Peace (46 page)

One movement adeptly combining elements of all three of these organizational types, as most do to varying degrees, is the global Department of Peace Initiative. Its aim is to establish such bodies, wholly dedicated to peace programs, within national government frameworks so that tax funds can directly supplement the donations and endowments required to support all these organizations and synchronize their efforts for maximum effect, just as is done for national and international military organizations and in the hopes of replacing them. The Solomon Islands was the first to create a Department of Peace, Nepal the most recent. What these organizations taken together suggest is an ever-widening acknowledgment that “violence among humans has never solved any problem without creating new ones; enduring solutions arise from continuous voluntary co-operation.”
³³
The emergence of peace professionals such as researchers, advocates and activists, paid to advance peace in different ways even aside from governmental mandates, does not take away but adds to the spirit of voluntarism vital to peace as a condition of survival since the origins of humanity. What remains to be seen is whether they will meet the fragmented fate of the nineteenth-century organized peace movement or collectively rise to meet the challenges of a new millennium and make it one in which the final chapter of this world history of peace can serve as an introduction to a history of world peace.

Conclusion

The Pyramid of Peace: Past, Present and Future

Among the purposes of this book has been to challenge the notions that peace is solely the absence of war and that writing history is an exclusive privilege of the mightiest militarily. Without the victories of peacemakers and the resourcefulness of the peaceful, I have tried to show, not only would there be no history to write, but there might not even be a world in which to write it. Learning from them, as the most successful have from those before, is perhaps the safest way to ensure that the only constraints to peace and peacemaking are those beyond our control. As mentioned in the introduction, the analytical narratives presented in the preceding chapters are meant less as guidelines than as signposts; the opposite applies to this conclusion. Its purpose is in no way to draw the world history of peace recounted and still unfolding through us to a close, but to reopen certain of its lessons in redoubled directly applicable ways.

To recap and attempt to make a small contribution to pasts, presents and futures of peace, I present this Pyramid adapted from Abraham Maslow's pyramid of human needs and motives, summarizing and pragmatizing some salient peace principles and practices already covered in more depth.
¹
Defining the Pyramid's terms theoretically and by way of key historical examples will, I hope, not limit but rather inform the meanings and applications they may take on in different contexts. The structure, in which the levels below are supportive prerequisites for those above, is likewise not intended to limit their scopes or functions but to expose relationships and interdependencies that may be difficult to see outside of it. That the Pyramid is based on peace strategies with track records is indicative only insofar as they can transcend their original circumstances through constant re-qualifications within cultural contingencies and
diversities as evolving conditions and participants require. The point is less to offer a definitive plan for world peace, of which there is no shortage, than to propose for ongoing debate and action an alternative framework in which it becomes additionally actualizable and sustainable.
²

Pyramid of Peace Principles

Items linked to each level, like the levels themselves, are applicable in individual, social and collective ways demonstrated by the selected examples given. They are purposefully limited in number because a less suggestive, fuller exposition would require a separate book, which new generations could rewrite with levels, items and examples relevant to their times. Cumulatively, differences and similarities in version chains would thus provide prosperity with more and more complete historical guides to world peace, analyzable and implementable as experimental scientific models. World peace requirements discovered in or expressed through the Pyramid are intended to be pertinently holistic for humanity for now not forever, that is only as suitable to unaccounted-for idiosyncrasies. If not, such requirements can be catered to fit the needs of situations at hand, in which case the Pyramid and the lessons of the world history of peace it represents would stand amended. Conversely, they can be wantonly rejected outright and the Pyramid falls if it is not restructured by item, by level or from the ground up as necessary.

Climbing the Pyramid, so to speak, means actualizing each item of each level from the bottom up on a continual, progressive basis. Reaching any level except the top at any one place and time does not necessarily depend on it being reached everywhere by everyone, but surely would not hurt. Likewise, reaching any level once does not mean it will always be held, as the Pyramid embodies a static dynamism by which its structure can stay intact even if its levels and items are periodically unactualized, though each must be actualized before or in tandem with the next. Extents to which items and levels are actualizable individually, socially and/or collectively depend in large part on the specificity of the meanings attributed to them, which must perforce be substantiatedly general for our purposes here. The set of imperatives previously discussed are part of the Pyramid as binds that tie together its items and levels. On these premises and those set out below, the Pyramid is both a description of world peace and a way to achieve it.

Corporeal Peace

The premise of corporeal peace is that without the wellbeing of our bodies and minds world peace is an irrelevancy. As obvious as this premise may be when pointed out, a prevalent pitfall of peacemakers historically and contemporarily has been failing to take it into account. If true, then nothing is more relevant to world peace than components of corporeal peace such as nutrition, shelter and sanitation, healthcare and education. Individual experiences concretize this level as the Pyramid's base in ways history cannot, and make self-evident that corporeal peace is a precondition of world peace. Nevertheless, history does provide examples of how instinctual and bio-genetic imperatives were made into systematic measures consciously taken to secure or enhance corporeal peace as the basis of all other peaces.

Nutrition

Starvation precludes the peace of an individual just as, on wide enough scales, it does for society. In addition to the suffering empty stomachs cause to individuals and societies, they are like ticking time bombs inadvertently targeted at collective peace. Efforts to secure enough food have been starting points of peace since primordial times, when gathering and hunting were the norms. Advents of agriculture and hydraulic revolutions were expansions of this base, which the Ancient Chinese and Japanese rightly believed to be the source of any and all kinds of peace. Similarly
in Ancient Greece, first-generation Horae who represented how peace was made and maintained were agricultural goddesses the worship of whom was intended to ensure plentiful harvests. Industrialism changed the way food is produced and distributed, but not its being the foundation of world peace. What individual nutrition needs are and how they are met depends on cultural traditions as much as economic systems, and world peace depends on nutrition needs being met in consideration of cultural traditions and economic systems.

Shelter and Sanitation

Shelter was as necessary for the corporeal peace of prehistoric nomads as it is for us now, though only with transitions to sedentary life in the home base structure of hunter-gatherers can the idea of home originate. The first meanings of Shalom for the Jewish tribes of the Torah related to protection from hostile natural elements, the basic sense in which shelter is taken here. Metaphorically, their perennial search for the Promised Land as a prerequisite of peace can be seen as an indication of the significances of such a permanent dwelling for aspiring or currently sedentary peoples. The violence used in stealing peoples' homes as a way to the Promised Land may have been justified by Yahweh, but within our context serves only to show how for people so lacking, no place is more precious to peace than home. In Ancient India, pre-Vedic societies and, millennia later, Ashoka sought to secure sanitation for all as a step towards peace because diseases terminally infecting people otherwise at peace can thereby be curtailed. Reconstructions that have occurred after destructive wars attest to the importance of shelter and sanitation as a second step after nutrition in rebuilding peace; world peace cannot be actualized before everyone everywhere who so wants to has taken these two steps.

Healthcare

The Hippocratic Oath, a non-violent code by which doctors' duties are combined with doing no harm and protecting their patients from injustice, and Henri Dunant's efforts to assist the wounded in war regardless of the nationality, may be the only specifiable healthcare items in this book. But implications of the Oath and the Red Cross which Dunant founded, that healthcare is a birthright linked to justice and necessary to corporeal peace because of its upholding role, are logical extensions of nutrition, shelter and sanitation. Once available only to the high-born, the well-off and the poor as charity, universal healthcare was made actualizable with industrialism coupled with the social planning developed to stem civil strife along antithetical ideological lines during the Great
Depression, a sign that universal healthcare can be part of any political position. Efforts towards universal healthcare are made more difficult by meanings it has in different parts of the world. While debates in some places are about providing health services more equally or cost-effectively, in others they are about how to provide it to begin with. Universal healthcare would not be necessary for world peace if everyone was always healthy; as this is an unfortunate improbability universal healthcare is required for world peace.

Education

Education is a form of healthcare for the mind. In Clement of Alexandria's view, peace is the point of education and war a result of its absence, but education itself can create absences of peace depending on what is taught. Enculturation processes, such as those of simple societies like the Tasaday, can both extend past peace practices into the present and prepare youths to deal with future problems in peaceful ways. Universities have been places where peacemakers have converged and emerged when they have not been instruments of bellicose status quos. Peaceful catalytic examples can be drawn from US universities in the 1960s and 1970s and European in the eighteenth century; counter-examples would be early medieval universities in servitude of momentary militant powers. Today's University for Peace in Costa Rica may not be historically related to the School of Prosperous Peacein Tokugawa Japan, but they share an impulse that, if more widespread, would put the power and influence of intellectuals at the disposal of peacemakers and/or make peacemakers out of intellectuals themselves, as was the case with atomic scientists in the mid twentieth century and the Pugwash Conference to this day. More than for other items of corporeal peace, what constitutes education for peace thus depends as much on how it is done as on if it is done.

Sanctuarial Peace

The premise of sanctuarial peace is that without tangible assurances and reason to believe that intentional harm is unlikely to be done to us as individuals or groups, world peace is no less a mirage than the promise of bodily and mental wellbeing. Indeed, breaches of sanctuarial peace often originate in violations of corporeal peace at the level below and result from contraventions of socio-economic peace at the level above. The “minimal” before each item in this level serves to indicate that regardless of longstanding cultural and categorical imperatives aimed at curbing and
eliminating intentional harm, it has, does and is likely to continue to occur despite best efforts. Though beyond our scope to explain why this is, what can and has been done about it is not. The use of “harm” instead of “violence” is intended to denote that damage can be done in more ways than physically. Minimalization as a goal for social and collective mechanisms for averting harm, ending it quickly and equitably is thus more probable and plausible than permanent eradication, as history makes painfully clear. Sanctuarial peace is not absolute in the same way as corporeal peace and perhaps cannot be, even if to actualize it we must believe it is.