War, Peace, and the Human Soul

In the last 2,000 years, according to historians, we have had a grand total of 100 years of peace. That is, there have only been 100 years scattered among two millennia in which there has not been some kind of armed conflict somewhere in the world.

A classmate of mine today, who has lived through wars in his own country, shared the observation that it is easy to consider war to be something unusual, an enigma, an anomaly, a break from the routine. It is more accurate, he pointed out, to observe peace as the anomaly, the exception rather than the rule. Human history is much more a tapestry of consistent war occasionally interrupted by aberrant outbreaks of peace. So then, it is much more realistic in considering a particular nation not to wonder IF they will have a war but WHEN, how, with whom and why.

This is not, however, because people do not want peace. In fact, a very real part of the problem is that everyone wants peace, they just want it on their own terms. The world does not fail to attain peace and utopia for a lack of trying. In fact, every man who has ever lived has lived in pursuit of utopia. The difficulty is that every man also has a different idea of what that utopia, that peace, would look like and, likewise, how to attain it. Americans want it with liberty and justice for all, Islam wants it with every knee bent to Allah and Kim Jong II wants it with luxury, power and preeminence for himself. Same pursuit; different goals.

Clinton (the former president, not the wanna-be president) was wrong when he said…

“The real differences around the world today are not between Jews and Arabs; Protestants and Catholics; Muslims, Croats, and Serbs. The real differences are between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it.”

It is a strange thing that man should bear both the proclivity for war and the desire for peace in the same soul. As shown above, war is the rule and peace the exception. And yet, even so, man has never submitted to the classical conditioning around him that would adapt his spirit to warfare as a way of life. Rather, there is still something in the soul of man that looks at war and says “this is wrong, this is out of place, this thing should not be.” Both those who abstain from warlike acts and those who engage in them know that they are bad; indeed, those who wage war would not do so unless it was bad! You do not wage war against your enemies because war is GOOD but because war is BAD and you are using a bad thing in an attempt to punish, threaten, subdue or destroy those who stand in the way of your peace on your terms.

Thus we find these two curious things to be so. First, that man recognizes war as an atrocity and a bad thing and that man also desires peace of some kind. And second, that despite this aversion to war and desire for peace, 95% of our most recent world history has seen war of some kind. Something is, it would seem, fundamentally wrong. Perhaps man is broken.