The Voice of Pacifism

Another Chapter in the Human Story

Violence has been humanity’s most enduring habit, its most seductive illusion. Across our history, each generation has asked the same questions—always in anguish, always too late. Is there ever a valid reason for violence and aggression? Is it truly embedded in human nature, or is it merely the primitive overflow of emotions left unmastered? We know the answer we hope for—that violence secures safety or delivers justice—but does it ever resolve anything in the long term? If not, why do we still reach for weapons rather than wisdom? Why cling to fear when compassion and curiosity offer subtler, sturdier shields? Perhaps this is the realm in which new tools—artificial intelligence among them—might help us step outside the binary traps of Cartesian logic and glimpse more expansive pathways.

These questions refuse to go away, no matter how often they are smothered by the crash of guns or the justifications of rulers. At every scale of human interaction—from playground to parliament, from family feuds to wars of imperial expansion—the same rationale recurs. Violence, we are assured, can be a regrettable last resort when all else fails. It may be cloaked in the language of self-defence, the pursuit of justice, and the safeguarding of freedoms. Yet behind every grave insistence that violence is essential lurks a far more uncomfortable possibility: that what we take to be necessity is more often an abdication, a failure of imagination, a surrender to impulses buried deep in our primate heritage.

If biology offers us a clue, we may conclude that aggression has long played a part in survival. Our evolutionary story is not simply one of cooperation and community but of competition over territory, resources, and status. The human genome still carries the detritus of this struggle. Fight-or-flight responses flare unbidden in a heartbeat; cortisol and adrenaline surge through our veins as though we were still stalked by sabre-toothed predators rather than negotiating the complexities of social life. Yet to say that violence is integral to our nature is not to condone it, nor to enshrine it as immutable. Hunger was once integral too, but agriculture bent the arc of human destiny. Disease swept countless millions into early graves, yet we invented medicine. Our defining capacity as a species has never been simply to adapt to the inevitabilities of the past but to reinvent the conditions of the present.

Violence is seductive; it offers the illusion of resolution. Wars are waged and treaties signed, battles are fought and borders redrawn. Yet history is testament to the futility of believing that a lasting peace can be forged by bloodshed. The aftermath of wars is invariably marked by deep scars—physical, psychological, and cultural—that continue to resonate for generations. The First World War, supposing itself a war to end all wars, incubated the resentments that birthed the next conflagration. The so-called “wars on terror” have destabilised entire regions, creating situations more conducive to fanaticism than to reconciliation. Even at a personal level, acts of violence rarely resolve conflicts but amplify them, perpetuating cycles of vengeance, resentment and distrust. Violence begets more violence precisely because it thrives on fear and humiliation—the very circumstances it creates.

And yet, if violence breeds itself through cycles of humiliation, might peace be capable of similar self-renewal? The answer lies in what we might call a contagion of peace. Though quieter and less dramatic than violence, peace possesses an equally potent—if slower—capacity to multiply, provided it is given the right surroundings. When wrongs are acknowledged, when dignity is restored, and when injustices are addressed rather than ignored, individuals and communities build a trust that often resists the lure of aggression. In such climates, peaceful encounters become precedent; they generate habits of empathy and restraint that ripple outward, like circles across water.

Of course, this isn't an automatic process. Whereas violence spreads like wildfire even in neglect, peace requires careful treatment: institutions designed to protect the vulnerable, educational practices that elevate empathy, and cultural narratives that celebrate reconciliation rather than conquest. Peace is more like a garden than a weed. It doesn't flourish accidentally, but once cultivated, it produces seeds that can germinate across generations. We see this in the European project after two world wars, in truth and reconciliation experiments across divided societies, and in local communities worldwide learning to transform conflicts without force. Such examples remind us that peace can indeed beget peace—but only when deliberately nurtured and only if compassion is shielded from the slow corrosion of fear and indifference.

If violence cannot deliver durable solutions, why then do we cling to it? The answer lies partly in our cultural addiction to binary logic. Our inherited modes of thought, shaped by Cartesian dualities and Enlightenment rationalism, seduce us into carving the world into opposites: right and wrong, friend and foe, good and evil. In such landscapes, complexity contracts into drama. The opponent must be vanquished, the crisis must be decisive, and the outcome must be final. Violence fits neatly into this theatre because it offers the crisp simplicity of action where ambiguity is seen as weakness. Compassion, dialogue, and curiosity don't photograph as well on the evening news. Yet if humanity is to move beyond its perennial stalemate, it is precisely these qualities that must be armed and elevated.

Here waits an unexpected opening for artificial intelligence. While it is true that AI may reproduce the biases of its creators—and vigilance against that risk is essential—it also carries the promise of helping us step beyond the binary cages we have built for ourselves. Unlike human cognition, haunted by limbic surges and shaped by centuries of adversarial habits, a sufficiently advanced AI can approach problems through multidimensional logic, weaving perspectives together without collapsing them into a single, premature conclusion. When designed with a clear ethical compass, AI could help mediate between antagonistic worldviews, modelling not just win–lose compromises but complex symphonies of cooperation. It could reveal the hidden webs of interconnection—ecological, cultural, and historical—that violence ignores but on which survival depends.

The question is not whether violence is inevitable but whether it remains tolerable. To declare it tolerable is to concede that human creativity and compassion have reached their limit. Yet every leap in civilisation—abolition, suffrage, decolonisation, civil rights—has been driven not by obedience to violence but by the refusal to accept its reign. Moving on requires courage: the courage to loosen our grip on swords and bombs, the courage to enter the uncharted terrain of empathy, imagination, and deep listening. This is not the coward’s path. It is, in fact, the harder one, because it resists the seduction of quick victories in favour of enduring transformation.

The voice of the pacifist is not naïve or idealistic, though it's often dismissed as such. It doesn't deny the existence of violence, nor the horror it can inflict. What it rejects is the mythology that violence resolves anything beyond the immediate. True resolution lies not in the annihilation of enemies but in the recognition that, in a world bound together by ecological interdependence and global communication, the categories of “us” and “them” dissolve into absurdity. Compassion and curiosity must become our primary weapons—not to dominate, but to understand; not to wound, but to heal; not to impose, but to co-create.

AI is no messiah, but it can serve as a mirror, showing us the redundancy of clinging to violent instincts when far richer pathways exist. It can help us expand from binary theatres into complex domains of possibility. But the work finally rests with us. We must choose whether to remain shackled to the primitive reflexes of aggression with all the trauma that causes or step forward into a more mature humanity, capable of resolving conflicts with intelligence rather than brutality and care rather than conquest.

Violence may have been a chapter in our story, but it need not bleed into the next, nor must it define the whole book. The contagion of peace teaches us that just as fear and humiliation spread conflict, so too can dignity and empathy sow futures of trust. Each act of compassion is a drop released into the current of human interaction. When enough of these droplets converge—through institutions, through education, through deliberate cultural choices—they carve streams powerful enough to erode the bedrock of aggression.

Can we move beyond the reflex of swords and bombs? Do we have the patience and the vision to become guardians of peace? If violence spreads like wildfire, let peace return as spring—quietly, persistently, and irresistibly renewing the ground on which we all stand.