Emmanuel Onwubiko
1 December 2008
opinion
PEACE and freedom walk together, and peace is, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights", so says former United States President, John F. Kennedy who ironically paid the supreme price when he was assassinated before the expiration of his tenure.
The academic enterprise of doing this piece is aimed at uncovering the possibility of constructing a philosophy of peace and also geared towards a critical analysis of what man views or should view as the normal human condition.
In other words, our focus in this write-up is to attempt a philosophical exposition of the philo-ethical concepts of war and peace with the end-purpose of discovering what is the normal human condition between the above mentioned human conditions, namely war and peace.
Without mincing words, we must remind ourselves that humanity has spent the better part of their existence on earth in unending warfare.
The French revolution and the Napoleonic wars in the nineteenth century, the first and second world wars, in the early twentieth century, the gulf war of our modern time and the many civil wars currently going on or that took place in Yugoslavia (which stopped in 1995), Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia, Uganda, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Srilanka and Cambodia, to mention just a few, are clear attestations to the fact that humanity has always been engaged in ceaseless battles. Some concerned observers and monitors of violence have categorically predicted that so long as man continues to harbour that egocentric quest to actualise his selfish satisfactions at the expense of other people's human and natural rights, then 'war' will always be with us.
This human selfish tendency is tantamount to a return to anarchy, chaos and the state of nature which was described by philosophers as periods of lawlessness.
Thomas Hobbes, one of those finest philosophers that recorded the condition of humanity during the period when members of the human race lived in the state of nature correctly wrote that "it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such war as is of every man against every man.
For war consisteth not in battle only or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the 'will' to contend by battle is sufficiently known and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together; so the nature of war disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace".
The prevalent warring situation in our global village or 'global hall' is a sharp contradiction of the first premise of the above assertion on the condition of the state of nature. Today, men are living under various sovereign powers and even under the common power of the United Nations Organisation. One wonders why humanity has not yet embraced the much desired philosophy of peace. Contemporary writers see the unequal hierarchical structure of the United Nations whereby a hand-picked few made up of five world powers are regarded as veto wielding members of the UN, whereas all others are second class members as the reason which could account for the weakness of the UN.
Milton A. Gonsalves opined that the common philosophical tradition is that peace is the positive reality because it is the good, whereas war is the evil that consists in the absence or negation of this good. Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Gabriel Marcel, Blaise Paschal, among many others, want us to believe, rightly so, that all created beings are made by a creator who is intimately and absolutely 'Good'. In short they want us to know that man was created in the image of God (imago Dei).
Since man is created in the image of God who is absolutely 'good', man is then bound to imitate that which is good and live a peaceful and happily life. This assertion of Christian philosophers reminds us of the self evident truth that man is a being who is continuously searching for peace. That man as self-transcendent should not be viewed as being self-destructive. Man is engaged in a perpetual quest for peace.
Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the most respected medieval-cum-Christian writers wrote that "whosoever gives even moderate attention to human affairs and to our common nature, will recognise that if there is no man who does not wish to be joyful, neither is there any one who does not wish to have peace. For even they who make war desire nothing but victory, desire, that is to say, to attain peace with glory.
For what else is victory than the conquest of those who resist us? And when this is done there is peace. It is therefore with the desire for peace that wars are waged, even by those who take pleasure in exercising their warlike nature in command and battle. And hence it is obvious that peace is the end sought for by war. For every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace, for even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better".
Saint Augustine posited further that; "they do not therefore, wish to have no peace, but only one more to their mind..." (See St. Augustine's City of God, book X, X, chapter 12).
President George Walker Bush (Jnr) who took the United States to war in Iraq in 2003 (that is Gulf War II) with the aim of completing the first Gulf war waged by his father former President George Bush (Snr) never obtained the permission of the United Nations Security Council resolution. The American administration alongside some of the allies in the West, including the United Kingdom, went to war in Iraq to unseat the then Iraqi maximum dictator Saddam Hussein for allegedly amassing weapons of mass destruction.
Five years into that bad war, it turned out that America went to war based on false intelligence. George Tenet the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) then Director admitted in his recent best seller book, "In the Middle of the Storm", that President Bush led U.S. A to war in Iraq based on false intelligence.
What is peace? The good philosopher interrogates. Augustine sees peace in the following perspective: "The peace of the body then consists in the duly proportioned arrangement of the parts. The peace of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites, and that of the rational soul the harmony of knowledge and action. The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature.
Mr. Onwubiko, a human rights activist, writes from Lagos.
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