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The War of Words: Living without Morality – Profit not Peace
by William A. Cook
 There exists in the great satirists – Swift, Voltaire, and Twain – a profound respect for the human’s ultimate weapon against mass stupidity, the human intellect.
That stupidity is exemplified in allegiance and obeisance to organized religion, political parties, exclusive philosophies, the fanatical adherence to charismatic idiots, and to a blind belief in the equity of Capitalism as an economic panacea for the world’s ills. When one views our world today through the eyes of Swift or Voltaire or Twain, we cannot help but see whole societies kneeling before ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams reciting in unison beliefs determined by self-proclaimed prophets of their respective gods, shedding in the process their allegiance to their intellect, the font of reason that enables each of us to distinguish good from evil.
As it is with organized religion, so it is with political parties, neo-conservative philosophies, Islamic Jihad, and secular Zionism all of which drool with words without meaning – democracy, liberty, freedom, security, everlasting life, and peace – all made meaningless as they are made achievable through fear, the glue that solidifies countless minds into mass stupidity.
Paradoxically, yet understandably, the satirist’s respect for
human intellect finds a parallel in the profundity of the Gnostic
conception of the teachings of Jesus who understood that the human
intellect raises the value of an individual to incredible heights even
as it humbles the individual to an understanding of his or her relative
significance in the totality of the universal system.
Recognition of
one’s absolute significance, without which nothing is, and one’s
minusculeness when considered in universal terms, creates a bond with
all creation and a profound awareness of the interrelatedness of all
existence that unites, binding all in mutual respect and dignity. The
scope of this concept gives magnanimity to the intellect as its ideal
becomes, as it did for Swift, a decorous citizen who is both learned
and moral. In Jesus’ terms this is God’s gift to humans, the power to
know self that one could know the condition of all and, hence, grasp
the oneness that binds all humans, the ultimate moral truth.
How strange that the cynic in the Diogenes’ sense, one who understands
the ideal and knows as well the impossibility of attaining it, can be
understood conceptually as compatible with the Gnostic who seeks
knowledge of God which is self-knowledge, knowing the self and the
divine are identical, and knows the near impossibility of reaching that
divine state (Elaine Pagels xx).
That is the paradox we face in a world
driven by words without meaning: we desire to seek new meanings of
peace when the source of that meaning resides in the souls of humans,
the very beings that make peace impossible. Swift ridiculed the society
that envisioned mankind as essentially good, a being naturally inclined
to virtue as its own reward, as a chimera that exists if at all in
dreams or delusions while its reality, the appetites that drive will –
need for power, greed, selfishness, innate racism, a sense of
superiority, envy, malice, the whole tyranny of human debauchery and
malignity – nullifies the dream and corrodes the delusion.
How then find peace in a world driven by such appetites?
The cynic
will tell you it’s not possible; the satirist will show you why. The
idealist, caught in his or her dreams, will seek solutions, even if it
means redefining peace to make possible what cannot be. Peace after all
is but a word, no different in that respect, as the scholar of global
mythology Joseph Campbell noted, from “God”; it is but a word.
Our
definitions limit and commit; limit what a word means, and commit those
who consent to it to enforce the meaning. Therein lies the danger.
Peace can only exist if all accept its meaning.
What in the
definition of peace unites all?
What but the human intellect, the
salvation of humankind as perceived by the satirist and the salvation
of humankind as understood by the Gnostics.
If all comprehended the
moral foundation resident in the human intellect -- all are one, all
are the same, all have equal rights, all deserve respect and dignity –
none would impose his or her will on another nor impose on another what
they would not have imposed on self.
Peace resides in this
understanding, and unless it is promulgated throughout the world and
becomes the accepted base for all interrelatedness, there will be no
peace. Yet, as we have marked above, the world is ruled by the tyranny
of human debauchery and malignity, not by the peace that passeth
understanding.
Turn with me to that microcosm of malignity that
inhabits Palestine to consider how possible peace might be in a world
fractured by internecine hate, racism, greed, and that sense of
superiority that stifles respect, decency, compassion, and love.
As I
write this paper, I read a dispatch from Jabalyia dated March 7, 2008,
titled “Nowhere To Run To.” These words leap from the screen, capturing
a scene in Kamal Adwan Hospital:
- “A young man is lying down for
treatment in a shared room. Both his legs, and one arm, are gone. He is
trying to say something but he cannot. ‘He was feeding the sheep at our
home when an Israeli F-16 bombed our house,’ says his father by his
side. ‘His legs were blown out from under him.’ ‘Wake up Samah …
please!’ a girl is screaming. The girl she is calling out to is still,
her torso burnt black. So is what is left of the body of another young
woman in the hospital room. They were her sisters Samah 17 and Salwa
Asayia 23.”
Scenes from Gaza under siege; part of the “global war on
terrorism” we are told by the press in the U.S.
But it’s not a war
in that hospital room; it’s the death of innocents, of children caught
in the web of deceit that uses words to further greed for land, to
further Zionist falsehoods that exist in plans conceived 60 years ago
to cleanse the land of Palestine of those different from the Jews,
indigenous Arabs who have lived in Palestine for centuries upon
centuries. Here we have a microcosm of human behavior that defies the
definition of peace: “a state of quiet or tranquility; freedom from
disturbance; absence of war; a state of reconciliation after strife or
enmity; freedom from mental agitation or anxiety; spiritual content.”
Here instead we have malignity: “violent animosity, evil.”
Masking
the slow, systematic genocide taking place in Palestine as a necessary
battle against terror in this global “war on terror” is to recognize
only that the very people destroyed by genocide in the 20th century are
capable of committing genocide in the 21st century.
If Nazi Germany
represented “The supremacy of one side over another … as a fatal threat
to the idea of peace in the world…,” then the supremacy of the
Israeli war machine over the imprisoned Palestinians is a fatal threat
to peace now.
But the words being used by those in power justify
the carnage ravaging Palestine; the oppressors become victims, the
innocent become aggressors, soldiers become peace makers, civilians
become terrorists, family land becomes security zones confiscated by
the occupiers, rule of law becomes vigilantism, starvation becomes a
means to attain peace -- all words without meaning because devoid of
morality.
The common denominator that can bring a semblance of
tranquility resides in the human intellect, but only if the world’s
community of nations accepts without reservation the moral rights
imbedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as stated by the
United Nations Charter, because in that document rests the concept that
both the satirists and the Gnostics understood as the key to peace,
universal acceptance of the equity of all. That alone must be supreme:
above nations, above religions, above philosophies, above charismatic
idiots, above the economic system that is destroying the globe,
Capitalism.
Achievement of that goal will only happen if nations unite
for peace to foster the spiritual union that binds all as neighbors on
this planet.
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