Though the most common way to define peace is in opposition to war, as in Thomas Hobbes’ notion of peace as an interval between battles, this doesn’t really tell us much about peace itself. What’s more, by beginning from a polar opposition of war and peace, a kind of immanent conflict between two “camps” is built into our frameworks for understanding. What’s needed then is a definition of peace understood in its own terms.
Here we discuss what is peace itself. Drawing on deep experience in peace-building from her work for the Unitarian Fellowship at the United Nations, lifetime peace activist Eryl Court settles on a metaphor of harmony to describe the condition of being at peace. This is an ancient idea with cross-cultural resonances that speak across civilizational divides. Early on in the Western tradition Plato described the attunement of the soul to the order of the cosmos and to lawful order within communities as harmonious attachment, wherein we perceive the rational order of the whole within the structure of reason itself. Our sense of harmony is thus treated as a kind of intuition of this rational law governing all things. In the same spirit, Cicero described political order as an instantiation of “the music of the spheres”, as Eryl uses the phrase here.
At a personal level, this understanding of peace as harmony means that our visceral repulsion felt towards violence is an indication of what is a more substantive attachment to harmonious union. In this sense, war is experienced as a surreal dissonance and absence of peace.
How then, over the course of human history has war been normalized as the default condition for political reality? How have we as global citizens been enculturated against nature and reason to accept violence as necessary? What means are available to amplify that attunement to harmonious union that exists inside of every person? What is the reality behind the drive to stop illegal wars?
Interviewed by Dr. Toivo Koivukoski of Nipissing University as part of the Agents of Peace Project.
