Thinking Through Peace and Power

September 12, 2007

Sometimes at the tail end of a cold I get a cough that hangs around for a few days. The way to combat this persistent cough, I have found, is not to cough as hard as possible in an effort to clear it out of my system.. that only makes the cough grow worse. The thing to do is to try to suppress the annoying cough itch for as long as possible.. and let my throat build up resistance. Getting rid of the cough means vigilance in avoiding a big flare up.

Fighting for peace is similar. The goal is not to outviolence the violent.. believing that if we could get just one decisive flare up we could establish the peace. A better goal is to smother violence wherever it threatens to break out.. as soon as possible. Violence dies down not after a final conflagration, but as little by little a resistance to violence develops.

This philosophy of constantly settling violence, and refusing to meet violence with violence, is directly contrary to the dominant political language of our time.. which rests confident in its ability to manage violence. Where has this dominant philosophy gotten us? Violence begets violence.. almost inevitably. We congratulate ourselves for giving the Soviets a black eye in Afghanistan.. only to find out that we had been training jihadists to take their battle against us. Israel invades Lebanon in the 80s and radicalizes the Shi'ite.. and thus create the problem of Hezbollah. We mess around with violence.. using it to our advantage.. only to get a serious dose of blowback.

I would not call myself a pacifist.. since every level human society needs authority. At the point when early humans abandoned the self-governing tribe they needed people who could keep order through the threat of violence. The result is an ever expanding circle of security.. from personal security to police forces to national military forces. I am fine with that basic set up.. or at least see no way out of it. But this system should be tempered by a peaceful philosophy.. one that recognizes that the use of force tends to rebound and should therefore be used only in the most limited of cases.

Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of 9/11.. I made no comments. What I wrote last year holds up. It is one of the saddest things I can imagine: that an act of extreme violence against us could be transformed into a call for war.. and not just a "war" but the GWOT which would be run on a rolling and interminable basis. Perhaps with time.. and dedication.. the day can become something more: a time to reflect not on good and evil, but on the false human confidence in the use of violence to solve problems. That time seems a long way off.. but it will be one of the revolving themes of this blog from here on out.