Understanding Peace

A Comprehensive Introduction

Michael Allen Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134745876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction fills the need for an original, contemporary examination of peace that is challenging, informative, and empowering. This well-researched, fully documented, and highly accessible textbook moves beyond fixation on war to highlight the human capacity for nonviolent cooperation in everyday life and in conflict situations. After deconstructing numerous ideas about war and explaining its heavy costs to humans, animals, and the environment, discussion turns to evidence for the existence of peaceful societies. Further topics include the role of nonviolence in history, the nature of violence and aggression, and the theory and practice of nonviolence. The book offers two new moral arguments against war, and concludes by defining peace carefully from different angles and then describing conditions for creating a culture of peace. Understanding Peace brings a fresh philosophical perspective to discussions of peace, and also addresses down-to-earth issues about effecting constructive change in a complex world. The particular strength of Understanding Peace lies in its commitment to reflecting on and integrating material from many fields of knowledge. This approach will appeal to a diverse audience of students and scholars in peace studies, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as to general-interest readers.

Part I

Beyond the War Mentality

1

Historical Narrative and the Presupposition of Violence

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

—Benjamin Franklin, letter to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, 27 July 1783

Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn’t have as many monuments to unveil.

—Frank McKinney (“Kin”) Hubbard (1868–1930), American journalist, cartoonist, and humorist

[I]t is the lot of all myths to creep gradually into the confines of a supposedly historical reality, and to be treated by some later age as unique fact with claims to historical truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, sec. 10

1.1. History as a Conflict Zone

History and Truth

Accounts of the past single out parts of the human story that historians perceive as worth telling or somehow obligatory to tell, which are then told from a certain standpoint or standpoints—temporal, cultural, topical, and so on. Nobel Prize author V. S. Naipaul correctly observes that “There must always be certain things that drop out of history. Only the broadest movements and themes can be recorded. All the multifarious choppings and changings, all the individual hazards and venturesomeness, and failures, cannot be recorded. History is full of mysteries.… Certain things are lost.…”¹ But a more specific problem about history also calls for our attention. As the description of a recent historiographical volume states, “Every piece of historical writing has a theoretical basis on which evidence is selected, filtered, and understood.”² One prominent historian asserts that “it is apparent that the past impinges on many people and no single group has exclusive possession of it. It is also apparent that the historian plays a vital role in assisting occupancy.”³ Many may find these sorts of ideas unfamiliar, and perhaps a bit odd and unsettling. We are inclined to believe that there is knowledge, on the one hand, and everything else, on the other. We are likewise predisposed to think that if a reputable or learned authority, such as a historian, tells us something against the background of his or her expertise, then that must be the way it is. But we learn as we grow older that these assumptions cannot necessarily be relied upon or even, more radically, that the foundation on which they rest is either very shaky or eroded beyond repair. Living in a postmodern age of increasing skepticism about conclusive statements of any kind makes it quite difficult to cling to reassuring certainties and to resist the idea that “truth” might itself be a fiction, or at any rate a will-o’-the-wisp, an unattainable goal even in principle.

Although there is no possibility of historians stepping outside of their own era and system of beliefs, there are nevertheless those who would speak of studying the past as a way of “objectively” getting at the “facts” about it, and of aiming to ascertain what it “really means”—all very loaded and frequently ill-defined notions. Yet for each of these historians, there are probably at least as many others who ask, “Who owns history?”;⁴ or decry “the discipline’s relentless focus on the experience of white men only”;⁵ or assert that only the victorious get to write the “definitive” account of an event or age; or observe that historical writing in a certain area is beset by “history wars,” “ethnocentrism,” “mythmaking,” “fabrication,” “political correctness,” “left-wing” or “right-wing” agendas, and more. Recent books include telling title phrases or chapter headings such as these: “whitewashing war,” “history as weapon,” “history on trial,” and “lies my teacher told me.”⁶ Summing up the variety of problems raised by the writing of history, a professor of the discipline rhetorically asks, “Who determines which history is ‘anointed’ as the ‘true’ history?”⁷

In addition to this more “innocent” dilemma, there is the comparatively daunting one of correcting deliberately falsified and/or “official” versions of the history of a particular country, ethnic group, or time period. There is also the little-known history of those who have been displaced by history—for example, the victims of colonialism and various diasporas around the world.⁸ It begins to look as if the past cannot escape being an assemblage made from the (or rather someone’s) standpoint in the present, and so history-telling is in danger of coming to resemble virtual reality, personal memoir, or opinion piece more than fact.⁹

Yet in spite of these confronting ideas about the construction of historical narratives, history is indispensable because it defines who we have been, are, and may yet be; expresses the significance of our collective actions; and helps us understand how to come to terms with what we have done and propose to do. Historical narrative is a tool for finding our way, our place in the scheme of things—even for identifying what “the scheme of things” is. And historians do strive to focus on and stay faithful to certain “facts,” although, as it has been said, “No historian … treats every fact equally.”¹⁰ But because history is a defining form of cultural reference, misusing it to specify reality (or some part of it) as one sees fit, or as certain vested interests, prevailing cultural values, or traditions require, is a serious matter. Aside from the influences and underlying factors that may govern historical interpretation, there is a sort of inertia, too, that propels it along, unless and until it meets with opposition. Newton’s First Law of Motion applies to ideas as well as to objects.

A Common View of History

Whatever perspective one takes on the issues briefly reviewed above, it must be observed that standard versions of history, as most people have been taught it, revolve around the great deeds and ambitions of famous (mostly male) rulers and the wars they have fought (see Introduction, “War myths,” Myth #1). Ambrose Bierce put the point humorously in his Devil’s Dictionary: “History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”¹¹ More precisely, one could say that the “engines” of history are usually seen as economic power, invention, technology, religion, growing populations, environmental resources, ideas, and war, with all of these factors either directly or indirectly serving the last—war. Of course, these are generalizations, and they are in no way intended to obscure recognition that many worthy historical studies of specific cultural trends and tendencies do not fit this pattern, just as some accounts of the past, like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States,¹² do emphasize the role played by the actions of ordinary and even obscure individuals and movements. However, our interest here is in capturing what has most generally been presented as “history” or “world history” and therefore what most readily comes to mind when these words are mentioned.¹³

The reader will perhaps have noticed, too, that absent from the above list of the factors that shape history is cooperation (discussed in Chapter 2). Historical accounts do acknowledge some forms of cooperation, for example, military treaties, alliances, and foreign aid. Yet cooperation plays a much more fundamental role in history, which is only superficially captured in such partnerships as these.

Lively controversies in Australia and Canada underline the kinds of concerns raised so far. In Australia, some historians have charged that the history taught in schools is being militarized, and war glorified and romanticized; others declare in response that students are being exposed to different dimensions of war and are being encouraged to examine military interpretations of history critically.¹⁴ In Canada, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper committed 28 million dollars to commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the War of 1812, which is, in his words, “the beginning of a long and proud military history in Canada.” Reflecting on Harper’s decision, historian Ian McKay and journalist Jamie Swift acerbically suggest that Canada’s forthcoming observance of the World War I centenary (in 2014) will likely “romanticize that ghastly spasm of ineptitude in the service of a ‘Birth of a Nation’ story, all the while airbrushing out its incalculable costs.”¹⁵ Many historians dispute, in any case, whether the War of 1812 accomplished anything significant by its military campaigns—though it might alternatively be celebrated for the peace treaty that banned warships permanently from the Great Lakes and established the longest undefended border in the world, between the United States and Canada.

1.2. Constructing, Revising, and Controlling History

The Power of Historical Accounts and their Manipulation

Even though most historians do their job conscientiously and with a scholarly respect for the truth, there clearly are false and deceptive historical accounts. These can have deadly consequences when they play a role in causing real wars. Historian Glenda Sluga contends that in the destruction of Yugoslavia that occurred in the 1990s, historians played a key role in creating an environment in which ethnic conflict seemed inevitable:

To some degree, the new wars between (depending on when and where) individuals whose motives were reduced to their collective assignations as Serbs or Croats or “Muslims” or Bosnians or Albanians or Macedonians, were conceived of, or imagined, with the help of commentators in the press and on television, as well as in the universities, as extensions of older wars. But they were also wars fought to affirm a particular version of those past wars and of past and present injustices. The sides that coalesced into ethno-religious groupings did so as a result of the ways in which historical narratives were invoked.¹⁶

To be fair, however, one should reflect here that history can be abused not only by those who write it, but also by those who regard it uncritically or who appropriate it for their own ends. The past is not reconstructed by historians alone. And, clearly, historians cannot be held responsible for all the distortions people make of their narratives. In wartime and peacetime alike, politicians, demagogues, and other opinion-shapers try to mold the public’s perception of the reality of world affairs, in order to create constituencies of their own.

Disturbing though the Yugoslavian example is, there is nothing especially unique about it. John Quigley shows, for instance, how US administrations have manufactured and manipulated historical reasons for starting wars since the end of World War II, public opinion falling into place accordingly.¹⁷ Negative images of the enemy and doublespeak are devices also typically marshaled in support of war-preparedness and war-making.¹⁸ These are but a few of the means that have been at the disposal of war propagandists throughout the ages.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that narratives of the past are contested, inasmuch as no one “owns” history; furthermore, as Michel Foucault has carefully shown, the control of information flow and of the interpretation of events are power games. John Pilger, a prominent journalist, author, and filmmaker, points out that in the modern world, any effort to control history in order to advance a political agenda crucially depends on “the media as its transmitter and amplifier.”¹⁹ This includes actively or passively endorsing official governmental outlooks and policies, while effectively silencing others. Leading up to the Iraq War, against which there were large-scale demonstrations worldwide, Christopher Leahey remarks, “The media failed to challenge the Bush Administration’s pronouncements, seek out alternative sources of information, provide space for dissenting voices, and portray the dangers and complexity of war.”²⁰ Leahey, a public school teacher, also shows how in the United States, critical consideration of wars past and present is perceived as crossing the line into forbidden terrain and is stifled by blinkered “corporate textbooks” and conservative school boards that...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• List of Diagrams
• Introduction Thinking about Peace Today
• Part I Beyond the War Mentality
• Part II A Window on Peace
• Bibliography
• Sources for Epigraphs
• Index