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{{a|devil|{{image|World peace|png|It’s a battle.}}}} | {{a|devil|{{image|World peace|png|It’s a battle.}}}}The problem with theories of justice is they don’t bear close examination. | ||
Collective ones run into the problem “who gets to decide, and what’s to stop ''them'' tilting the scales, and what of people who legitimately disagree?” | |||
Individualistic ones are fine until we have to interact with each other — over the course of human history, we’ve tended to do that a lot — whereupon they all run into the same basic conundrum: what to do when ''my'' expression of personal freedom interferes with ''yours''? | |||
These lead to strands of philosophy one may characterise as basically ''Hobbesian'' (pessimistic) or ''[[Adam Smith|Smithian]]'' (optimistic) in grappling with the proposition that there are finite resources, unlimited demands on them, but in any case when gathered together humans are a fundamentally argumentative bunch, and this is a necessary condition of society (Hobbes) and a desirable one (Smith). | |||
It used to be only those contesting beauty pageants who aspired to end conflict and lube blissed out in peace, love and happiness: nowadays it seems to include a large part of the educated metropolitan elite — at least, in their in unguarded moments, when they haven’t been thinking too hard about it. | |||
Influencers wring their hands and ask, “What is the biggest impediment to world peace? How can we reach this state? What must we change? | |||
They harvest predictable enough, fit-for-beauty-pageant answers: greed, ego, colonialism, the Great Satan, Putin, men, idiocy, defence companies, toxic ideologies, the military-industrial complex, the lack of respect, the establishment — | |||
But isn’t the answer, ''the hope for something better''? | But isn’t the answer, ''the hope for something better''? | ||
We might not like the idea of conflict, but isn’t | We might not like the idea of conflict in the particular, but in the general disruption is a font of progress. In which case, isn’t the ''absence'' of stimulus for change even ''more'' horrifying? | ||
World peace — ''the total absence of conflict'' — implies a settled ''consensus''. It takes as a given that all mysteries have been resolved or, at any rate, agreed upon, that all possible questions have catalogued, taxonomised and satisfactorily answered, that all [[unknowns]] have been eradicated. World peace implies a ''total homogeneity of need, want and value''. There are no inventions left, no efficiencies to be gained, no services to be improved, no sunlit uplands to move towards. | World peace — ''the total absence of conflict'' — implies a settled ''consensus''. It takes as a given that all mysteries have been resolved or, at any rate, agreed upon, that all possible questions have catalogued, taxonomised and satisfactorily answered, that all [[unknowns]] have been eradicated. World peace implies a ''total homogeneity of need, want and value''. There are no inventions left, no efficiencies to be gained, no services to be improved, no sunlit uplands to move towards. |