Steve_Bamlett_blog

What brings you peace?

We tend as a culture to fetishise a notion of inner peace, precisely because we live in a world in which both what is good, bad or on some scale between them, are of necessity the product of a dialectic that is necessarily based on conflict. We feel that we have had our fill of conflict often; brought up as we all are in families which thrive on its expression and simultaneous repression. We all have to say to ourselves that our family brought us peace but we think only of temporary outcomes against a background of conflict between parents and children, spouses and sibling rivalries and tension. In the case of only children like myself, the conflictual tension sometimes appears within, in what the later psychodynamic thinkers after Melanie Klein called internal ‘object’ relationships or with transitional objects, dolls and bears alike.

The dialectic in which peace forms one possible outcome, and that in variations, is inevitably a thing that utilises memory to tend to be independent of conflict is itself often racked by remembered tension though in a basement location. In the self, whilst its upstairs equivalent avatar relaxes on a luscious sofa, a predictor of some eternal cloud of peaceful unknowing.

Peace is beautiful but it is as illusory as are some of the conflicts it supersedes – paranoid feelings of relationships splitting or split even in fragments of the self. Klein called this the schizoid position and it preceded developmentally a stage of greater stability that in her view was not peaceful but was accepting of reality: the depressive position.

We turn, as Jung did, to Eastern religions for our models of peace but these in themselves, certainly in root polytheistic religions were phases of peace in which a conflict has brought the hegemony of a higher power. Thus in the Bilateral religions of the Greco-Tyrian world view had their ur-myths of peace achieved through dominance over a world order: Zeus over Saturn / Chronos was itself a repetition of earlier cycles.

Judeo-Christian-Muslim mythologies struggle without Satan and demons, even genii and angels, however much they abstract the conflict in the peace of Heaven that they represent. The model of peace chosen has at times been Buddhist and has taken shape in the material practice of mindfulness. But mindfulness in the modern world is rarely innocent as witness the revelation in Rugby Wax’s latest book that her pursuit of it has some relationship to her struggle to maintain a lucrative career simultaneously in order to pay for expensive retreats and whale diving experience. And the paranoia in Rugby returns, and will, as she admits again.

The search for peace is then based on an impossible quest for an unimaginable Holy Grail. And even Grail myth involves fighting both other people with contradictory beliefs and dragons the size of one’s inner repressed awareness of the instability of all peace. In art peace is too often death, as in the marital and international conflicts in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Ragnarok and Apocalypse trump Valhalla and Heaven, while Christ has a final go at the Harrowing of Hell.

We are well beyond all that medievalism, the Church (or its public voice at least) says. Heaven is the abstraction of qualities like Love, the Good and ‘Peace’. But naivety and childlike magical thinking is no substitute for realism about the fact that peace must be actively achieved resolution; of problems are far as they are capable of resolution but certainly of the schizoid processes of splitting and aggression, directed inward and outward, in our development through both childhood and adulthood, and in their analogues in group building up to that unstable notion of the nation.

To pursue peace as an aim without recourse to taking conflict into account, and taking responsibility for it – for only thus can one engage actively in the process of peacemaking. Of course, this like so much human activity has to be graded in intensity and level, for many people have fallen in the fight, which was for them grossly unequal, and been damaged sometimes beyond repair. They will not find peace and will rightly scorn those who seem to think finding it is a matter merely of mentally choosing to do so. The matter is an illusion only fostered in entitlements such as status, present or expected power, money, esteem and so on.

So ask not, what brings peace. Ask where can I, and how much can I, take responsibility to face the presence of real conflicts even in the nature of love, caring and governance of justice. And avoid guilt as a response because guilt is complicit with the belief that you have no responsibility for the fault in you has already made no resolution EVER possible.

Here endeth the final lesson. Jeez.

All love

Steve