Valson Thampu
Given a chance, human beings will trust only their own arms. The arms they make are technological extensions of their arms. Progress involves a shift from faith in God to faith in the handiwork of man. In relation to human security, it is called the doctrine of deterrence. So, peace blossoms on the adequacy of deterrence.
The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is the earliest illustration of this pattern. The Tower was envisaged to deter disunity and dispersion. Till then, God was the source of their unity. Thenceforth, a man-made Tower will be. The Tower is preferred, not because it is an improvement, but because it is man-made.
In relation to peace too there are two paradigms: God-granted peace and man-made peace. Deterrence is the latter’s defining aspect.
For all his sophistication, the modern man, insisted Nietzsche, is a barbarian. Of course, his barbarity expresses itself in the idioms and syntaxes of modernity; but he is a barbarian, all the same. For the barbarian, war was the rule; peace the exception. His gods were warlike gods. Unsurprisingly, the main duty of Yahweh in the Old Testament was to fight and win Israel’s wars. This was not exclusive to the Jews. No war happened in olden days without invoking the favour of God via fervent rituals. Even today God is cherished mostly because he is ‘Almighty’.
The human progress from barbarity to civilization was marked, says Will Durant in Our Oriental Heritage, by a shift from the power of the sword to the power of the word: from faith in violence to faith in the efficacy of persuasion. But the barbaric instinct never dies out of the human psyche. Ask Putin, if you have any doubt, if the international rules-based order should matter, or the barbaric dictum, ‘might is right’. ‘Peace with Strength’ is the advocacy of civilized and sophisticated barbarians.
On the face of it, this motto seems anything but barbaric; especially when propounded by Trump and his miniature versions around the world. It is an offshoot of the idea of deterrence. But, the question to be asked is if peace with strength will accommodate justice as well. Or, is it peace sans justice, as Ukraine is now realizing to its detriment? The rulers of the world are practical men. They cannot be expected, perhaps, to mind such subtle distinctions. So, no one asks Trump, or the leaders of his ilk, for their logic in assuming strength to be the engine of peace.
There is, however, a suggestion in the Bible, as well as in the history of our species, that when peace is combined with justice, absolute faith in power becomes invalid. Consider the face-off between David and Goliath. It is not the strong man, but the weak, that prevails. It is not the mighty, but the weak, in every society that crave for justice. To the powerful and the privileged, equal entitlement to justice for all is an inconvenience. Hence the difference between peace understood spiritually and peace as the world knows it. To the former, peace is inseparable from justice. To the latter, peace can be pursued in difference to justice. Only in that case will might be right. If might is right, justice will remain, as Tolstoy argued, an elite entitlement.
Human progress from the barbaric to the civilized state is an unfinished agenda. So, at heart we still remain barbarians. When a war-mongering demagogue tries to work up popular passions in his favour, it is to our barbaric instincts that he appeals. War propaganda appeals to our cruder instincts and relies wholly on falsehoods. It is all right for the Supreme Court of India to express indignation at the MP minister, Ajay Shah, for expressing his national fervour in barbaric verbal ejaculations, but his party knows that nothing less will do to ravish a mob. War and violence effect a degradation of the human. It activates barbaric bloodthirstiness. How else would killing fellow human beings seem a noble and virtuous achievement?
To Jesus, peace could never be achieved with overpowering strength. Security from external aggression perhaps; but not peace. To him peace is not something to be sought in itself. Peace is the byproduct of a re-orientation of humanity. The world will be at peace only when humankind is reconciled with God, as envisaged in the idea of the Kingdom of God.
Why the Kingdom of God? Well, as Immanuel Kant pointed out, so long as individual nations remain sovereign, and pursue their disparate agendas as if they are a law unto themselves, the world cannot be at peace. Peace within countries was achieved by eradicating wars between the groups within via the rule of law. Likewise, war between nations can be abolished only by establishing a world government, transcending national sovereignty. Kant’s idea is a secular derivative of Jesus’s idea of the Kingdom of God, substituting the authority of God with the authority of law.
A country wherein the fundamental values of freedom, equality, and justice are not available to all its citizens, Kant argued, cannot also live in peace with its neighbours. This may be the reason why neighbouring countries rarely live in peace with each other. The transformation of human nature, via its God-orientation, is the sine qua non for liberating human nature of its affinity to violence and allergy to peace. Jesus wept over the ‘unwillingness of Jerusalem’ to ‘accept matters concerning its peace’. The fundamental problem is not that peace is not available, but that peace is not acceptable. In such a context against whom is this ‘strength’ to be directed for the sake of peace? The answer lies Jesus’s proclamation at the beginning of his ministry-
Repent; for the Kingdom of God is at hand!
