Why Peace doesn't Have Momentum

Is War Unavoidable?

BRUTUS: Stoop, Romans, stoop,
And let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood
Up to the elbows, and besmear our swords:
Then walk we forth, even to the market-place,
And, waving our red weapons o’er our heads,
Let’s all cry ‘Peace, freedom and liberty!’
CASSIUS Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (3.1)

The last months have been a turmoil of bewilderment that Symplicius has correctly described as “spinning like a dreidel.” What’s happening? Who is creating this incredible mess of things? Is there a plan? Are the gates of hell open?

I can tell you that I am personally involved in at least two international peace initiatives, and an Italian one in addition. But we are getting nowhere. Peace has no momentum: we are old men yelling at clouds.

How is it that nobody wants peace? There is something deep that’s leading us to do irrational things. I think René Girard, the anthropologist, identified it correctly when he wrote in his “Violence and the Sacred” (1972)

"The general direction of the present hypothesis should now be abundantly clear; any community that has fallen prey to violence or has been stricken by some overwhelming catastrophe hurls itself blindly into the search for a scapegoat. Its members instinctively seek an immediate and violent cure for the onslaught of unbearable violence and strive desperately to convince themselves that all their ills are the fault of a lone individual who can be easily disposed of. Such circumstances bring to mind the forms of violence that break out spontaneously in countries convulsed by crisis: lynchings, pogroms, etc.”

René Girard also described this behavior in his other book “Of Things Hidden from the Foundation of the World.” (1978). He is not the only anthropologist who noted this facet of human behavior. It is well known from the times of Frazer and his “Golden Bough,” dedicated to describing ancient and modern rituals of human sacrifices. Even contemporary anthropologists are arriving at the concept that violence erupts every time a society is under stress (see, e.g., Richard Wrangham’s “The Goodness Paradox” (2019).

The idea is that human societies are finely tuned for collaboration, but sometimes an external stress may force a structural re-arrangement. Almost always, that involves a scapegoat, a chosen victim which embeds all the evil that society wants to get rid of. Girard calls the scapegoat “sacred” according to the ancient meaning of the term: “removed,” “untouchable,” “chased out.” The blood of the victim(s) is sacred, too, as Shakespeare masterfully described in his “Julius Caesar” when the killers bathe their hands together in Caesar’s blood.

That’s what we are seeing today. Society is under tremendous stress, in search of victims. The latest round of madness sees hate focusing on individuals (Putin or Trump, depending on which side you are), on groups (immigrants, wokes, scientists, and the like), and even on objects, suddenly turned into evil entities (Tesla cars, for instance). There is nothing rational in these beliefs, and they cannot be fought by data, facts, and reasoning. We don’t need anthropologists to convince us that it is true.

What is the stress that’s leading to the current outburst of violence? Not so difficult to find. Already in 1972, the Club of Rome had sponsored a study that proposed that if the current trends were to be maintained, in a few decades the world’s economy would go into a severe stress caused by a combination of 1) Resource Depletion, 2) Pollution, and 3) Overpopulation. It is happening: squeezed between depletion and pollution, governments have become unable to provide services and security to their citizens. As a consequence, they are applying the fundamental principle that “the art of Politics consists in finding someone to blame.”

No one seems to understand how dangerous a weapon propaganda can be. Once a scapegoat has been created, it is nearly impossible to avoid a burst of violence that will unite society into the task of destroying him/her/them. And even when the scapegoat is crushed in blood, its shadow continues to haunt the killers and their descendants.

There are still people in Italy who think the Austrians are evil because of a propaganda campaign of more than one century ago. There are still veterans of WWII in the US who hate the Japanese because of the campaign that depicted them as subhumans with forward-protruding teeth. The wounds of WWII are still smoldering under the surface in the relations of Germans with Russians. And there are many more examples of the resilience of propaganda in human minds.

It takes just a few months to create a burst of hate that will last for decades. Those who are financing the ongoing hate campaigns have serious blood on their hands. And that’s where we stand, forced to blindly stumble onward, without knowing where we are going.