Corporeal Peace

The premise of corporeal peace is that without the wellbeing of our bodies and minds world peace is an irrelevancy. As obvious as this premise may be when pointed out, a prevalent pitfall of peacemakers historically and contemporarily has been failing to take it into account.

Nutrition

Starvation precludes the peace of an individual just as, on wide enough scales, it does for society. In addition to the suffering empty stomachs cause to individuals and societies, they are like ticking time bombs inad­vertently targeted at collective peace. Efforts to secure enough food have been starting points of peace since primordial times, when gathering and hunting were the norms. Advents of agriculture and hydraulic revolutions were expansions of this base, which the Ancient Chinese and Japanese rightly believed to be the source of any and all kinds of peace. Similarly in Ancient Greece, first-generation Horae who represented how peace was made and maintained were agricultural goddesses the worship of whom was intended to ensure plentiful harvests. Industrialism changed the way food is produced and distributed, but not its being the foundation of world peace. What individual nutrition needs are and how they are met depends on cultural traditions as much as economic systems, and world peace depends on nutrition needs being met in consideration of cultural traditions and economic systems.

Shelter and Sanitation

Shelter was as necessary for the corporeal peace of prehistoric nomads as it is for us now, though only with transitions to sedentary life in the home base structure of hunter-gatherers can the idea of home originate. The first meanings of Shalom for the Jewish tribes of the Torah related to protec­tion from hostile natural elements, the basic sense in which shelter is taken here. Metaphorically, their perennial search for the Promised Land as a prerequisite of peace can be seen as an indication of the significances of such a permanent dwelling for aspiring or currently sedentary peoples. The violence used in stealing peoples’ homes as a way to the Promised Land may have been justified by Yahweh, but within our context serves only to show how for people so lacking, no place is more precious to peace than home. In Ancient India, pre-Vedic societies and, millennia later, Ashoka sought to secure sanitation for all as a step towards peace because diseases terminally infecting people otherwise at peace can thereby be cur­tailed. Reconstructions that have occurred after destructive wars attest to the importance of shelter and sanitation as a second step after nutrition in rebuilding peace; world peace cannot be actualized before everyone everywhere who so wants to has taken these two steps.

Healthcare

The Hippocratic Oath, a non-violent code by which doctors’ duties are combined with doing no harm and protecting their patients from injus­tice, and Henri Dunant’s efforts to assist the wounded in war regardless of the nationality, may be the only specifiable healthcare items in this book. But implications of the Oath and the Red Cross which Dunant founded, that healthcare is a birthright linked to justice and necessary to corporeal peace because of its upholding role, are logical extensions of nutrition, shelter and sanitation. Once available only to the high-born, the well-off and the poor as charity, universal healthcare was made actualiz­able with industrialism coupled with the social planning developed to stem civil strife along antithetical ideological lines during the Great Depression, a sign that universal healthcare can be part of any political position.

Education

Education is a form of healthcare for the mind. In Clement of Alexandria’s view, peace is the point of education and war a result of its absence, but education itself can create absences of peace depending on what is taught. Enculturation processes, such as those of simple societies like the Tasaday, can both extend past peace practices into the present and prepare youths to deal with future problems in peaceful ways. Universities have been places where peacemakers have converged and emerged when they have not been instruments of bellicose status quos. Peaceful catalytic examples can be drawn from US universities in the 1960s and 1970s and European in the eighteenth century; counter-examples would be early medieval uni­versities in servitude of momentary militant powers. Today’s University for Peace in Costa Rica may not be historically related to the School of Prosperous Peacein Tokugawa Japan, but they share an impulse that, if more widespread, would put the power and influence of intellectuals at the disposal of peacemakers and/or make peacemakers out of intellectu­als themselves, as was the case with atomic scientists in the mid twentieth century and the Pugwash Conference to this day. More than for other items of corporeal peace, what constitutes education for peace thus depends as much on how it is done as on if it is done.