Cataclysmic Peace
History does not quit because of events, nor even cataclysm. The World Wars; the US Civil War; the British Civil Wars; the Hundred Years' and Eighty Years' Wars. The fall of Rome. The rise of Rome and the destruction of the old Greek and Egyptian and Persian Empires. The violent conquest of the Toltec and Mayan Empires by the Aztecs. Pizarro's conquista of the Incan Empire. Violence rarely ends anything.
A lot of people say violence never solves anything, but they are obviously overgeneralizing; violence is often used to solve questions that have no answer anyone can agree to otherwise, but rarely in a way that everything else is somehow brought to an end.
We are now faced with cataclysmic peace, a period in which the entire world, especially EurAsian and northern peoples, must adapt to a near-total absence of violence. The grand questions of our day, which our grandfathers would have needed violence to solve, must now be settled by peaceful means, which often create the same resentments and fears, without the satisfying finality of a peace treaty, nor even the resentful entente of an armistice. Not a comfortable period, nor one in which many men have the skills, international or interpersonal, to answer the grand questions which face humanity, both collectively and nationally. History, meanwhile, insists on continuing, whatever human beings think is possible or impossible, find satisfying, unsatisfying, resentful or harmful or delightful.
Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history (knowing of course, that it was at least partly tongue-in-cheek) and Samuel Huntington wrote about the clash of civilizations, knowing equally well that, as Tom Friedman has described it, in a flat world, there really is only human civilization to clash within itself. Two of the grand cult religions face a cataclysmic disagreement over which of their versions of a common god's word should be commonly believed. So many factions within each believe that they have a solution to the common problem, that from inside and outside it seems nearly impossible that any of them can be correct. Yet to many observers, this philosophical conflict spanning so very many of humankind is mainly irrelevant to the ongoing history of the world; that politics and economics continue oblivious to the great philosophical argument.
Peace, it seems, is as implacable and inevitable now, as once was war, at this end of history on a flat world, and civilizations must clash along merely intellectual lines, because history refuses them the chance to contest their differences in war.
War, of course, goes on as well. Many in the United States think of it as continuing indefinitely, with no “exit strategy” and no resumption of normal relations in sight, which is of course unremarkably short-sighted and almost uniquely American in its optimism, that peace is the normal state of affairs and war the disruption to them. I would suggest, that in this century, that American philosophy has become true, despite its emergence well ahead of its time, early in the last century. And, as Tom Barnett loves to point out, everything else continues, in war and peace. Philosophy, economics, work and living and the rest of humanity's pursuits don't seem to care when cataclysm strikes or fails to strike. Indeed, the grand cataclysms that disrupted history in the past have been as ineffective at ending history as the peace which characterizes the flat world in this century. Plagues, wars, pestilence and famine have brought many apocalypses, but never an end to humanity and all of the everything else we were busy doing in the meantime.
And that, I would suggest, is the only possible conclusion to draw from the very depth of history, and the very profundity of change ongoing in this era: that, regardless of disruption and cataclysm and apocalypse, we must and we will find the means to go on doing what else there is to do. Which implies, as I believe, that all of those “little” things we do every day, are far more important to go on doing than the grand things history occasionally saddles us with.
Carry on.