Peace
My Dad was a prairie boy from Souris Manitoba. When WW2 broke out he lied about his age so he could join the army to fight the nazis. He stepped on a landmine and lost his leg. That is not peace.
But after that war the world was a bit horrified. Surrender was bought by bombing Hiroshima and Dresden. A long peace ensued because we all knew how bad war was. But we forget.
Before WW2 Neville Chamberlain negotiated with the Nazis and sold out Czechoslovakia claiming that his appeasement had brought "peace for our time". What a short time that was. Within a year Germany invaded Poland.
I learned in school that you can't make peace with bullies if you try to appease them. Each appeasement just enables new demands. I learned that if I didn't give in to bullies they would go away and leave me in peace.
I like peace a lot but sometimes the way to keep the peace is to be known as a good fighter.
My generation in Canada is one of the luckiest generations in history I think. The country was never at war in our watch. Generations younger than me went to war in Afghanistan after 911 but thankfully we weren't involved in Iraq. But peace is rare. The human norm seems to be warfare.
Warfare fits with the common view of nature as being "red of tooth and claw". It seems natural that people will fight and the strongest will prevail. Nature and natural selection are not actually red of tooth and claw. Heck - most life forms don't even have teeth or claws let alone blood.
Warfare is a form of competition and competition often is a zero sum game. There are winners and losers. For example - in the competition between hares and foxes a hare loses if it gets eaten by a fox. In the fox loses if it can't find hares to eat. Evolution isn't about who wins that competition. Evolution works on population dynamics - not on competition
People are pretty good at getting around the harms that nature can do. We have treatments for diseases and eyeglasses. We've evolved legal systems so that disputes can be settled without bloodshed. Those systems enabled the peace I've lived with all my life.
Now we have strongmen like Putin and Trump trashing all that. They don't need no stinkin legal system. It's frustrating.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.