Meditations on War and Peace

Justice. What is justice? For you who values justice, who genuinely aspires to creating a just world, how do you determine how to feel, what to think, what to fight for when chaos reigns, emotions run high, the news cycle feeds whatever specific fears appeal to you, whether the news tells the truth, the whole truth, parts of the truth, or blatant untruths?

In such times, I try to place myself behind the “veil of ignorance”, a tool for moral reasoning conceptualized by the philosopher John Rawls. It asks quite simply: what would you consider a just world if you didn’t know who you would be when you were born? If you didn’t know where in the world you’d be born, which gender, race or religion you’d be born into; what financial, physical and intellectual resources you would have. If you knew none of these things before entering the world, and you had as good a chance of being who you are today as whoever you think is most different from you, how would you design a moral society?

In a more specific circumstance, what would you consider the just course of action if you didn’t know which side of a longstanding conflict you would have been born into? If time was turned back today to your date of birth, and the world had shrunk down to a strip of land between a river and a sea, and there were equal chances that you’d be born on either side of an ethnic/religious divide that defines with wildly different outcomes the kind of life that you and your descendants would live — what would you wish the world that you were about to be born into to look like to align with your sense of justice and morality, and quite frankly, to protect your own interests?

I bet that you wouldn’t think that you needed a PhD, or that you would have to have read any thick books on history, geopolitics or theology and religion to define exactly what kind of world you hope meets you on the other side of your mother’s womb. You would know exactly what a just world ought to look like for everyone, because you would know that you could be anyone.

Now, fast forward however many years old you are today. What would you think is the just course for a war predominantly between these two groups, to either of which you would have an equal chance of belonging (would you even call it a war if you didn’t know to which side you would belong?)?

I would like to believe that most people, from behind the veil of ignorance, would agitate for the deescalation of violence. When you don’t know what side your children would have been born into, you would likely not ignore, discount or celebrate the killing of children on either side. If white phosphorus could as well have been dropped on top of your house, searing the skin of your loved ones as they burned to death, I bet that you would be furiously writing to your representatives, taking to the streets, doing whatever you could to condemn its use as a brutal war crime. If you didn’t know which history would have led you to where you are, you would likely be out there condemning those who use the crisis as an excuse to fan the flames of a centuries’ old hatred for one of the groups, a hatred that led to the extermination of millions of them while the world stood by doing little to stop their genocide only but a few decades ago.

But perhaps it would start earlier than that. Perhaps, if you were the kind of person who cared about peace in a particular region where conflict forments along an ethnic divide, if only because behind the veil of ignorance, you would not know which side you and yours would have been born into, you would likely not have been indifferent to the reality that one side could lock the other behind an open air prison, forcing generations of their children to grow up dispossessed, disenfranchised, stateless, robbed of any sense of control over not only their destiny, but their daily existence since their access to food, water, electricity, medicines, even movement, was restricted by the other side. You would likely call that kind of segregation and brutal control apartheid on a gentler day, something else on a day when you truly imagine that that life could have been yours, because that’s not a life anyone would roll the dice on. Let’s be honest, nobody would take a chance on such a fate for themselves or their children.

And if you thought that it might be a possibility, I can bet that you would use every means at your disposal to end such a reality, knowing fully well that the human spirit rejects bondage, ever since Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt (no less, after killing the Egyptians’ first born sons!), a course of history of liberation struggle that found itself millennia later in the Black Jacobins who turned against their colonial masters back in 1791, and all the others across the world who followed after that (to my own personal benefit because, thanks to them, I myself was born free to parents who were born in bondage).

But if not for the knowledge that, had it been you who was doomed to such an existence, you would have fought every way you know how for your freedom just like the Black Jacobins did, perhaps you would fight for a just and moral world simply because you would know that injustice anywhere is a scar upon humanity everywhere. And that when humanity rightly said “never again” after one side was the victim of an eerily similar crime elsewhere as is happening right now on that strip of land between the river and the sea — complete with the rhetoric of dehumanization, extermination and ethnic cleansing — then it ought to be “never again” for everyone, everywhere.

You see, if you didn’t know whether you would ever know peace again whichever side of the ethnic divide you might belong to, because nobody on either side will ever know peace, real lasting peace, without justice, perhaps you would start right now by demanding that every international mechanism available is used to bring this conflict to an immediate end. You would be horrified by the idea that powerful countries elsewhere were escalating the conflict by further arming either side, and you would loudly condemn your own country for whichever role it’s currently playing, even if that role is silence.

You would also recognize that cessation of conflict will never mean peace until every single person living on that strip of land gains their right to safety, to a homeland, to citizenship, to self determination, to control over their daily existence, to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.

If you don’t know what to believe, what to fight for in such times, try standing behind the veil of ignorance. You will know what to do, I promise you.

Now, if you find that you’ve decided whose humanity is more human than another’s, whose life deserves living more than another’s, or worse still, whose pain and suffering is justifiable for the ends specific to “your side”, then you don’t really care about justice, and you join a hall of infamy of many others just like you who have gone before. History has not been kind to their memory and it won’t be kind to yours.