Disarming Culture
Raimon Pannikar's extraordinary reflections on the mythic symbol 'peace', and the risks entailed in discovering it
“Peace is not possible without disarmament. But the required disarmament is not only nuclear, military, or economic. There is also need for a cultural disarmament, a disarmament of the dominant culture, which threatens to become a monoculture capable of engulfing all other cultures and finally drowning along with them.” - Raimon Pannikar
The concept of cultural disarmament championed by Raimon Pannikar is perhaps the most important idea never to be talked about. A fervent advocate for peace and an exceptional exponent of interreligious discourse, Pannikar himself embodied the crossroads between wisdom traditions. His mother was a Roman Catholic in Barcelona and his father a Hindu. Like Ivan Illich, Pannikar was a Catholic priest who fled from orthodoxy without giving up his commitment to Christianity. Extraordinarily, Pannikar was able to exemplify the teachings of Christ while recognising kinship with other traditions. Thus he wrote, after his first visit to his father's homeland of India: “I started as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without having ceased to be a Christian.”
In his 1993 book, Cultural Disarmament, Pannikar explored the concept of peace as a mythic symbol, approaching the issue from an expressly religious perspective. He recognised this would be problematic, because the very word ‘religion’ has been so scarred by its history that it “piques a kind of allergy that has settled within us”. Thus the younger generations today tend not to consider themselves religious at all - despite undertaking projects expressing all the flaws and prejudices associated with that caricatural bugbear ‘religion’. Yet as a symbol, as a metaphor, peace inherently belongs to the mythic world that is the domain of religion even when people cannot recognise whatever part of their lives belongs to that order.
For Pannikar, peace is a discovery and a gift of grace, something to be received that could never be imposed. Fighting for peace represented to him an absurdity, for victory leads solely to victory and never to peace. He rejected the idea that reparations (a worryingly popular theme today) could ever lead to peace, seeing this to be quite as absurd as the idea that vengeance could bring about an escape from strife. He felt such naïve impressions were both immature and artlessly mechanistic, since no manner of compensation can undo what has already happened. It will not be attempts to rebalance the wrongs of the past that lead to peace, but only moving decisively forward into new ground while burning the bridges behind us in an act of forgiveness that liberates us from the festering anger and hate of past conflicts.
His vibrant conception of ‘cultural disarmament’ represents a requirement for attaining peace, and he is keen to stress that any talk of military disarmament (not that there is much of this left today...) was pointless if it did not begin by disarming the mythic and cultural circumstances that made such bizarre concepts as an ‘arms race’ - and indeed a ‘knowledge race’ - seem meaningful in the first place. Peace, as a symbol, could not ever mean the same thing to everyone. Yet the rising imposition of rational organisation (which Pannikar does not hesitate to call ‘technocracy’) inherently denies this ambiguity by seeming to require and necessitate. When the supra-culture claims this power - especially when it does so in the name of the one permitted sacred symbol of ‘The Science’ - peace becomes impossible, since peace requires discourse, which is only possible under conditions of equality.
Disarmament, whether of weapons or of culture, is inherently risky, because it renders us vulnerable. Yet it is essential for peace, because it is only by disarming the arrogance of our supra-culture that the necessary discussions to clear the way for peace might begin. Pannikar warned that the dominant culture was not only monolithic, it was swallowing up all the other ways of being, dragging them down along with it. We are now far farther along this disastrous path than ever before. The road to peace consists above all in the desire to walk it. This wish is equivalent to a commitment to dialogue, which requires us to be willing to learn from others rather than insisting that they convert to our perspective. If we wish for peace, we have to prepare ourselves to discover it.