Peace: Three Important Issues

We began this blog on the topic of global peace with a discussion of the distrust with which adult humans view other humans and which, we suggested, is the reason behind the need for national standing armies. Two more important issues have come to the fore: the human tendency to assemble in groups that are not always cooperative in the way they work; our unique ability to pretend that we members of another species.

All three issues play a role in the example, we discussed earlier, of the group leader who would not keep within the group anyone who is working against the best interests of the group. By extension, they are also implicated in the realization that, whereas every member of the human workforce is working to advance the cause of some institution, none can be said to be working to advance the interests of the species to which they owe their very existence.

Some may argue that this last point is irrelevant because, unlike any of our institutions or groups, no one has been given the responsibility to ensure that the interests of the species are being served. However, on this point we are no different from any of the other species which, it bears repeating, have been our teachers on how to live and survive on this planet. We are well aware of the groups among primates and canines (e.g. wolves, dogs, jackals, foxes). These animal groups have leaders, sometimes called the alpha male. Even though group leadership is an integral quality of these species there is no alpha male who claims leadership of all wolves, or gorillas in the world. Nature seems to abhor global leadership in an individual.

The integrity of the species appears to the entirely determined by the species’ DNA. Individual members of a species do not act cooperatively for the benefit of the species because someone tells them to, or because a group leader keeps them in line, but because it is encoded in their DNA. It is because of these instructions that these groups within a species work cooperatively instead of trying to destroy each other. DNA is the employer, the group leader, the alpha male.

What does this mean for humans who are longing for permanent, universal and lasting peace? The obvious conclusion is that while our institutions (political, sports-related, educational, etc.) can benefit by teaching people associated with these institutions particular ideas about peace, our best hope for global peace is to direct all humans to a state of being in which we intuitively wish to work cooperatively, regardless of our differences and without being required to change our sense of identity.

Maintenance-free peace can never come out of a process in which individuals are forced or shamed into changing, or believe that they were forced or shamed into changing who they believe they are. Resentment will always remain. We have a good example of that in the events that led up to the rise of the Third Reich and the Second World War. Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles but this peace treaty did not take away the notion that the terms of the treaty were restrictive to Germany. Clearly, many Germans shared Adolf Hitler’s passionate desire to throw off those shackles.

To accomplish this goal of a species that functions, in terms of cooperative coexistence, in the same way that every other species on the planet functions we need to understand something of the interplay among the three issues mentioned above and how they relate to who and what we are.