The way of the crusade and the way of peace

I have always been skeptical of those who call for crusades, for the simple reason that crusades have killed many more people than they have ever saved.

There is something attractive about taking up the banner of the knight-errant and fighting the demon-of-the-day allegedly holding civilization in its grip.  Moral clarity is attractive, and the demand for action inspired by any crusade provides meaning in a world where both human and heavenly action appears dictated by the rule of whim, and not by any other logic.

Thus, the seed of every crusade is the seed of fundamentalism — an unshaken belief that the cause worth fighting and dying for is noble and just.  And fundamentalism, as we are all too aware, is a tool of immense destruction.  Whatever their intentions, no one can deny that fundamentalists — of any stripe — will not hesitate to commit great acts of mischief in the name of their conviction.

The crusade is still at work today.  Every religion, every belief, every ideology has its crusaders.  They hoist their flags and build their intellectual forts, ready and eager to combat any deviation from dogma.   They leave their home countries to convince some far away people that their God or their government is the right way to do things — the only way to do things — incapable of leaving their narrow perspectives for a deeper appreciation of the diversity of human existence.  Diversity, in fact, is the enemy of the crusader; and if there are only a handful of languages spoken on this Earth today, a handful of governments, a handful of religions, a handful of people who run the banks and issue the currency — well, we can thank every crusader who has ever lived for that.

Please don’t think that I am rejecting the struggle for justice, or the quest for progress that has defined human civilization.  There are things that are wrong on this Earth that must be righted.  There is injustice, and suffering; there are people who live in physical and spiritual destitution on account of outside oppression.

And there have been many people over the millenia, genuine agents in the cause of justice, who have righted many wrongs and broadened the frontiers of human dignity.

But these stunning individuals who have furthered those frontiers were never crusaders, or fundamentalists, or moralists; these bright lights never called for the deaths of those who stood in their way, never insisted that there is only one right way to do things, never for one moment thought that it was appropriate to kill in the name of an idea.

If you look at human history, and if you trace back this history over thousands of years, you will see little more than one crusade after another — one group of people killing other people in the name of some idea.  That idea might involve God, or government, or some perceived injustice, or may even be as simple as greed for more land and resources.  But before a person can pick up a spear or a gun against another person and commit murder — legal murder, but murder nonetheless — she needs to have a reason.  A human being cannot kill for no reason alone.  The ones who do so we call sociopaths; the ones who give us those reasons we call our leaders.

The crusade cannot further justice.   Even today, in the Middle East, we reap the effects of crusades started 1000 years ago.  This is how long the effects of a crusade will last!  The crusades we have initiated today — and there have been many — will have similarly long effects.

And it is also the case that the most fervent crusaders are those who are least at peace with themselves.  This is why they feel the need to go on exotic missions with weapon (or religious book) in hand and advance their idea — they have no inner serenity unless there is some violence in their lives.  This is why Frederick Nietzsche wrote long ago, “When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”  A crusader is the enemy of peace because in times of peace the crusade is over and the crusader becomes useless.

Let us examine all the crusades that exist today, crusades which we know are plowing the seeds of future conflict many years from now, maybe even a thousand years from now.  There are the countless religious crusades, too numerous to list.  There are the political crusades — democracy versus communism or socialism.  There are the crusades of the strong against the weak — the Israelis against the Palestinians, the Americans against the Afghanis.  There are the crusades against other people even in the same society — white versus black, man versus woman, the fundamentalist versus the gay couple wanting to get married.  These are not so violent, but the kernel is the same, the desire for sameness is there, the need to destroy all diversity and insist on a bland conformity that has been the dream of tyrants for thousands of years.

We have developed so much technology over the last hundred years that we forget how little our minds and hearts have changed over that same period.  To go from horse-and-buggy and sail ship to electric cars and space ship is a phenomenal feat of ingenuity.  We are so advanced when it comes to our tools.  Why then are we such infants when it comes to human decency?  Why this desire for the crusade, this desire to force our own beliefs on others even if it means blood?

The answer to that question lies inside our heads.  And so, instead of looking for answers outside, we must look inside, to our inner worlds.  The crusade must be turned inward.  Instead of fighting the outside world, instead of proselytizing and pointing a gun at someone else in the name of an idea, we must use that same urgency of purpose to confront our inner psyches.  This is the real battleground for the courageous, because it is a terrifying thing to examine our own minds.  Our minds are filled with fears and anxieties and old habits which we insist on performing day after day unthinkingly.  So many of us today drown our heads to avoid this very self-examination.  Not even one minute of silence can exist in our day or else the mind starts to shake and tremble at its own character.

But it is only here, in this inner crusade, where real peace is found, which is the kernel for world peace as well.  For so many thousands of years people have been killing each other and at each others’ throats.  And not just on the battlefield, but in marriage, in friendships, in the marketplace — please, look wherever there is any human interaction and you will see the specter of violence and tyranny at every moment.  This is how we define ourselves as a species, with behavior that would make even the most base animal ashamed because we do it in the name of an idea.  At least when a dog bites another dog, it does it out of some instinct; it does not need to come up with a reason why it had to attack.  It is only humans who are so devious with each other that they have to justify the killing of another in the name of God or country.  Even a dog has better sense than that.

And the mind itself, a thing of such beauty, never reaches its full potential.  How can it?  It is tied to an idea, like a boat moored to the dock, floating here and there but never straying far from its provincial port.  The mind is the real treasure, but it is never explored.  It is like having a treasure chest of gold in the closet in your home, but you never look inside your own house because you’re too busy outside looking for the treasure everywhere else.  The treasure is right there, the gold is right there, but it’s in the one place you never look, the one place you refuse to look because who wants to examine the mind?  So the treasure is never found.

There is injustice in this world, there is oppression, there is violence and there is suffering.   But there is never a need for any one of us to participate in those things.  If all of us were just a little more at peace with ourselves, a little more in tune with our minds and our thoughts and our motivations, we would be just a little more at peace with each other as well.  And, over time, with little improvements over our lifetimes and the lifetimes of our descendants, you would see oppression wither away, violence slowly end, and the scales of justice ever gradually right themselves.  This is the only way justice, peace, and freedom have ever come about.

It sounds like fantasy but the best way to ensure peace on the Earth is to work on peace in our own individual lives.  We make peace with our friends and neighbors, peace with our acquaintances, peace with our enemies, and most importantly, peace with ourselves.  When we have that peace of mind that comes through self-analysis, the injustices of the world take on a different hue.  Suddenly, it is no longer about us and them, which killer is right and which killer is wrong; instead, one sees that in all wars, in all conflict, in all crusades, the injustice is the mental harm and damage done to the next succeeding generation who will continue to blindly kill for no other reason than that is what they were taught.  That is the real injustice.

It makes no difference whether one side is weak and the other is strong.  The weak can triumph through peace.  This was the method of Gandhi, and never before in human history was one man so powerful as to defeat an empire.  Gandhi was but the pioneer of this technique; the method of peace has yet to be truly explored.  And its potency lies in the fact that it has nothing to do with the method of the crusade, and everything to do with truth, and justice, and freedom.  These are the real sources of power in human existence; how rarely they are utilized!

With so many problems facing the human race today — problems of war, of sustainability, of oppressive government — many men and women are beginning to feel a need for action.  It is tempting to think that by picking up the banner of an idea and marching off to battle against the enemies of that idea, solutions can be found.  But this will not work.  Please, don’t take my word for it, but simply examine the many thousands of years of history and see the bloodshed that has been produced by every idea to ever cross the mind of every well-intentioned but misguided soul who has insisted on the way of the crusade.  Make your own conclusion.

The better way — the way towards genuine human advancement — is to take that need for action and use it as a tool of self-discovery.  It is enough for every one of us to explore the universe that resides in our own heads and to come to peace with our individualities, our own psyches.  Really, that is enough.  One person does this, and just somewhere on this beautiful Earth, there is one person who has peace, who lives in perfect harmony and perfect freedom.  Than, another person finds his or her peace, and the boundaries of peace and freedom have multiplied and expanded.  Real peace!  Then two more people do this, and so on and so on and maybe there will exist one day even just one neighborhood where there is real peace and real harmony.  And that neighborhood expands into a town, and then into a city, then a state, and then maybe one day there will be one shining nation of individuals in peace with themselves and each other.

This is the way of peace, a way very different than the way of the crusade.  The era of the crusade is over.  No more crusades; it is time for peace.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 12:49 am and is filed under Alternative Living, Freedom and Democracy, Freedom and Spiritualism and tagged with bigotry, criminal behavior, crusades, happiness, ignorance, observing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.