generalspeaking

Peace In Our Time

The world's great minds turned to ponder the propensity of humankind to turn on its own. Socrates also sought to understand the human emotions and the process by which men undertook to subjugate one another and through that intention slaughtered one another mercilessly. Thousands of years of conjecture and hope and trust that things might change with education and a concerted effort to awaken the universal conscience, leading it to give homage to compassion and support for universal human rights have made little gain.

In the Twentieth Century two great geniuses - one whose transcendental genius lay in his instinctive grasp of the matter and method of the universe, the other in the brilliant grip of understanding the mysteries of the universal mind - exchanged their thoughts, hoping to reach some meaningful conclusion that might lead humankind to a collectively massive effort for peace, finally eschewing violence and warfare forevermore.

Their brief exchange pre-dated World War II. And then those men of peace who so abhorred the vicious destruction of war, understood that there is little that can be done to alter mankind's basic instincts and fundamentally destructive emotions. And they understood too that there is such a thing as a just war. And suddenly, it appeared that there was justice in encouraging a war front to combat the bestiality of a Nazi predator.

On July 30, 1932, Albert Einstein, the ultimate genius of the physical world around us, wrote to Sigmund Freud, the genius of a brave new understanding of human psychosis. "Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?" Einstein proffered what he felt might help turn the tide of everlasting lust for war around. The creation of a highly respected and resourceful international authority. Yet when the League of Nations was initiated, Albert Einstein time and again feared its lack of purpose and refused to join.

Freud did respond to Einstein's brief question, as a fellow pacifist. He agreed with
Einstein that an international court of authority might, if it could succeed, pave the way toward world peace, as long as it was properly attuned to "its investment with adequate executive force". And at the same time he found agreement with Einstein on his observation regarding humankind's instinct for hatred and destruction.

"The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by, unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk. The Bolshevists, too, aspire to do away with human aggressiveness by ensuring the satisfaction of material needs and enforcing equality between man and man. To me this hope seems vain. Meanwhile they busily perfect their armaments, and their hatred of outsiders is not the least of the factors of cohesion among themselves."

Sigmund Freud might have been a bit of a futurist; or else he knew the human mind so well that he was also able to project another thought, that in viewing the future potential, men might turn away from war due to "a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take." We know what Nazi Germany in its fascist dedication to its view of the supremacy of a super-race brought to the world in suffering and mass annihilation of defenceless civilians. We know what the Communist USSR wrought in service to its superior ideology of socialism resulting in huge suffering and yet again mass annihilation of defenceless civilians.

We view now another type of war front, one dedicated to another type of ideology, this one of a fascist religion whose adherents interpret basic tenets as a call to jihad. A religion that seeks utter control of every aspect of human life. One whose fundamentalist lovers imbue it with the pathology of death. One through whose fervid promise fanatical adherents celebrate their love of death; their own, where they may be re-united with their founder in Paradise, serviced by three-score-and-ten virgins as reward for annihilating others unlike themselves in as great numbers as inhumanely possible.

Labels: Conflict, Human Fallibility, Human Relations, Human Rights, Justice

posted by Pieface @ Monday, September 21, 2009