THE CULTURE OF PEACE

“I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.”

General Douglas MacArthur

It is one of the ironies of history that war has often been the greatest benefactor of peace. And never was that more true than during the twentieth century. With the destruction wreaked by the two world wars, the Holocaust, and the unleashing of nuclear weaponry on the Japanese mainland, the cry for peace grew louder than ever before as the sheer physical, moral, and spiritual exhaustion with the human capacity for violence reached unprecedented levels. “The more ruthless the world, the more it needs idealistic compensation,” peace historian Carl Becker was once quoted as saying. And more than a few people over the last decades seem to have taken this message to heart. Indeed, our post–world war culture has seen a veritable explosion of scholarship, research, activism, university programs, and international institutes all dedicated to understanding the nature of peace, nonviolence, pacifism, and religious violence. Spiritual and philosophical contemplations of war and peace have ancient roots—scholars claim that some form of peace activism can be traced all the way back to the ancient civilization of Sumer—but for both scholarship and activism, the twentieth century is unequaled.

So if we want to understand how to approach the all-important issue of peace and nonviolence in the twenty-first century, it might be best to start by looking at how these concepts are understood in contemporary religious and secular life. After all, we live in a time when the ideal of peace has become embedded in the very fabric of our culture. Once an edgy and dangerous countercultural rallying call, peace is now the sober subject of doctorates and dissertations. Once a rare and religious form of idealism, peace has, in its modern incarnation, transformed itself into an almost secular principle. In the boardrooms of NGOs and the strategy sessions of policymakers, we are applying modernity's ample talents to the subject. We are dissecting its component parts, analyzing its constituent processes, testing new methods of implementation, and publishing position papers on how to achieve results better and faster. Presidential candidate and congressman Dennis Kucinich has even proposed a peace department that would be a cabinet-level part of the executive branch. Calling Washington, DC, a “font of official violence,” Kucinich is determined to “challenge the idea that war is inevitable.” Imagine another Pentagon, one filled with thousands of government workers poring over the history of conflicts around the globe, studying new ways to resolve tribal wars, exploring better methods of on-the-ground peacekeeping, flying in lightning-quick special forces to mediate in trouble spots around the world. In Kucinich's vision, these sorts of things would be commonplace.

Some manifestations of peace in contemporary culture are more lighthearted. Judging by the back bumpers of our nation's cars, we seem to be busy either building peace, creating peace, thinking peace, teaching peace, giving peace a chance, waging peace, or visualizing world peace. We have books that promise “forty more ways to be a peaceful person” and “108 steps to create a more peaceful world.” And in a society where The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Iraq was recently published, I imagine that Peace for Dummies can't be that far behind. What do Miss America contestants want to work for? World peace. In a time when war and conflict are still so prevalent around the globe, sometimes it seems that the only place peace has broken out consistently is on the bumper stickers, key chains, and T-shirts of countercultural chic. Peace, it seems, has become a commodity of cool.

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this postmodern plethora of peace, but it does raise the larger question of what we really mean by the term. Is peace a spiritual concept or a political one? Do we mean peace with other countries? Peace in the Middle East? Peace with Al Qaeda? Do we mean peace between races or peace with racists? Do we mean that politically popular concept of “peacekeeping”? Or do we mean that well-worn and slightly vague notion, “inner peace”?

Perhaps the most common thing people mean by peace is simply pacifism. “Pacifism means the rejection of war fighting,” explains Dr. Michael Nagler, who founded the Peace Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early seventies. It may sound simple, but be warned—like the proverbial Eskimos and their many different kinds of snow, peace studies professors have drawn some fine distinctions on the many forms of opposition to war and violence. John Yoder, one of last century's great scholars of pacifistic thought, actually managed to identify twenty-nine unique types of religious pacifism alone.

For example, there is the pacifism of utopian purism (for those seeking to create a utopia), the pacifism of absolute conscience (for those whose personal conscience will not let them kill), the pacifism of the categorical imperative (something to do with Kant), and the pacifism of nonviolent change (for those who are seeking social justice). How many ways can you protest war and violence? Well, believe it or not, someone's been counting. But without spilling the subtle secrets of graduate peace courses, the big picture of peace advocacy goes like this: Pacifism is generally understood to be a rejection of violence—usually, as Michael Nagler points out, a rejection of war. It is often called “nonresistance,” a term derived from the biblical phrase, “Resist not him that is evil” (Matthew 5:39), presumed to mean that Christians should uphold Jesus's example of not fighting back against injustice. Think of the Mennonites or the Quakers. Both denominations have strong pacifistic sensibilities, and during times of war their adherents often take what the government calls “conscientious objector” status, which allows them not to participate in war-related activities. That is pacifism. Now, if they start demonstrating against the war—staging sit-ins, burning draft cards, and getting arrested—that's different. A true-blue pacifist would tell you that they are now engaged in active resistance, a euphemism, the pacifist might say, for a kind of fighting. They have crossed over into active social protest, and assuming that they don't start overturning cars or firing RPGs, you could say that they are now practicing “nonviolent resistance,” or just “nonviolence.”

The term “nonviolence” entered the English vocabulary in 1923 as a translation of ahimsa, a Sanskrit word adopted from Hindu scripture by Mohandas Gandhi. Ahimsa means “the force that comes into play when every vestige of the desire to harm is eliminated,” says Michael Nagler. And force is probably a good word to use because nonviolent resistance is hardly passive. Indeed, in the capable hands of the “half-naked Indian fakir,” as Churchill described Gandhi, the ideal of nonviolence began to define a revolutionary new way of interacting within the political sphere. A whole new method of applying force was born, a middle way that existed somewhere between outright violence and turning the other cheek. Gandhi brought together Jainism's teachings on nonviolence, Henry David Thoreau's idea of civil disobedience, and the Bhagavad Gita's call to “do your duty and fight for this just cause,” and the resulting fusion changed the face of the twentieth century.