My definition for peace – just for today – the absence of force.
Yesterday I was witness to a conversation about how we create peace. The immediate contexts are obvious, Ukraine and Gaza, with the wider trend in global responses – European military budget hikes. At the same time, we have never known a world without war. Peace, at that level, is relative and often temporary.
But peace is not only the absence of war, not only in the sense that countries never stop training people in their armies to kill, and armaments factories don’t stop making weapons. All around us, people are always in conflict, from family disputes to political arguments, from petty resentments between neighbours to deep feelings of hostility like racism.
This is perhaps one of our deepest paradoxes. Can we safely say that most people want peace? That was an assumption in the conversation. If so, it seems that we are not very good at it and must look at why that’s the case.
Let’s go a little deeper. There was a spiritual context for the conversation, which is that the Divine is present in all humans and that we should see and cherish the light in every individual, including Hamas leaders and Netenyahu’s hawks and Iranian Ayatollahs determined to eliminate Israel. I accept that underlying truth, but question how much it helps.
The Divine is present in everything. I don’t want to offend any Buddhists, but if I see a mosquito land on my arm, it’s dead. The Divine is equally present in the cat and in the mouse it toys with. Humans too are biological creatures with mammalian genes, fight-flight hind-brain responses embedded in our brains overlaid with recent evolutionary cognitive features and even more recent social programs. You are all these things.
The Divine, the connective field of all that is, the noetic consciousness, call it what you will, is also flowing through and around you in many different ways. You are affected by your family constellation, the hidden energetic influences. You live in a cultural context propagated through media and education. You have personality and emotional leanings which are attributes of your personal, local field. You have a life history that informs your patterns of thought and behaviour. You have desires and fears, hopes and dreams, impulses to protect yourself and those you love alongside care for all people and all life. We are not simple; we are all these things.
So where is peace in all of this? Is it in you or in me? Is it something external that we create, independent of who and what we are? Do we even know what peace is?
I think that when we are talking about peace and seeking to promote peace, we are usually talking about the absence of war. That causes a problem, because while that might be a good start, and we can at least begin a conversation when we are not killing each other, human history shows that halting war is not a solution because the underlying causes persist. We partition countries, install peacekeeping forces, sign treaties that literally paper over the cracks. The origins of the conflict are still there.
In my country, the UK, 80 years after the end of WW2 the cultural references to nazi Germans, French surrender-monkeys, Italian cowardice continue to echo, even if only spoken in jest. Across South-East Asia, the history of Japanese imperialism and subjugation is not forgotten by those who were invaded. Nor have we healed the history of slavery. Maybe we have just about dealt with the Romans, the Vikings and the Norman conquest. Maybe in forty years from now we will celebrate its 1000-year anniversary since by now, most of us Caucasian Brits are a little bit Norman.
It seems right to us that people should celebrate and treasure their origins. Efforts have been made to preserve the Welsh language because we believe that cultural diversity enriches us all. Most of us are not against Islamic culture. The 2012 Olympic ceremonies celebrated the richness of all that is in the UK. At the same time, Glasgow’s Celtic and Rangers are not merely soccer teams, they are religious symbols, still holding the history of Christian sectarianism across communities. And in stark daily reality, our political life has been greatly distorted by tensions around immigration.
We have absence of war – just about. Terrorism kills people. Cyber-warfare hasn’t done so yet, at least not in an obvious way, but weapons have been developed designed to take out the power systems and communications that modern societies depend on. The chaos that could produce would kill people too. This is today’s reality.
The conversation I witnessed had as its basis the belief that if we didn’t make guns and bombs, and if we all refused to join armies, then peace would be achieved. For sure, that would be the absence of war, and you can’t argue against that. Unfortunately saying that doesn’t get us there. It leaves us with the tension. It is not only that a warmonger like Putin is not about to stop being who he is. It is not even that he is kept where he is by a nation which either shares his beliefs, or fears being killed for saying otherwise.
Is that me too? Is it you? Are you ready to be killed for what you believe? Am I willing to die for world peace? In theory I might be. If I knew for sure that my death would deliver world peace, I would seriously consider volunteering for that; it would be a small price to pay. But that isn’t how it works, is it? Recognising that has its consequences. The only way to stop a Putin is to confront him by force. The only way to constrain him is if he knows that he can’t win. So the price of peace tomorrow is being armed and ready for war today. Does that principle mean that we can never have peace tomorrow?
If we wish to solve that problem we will need to go deeper. In one sense the arch-pacifists are not wrong; if everyone would share their choice then peace could go viral. That doesn’t happen because conflict is within your psyche and mine. I have not given up all resentments against people who have abused their power over me. I haven’t abandoned all thoughts that if I had a gun, and Putin in front of me, it would be OK to pull the trigger. You may still be angry with a family member or barely containing the impulse to punch your bullying boss in the face. If you are a member of an identifiable group, targeted by certain others solely on account of that identity, would you defend yourself? And if not for yourself, maybe you would do it for your child, or to protect someone else whom you love.
I am saying that the roots of these conflicts, large or small, are in each one of us, conscious and unconscious, personal and ancestral, individual and cultural. From those roots we easily grow the belief that others should do or think what we believe is right. In so many cases that slides into the small extra step of asking that they be made to, so at the smallest level we believe in force. I felt, witnessing the conversation, that disagreement would not be accepted. My presence in the group was conditional on that. Perhaps no-one would exclude me in practice, but energetically I was excludable. On the surface, peace. Beneath the surface, the subtlest of forces.
That is the microcosm which is reflected in the macrocosm. Tensions and conflicts are inherent to life itself, part of the dynamics of existence and its choices, my individual needs against the needs of the many, or even the daily negotiation in a relationship of what I want when you want something else. Learning to manage that is a part of our maturation. What do I do when you are not hearing my needs? How quickly can I let go and move on? How do we avoid the build-up of history.
For me, these are the realities of existence. Pacifism is an ideal and an aspiration, but desiring peace doesn’t make it manifest. The presence of the Divine is in the love, and at the same time in the dynamics of the living tensions. Not standing up to bullies is not a viable choice. Peace without justice, peace without safety, peace without domination is no peace at all. In personal interaction I can turn the other cheek, but I cannot ask it of Ukraine, nor can I ask it of my Lithuanian friend that she would not want her nation to prepare its defences, because the Divine is in her and in them too. I am a pacifist, but not an absolutist. So, the search for peace cannot be forced and it goes on until it is in us all.
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The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness
Your Access to Possibility: 7 Amazingly Simple Success Keys to Creating Your Life Consciously
7-Stage Parenting: How to Meet your Child's Changing Needs
Reinventing Capitalism: How We Broke Money and How We Fix it, From Inside and Out