What is peace?
This is a question a few hundred students and attendees were not led to ask during Nobel Peace Prize winner and former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias Sanchez’s speech “Human security in the 21st century” last week.
“I know that one day the goodness of humanity will prevail,” said Sanchez at the end of his speech. “We have a voice and a vote, so we can make changes. Peace can seem like a dream, but it’s a dream worth having.”
Walking home afterward, a small group of us admitted we actually were not fully comfortable with the premise of this inspirational figure’s speech.
Cutting the world’s military spending by “just” 25 percent, apparently could buy every child in the developing world a laptop. The salary of a single soldier could fund a single English teacher. These statistics at face value point at the warped priorities of our system, in which war prevails over the well-being of people.
However, if we stop for a moment to consider these statements beyond face value they are not only infeasible, but do not make sense for the lives of people globally. A laptop is probably one of the biggest participants in the Western, industrialized rat race. Without causing any rise in net happiness, they are incredibly useful within the system we exist in — a Western system driven by Western priorities and ideals.
Added to this, if every child in the developing world had a laptop, the electronic waste from this technological invasion would exponentially destroy our natural environment. We may not be around much longer to play World of Warcraft or type out documents that were once culturally evolved and valued handwriting.
Replacing soldiers with English teachers also seems incredibly ideal until the concept of English as the savior to the “underdeveloped” world — a method for achieving “peace” — is considered.
War is undoubtedly an industry. It employs people, it makes money, it is a form of trade and a construct of human and social relations. Sadly, it can even be a source of entertainment. It is tragic, and is not something that ideally would exist at all. But without sounding like a complete pessimist, which I am not, humanity does not seem to ever exist without forces we consider to be “good” and “bad.” Pleasure does not exist without knowledge of pain. Perhaps peace does not exist without the existence of its counterpart.
And then we come back to what the word actually means anyway. Peace, the “cessation of or freedom from any strife or dissension,” is surely not the absence of physical war. Humans have developed further than this, in spiritual and cognitive understanding.
Poverty and pain are no more prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa than they are here. They just exist in different forms. For people who are depressed, chronically stressed or lonely, no matter how much food they have access to, inner peace may be a long way away. It’s important to remember to keep in mind different ways of prioritizing our existence.
“To plant a seed is the maximum act of faith,” Sanchez said. This topic is far too vast to discuss in a column. But perhaps, more than a simple call to fix the surface problems of the world, seeds will also have been planted at the speech. Perhaps in the end we will advocate for the “cessation of … strife” that may be able to transform not just a distant impoverished nation but our own lives here and now.