'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).
No comments:
Post a Comment