Alternatively titled-‘The Mathematics of Peace.’  

Math is an extremely complicated and broad subject dealing with many things, but most non-mathematicians interact with it in very simple ways.  You have a quantity, and you change it.  I have a quantity of 1 apple, and I add 1 apple to that other apple, and I now have 2 apples.  I’m tempted to go on, but I don’t have heart to subject you all to several paragraphs recapping math you probably already understand.

In relation to our daily lives, we use math pretty regularly, even if we aren’t aware of it.  Many mathematical functions are automatic in our brains, or we use approximation to answer the question we have, without having to fully complete the equation.  An example of this would be my drive through order.  I know that my desired meal will cost approximately $5, and since it was just pay day, I know that I have approximately $12 in the bank.  I could write out the equation and show my work to find out if I have enough, but I know that 12 is bigger than 5, and the specifics are not as important as the end goal, which is, of course, purchasing delicious Taco Bell breakfast burritos.  Now if I return the next morning to order again, I will likely be more cautious as I consider whether I can pay or not.

It is easy to think of money as the way we most often use math in our daily lives, but I think there are other areas that we use math just as often.  After I’ve gotten my Taco Bell for the morning, I fight through the traffic, and drive to work for the day.  I arrive at work, and then proceed to work for the day, then drive home.  Many people find that they would rather be at home than work, so why do people go anyways?  Well, they have simply done the math.  They know that even though they enjoy being at home more than being at work, in order to maintain their home, and have all the nice things like food and drinks that make home so nice, they must have money.  They know that getting money can be accomplished by going to work, so they calculate the amount of their distaste for work, against the amount of desire they have for the good things provided by money.  In the form of an equation, it would be “desire for money” minus “dislike of work”.  If desire for money is bigger than dislike of work, than the individual will go to work.

So as you can see, we use math all the time.  Especially when it comes to weighing our desires against their costs.

Things get interesting when we start to apply mathematical concepts to socio-political concepts like war and peace.  (Shout out to my homeboy Tolstoy!)

War is created by an imbalance in our perception of the justness of the world around us.  Perhaps the aggressor feels that they have earned more of the worlds resources than they have thus far acquired, and they calculate that they can get more of what they feel they deserve by forcibly taking it from those around them.  Or, perhaps a group with a certain ideology feels that they are being unfairly persecuted, and their only recourse is to fight to correct the equation.  Warring parties evaluate the cost of the war, against the perceived gain of winning the war.  There are millions of micro-calculations taking place throughout the conflict as well.  Leaders should be constantly evaluating whether they can win this battle with this number of forces while suffering this number of casualties.

To simplify it, we look to the old testament.  ‘An eye for an eye.’

We constantly seek at least that balance.  He who has wronged me should be wronged equally as much as I was wronged.  Many times we aim to hurt them more than they have hurt us, which is why the old testament specifically addresses the issue, telling us it is wrong to seek to do more harm than was done to us.

So we see the math of war in front of us.  If you extrapolate it out to its furthest reaches, and attempt to balance the equation with ‘an eye for an eye’ as the standard for the solution, we quickly discover that war will eventually destroy everything.  Each injury results in a ripple effect through generations, as children are left parentless, and seek to balance the equation by taking revenge.  There is no way to balance the equation, as each retaliation shifts the imbalance to the other side.  We are on a teeter-totter of violence, each side seeking to rise above the other.

Until, that is, we introduce peace as an operator in the equation.

Peace resets the balance.  It levels the teeter-totter.

In mathematical terms, peace is impossible, it is breaking the rules of the equation, because one side or the other (and often times both) have to let something go from the ledger of wrongs committed against them.  They have to choose to ignore the numbers.  Peace is a willful choice to reset the math.  Each side has to let something go, and agree to start over.

This is what has happened for millennia, we discover the equation to be too complicated, and we pursue peace to wipe the slates clean.  The equation is 1=1 again.

The world could certainly benefit from a re-balancing now.

Let us pray for peace.

Be sure to check out the other people on the journey with me at 254peace.org, or on our Facebook page.  There are some awesome people participating this year, and they all have something important to say.