The Nature of Peace

The Nature of Peace

Sarah Tennant

Can humans ever be in total peace? If humans are constantly in conflict within themselves, each other and the environment, how then, can there ever be a peaceful civilization? To achieve peace, you'd have to eliminate all instincts, desires and passions. All free will, original thought and the want to hold onto your possessions and the ones you love would have to also be abandoned. Peace is an ideal, conflict is reality. Peace can be defined as the absence of hostility or enmity. Alternately, a definition of conflict is the state of opposition, disagreement, or incompatibility between two or more people. The following critical essay will deconstruct three separate statements, establish how they might be connected and draw conclusions based on their philosophical validity.

Statement one calls on the notion that humans are only ever happy when they are immersed in peaceful conflict. The human being is an instinctive animal. We are designed to survive conflict and to inflict injuries on others. Given that we are designed for conflict, we in turn, crave it. This is where sociable school debates, sport games and computer games come in. These so called friendly games, which are orientated on dominating, crushing and persecuting, fulfill our natural biological and emotional instincts. Whilst involved in these competitions our emotions, including some of the most distinctive, such as wrath and vengeance, drive us to attack and dominate the opposition. In return for this conflict, our bodies then reward us with innate, powerful drugs such as adrenaline. Why then, if conflict was so unnatural and rationally undesired by many, would the human body reward itself with feel good drugs?

One could say that peace could only really come from unified thought, and with unified thought there would be complete equality. Could you sacrifice your instinctive emotions for peace? As humans and as individuals, we are ordained to have unique views which are sure to generate conflict. If everybody was identical then we wouldn't have the aptitude to decide, to reason, we would just discern and accept. With no freedom of speech or sole thought, we wouldn't have emotions. Therefore without the capability to enjoy, it would be impossible to enjoy peace. Thus we need to have conflict in our lives for us to be able to feel what it is like to take pleasure in life. The path to true happiness is indeed conflict in peace. With the use of small competitions such as school debates in our society, they alleviate the need for major conflict yet still satisfy the typical, instinctual drive for conflict.

Humans can only ever be at peace with spiritual contentment, which denies conflict and embraces peace, which can only be found through love and God. This is the concept that statement two would have you believe. This statement has much to do with Christian religion unlike the previous statement. Human beings are spiritual creatures. We strive to believe in higher powers for answers for unexplainable incidents. We need someone to blame when something goes wrong, or something to have faith in when we need support. The power of a religion comes from the Ð''shield' it is able to put up around its dogmatic answers to ultimate questions, protecting such answers from modification. "Can there ever be peace on earth?" "Humans can only be at peace if the individual is spiritually content." There is a question and a religion's answer to the question. However it doesn't give much of a complete answer to whether there can ever be total peace. This is why even religions can't engage in absolute peace with one another. Religions are motivated by an aspiration to create peace; however when religions believe that if others are wrong, they must protect what is right. During the infamous crusades, European Christians in the 11th to 13th centuries made several military expeditions to retake areas captured by Muslim forces. This resulted in much major conflict in religious views and death. Does that sound like religion offers peace, an absence of hostility, as a real solution? However much they strive to be in peace, religions will always be in constant conflict with each other unless there is unified thought, as previously mentioned. To achieve united thought, there would also be conflict, as to whose religion should be what everyone