Is peace really so precious that it is popularly viewed in irenology (peace studies) of our time as natural and a prime force in human behavior -whereas war, its opposite, is instead condemned as sinful and not natural? In fact, there is even the prestigious Nobel peace prize to be awarded to those who contribute to world peace but not an equivalent Nobel war prize to those who do the contrary.This euphoric view of peace is by no means a constant conventional wisdom in human history, as it can be sharply contrasted with an equally seductive view of war in polemology (war studies). For instance, only several decades ago, the well-known writer Thomas Mann once approvingly asked about war: Is not peace an element of civil corruption and war a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope? (WK 2009a) This fickleness of conventional wisdom on war and peace has blinded us from the dark sides of both war and peace, with the consequence of impoverishing our understanding of the human condition and its future.
Contrary to the two opposing sides of this conventional wisdom in its fickle history, war and peace are neither possible nor desirable to the extent that their respective ideologues would like us to believe. In addition, war and peace cannot exist with each other.Of course, this is not to suggest that irenology (peace studies) and polemology (war studies) are worthless, or that other fields of study (related to war studies and peace studies) like political science, economics, psychology, sociology, international relations, history, anthropology, religious studies,…gender studies, as well as a variety of others should be ignored. (WK 2009) Needless to say, neither of these two extreme views is reasonable either. Instead, this book accepts the challenging task to provide an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of war and peace, especially in relation to aggression and pacificity-while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). Thus, this book offers a new theory to transcend the existing approaches in the literature on war and peace in a way not conceived before. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about war and peace, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its post-human fate.
