Communication in search of lasting peace

The insight that ‘war is the father of all inventions’ was the untested truth. No war – religious, political, economic or ideological –has ever led to a free, just and sustainable peace. From the beginning of cultures, anything foreign was considered a threat against which war was an acceptable answer. And where such a threat turned to enmity across cultures and ethnic borders, war was inevitable; as was civil war where envy and hatred remained contained within a population. In this inevitability of war, peace remained the goal of hope.

From early on the founders of the great world religions– Moses, Zarathustra, Jesus, Mohammed – held up peace as the intended result of necessary wars which their followers unleashed in defence of their masters’ visions. Moses, the Man of God, (ca. 1200 BC) recognized Jahwe, his God, the God of Law, who wills that his laws be obeyed in order for peace to come to all who obey. The Prophet Ezekiel (ca. 6th century BC), saw in Yahweh the God of Law and the ruler of a theocracy in which all have equal possessions, equal access to justice and therefore peace for all.

The tension arising out of the choice between good and evil led Zarathustra, likely a historic figure of princely origin (8th century BC), to realize his revelation in a theocratic body politic. Its wars with the adjacent cultures have been illustrated in classic history and poetry. Some ideals of benevolent equality among all peoples have found their more detailed expressions among Greek philosophers, such as Plato (4th century BC) and Zeno of Citium (3rd century BC), in their various treatises on a utopian order for the nations.

Jesus of Nazareth founded Christianity, the dominant religion of the western world. The internal wars between its three divisions – Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism – have had the goal of peace, though on mostly irreconcilable theological terms. The Catholic ideal was in succession to the Pax Romana, the pax ecclesiastica – with princely rulers by the grace of God crowned by the Pope in Rome. Protestants aimed at democratic nation states governed by Christian values. The Orthodox world – for a long time defending and defining itself under the onslaught of Islam – sees itself as the religious inheritance of divine order for the nations which emerged within its region of influence after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

This peace, after 30 bloody years of religious confrontation, sought to establish sustainable stability in Europe. Looking back from the perspective of the 21st century, we know that the peace of Münster and Osnabrück of 1648 did not hold. The often unreflected medieval dreams of peace had not yet died down. Not only was there the early memory of the Roman Emperor Antonius Pius (of priestly descent, 153 AD) who had identified ‘Peace as the highest goal of all politics’, but there was also Pierre Dubois, pacifist and advocate (13th century AD), a student of Thomas Aquinas and in the service of his Sovereign Philippe IV le Bel, who more than any other monarch of his time had shaped the future of western civilization. Pierre Dubois called for a ‘Peoples’ Confederation for Peace’.1

Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam and vicar of Allah (570-632 AD), shares some of his Medianite background and his aversion to a divine call to leadership with Moses. But once havingaccepted the call, he exercised, like Moses, a harsh law-abiding regime. He links the Arab world through his Gnostic influenced soteriologic religion to Judaism and Christianity. Islam (unconditional surrender to Allah), like Moses’ Law of the Covenant that guided early Israel. Sharia Law, presupposing a theocratic concept of statehood, guides many Muslim communities today.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam have led numerous wars in defence of each other and for political or theological dominance of one another. Any rarely negotiated peace among them – like the 40-year peace of Jerusalem, negotiated without bloodshed by Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor 1240, broke down, only to be followed by further wars.

Catholicism, through the Popes, sanctioned wars against Islam, the same Islam against which the Orthodox for centuries found themselves on the defensive. While these religiously motivated wars raged, the post-1648 emerging European nation states found through political, industrial or empire-induced competition new causes for wars, none of which ever led to lasting peace.

The two most devastating world wars brought this long period of enmity, hatred, mistrust and power competitions to some end. After WWI the global community hoped to find new forms of international order in the League of Nations (1920). After WWII it was the United Nations (UN) (1947) which kindled a new hope for peace. The UN as peacemaker and peacekeeper has become the instrument for suggesting new codes by which to overcome enmity in future wars.

Communication: Captivity or freedom

Compared to the millennium-old search for lasting peace, communication, as an industry, is but a youngster. Though people have always communicated, spoken to each other, sought to persuade and convince one another or threaten the neighbouring stranger, Communication, the noun, is an industry thought to have begun in 1794. It was then that the French army put to use the semaphore as ‘an unprecedented advance in the speed of message transmission’ in war.2 With the ‘Morse-code’ and the electric telegraph, from 1837 communication became ever more complex.

Today electronic communication is threatening to replace verbal communication. Entertainment fills the space of interpersonal contact and information technology occupies ever more space in employment and the industrial process. Thus, entertainment and information have become commercially attractive commodities. By applying technological advances to these fascinating commodities, they become the captives of entrepreneurial greed and competition. And those who direct, improve, look after and fill with content these media commodities, share in this captivity.

It did not take long before the media world became the irresistible temptation for the power brokers of our days –politicians, captains of industry, promoters of lucrative ideologies or of easily digestible belief certainties. They made the persuasive force of the media their own.

During the last generation, there was the hope of keeping this emerging media world free from greedy exploitation. However, today we have to admit that this hope of a free media stream has dwindled to a trickle. The amount of cash required to run a technologically up-to-date network with mass-appeal content does not come without strings attached. As communication has become an industry, the tested truism ‘there is no free lunch’ also applies to broadcasting.

There are, however, a few exceptions. Following the example of the BBC, public broadcasting services have come on the air in many countries. They, like the BBC, are ‘to be free from both political and commercial influence and to answer only to their viewers and listeners’.3

In the highly contested field of religious communication, the WACC is an ecumenical organization which supports the communication needs of churches – many of which are ministering in the developing world. It strives to deliver constructive, non-biased information, train skilled media workers, journalists, technicians, writers, presenters – for the benefit of many and for the enlightenment of nations and their political processes. The hope of capturing the long evasive peace of this world rests in some part with this liberated communication, free from greedy and self-serving interests and free for the benefit of all.

What is true peace?

Answering this question with an example is impossible because there has never been a just and lasting peace. The answer that peace exists after war has come to an end is much too simple. When war and violence stop, one party surrenders the means of waging war. But hatred, deprivation and often poverty remain – only to plan for the next war. Thus, true peace must be a lasting peace and ideally an eternal peace.

An encyclical definition of such a peace runs like this: ‘Eternal peace, thought of as a religious goal, is possible only where an ideal peace has won ethical or metaphysical predominance for the complete perspective of one’s life.’4 This definition is both personal and dependent on ethically responsible human cooperation.

The dream of peace is ancient. Me-Ti, Chinese philosopher of the 5th century BC describes a new social order, which abandons class structure but depends on the renewal of personal morality with responsibility for the common weal and common needs. Through his call for ‘love of neighbour’, war becomes superfluous.5 Meng-Tse, Chinese philosopher of the 4th century BC, holds that the natural graciousness of man leads from kindness and generosity to social responsibility for all; the tyrant has to follow the peoples’ social responsibility for the peaceful and democratic development of the commonwealth. Peace is the highest goal!6

Here are two among many ‘communications’ from the Bible:

Old Testament: ‘How wonderful it is to see a messenger coming across the mountains bringing good news, the news of peace! He announces victory and says to Zion “Your God is King!”’’ Isaiah 52:7 (Good News Bible).

New Testament: Jesus says: ‘Peace is my parting gift to you, my own peace, such as the world cannot give. Set your troubled hearts at rest, and banish your fears.’ John 14:27 (The Revised English Bible).

One text speaks of a peace which comes down from an unattainable summit, healing a war-wounded world – a peace which surrenders its inaccessibility and thereby brings victory (in another translation: ‘salvation’) – a peace the guarantor of which is King, Jahwe, the God of Moses, of Zion, of Israel, and by inclusive extension, God of all.

The other text speaks of this same peace. This time this peace is left by Jesus, according to Pontius Pilate, ‘King of the Jews’! This peace Christ leaves to his disciples – and, by the same inclusive extension, he leaves it to all of us – for us to look after, live by, work for, to heal this wounded world and thereby prepare for the Kingdom, of which God/Allah/Jahwe is King and within which there will be eternal peace!

Communication – a tool for peace

Today we know that a lasting peace is the only hope for the survival of our planet. The efforts to achieve that survival are so enormous that we cannot afford to waste our limited energy reserves on further wars between conflicting ideologies or religions. Likewise, an energy-absorbing conflict for economic gain in favour of the select at the expense of the many would be the ultimate crime not only against our planet but also against its creator.

Today we also know that this peace is the prime topic exercising the collective minds of all peoples. Saving our planet has become the concern of our days. Addressing this concern should become the foremost challenge of communication. One example of bringing this task to the attention of a wide international audience is, of course, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. There cannot be too many such efforts! Not only would they help multiply this concern but they would do it in the true and tested tradition of communication: to inform and to entertain.

However, coming across ‘Swarm Theory’ in the July 2007 National Geographic, there is a much subtler format of communication: the format of subconscious signal dissemination with which most successful dictators since the 20th century have whipped whole populations into a patriotic frenzy. After reading this article I imagined that the worst form of communication must also have a contrasting salutary side.

But first a word about ‘Swarm Theory’. The key words for defining the functioning of a specific population of ants, bees, pigeons or even caribou are ‘collective intelligence’ without any individual leadership:

‘Crowds tend to be wise only if individual members act responsibly and make their own decisions. A group won’t be smart if its members imitate each other, slavishly follow fads, or wait for someone to tell them what to do. When a group is being intelligent, whether it’s made up of ants or attorneys, it relies on its members to do their own part.’7

The fascinating thing about a swarm is that its members have their individual tasks: workers, scouts, cleaners, transporters, defenders, feeders and tenders of the young. Those functions are in their individual genes. However, if called upon to help in jobs other than their own it is thought that a subconscious wave of concrete consciousness moves through the population to indicate the tasks which have to be tackled first for the survival and well being of the common weal.

If this insight of identifying the necessary tasks and informing subconsciously all individuals of their tasks were to be transferable to the human community of populations, this role would fall to communication. From the experience of the use to which communication has been distorted by dictatorships, we know that the signal content of such communication cannot bring peace to the Commonwealth of Nations.

The swarm study sees as ‘the wonderful appeal of swarm intelligence… the ingredients of smart group behaviour – decentralized control, response to local cues, simple rules of thumb – add up to a shrewd strategy to cope with complexity’.7 These features of the signal contents of communication for peace do not lend themselves to exploitative mass hypnosis. Rather, the skill of subconscious communication for peace would require the conscious renunciation of nurturing any selective benefits for an elite group of the few.

From what I see in philosophical thinking throughout history, there are no decentralised social structures without any individually identifiable leadership, as seem to exist in a swarm. Theocracies have not worked in the past. And democracies with their regular corruptive derailments seem to be reaching the end of their useful shelf-life.

For communicators who dare think of future signal contents I might list, without apologies for my utopian bias, these features of a social order: respect among all members for each other, orientation of all toward the essence/divinity/spirituality greater than self and, therefore, no need for accumulating goods by which to differentiate one self from one another.

Such a commonwealth would have no need for war. It would seek and keep a just and lasting peace. It would muster all its resources to heal our environment, to save our planet and to preserve creation – which was not ours in the first place!

Such service would make communication the ultimate Human Right–and even more: the ultimate Human Necessity.

Notes

1. Arno Peters: ‘Synoptische Weltgeschichte’, Muenchen and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Dubois

2. Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia, World History post 1800, Vol. 4, Oxford University Press, 1988, p.80

3. BBC Royal Charter

4. Translation from ‘Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart’, vol II, J.C.B. Mohr, Tuebingen, 1928, p. 786.

5. A. Peters.

6. Ibid.

7. Peter Miller, ‘Swarm Theory ’, National Geographic, July 2007, p.146

Hans Florin is a retired Lutheran pastor. He worked for the Lutheran World Federation ( LWF) in Geneva and South Africa (1961-65), was coordinator for World Mission for the Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) (1966-76), General Secretary of WACC (1976-86), and Regional Secretary for Europe and Middle East of the United Bible Societies (UBS).