War, Peace, and Fuzzy Logic

Our tempestuous times are in desperate need of Peace. We live on a small planet; threatened by common enemies such as global warming, AIDS, super-bugs, environmentally-rooted diseases, crime, suicides, school-shootings, road-rage, hate, and above all else – indifference. We are all in the same "sinking boat". No longer can we afford to antagonize one another. We need all our global human resources and skills to save the "Arc". In the same way that today's hard sciences are concerned with disease and climate change, we should also pay anxious attention to Peace. Sociologists, political scientists, and peace activists are currently struggling with the very limited scientific potions at their disposal to find a panacea for war. There has been little attempt by the hard-science community to contribute to these efforts. This paper is an attempt to apply fuzzy logic (a methodology designed to bridge across the hardand soft-sciences) to the peace-making process. Our universe is controlled by the Darwinian principle of "survival of the fittest". In the causal equations of events, Peace is a "trivial solution" that becomes lost, like a needle in a haystack, among war-bound "general solutions". To find Peace, we propose two routes. The first, and perhaps, preferred option is to leave the Darwinian universe of "conflict" and attempt to layout our problems in a different setting in which the ruling principle is "concord" rather than "conflict". The second path is to salvage Peace from its triviality by compromising its purity and moving into a universe that re-defines "concord" and "conflict" in a fuzzy way. We will show that the first approach (that we call "Transcendental") and the second track (that we call "Pragmatic") can overlap to define a "Pathway to Peace". The Transcendental approach provides boundary conditions without which the generation of Pragmatic rules becomes too complex and confusing. The first idea is that of the Peace activists and spiritual pacifists. Clearly, the desire for Peace among these "purists" has not yet been achieved and remains a constant challenge. The second option is the way of the Peace diplomats who look for compromise that can create an armistice situation or a "time of quiet". It is imperative that the advocates of these two camps (i.e. Peace activists and Peace politicians) open up to a dialogue that generates real communication. To do so requires a common language and common methodology in which the language itself becomes the means of compromise. This paper attempts to fashion such a fuzzy logic-based common language to help with the mediation of Peace. We have used the universal laws of thermodynamics as a framework to understand the nature of conflict and to bridge between the hard and soft sciences. To this framework we have added some fuzzy rules to pave the passage. We show that diversity should not be compromised for Peace. Prologue Like Russian wooden dolls, each nesting within another, trying to analyze the common features of War reveals problem upon problem inside each other. In attempting to find common threads in Wars, we must ask question such as, "what is commonness?" among others. One can begin the analysis with "facts" and numbers – size of armies, number of tanks, aircraft or battleships, length of the conflict, number of participants, etc., etc. But "facts" do not approach even closely, the need to have "experiential" knowledge of what is War. Many have studied War scientifically – to find the optimum way to wage War – the theory of how to win a battle. Others base their analyses on empiricism to tell the story of the horrors of War – the genocide, the battle, the killing of young children and other innocents. And who has analyzed the dichotomy that is War and Peace better than Leo Tolstoy through a tome of some 1500 pages with what is, perhaps, the greatest novel ever written. As an aside, the Russian words for "peace" ("миръ") and "world" ("міръ") are homonyms – a different spelling in this case, but the same pronunciation. Is this coincidental or accidental? Does it stem from a desire for a peaceful world or does it express a belief in what is believed to be the natural state of the world? Tolstoy's novel begins with Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and tells the story of five aristocratic families and the entangling of their personal lives over the period 18051813. As events proceed, Tolstoy's subjects are systematically prevented from having any significant free choice. It is the dichotomy between individual freedom and social order that is at the very heart of understanding War and Peace.