The world needs arevived peacenik movement to face up to new threats

Because it’s extremely plausible that civilisations blow themselves up before they get off-planet. That their culture and behaviour lag well behind their world-transforming (let alone space-traversing) technologies.

So our self-termination can be slow (the unravelling of a biosphere). Or it can be fast (annihilating weaponry). Or it can be both at the same time. But it’s the probable cause of all the silence out there.

Yet this can’t be an iron-clad law. Evolutionary common sense, assuming endless variations in our vast universe, would suggest there must be exceptions.

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There must have been some voices and forces upon various exoplanets that urged, in their own way, that we “give peace a chance”.

But perhaps not many. And it’s likely they’re too far away for us to know about them. So maybe – massive shudder – it’s considerably up to us, to get through our own “gate” of survival.

So what are we going to decide? Do we accept the grim fate implied by EO Wilson’s axiom: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”?

Or can we get to work on the first two, so that we can witness and explore the universe, gently and idealistically, by means of the third?

Thus my “peacenik” status. By which I mean that I seek the active construction of peaceful mentalities, behaviours and cultures. Ones that will loosen our grip on the existing lethal dangers (nukes, military AI and biotech, ecocide). As well as directing our energy and ingenuity towards inventing structures and organisations that foment peaceful co-existence – as a ground from which to stand in the universe.

Is that construction just too tall an order? Well, let me give you the most local of examples.

It’s likely you’re reading this under the (partially national) jurisdiction of the Scottish Parliament. Here, a majority of independence-supporting parties currently urge the removal of the Trident missile system from Scottish territory.

One of them (the Greens) want Scotland to not join Nato upon independence, because of its continuing commitment to the right to “first nuclear strike”. The other (the SNP) believes that it can both shelter under Nato’s nuclear umbrella, and also remove nukes from our soil. Yet both are making a leap of the moral imagination.

Meanwhile, former first minister Humza Yousaf leads the world in calling, persistently, for a ceasefire in the Gaza-Israeli state conflict, and the “equivalence of all lives”.

Another former first minister – Nicola Sturgeon – sets a precedent for a national parliament to pay “loss and damage” (an initial £5m) to developing countries in the Global South. This represents the beginnings of reparations for the historic environmental damage that industrial countries in the Global North have inflicted on their former colonies.

To say the least, a commitment like this taken on board internationally will “increase the peace”, in nations struggling with underdevelopment from the imperial era.

The point I’m making is this: the active, positive and creative construction of peaceful conditions is entirely possible. Jings, it can even arise from the knockabout antics of Scotland’s party politics.

But, as the stumbling progress towards Scottish independence shows, we may need to go deeper for the sources of a peaceful human culture, than mere party-political ambition and achievement.

More than 30 years ago, I cited the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s definition of peace, at the end of my first book Tinsel Show: Pop, Politics and Scotland. “Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other”, wrote Adorno.

Very philosophical, I know. But I think it points to something extremely necessary – which is that we try to resist the demonisation of the aggressor, even as they aggress.

Most fighting armies are rooted in some degree of social and cultural legitimacy at home. How do we stay in touch with the complexity of this – the narratives and emotions that are engaging the home front – so that we can amplify their civilians’ discontent with the current order?

Sometimes it’s just about reading widely. Every other day I call up the opinion-editorial pages of the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz.

It conveys an Israeli public sphere which is far from the image of a “rogue state”. They are thoughtfully enraged by Benjamin Netanyahu and his leadership. They’re able to see how atrocious and incommensurate their nation’s military response is to the October 7 atrocity. Yet they’re also able to register the deep traumas of post-Holocaust life, juddering unto this day.

“Distinctness without domination” could be their editorial slogan.

To become a China-watcher can also help create Adorno’s complex space of “peace”. The drumbeat of a military “pivot to China” currently thuds through Western media. So it helped me to discover this week, from Andrew Jaspan’s academic-journalism website The Conversation, that the early 20th-century Chinese philosopher Kang Youwei is a bigger influence on contemporary China than Mao Tse-Tung. And that Youwei’s key text, The Book Of Great Unity, is devoted to defining the conditions for peace.

“The boundaries we construct for ourselves – class, race and sex, for instance – are the cause of most of our suffering. In his view, humans should extend their care and concern for others more impartially across the world”, writes Newcastle University’s Daniel Hutton Ferris.

Don’t we need to know these influences, and many other reports of their civilisation’s subtleties, before rushing to condemn the Chinese as an imperium tout court?

Vladimir Putin’s super-surveillant control of the Russian mediasphere – misreporting their war in Ukraine, promoting national suprematisms and restorations – is a more difficult barrier of narratives to pierce.

But there will be clusters of peaceful sentiment in contemporary Russia. We must attend to our way of listening, to make sure we can pick up the signs.

On this part of the planet, that space of “distinctness without domination” is going to be easier for younger generations to occupy.

The Tories’ disastrous dabbling with conscription was preceded by the then head of the British Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, urging the need for a “citizen army to fight Russia”, as recruitment levels tumble ever lower.

In response, a YouGov survey revealed that “38% of under 40s say they would refuse to serve in the armed forces in the event of a new world war, and 30% say they would not serve even if Britain was facing imminent invasion.”

Clear majorities still would – but those minorities point to a deep lack of acceptance for the establishment case, that we’re in a “pre-war” condition.

I think we need a revived peace movement whose idealism and vision match our current predicament. Which is, at times, almost comically apocalyptic.

Are you aware that the AI GPT software that writes a poem for your daughter’s wedding speech could also potentially identify and design any number of killer viruses and toxins, by means of the same forms of computation?

Are you also aware that extractive capitalism is literally “at war” with nature, already costing hundreds of millions (and soon to be billions) of lives – a “structural violence”, as the peace thinker Johan Galtung once described it? Are we this absurd, pre-extinction species – either scurrying down one path of disruption and breakdown, or down the other path of tyranny and authoritarianism (which reacts against the first)?

Both paths increase the odds that we calamitously end ourselves.

Or is there a “third” path? Towards a creative, curious, complex, capacious, capable co-existence – one that we could dare to call “peaceful”?

As ever, Scots have both their tasks and their idealisms directly to hand. Let’s do our bit to get humanity through its iron gate. The only way is, peacefully, up.

Thanks to Indra Adnan and Jonathan Rowson for help with this column