Passion-Peace; Peace-Passion

Peace and Passion; Passion and Peace

          It was 1966 and the mountains rose steeply behind the chalet-style condominium. The young woman was focused on selecting her focus for life, and engaged me as a soundboard as she considered the dilemma of passion versus peace. She rapidly decided on peace being for her, Buddhism being big amongst her community at the time.

          Christianity, of course, bases itself on the Passion of Christ and the Saints, all that ‘peace on earth’ guff being just a marketing ploy that real-world Christians – other than Quakers and the like – have almost never pursued.

          Being 20 years old, I myself conceived of passion as, well, sex, as I did so much else, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to trade that in on a totally passionless, ethereal way of life, just yet. I was also impressionable, and therefore so accepting of her certainty that at the time it didn’t occur to me to challenge her false dichotomy, the either-or choice that she asserted was ours to make. It didn’t occur to me then to suggest that ‘passion’ and ‘peace’ are two points on a spectrum, a dimension, that nearly all people proceed through life by mixing, and that the everyday cultural and personal values along this spectrum are most likely to be a matter of more-or-less rather than either-or.

          About 25 years later, far from the Rocky Mountains and re-immersed in academia, I discovered the work of Geert Hofstede, a Dutch industrial psychologist who constructed an empirically based theory of cultural value dimensions. At first he found a basis for four: individualism-collectivism, acceptance or rejection of the power structure (power distance), accepting or trying to impose order on a chaotic world (uncertainty avoidance), and masculine-feminine. I can, of course, think of dozens of other possible values dimensions, but these are the ones for which Hofstede’s data provided empirical support.

          Since then he – or his organisation – has identified two more: long-term orientation-short-term orientation and restraint-indulgence. Passion-peace, you may notice, is still not one of them.

          For my PhD thesis, naturally, I set about testing the hypothesis that passion-peace (or at least indifference) is a demonstrable political value dimension, partially due to having had that long-ago conversation and by my personal, anecdotal observations of different national cultures. I figured that I could do it with existing data by measuring survey respondents’ choices for certain items of the strongly-agree and strongly-disagree options against the three options in the middle. Clever, eh?

          This, however, was in the early days of the internet, before the introduction of powerful search engines, and I was also having little luck in convincing the university to buy me the dataset of some European survey from a uni in Germany, which seemed promising, so my progress was laborious and frustrating.

          So there I was in December 1993, sitting in a windowless office in Building J, staring hopelessly at a screen showing a list of unconnected websites, when I received an official slip of paper telling me that I had to pay the uni something like $1700 for the privilege of carrying on doing more of the same for another year.

          I reckoned that I could put that money to better use taking my family to Waiheke Island for a week over Xmas (my daughters were eight and six at the time), so I took what little personal shit I had at the uni home with me, and confirmed our booking at a place near the beach.

          I don’t think the passion-peace dimension had much to do with that decision, as my marriage was already well past the point at which either end of the spectrum had much to do with it, and kids – well, my kids involved a mish-mash of both strong emotion and peacefulness in my mind.

          Now, almost 24 years later still, peace is definitely dominant over passion in my life strategy. What passion I feel, unlike 51 years ago, is of course no longer focused entirely on sex. It tends to centre largely on responses of anger and disgust toward those of the world’s arrogantly stupid people, and their depredations, who intrude upon my consciousness. This provides me with few benefits. My daily doses of pain-killer medicine for my aged back, furthermore, help me to sustain, unevenly, a foundation for an approximation of peace.

          My life experiences since the 1940s, however, have led me to conclude that passion is a natural, inescapable part of human existence that we (or at least I) best learn to control, whilst peace is an elusive human construct that mostly results from effort in its direction. Passion usually has painful consequences; peace tends to relieve emotional pain. Passion tends to result in frustration and disappointment; peace makes winning and losing, or success and failure, irrelevant. Passion can make depression or the echoes of trauma dangerous; peace has a way with helping to smooth such psychological disabilities out.

          Still, at age 71, I don’t regret any instance when peace has eluded me, whether due to curiosity or exposure to art or something else, and I do deeply regret those numerous instances when the consequences of the emotional trauma I suffered during childhood brought out my tendency to turn people off or otherwise fuck things up, thereby denying me the passion of possibly ecstatic and fulfilling experiences of sexual love. The 20-year-old is still there, I guess.