By Banlam K Lyngdoh
They have healed the wounds of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, Peace,’ when there is no peace – Jeremaiah 6:14
It’s Christmas; and we live in a generation where the intrinsic logic and the manifestive symbol of the nativity are lost. TS Eliot in his poem “The Journey of the Magi” opines that the birth of Christ opened up a new era for mankind. The coming of Christ ushered in a new platform for cultural discourse hitherto monopolized by the Greco-Roman worldview. At the sublime height that philosophy could attain in the realms of politics and culture, the world before Christ had always thought and defined peace only as the absence of war. The longing for peace therefore became inseparable from the common people’s ever renewed thirst for a warrior-hero, a superman kind of deliverer, at once a paragon of compassion and mercy at the throne and an embodiment of might and awe in the battlefield promising his subjects freedom from injustice and oppression.
Not only mankind thought of peace in this light. The active and enthusiastic participation of the ancient gods and goddesses in human wars and conflicts implies a political and cultural acceptance that peace was worth the fighting because of fighting for it, the discourse of power and its parameters came into play. Wars were fought to achieve peace but not for the sake of peace, for if it was for the sake of peace per se then power would have become only a means and not an end. As long as gods and goddesses dealt in the realm of mortals they too were shown to be necessarily in perpetual conflict and with conflicting natures, inciting conflict in humans. So when the ancient world used the word ‘peace’ it symbolized the temporary peace of mind that the deities and the rulers with their courts had – the peace of mind brought about by a sense of fleeting achievement of glory, fame and pomp, which significantly contributed to a sense of mundane security for the common men.
Even in the stern and absolute monotheistic culture of the Hebrews peace had always been discoursed and interpreted in the larger light of political stability and of covert and repressed wish for political hegemony. The inseparability between the thirst for peace and the ardent anticipation for a warrior-king who would fight against foreign dominion and establish an ideal kingdom of milk and honey is sharper and more intense in the Hebrew context for the mere two-fold fact that the Jews had been the most oppressed and vilified people in unceasing struggle for a promised homeland and that the coming of a warrior-king had been foretold and recorded in their holy book. The world before Christ in the Levant region and further west never could see and appreciate peace subjectively. Like any other entity in the discourse of the state and governance, peace was seen in its stark objective dimension both by the rulers and the ruled, the oppressor and the oppressed. Every holy book that the world has today is an ancient book, a book written in the light of such an objective understanding of peace. It is therefore not surprising that all holy books (including Homer’s “Iliad”, if we can call it holy) unabashedly recounts tales of war and justified confrontations that inevitably breed other tales of deceit, intrigue, betrayal, lust, love, honour and heroism.
The birth of Christ and the message that he gave in the short span of his life gave a well-timed social space for mankind to revise this ancient worldview. It depoliticized the concept of peace and reduced it to a subjective experience. In so reducing the connotation of peace, the meaning and value of peace got expanded, and the individual man became the focus of the latent ennobling virtue of peace. Whereas the discourse of peace before him had been based on political situations and issues where individual man was at best a beneficiary and at worst a pawn, Christ saw and taught that peace was man’s intrinsic and fundamental right and potential. It was only natural that nationalistic Jews became disillusioned in him, especially the zealots, for he adamantly refused to take and entertain any political question thereby appearing to have relinquished the expected and proclaimed role of a deliverer and a harbinger of a politically defined peace. Important as the freedom of the people and its implied reestablishment of the Jewish national identity were, it stood little or nothing at all beside Christ’s idea of peace in an individual man. While to his compatriots deliverance would definitely bring peace, for him it was the other way round – peace would deliver.
Christ’s message is complicatedly simple. Man does not need institutions and political jargons to remain free and be free. The freedom of a race or a nation signifies nothing as long as man is not free; for the world cannot run on manufactured peace. Read in the light of his own time when the world was largely conditioned by violence in all spheres of life (even in religious rites and punishment), Christ’s message was indeed iconoclastic for he preached that man had a potential for peace and love. Peace for him was a means and a process and not an end or an achievement. And if it was to be a means it had to be spontaneous. That’s why he taught his followers to be peace-makers. In other words he exhorted them to be the suppliers of peace, meaning that peace should be abundantly alive and burning in them to the extent that they could give to others who were in need of it.
It is here that the idea of freedom comes. Christ sent out a strong message to his zealot followers. In simple rephrase he told them, “if you passionately believe that freedom alone can bring peace and deliverance then start at the grassroots. Free yourselves first. Unbind the shackles that bind your peaceful and peace-loving selves. Love your neighbours, feed the poor and the destitute. Turn the other cheek to slander and censure. If freedom is what you fervently want see what a long list of opportunities I give you to get it. Do these first. Then you will know your true selves and you will know God. Your peace is in you. Scatter it and you are free.”
The sublime simplicity of Christ’s teachings is lost today in the very same way it was ignored and pushed aside during his days in the pomp and glory of the Roman Empire. Christ came into the public scene in the days when the Romans had institutionalized their way of life and ensured that their polity and policies touch all their annexed provinces. With its epicenter in mighty Rome, the Roman policy was such that it empowered those that it enslaved. In Christ’s homeland, Herod and his descendants and his likes stood as a perfect example of this empowerment in enslavement. By choosing not to negotiate with the likes of Herod, Christ showed his refusal to do anything with institutions and principalities for these were not the source of man’s peace and freedom. It is indeed the inscrutable doings of historical irony that his simple teachings attained institutional heights and glory in the fourth century CE. The irony has graduated into a melodramatic farce now that his message has become an enterprise. Undeniably, history has repeated itself. Christianity has become the very force that Christ avoided, fearing that it would dilute and poison the spirit of his vision of human peace. As an enterprise, Christianity very much empowers, in various forms of cross-country power delegation, those that it enslaves economically and culturally.
History teaches us about empires and emperors, from brutal to benevolent ones and the cycle continues. Despite the rise of democratic governments and the emergence of independent nation states we are not free from the dominance of single super power(s).
Peace is the essence of human society. In the backdrop of abject poverty, diseases, gender conflicts, arms race and development of nuclear war heads, injustice, communal clashes, war and threat of war, human society longs for peace. Nations and individuals as usual are ready to pay a price for its possession. Our State needs peace and development and our children should be given hope. Beside religious ideas and piety human society needs change of heart, freedom as well as sheer basic will, as Christ encouraged, to overcome depravities.
In this extremely dichotomized and polarized world, peace means different things for different people. For some it is freedom from exploitation, diseases, hunger and violence. For others it means better means of livelihood. Peace is a relative term but it cannot operate in the absence of justice. For emperor/rulers peace has a different connotation. It means economic sanction against independent nations. It means forceful eviction of poor tribals from their land and forest areas. It means getting rid of dictators/tyrants (of course selectively).
The free market economy has opened a floodgate for economic domination. Growth is the new-found mantra and in the name of growth exploitations against dalits, tribals, women and children continue unabated. Free market/economy is for the emperors/rulers the ultimate peace. Can we match the proclamation for peace with nuclear weapons, smart bombs and fighter jets? Can we match the proclamation for peace with violence meted out to the underprivileged? Can we match the proclamation for peace with the stringent patent laws whereby poor nations cannot afford to procure medicines for citizens? Signs of peace and hope rest not with institutions but with brave citizens and free thinkers who have themselves experienced that kind of inner peace that Christ has proclaimed. At times we are overfed with the message of peace packed and marketed by corporate houses. Undoubtedly those packages come as freebies but at the end of the day we are paying a big price for those gift boxes – we denounce our own self, our culture, identity, resources, dignity, integrity, and more importantly our independence and freedom.