The recipient(s) of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize will soon be announced (October 7), and this week’s news offered strong support for the negotiators who have solidified the Colombian peace treaty, which, if it stands, would mark the end to a war that has lasted nearly half a century. In addition, as Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker noted in a recent co-authored op-ed piece, the western hemisphere will have reached a more far-reaching milestone: “Today, there are no military governments in the Americas. No countries are fighting one another. And no governments are battling major insurgencies.”
This historic moment barely registered in the lists of most-shared news stories. Instead, countless doom-and-gloom fears and anxieties continued to dominate social media from nearly every point on the political sphere. Some of my most well-intentioned pacifist friends continue to bemoan the “fact” that our world is more violent and war-torn than ever before.
In fact, the “facts” don’t support such pessimism and cynicism.
As Steven Pinker pointed out in his well-researched book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, “Violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.” Rather than recognize and build on this moment of hope and optimism, many have sought to rebut his claims and focus attention on recent horrific instances of terrorism or the loudest voices of hatred, contempt, and intolerance in our society. Some have also attempted to redefine the word “violence” to include a broader range of complaints and offenses that can justify their own dire perspectives.
I won’t take up those arguments here or attempt an explanation of why they persist in our culture despite evidence to the contrary. Truth be told, I struggle with these same issues every day in my own dark-leaning psyche. Regardless, I won’t allow the lure of negativity to detract from the hopes of a fully peaceful South America, especially not in this end-of-summer moment while the positive glow of the Rio Olympics still shines from Brazil.
I will, however, argue that we need to make such stories of peace more popular and share them more widely when they occur. To explain why, I offer this short yet inspirational excerpt from Pinker’s book: “Peace first became a popular sensation with the publication of two bestsellers. In 1889 the Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner published a work of fiction called Die Waffen Nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), a first-person account of the gruesomeness of war. And in 1909 the British journalist Norman Angell published a pamphlet called Europe’s Optical Illusion, later expanded as The Great Illusion, which argued that war was economically futile.”
I had never heard about Bertha von Suttner upon reading this, but I was greatly intrigued, and so I began doing some research into her life and works. Every book opens another, and this certainly held true here: Pinker’s book led me to seek out and open Suttner’s book, which led me to open up biographies of Alfred Nobel, which led me to begin writing my own historical novel, Peace at Last. This project seemed the most viable path to employ my own talents and interests in the hopes of promoting and perpetuating global peace.
Such a stance doesn’t come without its detractors, and the voices of yesteryear still echo too loudly today. As Pinker wrote, “For all its literary popularity, the antiwar movement seemed too idealistic at the time to be taken seriously by the political mainstream. Suttner was called ‘a gentle perfume of absurdity,’ and her German Peace Society ‘a comical sewing bee composed of sentimental aunts of both sexes.’ Angells’ friends told him to ‘avoid that stuff or you’ll be classed with cranks and faddists, with devotees of Higher Thought who go about in sandals and long beards, and live on nuts.’”
Nay-saying and name-calling is nothing new. The pessimists continue to challenge the idealists; those who seek to profit from war continue to rail against those who continue to point out the proven and vastly greater economic benefits of peace. Luckily for all of us, the trend over time continues toward peace. The news from South America this week supports that momentum, and so we should all celebrate the Colombians’ efforts and work with them toward preserving our newly war-free western hemisphere.
Peace at Last 