Is Peace a Goal?

My friend Ale got me thinking about this issue. During one of our better Italio-Inglese conversations, he said that what he sought most in this world is "peace". His own peace is what I assume he means.... inner peace. I must own that such a desire has never really been on my list. Yes, I would like to more comfortably rest within myself. Certainly I would rather not be so subject to my swings of mood and emotion... but to seek peace, in and of itself, is somewhat foreign to me as an idea.

Is peace a goal in itself, or is peace a by product of a just world, a just life, or of changing your perception of reality? And, is peace truly a desirable thing?

For the last 6,000 years, we as a people have evolved an entire civilization based on war and struggle. Empires have been built, art has evolved, literacy is rampant - as a result of these struggles. Certainly, at the pinnacle of our cultural success we are on the brink of destruction - but even in facing this impending doom, we are discovering an ethic to face it and recreate our lifestyles to foster our own survival.

For millions of years before this, we lived in relative peace. But... there is no record. We lived in isolation. We hunted and gathered and lived and died, but there is no record that we ever before became like the gods themselves - creators of our own universe.

In the world in which we live now, the concept of world peace is based - I believe - on justice. Peace and justice are different sides of the same coin, according to Benjamin Franklin. The only way to achieve justice is to fight for it. Fighting is anathema to peace.

I am in essence, a warrior. How does one become a peaceful warrior? I hear the term, and it appeals to me - yet I can make no sense of it! Sometimes, in my childish imagination, I see 'peace' in the same way that I see 'heaven' - portrayed in the Renaissance; an endlessly boring harp playing song singing nowhere land.

It is said the angels feel nothing but endless joy - I DO NOT WANT TO FEEL ENDLESS JOY. I want to feel the whole range, joy and love, despair and longing, sadness and heartbreak - because if I never suffer, how do I know what joy feels like?

If one lives always in a state of peace, a state of grace - how does one grow? If we had no obstacles, we never would have grown legs. If there were no trees to climb, we wouldn't need our arms. Evolutionarily speaking, without the struggle for survival we could have remained peaceable single cell amoeba, happily munching on each other in the primordial ooze.

It is not that I do not want the world, ultimately, to be at peace. I would like to see, in my lifetime, a world without war and injustice. But a perfect world might not have a place for me in it... revolutionaries must be shot the moment the struggle is over, or else they do nothing but create trouble!

And I wonder, because there MUST be something here, like algebra, that I just don't understand!