What This Is For

The question I keep being asked is some version of: what are you trying to do here? (followed by: are you crazy?)

It’s pretty simple: we can no longer afford the luxury of war. Our technological killing efficiency has far outstripped our collective emotional maturity. In the words of General Omar Bradley in 1948: Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

How Peace is one person trying to think through why a species this intelligent and tender keeps killing itself, and what we might do about it that we have not yet tried.

Another thing: have you noticed there are no serious discussions in the general public, about what we can do to achieve some form of world peace? It’s like it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s hopeless, so why even try. In one way, it should be like basic problem solving: identify the problem, identify possible solutions, narrow it done to the top ones, and start trying them, one by one, learning as you go, and hopefully you find the right one.

Well, for this problem, it turns out two of our greatest minds in human history, who happened to have front row seats to WWI and to the rise of Nazi Germany, had a correspondence, focusing on the question “Is there anything we can do to rid ourselves of the menace of war?” How Peace is simply saying, given the seriousness of the problem and given the stature of these two men, we should take their solution seriously.

Welcome.

Scott