A friend once told me there are two kinds of peace.

The first one is false, when everything is made peaceful not because it is right or just, but because people have artificially forced the peace to happen. He called this “the peace of the grave” because in that kind of peace, something dies in order to bring it about.

The second kind is a true peace, when things are in order and just.

This is the peace that we all really want, but too often we strive for the first one.

In the name of peace and unity, some Americans have tied themselves together and walked out onto freeways, staged sit-ins, stripped off their clothes and draped their naked bodies in treetops, held topless “Breasts not Bombs” rallies and written countless songs of love and togetherness.

None of these help bring about justice or order, which are the only means of securing a real peace.

Justice and order are difficult things to accomplish, however, and so many people simply give up and strive for a counterfeit. This counterfeit is usually called “unity” or “consensus.”

When the Hamilton-Baker Iraq Study Group report came out in December 2006, it was lauded as a fantastic solution not on its merits, but because it represented a wonderful consensus opinion of those on the left and right. How wonderful that we can get Democrats and Republicans to agree on something, pundits said.

This must be the answer we’ve been looking for!

Except that the ISG report was wrong on its prognosis of the war.

The Washington Post declared at the time that the report showed “the war is essentially already lost” – and yet here we are in May 2008 looking back at the great success of the surge and the progress it has fostered in Iraq.

But the condition of Iraq isn’t my point. The takeaway from this is that “consensus” opinion doesn’t have a thing to do with truth.

No matter how many Sandra Day O’Connors and Vernon Jordans agree on how best to deal with the Iraq war, the fact that they agree on a solution means nothing.

On the issue of global warming, Al Gore famously declared that “the debate in the scientific community is over.”

Nevermind that plenty of scientists disagree on whether global warming is real or not, how much might be caused by humans and what the best course of action might be; if Al Gore has declared the debate over, then anybody disagreeing at this point is clearly a partisan hack who wouldn’t know truth if it was living in Gore’s giant Tennessee mansion with a $1,200 electric bill.

When there really is no actual consensus about an issue, some people try to resolve the friction by railing against others as being “divisive.”

For example, I have received lots of Letters to the Editor about my columns and a few of them have accused me of being divisive (despite one letter’s author claiming one of his favorite quotes was “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”).

I don’t write columns to tick people off – it doesn’t please me to be irritating.

That being said, I also don’t try to water down my opinions to avoid being divisive. I believe truth is real and absolute, and if you compromise on it then you can no longer call it truth.

This is why consensus is so overrated, especially in politics. The leading presidential candidates all claim they can reach across the political aisle and work with their rivals to get things done.

Why this is something to be celebrated, I haven’t a clue. Getting along was something we were taught in kindergarten. When did “learned the lessons of elementary school” become an attractive part of someone’s political platform?

We expect our elected officials to work with people they might disagree with because they are all adults. What we don’t want is for those we elect to compromise on their beliefs.

If I vote for someone who claims he will protect the lives of unborn children, I don’t want him to seek compromise with pro-choice officials.

If liberals vote for Obama hoping he will quickly withdraw troops from Iraq, they shouldn’t want him to compromise with John McCain; that’s not he claimed he would do and not why people voted for him.

Our system of federal government is set up so that only when there are many factions seeking their own interests do we have balance. If everybody was always trying to agree with each other, it would undermine the checks and balances put in place and threaten the rights of the dissenting minority.

If we are only seeking unity and consensus, then we are striving for the false peace of the grave. We are trying to kill not only man’s natural tendency to disagree on things, but also any semblance of truth. The only way to achieve any kind of lasting peace is to have competing sides confront each other and let the truth win out. Settling for anything less is to settle for a counterfeit.