Perpetual Peace?

Perpetual Peace?

By John Taylor; 2006 June 26

"If a majority in every civilized country so desired, we could, within twenty years, abolish all abject poverty, quite half the illness in the world, the whole economic slavery which binds down nine tenths of our population; we could fill the world with beauty and joy, and secure the reign of universal peace." (Bertrand Russell, quoted in Dave Robinson and Judy Groves, Introducing Bertrand Russell, Icon Books, Cambridge, 2002, p. 3)

It took until the turn of the millennium for this seemingly pie-in-the-sky vision of Bertrand Russell's to enter the mainstream. Leaders of thought no longer consider it at all radical, and the desire for peace by a majority, the precondition for peace reconstruction of which he spoke, has grown and solidified into a strong consensus. Although poverty today is both more severe and more widespread than when Russell wrote, wealth and technical means have also grown correspondingly stronger. World leaders a few years ago agreed in principle to eliminate gross poverty within ten years, half the time that Russell allowed for. Unfortunately they did not go beyond idle promises and the project remains on the drawing board.

The audacious idea of a planned project for the permanent elimination of war, poverty and injustice was sparked in G. W. von Leibniz when at an inn in Holland he happened to view a poster depicting a graveyard at night. Above dark images of gravestones, plastered in large letters were the words: "Perpetual Peace?" He found this question thought-provoking and he mentioned it in a letter to his pen pal, Immanuel Kant. Kant was so intrigued that he started off his "Philosophical Sketch on Perpetual Peace" with a discussion of its meanings and interpretations. The picture on the poster may have been a sketch; Kant named his peace essay a sketch too, a philosophical rather than a visual sketch.

The meaning of the question, "Perpetual peace?" juxtaposed on that graveyard may seem obvious, but not to a philosopher. Kant at the beginning of the Sketch points to it. Clearly both great thinkers had asked questions like:

Is this satirical question "perpetual peace?" holding all of humanity up for derision? Or is it mocking the rules that nations go by? Is it directed at their pretense of upholding law and order while inwardly they are "insatiable of war?" Is the grave the only lasting peace we can hope for? Is life mere struggle and brute conflict? Is death our only hope of surcease? Is peace a dream? Is it practicable? What would have to be done for peace to become real and permanent?

Kant wonders if the poster aims its sarcasm at the thinkers who feed ideas to practical leaders, or it perhaps a protest against the obscurantism that keeps philosophers from speaking truth to power? (Kant could not publish this locally because of the suspicions of censors) As long as that divorce continues, peace will remain a pipe dream.

Are peacemakers, theoretical or practical, dreaming a futile ideal? We all hope that goodness and equality will win out but is it not a fact of history that those with the gumption to rise to the top of the heap are not the nice guys but breakers of the Golden Rule, ruthless, cynical, scheming backstabbers? Will the only time the meek will equal tyrants be when both are six feet under? Is that graveyard scene the last, forlorn hope of peacemakers?

The way to peace is no different today than it was then. It begins in simple questions like the ones this poster provokes. We all have to pose them in our own words before we take a step, before we say a word.

We all know that at the top things are rotten, which is why we have war in the first place. Kant sees that in the poster. Nations pretend to defend law and order but they do the reverse, they continually lead us into war. As the Bible put it, "Peace, peace, they declare, but there is no peace." Nowadays, the agenda setters claim to fight the good fight on our behalf against terrorists and other threats. But is this done from our need for security or is it the voice of a supercharged arms industry avid to sell weapons of mass destruction to all comers? We know that greedy corporations set the agenda, they ask our questions for us first, all the way down the line. We must ask our own questions, and answer them for ourselves. If every world citizen had an equal say we can be sure that the fight for peace would be won immediately, but that is not going to happen without a plan and a polity for world citizens.

The problem, Kant continues in the Sketch, is that practicing statesmen apply naked empirical principles and look down on the political theorist as a pedant with empty, irrelevant ideas. The result is that many take for granted an astonishing thesis of human nature as inherently violent at face value, from Machiavelli to Hobbes. Kratos will always dominate Ethos, they say, might makes right whether we wish it to be so or not.

Nor did Kant wholly disagree with them. He recognizes that peace at times can seem insipid and namby-pamby; as often as not, war galvanizes the chaotic masses into planned, concerted action. Conflicts are inherently dramatic and give vitality for a time, at least until the after-effects set in. In an earlier work, the Critique of Pure Judgment, he had written that some forms of peace can be almost as unproductive as war,

"a prolonged peace favors the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation."

Kant therefore makes a strict distinction in the Sketch between a drawn out, limited, temporary peace that is in reality a preparation for more wars, and real peace, which is permanent and perpetual in nature. The former is an imposed cessation of hostilities rooted in fear and exhaustion rather than love, whereas the latter would be firmly based upon universal brotherhood. We use one word for both, "peace," but they are entirely different. What keeps us back from even imagining real peace is our persistent acceptance of nature as warlike, whereas the opposite must gradually become our operating principle. Kant had said in the Science of Right,

"But if the idea is carried forward by gradual reform and in accordance with fixed principles, it may lead by a continuous approximation to the highest political good, and to perpetual peace."

This scientific, ordered planning for peace is what we are urgently called to commence at this juncture of history.

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John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com