Theory and Practice, Ideal and Real, War and Peace
If one group of people chants peace, peace, while another prepares for, and makes, war — without justice rather than profit being its central motivation and the arbiter of its outcomes — there’s little chance of mutual understanding. The peaceables will think the warlikes lack “moral” sense, the warlikes will think the peaceables lack “common” sense, each side will seem senseless to the other — and the wheel will continue to turn.
What I would like to see — to foster — is deliberation, debate, discourse between these two camps, the idealists and the realists (and I use those terms without their technical senses as terms of art), those who would seek peace and those who would protect them from violence.
Because humanity is half-angelic, half-bestial, and the question is how the angelic can best deploy against the bestial. Or as Naji has it, against Savagery.
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There are two distinct scenarions that I try to bear in mind, in one of which an archipelago of islands is seen in a seascape, while the other shows a number of lakes in a lanscape of mountains, hills and valleys.
The only difference between them, as I envision them, is the water level.
Raise the water level, and the lakes join to become a sea in which the isolated remaining hill and mountain tops have become islands — lower the water level, and the islands become the hills and mountain tops of a landscape, with the sea now diminished to a congeries of lakes and pools in its valleys.
The quest, here, by analogy, is for optimal levels of protective violence to obtain and sustain a widespread and liveable landscape of peace.
Your thoughts?
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Image sources:
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Cheryl Rofer:
January 27th, 2015 at 3:38 am
All right, Charles, you’ve trolled me successfully! I’m listening to “Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream”, one of my favorites. I see the men signing the paper saying they’ll never make war again and making thousands of copies.
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Your request looks to me like a variant on the dichotomy I was trying to muse on when I was verbally assaulted in another thread. So we’ll try your formulation. For this one, it seems to me that you may have made dialog impossible already with too strong a dichotomy. Maybe that was my problem too. I think most of us are somewhere on a spectrum between peace and war as objectives. The question is when to emphasize which.
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The images of “protective violence” and “strong men” imply that the violent are protecting the fragile flowers of peace. Also a bit on the masculine side, although I would not make that a major part of the discussion unless it comes in from someone else. I do think you’ve given a bit more credit to violence than to peacemaking, which I think needs more attention.
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Optimum levels – ah, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get there! So easy to tip to one side or the other. I like what you said here:
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And now Joanie is singing about having God on one’s side. “To hate them and fear them, to run and to hide.” So I’ll stop here.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 27th, 2015 at 3:40 am
If God is on our side, he’ll stop the next war.
Grurray:
January 27th, 2015 at 4:39 pm
I would propose that, while God is undoubtedly on all our sides, he’s letting things play out, perhaps more than we’d like, letting us figure out for ourselves how to “deploy” those optimum levels, hopefully intervening occasionally where it would be best (which, darn the luck, always seems to be where we’re not expecting it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKlmc8HpkI4
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“I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculature, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.”
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And then their children will in turn study war and politics to defend their parents creation, and then the cycle repeats. Is that the optimum balance?
Grurray:
January 27th, 2015 at 4:55 pm
Then again, maybe it’s inner peace we’re after, and once we all get our own selves straightened out then we can tackle the outer peace, and not anytime sooner than that.
J.ScottShipman:
January 27th, 2015 at 7:40 pm
We live in a world governed by the aggressive use of force. Sitting at the top of the food chain, as it were, we’ve mostly been able to keep the barbarians off of our shores, but they’re still there (often in the name of “God”).
Charles Cameron:
January 27th, 2015 at 8:13 pm
Cheryl:
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I try to see things two ways at least, one of them sub specie aeternitatis. In that mode, as Plotinus says:
or as Rumi suggests:
— all of which, in my view, opens me to the human tragedy, rather than the reverse. I aspire and trust to be, as they say, of the lovers of Love, and thus also, of the peacemakers of Peace.
Charles Cameron:
January 27th, 2015 at 8:20 pm
Grurray:
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Yes, on “letting things playu out” — and yes again, on “maybe it’s inner peace we’re after”.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 2:32 am
Hi Charles –
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I think I’m not completely following you. I’ll just throw in Jung’s shadow side here that perhaps war and peace are two sides of the same thing, which I think is one of the things your Rumi quote is pointing to. And then of course there’s Krishna and Arjuna.
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I wonder, though, if those are the right categories, if war isn’t an extreme that we could live without and have the shadow take on other forms. Certainly life eventually offers up death without any assistance.
Charles Cameron:
January 28th, 2015 at 5:12 am
Cheryl:
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There’s apparently a scene in American sniper when the father tells his son, the young Chris Kyle:
That’s an interesting and up-to-the-minute version of the Grenier / Adams point, I think.
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I don’t claim it’s true or false, just that it’s a voice that should be heard from the “warlikes” side of the table, a consideration that my friends on the “peaceables” side should hear and take seriously.
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I’m trying to help each “side” hear the other.
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As to the shadow taking on other forms — yes indeed.
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I don’t talk about it a whole lot, but one of my interests is the way in which high risk sports could serve some of the more beneficial functions that war provides more or less as side effects — I think I’ve written about that in the context of the origins of lacrosse, but I guess that’s one of the posts that got infected & lost in our recent move.
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But even if we had “war games” that substituted for saome of the things war does, we’d still have the question of how to cope with people who wish to aggress and are fully capable of it, both in our own society and in others around the globe.
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If I can get to it, Ill have a post coming up about Sapolsky’s paper about baboon behavior, A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission, and perhaps Elizabeth Sahtouris’s comments about the emergence of butterflies from “imaginal cells”.
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There are some hints in both — but I probably need to do more critical thinkinbg about them before letting loose!
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 6:14 am
Charles:
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I think war may be necessary at some times. But I think the present has an overabundance.
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I appreciate what you’re doing, and I get that some (the strong, the sheepdogs) think that they are protecting the rest of us. But they may also be making the world more dangerous and doing the opposite of protecting. Or perhaps the peacemakers are making the world safe enough that the more warlike think that war becomes easy and okay – we are making the world safe for war in the same way that vaccination removes the deaths and misery I can recall from polio so that younger people think that the greater risk is the minuscule one from vaccination.
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That strong protector metaphor – I’ll be honest – just gets my back up, because it makes the rest of us into sheep or feeble females who are too stupid or weak to protect ourselves. So it’s not something to be used to help me hear whatever it is that’s motivating them. They want violence and to put me down too. John Schindler, for one example, is quite explicit that women should shut up, be protected, and be baby machines. It makes him feel good, I guess. I would hope that there are other things that can make people feel good.
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We see a rise in high-risk sports – football, the recent climb of El Capitan – as, arguably, we are becoming less warlike (Pinker, for example). So there may be something there.
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Sometimes being strong means shutting up and letting other people talk (minimally) or take their own path. That can be harder than punching someone out.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 1:26 pm
How about if the warlike are janitors in the great building of life, keeping it free of cockroaches and other undesirable detritus so that the rest of us can do the important things like science and poetry and history and art? See what I did there?
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 2:10 pm
Seems to me we need to come up with a metaphor that respects everyone.
carl:
January 28th, 2015 at 2:44 pm
It seems to me that all are saying about the same thing, you have to know when to fight and when not to fight. An addition that must be added is that you have to know HOW and have the wherewithal to fight if and when the time comes. If you don’t have that the ability to know when to fight avails you nothing.
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The problem is sometimes people, on maybe both sides of the question, mix up knowing how and having the ability to fight with an over eagerness to fight. Just because he practices with the sword doesn’t mean he wants to get to whacking over nothing and just because you are really good with that thing doesn’t mean that everything needs to be whacked. But when the time comes the sword had better be there along with the skill to use it.
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Somebody or other said (I forget who) that this kind of debate is perhaps peculiar to our modern safe societies. We can get along for a good while without ever being threatened personally by violence and so forget that it is out there and must be fended off sometimes with violence. In times and places past, say republican Rome and classical Greece for example, war was never very far away and everybody knew it personally and recognized the need to be prepared to wage it, personally. Thank God we aren’t like that anymore but our circumstances make it easy to forget that it is out there, which could hurt us at times.
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Cheryl, I don’t think there is anything wrong with the sheepdog metaphor if you look at it from the prospective of the individual. It is a hard thing to go across an open field to try to knock out that gun and if the guy who has to do that can think of himself as a protector it will make it easier for him.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 5:12 pm
It will also make it easier for him to knock me around, stupid sheep.
carl:
January 28th, 2015 at 7:25 pm
No, I don’t think so. A protector protects. If the protector decides to agress, no more status as a protector and no more honor that comes with that status. Or if you want to keep going with the metaphor, if the sheepdog turns on the sheep you shoot him.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 8:10 pm
Carl –
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You seem to be arguing that these brave defenders must be motivated toward their job, whereas no motivation toward peace is necessary. Charles’s arguments are a bit different and, I think, imply that some are inclined toward that kind of violence.
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Indeed, if people must be motivated to violence by being told that it makes them superior to the sheep, then perhaps the problem is that we believe that violence does some good and there is value in motivating people to it. In short, are people inherently peaceful or warlike? I suspect that there is a mixture of both, depending on a great many individual traits. We must all live together. Metaphors that make one superior to the others damage that ability.
carl:
January 28th, 2015 at 9:34 pm
Cheryl:
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It takes a lot to get up out of a nice safe hole and move toward a group of people who are intent on tearing your little pink soft body to pieces with bits of hot metal, or to stay in a place when those same people are moving toward you intending to do the same. So yes, a lot of motivation is needed and a self image of the protector can help somebody stay in the fight when every animal instinct says ‘run away, run away.’
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At the same time, since we are dealing almost exclusively with young men, a motivation toward peace is needed. You give young men weapons and tell them to go do violence you are dealing with something that can get out of hand pretty easily. I think something is needed to help keep them in check and saying that acting as a protector is honorable and they will be dishonored if they don’t act so helps.
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I don’t know if people are inherently peaceful or warlike. They are inherently people and sometimes those people have to go places that are dangerous and need help to do so and sometimes have to restrain themselves and need help to do so.
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So I don’t see anything wrong with people whose job means going into harms way thinking of themselves that way, as long as they take the metaphor all the way in that a protector protects, always and if he doesn’t he is dishonored. To keep going with the metaphor (this fool treading confidently perhaps) the sheepdog has no purpose and his life no meaning if it weren’t for the sheep. The survival of the sheep is the main thing and the sheepdog only a tool, an expendable tool, to further that goal.
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(I must emphasize that I have zero military experience and my opinions are based upon reading only.)
morgan:
January 28th, 2015 at 9:53 pm
Cheryl, don’t know whether this is relevant or not Re; sheepdogs “knocking us around,” but I grew up in an area that had a lot of Basque sheep owners and it was amazing to see a shhepdog at work. However, if a sheepdog bites a sheep and tastes blood, then it is killed as it will turn into a predator. A couple of my classmate in grade and high school came from these Basque-originated families and they told me of this fact, which was common knowledge in my neck of the woods.
Charles Cameron:
January 28th, 2015 at 9:57 pm
I’m having trouble keeping up with this conversation, fine though it is, by force of sheer volume — but I’d like to add a couple of new characters into our bestiary: black sheep, and wolves.
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I’d also like to ask whether Cheryl’s cockroaches that the janitors clean out might, at least in some people’s minds, include the Taliban, street gangs, etc — ie human cockroaches? Because IMO that’s a dangerous place to go. Sheep, not so much.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 10:53 pm
Okay, so a sheepdog will be killed if it turns into a predator. But if the armies are the sheepdogs, then who will kill them if they turn bad? Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? The constant question.
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That’s only one problem with that metaphor. I repeat, I AM NOT A SHEEP. I don’t care what it does for someone else’s ego to think that. Although I have objected several times and suggested in a couple of ways that working metaphors in the conversation Charles wants must be respectful of everyone nobody seems to have heard that THAT IS NOT THE CASE FOR THE SHEEPDOG METAPHOR.
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Additionally, I am being exhorted to sympathize with the warlike types when WHAT I AM SAYING IS NOT EVEN BEING HEARD. This is par for the course for women, but it doesn’t augur well for Charles’s objectives of a dialog.
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My point, Charles, with the janitor-cockroach metaphor was to put a higher value on the peaceful types and downgrade the watchers a bit. Yes, I would include all sorts of “bad guys” as the cockroaches.
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How about thinking of armies and such in analogy to policing? The way policing is supposed to be done, that is: protecting the law-abiding (not killing them out of fear as we are seeing in far too many cases lately) and dealing with the lawbreakers in appropriate ways, which may include force but not necessarily.
carl:
January 28th, 2015 at 11:10 pm
Cheryl:
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Other armies, to include irregular armies, will kill them, hopefully. If not the people suffer. The trick is to make sure the values that motivate that army militate against predation.
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Armies as a type of police is fine. Both are protectors who are dishonored if they don’t protect. But both it is very important to note must use lethal violence or the threat of it at times to protect and that sets them apart.
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If you object to the sheepdog metaphor that is fine. I can see why you feel that way. At the same time, I can see how it helps guys like Mr. Kyle do their jobs properly and if it helps him do that, fine with me too.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 28th, 2015 at 11:22 pm
So we can count on the Russian army to deal with ours if it gets out of hand? I don’t think so. And I’m outa this conversation unless Charles or someone else comes up with something better.
larrydunbar:
January 29th, 2015 at 1:37 am
Armies as a type of police is not fine, it is a matter of economics.
Police are inside the economic system–armies are outside the economic system. Police are there to uphold the scales of justice of the society made up of many–armies are there to control resources, human and other kind, on both sides of the scales, for one society.
carl:
January 29th, 2015 at 1:49 am
Police protect the weak or should. Good armies protect the weak or should. Seems similar.
Charles Cameron:
January 29th, 2015 at 3:14 am
Aha: “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, “other sheep” (ie sheep in other flocks) — my needed bestiary keep expanding.
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I think part of the verbal problem here may come from “sheep” being a term that brings with it connotations that aren’t strictly intended in the metaphor — sheep as “sheeple” easily pushed around, when for the metaphor’s sake it just means “those not in the protective services, who are supposed to be protected.” I’m a poet and game designer, and in the metaphor’s terms, a sheep. Or you might say, someone who chooses to “study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine”.
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Earlier on, Cheryl wrote:
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The images of “protective violence” and “strong men” imply that the violent are protecting the fragile flowers of peace.
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As I read the “flowers” metaphor, I don’t think the flowers are necessarily fragile, I count myself among them — and I would hope I’m the sort of flower that would find a way up through cracks in the paving stones of war, i that’s where I found myself. So a flower, yes — but a human flower that is willing to speak truth to power, that being to my mind a powerful form of strength.
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I’m not sure, Cheryl, short of a Rogerian attempt to express your views back to you repeatedly until you are satisfied that I have understood you, whether you will feel heard by me at this point — but I surely hope so, at least a little better than before.
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More generally, if this conversation brings me even a little closer to understanding how to have such a conversation while avoiding a few more of the early pitfalls, it will have made progress within the far greater, ongoing, bridge-building discourse that I hear, taking a vast variety of forms, all around me — and no doubt, far from me and in blissful ignorance of me, too.
Cheryl Rofer:
January 29th, 2015 at 3:59 am
Charles, I have no problem conversing with you. Others on this thread seem to have been talking exclusively to themselves, however.
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And yes, after my irritation simmered down, I figured that this thread might help you figure out some things about how a bridge-building discourse might be carried out (or on), although I can come up with many, many thoughts on that subject.
Grurray:
January 29th, 2015 at 2:39 pm
The police/army comparison is interesting. I think they are alike in some ways.
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The purpose of police is to enforce law and maintain order. The purpose of an army is to kill people and seize territory to satisfy political aims.
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Protecting the weak can be a result if it’s aligned with the particular laws or policies they happen to be following. One would hope that the laws and directives would be in the best interests of citizens, but we seem to often get in trouble when we mandate the police and armies mission is to rescue us.
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And I’m not talking about paramedics or pararescue. I’m glad they do they’re job, and maybe they have to be militarized to accomplish it in tough neighborhoods.
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However, it’s when we start to get into institutional intervention that we get in trouble. Then we arrive at debacles like overthrowing governments with no care about the ramifications, or we end up killing some idiot just for selling cigarettes on the street corner. Taking sledgehammers to brass tacks and such.
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In that case I think Cheryl has a point about the strong protector.
Charles Cameron:
January 29th, 2015 at 5:22 pm
Cheryl:
If you would like to write a guest post, I’d be happy to format & post it for you.
carl:
January 29th, 2015 at 11:30 pm
Parts of this exchange are a genuine puzzlement to me. Why should how somebody thinks of himself vs. others be objectionable if that self-image helps the guy do his job properly? It seems a bit unreasonable to ask that a guy who goes into harms way to change the way he views those he goes into harms way for because they are miffed with that view. He should be permitted to think what he wants as long as his actions are proper. To think less of his professional performance because of this seems to me to be equating that performance in importance with his sentiments that have nothing at all to do with battle. If an all-star hitter had .350 seasons year in and year out but thought the fans were clueless twits those fans would confirm his opinion of them if they demanded he be traded because of that.
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The other thing that puzzles me is the view of the word ‘sheep’. I get Charles’ point but as he explains that word is really beside the point of the metaphor. If we all lived in the country that would probably be more apparent as Morgan suggested. I don’t live in the country either but what comes to my mind when the sheepdog and the wolf is mentioned is the Warner Bros. cartoons about Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf. Sam thumped Ralph repeatedly and the sheep weren’t mentioned or commented upon at all and certainly weren’t thought of as lesser beings. They were just there and the battle went on around them and for them when Sam had to get one back. If they had staged a demonstration carrying signs that said “Sam doesn’t respect sheep!” that may have puzzled him.
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The other thing that seem important to me is one of the reasons protectors protect in police in military jobs is they like the action. They want to be the hunters and not the hunted. We’d all be lying if we didn’t acknowledge that. To somebody who wants to be a hunter images of a janitor just don’t cut it. It helps to think of oneself as more than just a broom pusher cleaning up the icky stuff when out on patrol at 2:00 am 40 miles from any backup. When you get back to the office yeah then you can gripe about how you just clean up but when you are alone out there you had better figure you are the hunter or you might not go poking around looking for the icky stuff that might try and do you harm.
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A puzzlement it is.
Charles Cameron:
January 30th, 2015 at 2:43 am
Hello Cheryl, Carl and all:
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I know I’ve learned a thing or two, and most of all perhaps how rich in emotions the distance I am hoping to bridge is — something that is evident if nothing else from the fact that we’re now at comment #30, when my posts frequently garner no comments at all.
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I’d also like to say that we’ve been engaged, here, where many, I suspect — both “peaceable” and “warlike”, and I really do need two better terms — would have simply avoided a topic so deeply fraught.
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I thank you all: it may be time to turn to other topics.
larrydunbar:
January 30th, 2015 at 6:43 pm
I think this post is one of my, if not the, all-time favorites.
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Maybe it is the bridge quote at the start and the water level at the end that I like so much.
I suppose man wouldn’t have had to learn how to build a bridge, if the water level could have been controlled or the world was more flat.
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Then, of course, where and who would we be without physics? Lost poets?
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And how would the poets know they were lost, unless we had the bridge (and ship), dam builders, along with the mountain movers, come into being to show them just how lost they were?
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I mean your last analogy was a perfect double-quote to the cantilever, if you think of floats tied to each end and center (what? to hold back the rising tide of humanity coming?) of the bridge instead of rocks. In that case, as the water level raised, more weight would have been push towards the men’s arms, which, considering climate change, its what’s, more or less, going to happen.
Grurray:
January 30th, 2015 at 9:15 pm
Speaking of cantilevers, saw this image earlier in the week
pic.twitter.com/c719ZBTGiG
of a balancing act during the Indian military parade Obama was watching with Modi during his state visit.
Another example of theory and practice in tenuous balance.
Charles Cameron:
January 31st, 2015 at 5:24 am
Thanks, Larry.
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I’m glad you liked the archipelago / lakes model, it’s one I’m fond of.
Charles Cameron:
January 31st, 2015 at 5:39 am
Hi Grurray:
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I knew I’d seen something like your image before, and a little hunting tracked down a video of the parade, and allowed me to screencap the image I recalled, as well as a variant on yours.
As you see, I have made the version of your image, representing India the alert military power, into the upper panel, and mine of India the multi-faith nation the the lower panel, in this DoubleQuote:
I have to say, though — there were a lot more military displays than displays of religious amity in the two hour long procession as a whole…
Charles Cameron:
January 31st, 2015 at 5:40 am
One of our readers kindly offered the following alternative metaphor by email, giving me permission to quote as I saw fit:
My thanks..