Do you like audio books? I do. What about peace, do you like that? I'm referring to peace here as the absence of war. I'm not intending to challenge everyone's favorite aphorism that -- chant it with me -- "Peace Is More Than the Absence of War." I'm just referring to that thing, whatever it is, that includes the absence of war plus some other stuff.
If you search for "Peace" on mega-audio-book-supplier Audible (or at least if I do -- perhaps everyone's search results are unique, but I would think mine would be more likely than average to find a book about peace) you don't find any books about peace as defined above. The vast, vast majority of the books you find are about inner peace. They are not about getting your government to stop killing people on an industrial scale, but about getting your own mind to relax about how awful things are in the world. A few are about "financial peace" which, I confess, I had never heard of, but which seems to consist of getting your mind to relax about how much money you have. And a few are fiction, but fiction not apparently related in any way to getting your government to stop mass-murdering people or threatening overnight genocides.
The 48th book in the list, and another in the 60s somewhere, are nonfiction related to World War I, both of them with titles playing with the Wilsonian propaganda about a war to end all wars. There's also one that claims to be nonfiction about noble missionaries bringing god to cannibals. In the 80s and 90s you find one book about ancient Rome, one about the Middle East, and one about U.S. foreign policy. After 100 books, I gave up.
There are, of course, books in the world that are about peace. A few of my favorites are these. Most of those, for whatever reasons, cannot be found on Audible at all.
The world is full of wars that almost nobody likes.
The world's governments are moving our money into more and more war preparations.
At some point it would be useful to have a culture that talked about peace as something other than personal indulgence.
I tried the same thing on Amazon, which includes all formats of books -- or so I thought. If I just search for "Peace" I find a mountain of books about "inner peace" and then a bottle of oil that creates it without having to read any books.
If I then specify that I actually want to find a book, not just any product, it throws in a book by the Pope, and one by Immanuel Kant, and -- pretty far in -- "A Separate Peace" by John Knowles, and eventually "War and Peace" by Tolstoy. Nothing about financial peace; Amazon's search focuses in on peace with your heart, peace with your mind, peace with your god, peace through breathing.
If I could end wars through breathing, don't you think I would have done that by now?
If proper breathing could make me shut up about ending wars, don't you know that I'm going to avoid it at all costs?
