Waging Peace
I do not want the peace which passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
-- Helen Keller
Recently I came across an op-ed article lauding Dwight Eisenhower for having kept the U.S. from bogging down in unwinnable foreign wars during his eight years as president (in marked contrast to some of his successors). I grew up in that period of ostensible peace and prosperity but never felt safe. Perhaps this was because school children in the 1950s routinely practiced ducking their heads under their desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. I was a precocious child who read newspapers and saw newsreels of A-bomb tests. I knew full well that ducking your head under your desk at school offered pitifully little protection against a nuclear blast. My mother, who was not one to mince words just to coddle impressionable young minds, was convinced we were all going to be incinerated. She tried to talk my father into moving the family to New Zealand.
If nothing else, the Cold War should have taught us that the absence of armed conflict is not the same thing as peace. Under most circumstances, no war is preferable to war; however, it would be premature at best to conclude that arming ourselves to the teeth is the best deterrent against aggression. Even more dubious is the notion that you can achieve lasting peace by fighting yet another war. World War I, which was billed as the “war to end all wars,” proved to be merely the prelude to an even bloodier conflict 20 years later. Jesus identified wars and rumors of wars as one of the signs of the coming end times, which has meant we have been in a state of perpetual readiness ever since.
Eisenhower’s presidential memoir was subtitled Waging Peace, which says more perhaps than he intended about the mindset of the Cold War. As a military man, he had seen enough of war not to glory in it, and he appreciated the inherent futility of trying to achieve strategic ends through armed conflict. “War settles nothing,” he said. Yet like many other world leaders before and since, he was trapped into thinking about peace in military terms. At one point he vowed, “We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.” Eventually, such pronouncements become self-fulfilling.
The main reason we fail repeatedly to keep the peace is that we choose the wrong battleground. Apart from the inherent contradiction of fighting for peace, we are always looking outside ourselves for changes that will end strife without addressing the inner conflicts that give rise to the troubled state of the world. The world appears to be a lot bigger than we are, so we might be excused for looking elsewhere. However, the ancient law of correspondence still applies: as within, so without. There is nothing magical about this, since “within” and “without” are really nothing more than looking through the same telescope from either end. The important thing to remember is that the starting point is always from within. When Jesus admonishes us to love our neighbor as ourselves, we don’t wait for our neighbor to make the first move.
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