The Art of Peace

"Again, if you go to Foyles you would not find Erasmus’s essay The Education of a Christian Prince , which contains the passage “The Art of Peace”, but you would find several editions of Machiavelli’s The Art of War and The Prince . Erasmus marks the start of a discussion about peace which you can trace onwards from the Renaissance , through the Enlightenment , and up to the present day. In other words, he identifies issues which we can translate into modern terms. Erasmus was very well known in his times. He was able to speak to kings and popes and emperors. He received a handwritten invitation from Henry VIII at one point. He and fellow humanist scholars were engaging in a dialogue over the relative attractions of peace and war to the ruler. It seemed at times a reasonable chance that the differences between the European potentates could be settled by peaceful rather than by warlike means. Translated into modern English, Erasmus’s writings on peace would occupy more than 400 pages – he returns to the subject again and again. He tends to be written off as an idealist, but gives very practical advice. First, he argues that if you stand back and look calmly at a given situation, the cost of war is almost always higher than its benefits to the people, even if the prince gains some territorial advantage. Second, he identifies peaceful arbitration as a way of settling disputes. He says, why don’t you call on wise bishops or other learned people to settle the argument for you rather than going to war? So Erasmus begins an argument which carries on over time. In a way, it illustrates my argument that there is a persistent bias for war over peace. One would have to ask publishers why they haven’t seen the commercial value of Erasmus. War undoubtedly has a fascination, and there’s a rather perverse appeal in the hardheaded, brutal approach to human existence, in the doctrine and art of war, which I think can seduce and has seduced politicians and academics. I am struck by the way in which otherwise level-headed voices have a habit of making very wild assertions about war and peace. Well, Tony Blair talks in existential terms about the neverending struggle against Islamic terrorism, and compares that to the neverending struggle against communism in the past. But I’m thinking more of academic voices, for example the stickleback theory of conflict, which emphasises aggressive elements in human nature at the expense of pacifist elements. Human nature is fundamentally warlike, and the explanation lies in man’s origins in the animal world. But that’s a very crude view of Darwinism, which misunderstands what Darwin said about the growth of civilisation. Darwin fully identified and explained that as humanity developed, the advantages of cooperation began to outweigh the advantages of competition. So it is not unmitigated survival of the fittest. There are also serious academics who tell you that war is sexy and peace is dull. The idea that peace is dull is quite widespread – and also the parallel concept that peace is merely the absence of war. If you want a definition of peace, I would sum it up as follows. First of all, it is being at peace, which is what we mostly are. Most humans, for most of human history, have been at peace not at war. But being at peace is not a passive exercise, because if humans are not at peace for most of the time, human civilisation does not progress. The other area where peace is meaningful is what I would call peace in action – dynamic peace, in other words peace which prevents war. Peace is also a state or activity which seeks to prevent the occurrence of war. This is where you enter the field, opened up by Erasmus, of looking at ways to prevent war from a peaceful starting point. This first involves making an objective assessment of the ultimate costs of war. If an objective assessment had been made of the cost of the Iraq war, then on cost-benefit grounds we should not have gone ahead with it. Second there is arbitration and mediation, which implies some form of supranational mechanism – whether a council of European states, the League of Nations or the UN. The third indispensable aspect of peace is satisfying the material and spiritual needs of people to an extent that they don’t need to go to war. And it’s not enough to be at peace in your own country – you have to try to help your neighbours to be at peace as well. Peace means plenty. The Greek view of peace also implied plenty and prosperity. So in modern times, we are not going to have a world at peace unless we can solve outstanding political issues, and also solve problems of world poverty and inequality . That is called the chariot theory of history – the idea that the invention of the chariot transformed early bronze age society, and so on through the Gatling gun to atomic bombs. To that I would reply that most significant inventions and discoveries are of a peaceful not a military kind. Against the chariot theory of history I would propose the shadoof theory – the shadoof being the discovery in ancient Mesopotamia, at about the same time as the chariot was being invented, that if you have a bucket at the end of a pole which is pivoted on a wooden cradle, you can hoist water from a lower level to an upper level. That was a huge step forward in irrigation and agriculture. I would insist that most technological advances and developments of civilisation have, can and could only take place in conditions of peace rather than war."