War is (though I wish it wasn’t) a fact. War is happening, unfolding, around us. Those of us here in the United States may not face the rockets and bombs, in the flesh. But our government is actively debating which wars to fund, and how much. Peace seems like a strangely glimmering illusion from another time and place.
It’s not only war that’s destroyed the illusion of peace, of course. Peace times, themselves, have failed. Peace has destroyed itself, we could say. Peace helped to maintain a world without justice. And this failure—peace’s failure—is also responsible for destroying the illusion of peace that so many of us used to live with. Even the call for a ceasefire isn’t quite a call for peace. It’s certainly not a call for a return to peace times, as they used to be.
In the midst of World War I, Freud wrote the lectures that would later be published as Reflections on War and Death. His declared purpose was to help people make sense of the deep disillusionment that so many were feeling, in the midst of the war. He was speaking to people who had once considered themselves to be civilized citizens of the world, but had since watched the world around them descend into what they could only describe as barbarism. He wanted to help people make sense of what was happening to them, emotionally.
To begin with, Freud said, the disappointment they were feeling (the loss of this thing they called the civilized world) was over “the destruction of an illusion.” The civilized world was an illusion, and people embraced that illusion because illusions themselves “save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead.” But because it was an illusion, Freud noted soberly, “we must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”
We could say that peace, like the idea of civilization, is an illusion. Peace times never create conditions that are uniformly experienced as tranquil, harmonious, restful, or free of conflict for absolutely everyone. But the widespread absence of war or conflict gives many of us the illusion of a peace that reigns over us all. This allows those of us who can live within that illusion to enjoy pleasure, and live with less pain. Freud might tell us, now, that we must accept without complaint that this illusion has been dashed to pieces against the hard rocks of reality.
I don’t disagree with Freud. Not really. And yet, I think of peace as something other than an illusion. I think of it as a dream. An illusion is something that we share, culturally and collectively. Whether it occurs in waking or sleeping life, a dream is something that happens in our biological bodies. It’s an elemental impulsive experience. It emerges from the underworld of our imagination and speaks to us in a spacetime where no one else can hear it. A dream is its own form of reality. I don’t know what a Freudian would make of this, but in my view a dream can produce illusions and yet an illusion isn’t necessarily a dream.
A dream, says Freud, informs us “of the regression of our emotional life to an earlier stage of development.” A dream is a primal kind of experience, in Freud’s account. It feeds us material from the subconscious—from the underworld of our thoughtscape and imagination—and we interpret this information through purely egotistical impulses. If I’m suggesting that peace is a dream, then does this mean that a desire for peace is also egotistical? Perhaps.
The assumptions is often made that, if someone is acting out of a so-called egotistical or self-oriented motive, that this inherently does a kind of violence to the collective. When we withdraw into self, the assumption goes, we cut ourselves off from the collective, we devalue or destroy it. But what if some of our most capacious actions are fed by a desire that’s deeply oriented towards what we feel inside of ourselves?
In her essay “The Human Personality” French philosopher Simone Weil wrote about a self-oriented desire that she believed was universal. “At the bottom of the heart of every human being,” she wrote, “from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him.” Like a tiny baby who knows only what it feels to be held, there is something still buried in us that expects the good of tenderness.
What if the dream of peace is born here? What if the dream of peace is a retreat into this deeply primal expectation that we must have had when we emerged into the world, when we knew nothing of its cruelties? What if the dream of peace is the experience of this expectation, preserved in perpetuity in the underworld of our imagination? And what if it becomes an illusion—a dream that we hold and share, collectively—because we recognize that this basic expectation unites us with others? What if we have realized that the best sort of shared space is the one where we can all keep expecting this?
Peace feels like an illusion, now. It feels like an illusion that culture feeds us. And I think that there are reasons to feel cynical about all of the violence that peace times can hide. But I can’t help but also feel that there is some deep, impulsive drive within me that clings to the word as if it can do something. There’s something in me that only feels expressed by that word, by the visions in my mind’s eye—the soothing greens that pass across the back of my eyelids when I hear it. It feels like a dream that I keep dredging up from the underworlds of my imagination, an elemental experience in my body; a memory of a time and space that feels so alien right now. But still so vital.
Thank you. This provoked a lot of thought in me on the difference between illusion and dream, especially the way you connect dream so close to the body, which I take for granted. I think the saying (by Adorno, I think) that all music tends to silence could connect with the idea that all conflict tends to peace, and in some way, peace is always present although often conflicted, distorted, pressed down and driven away, and like a dream, we long for that primal feeling of peace we want to believe was once and can be evermore. But then we have to reconcile with the idea of a dream.
Hi, I am from Australia.
Please find an Illuminated Understanding of peace, death and the non-human inhabitants of this mostly non-human world.
Not Two Is Peace
http://www.dabase.org/12laws.htm
http://www.dabase.org/p8rightness.htm
http://www.nottwoispeace.org/excerpt-two-is-not-peace
http://www.priorunity.org
Death & Dying
http://www.easydeathbook.com/purpose.asp beautiful prose
http://global.adidam.org/books/easy-death
http://www.beezone.com/wide-stacks-many-topics/death_message Death as the Constant message of Life
http://www.beezone.com/adida/laughingmanmag/vol2no3deathdying/welcomesisterdeath.html
Welcome Sister Death
Fear No More Zoo - the non-humans and Trees too
http://fearnomore.vision/human/what-man-represents
http://www.fnmzoo.org/wisdom-teaching
http://www.dabase.org/trees.htm