By David L. Swain

        There is no better focus for discussing peace than the urban context, for the violence of modern warfare is intentionally directed at an enemy\’s cities. While many crucial World War II battles were fought in rural areas, the major killing fields were the cities of England, Italy, Germany, China, and Japan. Of these, Germany and Japan provide examples of sustained, long-term bombing.

          The decisive bombing of Japan began on March 9-10, 1945, when a stream of B-29s fire-bombed Tokyo for nearly three hours, embroiling the city in a firestorm with temperatures reaching 1,899 degrees Fahrenheit. Approximately 100,000 people perished, and a million were made homeless in the scorched capital. The raid initiated a five-month bombing campaign that destroyed over half the total area of 66 urban centers, reducing 178 square miles to ashes.

Since the end of that war, we have continued to maximize violence toward real and potential enemies. Thousands of nuclear warheads equivalent to a million Hiroshima bombs are still deployed around the world. We have maximized violence toward potential enemies.

But not all violence is military. We also permit, even if we do not purposely promote, various forms of structural violence. Poverty, and especially dire poverty, is a form of structural violence; it hurts and kills people. Not least, poverty deprives people of opportunities for self-realization. Today, two-thirds of the world\’s population live in poverty, the greater proportion of them in cities.

Also, we do severe violence toward nature, through our toxic polluting of air, water, and soil. Hazardous waste is a major problem in many industrial societies. Unless serious measures are taken, there is danger of a worldwide and perhaps terminal collapse of the earth\’s livability. The earth is, literally, full of violence, much of it concentrated in cities.

If we are to recover a truly peaceful world, four areas of violence must be addressed: minimizing and eventually eliminating all forms of militarized violence, especially nuclear arms; violence against the poor and underprivileged; violence rooted in racial and ethnic discrimination; violence against nature, especially pollution and possible ecocide.

To achieve such a massive turnabout in our otherwise “dying civilization” will require a rapid growth of peace studies, redefining of our economic and industrial priorities, and not least at all nourishing a new spirit among all peoples. To put it more simply, we must nourish the values, attitudes, and practices that make for peace.

A NEW ETHICS OF PEACE

              There is, of course, no single, universally accepted concept peace. “Peace” that is simply the absence of war means little to people already trapped in desperate poverty, or excluded from social, political, and educational opportunities due to racial discrimination. Drought and famine can also devastate an entire tribe or racial group, as can violence and aggression.

Photo by Cathryn Shaffer.

Different cultures have strong religious and philosophical traditions of peace that overlap and reinforce each other. The Hebrew word for peace, shalom, originally meant “wholeness” and “completion,” though in current usage it stresses prosperity and justice. The Greek irene and the Latin pax have a marked emphasis on prosperity and order. Thus, in Western culture (a combination of Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman influences), the marks of peace have been justice, prosperity, and law and order. A warless condition was, of course, always preferred, but it was not considered an absolute condition for peace.

In East Asia, however, the Chinese wha-pin and the Japanese heiwa placed primary emphasis on a harmonious social order and serenity or peace of mind. And the Indian term shanti stresses tranquility of mind in a way that condones no killing (ahimsa) of living beings; concern for social justice and interest in political economy played a lesser role.

Thus, we do not have, in today\’s world, a commonly accepted understanding of peace, even as regards war. Peace does not prevent drought or famine from decimating an entire tribe or population. The lawlessness of violence and oppression have different values for the perpetrators and the victims. Instead, peace must be seen as a process in which “either/or” must give way to “both/and,” so that boundaries may give way to bonded commitments. Peace studies, then, must focus on how to understand and help each other achieve a harmonious and warless world.

We can no longer expect new ventures for peaceable living to emerge solely from established centers of learning and research. With its physical beauty, creative culture, and progressive thinkers, Asheville is a natural home to such endeavors.

*A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The history and moral legacy of the WWII bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan (2006).