Alternative Editorial: We Simply Can't Imagine
This week the UK opened up a third battle front. While some might say we are not technically at war with anyone, we are directly involved in a military combat in Ukraine, Gaza and now Yemen. “Directly” means explicitly taking sides and supplying (and it some cases deploying) weapons.
Our government, without the agreement of our Parliament, is enabling the killing of thousands of people in our name. And because we are very visible in this positioning - the war of words being much louder than the somewhat veiled actions - we are also in the direct line of retribution. At any time we could be on the receiving end of terrorism. Worse, the conflicts we are heightening irresponsibly, could easily tip us into declarations of war.
While some might say that is fear speaking, we would say no: that is simply the predictable effect of a cause we are constantly making – which is that we are prepared for war at all times. Not only are we prepared, but we have also constructed an economy that advantages war through the sale of mind-bogglingly destructiveand expensive weapons. In addition we have a news media that constantly leads us to war - rather than peace - as part of their business model.
War is good for the economy: we profit from suffering and death. Is it any wonder that Lord Cameron barely winces when he nods his head to escalation? It's painful, but there are rewards. One of which would be electoral advantage. Both PMs Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair used the energy of going to war - the suggestion that Britain will always defend the vulnerable - as a call upon the moral decency of the electorate. In each case the Opposition is challenged to follow the government's lead—or if not, appear as cowardly or (in the case of Jeremy Corbyn) immoral.
What role can the wider public play? Following decades of engaging actively with peace movements, embarking on peace studies and initiating peace projects we know, categorically, that a world without war is possible. We'll stand by that on the basis of preferring conflict transformation to conflict resolution. And understanding how cultural and structural violence prompts the acceptance of violence at national level. For more on this, spend some time with peace academic Johan Galtung's review of Mahatma Gandhi's life.
However, our observation is that there is still, today—in NATO member countries at the very least —only a low-level awareness of the UK's cultural and structural bias towards war. And therefore there is very little engagement in the possibility of evolving beyond it.
Instead, the common response to war would be to debate whose side to take. Very few people consider the notion that war itself is the wrong response to conflict. Conflict is healthy and a necessary energy for establishing human autonomy within human diversity. Violence occurs when the protagonists cannot manage their own response to the behaviour of the other: force appears necessary. Both the behaviour of one and the lack of options of the other seem to be more naturally occurring than the idea that both could be prevented by a redesign of our society.
Within our current culture, peace is presented as the absence of war: peace 'breaks out' when conflict is resolved. This is not dissimilar to the idea of health as what 'comes back' after illness is beaten. Today, we understand that health has to be designed from day one of a child's life, after which it has to be maintained through the years.
That design is not a one-size-fits all formula - each person has a unique context. Nor does it stay the same, in the course of the child becoming an adult and then a geriatric. Health is a challenging roller-coaster - part of our human condition - and we have to be responsive and inventive at every stage. It’s the same for peace.
War is a collective commitment arising from hundreds of thousands of individual agreements. We would never be able to go to war unless enough of us submitted to the idea that war was necessary and was the right thing to do. We would not have an army unless enough people - men signing up, women allowing it - were prepared to fight and kill complete strangers in the name of a proposition: that doing so would bring peace. Or at least a return to the status quo dominance.
Only imagine - as John Lennon famously said - enough people saying No to war. There would be no army. Until now, we have collectively lacked that imagination. Our mind-forged manacles have kept us in thrall to violence. We believe in our own righteousness. We mourn the death of a single young boy on the street, yet we condone the mass death of countless young men in the fields of Ukraine. Many of whom were conscripted against their will (ref). This is a familiar cognitive dissonance.
Sitting in Edinburgh - rather than London, as we recently were - there has for a long while been the beginnings of an anti-war possibility because of the anti-Trident/nuclear weapons stand of the Scottish National Party (SNP). When nuclear weapons are on your territory - rather than in some unidentifiable location, or somehow confused with nuclear energy - your objection might become non-negotiable. You don't allow the idea that these nuclear weapons are necessary as a deterrent any more than you would keep a gun in your house to ward off burglars. You don't take the risk of someone - anyone - reaching for the weapon, in a moment of uncontrollable emotion or unpredictable process.
But there's no sign yet of that anti-nuclear clarity translating into a commitment to go beyond war itself. If you’re reading this and finding such a commitment unimaginable, Costa Rica giving up its army or Japan - for 70 years - unable to use its army for anything more than emergency relief. It is possible to say No, but it takes a journey.
In his recent Substack article, The Future of Peace (Part One), Jonathan Rowson - Founder of Perspectiva 'soul tank' - describes such early steps and invites us on the path:
An idea of peace forged in modernity may well mislead us when what we need is a vision of peace for a liminal time where it feels like modernity is slowly ending. The nation-state and the army are the quintessential modernist institutions. It feels like we may be in the process of gradually moving beyond them, for good or bad, but peace in the context of that possibility is very different from peace as two hostile sides agreeing to a ceasefire.
As I argue in Five Flavours of Betweenness we are arguably between cultures, systems, paradigms, ontologies, and metaphysics. While Zak Stein’s term “a time between worlds” is elegant, he would be the first to admit that one of the defining characteristics of a time between worlds is violence and lots of it.
And yet what is unique about our historical moment is that we have the power not merely to inflict localized harm, which was always true; now there are a variety of ways we can destroy the viability of humanity’s only habitat.
This is not just with nuclear weapons, but with deep fakes declarations of war causing chain reactions, or homemade dirty bombs sent into marketplaces with homemade drones, and the creation of internecine violence through misinformation. The recent Netflix film Leave the World Behind gives a taste of that kind of scenario.
In that emerging context, I feel it is our responsibility to be as proactive and pre-emptive about peace as possible.
I surprise myself a little because I am not particularly irenic by nature. Through decades of sublimated warfare on the chess board, I have developed quite a martial spirit. In day-to-day life, I am often looking for peace, but usually after the struggle, and sometimes I feel restless and inauthentic when a necessary struggle is avoided (Johan Galtung calls this ‘negative peace’).
Real war is very different of course, and well worth avoiding where possible. I count myself lucky never to have been in a war and have no wish for that to change.
It sounds privileged to say so, and perhaps offensive to those more directly affected by war, but in all candour, I have for many years considered the notion of peace uninteresting, static, even worthy. Until recently peace felt lenten and generic, never the subject of our best stories.
But how wrong I was.
I am beginning to understand that peace is the battle of our times. Indeed peace is inherently about struggle, and it is co-extensive with conflict. Moreover, peace is fascinating.
A few things become clear when you look into it. The first is that peace is not about avoiding conflict but about recognizing conflict as a perennial feature of life and then leaning into the delicious complexity of conflict resolution as an intensely humanising and creative process.
War may be meaningful but it is notoriously unimaginative. Peace, however, is often inherently creative in a way that calls for us to grow into a deeper version of ourselves.
The creative processes that lead to peace call for us to venture into the heart, into the psyche, deeper into social relations, deeper into emotional needs, and beyond the trappings of identity towards individuation forged by knowing ourselves through things and people that are both parts of ourselves and unique.
Moreover, peaceful outcomes invariably involve forms of insight or transcendence that are all but unimaginable before the peace work begins. Peace can be profoundly surprising.
Enough said. Let's get on that train and see where we get to, in the time we have available.