16 August 2009: Pacem in Terris
Picture this: a rocket flies over the boundary between northern Gaza and Israel. It lands and explodes amid a group of military guards. Oddly enough, huddled on the ground in "crash" position, trembling, they are unscathed. They stand up, smiling, and walk toward the border. From the other side, they hear, "Asalamu aleikum!" Dazed, they reply "Aleichem shalom!"
They come together and break bread. The Hamas soldiers say that the Israelis look more Arab than they do, and all laugh and share a bottle of wine.
Nice vision, Severinagrammatica. Now wake up into the reality of how many missiles are being fired and machine guns shooting even as you type this with tears in your eyes.
Peace is not impossible. Here's how to bring it about, writes one of the most unscientific people in the world:
To combat what I believe is at the root of all evil, the "bad" side of human nature, I have suggested that we evolve. An example of this process has occurred in the last century, according to my daughter, who is a Ph.D. candidate in the social sciences, an ABD.
She said that people evolved in this country to become taller because women, when seeking a mate, prefer tall men. On the basis of this premise, it seems possible that we can evolve quickly in other ways. There is a good chance that if gentle people marry and have children and raise them to be peace-loving, we could evolve toward a gentler culture. But of course there is the outside world, which would militate against this.
If we turned, however, to science, to rout violence from human nature, it is possible to blame the y-chromosome, said to be the source of male violence. With all that is known about genetic alteration, why not study the y-chromosome to find the "root of evil," so to speak? I know that it is possible to treat every cell in the body at once with medication. I fantasize about military weaponry being manufactured to shoot such a cure in place of bullets and bombs, gentling the enemy. We shoot anesthetics into wild animals to put them to sleep so that they can receive medical treatment? I have read stories of temporary truces among adversaries at war as they dined together for an evening.
We resort to pharmaceuticals to cure other ailments--why not the tendency toward violence, the source of warfare since the beginning of time? Men declare war and fight it themselves, or at least relegate the bloody part to male "underlings" a large percentage of the time. Kings no longer fight with their knights. Politicians stay home and hear about the violence going on thousands of miles away, or hundreds of miles away, whatever.
When the Women's Liberation Movement began in the 1960s, I read some literature theorizing an era before civilization as we know it was born, when women controlled things and men were subservient, not that I advocate subservience for any gender. But according to this mythology, peace reigned. No war in the days of the goddess Tiamat.
I know of many gentle and nurturing men. But enough violent ones exist to have made history what it is--one war after another.
A gentling down of male violence would incline politicians everywhere to value diplomacy more, to prioritize peace over their immediate objectives.
I'm not saying that other forces don't propel humans toward violence. But I have written many times that every time I consider tragic hostilities the world over, I find the bad aspect of human nature at the core of things.
And science has advanced enough to create a cure for at least some of our self-destructive tendencies that ruin so many innocent lives when not obliterating them altogether.
I find this a more promising and realistic solution than exporting the entire male persuasion to someplace far away and isolated like Antarctica, as I suggested in a previous blog.
Several years ago, but in the 2000's, I wrote a poem, "Peace," in which, miraculously, bullets turned into flowers. The entire vocabulary associated with war and violence was altered to refer to positives--peaceful antonyms.
Again, though steeped intellectually in the humanities, I put my trust in science and technology, which have invented so much of our modern weaponry, to invent the opposite in a form that will not humiliate or emasculate.
I have been called "tongue in cheek" if not "quixotic" for this modest proposal. What a wonderful contribution to world civilization the benighted pharmaceutical companies would donate by coming up with a drug like "pax" or "hesuchia" or "dulcimen" (drawing on the "dead" classical languages as science and medicine do so often when they invent new phenomena) to cure so much of human misery.
Just a suggestion. Worth a try, no? Shoot roses instead of guns. Give peace a chance. Not absence of war, but peace.
