These are tender days for those who wish to be peacemakers amid the savagery in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel and dozens of African countries too accustomed to being forgotten. Who can speak of peace with any credibility without empathizing with the rage and bitterness? But how to empathize without enabling? Is there nothing in play but raw violence ending only with extermination?
I was raised in a military family and predictably entered ROTC at Wake Forest. But then I woke up (I’ll claim it!) and began the process of applying to be a conscientious objector, thinking of Canada if my application was denied by the draft board, as it likely would have been given my family. I pulled #348 in the draft lottery which made the question entirely theoretical, never applied and don’t know to this day what I would have actually done. One never does until one is in the actual moment of decision.
Years later I found myself at the Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemane in bourbon country south of Louisville for a meeting to develop a protocol of just peacemaking to balance the many centuries old protocol about just war. The more appropriate ambassador types at The Carter Center sent me because it sounded more like religion than serious statecraft. I found a spot in the back row until I was informed, I was supposed to be one of the experts to provide some basic principles to guide the discussion. Yikes. (The story of that otherwise dignified event is here.)
The group had giants in the field, so despite me, they identified 10 basic practices to judge whether a government, religious group or non-governmental organization can claim they have exhausted the peacemaking. Only then—after all the peacemaking–is just war theory relevant at all. War can only be considered ethical after the peacemaking.
Despite about sixteen centuries of weirdly meticulous ethics debate about its principles, Just War theory is almost always an ineffectual footnote applied after all the blood and tears has soaked into the soil. How do we know when peacemaking is enough?
This week the International Court said that the state of Israel had plausibly failed to conduct a just war so egregiously that genocide may be underway. Generations of Israelis will have to explain that to their children, a desecration of the memory of the lives so horribly lost on October 7th. Their failure is not my point here. I have a lot to live with, too.
I am am pretty sure the court would find those of us claiming to be peacemakers negligent, too. We are guilty of malpractice, lazy practice and no practice at all as the engines of war were tuned and the lies so necessary for hatred were refined and repeated. We have known better for at least 30 years, from the beginning of Just Peacemaking theory at Merton’s abbey. More than that as he wrote 14 years earlier:
“Finally, we must be reminded of the way we are ourselves tend to operate, the significance of the secret forces that rise up within us and dictate fatal decisions. We must learn to distinguish the free voice of conscience from the irrational compulsions of prejudice and hate. We must be reminded of objective moral standards, and of the wisdom, which goes into every judgment, every choice, every political act that deserves to be called civilized. We cannot think this way, unless we shake off our passive ear responsibility, renounce our fatalistic submission to economic and social forces, and give up the unquestioning belief in machines and processes which characterizes the mass mind. History is ours to make. Above all we must try to recover our freedom, or moral autonomy, or capacity, to control the forces to make for life and death in our society.” (Thomas merton, The Non-violent Altnerative (New York: Farrar, Strais and Giroux, 1980) 78-79.)
The group at his Abbey came up with these guidelines which have become official policy of numerous religious bodies. An academic industry has risen up around them. You can get a PhD in them. But as a generation we have failed to do them with anything like the scale or energy of those seeking death. As Dr. Fred Smith says, we have allowed evil to out-organize us. Guilty.
You can’t say you have sought peace until we:
- 1. Support nonviolent direct action.
- 2. Take independent initiatives to reduce threat.
- 3. Use cooperative conflict resolution.
- 4. Acknowledge responsibility for conflict and injustice and seek repentance and forgiveness.
- 5. Advance democracy, human rights, and religious liberty.
- 6. Foster just and sustainable economic development.
- 7. Work with emerging cooperative forces in the international system.
- 8. Strengthen the United Nations and international efforts for cooperation and human rights.
- 9. Reduce offensive weapons and weapons trade.
- 10. Encourage grassroots peacemaking groups and voluntary associations.
From Just Peacemaking, edited by Glen Stassen (Pilgrim Press, 1998)
No American voter can be proud, measured by these standards.
But it is not only up to the leaders of statecraft to do peace. The politicians and their technicians are trapped unless we the people lead in making peace possible. A brilliant interview of Mahmood Mandani in The Nation provocatively argues that the state itself is built to exclude and that genocide is just an extension of its logic.
Dr. Mandani is not a cynical man, but inconveniently clear-eyed for those of us who think the instruments of state will just do the right thing. We citizens must not give up on the means of peacemaking, including the structures of government. He and Merton warn us that the seeds of the next war are already germinating in us, the people.
We must hurry to do justice and mercy now. Who will build back the ruined hospitals, public health and social services of Gaza? Why would we imagine that it is anyone else’s job than those of us who dare to think we are peacemakers?
