Realistic peace

In his essay “Two Concepts of Peace,” (Modern Age, Winter 2020), Jared Morgan McKinney examined “peace is the result of pacification. It occurs when the strong forces the inferior to submit and offer supplication. It is the peace of hierarchy and command.” And peace as “mutual identification, mutual flourishing, mutual submission, and mutual supplication. It is the peace of equality and cooperation.” After examining the history of war and peace McKinney ends by saying “as Hobbes himself understood, it is the face of death that can tame man’s desire for the peace of dominance, making possible the peace of equality—at least for a time.”

That seems realistic to me as far as it goes, but when we are talking concepts of peace and war the biological origin of social behavior needs to be included as vital in defining human nature and human history because the biological origin of social behavior ends up determining peace and war. The science of sociobiology has shown us that human nature developed many thousands of years ago and even the smallest change in human nature and our DNA structure, for example, in our immune system, takes hundreds of thousands of years. We remain genetically kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, among other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection followed by individual selection.

Surely the biological origin of social behavior needs to be included when discussing concepts of peace and war. Although now just rising, identity politics and re-identifying with ethnicity, nationality, race, culture and faith is the world's future. People will see that racial and ethnic diversity within the same state is not our greatest strength but is our weakness. A true natural rights or civil rights movement would promote an ethnopluralism of ethnostates for all groups, black, white, brown, yellow, or red, with each ethnostate protected from marauding imperialists, global businesses, supremacists, Marxists, etc., and defended by a defensive federalism. For example, an ethnopluralism of ethnostates could be established legally in the United States with our constitutional separation of powers and states.

Will we face and accept the reality of the humaneness of ethnostates in harmony with the biological origin of social behavior or will we fall into the constant chaos of civil strife and open racial civil war? An ethnopluralism of ethnostates is the best we can do to create whatever peace is possible given the biological origin of social behavior and real human nature.