“Peace on earth, good will towards men.”

It’s a fine old season, a good old season, the best old season of all the good old seasons in the year. It’s  jolly and merry. It’s a mistletoe and holly berry time when grudges and spites are set aside and when for some few short weeks it seems there might really be a little good will towards men. Or at least it used to be.

As a motto for the current Holiday Season this Peace on Earth thing looks as dead as a door-nail… Although, as Charles Dickens once observed, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail I don’t know. “I might have been inclined, myself,” he said, “to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it or the country’s done for.”

This year no place on earth is less likely to capture the spirit of  the old motto about peace and good will than the Holy Land. In that little patch of ground, sacred to three of the world’s great religions, there seems little promise of peace and precious little good will.

The Israelis and the Palestinians appear to have settled on explosion as the most efficient language of political discourse. The Muslims, when not blowing up Jews, are casting around for ways to blow up the rest of us; and  the Christian leader of the world’s only hyper-power (that’s us, gang) is  taking the Crusades as a model for rational dispute resolution.

Ordinary folk, when they find that something doesn’t work, try something different. Not these guys. They have stumbled on a strategy for resolving their differences that even the dull normal among us recognize isn’t getting the job done. When it doesn’t work they simply take up the same old cudgel and try it again. Harder. More explosively.

Sniping, bombings, and savage little fratricidal conflicts around the world are the order of the day. The people responsible for them have unleashed pestilence, famine and death on their fellow citizens, frequently on the grounds of differences of religion. Or sometimes over differences of oil reserves.

Forgive me for pointing out that it ain’t  the rational humanists who are out there whuppin’ other folks in line.

What would peace and good will be if ever we could achieve them?

Peace is not simply the  absence of war;  good will towards men is something greater than simply leaving them alone. The word  “peace”  is more nearly a verb than a noun. It suggests a  continuous activity rather than  a condition we can passively enjoy while we turn our attention to other things. It is not something we have, but something we do.

If there were a word for this activity it would be “peacing.”

Nor is peace that quiet serenity of the spirit in which all our personal disturbances are dissolved and set to rest. It is not the peace of the expression “He is at peace now,” which is what we say of the dead.

A world at peace is not a world without problems or challenges. Nor is it a world in which we don’t know personal anxieties, sorrow or despair. It’s a world in which the human spirit is freed to be constructive rather than destructive. It is a world in which  human energies can be channeled against anxiety, sorrow and despair wherever they are found.

Peace and good will are connected in very practical ways. War, even in a righteous cause, is costly: In human energy, human life, suffering, and money. It is the great corrupter of good will.

However much you wish it you cannot simply settle for the state of not-being-at-war and then proceed to ignore poverty, disease, or hunger in other parts of the world. Those are the causes that drive people to make war in the first place.

Since we started with Dickens let’s remember the pain of Marley’s ghost: That he cannot now intercede to help the sufferers he sees around him, and that he did not do so in life. For him good will toward men was simply letting them alone.

We need a second motto for the Holiday Season, one which is not a goal to strive for or a hope to be made real but which, sadly, reminds us of the principle upon which the world is now acting. It reminds us of what now, and in all the year to come, we should struggle to avoid.  I saw it once posted as a sad little note in the break room of a place I worked…

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.