Peace

Peace Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Peace Read Online Free PDF
Author: Antony Adolf
can both extend past peace practices into the present and prepare youths to deal with future problems in peaceful ways. Universities have been places where peacemakers have converged and emerged when they have not been instruments of bellicose status quos. Peaceful catalytic examples can be drawn from US universities in the 1960s and 1970s and European in the eighteenth century; counter-examples would be early medieval universities in servitude of momentary militant powers. Today’s University for Peace in Costa Rica may not be historically related to the School of Prosperous Peacein Tokugawa Japan, but they share an impulse that, if more widespread, would put the power and influence of intellectuals at the disposal of peacemakers and/or make peacemakers out of intellectuals themselves, as was the case with atomic scientists in the mid twentieth century and the Pugwash Conference to this day. More than for other items of corporeal peace, what constitutes education for peace thus depends as much on how it is done as on if it is done.
    Sanctuarial Peace
    The premise of sanctuarial peace is that without tangible assurances and reason to believe that intentional harm is unlikely to be done to us as individuals or groups, world peace is no less a mirage than the promise of bodily and mental wellbeing. Indeed, breaches of sanctuarial peace often originate in violations of corporeal peace at the level below and result from contraventions of socio-economic peace at the level above. The “minimal” before each item in this level serves to indicate that regardless of longstanding cultural and categorical imperatives aimed at curbing andeliminating intentional harm, it has, does and is likely to continue to occur despite best efforts. Though beyond our scope to explain why this is, what can and has been done about it is not. The use of “harm” instead of “violence” is intended to denote that damage can be done in more ways than physically. Minimalization as a goal for social and collective mechanisms for averting harm, ending it quickly and equitably is thus more probable and plausible than permanent eradication, as history makes painfully clear. Sanctuarial peace is not absolute in the same way as corporeal peace and perhaps cannot be, even if to actualize it we must believe it is.
    Minimal Interpersonal Harm
    Intentional interpersonal harm has been proportionally less prevalent in primate behavior than help, an equation equally applicable to human prehistory and history. Sympathy, mutual aid and social cohesion as evolutionary advantages; Confucius’ passive rule not to do to others what you do not wish for yourself; Jesus’ active rule to do to others as you would have done to you; and Kant’s categorical rule to do only that which could bear being universally done are just three of many exemplary imperatives to prevent interpersonal harm so far proposed, which of course would be pointless to posit if it never happened. Interdependencies like those put forth by capitalists and cooperatives put forth by socialists each served the same purpose: making interpersonal harm unnecessary by meeting individual and social needs. Conflict may or may not be inevitable but using harm to resolve conflicts certainly is not, and doing so creates retaliatory cycles much more difficult to end than start. Interpersonal harm prevention as a discipline is still in its infancy, but as an unevenly studied practice is as old as humanity.
    Minimal Structural Harm
    No social, political or economic system yet implemented has been devoid of structural violence, again redubbed harm to broaden its senses, despite the fact that without those on whom it has been inflicted they could not have existed. The Indian caste system, citizenship in Ancient Greece and Rome, European feudalism and Chinese Fengjian, and industrial societies’ classes show that many such systems have nonetheless survived for
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