the Pyramidâs previous peaces by aiding their adaptation to conditions and participants as circumstances require. Crucéâs analogy between humanity and the human body, the organs of which are in such sympathy with each other that the sickness of one affects the other, takes on its full meanings in the levels below and culminates in world peace, not the other way around. No state or organization today has the expertise, authority or means to make world peace possible along the Pyramidâs lines. UN agencies as a bettering expansion of the League of Nationsâ multi-pronged approach have been one of the few ways a global, centrally funded organizational approach to world peacealong the Pyramidâs lines has ever been effectively enacted. But it may be undesirable that a single one does because doing so puts all the proverbial eggs of world peace in one basket. Another possibility is the recent emergence of independent, specialized agencies which have taken on limited tasks not explicitly for world peace, and professional peace researchers, advocates and activists who have, which cumulatively can circumvent barriers to world peace political imperatives on their own cannot. The point of the items in the Pyramidâs level of world peace is thus not to show how the levels below can be accomplished on a global scale, which must be worked out within the levels themselves, but rather to suggest what can be done to help and sustain them in the meanwhile and afterwards.
Legitimacy and Law
Wolffâs scientiï¬c fourfold allotment of laws as voluntary, natural, implicit, customary and explicit treaties are applicable throughout world history and have each been crucial to peace. The legitimacy of both those in power and their agents, and laws to regulate relations and deï¬ne penalties for contraventions, were as crucial for the peace of early civilizations as they are today even if in strikingly different ways. At the heart of Ancient Chinese legalism was that the law itself not people who apply it is the source of all legitimate authority capable of making and maintaining peace, which in conjunction with Confucian traditionalism and meritocracy became the longest-running governmental form in history. The second, Roman Republicanism, must be taken with a big grain of salt because Augustus was an autocrat who upheld republican forms as a matter of convenience more than of conviction. The Pax Romana he inaugurated is a testament to the fact that for peace political functions do not always follow their forms. Solonâs reforms in Ancient Athens were meant to allay the dangers of direct democracy such as demagoguery with isonomic principles of equality in law. Representative democracy today has the added danger of ofï¬cials saying one thing to get elected then doing another, or doing what they said they would do like Hitler and the last leaders of Yugoslavia. For Machiavelli, war and peace are indifferent instruments to get and keep power, but no one can do so by force alone because they thereby lose their legitimacy, wherein lie the powers of laws and periodic or emergency elections in making peace when broken and maintaining or enhancing it when not.
Incentives and Deterrents
Deterrence, the prevention of aggression by threat of retaliation, was one of the uses of large teeth in primates. Their smaller size in humans,a morphological modiï¬cation providing the earliest evidence of peace, was made up for in the destructivity of our weapons from arrowheads to atomic bombs. Arms races that have always been part of the human race, then, have also always been peace races in part, a paradoxical absurdity fully exposed in the face of annihilation. Yet, for Spartans and Athenians as for Egyptians and Hittites, as for the Allies in the First and Second World Wars, as for NATO and the WPO, uniting to deter was an incentive to unite in peaces that may not have been feasible otherwise. Incentives go as far
Stan Berenstain, Jan Berenstain
Doris Pilkington Garimara