ESSAYS FOR PEACE

YOU MAY SAY I AM A DREAMER

By Lacy Ketzner
St. James School

1st Place Winner

Sadat Essay for Peace Competition
November 2002

Man is man’s only natural enemy.   His intellect is supreme, his potential boundless, his great destiny thwarted only by the cosmic perversity of being his own worst enemy-literally.  War.  Homicide.  Genocide.  Organized, government-sponsored, mass-destruction.  Ever since Cain clubbed Abel (or, if you prefer Arthur C.  Clarke’s own Genesis, since that missing link fist whacked his fellow monkey over the head with the femur bone of a saber-tooth tiger) human, somewhere, have been engaged in organized conflict.  The actual motivations for this perpetual intra-species killing are Darwinian, Freudian, economic, ecclesiastic, whatever.  They reflect a defect and irrationality within the human psyche.  Man will kill for wealth.  He will fight for “justice”.  The greatest irony: he will slaughter for peace.  He has elected destruction into a form of high-worship to impress and please a god.  Counter-Reformation.  Crusades, Jihad.  Since the Bronze Age, the absolute paradox of religious warfare has impeded man from the generally holy pursuits of peace, understanding, life.  Each generation honors its warriors and shocks its pacifists until the wisdom of old age reveals that they got it backward.  Then they die, wise too late.  And the cycle begins anew. 

Man wallows in violent chaos.  His history is a bath of blood.  The history of ancient and allegedly civilized Greece is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism –war for war’s sake, a citizenry of warriors.  The Athenians, according to Thucydides, proudly asserted, “The powerful exact what they can and the weak grant what they must .  .  .  and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do.  So much for the gods; we have told you why we expect to stand as high in their food opinion as you.” Their wars were, like ours, irrational, inexplicable, and painful to describe.  Contemporary man inherits all the pugnacity and blood lust of his ancestors.  The horrors of past wars are lost on modern man--the battles are studied as fascinating events, the death tolls are like old football scores.  War-taxes are the highest and most willingly paid, war shortages are the most quickly accepted.  Man’s highly paradoxical opinion of war allows him to both idealize his warring ancestors as heroes and demonize their enemies as wrongdoers.  He revels in past slaughters-Independence day, the Civil War, D-day-and believes that the celebrated carnage was heroic and worthy--anything but stupid.  If provoked, if the enemy’s insult is so egregious then war is permissible, mandatory, even laudatory. 

However, if war is the unavoidable conflict waged against perceived injustice, then war is the means to peace.  Indeed, war is a part of “peace”, not the absence of peace.  War and peace become the same thing.  Our race has a great gift for sophism.  During the Civil War, America and Russia armed “for peace”.  Our destruction was mutually assumed.  Millions died in this false peace.  Man uses war to uphold his nation’s high values.  Inevitably, one of those high values is a great desire for peace.  The evidence of history, though, would suggest that the “great societies” of the past were those with great abilities at making war--not peace.  He longs not for the gradual “evolution” of mankind, but craves the spectacular revolution of war.  “Dogs, would you love forever,” Frederick the Great shouted at his soldiers.  Pax Romana, Pax Britania, Pax Americana all were based on the ruthless application of the overwhelming military authority. 

Peace, though, does not exist within human nature, though in the same manner that the love of war also exists.  Patriotism and ambition are only manifestations of a more general competitive inclination; and, through militaristic expression is one way of sating these passions, it need not be the only way.  Extravagant ambitions can be tempered and replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause to so temper.  The concepts of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which military training provokes, can be directed for the achievement of peace, rather than destruction.  The vigorous pacifism of Gandhi’s satyagraha and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil disobedience prevailed.  There were no calls to arms, no cause as any government-backed, propaganda-fed war.  And they succeeded.  Whole societies, whether they are nation-states or races or tribes, that are organized primarily to wage war will ultimately destroy themselves, for the nature of destruction vies unavoidably with the nature of production, and, thus, renders such  society absurd.  A peace-economy, therefore, must be created in which societies pacifically organize, yet preserve a martial-discipline in their goals and pursuits.  Now that we are capable of destroying our entire planet, we must all, for the first time in history, bring military discipline and full mobilization to the maintenance of peace. 

 We must achieve real self-knowledge before we can realize peace.  We cannot continue to live blind to the great inequalities of human existence.  We cannot continue to ignore the hardships of some and exploit the weakness of others.  We must think globally.  We must rage against Nature--against the basic injustices rendered against others because of birth, race, or religion.  Peace is found in education, in understanding.  However, it cannot be achieved and maintained without military-like motivation.  It is preposterous, though, if the principle motivations inspiring ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into human endeavor are our fear of being killed by Nazi invaders or Iraqi terrorists.  As effective as fear may be, fear is not the only stimulus that can arouse the higher ranges of our spiritual energy.  Courage, not fear, should be our overarching source of funding universal peace.  We must seek the moral equivalent of war, found in the active pursuance of global peace, and embrace our own.

The United Nations stands as a flawed expression of our hope for real and lasting peace.  We are not perfect and the UN is not perfect.  But we must start some place.  If we shirk our duty as rational individuals on this planet, we not only impede peace, but also reduce ourselves to an unthinking, irresponsible beast.  There is not formula for peace, no equation for world love.  Peace is a living, breathing organism that must be fostered by the UN, or whatever better nurse we can devise for the task.  We can do it.  We merely need to collectively organize a Manhattan project for peace, an Operation Overload for respect, a Desert Storm of assured survival.

At the risk of committing blasphemy, I believe that war may be the single best evidence of the existence of God.  No rational, natural selection could explain a species as celestial as being able to effect its own destruction and so savage as to actually do so.  Some greater hand must have put the war-urge in our DNA, along with the intellect to overcome that urge.  We are a great species and we are capable of finding peace.  We all have that within is.  We merely have yet to discover it.  As Kofi Annan observed, “If something has not been done before, it does not mean it can’t be done; it only means you could be the first to do it.”