Peace is probably going to be a pretty major theme around here for the near future, what with the recently-begun war in Syria and the upcoming war in North Korea, soon to be followed by World War III and then the nuclear obliteration of everybody. Good thing I don’t live at the closest possible missile target to both Russia and China! Not to mention I don’t even have Don Rickles to take my mind off of it anymore.
Where was I? Oh, right: peace. It’s a bit awkward for me to claim that peace is such a big deal — which claim I do intend to make — without first providing a definition of what, exactly, it is. What does peace consist of? Where does it come from? How can it be maintained, and why does it matter?
We begin, as we should, with methodological individualism. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines methodological individualism thusly:
It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.
In short, methodological individualism holds that the root cause of any phenomenon must lie in the specific actions of individuals. There is no way for groups of people to "act" that does not involve members of those groups so acting. Since we hold that the individual precedes the group (as he must, since it’s possible to conceive of the existence of man without the existence of human society, but not vice versa), and since all group phenomena are aggregations of individual phenomena, then it follows that the concept of "world peace" has no meaning without a defined concept of individual peace. So it is there that we begin.
Does it mean anything to be peaceful in an absolute vacuum? In other words: can Crusoe, alone on his island, be meaningfully "peaceful?" I contend that he cannot; peace, for our purposes, necessarily involves interaction, and interaction requires a counterparty. Surely, Crusoe could find some state of "inner peace" or other, but that’s a materially different meaning of "peace" from the one we’re discussing, which, as we’ve mentioned recently, can be fairly defined as "harmony in personal relations." Surely there can be no personal relations in the absence of any person to relate to!
Even so, since we’re digging into the nitty-gritty of it now, "harmony in personal relations" seems a bit of a wan definition. It inevitably leads in to the follow-up question: what does "harmony in personal relations" consist of? I contend that it consists of respect for the rights of other people. This is not some cosmic, metaphysical "respect," mind; all I mean by "respect for the rights of other people" is a lack of violation of those rights. You and I can consider each other to be total dirtbags, and we can have nothing kind to say about one another, but, as long as neither of us violates the other’s rights, we are at peace.
All rights are property rights. This is a critical, yet oft-neglected, point. As Murray Rothbard put it in his seminal Man, Economy, and State:
For not only are property rights also human rights, but in the most profound sense there are no rights but property rights. The only human rights, in short, are property rights. There are several senses in which this is true. In the first place, each individual, as a natural fact, is the owner of himself, the ruler of his own person. The "human" rights of the person that are defended in the purely free-market society are, in effect, each man’s property right in his own being, and from this property right stems his right to the material goods that he has produced.
In the second place, alleged "human rights" can be boiled down to property rights, although in many cases this fact is obscured. Take, for example, the "human right" of free speech. Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate "right to free speech"; there is only a man’s property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners. [Emphasis original]
There is no sense in which one can respect the rights of another person that is not respecting that other person’s property rights. Therefore, I maintain that peace between two people is neither of those people violating the other’s property rights.
One could easily argue here that peace is therefore impossible; given that man is imperfect, and knowledge is imperfect, countless minor infractions of property rights happen constantly. Quite frankly, I would agree with this objection, with but one caveat: this proves not that peace itself is impossible, but that perfect peace is impossible. Any lasting peace will be plagued with minor blemishes. That is undeniable. Crusoe, after all, may accidentally pick berries from a bush he didn’t realize was Friday’s. What’s important, however, isn’t whether or not we can concoct some sort of magical, impossible system to prevent any such occurrences; so suggest as much is to be utopian in the extreme. No, what’s important is how we deal with failure.
I’ve written previously that "the civil suit for breach of contract is the thing that separates free men from barbarians," and I wasn’t just being cutesy. If Friday is a barbarian, he responds to Crusoe’s invasion by invading Crusoe right back; this is, of course, an escalation of violence, and the real way minor infractions can accumulate. If Friday is civilized, he seeks redress through peaceful means, by bringing the wrong to Crusoe’s attention and requesting recompense. Granted, this is where the analogy breaks down; the civil suit is not really a thing in a "society" containing exactly two people, but the gist of it holds: long-run peace depends not upon people being perfect and never committing any tiny infractions against other people, but upon people reacting to the inevitable tiny infractions in a civilized manner.
Next time, we’ll look into how we can build on individual peaceful action to develop a sort of "nexus" of peace, and see how that more or less becomes civilization. We’ll also take a look at the inevitable barbarian pressure. For now, I leave you with the Harlem Boys’ Choir, because I can.