On the concept of peace

Dougald Hine starts (and doesn't finish) talking about:

  a talk that Ivan Illich gave at the start of the 1980s in Japan about the culturally specific flavours of “peace” and how historians have preferred to dwell on the violence of the past than on its forms of peace. He brings in a distinction from Ishida Takeshi between the peace of the centre (“peace-keeping”, “peace-making”) and the peace of the margin, where people’s hope is to be “left in peace”. And he offers this thought about what we are usually talking about nowadays when we use the language of peace:

Paradoxically, peace was turned into an academic subject just when it had been reduced to a balance between sovereign, economic powers acting under the assumption of scarcity. Thus study is restricted to research on the least violent truce between competitors locked into a zero sum game. Like searchlights, the concepts of this research focus on scarcities. And they permit the discovery of unequal distributions of scarcity. But in the process of such research, the peaceful enjoyment of that which is not scarce, people’s peace, is left in a zone of deep shadow.

It is hard to bring into view what Illich is trying to speak of when he says that the past includes “the peaceful enjoyment of that which is not scarce”. We’re so saturated in a story of original scarcity, there’s something here that doesn’t compute.

Then Hine quotes an hour discussion with a student of Illich's which is difficult for me to understand...but I will try again later.

I like being pushed to understand more about peace.

Inner peace has been so much the focus in my life, due to the incredible disruptions in our world these days. It's a survival technique I'm sure.

Just wanted to share this, as these are thoughts of a stream of ongoing considerations.