How can we achieve world peace?

 Two posts ago, I published my submission to Philosophy Now's Question of the Month, from 2 months ago: What are the limit of knowledge? Which was published in Issue 159 (Dec 2023/Jan 2024). Logically, they inform readers of the next Question of the Month, which is the title of this post. I'm almost certain they never publish 2 submissions by the same author in a row, so I'm publishing this answer now. It's related to my last post, obviously, and one I wrote some time ago (Humanity's Achilles Heel).

There are many aspects to this question, not least whether one is an optimist or a pessimist. It’s well known that people underestimate the duration and cost of a project, even when it’s their profession, because people are optimists by default. Only realists are pessimistic, and I’m in the latter category, because I estimate the duration of projects professionally.
 
There are a number of factors that mitigate against world peace, the primary one being that humans are inherently tribal and are quick to form ingroup-outgroup mental-partitions, exemplified by politics the world over. In this situation, rational thought and reasoned argument take a back seat to confirmation bias and emotive rhetoric. Add to this dynamic, the historically observed and oft-repeated phenomena that we follow charismatic, cult-propagating leaders, and you have a recipe for self-destruction on a national scale. This is the biggest obstacle to world peace. These leaders thrive on and cultivate division with its kindred spirits of hatred and demonisation of the ‘other’: the rationale for all of society’s ills becomes an outgroup identified by nationality, race, skin-colour, culture or religion.
 
Wealth, or the lack of it, is a factor as well. Inequality provides a motive and a rationale for conflict. It often goes hand-in-hand with oppression, but even when it doesn’t, the anger and resentment can be exploited and politicised by populist leaders, whose agenda is more focused on their own sense of deluded historical significance than actually helping the people they purportedly serve.
 
If you have conflict - and it doesn’t have to be military – then as long as you have leaders who refuse to compromise, you’ll never find peace. Only moderates on both sides can broker peace.
 
So, while I’m a pessimist or realist, I do see a ‘how’. If we only elect leaders who seek and find consensus, and remove leaders who sow division, there is a chance. The best leaders, be they corporate, political or on a sporting field, are the ones who bring out the best in others and are not just feeding their own egos. But all this is easier said than done, as we are witnessing in certain parts of the world right now. For as long as we elect leaders who are narcissistic and cult-like, we will continue to sow the seeds of self-destruction.

Bad things happen when good people do nothing

 At present there are 2 conflicts holding the world’s attention – they are different, yet similar. They both involve invasions, one arguably justified, involving a response to a cowardly attack, and the other based on the flimsiest of suppositions. But what they highlight is a double-standard in the policies of Western governments in how they respond to the humanitarian crises that inevitably result from such incursions.
 
I’m talking about the war in Ukraine, following Russia’s invasion 2 years ago next month, and Israel’s war in Gaza, following Hamas’s attack on 7 Oct. 2023, killing around 1200 people and taking an estimated 240 hostages; a reported 120 still in captivity (at the time of writing).
 
According to the UN, 'Gaza faces the "highest ever recorded" levels of food insecurity', as reported on the Guardian website (21 Dec 2023). And it was reported on the news today (6 Jan 2024) that ‘Gaza is uninhabitable’. Discussions within the UN have been going on for over a month, yet have been unable to unlock a stalemate concerning humanitarian aid that requires a cessation of hostilities, despite the obvious existential need.
 
Noelia Monge, the head of emergencies for Action Against Hunger, said: “Everything we are doing is insufficient to meet the needs of 2 million people. It is difficult to find flour and rice, and people have to wait hours to access latrines and wash themselves. We are experiencing an emergency like I have never seen before.” (Source: Guardian)
 
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this is a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions in modern times. It’s one thing for Israel to invade a country that harbours a mortal enemy, but it is another to destroy all infrastructure, medical facilities and cut off supplies of food and essential services, without taking any responsibility. And this is the double-standard we are witnessing. Everyone in the West condemns Putin’s attack on Ukrainian civilians, their homes and infrastructure, and calls them out as ‘war crimes’. No one has the courage to level the same accusation at Benjamin Netanyahu, despite the growing, unprecedented humanitarian crisis created by his implacable declaration to ‘destroy Hamas’. Has anyone pointed out that it’s impossible to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza? Because that’s what he’s demonstrating.
 
The UN’s hunger monitoring system, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), issued a report saying the “most likely scenario” in Gaza is that by 7 February “the entire population in the Gaza Strip [about 2.2 million people] would be at “crisis or worse” levels of hunger. (Source: Guardian)
 
In America, you have the perverse situation where many in the Republican Party want to withdraw support from Volodymyr Zelensky while providing military aid to Israel. They are, in effect, supporting both invasions, though they wouldn’t couch it in those terms.
 
Israel has a special status in Western eyes, consequential to the unconscionable genocide that Jews faced under Nazi Germany. It has led to a tendency, albeit unspoken, that Israel has special privileges when it comes to defending their State. This current conflict is a test of the West’s conscience. How much of a moral bankruptcy are we willing to countenance, before we say enough is enough, and that humanity needs to win.

Modes of expression in writing fiction

As I point out in the post, this is a clumsy phrase, but I find it hard to come up with a better one. It’s actually something I wrote on Quora in response to a question. I’ve written on this before, but this post has the benefit of being much more succinct while possibly just as edifying.
 
I use the term ‘introspection’ where others use the word, ‘insight’. It’s the reader’s insight but the character’s introspection, which is why I prefer that term in this context.
 
The questioner is Clxudy Pills, obviously a pseudonym. I address her directly in the answer, partly because, unlike other questions I get, she has always acknowledged my answers.
 

Is "show, not tell" actually a good writing tip?
 
Maybe. No one said that to me when I was starting out, so it had no effect on my development. But I did read a book (more than one, actually) on ‘writing’ that delineated 5 categories of writing ‘style’. Style in this context means the mode of expression rather than an author’s individual style or ‘voice’. That’s clumsily stated but it will make sense when I tell you what they are.
 

1. Dialogue is the most important because it’s virtually unique to fiction; quotes provided in non-fiction notwithstanding. Dialogue, more than any other style, tells you about the characters and their interactions with others.


   
   
2. Introspection is what the character thinks, effectively. This only happens in novels and short stories, not screenplays or stage plays, soliloquies being the exception and certainly not the rule. But introspection is essential to prose, especially when the character is on their own.


   
   
3. Exposition is the ‘telling’, not showing, part. When you’re starting out and learning your craft, you tend to write a lot of exposition – I know I did – which is why we get the admonition in your question. But the exposition can be helpful to you, if not the reader, as it allows you to explore the setting, the context of the story and its characters. Eventually, you’ll learn not to rely on it. Exposition is ‘smuggled’ into movies through dialogue and into novels through introspection.


   
   
4. Description is more difficult than you think, because it’s the part of a novel that readers will skip over to get on with the story. Description can be more boring than exposition, yet it’s necessary. My approach is to always describe a scene from a character’s POV, and keep it minimalist. Readers automatically fill in the details, because we are visual creatures and we do it without thinking.


   
   
5. Action is description in motion. Two rules: stay in one character’s POV and keep it linear – one thing happens after another. It has the dimension of time, though it’s subliminal.

 
 So there: you get 5 topics for the price of one.
 

What are the limits of knowledge?

 This was the Question of the Month in Philosophy Now (Issue 157, August/September 2023) and 11 answers were published in Issue 159, December 2023/January 2024, including mine, which I now post complete with minor edits.

 

Some people think that language determines the limits of knowledge, yet it merely describes what we know rather than limits it, and humans have always had the facility to create new language to depict new knowledge.

There are many types of knowledge, but I’m going to restrict myself to knowledge of the natural world. The ancient Greeks were possibly the first to intuit that the natural world had its own code. The Pythagoreans appreciated that musical pitch had a mathematical relationship, and that some geometrical figures contained numerical ratios. They made the giant conceptual leap that this could possibly be a key to understanding the Cosmos itself.

Jump forward two millennia, and their insight has borne more fruit than they could possibly have imagined. Richard Feynman made the following observation about mathematics in The Character of Physical Law: “Physicists cannot make a conversation in any other language. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form.”

Meanwhile, the twentieth century logician Kurt Gödel proved that in any self-consistent, axiom-based, formal mathematical system, there will always be mathematical truths that can’t be proved true using that system. However, they potentially can be proved if one expands the axioms of the system. This infers that there is no limit to mathematical truths.

Alonso Church’s ‘paradox of unknowability’ states, “unless you know it all, there will always be truths that are by their very nature unknowable.” This applies to the physical universe itself. Specifically, since the vast majority of the Universe is unobservable, and possibly infinite in extent, most of it will remain forever unknowable. Given that the limits of knowledge are either infinite or unknowable in both the mathematical and physical worlds, then those limits are like a horizon that retreats as we advance towards it.

Philosophy in practice

 As someone recently pointed out, my posts on this blog invariably arise from things I have read (sometimes watched) and I’ve already written a post based on a column I read in the last issue of Philosophy Now (No 158, Oct/Nov 2023).
 
Well, I’ve since read a few more articles and they have prompted quite a lot of thinking. Firstly, there is an article called What Happened to Philosophy? By Dr Alexander Jeuk, who is to quote: “an independent researcher writing on philosophy, economics, politics and the institutional structure of science.” He compares classical philosophy (in his own words, the ‘great philosophers’) with the way philosophy is practiced today in academia – that place most us of don’t visit and wouldn’t understand the language if we did.
 
I don’t want to dwell on it, but it’s relevance to this post is that he laments the specialisation of philosophy, which he blames (if I can use that word) on the specialisation of science. The specialisation of most things is not a surprise to anyone who works in a technical field (I work in engineering). I should point out that I’m not a technical person, so I’m a non-specialist who works in a specialist field. Maybe that puts me in a better position than most to address this. I have a curious mind that started young and my curiosity shifted as I got older, which means I never really settled into one area of knowledge, and, if I had, I didn’t quite have the intellectual ability to become competent in it. And that’s why this blog is a bit eclectic.
 
In his conclusion, Jeuk suggests that ‘great philosophy’ should be looked for ‘in the classics, and perhaps encourage a re-emergence of great philosophical thought from outside academia.’ He mentions social media and the internet, which is relevant to this blog. I don’t claim to do ‘great philosophy’; I just attempt to disperse ideas and provoke thought. But I think that’s what philosophy represents to most people outside of academia. Academic philosophy has become lost in its obsession with language, whilst using language that most find obtuse, if not opaque.
 
Another article was titled Does a Just Society Require Just Citizens? By Jimmy Aflonso Licon, Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy at Arizona State University. I wouldn’t call the title misleading, but it doesn’t really describe the content of the essay, or even get to the gist of it, in my view. Licon introduces a term, ‘moral mediocrity’, which might have been a better title, if an enigmatic one, as it’s effectively what he discusses for the next, not-quite 3 pages.
 
He makes the point that our moral behaviour stems from social norms – a point I’ve made myself – but he makes it more compellingly. Most of us do ‘moral’ acts because that’s what our peers do, and we are species-destined (my term, not his) to conform. This is what he calls moral mediocrity, because we don’t really think it through or deliberate on whether it’s right or wrong, though we might convince ourselves that we do. He makes the salient point that if we had lived when slavery was the norm, we would have been slave-owners (assuming the reader is white, affluent and male). Likewise, suffrage was once anathema to a lot of women, as well as men. This supports my view that morality changes, and what was once considered radical becomes conservative. And such changes are usually generational, as we are witnessing in the current age with marriage equality.
 
He coins another term, when he says ‘we are the recipients of a moral inheritance’ (his italics). In other words, the moral norms we follow today, we’ve inherited from our forebears. Towards the end of his essay, he discusses Kant’s ideas on ‘duty’. I won’t go into that, but, if I understand Licon’s argument correctly, he’s saying that a ‘just society’ is one that has norms and laws that allow moral mediocrity, whereby its members don’t have to think about what’s right or wrong; they just follow the rules. This leads to his very last sentence: And this is fundamentally the moral problem with moral mediocrity: it is wrongly motivated.
 
I’ve written on this before, and, given the title as well as the content, I needed to think on what I consider leads to a ‘just society’. And I keep coming back to the essential need for trust. Societies don’t function without some level of trust, but neither do personal relationships, contractual arrangements or the raising of children.
 
And this leads to the third article in the same issue, Seeing Through Transparency, by Paul Doolan, who ‘teaches philosophy at Zurich International School and is the author of Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies; Unremembering Decolonization (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2021).
 
In effect, he discusses the paradoxical nature of modern societies, whereby we insist on ‘transparency’ yet claim that privacy is sacrosanct – see the contradiction? Is this hypocrisy? And this relates directly to trust. Without transparency, be it corporate or governmental, we have trust issues. My experience is that when it comes to personal relationships, it’s a given, a social norm in fact, that a person reveals as much of their interior life as they want to, and it’s not ours to mine. An example of moral mediocrity perhaps. And yet, as Doolan points out, we give away so much on social media, where our online persona takes on a life of its own, which we cultivate (this blog not being an exception).
 
I think there does need to be transparency about decisions that affect our lives collectively, as opposed to secrets we all keep for the sake of our sanity. I have written dystopian fiction where people are surveilled to the point of monitoring all speech, and explored how it affects personal relationships. This already happens in some parts of the world. I’ve also explored a dystopian scenario where the surveillance is less obvious – every household has an android that monitors all activity. We might already have that with certain devices in our homes. Can you turn them off?  Do you have a device that monitors everyone who comes to your door?
 
The thing is that we become habituated to their presence, and it becomes part of our societal structure. As I said earlier, social norms change and are largely generational. Now they incorporate AI as well, and it’s happening without a lot of oversight or consultation with users. I don’t want to foster paranoia, but the genie has already escaped and I’d suggest it’s a matter of how we use it rather than how we put it back in the bottle.

Leaving that aside, Doolan also asks if you would behave differently if you could be completely invisible, which, of course, has been explored in fiction. We all know that anonymity fosters bad behaviour – just look online. One of my tenets is that honesty starts with honesty to oneself; it determines how we behave towards others.
 
I also know that an extreme environment, like a prison camp, can change one’s moral compass. I’ve never experienced it, but my father did. It brings out the best and worst in people, and I’d contend that you wouldn’t know how you’d be affected if you haven’t experienced it. This is an environment that turns Licon’s question on its head: can you be just in an intrinsically unjust environment?

Are people on the Left more intelligent?

 Now there’s a provocative question, and the short answer is, No. Political leanings are more associated with personality traits than IQ, according to studies I’ve read about, though I’m no expert. Having said that, I raise this subject, because I think there’s a perception on both sides that there is, which is why people on the Right love to use the word, ‘elites’, to describe what they see as a distortion of reality on subjects like climate change, the COVID pandemic and just about anything they disagree with that involves a level of expertise that most of us don’t have.
 
We live in a world overflowing with information (of which, ironically, I am a contributor) and most, if not all of it, is imbibed through a political filter. On social media we live in echo-chambers, so that confirmation bias is unplugged from all conduits of dissent.
 
To provide a personal example, I watch panel discussions facilitated by The Australian Institute using Zoom, on topics like plastic-waste, whistleblower protection, Pacific nations relations, economics of inflation (all relatively recent topics). The titles alone have a Leftish flavour (though not all), and would be dismissed as ‘woke’ by many on the Right. They are a leftwing think tank, and the panellists are all academics or experts in their field. Whether you agree with them or not, they are well informed.
 
Of course, there are rightwing thinktanks as well; the most obvious in Australia being the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) with the catchcry, The Voice for Freedom. The Australia Institute has its own catchcry, We Change Minds, which is somewhat optimistic given it appears to be always preaching to the choir. It should be pointed out that the IPA can also provide their own experts and research into individual topics.
 
I’ve never hidden my political leanings, and only have to look at my own family to appreciate that personality traits play a greater role than intelligence. I’m the political black sheep, yet we still socialise and exhibit mutual respect. The same with some of my neighbours, who have strong religious views, yet I count as friends.
 
It’s not a cliché that people of an artistic bent tend to be leftists. I think this is especially true in theatre, where many an eccentric personality took refuge, not to mention people with different sexual orientation to the norm. We are generally more open to new ideas and more tolerant of difference. Negative traits include a vulnerability to neurosis, even depression, and a lack of discipline or willingness to abide by rules.
 
One of the contentious points-of-view I hold is that people on the Left have a propensity for being ahead of their time. It’s why they are often called ‘progressives’, but usually only by history. In their own time, they could be called ratbags, radicals or nowadays, ‘elitist’. History tends to bear this out, and it’s why zeitgeist changes are often generational.
 
Recently, I’ve come across a couple of discussions on Russell (including a 1960 interview with him) and was surprised to learn how much we have in common, philosophically. Not only in regard to epistemology and science (which is another topic), but also ethics and morality. To quote from an article in Philosophy Now (Issue 158, Oct/Nov 2023) titled Russell’s Moral Quandary by David Berman (Professor Emiritus Fellow, Philosophy Department, Trinity College Dublin).
 
…our moral judgements [According to Russell] come from a combination of our nurture and education, but primarily from our feelings and their consequences. Hence they do not arise from any timeless non-natural absolutes [like God], for they are different in different times and places.
 
It’s the very last phrase that is relevant to this essay, though it needed to be put in context. Where I possibly depart from Russell is in the role of empathy, but that’s also another discussion.
 
Even more recently, I had a conversation with a mother of a son and daughter, aged 22 and 19 respectively, where she observed that her daughter was living in a different world to the one she grew up in, particularly when it came to gender roles and expectations. I imagine many would dismiss this as a manifestation of wokeism, but I welcome it. I’ve long argued that there should be more cross-generational conversation. I’ve seen this in my professional life (in engineering), where there is a natural synergy between myself and cleverer, younger people, because we are willing to learn from each other. It naturally mitigates against close-mindedness.
 
The Right are associated with 2 social phenomena that tend to define them. Firstly, they wish to maintain the status quo, even turn back the clock, to the point that they will find their own ‘evidence’ to counter proposed changes. This is not surprising, as it’s almost the definition of conservatism. But the second trait, for want of a better word, has become more evident and even dangerous in modern politics, both locally and overseas. It’s particularly virulent in America, and I’m talking about the propensity to oppose all alternative views to the point of self-defeatism. I know that extremists on the Left can be guilty as well, but there are personalities on the Right who thrive on division; who both cultivate and exploit it. The end result is often paralysis, as we’ve seen recently in America with the House Speaker debacle, and its close-encounter with a nationwide catastrophe.
 
There is a view held by many, including people who work in my profession, that the best way to achieve the most productive outcome is through competition. In theory, it sounds good, but in practice – and I’ve seen it many times – you end up with 2 parties in constant argument and opposition to each other. Even if there are more than 2, they tend to align into 2. What you get is decision-paralysis, delays, stalemate and a neverending blame-game. On the other hand, when parties co-operate and collaborate, you get the exact opposite. Is this a surprise? No.
 
From my experience, the best leaders in project management are the ones who can negotiate compromises and it’s the same in politics. The qualities are openness, tolerance and persuasive negotiation skills. I’ve seen it in action numerous times.
 
In a post I wrote on Plato, I talked about his philosopher-king idea, which is an ideal that could never work in practice. Nevertheless, one of the problems with democracy, as it’s practiced virtually everywhere, is that the most popular opinion on a particular topic is not necessarily the best informed. I can see a benefit in experts playing a greater role in determining policies. We saw this in Australia during the pandemic and I believe it worked, though not everyone agrees. Some argue that the economy suffered unnecessarily. But this was a worldwide experiment, and we saw that where medical advice was ignored and fatalities arose accordingly, the economy suffered anyway.