Peace as a struggle

   “Shun evil, do what is right, pursue peace, pursue it.” (Psalm 34:15)

 

PEACE AS A STRUGGLE

During the week of 19 to 27 September, peace week will be celebrated in the Netherlands. For a week, we are called upon to reflect on the self-evident nature of peace in our own country. And above all, to realize that in many other places in the world, peace often seems to be no more than a breath that evaporates like ashes in the wind. In some places, peace is just a whisper around the ravages of collapsed buildings and smashed houses.

This year’s theme of this year’s Peace Week is: ‘Peace connects’. Under this motto, activities are organized by all kinds of local initiatives throughout the country. Various festivities are also organized in my own hometown. From my own volunteer work, I am also involved in organizing one of those  peace activities.

As these things are, regular consultations are held for this, both through meetings and through e-mail exchanges. A few weeks ago, a special email came in from one of our co-organizers. In it he wrote the following: ‘The theme that grows in me is peace as the fight with yourself, with the other and with the world. Peace connects, that can be so. But,’ he wondered, ‘doesn’t struggle do the same?’

I was touched by that consideration. I recognized that inner struggle. Peace is a beautiful word, worth striving for as a concept, but do we really understand the word when we talk about it? It may sound rosy and sweet, ‘peace connects’. But in a spinning battle with those who have hurt me – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth – am I not many times more connected to the other in struggle and struggle? What does peace really mean if we don’t understand how the struggle for peace is an ongoing part of ourselves?

In search of an answer to these questions, I came across the book ‘A terrible love of war’, by James Hillman. Hillman (1926 – 2011) was a psychoanalyst in the tradition of Carl Jung, who himself was a former student of Freud. He was study coordinator at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich for more than ten years and thought strongly about Jung’s psychological theory. Hillman was thus the founder of a – now largely extinct – movement within psychology: archetypal psychology.

Hillman’s basic premise was that our inner, psychic life is shaped by our innumerable fantasies and myths. And vice versa, our psyche gives substance to our myths and cultural stories. Central to Hillman’s psychology is imagination and imagination. We are constantly using images and our imagination to understand our interactions with others, with the world.

Hillman’s main thesis was that if we want to understand a certain psychopathology, we must dare to depict the pathology. Our inner life, according to Hillman, is arranged non-linguistically. It finds its order on the basis of mental images in which several things become visible at the same time, interact with each other and form a meaningful whole. If we want to understand why we have fallen into certain mental health problems, we should, according to Hillman, make every effort and try to form an image that fits that mental health problem. That imagination can sometimes be considerably confrontational.

In A Terrible Love of War (published in 2004), Hillman argues that if we are to achieve peace—if we are to cure ourselves of the pathology of war—we must form a true picture of war. We will have to imagine that we are glorifying war, the battlefield, the military hierarchical culture and the glorious tragedy of the fallen themselves. We will have to imagine that it is we ourselves who passionately raise the flag of war. To be able to talk about peace, according to Hillman, we must first have the courage to honestly imagine our own inner struggles.

All sociological, historical, biological and behavioural psychological studies of aggression, violence and mass hysteria fall short in their imagination, according to Hillman. They fail to grasp exhaustively the causes of war, because they are always about ‘the other’. According to Hillman, this is mainly due to the fact that all these disciplines in their attempts to understand war lack one entrance: they look for causes for war outside the war itself. But the cause of war, according to Hillman, is “in” the phenomenon of war itself. Something within war is strongly connected to our own human hearts.

The lack of insight, according to Hillman, lies mainly in the difference between a descriptive science and sincerely trying to understand it from within. The latter is an understanding that takes place through the imagination. It is for this reason that Hillman fights tooth and nail against statements such as those of Susan Sontag, who wrote in the New Yorker in 2002 at the end of her essay ‘Looking at war’ :  “We really can’t imagine what it was like. We can’t imagine how terrible, how terrifying war is – and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand it, can’t imagine it.”

On the one hand, statements such as Sontag’s are quite conceivable. Because if you haven’t experienced war yourself, how can you imagine it? In fact, doesn’t every imaginary idea – of the destruction of war do injustice to the reality of its horrors? Because you are in fact fantasizing with the use of your imagination? And in doing so, also reduces the horrible reality of senseless deaths, destroyed bodies and destroyed landscapes to a kind of fantasy?

But Hillman protests vehemently against that. According to him, not imagining yourself, not empathizing, is unacceptable. The devastation of wars, Hillman argues, is in fact the end result of an unimaginative bureaucratic imitation of cold hierarchy and even colder numbers. Lack of imagination is at the root of war and strife, according to Hillman. So, according to Hillman, if we want to strive for peace, we will have to try to understand the state of war by imagining it.

 

 

To do so, we must dare to imagine the horrors of battle. Let’s really imagine how the horrific becomes normal, Hilman suggests. Not to normalize it, but to be able to hold on to its horror itself. Worse, let’s imagine that somewhere within us, hidden deep and far away, there is a dark longing for struggle.

Instinctively, our first reaction will be that of denial. “No one loves war, and certainly not me!” we would like to exclaim. That’s understandable. We don’t like to look at our shadow sides, we don’t like to acknowledge that we have them. And of course, it’s also much easier and more straightforward to talk about peace. After all, peace is a beautiful word, a word that everyone likes to associate with: the sound is sweet and soft, tender and pleasant. It is nice to be able to say that you are committed to peace. But if you dare to look inside yourself very honestly, isn’t it possible that you too see a warpath somewhere deep inside?

You may see a path of competition that you fought your way through on your way to the position you wanted to be in. You may see the silhouettes of friends that you had to leave behind because you developed in a different direction. Or do you see a slippery road that glistens soggy red, because all your life you have had to cut your own needs and wants from yourself in self-sacrifice.

To acknowledge that each of us knows small, dark corners where something of strife, of war, is brewing, that is scary. But somewhere in the New Testament it is written: “Where does all this strife, where do all these conflicts arise from among you? Is it not from the passions that fight within you?” (James 4:1). In other words, the causes of war and strife are often not external at all. The struggle is not outside of ourselves. War lives in us. Only when we dare to acknowledge this do we have a real chance of peace, says Hillman.

One of the most interesting connections Hillman then makes is that between war and speed. According to Hillman, you will not hear a general suggesting to his soldiers to act slowly and prudently. A soldier is a bad diplomat. Catching the enemy off guard is the motto of war. Whoever reacts the fastest is the victor. Even in the weaponry of war you can see the importance of speed: the highest rates of fire are important selling characteristics for the arms industry. War has everything to do with speed and haste.

For this reason, Hillman quotes Aldous Huxley, who once said that modern times have been able to add only one true sin to the seven deadly sins. And that’s the sin of haste. In fact, it is not war itself that needs a medicine, Hillman points out. It’s not necessarily the inner struggle that we need to heal. It is the haste for which we need to find a cure.

The effect and consequences of speed are imaginable. We can all imagine how, in just a hair-splitting moment, we misinterpret a comment from a colleague and how the blood rises to our faces and we are ready to bite back, mercilessly bring the other person down. Or how rude behaviour of a fellow road user tenses our muscles in a fraction of a second, opens up all channels, makes the heart beat faster, lets the adrenaline run  flow. How tight our foot hangs above the accelerator.

From one moment to the next, we are ready to strike. And if we don’t press the brakes of all emotions, we will be in a state of war in a matter of seconds. A small, personal war, to be sure, but it certainly is a struggle. What, then, is the antidote to the haste of that rushing moment of war, according to Hillman? That is the deliberate delay.

Hillman strongly connects the delay with the experience and creation of art. Art in the sense of artistic art, but also in the sense of doing science, study and the art of having a real, intimate conversation, of writing letters and diaries. All of these are expressions of mind that have a delaying effect. They cannot be carried out in a hurry. You can’t go to war with a paintbrush or a book in your hand. 

Personally, I recognize the delay as a medicine for the hasty emotions strongly in the practice of meditation. Anyone who has ever been concerned with sitting quietly on the cushion, focusing attention on the breath, will probably recognize how strong the inner struggle can be with thoughts flying in all directions. It is precisely in meditation that I have experienced how I, as a human being, am accustomed – perhaps even almost addicted – to speed and haste. How quickly my judgement takes place. How hastily I am ready to strike, eager to defend myself.

Mindfulness, the practice in attentive awareness, I could therefore describe well in essence, not as an exercise in attention, but pre-eminently as an exercise in slowing down. But that delay is still a struggle for me. The practice in mindfulness is a disciplining exercise for me. If you want to sit quietly still, I have experienced, you sometimes have to force yourself to be quiet. And the truth is that in my attempts to come to inner peace, I struggle a lot. In order to achieve peace, I think people often have to struggle with themselves. 

The motto ‘peace connects’ may be a wonderful, almost self-evident motto for the peace week. But we only really connect when we consciously slow down. When we dare to take the time to have an intimate conversation with each other about our own struggle with that delay. If we dare to expose our own struggles. Only then does peace cease to be a hollow echo. Only then are we beyond imagination .

And maybe peace will become a reality…

(This blog was previously published on platform for ideological thought www.safon.nl)