Quote of the Day - 18.01.2013

'Peace then is the result of a balanced action between doing good and fighting evil' 

Mohammad Abu Nimer, Nonviolence and Peacebuilding in Islam

First of all, apologies for how sporadic updates are at present, I have an essay deadline on Tuesday and am working flat out on those, leaving little time for extraneous musings.

If my studies this year have made one thing clear, its that peace is a far from simple concept. Varying in definition from the absence of war to a Utopian idyll in which all injustices have been defeated and all that is left is harmony, peace appears to mean many things to many people.

For me, however, I like this idea of peace as somewhat precarious, a balancing act between both acting right in yourself and standing up to those who are not. It is a state that requires maintaining, not a point at which one can rest, but a position from which one can always be striving to do better. 

Here on earth, constrained by the competitiveness of human nature it seems unlikely that we will ever reach a state of perfect idyllic peace without injustice in perpetuity, something will change it, bring a new imbalance. Indeed, what we understand as just changes so often that that in itself seems to threaten such an idea. (It has been less than half a century since being gay was illegal in this country, and in two months time the first marriages take place). 

Such a definition of peace removes an option of complacency, one must always be balancing, precariously, on a knife-edge maintaining the peace without being subsumed by either complacency (good deeds alone) or war (fighting does not entail violence).

Quote of the Day - 11.01.2014

'Whatever the order inherent in the world, it is an order mediated by human perception'
Kevin Avruch and Peter Black, 'The Culture Question and Conflict Resolution'

As may have become apparent by my earlier posts, I find the question of perception fascinating. Avruch and Black write about the idea of 'culture-as-consciousness', your culture determines how you derive meaning from the world around you and from your own actions and feelings. This suggests that the world around us, or indeed the world as we understand it is a construction, the rules of behaviour and the rules of morality are determined not according to some greater order but by cultural ideals which then alter how we perceive actions and events.

This intrigues me as I then attempt to unravel my own cultural understandings that thus create my perceptions. Becoming aware of one own prejudices and the lenses through which one looks is an uncomfortable, difficult and often nigh-on impossible process. But to be aware of such things, to attempt to take into account at all times that how I am understanding something is not due to any greater order, but to my own individual cultural foundation, is at the same time thrilling and exciting.

To me the world has a set of rules that may be followed or broken, and following them or breaking them elicits further sets of rules. Yet this ordering is placed there by my cultural perceptions, as English, as Christian, as Female, as Young, from Cambridge, Oxford Graduate, all these different cultural groups play a part in making sense of my world. What makes sense of yours?

Quote of the Day - 01.01.2014

'Good and evil exist in our lives, and that evil, like good, is always a possibility'
(Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: Forgiving Apartheid's Chief Killer)

I remember once having a conversation with my father about child soldiers, I think it was in response to a news report on the Lord's Resistance Army, but I don't remember clearly. In it we discussed whether, put in the same situation, we would stand up even in the face of torture or death, or whether we would instead become like so many children put into impossible situations and forced to carry out abhorrent crimes.

Clearly in situations like that the argument as to where responsibility for the crimes lies is ambiguous, however, it strikes me that there are many situations which we view as far more clear-cut but aren't necessarily. Reading Madikizela's book examining her experiences of interviewing Eugene de Kock, nicknamed 'Prime Evil' in post-apartheid South Africa, I cannot help but dwell on the question she often raised, where does responsibility lie?

Does responsibility lie in the perpetrator unless one can prove beyond all doubt that they were given no other choice but to act in the way that they did? Or does it lie, at least in part, with systems that support such actions, which create the ideology that legitimises the crimes, the perception of necessity, the influence of upbringing, environment and personal circumstances. What is it that has meant that I am generally law-abiding, conscientious and slightly over-burdened with a sense of what ought to be?

A particular extension of this question that interests me is the idea of the age of criminal responsibility. The very existence of an age of culpability implies the belief that by a certain age you will have learnt right from wrong, according to the codes of your society. But what happens if you haven't? Or what happens if the right and wrong you are given to understand are not the same as those elsewhere and can you be held responsible for not acting according to a code you have had no exposure to?

I don't propose to answer this question, indeed to do so would be impressive given the debate on the subject has raged for much of the last century, but it is running round my head and I thought I would start the new year as I mean to go on... asking lots of questions to which there are almost certainly no answers.