Peace Analytics - Getting the facts

I've spent about six weeks now unfolding a philosophical perspective that humanity will evolve, and we will eventually come to a condition of universal peace.  I've also carefully inserted the notion that it is within our collective power to hasten that eventuality.  Indeed, that being the premise, it becomes our collective duty to hasten universal peace..

Now how do we go about the business of peacemaking?  Shall we all find a stage and act as if we've won a beauty contest, and say that we pray for world peace?  If you have access to an audience, and feel inspired to do so, I encourage your sentiment, but I'm skeptical that you will accomplish much.

What is needed is a disciplined, organized approach.  Specifically, a group working for peace should have good statistical knowledge of the society they wish to act upon, and the obstacles to peace which are presented.  The group must develop a plan with acheivable and measurable objectives, and monitor progress, thereby developing a process which will drive improvements in the peaceful actions of that society.  When the objectives are met, they should be reviewed, the processes continously improved via statistical control.

If you've been reading along in my posts, this activity sounds like nothing I have said so far.  If you've been involved in peace movements in the past it probably sounds unfamiliar as well.  This isn't a call for building an enormous rally in a city park and chanting slogans.  In fact, it sounds like dreadfully dull, uninspired stuff.  Happily, while it sounds like a dreadful process, it will simply manifest as a set of actions which will be oriented toward acheivable goals and pointed toward an ever improving  peace dynamic.  It will have dull bits, because it entails some hard work and some statistical work, but it will be uplifting and inspiring work as goals are met.

This sounds so utterly foreign to traditional peace organizing because it is, in fact, business theory.  I had the pleasure of spending several years at a small but prominent business school, where I was introduced to the theories of W. Edwards Deming, a well-known statististicial and business innovator, who advocated a statistically driven continuous improvement method, which revolutionized several industries.  In the years since I completed my studies there, I have come to realize that his model can be almost universally applied to human endeavors.  Peacemaking, I believe, is especially well-suited to the model.  Apparently Dr. Deming also felt this way; shortly before his death, he formed the Deming Institiute, dedicated to innovations for commerce, prosperity and peace.

One of the hard things about approaching peace with anything like a statistical approach is that we commonly see peace, and peacemaking as a 'fuzzy' concept, where the difference between peace and a state of non-peace (which I hope you agree is far broader that the presence of war) is hard to define.  In fact, it will probably take several posts to get through definitions, and we might have some give and take over those definitions.  For now, I'll leave you one of the best data sources for conflicts around the world, the Uppsala Conflict Database Project (UCDP), which has information on virtually every conflict since 1946 in the world.  Please take a look at it at http://www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/search.php . By the way Uppsala is an elite Swedish University (and city), which devotes a great amount of it's resources to peace studies.

In my next post, I hope to give you an illustration of what I'm talking about, by using a hypothetical example of organizing a peace organization in a US congressional district.  Hopefully, my illustration will clarify the way I propose to organize the peace process.

Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to comment.

Immanuel Kant's Revolution

Immanuel Kant's Revolution

An essay by Bill McKenna   ©2012

First, let me apologize for my two week absence.  My schedule has been disrupted as I’ve found teaching work.  The bad news is that I’ve been forced to radically change my personal habit of being a ‘night owl’ to being a ‘morning person’.  I have been in the habit of writing late at night, so the change has not been kind to my output.  On the other hand, I feel that teaching is a major component of my purpose in life, so I am grateful for the opportunity, even at the entry level, to practice this art.  That’s enough of the personal, so let us resume the peace work.

Today we’re going to tackle Immanuel Kant finally, so settle down for a rather long read, with a rather important conclusion.  This will wrap up my first foray into philosophy; subsequent posts in the near future will return us to the 21^st century, and some practical thought.

Before I talk about Kant, I need to do some table setting.  I want to build a bridge between Augustine and Kant, and Anselm of Canterbury is a convenient bridge.  Anselm concerned himself with theoretical proofs of God.  I find his conclusions somewhat unremarkable, but his process was genius.  His proof was a series of interlocking arguments, the most important of which is the line of reasoning that if we agree on the quality of something that is good (used in the sense of morality in this case, not quality), then there must be a standard of goodness by which we judge, and therefore, it follows, there must be an absolute good.  If the universe contains an absolute good, it is an intentional universe, and if it is intentional, there must be a God who intended it.  Please do not judge Anselm by my quick synopsis.  His proof is far deeper than I need to take you.  If you wish to offer a critique of Anselm, you must study him further.

Anselm’s process is what is important here, as he makes a case for an absolute good.  To do so, he relies on an a posteriori construct, beginning from the point he is proving, and analyzing deductively.  Thus, we know God exists because there is an absolute good.  Later, Kant will critique Anselm on this line of thinking, but it is in his critique of Anselm’s elegant logic that Kant’s a priori arguments flourish.  So, even though we find Anselm and Kant at logical loggerheads (and a six hundred year gap), Kant will effectively use Anselm as a starting point.

Now we can discuss Kant.  Kant was a product of the European enlightenment, and was concerned that the great thinkers of his time, such as Sir Isaac Newton, might posit that all human understanding could eventually be induced by scientific thought and reason.  Nonetheless, Kant was an enlightenment master, and instead of opposing the whole concept of scientific thought, he claimed that where reason would not suffice to answer the great questions, philosophical thought was necessary.  In his Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen  Vernunft), Kant asserted that in cases where the critical method failed to provide an answer it was possible to accept a hypothesis from a practical point of view, relying on an a priori set of knowledge (a reversal of Anselm).  In this argument, Kant asserts that reason itself in built from a priori concepts, such as the innate knowledge of simple arithmetic to build the science of mathematics.  Hence, in matters of morality, one can build a moral philosophy based on the a priori presence of God.  If we cannot accept an a priori construct we cannot reason beyond the refutation of the concept.

Nearly every western metaphysical philosopher since Kant has relied on Kant’s theories as a base.  When I return to philosophical essays in the future, visiting Hegel or the Concord Transcendentalists, you will see the ghost of Immanuel Kant.

Kant’s moral philosophy is difficult to work with.  I remember lectures in college on Kant, and thinking, ‘please let me absorb enough of this to pass the exam.’  At the time, I thought it was because Kant was deadly boring, but now with a few years of maturity (now there’s a double euphemism), I realize that Kant is just difficult, and not boring at all.  In the hands of skilled debaters, the dispute of a priori knowledge of God between an atheistic perspective and a theological perspective would leave me, and many of my readers, far back in the intellectual wake.  Happily, I’m not leading you to that debate.

In 1795, based on his moral philosophy constructs, Kant wrote an essay titled “Perpetual Peace:  A Philosophical Sketch”.  He relies on the a priori concept, that some things ought to be done transcending human understanding, and that achieving universal peace is one of the most important.  His elegant reasoning then gives way to a practical plan for universal peace, containing six preliminary articles and three definitive articles¹:

Preliminary articles:

1. "No secret treaty of peace shall be held valid in which there is tacitly reserved matter for a future war"
2. "No independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of another state by inheritance, exchange, purchase, or donation"
3. "Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished"
4. "National debts shall not be contracted with a view to the external friction of states"
5. "No state shall by force interfere with the constitution or government of another state"
6. "No state shall, during war, permit such acts of hostility which would make mutual confidence in the subsequent peace impossible: such are the employment of assassins (percussores), poisoners (venefici), breach of capitulation, and incitement to treason (perduellio) in the opposing state"

Definitive articles:

1. "The civil constitution of every state should be republican"
2. "The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of free states"
3. "The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality"

So, finally, there it is, in possibly actionable format.  If Augustine’s just war was the best accommodation we might have made prior to Kant (yes, I’ll allow for the possibility of other schema), here is a way forward.  Now we can move forward.  We can move beyond philosophy and start to look at a blueprint for peace.  My tongue is not in my cheek, and it is not hyperbole.  This is it.

Naturally, it isn’t all good news.  There’s a lot to do in these nine articles.  There are more than a few scenarios that are hard to fit into the framework.  Lastly, it is only philosophy, and can only help if it is acted upon.

Some of what Kant says, however is very good news.  Moreover, I want to add to that good news. 

Since Kant wrote his essay, humanity has endured terrible warfare.  Kant himself had to endure the Napoleonic Wars in Europe.  The twentieth century was especially bloody.  Yet through it all, we are starting to apply some of Kant’s tents.  The adoption has been slow and incomplete, but where and when employed, they work.  When you get to his three definitive articles, you see that the republican form of government is now the most common form of government.  It has tended to make nations more peaceful, and the democratic peace theory is an offshoot of the first article.  Sadly, the increased popularity of the republican form of government has revealed that many republics are nothing more than covers from authoritarian rule, but evolutionary improvement in suffrage appears to be moving humanity in the right direction.  The second article concerning a law of nations is also encouraging.  For all of its faults, the United Nations has successfully navigated difficult waters to achieve a degree of authority of the collected nations of the world.  You might correctly suppose that that will probably be the subject of future essays.  The final article, universal hospitality, is harder to see, but progress has been made there as well.  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, has been perhaps the most important advance in this area.

Of course, we still have dictators, standing armies, covert operations, and all manner of pre-Kantian behavior in our world today.  If we didn’t, perhaps I’d be building model railroads instead of writing about this.  We are, however, moving in the right direction, and our slow march toward perpetual peace is unstoppable.  As a student of history, it is clear to me that humanity is evolving, not just in better civilization and governance, but in a profound individual way.  We are becoming a more highly developed species.

We have a lot of work to do, my fellow friends and peacemakers.  Now that you know where I’m coming from, let’s put our philosophers back in the closet for a while and let them collect dust again.  It’s time to talk about practical matters.

Peace.

¹  articles copied from Wikipedia article"Perpetual Peace"

Why have a social contract

Why have a social contract?

An essay by Bill McKenna   ©2012

Before I take a giant leap into the European enlightenment, let’s recap Augustine’s just war.  I could have been harsher in my treatment of the concept.  It could be seen as a compromise between the teachings of Christ and pragmatism.  I think that Augustine is better than that though.  He is making an argument that given moral sovereign authority to stop evil war wagers by the use of force which will prevent suffering is just.  The practical offshoot of applying such a system really is a problem.  Tying just war to papal infallibility in medieval Western Europe, and you get the crusades (edit - see comment section - papal infallibiliity was not a medieval dogma - example is still worth noting however).  The Reformation brought the Thirty Years’ War which was fought over the proper sovereignty within the Christian Church itself.  Every combatant in that struggle claimed to be defending faith against those who would destroy that faith.  Lastly, the concept relies on benevolent monarchs, presumably made sovereign through the grace of God.  The idea of an insurrection or capricious tyrants doing evil within their sovereign space is left unaddressed.

Just war philosophy was tremendously lacking, but it was also revolutionary.  I’ll give Augustine full credit in western civilization for the revolution, but someone more learned than I can speak to similar philosophies that arose in Indian and Chinese culture.  My point is, before Augustine and his like-minded eastern philosophers, warfare was unlimited except by strength of arms.  After Augustine, there is a moral value to peace.  It is an enormous step forward in civilization.  Now, I ask you, what would the next step be?

Let’s jump more than 1,000 years ahead to England in the 1600’s.  If you’ve learned Western Civ in high school or college you may remember Thomas Hobbes as the foil for John Locke.  I’ll briefly recap here.  Both Hobbes and Locke developed an Enlightenment period concept of a social contract, one of the founding concepts of political science.  Both philosophers argued that in order to live more fulfilling lives as individuals, it is necessary to create a social contract between a governing sovereign, and a governed people.  In other words, it is desirable to surrender some portion of one’s own autonomy to accept the governance of a recognized authority.

For Hobbes, in his book The Leviathan, man in a natural state is beset by self-interest, and everyone living in this state of nature is subject to the whims of the strongest.  The pre-governed natural world of Hobbes leads to lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short”.  The way to develop a social contract is to ordain an absolute authority.  The Hobbesian perspective of humanity in a natural state is that it is essentially driven by base, evil objective thought.

John Locke, a near contemporary of Hobbes also advocated a social contract, but his presumptions of human nature led him to an entirely different outcome.  In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke talked about ‘natural law’ which governs how we conduct our lives in the absence of absolute authority.  In his view the social contract emerges from our natural law, and we create government to codify and create private property.  The authority of the government belongs to the governed.  Locke, therefore sees the natural human state as good, so that government can be agreed upon by consent.

The Hobbes-Locke duality is a common subject for political scientists, and it plays an important role in my thesis about peace.  I will argue that civilization has evolved over time; if one goes back to my Greek or Roman examples from last month, we see remnants of the old ‘strongest empire model’ where large armed groups preyed on the smaller.  Over time, however, as sovereignty has moved from kings and emperors to representative government, we see that more emphasis is placed on the legal standing of individuals and their rights.  Clearly, with current examples such as the barbarous suppression in Syria, we have a long way to go before we emerge as a truly evolved civilization.  Nonetheless, if you can allow me my thesis as I develop it further, you will see that peace becomes inevitable, and we collectively have the ability to hasten its arrival.

My long-winded thesis development is starting to take shape now.  If you’ve been reading along I hope it’s holding together for you.  Please comment if you have any issue with it so far.  Immanuel Kant is up next, and then we can put our philosophers on the back burner for a while, and move from peace theories to some practical stuff for my peacemaking friends.

Peace to you all.  I need to get some sleep now, as I hope to attend the Sunrise Interfaith service at Hampton Beach, which will involve (I think) The New England Peace Pagoda, NH and MA Peace Action and the Friends Service Committee, hoping that my Buddhist and Quaker brethren can use some prayers from a good Episcopalian.  If freezing rain keeps me away, they may expect my spiritual support at least.