Peace (47 page)

Minimal Interpersonal Harm

Intentional interpersonal harm has been proportionally less prevalent in primate behavior than help, an equation equally applicable to human prehistory and history. Sympathy, mutual aid and social cohesion as evolutionary advantages; Confucius' passive rule not to do to others what you do not wish for yourself; Jesus' active rule to do to others as you would have done to you; and Kant's categorical rule to do only that which could bear being universally done are just three of many exemplary imperatives to prevent interpersonal harm so far proposed, which of course would be pointless to posit if it never happened. Interdependencies like those put forth by capitalists and cooperatives put forth by socialists each served the same purpose: making interpersonal harm unnecessary by meeting individual and social needs. Conflict may or may not be inevitable but using harm to resolve conflicts certainly is not, and doing so creates retaliatory cycles much more difficult to end than start. Interpersonal harm prevention as a discipline is still in its infancy, but as an unevenly studied practice is as old as humanity.

Minimal Structural Harm

No social, political or economic system yet implemented has been devoid of structural violence, again redubbed harm to broaden its senses, despite the fact that without those on whom it has been inflicted they could not have existed. The Indian caste system, citizenship in Ancient Greece and Rome, European feudalism and Chinese Fengjian, and industrial societies' classes show that many such systems have nonetheless survived for centuries. However, they did so only because social strife stemming from structural harm was effectively mitigated and, when not, it brought about their downfall either from internal collapse or restructuring, or external invasion or amalgamation. Counter-dominant behavior such as non-violent removals from power, ostracism, coups, popular revolts and factionary feuds are answers to questions about why structural harm is perpetuated,
but not solutions to the problem in themselves. Power vacuums like power struggles have historically closely coincided with periods of broken peace for two reasons. One, external powers have no authority with which to make and maintain peace, as with Bengal and the British East India Company in colonial times. The other, crises of legitimacy by which wannabe powers lack the authority to internally make and maintain peace, a driver of the Thermidor during the French Revolution. Intra-national peace theories and practices across the political spectrum and collective bargaining have sought to mitigate structural harm when it cannot be minimalized, upon which world peace relies until it can be eliminated.

Minimal State Harm

That states must be adequately defended from external threats and properly equipped to deal with internal threats for peace to be secured is not tantamount to affirming that states have always been and must always be war machines. Cicero's conceptions of just war as self-defense and unjust for those without provocation were held even by the imaginary residents of Utopia, who also practiced Spartan discipline for protection and order. The key difference between Romans and them is that Utopians subscribed to Grotius' notion of just warfare, or doing the least harm possible, a version of “civilized” warfare as with the Bushido in Shoen Japan. Deterrence, the oldest and crudest means of preserving peace between states, was in the end what kept the Cold War cold, culminating in traditions of states and their leagues decreasing frequencies of warfare by increasing its specter's scale. International law, balances of powers, neutrality and isolationism, arbitration and coordinated disarmament have been successful in varying degrees in moderating harm between states. Harm caused by states internally is predicated on and perpetuated by their unchecked sovereignty, against which transformative non-violence works but also has its limits. The organized peace movement's peace-despitestates approach shows that the only way to absolutely guarantee the end of state harm is to eliminate or pacify states altogether. For now, the surest path to world peace is to globally secure minimal use of minimal force.

Minimal Harm to Nature

Depletions of natural resources are far from new concerns, and have been related to peace since before humans were humans. Bio-genetic imperatives or peace instincts such as restorative behavior and tension relief in primates have human correlates such as reconciliation and détente, and have as much to do with how we relate to each other as how we relate to ecological systems to which we owe our existence. The Minoan Peace,
the longest lasting in European history, ended with an ecological catastrophe of some kind, and inaugurated the fractious First Intermediary Period in Ancient Egypt after a unitive peace of some 700 years. Malthus' proposition that only checked populations can secure peace within and between nations because if unchecked, nature cannot support them is pessimistic insofar as it is realistic. The doctrine of peace at any price, he suggests, applied to the environment shows how ludicrous it is, as terminal harm to the earth would mean the ruination of the only place we have to be at peace. This simple logic was lent an added intensity in the second half of the twentieth century when nuclear energy was harnessed and burning oil became ubiquitous, reunifying the causes of environmental and peace activists. The non-violent direct action and awareness campaigns of Greenpeace and politicizations of peace and sustainability in Green Parties are thus two recent manifestations of age-old concerns.

Socio-Economic Peace

The premise of socio-economic peace is that how we live and work with each other (or not) as individuals and groups is a determining factor of whether peace is actualizable, as well as forms it takes if so. No historical socio-economic system has
a priori
made peace impossible other than mercantilism because each conceives of peace in a different sense based on its means and ends. That many participants would agree that their socioeconomic systems preclude peace for them by misusing its means and misconstruing its ends is a fact worthy of fiction. In some cases the ways or conditions in which socio-economic systems are implemented, rather than any one fault in them, preclude the peace they strive for. Thus using the peace proposed by one system to evaluate others would produce radically different results than evaluations of quality and degree of peace based on criteria common to all and distinct to one. Doing the latter provides critically safer comparative grounds for making one more like another, substituting one for another, or combining the best features of all. The point is not to give immunity to a socio-economic system for the positions it places and hardships it confers to the disempowered, upon whom the peace of every system so far set in place has rested, but to put the disempowered in a position to non-violently empower themselves as individuals and groups.

Full and Free Employment

Mozi, Hesiod and Bentham concurred that useful labor is constituent of peace for individuals as for societies, and tied it to justice in
socio-economic systems. For eons before them, as in our stage of globalization, a lack of remunerative work made chances of survival slim, let alone chances of peace. Receiving just enough to survive was a rife, worldwide rationalization for keeping vast majorities of populations barely above the subsistence levels of prehistory, and had this not been done to some degree no socio-economic system could lay claims to any peace, however deficient. Colonialism exposed this rationalization by exploitative oppressions abroad that made irrefutable what the powerful rarely acknowledged at home. Las Casas' plan for a Land of Peace where native laborers work alongside foreign for their own benefit as for empire and god is a case in point. Another is Ricardo's analysis of labor, which led to the conclusion that economic competition among individuals and nations can diffuse or be a substitute for war while supplying for the welfare of all. Industrialism and the diversified interdependencies it sponsored provided means to overcome agriculturally based exploitation, though not without entailing exploitations of its own. From socialist perspectives, the answer to the question of who owns peace is everyone, or no one. Full and free employment here does not mean that everyone does what they want for a living, an un-Platonic ideal, but that everyone can make a contributive, self-satisfactory living with commensurate compensation without being forced.

Elimination of Discrimination

Discrimination has always been based in prejudiced minds and adversative to peace in situations created by their manifestations. Anti-discriminatory responses along three lines have been put forth, related to the absence of explicitly political levels and items in the Pyramid. One is to change minds first and situations second, an instance being Abdul Baha, who saw prejudice as a cause of war and preached its elimination as a path to peace. As politics is a reflection of our prejudices in his view, their removal must be carried out non-politically, in his cause religiously. A second is to change situations first and minds second, exemplified by social justice movements from the non-citizen Socii to the two Great Peace Rebellions, as for women's suffrage, civil and worker rights. Of course, changing situations involves changing at least the minds of policymakers, but not necessarily those of prejudiced masses who must thereafter cope, in which case politics is a means to an end not an end in itself. Lastly is to simultaneously change minds and situations, as in cultural homogenizations like Romanization, Sinicization, Arabization and Americanization, and heterogenizations against which they are directed, into which they invariably turn. Adorno's definition of peace as differentiation without domination with the differentiated participating in each other is egalitarian politics perfected in ways yet to be made fully actualizable.

Reduction of Wealth Disparities

Like structural harm to which they tend to be attached, wealth disparities are historically omnipresent obstacles to peace when they are prohibitive of individual or group actualization of items and levels in the Pyramid. Only when wealth disparities have been effectively assuaged from barring such actualizations can peace and prosperity, persistently linked in thought all through history, also be linked in practice. Partnership societies do not necessarily preclude wealth disparities and can exist despite them, but only insofar as they counteract the inclinations of dominator societies to abuse wealth disparities and the power asymmetries wealth disparities can cause. In Mesopotamia, balanced geo-social configurations were keys to stemming decline due to latifundization and over-privatization, accentuations of wealth disparities which like all others if unimpeded become threats to peace. The Third Estate in France as the vehicle of its Revolution, and the Third World as the vehicle of the Non-Aligned Movement, are two sides of the same coin on different scales and positions on the peace spectrum. Contemporary critiques of globalism based on the reduction of wealth disparities between and within nations are thus historically justified in pointing out its menaces. Yet, imagining the management of components of peace as product lines of global businesses, in which everyone has a stake and expects returns on their investments, comes close to how handling wealth disparities can work today. Competing to meet unmet needs, continually improving their products to increase their market share, such businesses of peace would monetarily enrich stakeholders beyond their wildest dreams while non-violently satisfying their highest pacific hopes.

Inner Peace

The premise of inner peace is, as the precursor to Transcendentalism Channing preached, there can be no peace without but through peace within. With few if any exceptions, corporeal, sanctuarial and socioeconomic peaces are as essential for individuals to be internally at peace as for societies, just as peace within societies is essential for peace between them. In the same vein, inner peace on individual, social and collective levels are prerequisites of world peace even if by proportions and degrees more than for the Pyramid's previous items. Privileging one prescription for inner peace over others must be an individual choice for it to be actualized, and the best way to ensure optimal choices are made is for many options to be available, regardless of where they come
from. Unconditional acceptance and encouragement exponentially increases the probability of success once a choice for inner peace is made or changed, and compulsory choices not only invalidate the meaning of choice but the peace towards which choices are geared.

Quietude and Plenitude

Tranquility, calmness and stillness have long been and still are characteristics strongly associated with inner peace, as well as with the natural, social and collective states conducive to it. For example, the inner peace of Daoist inaction in wu-wei lies in the free-flow of inward and outward energy of which an individual can be a medium or impediment. Even samurai had their tearoom safe havens where weapons reminiscent of their livelihood were not allowed. Many share the desire for a few fleeting moments of quietude in the midst of everyday life's hustle and bustle; those systematically denied usually find peace difficult to attain. Eremite Christian monks and Shugendo practitioners made these fleeting moments ways of life, but may not have been able to without a degree of plenitude, a sense of completeness corporeal or otherwise. Fastings and moments of silence of different kinds prescribed by most religions serve to remind devotees of quietude's and plenitude's criticality for inner peace. The Epicurean Garden, Buddhist Sangha and cenobite monasticism are examples of how quietude and plenitude can be socially achieved while providing for their lack in societies of which they are a part and apart from. Stoic masteries of passions and loyal dedication make individual quietude and plenitude possible even when they are totally absent socially and collectively, a model though not a method for everyone.

Recognition and Respect

Mesopotamian issuance of coins by states was a way to non-violently assert their fiscal or political independence, cylinder seals cemented relationships between individuals and groups, and their value depended on recognition and respect. Medieval states were and modern states are recognized by one another through treaties and gain respect through mutually beneficial trade and/or protective alliances. Mohammed had a reputation for justice and honesty which allowed him to improve plights of the first Muslims. Trade unions were recognized by their states before they became effective collective bargaining bodies, as which they gained respect they lacked as militant bodies before. Individually, recognition and respect successively derive from or against family, community, education, professions, states, the media, and religious, regional and world bodies, without which the most successful peacemakers in world history
could not have achieved what they did. The flipside: militants and terrorists gain recognition the same way but at others' expense, thereby losing the respect of their enemies while gaining that of their backers, creating a precarious asymmetry that makes (re)conciliation difficult, let alone peace. Whom to recognize and how, whom to respect and for what are central questions to world peace depending entirely on what point of view is taken and what is at stake.