The Science for Peace Vocation

In a recent Note from the Science for Peace President (December 07), it is wisely stated that “we need to identify the social, political and economic mechanisms” that drive current conflicts, wars and oppression. One might add that we must clearly identify this set of mechanisms to realize the mission of Science for Peace – a mission that corporate media, politicians and activists normally do not and usually cannot fulfil with their given goals and resources.

In the same issue of this Bulletin, our Wasan Action Framework on ecological destabilization seeks “to identify the root causes of the crisis” on the environmental level. Again, one cannot but agree with this scientific objective. It flows just as clearly from the Science for Peace mission.

Yet what is missing in both this and the next issue of the Science for Peace Bulletin (April 2008) is any rigorous identification of any mechanism driving conflict, war, oppression and ecological despoliation – the latter now in cumulative trend at virtually all levels of life organization.

Rather, vague references to a “growth paradigm” – growth of what? – are the closest we get in either of these Bulletin issues to the causal mechanism behind our cumulative global disorder. Indeed, the December Bulletin’s most lengthy article advocates fictive “stories that teach us how to live”. The April 2008 issue continues at this surface level of analysis focusing on such things as a ìrevenue neutral carbon taxî, a recent federal Liberal policy which treats downstream symptoms and has been already in place in Norway over 20 years.

One need not disagree with these ideas to recognize that they are insufficient as Science for Peace analysis. It needs to lead in identifying the underlying and expanding system decider at work which remains taboo to name – even as the system selects, through its life-blind globalizing cycles, destabilized global climates and virtually all the other core problems that the world now confronts.

Surely Science for Peace can grasp the nettle a little more robustly. Our fields of meaning are already saturated with symptomatic commentary. Some words at least should be devoted to hard analysis of the exact causal mechanism at work.

Perhaps someone might point out the general fact, rather than avoid it, that there is hardly a contemporary war, invasion, oppression or ecological collapse anywhere that is not directed by a ruling value-sequence mechanism of turning private money into more private money demand for external money possessors as its ultimately regulating drive-wheel of selection.

Can anyone think of exceptions to this global system decider as the causal structure behind what Science for Peace seeks to prevent?

I have written books and addressed Science for Peace audiences on how this generic mechanism explains the inner logic of the perpetual war machine by which we are overwhelmed at both social and ecological levels – but the causal mechanism at work and its international regulatory solution still remains studiously avoided, even by Science for Peace Bulletins.

Surely it is time to take analysis to deeper ground in fulfilment of our Science for Peace vocation.