Recently a Guest Editorial by Edward Cline was posted at the IBA courtesy of The Dougout. In it he commented how the path to peace will never be found by the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. He didn’t pull any punches.
Even more than the roster of activists for statism and collectivism discussed in my commentary on the Medal of Freedom (“Medals for Mendacity,” October 7), the roll call of activists for “peace” is a grab bag of the foolish, the subversive, the charlatan, and the insidious. And, like most of the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, most of the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize reveal an ignorance of the requirements for peace among nations, or an overt hostility to those requirements.
Why is that? It’s got a lot to do with the concept of ecology. More of that in a second but back to Cline.
But the exigencies of peace have been ignored by both aggressors and pacifists. Aggressors believe that “peace” can be achieved by force; pacifists believe that it can be achieved by compromise. The record of peace movements has been largely one of repeated failure. In fact, most peace movements and diplomatic strategies to prevent war have almost consistently caused or led to war. Efforts by diplomats and pacifists, who eschew violence, to persuade those who live by and for force to refrain from coercion, only encouraged the use of force by those unconcerned with peace.
And the $64 question is…..
With no thought devoted to the necessary preconditions of peace.
For the answer to the $64 question we turn to the study of ecology. In one sense, ecology is the study of the relationship between living systems. To survive and prosper, living systems must adapt to the environment they find themselves in. Just being the biggest, strongest, loudest or baddist life form on the block doesn’t guarantee its survival. It must find its niche, adapt to it and then exploit it.
This idea of adaptation also applies to human ideas. In effect, if we study history, the grand political concepts of humanity survived only when the socio-economic environment made it possible to do so.
Slavery is a good example.
Many years ago during the heyday of the politically correct, a history student asked “Where did slavery come from?” The real question should have been, ‘Where did freedom come from?’ The student had no sense of what came before and how history was changed. The first question presupposes that freedom always existed and slavery was imposed onto happy free people throughout history. If the college student knew anything about history, he would have known that slavery was the basic predicament of man in history - not the other way around. Individual freedom is a recent development. In fact, it was Western Civilization that finally put an end to slavery around the world.
Why?
Because the socio-economic environment changed to allow the adaptation of the political idea of freedom to take hold. Personal freedoms took hold with the American Revolution. Slavery went by the wayside when it became uneconomical to use slaves. It wasn’t the political activist who brought about the end of slavery. It was the efficiency of machinery brought about by the Industrial Age that made slavery an uncompetitive solution. Once slavery was replaced by more efficient technology, laws were able to be accepted to outlaw it.
Individual freedom for all as a political concept could not exist before the economic need for slavery was diminished. As for peace, it can not exist in the current global cultural environment because peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice. There is no justice in half the world today. The global socio-economic environment can not support it so justice can not currently adapt to it.
Wishing it so, singing about it, marching for it, or yelling “give peace a chance” at the top of your lungs will not usher it in. Peace will be a long time coming as long as ideologies like Islamism holds a place in people's hearts and minds. Only when there’s justice for each and every individual human being will there be peace on earth.
1 comment:
Heroic - I don't think it's decribed in the original article. The 'peace is justice' concept is something I picked up about a year ago from somewhere.
But your question hits the mark What is justice? Maybe a Human Bill of Rights? And who will enforce it globally. Ceratinly not the UN or the World Court. At least, not the way they operate now with a political agenada - i.e anti-US.
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