We all know we're supposed to fight for peace. But do we know why?
Peace, like freedom, is a word without meaning. The last century and change has given us “peace in our time,” “peace with honor,” the “peace race,” and the Nobel Peace Prize, each of which both proposes an ideological notion of peace and references an historical reality. Not only do the historical realities differ from the principles, the historical realities and the principles do not even resemble their counterparts in the other definitions. Given that, let the reader assume that words are given meaning by their context and usage, rather than by any preexisting definition. The following will present three culturally pervasive definitions of peace, and their value to the good and harmonious operation of the world at large.
Let there be no confusion here. I am largely an ideological free agent, intellectually predetermined primarily by a fondness for freedom of action and thought and a dislike for human suffering. I consider myself liberal, skeptical and postmodern because I believe that those identifications fall most effectively in line with the above principles, and it is by those principles, rather than the respective canons of the camps with which I identify, that I will judge the definitions below.
Political peace, defined as the absence of unusual or pervasive violence, is probably the definition of the word most in use in the modern world. However, it is also extremely difficult to define. In this context, peace does not refer to a lack of any form of violence, or even any form of ethically reprehensible violence; murder, rape and various lesser forms of assault are no less common in nations during “peacetime” than they are in “wartime”. Rather, political peace is defined as the absence of violence sanctioned by a party in authority, such as war or genocide. So according to what standards is political peace good?
Most notably, political peace limits suffering. Violence countenanced by the state is the most efficient mechanism yet devised for the production of human misery. I put emphasis on its artificial nature both because the suffering of plagues, which are natural in origin, put even the most horrifying wars to shame, and because war is a human invention and therefore demands human solutions. To that extent, political peace is good.
Political peace is, however, very difficult to achieve. In various forms, state violence can be perceived to serve a number of goals, some of which can appear to be not only profitable but noble. Its inherent difficulty tends to blind its adherents to a crucial fact: peace, at least this kind of peace, is not the answer. At least, it is not the across-the-board panacea that much of the left touts it as. Nations at peace still have rape, they still have murder, and they most certainly still have corruption and venality. Political peace is not the ideal for a good and just society, it is, excepting extreme circumstances, the prerequisite. Political peace is a blank canvas with the paints ready; they still need to be applied.
To sustain the metaphor for a moment, a traditional subject of the political artist is social peace, defined as harmony, unity and comfort. Nations have traditionally made reference to this ideal in their most pervasive rhetoric: Renaissance Florence was “The Most Serene Republic,” the ideal future for the modern People's Republic of China is the “Harmonious Society,” and the motto of the state in which I am writing these words is “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” However, the goal of social peace is too often addressed by a drive for cultural and ideological unity, which frequently employs the tools of tyranny: propaganda, coercion and violence. Harmony is too often achieved by the repression of dissenting views. Likewise, the desire for comfort, neutral and inherent to the human condition in itself, raises troubling questions in the context of social policy.
There have been and are innumerable societies in which the necessity of providing the luxuries of the rich has actually endangered the lives of the poor. Even in areas in which quality of life has improved sufficiently to ignore those dangers, the comfort of the rich massively exceeds the comfort of the poor. In fact, these societies perpetuate the classism of comfort, by both lionizing the amenities of the wealthy through the mainstream media and countenancing the pursuit of such luxuries through unrestricted corporate capitalism. The definition of “comfort” is simply too nebulous, and its pursuit too stratifying, for it to be a legitimate basis for ideology. Given all this, the goal of social peace, that is, of a society that is easy to live and participate in, is both pragmatically unachievable and ethically reprehensible.
