I’m currently standing at the ruins of the famous Walls of Constantinople.
This is all that remains of the mighty Byzantine Empire. The same empire that fought Islamic expansion for 800 years. They thought these walls were invincible until Sultan Mehmed II proved them wrong in 1453.
I will be doing a deep dive into the history of this place in the evening. Stay tuned.
This is a very beautiful question and it forced me to do further research as a person. After all I’ve read, here are what I found out...
First of all, we need to stop looking at humans as some highly enlightened beings. I used to think peace was a matter of good leadership and dialogue, however, the reality is much deeper. We are much more of biological organisms running on very old, paranoid hardware.
If you read Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, the truth is quite brutal. Our bodies are survival machines built to ensure our genes outlive us. Genes do not care about world peace. They care about replication and hoarding resources. When our early ancestors were wandering the earth, resources were painfully scarce.
If an unfamiliar group walked into your territory, it meant your children might starve. Violence was a biological necessity for survival back then. That primal instinct never left our brains. We just traded caves for modern borders.
Then I looked at Edward O. Wilson in The Social Conquest of Earth. He broke down how human evolution was driven by a constant tug of war. Selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of cooperative people always wiped out groups of selfish people.
The result is a species that is incredibly loving and cooperative within our own small tribe, but violently hostile toward competing tribes. We are wired to be saints to our own kind and monsters to outsiders. It is a biological “us”versus “them.”
Yuval Noah Harari took it a step further in Sapiens. He pointed out our unique ability to believe in shared fictions such as nations, borders, and ideologies. This allowed millions of us to cooperate and build massive civilizations. However, it is a double edged sword.
Because we created these huge ideological tribes, we now go to war over abstract ideas. Animals fight over physical food and territory. Humans will slaughter millions of their own kind over a difference in a political system or a historical grievance.
Deductively, peace requires total equilibrium. It demands that every single human agrees on the same definition of justice and resource allocation. But nature operates on hierarchy and competition. Someone will always want more power or a higher status.
We have the intelligence to build complex machines and explore space, but we are also trying to run a peaceful global society on the ancient DNA of paranoid hunter gatherers. That is the root of the problem, and this is why we can’t live together in peace.
I hope this answers your question.
🗣Noussair Mazraoui:
"I might decide to retire after the World Cup. Life is short. I want to memorize the Qur’an and become an Imam of a mosque one day."