Peace Is a Different Way of Thinking
An article on Bertram Russell’s (1872-19700) acceptance speech for his 1950 Nobel Prize in literature popped up on my newsfeed the other week. The article touted Russell as one of the world’s "most luminous and lucid minds." But when I read his thoughts about the four desires animating a human soul, I found myself roundly disagreeing with him. Was it hubris, I wondered, that caused me to disagree so emphatically? The more I considered, I realized that his thinking was a negation of my deepest values.
For Russell, the central motives driving humans are acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity and love of power. I find this pessimistic and, quite frankly, shortsighted. If this is who we truly are, what's the point? Bring on the apocalypse! And indeed, it can feel in this moment as if people are working toward this end. In the midst of the war in Ukraine, we are once again hearing threats of nuclear holocaust from a dictator with a large enough arsenal to wipe out life as we know it.
I understand that Russell was a man of his times — and that those times were turbulent. He lived through both World Wars, the Korean War, and the beginnings of American involvement in Vietnam. He saw economic breakdown, a pandemic, and the use of and escalating threat of nuclear weapons. I was born at the beginning of the last 20 years of his life and graduated from college the year he died. As a child of the 60s and 70s, I am not unfamiliar with such pessimistic and cynical viewpoints, but I think they miss the incredible abundance and possibilities of life and the planet on which we live.
Perhaps in an unequitable and unjust world, fear and greed make such dystopian thinking seem logical. However, living in fear and anger diminish our abilities to do anything other than freeze, fight, or flee. Fear and anger actually reduce our brain cells, further limiting our ability to conceive other options for action. If this is where we choose to live, and it is a choice, it becomes impossible to consider Peace and Love as appropriate and powerful responses to the negative forces in our world.
Other options do exist. Our very biology points out that when we live in Wonder, Joy, and Peace, our bodies relax and are opened to experience life more fully. Love and Joy make life more possible. Even in a dangerous world, we have the opportunity to turn toward Peace and Peacemaking. Even in a dangerous world, we have the opportunity to turn toward Peace.
Love and Joy make abundant life more possible. It is in this Human Possibility that we can turn toward Peace and Peacemaking. Choose Peace with me. Choose to be a Peacemaker.
Salaam, Shalom, Peace. Blessed be.
Ann Keeler Evans, The Priestess and Peacemaker is in! Find me at https://annkeelerevans.organd sign up for my daily musing.
