On Peace

Peace

Peace through domination and submission destroys consensus, relationship, and environment.  Conflicts are now about group identity, not ideology.  These are hard to resolve by deals between government officials whose own populations have ceased to be homogeneous.  Values and beliefs have to be taken into account.  This is possible by realizing the universal forms of human suffering.  Spiritual respect is always at hand.  Peace is inside.  World peace implies freedom, justice, and the elimination of structural violence.  Peace is a process, embracing all opposites, and achievable through one outer and three inner stages.  Pacifying the mind - emptying it of thoughts - allows inspiration to create new insights.  Real knowledge is so inner that even the outer is inner.  Knower, knowledge, and known become one whole.

A.  Secular and Religious Models of Peace Are Both Limited

Throughout much of human history peace has been seen in many ways that reduced its pursuit and achievement to the purpose of domination.  Dominant cultures imposed their visions of peace to limit both processes and social outcomes so as to insure their continued domination.

A second commonly held view of peace equates it with passivity and the isolated tolerance of intolerable conditions.  The harmony of the individual is preserved by a direct identification with the supreme being and what is sacred.  This conceptualization derives its inspiration from some of the teachings in various religious traditions.

Both perspectives of peace, the secular and the ecclesiastical, have validity but carried to their extremes reveal excesses that undermine security.  We need to transcend our conceptual categories to move peace beyond the absolutism of politics and religion.  The traditional political and religious conceptual regimes have undermined the consensus of ideas, and underscored the isolation of people.  The same regimes have also neglected to establish a proper relationship with our physical environment.  The whole planet must be a context for human security.

B.  A Global Society

The first truly global political community has begun to emerge around us.  What we in the international relations community call the inter-penetration of states has in recent decades not only occurred in the Western world, it has probably evolved so far as to be irreversible short of global catastrophe.  We have moved from a humanity which lived its collective life as fragments of the whole, into a new context of humanity as a whole.

It is now no longer correct to speak of the West as sharply distinct from the East, or even to speak of the North as opposed to the South.  These distinctions are more appropriate as generalizations for popular mythology than as descriptions for actual international relations.  Manufactured goods presently exported by the global South (Third World) equal the value of the manufactured goods exported by the United States.  Other examples abound:  Japan is losing market share in steel and electronic home appliances to South Korea.  Truly global industries are emerging and, along with them, the foundations for a global economic system.

C.  Spirituality Based Conflict Resolution

The global system of the 90s is a pluralistic one with a crude but vital form of egalitarianism, as contrasted with the essentially European rooted aristocratic state system it is replacing.  Actors will approach each other differently than they used to.  Whereas heretofore they pursued their destinies, and resolved their conflicts, within a rigid and hierarchical social system, they will increasingly function within a pluralistic and egalitarian one.  Few conflicts will have ideological roots.  Most conflicts will involve communal identity - race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.  These conflicts are proving to be intractable to the best efforts of dominant methods of conflict resolution.

Traditional techniques of conflict resolution using mechanistic, problem-solving methods, including the often manipulative signaling of positions, are suitable for dealing with conflicts about tangible material interests, for which it is usually possible to forge some sort of compromise.  In contrast, nonmaterial identity-based conflicts are often not well understood by diplomats accustomed to operating in a Western, state-centered, culturally homogeneous system.  In the new international environment, viable conflict resolution requires an understanding of the beliefs, values, and behavior of the conflicting parties.

Plato said that while we might not be able to agree with each other, if we have opened an honest conversation, we will be able to empathize with the human predicament each of us finds ourself in, because human life is so similar in its deeper significance and issues, whatever our society and culture.

There is increasing concern about fundamentalism in the Islamic world.  We need to see also that the engineering, mechanistic, isolated approach to problem-solving is part of a type of fundamentalism of the dominant Western culture.  Fundamentalism is a kind of pathology of culture that arises by taking part of the basic tenets of a tradition and, under the pressure of either economic or social insecurity, desires to secure oneself by sealing off others or seeking revenge on them.  In all conflict situations, people under stress react by reducing their own beliefs to a small workable sub-set in order to fight and protect.  But this closes off the ability to hear and to communicate.  A return to the larger frame of the culture and its humane values, always present if sought for, can open up the space for understanding, cooperation, or, at the very least, deeper respect.  This is the essence of spirituality.

D.  Inwardness Is a Peace Process

Inner knowledge is a peace-making and healing process.  Peace refers to the inner freedom and spiritual elevation of the individual.  The place of peace lies within our spiritual domain.  It is there to be discovered and developed.  World politics is a struggle for world peace in   the broadest peace, that peace is more than the absence of war, but also is the presence of justice and freedom.

Peace is not seen as an abstract goal to be pursued.  Peace is a direct process of doing and being.  Peace is a process.  Peace includes both the absence of direct physical violence and war, and the elimination of structural violence.  The latter refers to the consequences of social, political, cultural, economic, and civil structures - institutions and processes that lower the material and spiritual quality of human life and degrade the environment.  Success in this struggle for world peace is dependent upon transcending in the critical areas the provincialism of the nation-states and making more real a world community.

Peace is a state of consciousness that implies and incorporates all experiences.  This state of consciousness does not oppose any state of consciousness but rather is, in itself, a totality, a whole.  And in being a whole, it includes what we usually conceive of as peace and war.