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.

Several questions arise here: What parity is there between peace in the world and peace within us? Is peace a universal concept, or is it a necessarily contested term (i.e. is it peace primarily for the victor)? How is the recognition of difference intrinsic to peaceful politics?

The analogy made between the “Wild West” and the apparently anarchical conditions of contemporary global politics draws attention to crucial issues concerning the relation between justice and power. This is an essentially ontological question, bearing on what is the basis of our shared reality. If, as some argue, justice is reducible to power – i.e. if peace starts with the Sheriff and a fight – then the conditions of peace will be similarly unstable. In contrast, if peace has its basis in a universal idea of justice, with power ancillary to principles, then the consistency and stability of rationally-based consensus will shine through. Principles are in this sense a more solid basis for sustainable peace than power. The practical challenge then is to take the role of individual agency and the principles of peace more seriously than any supposed fatalism of war and power politics.

Interviewed by Dr. Toivo Koivukoski of Nipissing University as part of the Agents of Peace Project, exploring the role of agency in peace-building.