PEACE AS A SUBLIME STATE
[image error]
Philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have often extolled the virtues of the spirit of war against the weak and cowardly condition fostered by perpetual peace. Kant went so far as to call war ‘sublime’, and one of the most sublime eulogies of the warlike spirit was uttered by Orson Welles in the famous cuckoo-clock speech in The Third Man. In that film, Welles wrote his character’s own monologue in which he compares the cultural achievements of the war-torn and strife-riddled Renaissance in Italy with the lack of accomplishments born from two centuries of peace in Switzerland. Welles’ argument is that war created Botticelli, Da Vinci and Michelangelo while the best thing that peace has come up with is the cuckoo-clock.
Nevertheless, the comparison is a false one: it is not ’peace’ but the mediocrity created by an emphasis on conservative values and the commercial spirit that makes Switzerland culturally insipid. Switzerland is an economy of clocks, but also of banks. And banks that have made themselves very rich through the wars in other countries.
Yes, the vulgarity of our economic lives in peace could be seen as a spiritual travesty, but that is not the fault of peace. It is consumerism, not peace, that deadens our own spirit with its vulgar want-more will. What is bad in our societies is the lust we have for acquisitions, not our endeavours to live in harmony together. Capitalist harmony is always based on competition which is a war in itself. A nihilistic competitiveness that has made us spiritually and creatively numb, and breeds more depression than exultation. Money inhibits creativity and ends up suffocating it. What we have to learn is how to see the great sublimity in our own human creations. Our power to create must always be more sublime than our will to win by defeating and destroying.
For humanity there can be no greater flaw than our tendency for war and the ease with which internecine conflicts start. War, an instrument for profit and a way of producing and expanding power by maintaining and escalating the capitalist system, has now lost any moral ground that it may once have seemingly possessed. Moral reasons have always been fabricated to justify the needs for wars, and governments will continue to falsify such reasons to dupe the public with flag-waving patriotisms. Without the false-morality, war is impossible in democratic societies.
But, in order for war to disappear, peace has to be elevated to a much higher moral pedestal. It is ‘peace’ that needs to be considered sublime, not war. The first casualty of any declaration of war is peace; the two concepts cannot coexist. If there is a little war somewhere, then peace does not exist.
Contrary to popular belief and a lot of philosophical ranting, peace is not a static state but a dynamic one. For peace to exist it needs to be sublimely creative, and it needs to transcend the false façades of peace created by consumerism and capitalism, which are their own kinds of wars.
Only through peace can purposeful dynamics be nurtured. Only through peace can truly creative progressive incentives, liberated from the distractions of conflicts, properly deal with the world’s most pressing problems – poverty, famine, violence, oppression, the climate emergency, and … war.
