MUTUAL SELF-DESTRUCTION AND THE PURSUIT OF PEACE - Part II

"The peace... which passeth understanding..."

Philippians 4

FEELING AT PEACE

Mutual self destruction may appear to be a new phenomenon that has emerged in our collective consciousness as a result of living in a nuclear age, but as I have hinted in my last post, the fear of mutual annihilation is rooted in our instinctual past.   The reason I feel confident in saying this is that the pursuit of lasting peace is as old as human history.

Peace is an abstract concept that does not exist without a context. While many may think of peace as a feeling, I would suggest that peace can neither be felt nor is it an emotional state.  Peace is a condition brought about by absence.  In other words, peace requires that a disturbing or disrupting precondition is removed or ended in order to "feel" at peace.

What we define as "feeling at peace" are emotions associated with an absence that have disturbed and disrupted our sense of normalcy which result in feelings of relief, joy, and/or security.  As such we tend to make such emotional feelings synonymous with a "feeling" of peace, but for the purpose of these posts, peace is defined as absence.

Why this is important to understand I hope to make clear in this post.  The primary reason peace is so difficult to maintain is, among other things, that humans are not natural peacekeepers. We are the descendants of prehistoric predators who have risen to the top of the food chain only to realize that we are the only creatures on the planet who pose a challenge to our own survival.

This realization has been around since the dawn of human history.  In my opinion, realizing our proclivity towards self destruction contributed to the rise of civilization and turning us into the religious animals we are.  What living in a nuclear age has changed is in regard to how easily accomplished this is and how tentative maintaining peace as the absence of all out war has become.

PURSUING PEACE

The pursuit of peace is rooted in the polar functions of the Impulse of Religion and the Differentiating Paradigm of Religion. In past posts I have used these terms to identify two early phases of religious development; the recognition of needing others to survive and differentiating what it means to be same and other.

Hypothetically speaking, one can identify the Impulse of Religion with the intellectual mind and the Differentiating Paradigm of Religion with the instinctual mind.  The Impulse of Religion seeks to reason and  recognizes the need of the other; whereas, the Differentiating Paradigm of Religion sees differences in the other as a threat to me and mine and leads to clumping around that which is familiar and fearing that which is different.

In these two functions is found the roots of civilization and the ideologies that bind us together into religious communities.  In this post, I want to ponder how the fears we have are related to the concept of peace and how the perception of fear and the pursuit of peace to rid us of our fear created a religious (binding) reaction that led to theism and civilization.

Fear is what brought us to our intellectual senses, so to speak. Once we rose to the top of the food chain, annihilated the competition, and started to populate and spread out over the world as tribal nomads, the biggest creature hazard we faced was ourselves. The other threat to our existence was natural disaster and the unseen.   Harnessing nature turned out to be an easier task than harnessing our predatory instincts which we turn on ourselves.

Theism arose to address that which humans found difficult to control or subdue in themselves. Initially the focus of theism was an attempt to placate what was understood to be an even higher level of creature, the gods, who were believed to control the unseen hazards and the forces of nature.
Human intuition (an enormous leap beyond instinct) deduced that every action involving inanimate substances in nature had a creature cause behind it.

Even though humans were at the top of the food chain on earth, intuition led our earliest ancestors to conclude there to be higher levels of the food chain, the gods, who were causing all sorts of havoc; earthquakes, floods, storms, and volcanism, not to mention the causes of disease and plagues.  Human and animal sacrifices to the gods give evidence to the primitive understanding that the gods were considered part of the food chain we needed to fear.  Simply put, the gods were a tough crowd to please.

Eventually, intellectual theism addressed and attempted to abate the innate forces within ourselves that caused us to engage in acts considered self destructive.  The greatest feat in early human history was the domestication of ourselves.  We call it being civilized.

Like domestication, civilization requires elements of control in order to ensure order and avoid chaos. Civilization led to consistent practices that people began to rely on; a familiarity that, for the most part resulted in contentment.  In that respect very little has changed about being human.  As long as we're content, we abhor change, but we are rarely content for long.

Unfortunately, history demonstrates that humans are poor at self regulation.  Curbing our predatory instincts as individuals became a communal effort and remains so to this day.  Even when regulated, contentment is fleeting. We live in a universe of polarities that is reflected in our genetic makeup and evident in our ideological interactions.

This polarity finds expression in almost every human activity.  Take our attraction to sports; for example, and the attraction of both seeing people win and lose.  Consider the daredevil: The greater the risk of failure, the greater the feeling of accomplishment - surviving a momentary brush with death leads to the exhilarating feeling of being alive.  Of course not everyone is a daredevil, but you can catch my drift.

THE VOID OF PEACE

The difficulty with maintaining peace is that it presents a void.  In the short term, peace "feels" good because we fill the void with transient feelings generated by the absence of that which we found disruptive and disturbing.  Over time these feelings dissipate and feelings of ennui set in. Boredom is a reaction to the absence of stimulus.  Peace is not very stimulating.  The key to maintaining peace is how to stave off the ennui that will eventually ensue and lead our species to engage in disruptive and disturbing behaviors.

Peace may be too abstract for us to fully realize due to its transcendent nature.  The Christian apostle, Paul, captures this sense of transcendence in his letter to the Philippians, "And the peace of God which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:7 KJV) While such a peace sounds tangible to our longing ears, Paul's concept of a peace that passes understanding grasps the abstract transcendent nature of peace.  What Paul's comment brings to bear on the concept of a lasting peace is the notion of agency in order to still (quiet) the mind and heart of a predatory species that is subject to ennui.  Paul's identifying agency  of God's peace is the agency of faith in his concept of "Christ Jesus."

Peace requires agency.  We are an addiction-prone species that craves stimulation.  When we are not feeling stimulated, we feel the void; we feel empty and bored.  Peace, in and of itself, is boring and boring is not bad.  Experts will tell us that boredom serves a purpose.  It's nature's way to make us pause and consciously quiet the mind. It is ironic, then, that we grew up in a world where parents and authority figures enforced the notion of "go out and play outside" - do something - when we complained of boredom.  It might have been better if they said, "Think about that for a moment." 

On a personal level "thinking" and quieting the mind is readily accomplished, but on a global level boredom is a problem.  Globally speaking, are we bored?

Are certain global populations prone to engage in activities that disturb and disrupt merely to feel stimulated. This may sound like a trite assessment of situations involving suicide bombers and mass killings, but is modern terrorism, for example, in reality a response to global boredom that has been brought about by a relative prolonged period of peace?

Has the void of  peace caused a polar reversal to occur in what former President Obama called the trajectory of history, which, until recently, has tended towards inclusiveness?

Until next time, stay faithful.