‘Peace hath her Victories…’
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 25 Oct 2010
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service
Since the beginning of the Vietnam War, several academic institutions and civil society groups have focused on creating the new discipline of Peace Studies, with varying degrees of clarity, in some places reflecting the urgencies of ‘conflict resolution,’ in others, the needs of communities to arrive at reconciliation. But the questions that have daunted humanists since the dawn of civilizations remain, how do we embrace ‘the other’ as a reflection of God, how can we look into the disturbing depths of our own cultural history, and challenge the fear of the other in our own psyches? Even if the saint succeeds, how does she convey her calm confidence to the temporary holders of political power? How do Peace, Inclusion, Compassion become the norms of social life?
Around forty years ago when the first wave of reductionist scholars posited the view that ‘aggression’ was somehow innate in humanity, a group of renowned ethologists, anthropologists, and social scientists refuted this opinion in a masterly collection of essays, ‘On Aggression,’ edited by Ashley Monatgu. They established that deadly intra-specific aggression – that is, between members of the same species – was almost always limited to human beings. Struggle for territorial space between animals should only be considered as accommodations for species survival. The existence of tribes which had no known history of violence, such as the Pygmies of Africa or the Lepchas of Sikkim, also indicated that there could be no innate or genetic basis for aggression. Since that early discourse, Dr Jane Goodall has pointed out the existence of a few instances of deadly aggression between members of the chimpanzees of Gombe, but it remains a moot point whether ‘unnatural’ crowding and other environmental pressures have produced a new behavioural trait, a point that has been argued before with regard to findings by Dr Konrad Lorenz and others. While this discourse between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ continues to wax and wane, it appears that for very long early periods humanity was at peace with itself, and its strangers. We now know that the Neanderthals were not exterminated by modern ‘man’ but absorbed in our communities through ‘marriage,’ so that everyone of us outside of West Africa can boast of a few ‘Neanderthal’ genes.
At some point in the early history of scattered human communities, they took an aggressive posture towards Nature herself. Instead of being content to live on her bountiful margins, these communities decided to drain fens, clear forests, domesticate animals. A beautiful Indian myth illustrates this change in attitudes. Mahisasura, a buffalo demon terrorised the Gods, the earth and the nether world. This demon is also called an asura by the early Hindus giving him a temporal identity, that of the Assyrians with whom they clashed as they moved east towards India, some time in the third millennium BCE. The demon was unbeatable. So all the Hindu Gods created a woman goddess endowing her with all their powers and weapons, and she destroyed the buffalo demon. The festival of Mahisasuramardini, or Durga, is celebrated every year by all the peoples of India. This early myth signifies the settlement of land, and the conquest of Nature by the nomadic Hindu pastoralists. The conquering female figure is Durga whose victory ensures the growth and fertility of her people.
If a tribe can conquer Nature and animals, why not other tribes, their women, their properties? The leading European archeo-mythologist, Marija Gimbutas, has unveiled the peaceful nature of early urban and ‘matrifocal’ riverine societies in Europe till these were conquered, again in the third millennium BCE by the patriarchal Kurgan cultures. A similar fate seems to have overtaken other riverine urban societies, such as those of Sumer and the Indus valley. Perhaps, population pressures led horse-riding nomadic tribes to debouch out of the south Russian steppes and seek newer pastures for their cattle in Europe, the Middle East and India. In historical times, these invasions were followed by the depredations of Attila and Genghis Khan.
Certainly, humanity’s early epics and myths are full of stories of war and conquest, whether we read the Iliad or the Indian Mahabharata. Karl Marx, Frederich Engels and succeeding Marxist scholars have argued about the causative socio-cultural linkages between patriarchy, private property, and war. However contentious this formulation might be, it is undeniable that matrifocal tribes though numerous had small populations, while patriarchal tribes, few in number had sizeable populations. Antique civilizations used the instrument of war to gather property of all kinds, land, gold, trade links, artisans, slaves and also women. The Second World War was immensely destructive, but it expanded the economies of both victor and vanquished and their technological abilities to an extent undreamt of before. The subtext of the reasons for the conflicts in the latter half of the twentieth century has been unequivocal in stating that the defence of the American way of life was the main and real cause of war – in other words, control over the property of oil and other primary products, whether mineral or agricultural.
Can the establishment of a global empire do away with the necessity of war or conquest?
This great idea might have motivated the Mauryan emperor, Ashoka, of the third century BCE, to establish the Buddhist principles of ahimsa or non-violence throughout his vast empire, and ‘enforce’ it through a cadre of officials. However, his descendent and last Buddhist emperor was butchered in front of his own troops by his Hindu commander-in-chief, who said he had been a weak king, and that the times needed a soldier to confront the Greeks on the far western frontier. Indians who had lived for close to two hundred years under the principles of non-violence seem to have accepted the need to end the era of peace when faced by a military threat. But there was no credible threat; few if any could even have seen a Greek soldier west of Kabul, where their frontier ended. Two-thousand years later Americans also believed they faced a military threat in the Middle East, though few knew anything about Iraq or Afghanistan.
Neither the Buddhist Indians of Ashoka’s time nor the democratic Americans of the 21st century are unique for their easy acceptance of military solutions. History is written in the ink of such populist compliance in mass acts of violence and war. Various explanationshave been given over time with monotonous regularity – these include public gullibility, the actions of agents provocateur, patriarchy, the selfish greed in all to conquer and possess, centralized power, the culture of feudal and capitalist periods. Scientism has added to this list by searching for genes which instil irreducible compulsions towards aggression.
Such varied sources of a general inclination to settle matters by force could be viewed as enabling factors, but none seem to embody a defined civilisational thrust towards war.
However, a stark fact stares us in the face: In the last century, despite all scientific and rationalist advances, despite the creation of humanist international agencies for mediating conflict, despite the spectacular public acceptance of universal human rights, humanity as a whole murdered over 100 million people, many under the most brutal circumstances, and this unprecedented mass killing was suffered to proceed by all, of course with protest, but muted by the political apparition of necessity.
How did so many educated ‘rational’ people accept such universal irrationality; how did the cultured of the world accept the unacceptable barbarity of modern war, far crueller than any experienced in earlier ages? Could the conflicts of the external world and their terrible solutions mirror in some gigantic way the inner conflicts of life we all face, and our own little unsatisfactory resolutions? In what way do we view instinctively the large political dramas between nations and communities in the light of narrow personal experiences, of boundaries of fear, of threat and loss, of withdrawal and resistance? How much compassion de we have for those who oppose us? How inclusive in our own lives are we of those whom we dislike?
If such questions look like impossible leads to nowhere, how shall we understand the reduction of the prophetic voice to narrow dogma? Present-day jihadis have reduced the pre-eminently socialising religion of Islam to a fear-ridden exclusive arena where none is sure who is orthodox and who is not, and where orthodoxy is described as ritualized observance. There has been little of love either in the workings of Christian nations, where rulers and priests have set their face resolutely against the new commandment of Jesus to love each other as He loves you. Religious community after religious community have drowned out the prophetic voice in loud clamours of superficial belief. While plausible Marxist theories can extend intellectual understanding of such blatant contradictions between precept and practice of faith, no intellectual exercise extends to the depths of psychic reality.
But what is this reality? It is a reality that is grown from the perceived experiences of life itself as it is lived by each one of us, lives of perceived uncertainty, circumscribed by danger, limited by paucity of resources, informed by social techniques of survival. It is a life in which we undertake the impossible task of bringing permanence to change, in which we seek the security of routine, in which little by little the very nature of precious life is exchanged for the constancy of death. If the categorical imperative of life is to view its reality as a moral journey, this cannot be undertaken if we refuse to travel on its shifting path.
The conscious rationalist ego which attempts to sail a regulated and socialized route through its turbid unconscious sea is constantly threatened by the crystallized complexes that rise from the depths of experience, un-understood, unaccepted. ‘Oh, to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them!’ Hamlet’s tired solution is at hand, when we tire of endurance, when we will not proceed another step towards the promised land.
But where is this land? Is it not where we stand, where we have always been, under our feet? Is not the jaundiced assimilation of experience as much a distorting hallucinogen as any drug? Have not the dark satanic mills of fearful conjecture ruined our perception of the green and pleasant land which has never changed? Which can be seen in all its eternal beauty if life is undertaken as a moral journey, not without doubt and mistakes, but of firm purpose so that what is out of sight is always in view.
Psychic depths turn to still water in the light of spiritual insight – so easily offered by any religious practice. Such transformations have happened of course for saints, but why not for all? That special moment of reflection, that moment for opening the inner door, always present, seems to await the ripeness of time.
Technology and economic plenty has brought leisure for the few, but not stillness. They recognise in others what they hate in themselves, and attempt to overcome by force what can only be exorcised by the giving up of power – but at the right moment. When would this be? When wisdom and virtue bring about compassionate and sustaining inclusion of the other. When by making a generous concession, we enrich our souls with new cultural horizons. When by transforming we transcend. John Milton was right to aspire for peace, but wrong to think of it as a ‘victory,’ for on the path of peace none is vanquished but all are risen. How all this may be brought about is not unknown to humanity. Humanity awaits the emergence of its own will to undertake its moral journey.
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Vithal Rajan, Ph.D.[L.S.E.], worked as a mediator for the church in Belfast; as faculty at The School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as Executive Director, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. He has founded several Indian NGOs. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 25 Oct 2010.
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