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Contributors
John Mark Reynolds- Contributor
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey
Honors Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy,
at Biola University. His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.info.
 Peace
in our Time
Wishing for peace won't make it so...
[John Mark Reynolds] 4/9/04
You know
it is the political season when your children start to rate
you and discuss
your family poll numbers. Yesterday my
darling children got up early and produced a five page manuscript
covering my family tracking numbers for 2003 and the year to
date. You will be pleased to hear that my job approval rating
is up. However, this follows a trip to Toys R Us, which proves
that you can indeed buy votes. The data was not all good news.
As my six year old put it, “I was really down on you over
the whole clean-your-room thing.”
As a philosopher, I draw one political lesson from this. Helping
people do the right thing can be politically costly. Our president
has discovered this fact, if he did not know it already, and
I am not sure there is any national equivalent of Toys R Us,
perhaps Tories R Us?, at which We the People can be placated.
There are many competing visions for the future of our nation.
John Kerry represents at least five himself. Opponents of the
President have one thing in common: they believe times are hard,
too hard, and they long for peace.
Now peace is obviously
a good thing. Peace is something everyone wants, but like all
goods it has a cost. Is peace worth any price?
My favorite news weekly recently ran a cover story on the elections
in Spain. Hundreds of people stood in the rain with signs that
my high school Spanish assures me read, “Peace.” What
is the peace these Spanish voters want?
Peace for the socialists
of Spain is not the good that any of the world’s religions or great philosophies seek. Peace
for the socialists is the placated, drugged peace of the nursing
home or of the government day care center. Too many people are
like the woman commenting on the death of a seventy year old
relative who said that it was tragic to see this man cut down “in
his prime.” Life itself is at war with these people who
want the “beautiful feeling that everything is going their
way.” They fantasize that heaven has already come and the
struggles have all ended.
This is the peace
that values personal safety and affluence above God and country,
above right and wrong. It is often difficult
to tell from cowardice and selfishness. It is the spirit that
led British university students to vote that they would not die
for King and country in the 1930s. It is Neville Chamberlain
coming home from a meeting with Chancellor Hitler waving a peace
of paper in the air and proclaiming “peace in our times.”
Chamberlain was echoing
the words of the Book of Common Prayer service. He was forgetting
that this prayer for peace, this dream,
is preceded by sacrifice and passionate giving of self for the
sake of others. To evil, Christianity says, “Rise up O
Men of God” and not “big hug.” The Bible has
a special condemnation for those who cry “peace, peace
when there is no peace.”
The modern Chamberlains, who lack the grace, education, and
dignity of the original, are utopians. Having dispensed with
reality in some post-modern fantasy, they live in a world as
they wish it were not the way the world is. They look at one
of the most robust economies of the last twenty years and mutter
about Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. They see two nations
liberated from barbarism and see only quagmire and chaos. They
are utopians with some new crack brained scheme to create jobs
while robbing the job makers.
These utopians cry
for peace in this life, because the give and take of conflict
soon exposes their fantasy. Free markets
find their values wanting. Biology renders them impotent and
nature’s God is at war with their values. Stress tests
a person or a nation and they dread even the notion of a time
of testing for their ideas are build on nothingness.
Plato once wrote of men who sat chained looking only at flickering
images on the walls of a cave. These modern Chamberlains have
done Plato one better for they wish to chain themselves to their
lounge chairs and watch endless television. The peace of slavery,
which makes all men equal, is their fantasy. The nanny state
will care for them and help their unnatural desires and fantastic
schemes seem plausible and real.
And then came an event like 9/11. It forced them to see reality.
And they hate reality. Like children who resent being awakened
for school, the utopians, living in a perpetual adolescence of
extreme sports and video games, are angry not so much at the
terrorists after the first shock, but at the adults who want
them to get out of bed and do something about terrorism. You
hear it in politicians who reserve their fiercest words for Bush
and not for Bin Laden. You see it in voters who would turn out
the victor of the Battle of Baghdad for the boater of Massachusetts
Bay.
Grown ups know that dreams of personal peace are fine, but peace
won without struggle is usually bought by compromise and promise
of future tyranny. Grown ups know that Mr. Hitler will not go
away by wishing he would. They understand that Stalin cannot
be defeated by votes at the United Nations. They see that radical
Islam will not be brought to book by finding the right placating
French word.
Instead, of personal peace the adults seek peace for the family,
long term peace, won by hard labor. In the nineties, we benefited
from the sacrifice of the generations that came before us. World
War II and the Cold War were won. Clinton could spend the peace
dividend in a party that seemed endless while hiding from the
challenges ahead. The White House was one long late night frat
party, but the bill came due. After Clinton came the deluge.
Now the time of struggle has come, but this is not a cause for
despair. In any challenge, the worst thing that can come is death.
But death comes to us all and the only death that is really a
tragedy is the death that comes at the end of a life spent only
on self. Better to die in Kabul securing justice and so gain
immortal fame, than to die choking out a last breath in a nursing
home, having bought time with the freedom of our children and
grandchildren.
The call for this generation is to seek justice for the Middle
East. It is to stand with Israel and rebuild Iraq. This justice
will not come easily.
It cannot be legislated or wished into existence. It must be
fought for and earned. Our standard of living may suffer just
as it did in the Second World War and the Cold War. It will come
following days spent on the bitter cold plains of Afghanistan
and in the humid mud of Iraq. It will come by dealing American
justice to the terror networks of Falujah. The American army
has never failed to secure the victory when the home front remained
strong. It will not fail at this task, though it take great time
and treasure.
If their will were
made law, the people carrying the signs for peace would guarantee
only the peace of slavery. Instead, we
are called to pick up the tools of war so that at the end of
our labor we reap the real peace that comes from doing one’s
duty. Americans know this. They will not return children to the
White House. To paraphrase my favorite poet Blake, “we
will not cease from mental fight. Nor shall our sword rest in
our hand, ‘til we have built Jerusalem” in this green
and pleasant land. CRO
copyright
2004 John Mark Reynolds
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