Every civilisation inherits a catechism about violence. Mine, and probably yours, insists that wars are the tragic residue of bad people, bad ideas, or bad borders. The comfort in that tale is obvious. It suggests that with better leaders, purified doctrines, and smarter institutions, at a minimum, we might finally tame our more belligerent inclinations.
History offers a less flattering script. Wars tend to fade when the conditions that sustained them decay: when supply lines wither; when alliances reconfigure; when populations tire of body bags and funerals; when new predicaments steal attention from old vendettas. The banners remain, the speeches grow more theatrical, yet beneath the bluster the incentives are quietly rearranged.
What we like to remember as decisive victories and humiliating defeats are, on closer inspection, often much murkier. A supposed loser retreats but tells itself the fight must resume in another generation. A supposed winner discovers that occupying the spoils is more draining than the battle. Human beings crave a clean win–lose story. Human systems, especially under strain, rarely oblige.
None of that means the appetite for aggression dissolves. We are perfectly capable of taking pleasure in domination and cruelty – in the spectacle of the enemy mocked, scourged, or erased. That dark thrill is not a glitch. It’s a recurring undercurrent in lynch mobs, stadium chants, online pile‑ons and, of course, on battlefields. Any attempt to let wars grow old without noticing the childish joy some of us get from another’s suffering is doomed. If conflict is to stiffen into something slower and less terminal, that delight will have to be caged, not denied.
What I want to explore here is deceptively simple: whether we can find ways of cultivating that readjustment, rather than waiting passively for exhaustion or catastrophe to do it for us. Not the fantasy of final peace mind you, but a deliberate slackening of war’s metabolism; what might begin to resemble a civilisational pause, or an engineered breathing space.
Confession, Shame, and the Theatre of Defeat
Most formally engineered “peace processes” smuggle in a moral demand that is psychologically intolerable to power: public contrition. They ask governments and armies to admit miscalculation, to acknowledge defeat, or to confess ethical failure. If one looks carefully at the historical record this is rare. The vanquished are more likely to insist that they were betrayed, or that the timing was wrong, or that a sacred mission must be postponed. The victors, for their part, tend to narrate compromise as magnanimity. The truth, such as it is, is buried beneath dramatics.
There’s a deeper pattern here. Groups will often accept material loss before they will accept visible humiliation. A state can lose territory yet refuse the word “defeat”. A movement can abandon armed struggle yet cling to the claim that it was never truly beaten. It seems our nervous systems tolerate practical retreat more easily when the story of who we are remains intact. Entire nations will absorb defeat on the ground while clinging to the conviction that, in some higher moral register, they are still the righteous ones.
This is where another trait cuts across the grain of the civilisational pause: the lure of purity. Many communities do not merely want to survive; they need to believe they are spotless. For those whose identities are fused with a sacred text, a transcendent cause, or an unblemished flag, compromise can feel like heresy. Victims of atrocity, too, may crave not just safety but explicit acknowledgement and punishment. To such sensibilities, a settlement that leaves the guilty unshamed is simply intolerable.
One might argue that this collective aversion to shame – and reciprocal addiction to moral absolutes – is a design flaw in current political arrangements. If that’s the case, then we should not build architectures of peace that rely on confession. It’s akin to demanding that a leopard apologise for having spots before it can be allowed to rest. At best, a civilisational pause provides time and space in which more exacting forms of justice might one day be attempted. It doesn’t pretend to be that justice.
So a sharper question, at least for me, is this: what forms of de‑escalation remain viable if nobody is willing to admit having been wrong; if every faction insists on keeping its story intact; if the very idea of closure is a luxury only the already‑secure can afford? Put bluntly: can we slow the killing without forcing anyone to kneel on camera?
The False Promise of a Burning Platform
From time to time, bright people propose that humanity will only set aside its internecine quarrels when faced with an overwhelming external danger: an incoming asteroid, a rogue solar flare, or alien visitors from beyond our little corner of the galaxy. The latter notion has enjoyed a long life in science fiction; it also shows up with surprising regularity in the private conversations of diplomats, generals and CEOs.
The implication is that if such a unifying threat does not present itself obligingly, we might be tempted to conjure one. A carefully curated emergency. Enough fear to knit us together; enough ambiguity to ensure the story can’t easily be disproved.
Here we run into two obstacles. The first is pragmatic. In a world where scientists collaborate across borders, where rival intelligence services monitor each other’s lies for sport, and where traders parse anomalies like oracles reading entrails, the odds of sustaining a planetary‑scale deception are slim. One leak, one well‑timed revelation, and the entire edifice would collapse.
The second obstacle is corrosive. Suppose for a moment, that such a masquerade succeeded for a while. When the ruse crumbled – as almost all do – what residue of trust would remain? A population that discovers it has been manipulated into cooperation is unlikely to respond with gratitude. Any attempt at future coordination, even for legitimate reasons, would be stalked by suspicion. The antibody of cynicism would be strong.
If we can’t conjure a single overwhelming story to frighten ourselves into sanity, we are left with something far messier: the real world.
A World of Abrasions, Not One Big Bang
Walk through any port, data centre, informal settlement, or hospital ward and, if you’re attentive enough, you will notice the same thing: a pervasive fragility. Power grids dart in and out under climatic strain. Logistics chains splinter in response to sanctions, storms, and pandemics. Digital networks shudder under mischief and incompetence in equal measure. Food supplies, which some of us once took for granted, now feel conditional: hostage to geopolitics, fertiliser prices, and rainfall patterns.
These are not speculative anxieties. They are chronic conditions. Insurers price them. Mayors dream about them at three in the morning. War colleges now run scenarios based less on conventional invasions and more on cascading failures: what happens when this fails, and then that, and then three others we thought were independent?
We have been trained by apocalypse narratives to look for a single spectacular finale. What we are living through instead is closer to acne – many small eruptions on the skin of a civilisation that no longer heals as fast as it injures itself. Each society interprets these irritations through its own mythic lens. For some, they confirm divine displeasure. For others, they signal the ruthlessness of markets or the incompetence of bureaucracy. In a handful of places they are simply accepted as the ambient weather of late modernity.
However we frame them, these abrasions reveal an intricate, often invisible interdependence. Your power cut becomes my food spoilage. Their cyberattack cascades into our hospital breakdown. These correlations, which industrial economism celebrated when it meant growth, acquire a very different hue when the system frays.
The difficulty is that our attention seldom stretches along such chains of consequence. We burn the future for a brief advantage and are then surprised by the smoke. Politicians with fragile coalitions think in election cycles; many of the very rich think in quarterly returns; the desperate or the homeless think about where this evening’s meal will come from. Warnings about systemic risk are easily dismissed as background noise when set against the lure of a quick victory, a triumphant headline, a profitable deal.
If anything deserving the name of a civilisational pause is to take root, it cannot depend on rare flashes of long‑range foresight. It must alter what feels immediately worthwhile. Keeping the lights on through tonight’s storm, restoring a bridge before tomorrow’s market opens, preventing a hospital from failing in the next heatwave – these kinds of actions must come to satisfy the same craving for urgency and achievement that is currently fed by one more missile test or one more theatrical threat.
There is, however, a stubborn minority for whom this self-same fragility is not a warning but a promise. Every civilisation produces its connoisseurs of collapse – those who see in flood, fire, and financial ruin the prospect of a great cleansing. Some are millenarian believers who yearn for an end‑times drama to vindicate their faith. Others are revolutionaries persuaded that only the incineration of the present order can clear space for something just. For such temperaments, talk of resilience and continuity smells like cowardice. They would rather dance on the fault‑line than reinforce it.
No pause architecture will seduce those sensibilities. At best, it can limit the reach of their fantasies: keep their arson from becoming planetary. Any serious design for slowing catastrophe must reckon with the fact that a portion of our species finds catastrophe irresistible.
Militaries at the Edge of a New Mandate
In that setting, the notion of the “national security apparatus” begins to look oddly threadbare. Tanks and fighter jets are of limited use against collapsing aquifers or mutating viruses. A stealth bomber or a nuclear submarine are blunt instruments when your main worry is whether a hospital in the next province has spare ventilators and diesel.
Yet militaries remain, often lavishly funded, frequently admired, and always alert to existential threats to their own relevance. Historically they have shown a certain genius for adaptation. No longer needed to sack neighbouring cities, they reconstitute themselves as guardians of empires. When empires crumble, they adopt uniforms of ideological purity. When ideology loses its gloss, they become managers of deterrence or internal order. It’s not fanciful to observe that armed forces around the world are already being drawn into the theatre of continuity. They fly water bombers over forests on fire. They build temporary bridges after floods. They deliver medical supplies when roads are impassable. They restore communications after storms. They help trace hostile code through digital undergrowth. In some countries they underpin food distribution when markets seize up. These activities are sometimes dressed in the language of humanitarianism, sometimes as rehearsals for civil defence, and occasionally as public relations. In every case they provide something politicians crave: evidence that the state, whatever its ideology, can still do something competent.
This quiet mission drift is far from universal. There are regimes where the army’s primary function remains repression at home or intimidation abroad, and where any “soft” deployment is viewed with suspicion. Yet it would be odd to ignore the emerging pattern in many other places: the soldier as engineer, logistician, technician and, occasionally, medic.
That matters because armies are not only instruments; they are tribes in uniform. They offer belonging, ritual, and a thick sense of unity often absent from brittle consumer cultures. Too often that “we” is woven around the prospect of a hated “they” who must be deterred, humiliated, or destroyed. Emerging continuity missions hint at a different possibility: a pride that comes from being the unit everyone calls when the river rises, the hillside collapses, or the network fails, rather than tormenting an enemy. Tribal loyalty doesn’t disappear; it acquires a different objective.
The point, for our purposes, is that this shift needn’t feel like a loss of status to those in uniform. It can be narrated – internally and externally – as a new kind of prowess: less about parades of hardware certainly, but more about mastery of complex, life‑supporting systems. In other words, it offers a way of “winning” that does not require an enemy’s humiliation.
PeaceQuest: Virtuous Work for Restless Armies
Some years ago, at the Centre for the Future, my colleague Jasper Zimmerman and I played with an idea which insisted upon taking that drift seriously and amplifying it. We called it “PeaceQuest” – perhaps an overly‑generous name, yet the label stuck in our conversations and at presentations in Europe and Africa.
At its heart PeaceQuest was straightforward. It imagined coalitions of armed forces collaborating on work most people would recognise as intrinsically worthwhile, technically demanding, and emotionally stabilising. But instead of waiting for wars to justify their existence, these institutions would engage in collaborative quests that made recurrence of large‑scale war marginally less likely, simply by tending to the fragile tissues on which all societies now depend.
As a small proof‑of‑concept, we piloted a specially-designed mobile phone app with one hundred mothers of conscripted soldiers drawn from states officially at war, or on the brink of it, in the Middle East. The app did nothing grand: it offered a low‑bandwidth, moderated space where these mothers could chat, exchange recipes, compare childhood stories of their sons and daughters, and share the daily logistics of living with anxiety and absence. Over a few months, patterns emerged. Women who had been taught to fear or despise each other’s communities instead found themselves trading tips on stretching food during shortages, discussing school exams, and swapping lullabies. The point was not to erase political differences, but to thicken the strands of ordinary, domestic humanity across a divide that official channels kept sharpening. If something so modest could soften perceptions among those most directly invested in the conflict’s human cost, it hints at what more structured, institutional forms of cooperation might achieve when they, too, are grounded in practical, shared vulnerabilities.
Picture, for example, a consortium of countries bordering a troubled sea, whose navies already shadow each other with weary familiarity. Instead of only rehearsing for confrontation, their engineers and divers could be jointly tasked with mapping, securing, and repairing the undersea cables on which their own banking systems, air traffic control, and emergency communications depend. Not under the banner of idealism, but for the prosaic reason that everyone needs those arteries to remain open.
Or imagine a region where monsoon patterns have grown erratic. Militaries there could form expeditionary construction brigades, pooling heavy equipment and expertise to reinforce riverbanks, redesign drainage, and move at‑risk communities to higher ground. The work would be hard, muddy, and far more physically demanding than most contemporary conflict. It would also leave behind concrete benefits, rather than the usual debris of broken infrastructure and trauma.
In the aftermath of a solar storm that cripples power transformers across a continent, rapid‑response units from states that barely tolerate each other diplomatically could still find themselves rebuilding grids side by side. Not because they have grown fond of each other’s flags, but because their own medical systems, data centres, and food warehouses depend on the same fragile networks.
These are not utopian fantasies. Elements of each have already occurred in different guises. The question is whether such missions can be designed deliberately and at scale; whether they can be woven into doctrine and career structures so that officers accrue honour by stabilising life, not only by mastering death.
Here the earlier question about human nature returns in a different guise. PeaceQuest doesn’t ask generals to renounce victory. It invites them to compete in a new arena: whose forces can rebuild faster, protect more, improvise better under pressure, leave fewer civilians harmed? Prestige is still on offer. Rankings will still be kept. The difference lies in what counts as a “win”.
Winning matters because war, for many of its participants, is not only horror; it’s also a solution to boredom. Young men in particular are routinely seduced by the sheer intensity of combat – the camaraderie, the risk, the mettle, the permission to step outside the dull routines of industrial life. If a civilisational pause amounts to little more than endless policy seminars and sandbagging, it will be quietly sabotaged by those who crave drama. PeaceQuest only makes sense if it honours that appetite for danger and difficulty, redirecting it into missions where courage is still required but fewer bodies need to be buried.
There is obvious danger here, too. Any apparatus with discipline, resources, and a mandate to “ensure continuity” can easily slide into authoritarian habits. The line between building flood defences and monitoring dissidents is thin in some contexts. PeaceQuest, if annexed by such impulses, would simply provide new tools for control.
That paradox can’t simply be wished away. It does, however, suggest that where such coalitions are attempted, their legitimacy must rest on a wider constituency than governments alone. Coastal fishers’ cooperatives, hospital networks, city councils, refugee‑led associations, long‑distance truckers’ unions, archivists and librarians of endangered cultures, and cross‑border water‑management councils, for example, would all need to help shape the agenda. This convergence of voices insisting that security means more than arms and more than order would be critical.
Freezing Time Without Freezing Injustice
While we’re busy constructing these new opportunities for cooperation, old quarrels will persist. Some are bone‑deep, involving land awash in too much blood to be easily bartered away. Others are more recent but no less emotionally charged, inflamed by decades of propaganda or humiliation. In diplomatic circles it is fashionable to speak of “solutions” – as in final settlements, comprehensive packages, and normalisation. But if we’re honest, a significant subset of these disputes may not be amenable to clean resolution within any timeframe that makes sense to those directly affected. That’s a bleak thought, but perhaps a necessary one.
There is, however, another pattern in the archive. Certain conflicts are not solved so much as placed in a kind of limbo. Shooting stops, or at least diminishes. New lines are drawn on maps. Declarations are made. Even so, sovereignty claims remain irreconcilable; each side continues to teach its children a version of the story in which it’s the rightful custodian.
You can see this in the unresolved war on the Korean peninsula, where an armistice has held for generations without a formal peace. You can encounter it on islands divided by buffer zones and watched over by foreign troops whose own grandchildren no longer remember how the crises began. You can also glimpse it in polar regions, where competing claims are politely parked in the name of research. These are untidy arrangements in terms of morality. The displaced are rarely granted justice. The perpetrators of atrocities often die in their beds. Whole communities grow up in a kind of suspended animation, neither totally at war nor wholly at peace. And yet, the absence of large‑scale killing over decades is not trivial. It allows economies to adjust. It creates space for cultural cross‑pollination, however constrained. It gives time for generational memory to soften at the edges, even if official narratives remain brittle.
Look carefully and another feature appears: each side usually keeps a story in which it has not truly lost. The frontier is “temporary”. The separation is “an open wound”. The ceasefire is “proof of our steadfastness”. Nobody formally surrenders; everybody, in their own mirror, preserves a measure of dignity. The human need for victory is not abolished. It is postponed, reinterpreted, displaced into ritual and rhetoric.
The civilisational pause I am sketching here doesn’t pretend to heal deep wounds. It proposes something much more modest and arguably more viable: the explicit shelving of uncompromising aims, accompanied by tight constraints on how grievances may be pursued. You can continue to insist that a particular mountain, river, or shrine is “rightfully” yours. You can announce, to anyone who will listen, that history is on your side. What you cannot do – for now – is trying to prove it with missiles.
The Sacredness of Certain Arteries
As our infrastructures have grown more entangled, a strange realisation has begun to take root in the minds of strategists like myself: some targets are almost too dangerous to touch, not because of conscience but because of contagion.
Disabling a military base or an oil refinery has always carried risks of retaliation. Sabotaging an undersea cable that carries the majority of a region’s internet traffic is another matter entirely. Attacking a satellite that provides timing signals for civilian aviation, banking, and emergency services may be tantamount to switching off your own lungs. Infecting a widely used software platform with a particularly vicious worm can rebound into one’s own critical systems.
Out of this dawning awareness, a new category is emerging. Call it “do‑not‑touch” systems, though that term is blunt. These refer to infrastructures whose destruction would cause such widespread collateral damage that even sworn adversaries flinch at the thought. Evidence of such restraint is patchy, but extant, nevertheless. States with formidable cyber capabilities have, on several occasions, stopped short of attacks that would have crippled hospitals or nuclear plants, preferring more limited operations. Even during heightened tensions, there are informal understandings about certain satellite functions: weather, rescue coordination, and some navigation services are quietly treated as part of a shared commons. Financial institutions, though often cynical, recoil from sponsoring actors that blatantly weaponise global payment networks beyond certain limits.
Is it fanciful to think that, over time, these half‑formed instincts could be codified into firmer commitments? Perhaps. Yet nuclear weapons, too, were once hailed as ordinary munitions, simply bigger and brighter. Only gradually did an unwritten taboo congeal around their use.
One can envisage, however faintly, charters that declare specific classes of asset – undersea cables, certain satellites, global health surveillance platforms, large hydroelectric dams – off limits, except perhaps in the gravest of emergencies. Such charters would be observed unevenly. They would be breached, that’s for sure. Some actors will sign with one hand and plot with the other; hypocrisy, after all, is one of the lubricants of international life. But even a porous membrane can slow a contagion. The point is not to conjure a flawless order in which everyone obeys the rules. It is to make certain forms of sabotage so reputationally toxic, so financially punitive, and so technically difficult that only the most desperate or fanatical will attempt them.
It’s in these liminal zones that PeaceQuest‑type operations could acquire unexpected leverage. When rival militaries have spent years collaborating to shield a particular satellite constellation or cable corridor from debris, decay, or accident, the threshold for deliberately targeting those same structures rises. To destroy them would not only be an act of aggression; it would also cancel one’s own claim to responsible stewardship and, crucially, risk a kind of reputational defeat that many rulers now fear almost as much as a beating on the battlefield.
Scoreboards and the Theatre of Reputation
For better or worse, and I have always claimed for the worse, we live in an era besotted with measurement. Governments track their rankings on innovation indices, logistics performance tables, education assessments, corruption perceptions, environmental scorecards, and happiness surveys. Some of these metrics are crude; others have real analytical depth. All feed into a restless comparison: what’s the benchmark and where do we stand in relation to others?
Industrial economism, with its obsession for growth and competition, has colonised even those corners of life once thought resistant to quantification. There’s a huge risk, quite obvious to anyone paying attention, that humans become data points in someone else’s control panel rather than agents in their own right.
There’s another risk as well. Communities that have already been branded “backward” or “failed” by a parade of foreign experts are understandably unsympathetic to yet more ranking. For those who feel permanently on the losing side of globalisation, each new index can look like a fresh instrument of condescension: another way of keeping them at the bottom of the league table and telling them to be grateful. Resentment ferments under such metrics and is one of the currents feeding today’s revanchist politics.
Yet this mania for comparison also offers an opportunity if we’re prepared to look sideways. Rankings that allow for swift movement – where a small, previously ignored country can leap upwards by doing the right kind of thing well – feel very different from those that merely ratify inherited privilege. If the scoreboard around resilience and continuity is designed as an escalator rather than a caste system, it might ease rather than deepen status anxiety. We already see, for instance, that the speed and competence with which a government responds to an earthquake, flood, or epidemic shapes not only domestic trust but international standing. Investors watch. Tourists watch. Migrants watch. So do neighbouring leaders.
Suppose, therefore, that we begin to take seriously those aspects of statecraft that keep people alive rather than those that only project menace. Imagine indices that don’t just track the size of arsenals, but the reliability of evacuation plans; not just the number of warships, but the robustness of coastal defences; not only military spending as a share of GDP, but the fraction of that spending devoted to continuity‑of‑life functions.
PeaceQuest missions, in that context, become more than paltry or niche experiments. They turn into stages on which governments can demonstrate a different kind of prowess. Whose joint task force restored power fastest after a massive solar flare? Which regional coalition managed to contain a crop blight without resorting to hoarding or sabotage? How effectively did military logisticians support civilian agencies during the last cyclone season, and with what degree of transparency?
Here we edge closer to the doubt about human nature that hovers over this whole discussion. The civilisational pause doesn’t denounce the desire to win; it tries to migrate it. Prestige is no longer tied solely to forcing an adversary to bow, but to avoiding the kind of public disgrace that follows when hospitals fail, children drown, or cities burn under predictable stress while generals boast about missiles.
There’s a danger here, too. Metrics can be gamed, and often are. Numbers invite propaganda. Yet the theatre of reputation is now so central to political life that ignoring it would be a fundamental error. If a fraction of the energy currently devoted to counting missiles could be redirected towards comparing injury‑prevention or recovery times, the symbolic economy of power might begin, slowly, to shift.
Energy as Story, Not Salvation
Energy has long been the unspoken author of geopolitics. Empires have risen on the back of coal seams, dams and oilfields; they have stumbled when those arteries ran dry or lost their value. The contemporary fealty to renewables and fusion carries a familiar messianic note: once we unlock abundant clean energy, so the story goes, scarcity will evaporate and conflict will dwindle.
I have always treated such claims with caution. Abundance, in human history, has never guaranteed serenity. More often it rearranges the field of contention. If sunlight and wind are plentiful, then battles intensify around land, minerals, intellectual property, and the labour that converts diffuse flows into usable power. Questions about who owns the panels, who controls the grids, who sets the prices, and who reaps the rents don’t vanish. They mutate.
What energy innovation might plausibly offer, though, is a horizon. Societies need plausible futures in order to exercise restraint. A petrostate like Saudi Arabia, that can only imagine decline, will be tempted to squeeze every last drop out of its current advantage, even if that means fomenting chaos elsewhere. A community that sees itself as permanently excluded from the next energy regime will reach for whatever leverage it can find, sometimes violently.
By contrast, if there are credible pathways by which today’s vulnerable can become tomorrow’s custodians of distributed energy networks, or stewards of restored ecosystems that sequester carbon and host new industries, the calculus shifts slightly. Holding fire in the present becomes a wager on participating in a less brittle economy later.
Here again PeaceQuest has a role. Cooperative missions around micro‑grids in remote regions, or around retrofitting infrastructure to cope with heatwaves, floods, and storms, can seed a narrative in which energy transition is not a zero‑sum game. Such stories also embed habits of interdependence in precisely those systems where sabotage would otherwise be most tempting.
Leadership Without Heroes
The industrial worldview bequeathed us a particular image of leadership: the solitary figure standing behind the podium, the invincible CEO, the field marshal on a white horse. That picture still populates our screens and our fantasies. Yet the actual work of maintaining a habitable civilisation is increasingly done elsewhere. Leadership, as I began to understand it from the time I completed the research that led to my third book, The Five Literacies of Global Leadership, is actually the shared phenomenon of stewardship. It arises when groups of people, often from very different walks of life, converge around the need to improve prevailing conditions. It might be the care of a river, the defence of a forest, the redesign of a city’s food system, the protection of a language from erasure, or the insistence that an army trained for killing must also learn how to learn how to heal.
In that sense, the civilisational pause is not something decreed at a summit, but a pattern of countless such convergences. Doctors and engineers insisting that hospitals and water systems be regarded as sacrosanct, even in wartime. Community organisers and technologists arguing for open data from citizen scientists on climate risk so that preparedness is not the privilege of the wealthy. Artists and educators reshaping how young people imagine “security” – less as domination, more as the quiet confidence that food, shelter, meaning, and dignity will still be available tomorrow.
Militaries participate in this only to the extent that they are drawn into such networks and held to account by them. A general who volunteers his logistics corps for a PeaceQuest mission and then listens seriously to the indigenous elders whose land they are reinforcing is enacting stewardship. So is the sergeant who refuses an order to target a hospital. So is the civil servant who rewrites procurement rules to prioritise continuity rather than prestige weapons.
Nor should we kid ourselves that elites will suddenly become honest and develop scruples. The civilisational pause is not a covenant of saints. It assumes that “leaders” will sign principles they don’t intend honouring, that militaries will exploit loopholes, that corporations will cheat when they think nobody is looking. Its modest claim is that, through overlapping norms, financial pressures, public expectations and material interdependencies, the price of cheating on a grand scale can be raised high enough that fewer will try. In that sense, it’s less a moral revolution than a clumsy piece of institutional acupuncture.
Managed Fatigue
I am often asked whether I “believe” in peace - even by friends who know that I’m a pacifist. The truthful answer is that I am far less interested in peace as a static condition than in the changing tempo of harm. Our species is adept at squabbling. We argue over gods, land, status, gender, and the meaning of justice. I doubt that will vanish any time soon. What might change, if we’re lucky and marginally wiser than we look right now, is the speed and scale at which those quarrels translate into slaughter.
A civilisational pause is not an armistice signed by all. It’s a gradual thickening of tissues that make total war increasingly inconvenient, increasingly costly, and – dare one hope – increasingly shameful. It’s the normalisation of armed forces that spend more days each year protecting the continuities of life than rehearsing its disruption. It’s the willingness to put certain disputes in the freezer of time, rather than on the pyre of immediate gratification. It’s the patient construction of corridors – infrastructural, informational, ecological – that everyone depends on and nobody quite dares to sever.
It doesn’t ask humans to stop wanting to win. That appetite for victory is older than most of our institutions. What it does, more modestly, is invite us to notice that there are different kinds of triumph. Keeping your people fed through a season of drought, or your hospitals functioning during a pandemic, or your children out of the trenches, might yet come to feel like victories worth boasting about. For that shift to stick, defeat must also change its meaning. Being unprepared, corrupt, or recklessly cruel will have to shame more, in the court of global opinion and in domestic mirrors, than failing to seize one more scrap of land.
This will never satisfy the purists. It leaves injustice unhealed, often for scandalously long stretches. It doesn’t provide the moral catharsis beloved of tribunals and manifestos. It tolerates hypocrisy; indeed, it depends on it. Those who prefer a world neatly divided into villains and heroes will always find it aggravating.
But when I look at the alternatives – permanent mobilisation, episodic annihilation, nostalgic fantasies of empire, or the cheerful nihilism of “after us, the flood” – the civilisational pause begins to resemble something more modest but most precious: not utopia, just a breathing space large enough to allow other kinds of work to proceed. The slow labour of reconciliation. The reimagining of education. The redesign of institutions no longer fit for purpose. The nurturing of alternative economies that don’t devour their own foundations.
We won’t become angels. On our better days though, we might become a little more adept at being tired of killing, tired of rebuilding the same ruins, tired of worshipping abstractions that demand human sacrifice. And from that fatigue, managed with a little intelligence rather than squandered in despair, new currents may yet flow.
If there’s wisdom here, it doesn’t come from optimism. It comes from watching, over many years and in many cultures, the stubbornness with which human beings cling to their myths, the tenacity with which they seek to save face, the dark pleasures they take in each other’s suffering, and the quiet ingenuity with which they sometimes, almost despite themselves, learn to inhabit those stories with less blood.