the International Day of Peace

Today, 21 September, is the International Day of Peace, a date which was set in the stone that is the United Nations’ calendar in 2002. Today’s news reports, smeared with the flaring white evidence of last night’s suicide blast at Islamabad’s Marriott hotel and its suffocating orange clouds, show that the date hasn’t exactly penetrated any universal human consciousness. But the day is starting to be marked. In Afghanistan, Afghan and NATO troops are suspending offensive operations and the day also got a message from the Taliban.

Earlier this month, a campaigning filmmaker, Jeremy Gilley and actor, Jude Law, turned up in Afghanistan “to promote peace”, as the news reports put it. Gilley’s Peace One Day organisation and two documentary films are dedicated to giving people the biggest kick up the backside they can limber the force to deliver to do the right thing by others. The essence of their loud message: THIS IS WHAT TO DO, a bit of HERE’S HOW and, finally, in a challenging sort of way, GO ON, THEN, DO SOMETHING! 

This Cat doesn’t know about promoting peace, but has a few observations.

1. Our two friends cheered up people they met immensely. The effect that they had was, briefly, galvanising.

2. There was a flash-of-illumination effect: people caught in Kabul’s raging political currents (then about the many civilian casualties being attributed to military action) were overheard enthusiastically saying how good it was to be reminded about the point of it all, to feel direction again (direction being something which wanders off on its own if not kept on the mental equivalent of a tight leash).

3. There was a yes-you effect, reminding each person, leaving no doubt, that propagating any sort of decency at all is entirely up to you. For Kabul’s muddled political bubble, it can be a bit of a relief to remember that political solutions are only one (thin, stratospheric) layer of introducing a different way of being which has to penetrate most people and communities if it is going to become the way that things happen in a whole society. And it’s good that there’s a Day as a reminder that, given the choice, it is in the general interest of humanity even just to manage tiny, tentative contributions to perhaps shifting a focus of small things to come in a slightly healthier direction.

4. The strongest effect our friends had was much more intangible. It came from the extraordinary power of just being – or appearing to be – considerate. Of things happening because you connect with, touch, people not because it’s your job, not because it gives you political credit, not because it’s an adventure or because you feel pity or whatever, but because you’re another normal human being so it seems like the right thing to do, even though you didn’t have to be interested, even though you’re not necessarily sure where your fellow-feeling-interest will lead.

This Cat thinks that this is what Kant was going on about in pondering that there was only one motivation that gives an action moral worth. Unfortunately, he called it moral duty then got into long arguments with himself about whether or not it actually exists. Whatever; it works.