John Gittings
The challenges of nuclear proliferation, conflict and terrorism, poverty and inequality, climate change and the deteriorating environment, are inextricably linked in our current world, and can only be tackled by a broad and unified effort to achieve peace in its fullest sense. Yet the perception of peace is much less vivid in popular imagination than that of war, and the growing body of serious peace studies is less accessible than it should be. Peace is often written off – especially by war historians – as a difficult concept to define, as a dull subject compared to war, or simply as ‘the absence of war’, a mere interval between wars which are claimed to be the driving motor of history. In my new book, The Glorious Art of Peace: From the Iliad to Iraq, I argue to the contrary that from ancient times onwards there has been a rich discourse about the meaning of peace and how to secure it, that there is a wealth of ideas and debate which continues to be relevant, and that The Art of Peace is as complex as the Art of War. Human civilisation could not have developed without long periods of productive peace, which have allowed for the emergence of stable agriculture, the growth of urban society, and the expansion of peaceful trade and intercourse between societies. Peace, as the great humanist thinker Erasmus (1466-1536) put it, is ‘the mother and nurse of all that is good for man’.
In an early chapter I examine a number of historical and literary texts from ancient Greece and China, to show that a great deal was thought and said in these cultures about peace as well as about war. We can discern in Homer’s Iliad, alongside the more familiar themes of rage and war, an alternative vision of the peace denied by war – expressed visually in his remarkable description of the Shield of Achilles. Modern scholarship also shows that attitudes towards peace and war in classical Greece are much more complex than might be inferred from the Thucydidean approach, while critical attitudes on the Greek stage can be identified not only in the ‘Peace’ and other familiar works of Aristophanes, but in several of the surviving plays of the great tragedians. The chronicles of the Spring and Autumn and subsequent Warring States periods of pre-imperial China, with their endless tales of battle and intrigue, might also seem poor material for a peace-oriented study, yet they too reveal a wide range of thought and argument in which rulers and their advisers seriously engaged questions of both morality and expediency in the exercise of power, weighing up the benefits of peace against the advantages of war. In the extract from this chapter which follows below, I explore the way that peace and war were discussed in the main schools of political thought from Kongzi (Confucius) onwards, in a lively debate from which we can still learn today. This debate among China’s early thinkers casts interesting light on the Chinese government’s current claim to pursue a peaceful and harmonious foreign policy based on Confucian principles. It may also help us in setting out some basic principles on how to move from war to peace – particularly in focusing on human justice and welfare -- a task which remains as important today as it was in pre-imperial China. Do the debates over war and peace among China’s early thinkers cast light on contemporary issues, in China and globally, particularly on the preconditions for moving from war to peace? READ MORE
