What if we started to view Peace not as the absence of War, not as its anemic and lethargic shadow, but as the equal and opposite of War? What would it look like to mobilize for Peace, train for Peace, and have intelligence for Peace - to Go to Peace? We tend to posit Peace not as an active, creative, lively project, but rather as a non-place where we hope our dead will rest. Can we redefine Peace not as the limbo, the temporary quiet, of a truce, but rather as truly constructive engagement that requires risks and intelligence and strategy? Can we convince our men, still charged with their mammalian task of protection, that the best way to protect us all is to cleverly engage in Peace?
What would Going to Peace even look like for us? Would we not need training and, most importantly, troops? Can we Go to Peace individually any more than we Go To War individually? And if Going to War is about (so often) the testing and cementing and defining of boundaries – tribal, national, religious, ethnic, territorial – is not Going to Peace about bridging, or blurring, boundaries? What then would be our tools, our weapons? A massive mobilization of people trained in basic skills of reaching across, storytelling, compassion, empathy? Perhaps we can look to the long histories of trading and gaming across borders for clues and signposts. We are talking here about making common cause, or rather making common cause apparent, as the common cause is always there, whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. We are all neighbors here on this planet of ours – human and non-human alike.
Going to Peace and Inner Peace are not the same. Just as a person who is not internally warlike can be mobilized in a war, a person without great inner peace can be mobilized in Going to Peace. Just as in wartime or in battle empathetic and caring people learn to ignore those tender impulses in favor of adopting their group’s dehumanizing separation from the Other, people, particularly in an appropriately supportive environment, can ignore their Othering tendencies in favor of their more compassionate ones. Support, practice, support, practice, support. Basic Training. Just as people who are seeking Inner Peace pursue disciplines to help them in their quests – meditation, yoga, church, jogging, etc – Going to Peace would require discipline, focus, rigor. Peace is not, unfortunately, some kind of default position, as we have imagined it to be.
Bridging, blurring, busting through boundaries is the work of our time, and yet we are not likely to leave behind our species’ love of team spirit anytime soon. The comfortable categories of nation, race, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, species, or rather the ways in which we have reinforced and reified these categories, are killing us, and not so softly, and yet we cannot let them go. Going to Peace is not a feel-good notion, but rather an enormously complex challenge. Going to War is almost a knee-jerk response; Going to Peace would take us into frightening unknown terrain. Just as Going to War requires massive coordinated defenses and deceptiveness, Going to Peace would require massive coordinated vulnerability and honesty. Empathy is inherent to humans but has not been reinforced with the same vim and vigor with which our inherent social tendency to Other has. Were we to Go to Peace, we would need an extensive support system, equal to the task at hand. A cadre of theoreticians, tacticians, teachers, troops. And the troops on the ground would not be the young, the impulsive, the 19-year-old minds that think in dramatic absolutes. Our troops would have older brains, would be people who have seen enough loss to appreciate the preciousness of life and seen enough ambiguity to appreciate the ever-presence of paradox - people who laugh easily.