That varies, but generally it assumes keeping the capitalist "representative" "democratic" framework in some form, or abiding by "human nature" - whatever that is. That tends to rule out the big ideas, and sadly world peace is one of them.

The argument that world peace is impossible does generally tend to rest on the argument that our human nature forbids it. Apparently humans are innately selfish, greedy and violent, and this means that we will always be stuck killing each other on a grand scale - so why bother agitating for world peace? It's an impossible dream.

There are significant flaws in this: firstly, the "human nature" argument seems less like an actual line of reasoning than a placeholder. Nowhere is human nature actually defined - instead, only a couple of traits, such as greediness or violence, are highlighted, and these traits change between variations of the argument. Secondly, human nature isn't just limited to negative traits - it also includes significant positive traits such as being able to co-operate with each other instead of trying to kill each other at every step. If human violence is an argument against world peace, logically human co-operation would be an argument for it.

I wholly expect someone to chuck some misunderstood biology at me, claiming that nature is a violent place, that species have to be violent to survive, and since that we're animals who share some of the same DNA we're going to act the same way and since genes determine, like, totally everything there's nothing we can do about it.

Well, I can't really comment on misunderstanding the biology - I study physics. What I can comment on is something that should be pretty obvious: DNA is not the be-all and end-all. It influences a lot, but it does not exclude the effects of environment - and, for a sapient species like us, the conscious choices of an organism. We aren't condemned to be nasty, mean, violent creatures, and we can't hide behind a misunderstanding of genetic determinism. To some extent, we are capable of changing our behaviours and rising above what we think determines our actions. We can choose to be less violent and more generous; we can learn these behaviours. We have restructured our societies before, moving from hunting and gathering to farming - arguably one of the greatest transitions. We can do so again, moving from a society that rewards ruthlessness and greed to one that focuses more on community.

World peace is not an impossible dream, or even one that's particularly far-fetched. It may be difficult to try and unteach selfishness and violence, but it can be done, probably on a grand scale if enough people get involved. And the more people move beyond what they consider "human nature" and towards working together, the less impossible it's going to get.

Why World Peace?

Why is world peace a good thing?

It might seem like a stupid question to ask, but how many people have really thought about it? How many people just pay lip service to the idea but would gladly drop bombs on a foreign country if someone told them to? And how many people extol the virtues of war?

I don't know how it works in other countries, but in the UK the Army actively tries to recruit people through advertising. We have CCF programmes sponsored by the Ministry of Defence; they say they're not a pre-services organisation, yet they dress youths young as 13 or 14 up in military uniforms and teach them to fire guns and obey orders. In the US as well as the UK, people (particularly politicians) tend to praise the military to the skies because they fought for our country against the Nazis, Japanese, Communists and terrorists depending on which period you look at; people like to conveniently ignore World War I on every day but one of the year, instead focusing on the glorification of the murder of people, sometimes particularly the murder of people of colour (because there is very much a racial element to some wars, particularly our War on Terror). Companies sell us media glorifying war. And I've had people come up to me and tell me that nuclear weapons contribute to peace.

Yes, the same nuclear weapons that led to MAD, paranoia, the Cuban missile crisis, and a looming war with Iran (you know, the last thing anyone needs - except the bankers, the military and the politicians).

Compared to this, what does the peace movement have? People telling us that the white poppies are disrespectful to the armed forces and thinking that our vision of a world without war is unrealistic, that it's the vision of a bunch of drugged-up hippies holding hands and singing kumbaya.

It's long past time for us to smash that image and to explain just why world peace is something we should strive for.

I'd deeply appreciate it if someone else could come up with (or show me) some better arguments for world peace, but one of the strongest - and the one that seems to come up most often - is the absence of war.

Most people would agree that the absence of war is a good thing, but even then you'd have a couple of hawks arguing that we need war to protect us from our enemies, to advance our causes (as in the case of "spreading democracy"), and to further scientific and technological progress - it is disturbing how much research is funded by militaries. (I'm not saying this because I'm anti-science; I personally was inspired by NASA as a child and now want to train as a theoretical or mathematical physicist. At the same time, it would be wrong of me to ignore the politics around research and so I have to help do my bit to kick imperialist, exploitative organisations out of science.)

Even assuming those three benefits (and as I'll show, all can be had without having to kill other people), war does far more harm than it could ever do good. War is murder on a massive scale, motivated by greed - for land, for people or for raw resources. It reaves communities apart and leaves nations - if there are any such things - in tatters. Pick up a history book. Read about what happened to Germany after World War I. This is far more typical of what happens to a country after a war than the sanitised storyline we're fed about the end of World War II - and even then, that was an utter mess. Look at what happened in Vietnam. And these are just a couple of relatively modern examples. It breeds resentment and scars the generations after it with the deaths of too many people, and the sufferings of far too many more. That is no guarantor of peace - but it is most certainly a guarantor of further fighting and instability. Now, that might be good news for armies, arms manufacturers, politicians and banks, but it's definitely not good news for anyone who wants an end to this cycle of violence. That would be most people. Most people don't want to lose their lives, their relatives, their homes, their jobs, their limbs or their minds to a greedy imperialist agenda. And I for one think they've got a point.

Now, as to the perceived drawbacks of a world without war...You don't need a huge world government to oppress people. You probably don't even need a government. You need to get people to work together, and that's not an impossible feat.

It's true that a peaceful world would not protect us from our enemies - but that's because a peaceful world is not a world that lies down and lets people trample all over it, it's a world that is united as one. I don't think that a peaceful world would have no concept of war or enemies - these ideas are too deeply branded in our collective consciousness.

Also, think about this: how many people from a different country are actually your enemy? How many people from a different country can you say have personally wronged you, and in how many cases would you say that justifies war? The answer is very few. The average [insert person from country we're supposed to be at war with or hate] may hate me; they may distrust me; but they have no personal quarrel with me and I would gladly help them out in times of trouble. The problem isn't down to ordinary people - it's down to the military-industrial complex, and even then if you put them in the front line I'm sure they'd be having second thoughts.

As for war advancing causes, the main cause it advances is greed. That's it. It may seem like I've been repeating this point a lot, but that's because it's quite starkly obvious, and it's what you're left with when you get down to basics. Moreover, wars cause instability. If you want to promote a high-flown cause such as democracy (actual democracy, mind, not the plutocratic farce a fair few so-called democracies have), making a country less stable and covering it in the blood of its people is not the way to go about it. This should be quite obvious.

Lastly, while war does often leave behind new technologies, this doesn't necessarily mean that we need war to make those new technologies - and indeed, some of them arguably divert funding from vital causes to projects used to kill. You can still pour resources into a project without war, and perhaps you can pour more in. Perhaps those resources can be used for learning how to cure and heal instead of how to murder.

Hello

So what am I doing with a new blog with an incredibly silly, long title?

Well, it's one dedicated exclusively to thoughts on peace - and I wouldn't normally have done it but I agreed to help out the wonderful EarthActivists team on Twitter and I wouldn't mind adding my own thoughts to the mix. Simply searching for "peace" on startpage doesn't give you that many good results, for example, and as someone who likes to read and try my hand at analysis I thought "Why not give thinking about peace a go"? It's a subject close to my heart; learning about the atrocities of World War I when I was 13 turned me into a pacifist and as someone who wants to reduce suffering in the world, I cannot stand by and allow wars to happen. I cannot pay lip-service to the idea of peace and yet support whichever war our lying politicians are angling for. I cannot cheer as people murder their fellow beings and scar entire communities for generations.

And so I try and do my bit. But how? I'm no politician; I can't stand up in the House of Commons and say "I don't want war". I can't stand for election either - no-one would vote for me!

I can still try and do something, though: I can protest, even if only as an individual. I can write letters to MPs, even if they go unanswered or ignored. And I can do something I do decently - which is write and write and write, in the hope that I can get the message of world peace out to other people.

So here I am. My goal, as someone passionate about world peace, is to get out a thought a day in the hope that someone out there's listening. I hope I'm not too egotistical; indeed, I do this not for myself - I don't have to convince myself that peace is a good thing - but for others, so that some day we will all work together for a world without war.