October 24 , 2005

Dear Colleague,

        History is mostly about war, and this is true since Thucydides. How many books have been written about the American Civil War or the Vietnam War? Many--and many have been reviewed in scholarly and popular journals. Of course, America has known peace and so has Vietnam. But who writes about peace--about the rise of settlements, the building of roads, the conversion of forests and grasslands into farms? Historians, yes, but even more so geographers. Unlike historians, geographers write about peace and peaceful processes almost exclusively. People, however, consider peace boring. That's why geography books are seldom read and are almost never reviewed in the popular press. That's why geography books are never made into blockbuster films.

         Converting "sword into ploughshare," an aspiration found in the Bible, is the motto of the United Nations. We say to ourselves, over and over again, "peace in our time" or even peace forever. We yearn to be rid of our propensity for violence; we see a sword and hope that it can be made into a ploughshare. But, wait a minute. Have you seen a ploughshare lately? It too is sharp and penetrating. It too is an instrument of violence, but directed against nature rather than against human beings. So what is the difference? Very little. In war, you ram your sword into human flesh; in peace, you ram your ploughshare into tender earth. It is a sign of the greatness of Homer's Iliad that it is very honest about this. The book alternates impartially and indifferently between war and peace, between the violence that warriors inflict on farmers and the violence that farmers inflict on nature--farmers who "rip out the grain and fruits as so many spoils of battle" (Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom be Found? Penguin, 2004, pp. 73-74).

         Children can be incredibly violent. Jonathan Franzen wrote that he knew the world's badness from a camping trip, when (at age 10) "I'd dropped a frog into a campfire and watched it shrivel and roll down the flat side of a log." But, then, what are the things we do that can be said to be free of violence? "Everything I do makes me feel guilty," says Charlie Brown. He's at the beach, and he has just thrown a pebble into the water, and Linus commented, "Nice going...  It took that stone four thousand years to get to shore, and now you've thrown it back" (Jonathan Franzen, "The Comfort Zone: Growing up with Charlie Brown," New Yorker, Nov. 29, 2004, p. 81).

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu