Dialogue Requires Equality

We cannot fight for peace, the path towards peace requires cultural disarmament

“One must realize that dialogue, concerning which so much is presumed, is utterly impossible without conditions of equality.” – Raimon Pannikar

We deceive ourselves when we take up a cause, such as social justice, and then believe we must be fighting for peace. Raimon Pannikar is explicit: “One cannot fight for peace. One fights for one’s own rights, or, in a particular instance, for justice. But not for peace. To fight for peace is a contradiction.” This is particularly so because “the regimes that we ourselves impose are not peace for the one who must endure them, be that one a child, a pauper, a foreigner, a family, or a nation.” We might add to that all those suffering from racial disparities and those suffering from attempts to enforce a rebalancing of these disparities. We might add to that all those suffering from the imposition of gender regimes, whether the terrible old version, or the dreadful new one. We might also add those unvaccinated pariahs who have been made into scapegoats by a medical empire that long since parted company with scientific discourse.

Dialogue is precisely that which we have lost touch with as we have given up on the wish for peace. Yet it is only through dialogue that peace has any hope of attainment. Whether we are talking race, gender, or vaccines, we have given up on equality, and as the Pannikar quote above makes clear, without equality, dialogue is impossible. The tendency to “treat others as enemies, barbarians, goi, mleccha, khafir, pagans, infidels, and the like” is precisely the problem to which the symbol of peace is a potential solution. Attempting to defeat the enemy is fruitless, because all we will do is enforce some new regime on the vanquished. “Victory leads to victory, not peace. And we all know the lethal effects of prolonged ‘victories’...” Neither does Pannikar see any aspect of peace as lying with the restoration of a lost past, or indeed in defence of the status quo. Indeed, he sees peace as requiring emancipation from the current order and the acceptance of what he calls a fluxus quo, which is never settled outright.

What Pannikar calls cultural disarmament does not mean that we have to give up our own values – it means that we learn to recognise when we are wielding “reason as a weapon”, as happens whenever we force our own technoscientific biases upon others. To Pannikar, this issue was primarily about the enforcement of economics and technology upon so‑called ‘developing’ nations, presupposing in that very name that we ought to be making them more like us. I have argued from the opposite direction: we have much more to learn from those cultures that have not yet fallen into technocracy than we ever presume.

It is even easier than ever to see this problem today. When the colonial programme occurred elsewhere, in places far from us, we were unlikely to witness it, and thus it tended to pass unnoticed. In the early years of the 2020s, however, we resorted to forcing our colonial technoscience onto each other. In so doing we created an incredible opportunity to finally understand that ‘science’ was never the secret name of absolute truth, but rather that of a fragile method of exploring possible truths through experimentation and discussion. Authentic scientific practice cannot be deployed to police the truth without falling back into our colonial arrogance, and it is a farce to talk about ‘decolonising curricula’ without first accepting cultural disarmament – all this can possibly mean is imposing new dogmas, new regimes. Peace will never be found on such a path.

Rather, Pannikar warns that we require “a critique of current technoscience,” and stresses this does not mean “destruction” or “reform”, but rather “an intellectual demythologization”. The myths of technocratic rule are so widespread now that we utter them without ever noticing. “Sustainable development” is something oft spoken of, for instance, but Pannikar cautions that even the concept of ‘development’ entails a presupposition, it is a kind of “cultural colonialism” (he optimistically suggested this was finally coming into question around the time he was writing). Our technocratic values are deployed “as weapons for invasion with the excuse that it is the natives themselves who seek entry into the technocratic club.” A greater lesson for contemporary billionaires has never been written.

Next week: The Symbol of Peace