peace and trust essay

Essay on Peace

500 words essay peace.

Peace is the path we take for bringing growth and prosperity to society. If we do not have peace and harmony, achieving political strength, economic stability and cultural growth will be impossible. Moreover, before we transmit the notion of peace to others, it is vital for us to possess peace within. It is not a certain individual’s responsibility to maintain peace but everyone’s duty. Thus, an essay on peace will throw some light on the same topic.

Importance of Peace

History has been proof of the thousands of war which have taken place in all periods at different levels between nations. Thus, we learned that peace played an important role in ending these wars or even preventing some of them.

In fact, if you take a look at all religious scriptures and ceremonies, you will realize that all of them teach peace. They mostly advocate eliminating war and maintaining harmony. In other words, all of them hold out a sacred commitment to peace.

It is after the thousands of destructive wars that humans realized the importance of peace. Earth needs peace in order to survive. This applies to every angle including wars, pollution , natural disasters and more.

When peace and harmony are maintained, things will continue to run smoothly without any delay. Moreover, it can be a saviour for many who do not wish to engage in any disrupting activities or more.

In other words, while war destroys and disrupts, peace builds and strengthens as well as restores. Moreover, peace is personal which helps us achieve security and tranquillity and avoid anxiety and chaos to make our lives better.

How to Maintain Peace

There are many ways in which we can maintain peace at different levels. To begin with humankind, it is essential to maintain equality, security and justice to maintain the political order of any nation.

Further, we must promote the advancement of technology and science which will ultimately benefit all of humankind and maintain the welfare of people. In addition, introducing a global economic system will help eliminate divergence, mistrust and regional imbalance.

It is also essential to encourage ethics that promote ecological prosperity and incorporate solutions to resolve the environmental crisis. This will in turn share success and fulfil the responsibility of individuals to end historical prejudices.

Similarly, we must also adopt a mental and spiritual ideology that embodies a helpful attitude to spread harmony. We must also recognize diversity and integration for expressing emotion to enhance our friendship with everyone from different cultures.

Finally, it must be everyone’s noble mission to promote peace by expressing its contribution to the long-lasting well-being factor of everyone’s lives. Thus, we must all try our level best to maintain peace and harmony.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Peace

To sum it up, peace is essential to control the evils which damage our society. It is obvious that we will keep facing crises on many levels but we can manage them better with the help of peace. Moreover, peace is vital for humankind to survive and strive for a better future.

FAQ of Essay on Peace

Question 1: What is the importance of peace?

Answer 1: Peace is the way that helps us prevent inequity and violence. It is no less than a golden ticket to enter a new and bright future for mankind. Moreover, everyone plays an essential role in this so that everybody can get a more equal and peaceful world.

Question 2: What exactly is peace?

Answer 2: Peace is a concept of societal friendship and harmony in which there is no hostility and violence. In social terms, we use it commonly to refer to a lack of conflict, such as war. Thus, it is freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.

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• Maria Ressa - Nobel Prize lecture

Maria Ressa

Nobel lecture.

Maria Ressa delivered her Nobel Peace Prize lecture on 10 December 2021 at the Oslo City Hall in Norway.

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Copyright © The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 2021. General permission is granted for the publication in newspapers in any language. Publication in periodicals or books, or in digital or electronic forms, otherwise than in summary, requires the consent of the Foundation. On all publications in full or in major parts the above underlined copyright notice must be applied.

Nobel Lecture given by Nobel Peace Prize laureate 2021 Maria Ressa, Oslo, 10 December 2021.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Distinguished Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests

I stand before you, a representative of every journalist around the world who is forced to sacrifice so much to hold the line, to stay true to our values and mission: to bring you the truth and hold power to account. I remember the brutal dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, Luz Mely Reyes in Venezuela, Roman Protasevich in Belarus (whose plane was literally hijacked so he could be arrested), Jimmy Lai languishing in a Hong Kong prison, Sonny Swe, who after getting out of more than 7 years in jail started another news group … now forced to flee Myanmar. And in my own country, 23 year old Frenchie Mae Cumpio, still in prison after nearly 2 years, and just 36 hours ago the news that my former colleague, Jess Malabanan, was shot dead.

There are so many to thank for helping keep us safer and working. The #HoldTheLine Coalition of more than 80 global groups defending press freedom, and the human rights groups that help us shine the light. There are costs for you as well: in the Philippines, more lawyers have been killed – at least 63 compared to the 22 journalists murdered after President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016. Since then, Karapatan, a member of our #CourageON human rights coalition, has had 16 people killed, and Sen. Leila de Lima – because she demanded accountability, is serving her 5th year in jail. Or ABS-CBN, our largest broadcaster, a news room I once led, which, last year, lost its franchise to operate.

I helped create a startup, Rappler, turning 10 years old in January – our attempt to put together two sides of a coin that shows everything wrong with our world today: an absence of law and democratic vision for the 21st century. That coin represents our information ecosystem, which determines everything else about our world. Journalists, the old gatekeepers, are one side of the coin. The other is technology, with its god-like power that has allowed a virus of lies to infect each of us, pitting us against each other, bringing out our fears, anger and hate, and setting the stage for the rise of authoritarians and dictators around the world.

Our greatest need today is to transform that hate and violence, the toxic sludge that’s coursing through our information ecosystem, prioritized by American internet companies that make more money by spreading that hate and triggering the worst in us… well, that just means we have to work much harder. (hold up t-shirt) In order to be the good, we have to BElieve THEre is GOOD in the world.

I have been a journalist for more than 35 years: I’ve worked in conflict zones and warzones in Asia, reported on hundreds of disasters – and while I have seen so much bad, I have also documented so much good, when people who have nothing offer you what they have. Part of how we at Rappler survived the last 5 years of government attacks is because of the kindness of strangers, and the reason they help – despite the danger – is because they want to, with little expectation of anything in return. This is the best of who we are, the part of our humanity that makes miracles happen. This is what we lose when we live in a world of fear and violence.

The last time a working journalist was given this award was in 1936, and Carl von Ossietzky never made it to Oslo because he languished in a Nazi concentration camp. So we’re hopefully a step ahead because we’re actually here!

By giving this to journalists today, the Nobel committee is signalling a similar historical moment, another existential point for democracy. Dmitry and I are lucky because we can speak to you now, but there are so many more journalists persecuted in the shadows with neither exposure nor support, and governments are doubling down with impunity. The accelerant is technology, at a time when creative destruction takes new meaning.

We are standing on the rubble of the world that was, and we must have the foresight and courage to imagine what might happen if we don’t act now, and instead, create the world as it should be – more compassionate, more equal, more sustainable.

To do that, please ask yourself the same question my team and I had to confront 5 years ago: what are you willing to sacrifice for the Truth?

I’ll tell you how I lived my way into the answer in three points: first, my context and how these attacks shaped me; second, by the problem we all face; and finally, finding the solution – because we must!

In less than 2 years, the Philippine government filed 10 arrest warrants against me. I’ve had to post bail 10 times just to do my job. Last year, I and a former colleague were convicted of cyber libel for a story we published 8 years earlier at a time the law we allegedly violated didn’t even exist. All told, the charges I face could send me to jail for about 100 years.

But, the more I was attacked for my journalism, the more resolute I became. I had first-hand evidence of abuse of power. What was meant to intimidate me and Rappler only strengthened us.

At the core of journalism is a code of honor. And mine is layered on different worlds – from how I grew up, when I learned what was right and wrong; from college, and the honor code I learned there; and my time as a reporter, and the code of standards & ethics I learned and helped write. Add to that the Filipino idea of utang na loob – or the debt from within – at its best, a system of paying it forward.

Truth and ethical honor intersected like an arrow into this moment where hate, lies, and divisiveness thrive. As only the 18th woman to receive this prize, I need to tell you how gendered disinformation is a new threat and is taking a significant toll on the mental health and physical safety of women, girls, trans, and LGBTQ+ people all over the world. Women journalists are at the epicenter of risk. This pandemic of misogyny and hatred needs to be tackled, now. Even there, we can find strength. After all, you don’t really know who you really are until you’re forced to fight for it.

Now let me pull out so we’re clear about the problem we all face and how we got here.

The attacks against us in Rappler began 5 years ago when we demanded an end to impunity on two fronts: Duterte’s drug war and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Today, it has only gotten worse – and Silicon Valley’s sins came home to roost in the United States on January 6 with mob violence on Capitol Hill.

What happens on social media doesn’t stay on social media.

Online violence is real world violence.

Social media is a deadly game for power and money, what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, extracting our private lives for outsized corporate gain. Our personal experiences are sucked into a database, organized by AI, then sold to the highest bidder. Highly profitable micro-targeting operations are engineered to structurally undermine human will – a behavior modification system in which we are Pavlov ’s dogs, experimented on in real time with disastrous consequences in countries like mine, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka and so many more. These destructive corporations have siphoned money away from news groups and now pose a foundational threat to markets and elections.

Facebook is the world’s largest distributor of news, and yet studies have shown that lies laced with anger and hate spread faster and further than facts on social media.

These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists. They are – by design – dividing us and radicalizing us.

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy, and it becomes impossible to deal with our world’s existential problems: climate, coronavirus, the battle for truth.

When I was first arrested in 2019, the officer said, “Ma’am, trabaho lang po,” (Ma’am, I’m only doing my job). Then he lowered his voice to almost a whisper as he read my Miranda rights. He was clearly uncomfortable, and I almost felt sorry for him. Except he was arresting me because I’m a journalist!

This officer was a tool of power – and an example of how a good man can turn evil – and how great atrocities happen. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil when describing men who carried out the orders of Hitler, how career-oriented bureaucrats can act without conscience because they justify that they’re only following orders.

This is how a nation – and a world – loses its soul.

You have to know what values you are fighting for, and you have to draw the lines early – but if you haven’t done so, do it now: where this side you’re good, and this side, you’re evil. Some governments may be lost causes, and if you’re working in tech, I’m talking to you.

How can you have election integrity if you don’t have integrity of facts?

That’s the problem facing countries with elections next year: among them, Brazil, Hungary, France, the United States, and my Philippines – where we are at a do or die moment with presidential elections on May 9. 35 years after the People Power revolt ousted Ferdinand Marcos and forced his family into exile, his son, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. is the front runner – and he has built an extensive disinformation network on social media, which Rappler exposed in 2019. That is changing history in front of our eyes.

To show how disinformation is both a local and global problem, take the Chinese information operations taken down by Facebook in Sept 2020: it was creating fake accounts using AI generated photos for the US elections, polishing the image of the Marcoses, campaigning for Duterte’s daughter, and attacking me and Rappler.

So what are we going to do?

An invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the universal declaration of human rights, to prevent humanity from doing its worse. It’s an arms race in the information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring facts.

We need information ecosystems that live and die by facts. We do this by shifting social priorities to rebuild journalism for the 21st century while regulating and outlawing the surveillance economics that profit from hate and lies.

We need to help independent journalism survive, first by giving greater protection to journalists and standing up against States which target journalists. Then we need to address the collapse of the advertising model for journalism. This is part of the reason that I agreed to co-chair the International Fund for Public Interest Media, which is trying to raise new money from overseas development assistance funds. Right now, while journalism is under attack on all fronts, only 0.3% of ODA is spent on journalism. If we nudge that to 1%, we can raise $1bn a year for news organizations. That will be crucial for the global south.

Journalists must embrace technology. That’s why, with the help of the Google News Initiative, Rappler rolled out a new platform two weeks ago designed to build communities of action. Technology in the hands of journalists won’t be viral, but like your vegetables, they’ll be better for us because the north star is not profit alone, but facts, truth, and trust.

Now for legislation. Thanks to the EU for taking leadership with its Democracy Action Plan. For the US, reform or revoke section 230, the law that treats social media platforms like utilities. It’s not a comprehensive solution, but it gets the ball rolling. Because these platforms put their thumbs on the scale of distribution. So while the public debate is focused downstream on content moderation, the real sleight of hand, happens further upstream, where algorithms of distribution have been programmed by humans with their coded bias. Their editorial agenda is profit driven, carried out by machines at scale. The impact is global, with cheap armies on social media tearing down democracy in at least 81 countries around the world. That impunity must stop.

Democracy has become a woman-to-woman, man-to-man defense of our values. We’re at a sliding door moment, where we can continue down the path we’re on and descend further into fascism, or we can each choose to fight for a better world.

To do that, you have to ask yourself: what are YOU willing to sacrifice for the truth?

I didn’t know if I was going to be here today. Every day, I live with the real threat of spending the rest of my life in jail just because I’m a journalist. When I go home, I have no idea what the future holds, but it’s worth the risk.

The destruction has happened. Now it’s time to build – to create the world we want.

Now, please, with me, close your eyes. And imagine the world as it should be. A world of peace, trust and empathy, bringing out the best that we can be.

Now let’s go and make it happen. Let’s hold the line. Together.

Nobel Prizes and laureates

Nobel prizes 2023.

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December 2, 2021

Peace Is More Than War’s Absence, and New Research Explains How to Build It

A new project measures ways to promote positive social relations among groups

By Peter T. Coleman , Allegra Chen-Carrel & Vincent Hans Michael Stueber

PeopleImages/Getty Images

Today, the misery of war is all too striking in places such as Syria, Yemen, Tigray, Myanmar and Ukraine. It can come as a surprise to learn that there are scores of sustainably peaceful societies around the world, ranging from indigenous people in the Xingu River Basin in Brazil to countries in the European Union. Learning from these societies, and identifying key drivers of harmony, is a vital process that can help promote world peace.

Unfortunately, our current ability to find these peaceful mechanisms is woefully inadequate. The Global Peace Index (GPI) and its complement the Positive Peace Index (PPI) rank 163 nations annually and are currently the leading measures of peacefulness. The GPI, launched in 2007 by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), was designed to measure negative peace , or the absence of violence, destructive conflict, and war. But peace is more than not fighting. The PPI, launched in 2009, was supposed to recognize this and track positive peace , or the promotion of peacefulness through positive interactions like civility, cooperation and care.

Yet the PPI still has many serious drawbacks. To begin with, it continues to emphasize negative peace, despite its name. The components of the PPI were selected and are weighted based on existing national indicators that showed the “strongest correlation with the GPI,” suggesting they are in effect mostly an extension of the GPI. For example, the PPI currently includes measures of factors such as group grievances, dissemination of false information, hostility to foreigners, and bribes.

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The index also lacks an empirical understanding of positive peace. The PPI report claims that it focuses on “positive aspects that create the conditions for a society to flourish.” However, there is little indication of how these aspects were derived (other than their relationships with the GPI). For example, access to the internet is currently a heavily weighted indicator in the PPI. But peace existed long before the internet, so is the number of people who can go online really a valid measure of harmony?

The PPI has a strong probusiness bias, too. Its 2021 report posits that positive peace “is a cross-cutting facilitator of progress, making it easier for businesses to sell.” A prior analysis of the PPI found that almost half the indicators were directly related to the idea of a “Peace Industry,” with less of a focus on factors found to be central to positive peace such as gender inclusiveness, equity and harmony between identity groups.

A big problem is that the index is limited to a top-down, national-level approach. The PPI’s reliance on national-level metrics masks critical differences in community-level peacefulness within nations, and these provide a much more nuanced picture of societal peace . Aggregating peace data at the national level, such as focusing on overall levels of inequality rather than on disparities along specific group divides, can hide negative repercussions of the status quo for minority communities.

To fix these deficiencies, we and our colleagues have been developing an alternative approach under the umbrella of the Sustaining Peace Project . Our effort has various components , and these can provide a way to solve the problems in the current indices. Here are some of the elements:

Evidence-based factors that measure positive and negative peace. The peace project began with a comprehensive review of the empirical studies on peaceful societies, which resulted in identifying 72 variables associated with sustaining peace. Next, we conducted an analysis of ethnographic and case study data comparing “peace systems,” or clusters of societies that maintain peace with one another, with nonpeace systems. This allowed us to identify and measure a set of eight core drivers of peace. These include the prevalence of an overarching social identity among neighboring groups and societies; their interconnections such as through trade or intermarriage; the degree to which they are interdependent upon one another in terms of ecological, economic or security concerns; the extent to which their norms and core values support peace or war; the role that rituals, symbols and ceremonies play in either uniting or dividing societies; the degree to which superordinate institutions exist that span neighboring communities; whether intergroup mechanisms for conflict management and resolution exist; and the presence of political leadership for peace versus war.

A core theory of sustaining peace . We have also worked with a broad group of peace, conflict and sustainability scholars to conceptualize how these many variables operate as a complex system by mapping their relationships in a causal loop diagram and then mathematically modeling their core dynamics This has allowed us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how different constellations of factors can combine to affect the probabilities of sustaining peace.

Bottom-up and top-down assessments . Currently, the Sustaining Peace Project is applying techniques such as natural language processing and machine learning to study markers of peace and conflict speech in the news media. Our preliminary research suggests that linguistic features may be able to distinguish between more and less peaceful societies. These methods offer the potential for new metrics that can be used for more granular analyses than national surveys.

We have also been working with local researchers from peaceful societies to conduct interviews and focus groups to better understand the in situ dynamics they believe contribute to sustaining peace in their communities. For example in Mauritius , a highly multiethnic society that is today one of the most peaceful nations in Africa, we learned of the particular importance of factors like formally addressing legacies of slavery and indentured servitude, taboos against proselytizing outsiders about one’s religion, and conscious efforts by journalists to avoid divisive and inflammatory language in their reporting.

Today, global indices drive funding and program decisions that impact countless lives, making it critical to accurately measure what contributes to socially just, safe and thriving societies. These indices are widely reported in news outlets around the globe, and heads of state often reference them for their own purposes. For example, in 2017 , Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, though he and his country were mired in corruption allegations, referenced his country’s positive increase on the GPI by stating, “Receiving such high praise from an institute that once named this country the most violent in the world is extremely significant.” Although a 2019 report on funding for peace-related projects shows an encouraging shift towards supporting positive peace and building resilient societies, many of these projects are really more about preventing harm, such as grants for bolstering national security and enhancing the rule of law.

The Sustaining Peace Project, in contrast, includes metrics for both positive and negative peace, is enhanced by local community expertise, and is conceptually coherent and based on empirical findings. It encourages policy makers and researchers to refocus attention and resources on initiatives that actually promote harmony, social health and positive reciprocity between groups. It moves away from indices that rank entire countries and instead focuses on identifying factors that, through their interaction, bolster or reduce the likelihood of sustaining peace. It is a holistic perspective.  

Tracking peacefulness across the globe is a highly challenging endeavor. But there is great potential in cooperation between peaceful communities, researchers and policy makers to produce better methods and metrics. Measuring peace is simply too important to get only half-right. 

The views expressed on this site are the author's. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics does not advocate particular positions but seeks to encourage dialogue on the ethical dimensions of current issues. The Center welcomes comments and alternative points of view .

2021 - Peace and Trust & Peaceful Coexistence

Here we are, into 2021, with more challenges ahead and peaceful coexistence of major concern. The nomination of 2021 as the International Year of Peace and Trust by the United Nations has made me briefly reflect on peace and trust with regard to peaceful coexistence by looking at the coronavirus pandemic and also election processes and outcomes around the world.

Elections of any kind at the international, national, or local level might be regarded to be of more importance to people involved in politics and people in specific geographical regions where elections take place. On the other hand, the coronavirus pandemic concerns everyone, because it has and continues to impact all of us in various ways, no matter who we are or where we live.

The complexities and impacts of the pandemic, including strategies such as lock-downs and travel restrictions around the world have created a sense of disconnect, loneliness, and alienation. The closure of borders (local, regional, and international) and the inability for many people to return home and be with their loved ones have contributed to mounting feelings of unease and heartache, anxiety and fear. And with time gone by, we can now observe growing isolation fatigue as well as rising frustration and anger among people. The fear of the physical threat along with the negative psychological impacts and the economic ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic have started to destabilise the domestic and international sense of trust and peace.

The importance of peace and trust shows itself on the global stage of politics - not only when we look at the coronavirus pandemic but also the processes and outcomes of national elections. The recent unsettling occurrences in the United States are signs that anything that undermines a sense of trust such as exclusion and inequity, lack of transparency, and violent communication challenge our individual and collective sense of peace – across borders and also within borders.

What we are witnessing is a growing climate of discontent, disillusion and distrust–

and the loss of inner and outer peace,

locally and globally.

Living in our media-centric and interconnected world, we are continuously reminded that a leadership style that embraces respect, empathy, compassion, and care for the common good is what is required to nourish trust and peace. Our observations tell us that peace is not only an outcome but also a process, with trust being of paramount importance.

Trust is most commonly viewed as a reflection of integrity, competence and reliability, yet it is also a question of intent, of goodwill or ill-will. The demonstration of positive intent as in goodwill includes acknowledgement of different perspectives, attendance to diverse needs, fair and equitable access to resources, and inclusion in decision-making for the benefit of all.

To foster trust and accordingly peace, it is worth our while to contemplate questions such as:

What is the actual intent behind certain actions? Is it one of good-will or ill-will, of mutual care or only self-care, of inclusion or exclusion, of values that reflect harmony or mastery?

What actions show integrity? Are the actions aligned with proclaimed values of peace and trust, with benefits extended beyond self and one’s in-groups?

What competencies are drawn on for acting upon proclaimed values - values that foster actions for the common good such as gender/health/education equity, poverty reduction, and climate change?

How reliably and transparently have the proclaimed values been at the core of decision-making and of the actions taken?

Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General pointed out at a speech in 2003 at the Tübingen University that:

“We need to find within ourselves the will

To live by the values we proclaim,

In our private lives, in our local and national societies,

And in the world. ”

No matter who we are, or what role we play as part of the system in which we live, work, or travel, all of us profit from reflecting on what is important for us and society at large–to take a look at the big picture.

As leaders in our daily lives at home as much as leaders on the global stage, it helps us to regularly get in touch with our individual and cultural value systems. And that means also power dynamics at play in our private spheres and within the public domain, including social structures and institutions across the micro to the macro level.

When we pause, we can see that the notions of peace and trust as guiding principles and aspirations for 2021 put forward by the United Nations carry importance in all life contexts, at an individual and societal level. Peace and trust are important in our personal relationships and in the political arena, including the context of travel and tourism, appreciating that tourism is a microcosm of society at large where

The joy of travel

The art of travel

The art of living together.

So, let us make 2021 the year where we pay attention to proclaimed values and moral imperatives as a way to gain big-picture perspectives and foster trust and peace in all our life domains.

January 18, 2021

Birgit Trauer PhD

Reference: Trauer, B. (2020), The Way of the Peaceful Traveller - Dare to Care and Connect

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Charles Eisenstein

Building a Peace Narrative

August 21, 2019 by Charles Eisenstein

(An edited transcript of the 2019 Cobb Peace Lecture)

The word narrative is bandied about a lot today, so that it’s almost become a cliché. But cliches are born from insight. In this case, it is about the power of the stories that we tell about ourselves, each other, and the world to cohere us in a common purpose.

A lot of the things that we need to do today don’t make sense if you are the only one doing them. A story can order the world, so that we see our choices as part of a larger happening. Granted, the “larger happening” unfolding on Earth today is bigger than any story that we could make about it. Nonetheless, for me a story that allows me to make meaning of my life, identify my allies, and understand what my role is, is essential.

The understanding of the power of narrative extends to all parts of the political spectrum. Everyone wants to control the narrative, a power for good or for ill. Adolph Hitler understood it well, riding a narrative of racial superiority and national glory that legitimized his ambitions and channeled latent cultural energies toward genocide and conquest. Today we also have powerful unresolved energies in society, just like in the 1930s: discontent, desperation, hostility to the elites, anger at the way society has turned, grief over the loss of community. How these express depends in large part on how problem and solution, cause and effect, are narrated to us.

If we want to serve peace and wellbeing for all people, a world of healing where society and all the beings on this planet are moving toward greater wholeness, we’d better make sure that we’re telling the right story. Today the dominant narrative, whether we recognize it or not, is a war narrative, not only on the obvious level of US foreign policy, identifying enemies around the world and bombing them, but also in our basic understanding of how the world works and how to solve problems. War thinking permeates the public psyche. To build a peace narrative, we need to identify the existing foundational war narrative. So, I will begin by excavating it and laying the foundation of a peace narrative. Then I’ll move on to its building components and architecture.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

In preparing for this lecture, I read a classic essay by the Christian theologian Walter Wink called “The Myth of Redemptive Violence.” Redemptive violence is the idea that the way to make a better world is to destroy something, to kill something, to kill evil, to extirpate evil, to overcome the forces of evil and chaos with the forces of good and order. Wink traces it back to a Babylonian creation myth over 3000 years old. In the beginning, the god Adsu and the goddess Tiamat were all by themselves in the universe. Since that was boring, they decided to have kids, a whole bunch of them. It wasn’t long before they regretted it because the kids were making too much noise. And so they decided, of course, that they were going to kill all their children. Right? Problem solved. Well, the children got wind of this and decided that they would kill their parents first. It wasn’t too hard to finish off Adsu, but Tiamat was a different story. None of them dared to face Tiamat until the youngest of the children, Marduk, volunteered. He said, I will destroy Tiamat, our mother, on condition that all you brothers and sisters make me the supreme ruler of the universe. (I’ll leave it to your imagination to draw parallels to the US after World War Two.) Marduk comes up with a plan. He blows poison gas into the stomach of Tiamat and stabs her with a spear. She explodes; all her guts and blood spew out and, from her body parts, he constructs the world that we live in today.

This creation myth recounts the misogynistic killing of the great mother, who was identified with chaos and the wild. Ancient civilizations, associated good with order. The king was the incarnation of good, conquering the beasts, killing the lions, cutting down the forests, bringing civilization to the barbarians, domesticating the wild. This process continues today, as we take the pieces of a ruined Gaia and build civilization out of them, building the world out of the destroyed mother.

The myth of redemptive violence translates in a striking way into modern science, which says that the tendency of the universe is toward entropy, toward disorder. Only by imposing our design onto this chaotic, disorderly and degenerating universe are we able to maintain a realm fit for human habitation; to impose good upon chaos. If you accept that nature itself hasn’t any inherent intelligence, any inherent tendency toward complexity, toward the emergence of beauty and organization, but instead that it normally degenerates into disorder, then we are inescapably at war with nature all the time, subject at any moment to being extinguished by random natural forces. Our wellbeing in that view comes through imposing more and more control on this wild, arbitrary, random nature that is outside of ourselves. For centuries, the ambition toward control has defined progress.

Here is the basic template of war thinking. First identify the cause of the problem, the culprit, the perpetrator – find something to fight. Then, control, imprison, exclude, kill, humiliate, or destroy the bad guy, the culprit, the cause, and all will be well. And the better able we are to do this, the better human life is going to be. Walter Wink gives the example of Popeye the Sailor. Every episode of the cartoon has the same plot: Brutus kidnaps Olive Oyl. Popeye tries to rescue her and is beaten to a pulp by Brutus. Then, just before Brutus can rape Olive Oyl, Popeye eats a can of spinach and, with a surge of strength, turns the tables on Brutus and beats him to a pulp instead. That’s the plot of Popeye. Walter Wink points out that nobody ever learns anything from this encounter. The characters do not grow or develop in any way, implying that this is just the way things are. The lesson is that the way to solve a problem is to overcome the enemy with force.

The War on the Symptom

The mentality of finding an enemy to overcome with force extends beyond warfare. Take agriculture, for instance. You have a problem, like declining crop yields, you identify the cause – there are weeds in the field. And the solution is to kill the weeds . Or maybe you have strep throat. What’s the cause? Let’s find the pathogen. That’s the orientation. Find the pathogen. Ah, streptococcus bacteria. Solution? Kill it with antibiotics. Or how about crime? Well obviously crime is caused by criminals, right? So if we lock up the criminals, then we won’t have any more crime. Terrorism, obviously it’s caused by terrorists. So let’s kill the terrorists. No more terrorism. Problem solved.

What if you want to be a better person or more effective in the world? Applying the same formula, you find the inner bad guy. Maybe it is your procrastination, your laziness, your addictions, your selfishness, your ego. Great – now you’ve got something to attack, something to control. Maybe you’re overweight and you think, “Oh, it’s because I’m eating too much.” Calories become the bad guy, and the solution is to control them. So this war thinking is nearly universal.

The war on the other always mirrors a war on the self. Underneath our judgments lurks a sneaking suspicion that maybe I’m one of the bad guys. In fact, this is more or less what science, economics, and many religions have been telling us. For example, an explicit teaching of biology has been that reproductive self interest is the fundamental motivation of all living beings. Selfishness, we were told, is programmed into our genes. That means that in order to be anything other than ruthlessly selfish, you have to overcome nature. That’s war mentality.

An alternative to war emerges when we see all the enemies – weeds, criminals, terrorists, calories, selfishness, laziness and so forth – not as causes of evil, but as symptoms of a deeper condition. Focusing on the symptoms, warring on the symptoms, allows the deeper causes to go unexamined and unchanged. We never ask, “Why does Brutus want to kidnap Olive Oyl?” If we don’t unearth that, we will be fighting Brutus again and again forever.

(And what if the spinach runs out or stops working? What if the weeds develop herbicide resistance and the bacteria develop antibiotic resistance and Brutus eats spinach too and starts an arms race?)

War thinking addresses its failure by going to further extremes. Don’t just beat up Brutus – kill him. Find an herbicide so powerful it kills the weeds once and for all. Find the Final Solution. Defeat evil once and for all in an epic war to end all wars.

We tried that once. It was called the Great War. Now we call it World War One.

When we see causes as symptoms, we can ask questions like, Why are weeds growing in the field? War thinking is not usually helpful with this question. Perhaps there’s a lack of biodiversity in the field or the soil is depleted in some way and those weeds are coming actually to repair the soil because there’s an intelligence in nature. There is nothing to fight.

Why is there crime? Is it because those criminals are just bad? Or are they acting from circumstances that we won’t ever examine if we are at war with them? What are the economic circumstances? How about legacy racism? What about trauma, despair, or the loss of meaning in life?

In all cases, war thinking is a simplifying and reducing narrative. To wage war, you pretty much have to reduce the enemy. You have to dehumanize the enemy. It’s a universal tactic in war to make them – them – less than fully human. If you want to kill or exploit somebody, dehumanization is a key enabling method. As war thinking infiltrates our political culture, I’m seeing more and more dehumanization and demonizing of the other side, left and right, red and blue, Democrat and Republican. Each side constructs narratives that make the other contemptible, evil, subhuman.

Here are some words that are agents of dehumanization that you see all the time in political discourse and beyond: “How could they?” “It’s totally unjustified!” “What’s wrong with them?” A war tactic is to accuse our opponents of some deficiency in their core humanness. They’re stupid, they’re ignorant, they’re immoral, they’re entitled, they’re greedy. And then this narrative gets weaponized because we can then use it to arouse the indignation of our side, to stir up war fever so that we can rise up and destroy those bad guys.

A Recipe for Despair

I was recently on a podcast speaking about the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, speaking about ecological healing, regenerative agriculture and things like that, and the interviewer said, “Well Charles, what would you say to this? The power elite are never going to change. They’re benefiting from this. They’re happy with this and they’re not going to change. So in order to change them, we’re going to have to somehow bring them down. We’re going to have to rise up in bloody revolution; that’s the only realistic way.”

So let’s first assume that that’s true. If that’s true, then our one hope lies in overcoming them by force because “they’re never going to change.” We have a formula for creating change when there’s a bad guy. It’s in all the movies, not just Popeye, it’s in Batman, it’s in the Lion King. It’s in pretty much every action movie you’ve ever seen. It’s in Star Wars. You kill Darth Vader, you kill the emperor, you destroy evil.

In the real world, our one hope is impractical. If it comes to a contest of force, who has more force? Who has more military power? Is it we hippies and peaceniks? Or is it the military-pharmaceutical-medical-financial-educational-NGO-prison-industrial complex? They have the guns. They have the money, they have the surveillance state, they have the police, they have the control of the media. So if, if it comes down to a contest of force, they’re going to win. Even if we talk about the force of propaganda and the force of a narrative and we try to ignite the rage and indignation of the oppressed against them, guess what? They are even more adept at manipulating narratives and making you look bad because they control the media. They’re doing it right now, creating narratives that are more ubiquitous and have a farther reach and more PR and advertising behind them, more money behind them than yours do.

So, domination is probably a recipe for failure unless you become so good at the technologies of war that you do tear them down. You have to be extremely good at wielding power to defeat the military-industrial complex at its own game. So you defeat the bad guys and now you’re in power. But is the fight over now? No. They are still bad guys out there. And in order to defeat those bad guys, you need to consolidate your power and extend your power, all of course to protect the world from evil. It’s OK to do that, because you are the good guy. You know it to be true. The whole war against evil was premised on it. So, identifying as good, you pursue yet more power. George Orwell described this very, very clearly in 1984: the goal of the Party is power. The justification is that they’re going to create a perfect world, and in order to do that, they have to have complete power. What is power? Power is the ability to make others suffer. So you end up becoming evil yourself.

The more likely scenario is that you lose the fight with the powers-that-be. And that’s why so many activists fall into despair. Despair is built into the paradigm of the fight. On one level it is because we know the powers are too great for us to win. Underneath that there is a kind of futility: if we do win it’s the same. The science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick put it really well in Valis: “To fight the empire is to be infected with its derangement. This is a paradox. Whoever defeats a segment of the empire becomes the empire. It proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby, it becomes its enemies.” If you go to war against war, if you go to war against the empire, you have actually become part of the empire. And George Orwell illustrated this too, when the main character, Winston, gets recruited into the resistance. Actually he’s being entrapped, but he thinks he’s being recruited into the resistance. And he’s asked, basically, how committed he is to overthrowing the Party, questions like, “Would you be willing to do anything? Would you be willing to commit sabotage? Would you be willing to commit mass murder if it served the overthrow of the Party? Would you be willing to throw acid in a child’s face?” And he says yes, therefore revealing himself to be no different from the Party: do anything to gain power. Do anything to overthrow evil.

The Threat of the Pacifist

Consider the following as a general principle: in any fight – and more and more of our political discourse has become a fight – the resolution lies in the things that are hidden by the fight, the things that both sides agree on without even knowing it and the questions that neither side is asking. So for example in the fight over immigration, one side says, “Immigration is harming us, they are breaking our laws, let’s keep them out.” The other side says, “You horrible bigoted, intolerant people, this nation was built from immigrants. It is inhumane to run detention systems and separate families. We should welcome the unfortunate masses from the world.” Nobody, at least in the mainstream media, is asking why are there so many immigrants to begin with. What has made life in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and so forth, so unbearable that people are willing to risk their lives and their children’s lives, willing to leave their homes and families. for a totally uncertain future? What would it take for you to do that?

That’s an uncomfortable question, first because it takes us outside of the familiar war paradigm of problem-solving. For the conservatives, you can no longer blame bad immigrants. For the liberals, you can no longer hold to the story of unfortunate victims of someone else, that can find salvation in America, Land of the Free, because any serious inquiry into that question reveals that we ourselves, the United States, is the cause of much of the misery in Latin America and elsewhere. US support for military coups, juntas, death squads, the war on drugs, and neoliberal austerity and free trade policies have made life in many places nearly unliveable.

As the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You look for nails and you start to see things that aren’t nails as nails, because here’s your tool. When you have the tools of war, you look for an enemy. If none is to be found we are uncomfortable, because we don’t know what to do anymore. All the more so when, as with immigration, the perpetrator, the cause of the problem, includes oneself.

If you are a pacifist or a peacemaker, you may find that you arouse a lot of hostility from both sides of a conflict. People who gain their identity from being on Team good in the war against Team Evil, actually need Team Evil. They need the other side. It’s like two cards leaning against each other and propping each other up. When “evil” is taken away, there is a crisis, a kind of political vertigo, and a desperate rush to find a new bad guy. Hence the flailing attempts after the defeat of the Soviet Union to reconstitute evil in concepts like the “Axis of Evil,” “Islamic terror,” the “clash of civilizations,” and more by demonizing Iran, Russia, and China. Team Good needs Team Evil to validate its identity. The pacifist, by challenging the identity of both sides, arouses more hostility than the enemy does. Pacifists are more despised than the enemy.

Foundations of a Peace Narrative

As the abovementioned examples demonstrate, war thinking pervades modern civilization. It goes all the way down to cosmology, to physics, and in biology to the idea of the selfish gene, setting up a view of nature as, in the words of Rudolf Steiner, a war of each against all. All of this, I would add, is obsolete science. Now we are starting to understand, with research on emergence and self-organizing systems, which are ubiquitous in nature, that the world actually has a tendency toward order, towards beauty, as if there were an intelligence in all things, and not toward disorder as the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to imply. The selfish gene, likewise, is obsolete biology. Now we are appreciating symbiosis, cooperation, and the merger of individuals into greater wholes in an ascent of complexity. That’s how biology works.

The emergence of systems thinking in biology is part of a peace narrative. Nature is not one gigantic war of each against all. Cooperation and symbiosis are primary evolutionary principles.

Ok, so what is the foundation of a peace narrative? If, as I said before, the essence of war is reduction – the reduction of the universe to object, of life to thing, of other people to enemy – the simplification of complexity so that there is a thing to fight – then, if we want to build a peace narrative, the first foundational pillar would be holistic thinking. Holistic thinking understands that everything is intimately related to everything else. That everything is a part of everything else. That to exist is to be in relationship. That we are not separate individuals, but are interdependent both practically and existentially. That we are inter-existent. Therefore, anything that we see as an enemy is part of a constellation of relationships that includes ourselves. To use a Buddhist term, the foundation of a peace narrative is interbeing: a connected self in a living, interdependent universe, in contrast to a separate individual in a world of other.

From that foundational understanding, we seek to understand the constellation of relationship – the first pillar of a peace narrative. So if you are getting strep throat a lot, you might seek to understand, “How is the bacteria part of my body ecology?” In fact, a healthy microbiome on the mucus membranes of the throat includes friendly bacteria that secrete substances that suppress the pathogenic bacteria. Killing the strep bacteria will end that particular episode of illness, but it also kills off the friendly bacteria, leaving you more susceptible. This exemplifies a general principle: war creates the conditions for war. When you bomb the terrorists, you create conditions for more terror. When you lock up the criminals and destroy families and destroy communities, you’re creating conditions that breed more crime.

Looking through a holistic lens, the lens of interdependency and interrelationship, the base conditions that breed all the things we war against become visible. And we no longer then default to fighting something. That doesn’t mean that there’s never a time to fight. It doesn’t mean never to run away from a robber or never to use antibiotics. Maybe you theoretically know that this person is about to harm your child because he suffered childhood trauma himself, but in this moment that doesn’t help you, and the only response you can see is to intervene forcefully. The problem comes when we default to a fight first because we’re so used to seeing the world in terms of good and evil. So a fight becomes the default, reflexive response.

The Pillar of Compassion

When we can understand the conditions that generate the behavior that we are fighting against, then there are other options, specifically, the option of changing those conditions. This leads to the second pillar, which I’ll call compassion. What is compassion? It’s not the superior person indulgently, patronizingly tolerating or sympathizing with the condition of the inferior person. Compassion is basically feeling what it’s like to be somebody else. It is the experience of identifying with somebody else and knowing what it’s like to be them. It comes from the question, what is it like to be you? What are the conditions that have made you into who you are? And how can I participate in the evolution of those conditions?

For most people growing up in this society, to see those conditions requires some deprogramming: deprogramming from condemnation, from, “which side are you on?” From judgment, judgment in the sense of, “If I were you, I wouldn’t have done that. I’m better than you.” Or maybe I’m worse than you. Usually it’s I’m better than you.

I once made these points to a colleague, using the example of how inner-city youth are demonized as “thugs” in total ignorance of their social and economic conditions. She heartily agreed that they couldn’t really be morally blamed for their behavior. But, she said, that doesn’t hold for the white supremacists. She said, “I can understand why a black kid who grew up in the ghetto might turn to crime when there’s no other economic opportunities and he’s suffered intergenerational trauma. But those white supremacists have no excuse. Look at those guys with their bellies hanging out over their belts, in their tee shirts and their hats. The very picture of entitlement. They’ve got no excuse to be the way that they are.”

We’re just waiting for someone to hate aren’t we? Here’s the enemy! Here’s someone upon whom we can let loose with our righteous rage. It feels good, doesn’t it, to know you are on the side of good and right. It feels good to let loose with the hate.

That feeling is a clue that a hidden psychological or emotional need is operating. Ultimately, it comes from the wound of self-rejection.

A few years ago, there was a biker gang riot in Texas. Rival gangs converged at a bar and started beating each other up in the parking lot. The police came, they started beating up the police too. It was a horrendous violent riot. I read about it in Salon magazine, which featured photographs of the men involved in this incident. Of course they chose the most contemptible unflattering pictures you could imagine. And the sub headline should have been: Here’s someone you can hate. Here’s the bad guy. Of course, every time they run an article about Donald Trump or anyone else in the opposite camp, they choose an unflattering photograph too. Both sides do that. It is part of the war strategy of dehumanization. Me, I look at those photographs and think, “Once upon a time, every one of those men was a cute little baby. A sweetums. What happened to you, my brother?” And I look deeply and sometimes I can see a hurt and frightened child, bewildered by the brutality of this world. That begets a different kind of solidarity than that of war. We don’t need a common enemy anymore to join together.

Compassion is the opposite of the dehumanization upon which war narratives depend. Dehumanization is a simplifying narrative, which is the opposite of holism or interbeing. The habit is, for example, when addressing racism to blame it on the individual attitudes of bad people – racists. Racism is caused by racists, right? Or could it be that racists are a symptom of racism, not the cause, and that by dehumanizing them we reinforce the basic psychic template of racism. Racism is dehumanization, and it will not be solved by dehumanizing the racists. Oh, it might feel good, you get to be on Team Good. But is that what you want to serve? Or would you rather serve the healing of racism?

Sacrificing Winning

I have a feeling that the healing of Earth, that we all want so much, is going to require a sacrifice. We are going to have to sacrifice the identity of being on the moral, ethical, right side. Nearly everyone imagines themselves to be. For things to change, an awful lot of letting go is necessary. But only for the other side, right? Are you willing to hold as lightly to your rightness as you wish them to hold lightly to theirs? How are you any different?

The third pillar of a peace narrative is to end the internal war and to develop a peace narrative inside of ourselves. It is to heal the wound of self-rejection, and thus to remove the psychic engine of war – the division of the world into us and them, good and evil, me the good person and them the bad person. The best, easiest way to establish your identity as a good person (and meet the need for self-acceptance) is in contrast to the evil people. So, are you willing to give that up? Are you willing to give up having been right all along?

How much do you care about peace? It said that one cannot serve two masters. Temporarily, you can, you can serve peace and at the same time serve getting the approval of an in-group. You can serve peace and at the same time serve your identity as a good person. You can serve peace and at the same time serve your goal of being heard, of being seen, being recognized, of being seen as a leader, of believing yourself to be moral. You can serve both for a while, but eventually the generosity of the universe is such that you will reach a choice point where you get to decide what you really serve, and you then need to make a sacrifice. This can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Please understand that I am not making a moral exhortation to drop hatred and anger. I am not the privileged white guy imploring those he has oppressed not to be angry with him. The point here is not that anger or hatred are wrong. It is that the energy of anger is neutralized when it is diverted towards symptoms rather than causes. It is that hatred is based on a misdiagnosis of cause. They lead either to revenge, defeat, or endless war.

The temptation to go to war is everywhere. Maybe you get upset about GMO seeds and Monsanto, which is now Bayer, vigorously spreading GMOs around the world. Destroying peasant agriculture, corrupting entire governments, instituting the next iteration of industrial agriculture, patenting seeds and varieties that were developed by indigenous cultures and so on. Okay, we’ve got to stop this. How are we going to do that? Well, in the mentality of war, step one is to identify somebody as the bad guy. Easy – that’s the Monsanto executives. Why are they doing that? How could they? If I were them, I wouldn’t do that, would I? I wouldn’t make those decisions. If I were a fracking executive, I wouldn’t destroy and pollute the waters like that. All for what? For my greed? I can’t believe those people. Let’s arouse some hatred. Let’s tear those fuckers down. That’s the strategy.

Imagine that you are a Monsanto executive and hear everybody talking about how greedy you are, how horrible you are, and you’re thinking, “I walk my neighbors dog when they’re on vacation. I work really hard. My colleagues respect me. I’m advancing science to feed the hungry.” Or maybe he’s a fracking executive, and his story is about building America’s energy independence. In their story, they’re the good guys and by demonizing them you seem ridiculous. You are in fact offering yourself as the bad guy by the way that you see them and relate to them.

What’s the alternative? Earlier I described two possibilities either get defeated by the military-industrial complex, or you overcome them and become the new complex. What’s the alternative?

The alternative comes from an entirely different place: interbeing. It starts by asking, Why? Why is he so greedy or why is she pro-fracking or why is he violent or why are those people – you know who they are – pro-this or anti-that? What story informs their belief system and what state of being co-resonates with that story? What is their experience of life? All we judge, we begin to investigate as symptoms. We ask, for example, Where does greed come from? That question opens up insights, understanding, and new possibilities for change. We may discover that it is another one of those symptoms, just like strep. It’s a symptom of an experience of scarcity. It’s a hunger that can never be met by the objects that are offered to feed it. If somebody is cut off from community, cut off from nature, cut off from meaning in their lives, they’re going to be hungry for those things. But instead, what’s offered is money, prestige, possessions, power. Those are the substitutes modern society most conspicuously offers.

A Story is an Invitation

If you can look at the person that you call an enemy and see in them that actually, on a deep level, they want what you want and what all people want – to contribute their gifts to a more beautiful world, to be generous, to belong, to know and to be known, love and be loved, and to serve a purpose beyond themselves – if you can see that, you’ll be able to speak to that, and you’ll be able to create an invitation to that.

One of my mottos is that the story that we hold about a person is an invitation for them to step into that story. Consider the story of Julio Diaz. This guy in New York, maybe he was Puerto Rican origin, can’t remember, but he takes the subway home every day and gets off a stop early to buy a burrito at his favorite burrito store before walking home. Well one day he gets off, and on his way to the restaurant a mugger holds him up at knifepoint. “Give me your wallet!” Okay. He gives him his wallet and then says, “Hey kid, it’s cold out. Do you want my jacket too?” And the mugger – what’s he going to say? Nonplussed, he says, “Sure, OK.” Julio gives him his jacket, then says, “Hey, I was about to go get a burrito. It’s a really good burrito joint. You want to come with me?” What can he say? He comes with him. And then they’re at the counter ordering their burritos and Julio says, “You know, I would treat you to the burrito but you’ve got my wallet. Can I have my wallet back?” He gives him his wallet. Then Julio says, “Now give me the knife, too.” The mugger gives him his knife.

That would not have been possible if Julio had seen that teenager as a bad guy. But he was able, even with a knife in his face, he was able to see something else. He held the teenage mugger in a story of, who knows, “A troubled young man with a good heart” so strongly that the mugger was helpless to resist. That is the power of the stories that we hold about each other. They can generate miracles. Now I’m not offering that as a formula. If someone holds you up at knifepoint, you can’t imitate the words or tactics of Julio unless you actually see something in your assailant, in your enemy, that you can speak to from a different story. It can’t be just a spiritual ideology, you have to actually see it. Conditioned to dehumanized versions of enemies, whether muggers or corporate executives, we might have trouble seeing something else, but we can learn with practice. The practice is in looking for it. To see it you have to look for it. To look for it, you have to be willing to put down the benefits you get from holding others as enemies or as lesser than, less moral, worthy, beautiful, or conscious than you. Less enlightened than you. Less spiritual than you. Less ethical than you. You have to be willing to put those judgements down, because as long as you hold them, you invite the enemy to be those judgments.

Judgements are a cloud, a distorting cloud that reduces people to the image of the judgements and allows little opportunity or invitation for them to be anything else. So you have to be willing to put them down. How do you do that? Is that a fight against yourself? Is that an effort of will? No. Putting them down comes from understanding where those judgments come from. Why do we have such a need to establish ourselves as the good guys? It comes, as I’ve said, from a wound of self-rejection. The wound of self-rejection is also a product of war thinking, that says something is wrong with you, and virtue comes through some kind of self-conquest. It’s built into school, it’s built into parenting, it’s built into religion. It’s ubiquitous in our culture. If you’re a parent, anytime you look at your child with contempt or disgust and say, “Why did you do that? How could you?” You’re basically conveying, “you’re bad.” It’s not just in the words,it is the energy behind them. “Why did you do that?” is rarely an honest question. Usually it is a coded condemnation. If you made it an honest question, then you’d be getting somewhere. Why did you do that? Please help me to understand, because I know who you are, divine being. Help me to understand, Monsanto executive. Help me to understand, Donald Trump. Maybe you don’t ask that person specifically, but that’s the orientation. That’s a way to look for what Julio Diaz was able to see, so that you can invite it into expression.

Peace Words and Solidarity Stories

So those are some of the foundations and pillars of a peace narrative. The building blocks, the construction components are the stories that foster understanding. They could be stories that help people understand what it is like to be an immigrant, what it is like to be a racist, what it is like to be a corporate executive, or what is like to live in a ghetto. So many of our political stances would be untenable if we really knew what it was like to be somebody else.

These stories need to be presented in a way that they can be heard. They are harder to hear if I present them with a secret agenda of making you feel ashamed and humiliated. The purpose is not to bludgeon their conscience with how much harm they’ve caused. That’s another form of warfare. Instead, I can present the story and trust you to make the connections. When that happens, authentic shame might arise, as opposed to coerced shame. Authentic shame is the breakdown of a self image. It dissolves and the chemical bonds, the psychic chemical bonds that held it together; they release heat and your face flushes. Energy that had been bound up in defending and upholding a self-image is liberated, and you feel a lightness and a new clarity of vision. To go through that process fully, it really helps to know that you’re loved. It is very vulnerable, and no one is likely to go all the way through it unless they feel safe. Instead they may retreat into defensiveness.

That’s why these stories –the building blocks of a peace narrative, the building blocks of solidarity that doesn’t require an enemy – are so much more powerful when they’re presented and held in a way where people feel safe to hear them. They have to sense that you’re not trying to attack them, and you trust them, you trust their basic goodness. You trust. You take the stance of, “I know it’s hard for you to go through this humiliation. I’m here for you, my brother, my sister. I’m here for you. We’re in this together.”

That’s a peace narrative. We are in this together.

Another component of building a peace narrative is our words and how we use them. A lot of the English language subtly or not so subtly suggests and facilitates dehumanization and war thinking. Take for example the word “inexcusable.” What is actually meant by inexcusable? Something like: Some bad actions have an excuse, they’re justified. (Justifiable is another such word.) And some actions just have no excuse. And if they have no excuse, you only did that because you’re a bad person. Words like that insinuate war ideology into our language. That’s true even if you’re hurling those epithets of greedy, inexcusable, unjustifiable, evil, or immoral at the warmongers. In so doing, you become one of them.

The point here is not to set ourselves up as the language police. Changing the words we use is not enough. As anyone knows who has studied Nonviolent Communication, the NVC formula can be used very violently. It depends on the intention behind it. I’m not an agent of the PC word police, extending its patrol to any word that might humiliate or dehumanize somebody. The reason I bring attention to these words is to illuminate the perceptions and assumptions built into them. Our use of these words can alert to how we carry war thinking within ourselves.

Then, rather than go to war against our own war thinking, we can look beneath that symptom and address the wounds. These are wounds of self rejection, alienation, and cutoff from community and nature and intimate participation in the material world. These have happened through trauma of all kinds, some obvious, some normalized in modern society and hence invisible. When we begin to heal those and no longer see through the lens of good guys versus bad guys, us versus them, good and evil, right and wrong, then it no longer feels good to use those words. They feel like lies. They feel inconsistent with who I am and who I want to become.

So those are some of the building blocks to place atop the foundation and pillars of a peace narrative. They embody peace in our words and in stories that foster understanding, that induce people to ask or to wonder or to consider, “What is it like to be you?” What are the conditions that generate the things that are hurting the world so much? That are so painful to witness? War thinking actually maintains those conditions. It maintains the status quo by diverting the grief, pain, and rage that injustice inspires onto a proxy called the enemy. Here’s something that hurts. Police violence, incarceration, ecocide, the draining of a wetland, whatever it is, here’s something that hurts. War thinking takes that energy that could go to healing and diverts it onto a scapegoat, so that we fight the symptoms forever, ignoring and even aggravating the cause. Let’s not take that bait. Let’s get serious about world healing.

A More Beautiful World

Beyond the foundation, pillars, and building blocks of a peace narrative, we might also speak of its structure, its architecture. I call it a story-of-the-world, the “more beautiful world our hearts know is possible,” that we invite people into. It’s a world where everybody has a place, where everybody is valued, where everybody is welcome, where everybody is known to have a gift that is essential to make that world even richer. And nobody is left out. As with Julio Diaz, to speak compellingly of that world, you have to have seen it. The story we hold about the world is an invitation for the world to enter that story too. We have to have seen it. And I would say probably everybody in this room has seen it. You have had a glimpse of what the world could be, that the world could be peaceful. You’ve seen that this isn’t really working for the power elite either, it’s not working for the perpetrators, the military commanders, the politicians, the executives. You might see that there’s a part of them that is willing to make the courageous choice to let go of something that was precious to them, something they’re starting to realize it’s not so precious after all.

Here we all are, having caught a glimpse or many glimpses in our lives of a world that we know is possible. And if you’re like me, we don’t know how to get there. The mind says it’s not possible because, What’s the plan? The mind is immersed in – I’ve been calling it war thinking, but it’s deeper than war thinking – forced-based causality. How are you going to make it happen? That’s a more subtle variation on war thinking. How are you going to make it happen? How are you going to exert a force on a mass? That’s Newtonian physics, another part of the old story of separation. Well, we don’t know how it will happen. We don’t have enough force and information to make it happen. If it isn’t entirely up to our own force, we’re going to have to trust something else. We’re going to have to trust that there is an intelligence in the world greater than ourselves, that there is an organic tendency or will toward organization and beauty and complexity that is unfathomably mysterious. Therefore, we don’t have to know how it’s going to happen, nor do we have to fight the world to make it happen.

Instead, we start by listening. What is my part? How shall I be deployed? Where am I to be and what is mine to do? What calls to my care? And from that place, maybe we become able to speak that world story, to speak that invitation, or maybe we just carry it in ourselves and act from our deep-seated knowledge of it. In these gatherings we remind each other that the knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible is real knowledge – because you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t seen it too. The very fact of this gathering stirs my optimism. It reminds me, I’m not crazy. You wouldn’t be here otherwise or have stayed to listen to all these words. Even if you have come with loads of skepticism and despair, you’re here. You still have hope. Life never dies. Living things die, but life itself always strives for more life. Thank you for carrying that bit, that glimpse of a more beautiful world with you, so that we can weave a peace narrative around it. Yes. Thank you so much.

Video of this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj9aI1d8miE

Reader Interactions

August 22, 2019 at 1:10 pm

Thank you for this. Your words speak to the heart. I follow a path that strives to move toward a peace narrative, and what you write validates for me the importance of this work. I’m going to share this. There are many out there who will see themselves and be inspired.

August 22, 2019 at 1:49 pm

Charles, thank you so much. Love, Joanna

August 22, 2019 at 2:20 pm

This is outstanding; thank you so much for taking something that feels overwhelmingly complex and putting clear language to it. Thank you for helping to point to a path of peace. Not an easy path, but the only viable way to healing and wholeness.

August 22, 2019 at 2:21 pm

Once again, Charles, you have touched me deeply with your wisdom.

August 22, 2019 at 2:45 pm

This is the nicest and best thing I’ve read for a while, thank you for writing it …

August 22, 2019 at 5:17 pm

I am weeping in tenderness and gratitude and while I have long held on to being a good girl in contrast to what felt perverse in my family I have also long had compassion for each of them though I do not feel at all safe with them.

Let me say one simple thing. LOVE in my experience and feeling held are so darn important…I know that last year when I had an affair and maybe felt love, admiration and joy for the first time in my life, my body healed even tho I later got hurt. I would not have missed that sacrifice/cost of feeling LOVE.

So much more I could say here. I like text and the ability to trace words with my body in contact with a page even if on a computer. I think in this moment for some odd reason of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, Call me by My True Name….and I have long used the motto Together We Heal. Much appreciation, Charles.

August 23, 2019 at 12:14 am

For activists trying to make change in a dysfunctional “democracy,” we sometimes resort to direct action and civil disobedience — of course, we see ourselves on the side of justice and, therefore, our tactics are righteous, the end justifies the means, even if the means involves force. Direct action is non-violent but it is an application of force in the sense that — the system isn’t working so we need to disrupt it and force the powers that be to listen to us and yield to our demands, even if those demands aren’t universally shared by all Americans/human beings. I’m all for what Charles is talking about as far as eschewing hatred and contempt and self-righteous superiority and trying to see the other person’s humanity, complexity and decency. At the same time, given the urgency of so many existential problems confronting our country and world, and given how badly divided we are with strong unwillingness to hear what the other side is saying, would Charles say that taking direct action in the service of what our side believes is “justice” is part of the problematic war model or is justified and necessary?

September 18, 2019 at 3:49 pm

A great question, Erica! At its best, non-violent direct action does not initiate or call for a use of disruption. What it aims to do is to make manifest the disruption that exists but is tolerated by the governed and the people as well. That in itself is a witnessing of reality, a physical explication of it.

There are blockades that I have participated in that do not stop there. In a blockade, one physically, with an unmovable presence, interrupts an injustice. I was part of Staughton Lynd’s Peoples Congress of 1965, in which we physically blocked the entrance to the congressional building, as best we could, to demonstrate that the people would not tolerate being represented in fighting this war. We submitted without struggle to arrest. I’ve been part of other blockades also, on similar grounds.

It seems to me that private citizens who put their bodies at risk to interrupt the injust operations of the law or the government – or in the present case of the world’s governments’ refusal to acti decisively on the climate crisis – is to interrupt violence with peace. As long as one is willing to accept the consequences of one’s action with no physical forcing, I maintain that is confronting injustice and the violence perpetrated by governments and industries bent on maintaining their ability to continue making money regardless of the unjust consequences of their rapacity.

I do agree that we should stay away from war-like framing of our actions. Struggling with one another is a very human thing to do. Making war or entering into battle always comes out of the three poisons humanity is liable to: greed, hatred and delusion. Sometimes a threat is so dire that a society understandably cannot rise above it to a higher consciousness, and therefore must be forced into some really evil karma. The attack on Pearl Harbor comes to mind. But along with accepting that karma comes much dire evil done in response. The internment camps of the Japanese shortly after Pearl Harbor comes to mind, of course, as do many other episodes of WW II, such as the atomic bombing of Japan, and the fire-bombing of German cities. Could we have been wiser? Many wise people were like voices crying in the wilderness – some of them conscientious objectors such as the Seventh Day Adventists. Many of these were imprisoned, forced to serve non-combatant roles in the military, or volunteered for forest fire-fighting, etc.

Life is complex, and clarity hard-won at best.

August 23, 2019 at 6:51 am

terrific essay charles – I have been on team good for a long time and through meeting you and other synchronistic happenings I have been practicing letting go of the us and them , learning inclusion , feeling for the other, embracing where possible and observing. this year I challenged myself with a dysfunctional committee – still set in the war story committed to making enemies and unnecessary difficulties. I used love, tolerance , clear communication , refused to take it personally at least overtly -there was an inner struggle . I wont say it is all peaches and cream, I did note the main trouble maker found it difficult to get a purchase on my ‘refusal to fight and my passion to come up with creative inclusive ideas and has had to leave. I am interested to see where and how it unfolds from here . It is a challenge to remove our Selves from the dominant story , to really look deeply into it and then reshape our world accordingly. You have a great gift of synthesising and bringing us along into the unfolding story. many thanks and blessings to you and yours.

August 23, 2019 at 1:32 pm

That’s a fantastic essay, Charles ! Thank you so much. Do you allow me to have it translated and shared in French ? It is so much needed. I work a lot on stories and narratives, I have translated several books by my friend Dr Lewis Mehl-Madrona, and anything that goes in that direction needs to have an audience as wide as possible. Kind greetings from Burgundy, Olivier Clerc http://giftofforgiveness.olivierclerc.com

August 28, 2019 at 8:24 am

Awesome! The time is now. Let’s give peace a chance. Thank you CE for providing a path.

August 28, 2019 at 11:03 am

Reading here with hope. Many wonderful thinkers and writers channeled and enter- woven here; help me add to the list: Marshal Rosenberg, Maria Montessori, Paulo Freire, John Buck, Riane Eisler,…

September 3, 2019 at 12:00 am

Thank you Charles for spreading I AM love(d). In the accepting and grounding of that, I see it out there as You Are precious. In seeing that I real-ize I AM love(d, ing). In that I share You Are precious. I am you, and IOU while you we experience ourselves as relation.

September 11, 2019 at 6:22 am

Dearest Charles, My heart is joining and celebrating the ‘isness’ of truth that has manifested through you. Thankyou

September 21, 2019 at 12:28 am

I’ve been thinking about how to lead a more peaceful life for quite some time. Some days I feel a bit overwhelmed with everything happening in my life and the world. Though now I feel more content in trusting the peaceful path.

Charles, Thank you for making such a beautiful essay about the love we all have.

September 25, 2019 at 9:54 am

Awesome narrative. If we could add some science about the structure of the life atom or soul that takes the form of the cute little baby you described in the passage it would complete the narrative. I am not a good writer like you but have great content about coexistence. A set of 16 books which explains every single sub atomic particle to the whole universe. I tried making a small presentation of the same. https://www.slideshare.net/AnandDamani/knowledge-to-create-a-heavenly-experience-and-live-it-always Would love to exchange more thoughts and start the process of setting the world in order.

September 26, 2019 at 4:40 am

Thanks Charles. This has been your drive for a long time… and its such a worth cause. Transferable to so many of our modern issues of objectification.

I would like to point out some demonisation and group think that I see occurring often enough these days. You mentioned the misogyny of killing your own mother, but what about the misandry of killing your own father? What an easy thing to overlook in our time of ‘toxic’ masculinity, the patriarchy and the backswing against men. Its very cool to jump on the feminist bandwagon and use words like that, but not so cool to point out discrimination against men, by women.

October 15, 2019 at 4:06 am

Just beautiful thank you

October 28, 2019 at 4:31 am

Thanks for sharing this!

October 29, 2019 at 6:55 am

Thank you Charles for spreading

April 27, 2020 at 3:39 pm

The basis of peace is happiness. Peace is within, in the silence and bliss of pure consciousness, beyond the noise of thoughts. Only when a man is permanently established in the bliss of pure consciousness can his individual peace be real and permanent. It is only when enough people will live the bliss of the silent state of their own consciousness, that world peace will be real and permanent. Bertrand Canac

June 9, 2020 at 5:38 pm

thanks for the last information

June 17, 2020 at 8:19 pm

From Charles I get a glimpse into the mind of the American upper middle class. I think Charles means well. But as a middle class kid who has clearly had an easy life, Charles has no insight into the life and mindset of someone who is oppressed and lives in poverty. He is not aware that for a person in that position, there IS a need to fight against “the other”, namely, the oppressor who placed him there. Charles’ philosophy only makes sense if you’re from the privileged class. You think a black man living in poverty, trying to feed his kids working a shit job for minimum wage would buy Charles’ ‘solutions’ ? I can see it now. “Just chill out, brother, we’re all interconnected. We’re all in this together. There is no “other.” We’re one human race. Trust the higher intelligence. There is no one to fight.” How do you think that would go down? What Charles says is true on a metaphysical level, but when we consider social structure and class, it’s not anything that an oppressed person could relate to. Nor a mother who lost her home and child to US bombs in Syria. Nor a person who had their drinking water poisoned by corporate activities. Basically, most people in this world. For those who have suffered most from the social order established and maintained by the ruling class, Charles’ ‘solutions’ are unacceptable.

July 7, 2020 at 3:09 am

August 31, 2020 at 6:00 pm

September 18, 2020 at 6:22 am

July 26, 2021 at 4:38 pm

Powerful paper and so important. For my I have always felt my life work is t become radically, unconditionally loving. True love is unconditional. But I, like many people, have some serious trauma. And an impact of that is a need for control where in the past I had no control. To heal from trauma there is a need either for the safety as you speak of in the essay, or to create the safety you do not feel via control. So my question is, how do we let go of this deep, unconscious need in favour of the complexity and interconnectedness, when safety is otherwise not apparent?

The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany , whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly : nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks , How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO , five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play . It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

• • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
• • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
• • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
• • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
• • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
• • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
• • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
• • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick , or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept . They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspectiv e from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here ). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation , depression , and dementia . According to Lissa Rankin, M.D. , air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good . The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome ? (See also here .) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika , Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report . Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C , was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC ( general info , double-blind placebo-controlled study ) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace :

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks , and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “ white robes ” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell , disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed , by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

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Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field We invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

Follow BI and the Hyper-Polarization Discussion on BI's New Substack Newsletter .

Hyper-Polarization, COVID, Racism, and the Constructive Conflict Initiative Read about (and contribute to) the  Constructive Conflict Initiative  and its associated Blog —our effort to assemble what we collectively know about how to move beyond our hyperpolarized politics and start solving society's problems. 

By Michelle Maiese

September 2003  

What it Means to Build a Lasting Peace

It should be noted at the outset that there are two distinct ways to understand peacebuilding. According the United Nations (UN) document An Agenda for Peace [1], peacebuilding consists of a wide range of activities associated with capacity building, reconciliation , and societal transformation . Peacebuilding is a long-term process that occurs after violent conflict has slowed down or come to a halt. Thus, it is the phase of the peace process that takes place after peacemaking and peacekeeping.

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), on the other hand, understand peacebuilding as an umbrella concept that encompasses not only long-term transformative efforts, but also peacemaking and peacekeeping . In this view, peacebuilding includes early warning and response efforts, violence prevention , advocacy work, civilian and military peacekeeping , military intervention , humanitarian assistance , ceasefire agreements , and the establishment of peace zones.

In the interests of keeping these essays a reasonable length, this essay primarily focuses on the narrower use of the term "peacebuilding."  For more information about other phases of the peace process, readers should refer to the knowledge base essays about violence prevention , peacemaking and peacekeeping , as well as the essay on peace processes  which is what we use as our "umbrella" term.

In this narrower sense, peacebuilding is a process that facilitates the establishment of durable peace and tries to prevent the recurrence of violence by addressing root causes and effects of conflict through reconciliation , institution building, and political as well as economic transformation.[1] This consists of a set of physical, social, and structural initiatives that are often an integral part of post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation.

It is generally agreed that the central task of peacebuilding is to create positive peace, a "stable social equilibrium in which the surfacing of new disputes does not escalate into violence and war."[2] Sustainable peace is characterized by the absence of physical and structural violence , the elimination of discrimination, and self-sustainability.[3] Moving towards this sort of environment goes beyond problem solving or conflict management. Peacebuilding initiatives try to fix the core problems that underlie the conflict and change the patterns of interaction of the involved parties.[4] They aim to move a given population from a condition of extreme vulnerability and dependency to one of self-sufficiency and well-being.[5]

To further understand the notion of peacebuilding, many contrast it with the more traditional strategies of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Peacemaking is the diplomatic effort to end the violence between the conflicting parties, move them towards nonviolent dialogue, and eventually reach a peace agreement. Peacekeeping , on the other hand, is a third-party intervention (often, but not always done by military forces) to assist parties in transitioning from violent conflict to peace by separating the fighting parties and keeping them apart. These peacekeeping operations not only provide security, but also facilitate other non-military initiatives.[6]

Some draw a distinction between post-conflict peacebuilding and long-term peacebuilding. Post-conflict peacebuilding is connected to peacekeeping, and often involves demobilization and reintegration programs, as well as immediate reconstruction needs.[7] Meeting immediate needs and handling crises is no doubt crucial. But while peacemaking and peacekeeping processes are an important part of peace transitions, they are not enough in and of themselves to meet longer-term needs and build a lasting peace.

Long-term peacebuilding techniques are designed to fill this gap, and to address the underlying substantive issues that brought about conflict. Various transformation techniques aim to move parties away from confrontation and violence, and towards political and economic participation, peaceful relationships, and social harmony.[8]

This longer-term perspective is crucial to future violence prevention and the promotion of a more peaceful future. Thinking about the future involves articulating desirable structural, systemic, and relationship goals. These might include sustainable economic development, self-sufficiency, equitable social structures that meet human needs, and building positive relationships.[9]

Peacebuilding measures also aim to prevent conflict from reemerging. Through the creation of mechanisms that enhance cooperation and dialogue among different identity groups , these measures can help parties manage their conflict of interests through peaceful means. This might include building institutions that provide procedures and mechanisms for effectively handling and resolving conflict.[10] For example, societies can build fair courts, capacities for labor negotiation, systems of civil society reconciliation, and a stable electoral process.[11] Such designing of new dispute resolution systems is an important part of creating a lasting peace.

In short, parties must replace the spiral of violence and destruction with a spiral of peace and development, and create an environment conducive to self-sustaining and durable peace.[12] The creation of such an environment has three central dimensions: addressing the underlying causes of conflict, repairing damaged relationships and dealing with psychological trauma at the individual level. Each of these dimensions relies on different strategies and techniques.

The Structural Dimension: Addressing Root Causes

The structural dimension of peacebuilding focuses on the social conditions that foster violent conflict. Many note that stable peace must be built on social, economic, and political foundations that serve the needs of the populace.[13] In many cases, crises arise out of systemic roots. These root causes are typically complex, but include skewed land distribution, environmental degradation, and unequal political representation.[14] If these social problems are not addressed, there can be no lasting peace.

Thus, in order to establish durable peace, parties must analyze the structural causes of the conflict and initiate social structural change. The promotion of substantive and procedural justice through structural means typically involves institution building and the strengthening of civil society .

Avenues of political and economic transformation include social structural change to remedy political or economic injustice, reconstruction programs designed to help communities ravaged by conflict revitalize their economies, and the institution of effective and legitimate restorative justice systems.[15] Peacebuilding initiatives aim to promote nonviolent mechanisms that eliminate violence, foster structures that meet basic human needs , and maximize public participation .[16]

To provide fundamental services to its citizens, a state needs strong executive, legislative, and judicial institutions.[17] Many point to democratization as a key way to create these sorts of peace-enhancing structures. Democratization seeks to establish legitimate and stable political institutions and civil liberties that allow for meaningful competition for political power and broad participation in the selection of leaders and policies.[18] It is important for governments to adhere to principles of transparency and predictability, and for laws to be adopted through an open and public process.[19] For the purpose of post-conflict peacebuilding, the democratization process should be part of a comprehensive project to rebuild society's institutions.

Political structural changes focus on political development, state building , and the establishment of effective government institutions. This often involves election reform, judicial reform, power-sharing initiatives, and constitutional reform. It also includes building political parties, creating institutions that provide procedures and mechanisms for effectively handling and resolving conflict, and establishing mechanisms to monitor and protect human rights . Such institution building and infrastructure development typically requires the dismantling, strengthening, or reformation of old institutions in order to make them more effective.

It is crucial to establish and maintain rule of law, and to implement rules and procedures that constrain the powers of all parties and hold them accountable for their actions.[20] This can help to ease tension, create stability, and lessen the likelihood of further conflict. For example, an independent judiciary can serve as a forum for the peaceful resolution of disputes and post-war grievances.[21]

In addition, societies need a system of criminal justice that deters and punishes banditry and acts of violence.[22] Fair police mechanisms must be established and government officials and members of the police force must be trained to observe basic rights in the execution of their duties.[23] In addition, legislation protecting minorities and laws securing gender equality should be advanced. Courts and police forces must be free of corruption and discrimination.

But structural change can also be economic. Many note that economic development is integral to preventing future conflict and avoiding a relapse into violence.[24] Economic factors that put societies at risk include lack of employment opportunities, food scarcity, and lack of access to natural resources or land. A variety of social structural changes aim to eliminate the structural violence that arises out of a society's economic system. These economic and social reforms include economic development programs, health care assistance, land reform, social safety nets, and programs to promote agricultural productivity.[25]

Economic peacebuilding targets both the micro- and macro-level and aims to create economic opportunities and ensure that the basic needs of the population are met. On the microeconomic level, societies should establish micro-credit institutions to increase economic activity and investment at the local level, promote inter-communal trade and an equitable distribution of land, and expand school enrollment and job training.[26] On the macroeconomic level, the post-conflict government should be assisted in its efforts to secure the economic foundations and infrastructure necessary for a transition to peace.[27]

The Relational Dimension

A second integral part of building peace is reducing the effects of war-related hostility through the repair and transformation of damaged relationships. The relational dimension of peacebuilding centers on reconciliation , forgiveness , trust building , and future imagining . It seeks to minimize poorly functioning communication and maximize mutual understanding.[28]

Many believe that reconciliation is one of the most effective and durable ways to transform relationships and prevent destructive conflicts.[29] The essence of reconciliation is the voluntary initiative of the conflicting parties to acknowledge their responsibility and guilt. Parties reflect upon their own role and behavior in the conflict, and acknowledge and accept responsibility for the part they have played. As parties share their experiences, they learn new perspectives and change their perception of their "enemies." There is recognition of the difficulties faced by the opposing side and of their legitimate grievances, and a sense of empathy begins to develop. Each side expresses sincere regret and remorse, and is prepared to apologize for what has transpired. The parties make a commitment to let go of anger , and to refrain from repeating the injury. Finally, there is a sincere effort to redress past grievances and compensate for the damage done. This process often relies on interactive negotiation and allows the parties to enter into a new mutually enriching relationship.[30]

One of the essential requirements for the transformation of conflicts is effective communication and negotiation at both the elite and grassroots levels . Through both high- and community-level dialogues , parties can increase their awareness of their own role in the conflict and develop a more accurate perception of both their own and the other group's identity .[31] As each group shares its unique history, traditions, and culture, the parties may come to understand each other better. International exchange programs and problem-solving workshops are two techniques that can help to change perceptions, build trust , open communication , and increase empathy .[32] For example, over the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the main antagonists have sometimes been able to build trust through meeting outside their areas , not for formal negotiations, but simply to better understand each other.[33]

If these sorts of bridge-building communication systems are in place, relations between the parties can improve and any peace agreements they reach will more likely be self-sustaining.[34] (The Israeli-Palestinian situation illustrates that there are no guarantees, however.) Various mass communication and education measures, such as peace radio and TV , peace-education projects , and conflict-resolution training , can help parties to reach such agreements.[35] And dialogue between people of various ethnicities or opposing groups can lead to deepened understanding and help to change the demonic image of the enemy group.[36] It can also help parties to overcome grief, fear, and mistrust and enhance their sense of security.

A crucial component of such dialogue is future imaging , whereby parties form a vision of the commonly shared future they are trying to build. Conflicting parties often have more in common in terms of their visions of the future than they do in terms of their shared and violent past.[37] The thought is that if they know where they are trying to go, it will be easier to get there.

Another way for the parties to build a future together is to pursue joint projects that are unrelated to the conflict's core issues and center on shared interests. This can benefit the parties' relationship. Leaders who project a clear and hopeful vision of the future and the ways and means to get there can play a crucial role here.

But in addition to looking towards the future, parties must deal with their painful past. Reconciliation not only envisions a common, connected future, but also recognizes the need to redress past wrongdoing.[38] If the parties are to renew their relationship and build an interdependent future, what has happened must be exposed and then forgiven .

Indeed, a crucial part of peacebuilding is addressing past wrongdoing while at the same time promoting healing and rule of law.[39] Part of repairing damaged relationships is responding to past human rights violations and genocide through the establishment of truth commissions , fact-finding missions, and war crimes tribunals .[40] These processes attempt to deal with the complex legal and emotional issues associated with human rights abuses and ensure that justice is served. It is commonly thought that past injustice must be recognized, and the perpetrators punished if parties wish to achieve reconciliation.

However, many note that the retributive justice advanced by Western legal systems often ignores the needs of victims and exacerbates wounds.[41] Many note that to advance healing between the conflicting parties, justice must be more reparative in focus. Central to restorative justice is its future-orientation and its emphasis on the relationship between victims and offenders. It seeks to engage both victims and offenders in dialogue and make things right by identifying their needs and obligations.[42] Having community-based restorative justice processes in place can help to build a sustainable peace.

The Personal Dimension

The personal dimension of peacebuilding centers on desired changes at the individual level. If individuals are not able to undergo a process of healing, there will be broader social, political, and economic repercussions.[43] The destructive effects of social conflict must be minimized, and its potential for personal growth must be maximized.[44] Reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts must prioritize treating mental health problems and integrate these efforts into peace plans and rehabilitation efforts.

In traumatic situations, a person is rendered powerless and faces the threat of death and injury. Traumatic events might include a serious threat or harm to one's family or friends, sudden destruction of one's home or community, and a threat to one's own physical being.[45] Such events overwhelm an individual's coping resources, making it difficult for the individual to function effectively in society.[46] Typical emotional effects include depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. After prolonged and extensive trauma, a person is often left with intense feelings that negatively influence his/her psychological well-being. After an experience of violence, an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, helpless, and out of control in a world that is unpredictable.[47]

Building peace requires attention to these psychological and emotional layers of the conflict. The social fabric that has been destroyed by war must be repaired, and trauma must be dealt with on the national, community, and individual levels.[48] At the national level, parties can accomplish widespread personal healing through truth and reconciliation commissions that seek to uncover the truth and deal with perpetrators. At the community level, parties can pay tribute to the suffering of the past through various rituals or ceremonies, or build memorials to commemorate the pain and suffering that has been endured.[49] Strong family units that can rebuild community structures and moral environments are also crucial.

At the individual level, one-on-one counseling has obvious limitations when large numbers of people have been traumatized and there are insufficient resources to address their needs. Peacebuilding initiatives must therefore provide support for mental health infrastructure and ensure that mental health professionals receive adequate training. Mental health programs should be adapted to suit the local context, and draw from traditional and communal practice and customs wherever possible.[50] Participating in counseling and dialogue can help individuals to develop coping mechanisms and to rebuild their trust in others.[51]

If it is taken that psychology drives individuals' attitudes and behaviors, then new emphasis must be placed on understanding the social psychology of conflict and its consequences. If ignored, certain victims of past violence are at risk for becoming perpetrators of future violence.[52] Victim empowerment and support can help to break this cycle.

Peacebuilding Agents

Peacebuilding measures should integrate civil society in all efforts and include all levels of society in the post-conflict strategy. All society members, from those in elite leadership positions, to religious leaders, to those at the grassroots level, have a role to play in building a lasting peace. Many apply John Paul Lederach's model of hierarchical intervention levels to make sense of the various levels at which peacebuilding efforts occur.[53]

Because peace-building measures involve all levels of society and target all aspects of the state structure, they require a wide variety of agents for their implementation. These agents advance peace-building efforts by addressing functional and emotional dimensions in specified target areas, including civil society and legal institutions.[54] While external agents can facilitate and support peacebuilding, ultimately it must be driven by internal forces. It cannot be imposed from the outside.

Various internal actors play an integral role in peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts. The government of the affected country is not only the object of peacebuilding, but also the subject. While peacebuilding aims to transform various government structures, the government typically oversees and engages in this reconstruction process. A variety of the community specialists, including lawyers, economists, scholars, educators, and teachers, contribute their expertise to help carry out peacebuilding projects. Finally, a society's religious networks can play an important role in establishing social and moral norms.[55]

Nevertheless, outside parties typically play a crucial role in advancing such peacebuilding efforts. Few peacebuilding plans work unless regional neighbors and other significant international actors support peace through economic development aid and humanitarian relief .[56] At the request of the affected country, international organizations can intervene at the government level to transform established structures.[57] They not only provide monetary support to post-conflict governments, but also assist in the restoration of financial and political institutions. Because their efforts carry the legitimacy of the international community, they can be quite effective.

Various institutions provide the necessary funding for peacebuilding projects. While international institutions are the largest donors, private foundations contribute a great deal through project-based financing.[58] In addition, regional organizations often help to both fund and implement peacebuilding strategies. Finally, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often carry out small-scale projects to strengthen countries at the grassroots level. Not only traditional NGOs but also the business and academic community and various grassroots organizations work to further these peace-building efforts. All of the groups help to address "the limits imposed on governmental action by limited resources, lack of consensus, or insufficient political will."[59]

Some suggest that governments, NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies need to create categories of funding related to conflict transformation and peacebuilding.[60] Funds are often difficult to secure when they are intended to finance preventive action. And middle-range initiatives, infrastructure building, and grassroots projects do not typically attract significant funding, even though these sorts of projects may have the greatest potential to sustain long-term conflict transformation.[61] Those providing resources for peacebuilding initiatives must look to fill these gaps. In addition, external actors must think through the broader ramifications of their programs.[62] They must ensure that funds are used to advance genuine peacebuilding initiatives rather than be swallowed up by corrupt leaders or channeled into armed conflict.

But as already noted, higher-order peace, connected to improving local capacities, is not possible simply through third-party intervention.[63] And while top-down approaches are important, peace must also be built from the bottom up. Many top-down agreements collapse because the ground below has not been prepared. Top-down approaches must therefore be buttressed, and relationships built.

Thus, an important task in sustaining peace is to build a peace constituency within the conflict setting. Middle-range actors form the core of a peace constituency. They are more flexible than top-level leaders, and less vulnerable in terms of daily survival than those at the grassroots level.[64] Middle-range actors who strive to build bridges to their counterparts across the lines of conflict are the ones best positioned to sustain conflict transformation. This is because they have an understanding of the nuances of the conflict setting, as well as access to the elite leadership .

Many believe that the greatest resource for sustaining peace in the long term is always rooted in the local people and their culture.[65] Parties should strive to understand the cultural dimension of conflict, and identify the mechanisms for handling conflict that exist within that cultural setting. Building on cultural resources and utilizing local mechanisms for handling disputes can be quite effective in resolving conflicts and transforming relationships. Initiatives that incorporate citizen-based peacebuilding include community peace projects in schools and villages, local peace commissions and problem-solving workshops , and a variety of other grassroots initiatives .

Effective peacebuilding also requires public-private partnerships in addressing conflict and greater coordination among the various actors.[66] International governmental organizations, national governments, bilateral donors, and international and local NGOs need to coordinate to ensure that every dollar invested in peacebuilding is spent wisely.[67] To accomplish this, advanced planning and intervention coordination is needed.

There are various ways to attempt to coordinate peace-building efforts. One way is to develop a peace inventory to keep track of which agents are doing various peace-building activities. A second is to develop clearer channels of communication and more points of contact between the elite and middle ranges. In addition, a coordination committee should be instituted so that agreements reached at the top level are actually capable of being implemented.[68] A third way to better coordinate peace-building efforts is to create peace-donor conferences that bring together representatives from humanitarian organizations, NGOs, and the concerned governments. It is often noted that "peacebuilding would greatly benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas and expertise and the bringing together of people working in relief, development, conflict resolution, arms control, diplomacy, and peacekeeping."[69] Lastly, there should be efforts to link internal and external actors. Any external initiatives must also enhance the capacity of internal resources to build peace-enhancing structures that support reconciliation efforts throughout a society.[70] In other words, the international role must be designed to fit each case.

[1] Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. An Agenda for Peace. New York: United Nations 1995 .

[1a] SAIS, "The Conflict Management Toolkit: Approaches," The Conflict Management Program, Johns Hopkins University [available at: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/resources/middle-east-studies/conflict-management-toolkit

[2] Henning Haugerudbraaten, "Peacebuilding: Six Dimensions and Two Concepts," Institute For Security Studies. [available at: http://www.iss.co.za/Pubs/ASR/7No6/Peacebuilding.html ]

[3] Luc Reychler, "From Conflict to Sustainable Peacebuilding: Concepts and Analytical Tools," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 12.

[4] Reychler, 12.

[5] John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies . (Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace, 1997), 75.

[6] SAIS, [available at: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/resources/middle-east-studies/conflict-management-toolkit ]

[7] Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis. "Building Peace: Challenges and Strategies After Civil War," The World Bank Group. [available at: http://www.chs.ubc.ca/srilanka/PDFs/Building%20peace--challenges%20and%20strategies.pdf ] 3.

[8] Doyle and Sambanis, 2

[9] Lederach, 77.

[11] Doyle and Sambanis, 5.

[13] Haugerudbraaten

[14] Haugerudbraaten

[16] Lederach, 83.

[19] Neil J. Kritz, "The Rule of Law in the Post-Conflict Phase: Building a Stable Peace," in Managing Global Chaos: Sources or and Responses to International Conflict , eds. Chester A. Crocker and Fen Osler Hampson with Pamela Aall. (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996), 593.

[20] Kritz, 588.

[21] Kritz, 591.

[22] Kritz, 591.

[25] Michael Lund, "A Toolbox for Responding to Conflicts and Building Peace," In Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 18.

[27] These issues are discussed in detail in the set of essays on development in this knowledge base.

[28] Lederach, 82.

[29] Hizkias Assefa, "Reconciliation," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 342.

[30] Assefa, 340.

[33] Kathleen Stephens, "Building Peace in Deeply Rooted Conflicts: Exploring New Ideas to Shape the Future" INCORE, 1997.

[34] Reychler, 13.

[35] Lund, 18.

[37] Lederach, 77.

[38] Lederach, 31.

[39] Howard Zehr, "Restorative Justice," In Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 330.

[41] Zehr, 330.

[42] Zehr, 331.

[44] Lederach, 82.

[45] Hugo van der Merwe and Tracy Vienings, "Coping with Trauma," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide, Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 343.

[46] van der Merwe, 343.

[47] van der Merwe, 345.

[48] van der Merwe, 343.

[49] van der Merwe, 344.

[51] van der Merwe, 347.

[52] van der Merwe, 344.

[53] John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Chapter 4.

[56] Doyle and Sambanis, 18.

[59] Stephens.

[60] Lederach, 89.

[61] Lederach, 92.

[62] Lederach, 91.

[63] Doyle and Sambanis, 25.

[64] Lederach, 94.

[65] Lederach, 94.

[66] Stephens.

[67] Doyle and Sambanis, 23.

[68] Lederach, 100.

[69] Lederach, 101.

[70] Lederach, 103.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Peacebuilding." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: September 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/peacebuilding >.

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Defining the Concept of Peace » Positive & Negative Peace

In this excerpt from our IEP Peace Academy, learn why understanding the different definitions of peace is crucial for peacebuilders.

Learn why understanding the concept of peace from both a negative peace and positive peace perspective is crucial for peacebuilders.

Defining the Concept of Peace: Positive and Negative Peace

There are two common conceptions of peace — Negative Peace, or actual peace, and Positive Peace.

What is Negative Peace?

IEP’s definition of Negative Peace is understood as ‘the absence of violence or fear of violence — an intuitive definition that many agree with, and one which enables us to measure peace more easily.

Measures of Negative Peace are the foundation of the IEP’s flagship product, the Global Peace Index .

However, while the Global Peace Index tells us how peaceful a country is, it doesn’t tell us what or where we should be investing in to strengthen or maintain levels of peace.

This leads us to Positive Peace , derived from the data contained within the Global Peace Index . Positive Peace provides a framework to understand and address the many complex challenges the world faces.

What is Positive Peace?

Positive Peace is defined as the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies.

It provides a framework to understand and then address the multiple and complex challenges the world faces. Positive Peace is transformational in that it is a cross-cutting factor for progress, making it easier for businesses to sell, entrepreneurs and scientists to innovate, individuals to produce, and governments to effectively regulate.

Difference between Negative and Positive Peace

In addition to the absence of violence, Positive Peace is also associated with many other social characteristics that are considered desirable, including better economic outcomes, measures of well-being, levels of inclusiveness and environmental performance.

A parallel can be drawn with medical science; the study of pathology has led to numerous breakthroughs in our understanding of how to treat and cure disease.

However, it was only when medical science turned its focus to the study of healthy human beings that we understood what we needed to do to stay healthy. This could only be learned by studying what was working.

Are you interested in learning more about peace? Sign up for the free, online Positive Peace Academy

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Most people in the world have no experience of lasting joy in their lives. We’re on a mission to change that. All of our resources exist to guide you toward everlasting joy in Jesus Christ.

The Secret to Peace and Contentment

Jon Bloom Twitter @Bloom_Jon

‘be perfect’, the wild glory of an ‘ordinary’ life, the strong legacy of a weak father, god beckons through beauty, when love takes you by the shoulders, the lost son who never left.

Staff writer, desiringGod.org

The secret to Christian peace and contentment is not a gnostic secret. It is not concealed knowledge only revealed to those who achieve higher degrees of holy enlightenment. This secret is hidden in plain sight throughout the Scripture and is available to anyone who is willing to believe it.

God has not only gone public with this secret, but he invites us and longs for us to know it. He does not want us to merely know about this secret — not to merely preach it, explain it, enjoy the idea of it, or wish for it — but to know it by experience.

Jesus described the kind of experience he wants us to know:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. . . . [For] your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be added to you.” (Luke 12:22, 30–31)

Paul, from prison, shared his experience of the secret with all who would listen:

“I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:11–13)

The secret to contentment is very simple. And it does not require heroic acts of piety. No, in fact it requires a childlike response from us. The secret is beautifully summed up in this phrase: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart” (Proverbs 3:5).

Could It Really Be So Simple?

Is it really that simple? Just trust God? Yes. So simple, but its reality is revolutionary.

God designed us to operate on trust. We are reasoning creatures made in God’s image. But God did not make us gods; he made us in small measure like God. He did not give us his capacities to contain all knowledge and all wisdom. We only contain very small amounts of each. Nor did he give us his power to bring into being whatever we wish. Our power is very limited. God designed us to trust him in whatever knowledge, wisdom, and strength he provides us and to trust his knowledge, wisdom, and strength when ours reach their limits.

What happened with Adam and Eve in the garden is that they broke trust with God by eating the forbidden fruit. When they did this, they unhinged their reason from Reality (Genesis 3:6) and besides living in a world subjected to futility (Romans 8:20), they had to deal with the overwhelming complexities of the knowledge of good and evil without the capacities of wisdom and knowledge and strength to adequately process them.

The story of redemptive history, culminating in Jesus’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, is God undoing the catastrophe of the garden and restoring sinful humans to holiness and once again trusting in him with all their heart.

No matter who we are, no matter what our gifts and abilities, no matter what our background, it all really does come down to trusting God with all our heart. If we trust him, our hearts will not be sinfully troubled (John 14:1). And trusting is simple. But it is by no means easy.

Why Trusting (and Obeying) Is Hard

The devil’s treachery and Adam and Eve’s fall from grace is why God chooses to save us by grace through faith, and not through works (Ephesians 2:8–9). God is looking for trust. Our works are important, in fact they’re crucial, but only in that they demonstrate that we trust God.

God knows that our living in simple trust in him will be hard for us in this age. Jesus promised that it would be (Matthew 7:14). It’s hard because we’re called to trust Jesus, demonstrated by our obeying Jesus, in a world under the power of the evil one that rejects and hates Jesus (1 John 5:19; John 14:15; 15:18), while living in a body of death that has faithless impulses (Romans 7:23–24).

But what we need to remember is that every time we are called to trust Jesus’s promises over our perceptions and the devil’s deceptions, we reenact what happened in Eden. And every time we exercise trust Jesus by obeying what he says, it’s a smack in the devil’s lying mouth.

We do not need to understand the “why” to every command of God or be able to answer every objection or shadow of doubt cast upon God’s word. But we do need to trust God and therefore obey him. In fact, God is particularly glorified when, in the face of disorienting temptation, we do not fully understand God’s reasons and we trust and obey him anyway — we rest our reason on the Reason of God.

Experience the Secret

Trusting God is not easy, but it’s not complex. The knowledge of good and evil is complex. It produces Gordian knots we cannot untie. But we were never meant to. We were meant to trust God with them. And when we do, it is a great relief.

Trusting God is the secret:

• To forgiving those who have sinned against us (Ephesians 4:32).
• To turning away from sexual temptation (1 Thessalonians 4:3).
• To giving generously to kingdom needs, even beyond your means (2 Corinthians 8:3).
• To not allowing material abundance to choke the word in us (Matthew 13:22).
• To rejoicing even when sorrowful (2 Corinthians 6:10).
• To contentment even when experiencing deprivation (Philippians 4:12).
• To boldness even in the face of fearful threats (Acts 4:29).
• To peace even when facing pressured trials (Philippians 4:6–7).
• To joy even when enduring withering affliction and illness (2 Corinthians 1:3–5).
• To hope when all around our soul gives way (Psalm 42:11).
• To gracious patience under pressured labors (Colossians 1:11).
• To blessing those who persecute us (Romans 12:14).
• To courage in leaving family and property for Jesus’s sake (Matthew 19:29).
• To overcoming discouragement due to adversity and weakness (2 Corinthians 12:10).
• To not allowing indwelling sin to reign over or condemn us (Romans 6:12, 8:1).
• To loving saints who sin and sinful unbelievers (John 15:12; Romans 12:10; Romans 9:1–3).
• To facing every other fear and anxiety-producing temptation.

God promises to give us peace and contentment if we trust him (Philippians 4:6–7). He really wants us to experience them in increasing measure, even here in this troubled world (John 16:33). So he has given us the simple, hard secret: Trust me. It is the only way.

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Essay on Peace and Harmony | Peace and Harmony Essay for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Peace and Harmony: To bring growth and prosperity in a society, the path that wiser people take is of peace and harmony. Without peace and harmony in a nation, it is impossible to achieve political strength, economic stability, or cultural growth. Before transmitting the notion of peace and harmony, among others, an individual needs to possess peace within them while their body and mind should be in balance. Even one person can transmit the notion of peace and harmony, among others, and it is everyone individual’s responsibility to maintain that peace and harmony in society. However, peace and harmony in society are disrupted with the increase in violence and chaos.

You can read more  Essay Writing  about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Long and Short Essay on Peace and Harmony for Students and Kids in English

Below mentioned are Long and Short Essays on Peace and Harmony of 500-600 words and 200-300 words, respectively. The students can refer to these speeches when required and grace the occasion by their words. Read on to find more about Peace and Harmony Essay.

Long Essay on Peace and Harmony 500 Words in English

Peace and Harmony Essay is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Science and technology were supposed to make our life comfortable. In contrast, people find alternative ways to use good inventions for an immoral purpose and eventually harm the ways of other’s living with peace and harmony. As the saying goes that with immense power so comes the tremendous responsibility is not at all a lie, for the government of each nation should invest on education, healthcare, and productive means to resolve economic issues rather than initiating war or destructiveness. If destructive ways among nation are promoted, then peach and harmony will not exist, and poverty will remain to be an everlasting problem.

The root to most of our troubles is the disruption of peace and harmony between one aspect of our life to another. Earlier people knew how to live in peace and harmony with nature and other animals, but with the realization of power and greed, it was us who harmed their harmonized relation with the environment. This change in the way of living is not at all desirable because the effects of ruining the harmony and peace in the ecosystem will have to be faced by us. Hence, people must always realize that a little kindness, compassion and self-perseverance can restore the sense of humanity in one and resolve all issues regarding peace and harmony in our life.

What is ‘peace and harmony’?

Peace and harmony is the fundamental prerequisite of our life and an ideal path to follow. Many ideas contribute to the logic of peace and harmony such as dealing with disputes, staying calm and focused, resolving conflicts, adjusting, adapting, neutralization, following the ‘middle way’ principle, etc. With globalization we are not anymore divided into our concentrated area of state or nation; instead, the world has united with the unprecedented extent of bond regardless of borders and resulting into the formation of a great and happy global community. And to maintain the well being of every individual of this global community, ultimately everyone has to implement the means of peace and harmony into the way of our living.

Ideas to maintain peace and harmony

• The integral and compressive part of humankind should be peace and harmony. And to maintain peace and harmony, the following six ideas should be adapted:
• To maintain equality, security, justice, and mutual trust, a word-wide political order must be introduced that embodies all of these.
• To promote the advancement of technology and science aspects that will provide benefit to humankind by maintaining everyone’s welfare.
• A global economic system should be introduced that embodies elimination of divergence, mutual benefit, removal of regional imbalance.
• Ethics that promote ecological prosperity and incorporates solutions for resolving the environmental crisis, acts toward shared success, actively fulfils individual responsibility, and ways to end historical prejudices.
• A mental state and spiritual ideology that embodies helpful attitude, physical and mental ease, and spreading of happiness and harmony through traditional wisdom.
• The code of conduct by recognizing diversity and integration along with conduction of dialogues to express emotion and enhance friendship and brotherhood must be achieved by developing a global cultural atmosphere.
• And it is a noble mission to promote peace and harmony by expressing how it will contribute to the long-lasting wellbeing factor of our lives.

Short Essay on Peace and Harmony 200 Words in English

Peace and Harmony Essay is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Factors affecting peace and harmony: Many powerful and influential people understood the importance of peace and harmony. As the famous saying of Lao Tzu’s goes like – “If you want to establish peace in the world, there also must be peace among and in the nations. If one wants there to be peace in the nations, then there should be peace in the regions of the nation. If one wishes for peace in the cities, then there also must exist peace between neighbors. And all this begins with the peace of mind” Particular aspects disrupt peace and harmony of a system, and people must be aware of the reasons as to why one should avoid those factors. A list of some of those disruptions is:

• Gender discrimination and oppression
• Religion and caste discrimination
• Poverty and unemployment
• Toxic traits like jealousy, greed, lies and hatred
• Exploitation of resources

10 Lines on Peace and Harmony Essay in English

• Peaceful dialogues are comparatively more helpful during dispute resolving and negotiations.
• The word peace is derived from the Anglo-French term ‘pes’ which means agreement, peace, silence or reconciliation.
• Harmony is a term that is derived from an old Greek word ‘Harmonia’ meaning the joint agreement or concord.
• The US Anti-Vietnam War movement was also called the peace movement that lasted from 1964 to 1973.
• Secularism is a concept for treating all religions equally, and this practice promotes peace and harmony among us.
• Peace and harmony are hampered when people fight in the name of faith which eventually results in the spread of communalism,
• The rise in the prices of necessary commodities is called inflation, and it is one of the significant disruption causing factor in the concept of peace and harmony.
• Peace and harmony improve aspects of business and economy which also ultimately results in the elimination of unemployment.
• A peace activist in a person who chooses non-violent methods to end affairs like violent conflicts or non-democratic rule.
• Gerald Holtom is the person behind the design of the modern peace symbol.

FAQ’s on Peace and Harmony Essay

Question 1. Explain with an example, the benefit of living with peace and harmony?

Answer: An excellent example of how peace and harmony are beneficial is the existence of the ‘Harmony Culture’ which is a Chinese tradition that has lasted for over thousand years now and has also made a massive contribution in the matter of coexistence of various ethnic groups that too with peace and harmony. Eventually, from those original ethnic groups, some fusion religions and groups also came into existence.

Question 2. How can we describe the concept of ‘peace and harmony’ very concisely?

Answer: The concept of living with peace and harmony can be described very concisely as the calm and happy state of life without disturbances like conflicts and revolts.

Question 3. Who guards peace and harmony in a country?

Answer: Anyone can contribute to maintaining the peace and harmony of a system, but there are also people who are given the task by the nations’ jurisdiction to look over law and order. Those particular jobs are called civil services for the work solely focuses on maintaining peace and harmony in the society by acting against any disobedience that disrupts the proper state of life.

Question 4. Are there different types of peace?

Answer: Peace can be classified into internal or inner peace and external peace. The inner peace is the calm, sane, tranquil, and undisturbed state of our mind. And the outer peace is interrelated to inner peace because unless there is peace in the mind one cannot perform peaceful actions.

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" To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war " are among the first very words of the UN Charter (in its Preamble), and those words were the main motivation for creating the United Nations, whose founders had lived through the devastation of two world wars by 1945. Since the UN's creation on 24 October 1945 (the date its Charter came into force), the United Nations has often been called upon to prevent disputes from escalating into war, or to help restore peace following the outbreak of armed conflict, and to promote lasting peace in societies emerging from wars.

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Over the decades, the UN has helped to end numerous conflicts, often through actions of the  Security Council & — the organ with primary responsibility, under the  United Nations Charter,  for the maintenance of international peace and security. When it receives a complaint about a threat to peace, the Council first recommends that the parties seek an agreement by peaceful means. In some cases, the Council itself investigates and mediates. It may appoint special representatives or request the Secretary-General to do so, or to use his good offices. It may set forth principles for a peaceful settlement.

When a dispute leads to fighting, the Council's first concern is to end it as soon as possible. On many occasions, the Council has issued ceasefire directives, which have helped to prevent major hostilities. It also deploys UN peacekeeping operations to reduce tensions in troubled areas, keep opposing forces apart, and create conditions for sustainable peace after settlements have been reached. The Council may decide on  enforcement measures ,  economic sanctions  (such as trade embargoes) or collective military action.

The Security Council has  15 Members  -5 permanent (United States, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and China), and 10 non-permanent members-. Each Member has one  vote . According to the Charter, all Member States are obligated to comply with Council decisions .

Reform of the Security Council

One of the issues of major concern at the international level is the stalemate in the Council's decision-making. This deadlock, largely due to the veto power of the five permanent members, is not new and has been synonymous with paralysis for the UN on many occasions.

During its sixty-second session, the General Assembly decided to begin informal plenary intergovernmental negotiations. The discussions started in the sixty-third session and were based on proposals made by the Member States. The dialogues focused on the question of equitable representation in the Security Council, an increase in its membership, and other matters related to the Council. The goal is to find a solution that will gain the widest possible political acceptance by Member States.

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According to the Charter, the General Assembly can make recommendations on the general principles of cooperation for maintaining international peace and security, including disarmament, and for the peaceful settlement of any situation that might impair friendly relations among nations. The General Assembly may also discuss any question relating to international peace and security and make recommendations if the Security Council is not currently discussing the issue. 

Pursuant to its  “Uniting for Peace” resolution of November 1950 (resolution 377 (V)), the General Assembly may also take action if the Security Council fails to act, owing to the negative vote of a Permanent Member, in a case where there appears to be a threat to, or breach of peace, or an act of aggression. The Assembly can consider the matter  immediately in order to make recommendations to Members for collective measures to maintain, or restore, international peace and security.

The Assembly meets in regular sessions from September to December each year, and thereafter as required. It discusses specific issues through dedicated agenda items or sub-items, which lead to the adoption of resolutions.

The Charter empowers the Secretary-General to " bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security ." One of the most vital roles played by the Secretary-General is the use of his " good offices " – steps taken publicly and in private that draw upon his independence, impartiality and integrity to prevent international disputes from arising, escalating or spreading.

Conflict Prevention

The main strategies to prevent disputes from escalating into conflict, and to prevent the recurrence of conflict, are preventive diplomacy and preventive disarmament. Preventive diplomacy refers to action taken to prevent disputes from arising or escalating into conflicts, and to limit the spread of conflicts as they arise. It may take the form of mediation, conciliation or negotiation.

Preventive diplomacy

Early warning is an essential component of prevention, and the United Nations carefully monitors developments around the world to detect threats to international peace and security, thereby enabling the Security Council and the Secretary-General to carry out preventive action. Envoys and special representatives of the Secretary-General are engaged in  mediation and preventive diplomacy throughout the world. In some trouble spots, the mere presence of a skilled envoy can prevent the escalation of tension. These envoys often cooperate with regional organizations.

Preventive disarmament

Complementing preventive diplomacy is preventive disarmament , which seeks to reduce the number of small arms in conflict-prone regions. In El Salvador, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste and elsewhere, this has entailed demobilizing combat forces, as well as collecting and destroying their weapons as part of an overall peace agreement. Destroying yesterday’s weapons prevents their use in tomorrow’s wars.

Preventing Genocide and Responsibility to Protect

Prevention requires apportioning responsibility and promoting collaboration between the concerned States and the international community. The duty to prevent and halt genocide and mass atrocities lies first and foremost with the State, but the international community has a role that cannot be blocked by the invocation of sovereignty. Sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States from foreign interference; it is a charge of responsibility where States are accountable for the welfare of their people. This principle is enshrined in article 1 of the  Genocide Convention  and embodied in the principle of “sovereignty as responsibility” and in the concept of the Responsibility to Protect.

The Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide  acts as a catalyst to raise awareness of the causes and dynamics of genocide, to alert relevant actors where there is a risk of genocide, and to advocate and mobilize for appropriate action. The Special Adviser on the Responsibility to Protect leads the conceptual, political, institutional and operational development of the Responsibility to Protect. The efforts of their Office include alerting relevant actors to the risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, enhancing the capacity of the United Nations to prevent these crimes, including their incitement.

Peacekeeping

United Nations peacekeeping operations are a vital instrument employed by the international community to advance peace and security.

The first UN peacekeeping mission was established in 1948 when the Security Council authorized the deployment of the  United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) to the Middle East to monitor the Armistice Agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Since then, there have been more than 70 UN peacekeeping operations around the world.

Over 72 years, UN peacekeeping has evolved to meet the demands of different conflicts and a changing political landscape. Born at the time when Cold War rivalries frequently paralyzed the Security Council, UN peacekeeping goals were primarily limited to maintaining ceasefires and stabilizing situations on the ground, so that efforts could be made at the political level to resolve the conflict by peaceful means. 

UN peacekeeping expanded in the 1990s, as the end of the Cold War created new opportunities to end civil wars through negotiated peace settlements. Many conflicts ended, either through direct UN mediation, or through the efforts of others acting with UN support. Countries assisted included El Salvador , Guatemala , Namibia , Cambodia , Mozambique , Tajikistan , and  Burundi . In the late nineties, continuing crises led to new operations in the  Democratic Republic of the Congo , the  Central African Republic , Timor Leste , Sierra Leone and Kosovo .

In the new millennium, peacekeepers have been deployed to  Liberia ,  Côte d'Ivoire ,  Sudan ,  South Sudan ,  Haiti , and  Mali .

Today's conflicts are less numerous but deeply rooted. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, and South Sudan today, are in a second or third wave of conflict. And many are complicated by regional dimensions that are key to their solution. In fact, some two-thirds of peacekeeping personnel today are deployed amid ongoing conflict, where peace agreements are shaky or absent. Conflicts today are also increasingly intensive, involving determined armed groups with access to sophisticated armaments and techniques.

The nature of conflict has also changed over the years. UN peacekeeping, originally developed as a means of resolving inter-State conflict, has been increasingly applied over time to intra-State conflicts and civil wars. Although the military remains the backbone of most peacekeeping operations, today’s peacekeepers perform a variety of complex tasks, from helping to build sustainable institutions of governance, through human rights monitoring and security sector reform, to the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants, and demining.

Peacebuilding

Within the United Nations, peacebuilding refers to efforts to assist countries and regions in their transitions from war to peace and to reduce a country's risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities for conflict management, and laying the foundations for sustainable peace and development.

Building lasting peace in war-torn societies is a daunting challenge for global peace and security. Peacebuilding requires sustained international support for national efforts across the broadest range of activities. For instance, peacebuilders monitor ceasefires, demobilize and reintegrate combatants, assist the return of refugees and displaced persons, help to organize and monitor elections of a new government, support justice and security sector reforms, enhance human rights protections, and foster reconciliation after past atrocities.

Peacebuilding involves action by a wide array of organizations of the UN system, including the World Bank , regional economic commissions, NGOs and local citizens’ groups. Peacebuilding has played a prominent role in  UN operations  in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kosovo, Liberia and Mozambique, as well as more recently in Afghanistan, Burundi, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste. An example of inter-state peacebuilding has been the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Recognizing that the UN needs to better anticipate and respond to the challenges of peacebuilding, the  2005 World Summit approved the creation of a new Peacebuilding Commission. In the resolutions establishing the  Peacebuilding Commission , resolution 60/180 and resolution 1645 , the UN General Assembly and the Security Council mandated it to bring together all relevant actors to advise on the proposed integrated strategies for post-conflict peacebuilding and recovery; to marshal resources and help ensure predictable financing for these activities; and to develop best practices in collaboration with political, security, humanitarian and development actors.

The resolutions also identify the need for the Commission to extend the period of international attention on post-conflict countries, and where necessary, highlight any gaps which threaten to undermine peacebuilding.

The General Assembly and Security Council resolutions establishing the Peacebuilding Commission also provided for the establishment of a  Peacebuilding Fund & and a Peacebuilding Support Office .

The Rule of Law

Promoting the  rule of law at the national and international levels is at the heart of the United Nations’ mission. Establishing respect for the rule of law is fundamental to achieving a durable peace in the aftermath of conflict, to the effective protection of human rights, and to sustained economic progress and development. The principle that everyone – from the individual to the State itself – is accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, is a fundamental concept which drives much of the United Nations work. The main United Nations organs, including the General Assembly and the Security Council, play essential roles in supporting Member States to strengthen the rule of law, as do many United Nations entities.

Responsibility for the overall coordination of rule of law work by the United Nations system rests with the  Rule of Law Coordination and Resource Group , chaired by the Deputy Secretary-General and supported by the Rule of Law Unit. Members of the Group are the principals of 20 United Nations entities engaged in supporting Member States to strengthen the rule of law. Providing support from headquarters to rule of law activities at the national level, the Secretary-General designated the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as the joint global focal point for the police, justice and corrections areas in the rule of law in post-conflict and other crisis situations. 

Women and Children in Conflict

In contemporary conflicts, up to 90 per cent of casualties are civilians, mostly women and children. Women in war-torn societies can face specific and devastating forms of sexual violence, which are sometimes deployed systematically to achieve military or political objectives. Moreover, women continue to be poorly represented in formal peace processes, although they contribute in many informal ways to conflict resolution.

However, the UN Security Council in its  resolution 1325 on women, peace and security has recognized that including women and gender perspectives in decision-making can strengthen prospects for sustainable peace. The landmark resolution addresses the situation of women in armed conflict and calls for their participation at all levels of decision-making on conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

Since the agenda was set with the core principles of resolution 1325, the Security Council has adopted seven supporting resolutions —  1820 ,  1888 , 1889 , 1960 ,  2106 ,  2331  and  2467 -. All the resolutions focus on two key goals: strengthening women’s participation in decision-making and ending sexual violence and impunity.

Since 1999, the systematic engagement of the UN Security Council has firmly placed the situation of children affected by armed conflict as an issue affecting peace and security. The Security Council has created a strong framework and provided the Secretary-General with tools to respond to violations against children.  The Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict serves as the leading UN advocate for the protection and well-being of children affected by armed conflict.

Peaceful uses of outer space

The UN works to ensure that outer space is used for peaceful purposes and that the benefits from space activities are shared by all nations. This concern for the peaceful uses of outer space began soon after the launch of Sputnik — the first artificial satellite — by the Soviet Union in 1957 and has kept pace with advances in space technology. The UN has played an important role by developing international space law and by promoting international cooperation in space science and technology.

The Vienna-based  United Nations Office for Outer Space serves as the secretariat for the  Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and its subcommittees, and assists developing countries in using space technology for development.

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Ten practical ways to build peace in your life and in the world around you

(Reposted from: Taylor O’Connor. Medium, March 10, 2020. )

By Taylor O’Connor

“Ask yourself what you can do to make a difference, then take that action, no matter how large or small.” – Graça Machel

There’s a lot of people out there who care deeply about some social issue (or issues), but aren’t sure what they can do to make a difference. For many of us, it is hard to know how we can help. It’s easy to become disillusioned, and perhaps cynical.

The systems and structures that govern the world don’t seem to be working. There is war and poverty. There is discrimination, inequality, and violence. The issues are big. They are complex. It can be overwhelming.

The good news is that everyone can do something to make a difference. Sure, the problems are complex, but to be effective in making change the solutions must be simple. I hope the ideas shared below will inspire you and many others to take some action for peace and justice, no matter how large or how small.

How to build peace in your life and the world around you

Based on my personal experiences collaborating with peacebuilders around the world, here is a list of the ten things you can do to build a more peaceful and just world.

1. Calm your mind

Whether a seasoned advocate for peace or a young person aspiring to make a change, it’s always good to start with yourself. Calming your mind will help you be more patient. It will help you be present for those who need you the most. It will help you engage with challenging people. It will hone your intuition. It will allow you to moderate feelings of anger and other strong emotions when they arise. It will give you more insight to analyze complex issues associated with conflict and inequality. It will help you be more focused and creative in your efforts to build peace.

Here are some things you can do to calm your mind. Learn simple mindfulness practices. Embrace quiet time. Observe your emotions. Spend time in nature. Be mindful of your media consumption. Breathe. Find and use contemplative practices that work for you.

2. Simplify your life

Living a simple life will help clear your mind. You’ll have fewer distractions and be more able to focus on finding ways to address an issue (or issues) you care about. It will help you live your life with intention. And with a minimalist lifestyle you will reduce your carbon footprint. That’s a bonus!

Here are some ideas you can consider. Minimize your possessions. Don’t take on too many work commitments. Let go of social engagements that are not meaningful to you. Enjoy the simple things in life. Detach yourself from the idea that you have to be ‘busy.’ Reduce physical and mental clutter, let the distractions fall away, and focus on what is important to you.

3. Educate yourself (and teach others) about injustice and inequality, and about peace.

Systems that produce injustice and inequality rely on their ability to remain invisible to the general public. Those not directly harmed by injustice and inequality often have a difficult time understanding these things, let alone acknowledge their existence. To truly build a more just and equal society we need to bring these issues to the mainstream.

Educate yourself about the structures that produce injustice and inequality, and their historical legacy. Learn about historic struggles for justice and equality, about social movements, about critical events where progress was made, and of the real heroes that made it happen. Use this knowledge to generate creative and strategic ideas for action. Teach others and inspire change.

4. Orient your professional life towards peace

Are you a teacher? Are you teaching your students to critically analyze war, conflict, and inequality? Are you a healthcare worker? What are you doing to make the healthcare system more just? Are you a police officer? How is your department addressing the harmful effects of common policing practices? Are you an entrepreneur? Are you applying your skills to address a social cause? Are you working in the global aid industry? What are you doing to decolonize aid?

Consider the ways your work contributes to injustice and inequality, or the potential for it to contribute to peace and justice. Clarify what social issues you care about the most. Spend time to reflect and find ways to address these issues in your work and professional life. Seek opportunities to make change, or create new ones. Practical actions will be unique to each profession type.

5. Transform interpersonal conflicts

If you are working to build peace, you must become adept at transforming interpersonal conflicts. On principle, transforming conflict in relationships allows everyone to live happier, more fulfilling (thus peaceful) lives. At the same time, working to make change can be stressful, and you will likely encounter conflict with persons on your team who have different ideas about how to move forward. Also, when rattling the foundations of injustice and inequality, you will certainly come into conflict with persons who benefit from these. You must then be well prepared to engage constructively to transform these relationships, to mitigate opposition to your efforts to build peace.

When you encounter interpersonal conflicts, whether you are directly involved or if you are a third party, take them as an opportunity to develop your capacity to manage conflict. Develop techniques to transform these relationships, to make opponents your allies, and to build strong, cohesive teams working together on issues of shared concern. Develop and practice listening and communication skills. Learn techniques to open constructive dialogue. Mediate a conflict. Find ways to build trust. Search for common ground. Create opportunities for forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation.

6. Transform community spaces; or use them for peace learning and action

Transforming community spaces is a unique, often overlooked way to build peace and justice. We often neglect how community spaces contribute to inequality and promote war culture. How are people divided in your city? Does your city have a history of segregating minority communities? Do some communities have better schools or health facilities? Who has access to parks and natural spaces? In which neighborhoods are the waste facilities, power plants, and factories? Where are the museums and cultural sites? What about public monuments? Do they glorify war ‘heroes’ or do they inspire peace?

Here are some ideas you can use to transform spaces in your community or use them for peace learning and action. Preserve, protect, and promote diverse cultural and historic sites. Make community spaces accessible, inclusive, and family-friendly. Reclaim parks, plazas, and walkways. Create shared spaces. Use community spaces for peace learning. Do a community art project. Remove monuments to war ‘heroes’ and bigots. Build monuments to peace heroes.

7. Transform structures tied to the dynamics of war, violence, injustice, and inequality, or withdraw resources and support for war.

Warfare is not possible without a high degree of organization and immense amounts of resources. If we are to abolish war, the structures and institutions of the State that create war abroad and state violence at home must be transformed. Money and resources that feed war must be removed. Likewise, inequality and injustice are a product of government institutions, public policies, and economic systems. To create a more just and equal society requires substantial structural and policy change that strikes to the core of how our societies operate.

Here are some ideas to transform the structures tied to the dynamics of war, violence, injustice, and inequality. Depending on your position and level of influence, your actions may range from voting, to advocacy, to direct policy/institution reform. Demilitarize defense and policing. Use military and police for peaceful purposes. Mobilize for incisive criminal justice reform. Divert funds for war and allocate them for education, health care, social services, diplomacy, peace, arts, and culture. Create laws that regulate the production and sale of weaponry at the national and international levels. Divest from companies, governments, individuals, and institutions that promote/profit from war. Resist paying taxes for war.

8. Disrupt narratives that justify war and rationalize inequality.

As children, we learn a history littered with stories glorifying war. We learn that violence is justified, even dignified. We are inspired by war heroes we read about in history books. Our religious leaders provide the military with their blessings. Political leaders craft lies that justify war, and media outlets provide an echo chamber. Likewise, these institutions produce countless rationalizations of inequality. Historic injustice and inequality are whitewashed in schools. We create the illusion that people become rich and successful only from their own volition. We obscure the vast inequalities that provide easy pathways to success for some while constructing barriers to advancement for others. Poor people are blamed for their condition.

These narratives must be disrupted. People must be educated about the reality of war and of systems that produce inequality. Here are some ideas for action. Transform the teaching of history in schools. Discredit war propaganda and myths that justify violence. Demystify threats. Promote an understanding that violence is not innate; war not inevitable. Expose motivations and deceptive tactics of corrupt leaders who rationalize violence. Deconstruct nationalist ideologies and the politics of division. Combat hate speech and humanize marginalized groups. Speak out against the misuse of religion for discriminatory purposes, especially within your own faith group.

9. Leverage the power of music, art, and culture for peace

Music, art, and culture can be powerful tools to make change. They can inspire us. They can unite people. They can heal. They can change hearts and minds. They can help us see things in different ways. There is infinite potential in art and music, and in the use of culture to make positive change. And with social media, messages spread fast, and can reach far and wide.

Here are just some ideas for leveraging the power of art and culture for peace and justice. Use music, performance, poetry, comedy, or storytelling to raise awareness of issues or imagine peaceful futures. Dance or craft for a cause. Build characters and storylines that break stereotypes. Use sports to bring people in conflict together. Celebrate days of peace, human rights, and social justice. Involve cultural icons in peace actions. Join or create public prayer, meditation, or vigils for peace. Create peace imagery or re-imagine symbols. Create or use rituals to promote peace and tolerance. And don’t forget to amplify your message on social media.

10. Create (or support) structures for peace and justice

When so much of our time is spent struggling to change systemic problems, sometimes the best approach we can take is to create structures for peace (or support existing ones). This can be refreshing because it shifts the focus from the problem to the solution. It creates new potential for peace because a structure for peace by its nature is creating something new. It is not chasing the problem. It is exploring new solutions.

There are many types of groups or structures that you can create or support. Here are some ideas. Start or support a community organization, non-profit, or social enterprise working on issues important to you. Create or support mechanisms to report, prevent, or respond to violence. Support the creation (or existing work) of government departments dedicated to promoting peace and justice. Create or join platforms, forums, or networks for peace. Launch a podcast, a blog, a vlog, or other online platforms for peace, or specific to an issue that is important for you.

I hope these ideas have been helpful for you. For more ideas about practical actions you can take to build peace in the world around you, download my free handout 198 Actions for Peace here .

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How Can Trusting in God Fill Us with "All Joy and Peace"?

In life we like to measure things. Measurements tell you how tall, how long, or how wide something is. They also tell you how well you are doing in a certain area. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, the scale measures how well you are doing (hopefully I didn’t just discourage you). As you walk with Jesus, there is one measure that instantly reveals how your walk with him is going. That measure is trust. Consider this verse in Romans:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” ( Romans 15:13 ).

This verse tells us that trusting God fills you with all joy and peace, so the question that matters right now is how are you doing in trusting God today? This is your measuring stick, and as you will soon see, it is the catalyst that sets everything in motion.

What Does This Verse Mean?

This verse is about a cause that produces an effect. The one word that drives everything else in this verse is trust. According to the Oxford Dictionary, trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. When you are trusting God, you are firmly believing in his ability to do what he said he would do.

As you trust God, he responds. In this case, God responds by filling you with joy and peace and causing you to overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. The real confidence we have in this verse is knowing that your trust in God does not go unnoticed.

When I was growing up, if you put out your hand to greet someone or lifted it up for a high five and the other person didn’t respond we use to say “hey, why are you leaving me hanging.” When God sees you are trusting in him, he will act on your behalf, and he will not leave you hanging.

How Would Trusting God Fill Us with Joy and Peace?

There is really one reason why trusting God fills us with joy and peace. That reason is confidence. I found this definition of joy by an author named  Rimi ,

“…Joy is a feeling of good pleasure and happiness that is dependent on who Jesus is, rather than on who we are or what is happening around us. Joy comes from the Holy Spirit, abiding in God’s presence and from hope in His word.”

Whenever you are trusting God, it means you are focusing on him instead of what is happening around you. Matthew 14 records the story of Peter walking on the water. The disciples were in a boat that was being rocked by waves. They saw Jesus approaching the boat in the middle of the sea and they were afraid (I’m sure I would have been too). Peter told Jesus, if that is you then tell me to come out of the boat and walk on the water. It was Jesus, and Peter boldly got out the boat and started walking. He was trusting Jesus, even though the waves were raging all around him.

The Bible doesn’t record this, but I can imagine for the brief moments Peter was walking on water there was probably a sense of amazement and joy that sprung up in his heart. He was probably saying wow I can do this. He was able to accomplish this because he was focusing on Jesus and trusting him.

However, that didn’t last because he took his eyes off Jesus, panic set in, and immediately he began to sink. The same holds true for you and me. Regardless of what storms you are facing, when you are focused on Jesus there is a sense of happiness that springs in your spirit. This comes despite what is happening around you because your confidence is in Jesus, and you know he is going to come through.

How Trusting in God Fills Us with Peace

The second byproduct of trust is peace. Let me remind you of this well-known verse in Philippians.

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” ( Philippians 4:6-7 ).

One way you demonstrate your trust in God is through prayer. When you pray and trust God, there is an exchange that occurs. You take your fears, worries, and anxieties and give those to God, and in return he replaces that anxiety with his peace. This exchange is only possible when you trust God. Remember trust sets a wheel in motion and when God sees you are trusting him, he rewards that trust with joy and peace.

We often think peace means the absence of chaos or trouble, but on the contrary, peace is calm that comes right in the middle of chaos. This type of peace is only possible when you place your confidence in a God who is reliable and who will not leave you hanging.

What Would It Look Like for Us to "Overflow" with Hope?

Hope is an anticipation and expectation that God is going to show up and help you in your situation. The verse in Romans mentions overflowing with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. To overflow means you have so much there is not enough capacity to store it all in one place. Isn’t it just like God that he wouldn’t just give you a trickle but an overflow?

Here is why the overflow is important. There is enough for you, and there is enough for someone else. The reason God causes overflow in your life is so you can share it with others. When you have an overflow of anything, you can be a blessing to someone else. This holds true of overflowing with hope as well. 

When you go to a restaurant to eat, you usually order a beverage with your meal. My go to is a glass of water with lemon because I like to live on the edge. When the server for your table comes around, they check to see how much is left in your cup. If the cup is empty or close to empty, they offer you a refill. The reason they can do this is because they have so much supply, they can refill your cup when it is running low. This is what you can do when you overflow with hope.

Our lives can often be like a cup. Sometimes those cups are full and sometimes they are low or empty. Right now, there are people all around you who are filled with hope and some who are running out or empty. When you are overflowing with hope, you can encourage those around you whose cups might be empty. The reason their hope fades is because their trust in God is beginning to wane. Because trust is a catalyst, when that begins to fade, the joy, peace, and hope go right along with it. The way you encourage them is to help them refocus and begin trusting God again. Since trusting in God fills us with all joy and peace, then we need to help people rebuild their trust. When this happens, they can once again overflow with hope.

3 Ways to Rebuild Trust in God

There are three key elements to building or rebuilding trust in God. These elements are not foreign, we just have to put them into practice. Those ways are the word , worship , and prayer .

• The word builds your faith in who God is and the promises he has made.
• Worships builds your perspective of who God is, and as he gets bigger the challenge you are facing gets smaller.
• Prayer demonstrates your trust as you take your situation and place it in his hands. As we saw before, when you make this exchange God gives you his peace.

Often, I have recognized in my life when I am anxious and not filled with joy and peace, it means one of these things is missing, which affects my ability to trust God. It will do the same in your life too. Since trusting God fills us with all joy and peace, then we need to do everything we can to keep building and rebuilding that trust.

Trusting God through life is not always going to be easy. There will be moments when your trust is high and you will see joy, peace, and hope present. There will be other times when trust is low, and you will discover worry, fear, and anxiety present. Should you find yourself in this place, go back and do the things that build trust. Go back to the word, back to worship, and back to prayer. As you do this, your trust in the God who will not leave you hanging grows and this sets everything else in motion. This is how trusting God can fill you with all joy and peace.

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Book excerpt: "The Fire Next Time" by James Baldwin

Updated on: August 10, 2024 / 9:38 AM EDT / CBS News

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Writer, poet and activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) was one of the leading literary voices of the civil rights movement. Through a powerful oeuvre of novels, plays and essays, he explored issues of race, class, politics and sexual identity during one of America's most turbulent periods.

Baldwin's essay "My Dungeon Shook," written in the form of a letter to his young nephew, was first published in The Progressive in 1962; the following year a revised version was included in "The Fire Next Time"  (now included in a new collection from Everyman's Library). The letter is a powerful treatise on the state of racism in America - how it affects Black people whose very dignity is circumscribed by social constructs, as well as whites undermined by their lack of understanding and their feelings of fear. It richly illustrates the ironies of how race relations can dampen the humanity of all involved.

Read the essay below, and don't miss Kelefa Sanneh's report on the centenary of James Baldwin on "CBS Sunday Morning" August 11!

"The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work" by James Baldwin

"My Dungeon Shook"

Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation

Dear James:

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody—with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendency towards holiness: you really are of another era, part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruction." You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a n----- . I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it.

I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

Now, my dear namesake, these innocent and well-meaning people, your countrymen, have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. (I hear the chorus of the innocents screaming, "No! This is not true! How bitter you are!"—but I am writing this letter to you, to try to tell you something about how to handle them , for most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there. Your countrymen were not there, and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isn't hard to find. Your countrymen don't know that she exists, either, though she has been working for them all their lives.)

Well, you were born, here you came, something like fifteen years ago; and though your father and mother and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavyhearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me—you were a big baby, I was not—here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children.

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason . The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them . And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed.

Your uncle, James

       From "The First Next Time" by James Baldwin. Reprinted by arrangement with Modern Library, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 1962, 1963 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed 1990, 1991 by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart. 

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For more info:

• "The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name in the Street; The Devil Finds Work" by James Baldwin (Everyman's Library), in Hardcover, available via Amazon , Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
• JamesBaldwinBooks.com (Penguin Random House)

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Josh Shapiro once wrote that peace ‘will never come’ to the Middle East. He says his views have changed over 30 years.

Shapiro is considered to be on the shortlist to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, and his views on the conflict in the Middle East have come under a microscope.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro wrote in his college newspaper in 1993 that peace “will never come” to the Middle East and expressed skepticism about the viability of a two-state solution, describing Palestinians as “too battle-minded” to coexist with Israel.

Those decades-old views stand in contrast to Shapiro’s positions today — he supports a two-state solution in the region — as he’s being vetted to be the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

In the opinion article, titled “Peace not possible,” Shapiro, then a 20-year-old student at the University of Rochester, argued that a negotiated accord between Israeli and Palestinian leaders would not end conflict in the region, writing: “Using history as precedent, peace between Arabs and Israelis is virtually impossible and will never come.”

He described the Arab world as fractious, and wrote that the then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was in danger of being assassinated “by his fellow belligerent Arabs.”

“Palestinians will not coexist peacefully,” Shapiro wrote. “They do not have the capabilities to establish their own homeland and make it successful even with the aid of Israel and the United States. They are too battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.”

The op-ed was published in the Campus Times , the student newspaper at the university where Shapiro was once the student body president. An Inquirer reporter accessed the article this week in the newspaper’s archives, which are maintained by the school’s library system.

The governor is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate — a decision she is expected to make in the coming days — and if elected Shapiro would be the nation’s first Jewish vice president.

Manuel Bonder, a spokesperson for Shapiro, said in a statement that the governor’s position has changed over the last three decades and noted his support for a two-state solution.

“Governor Shapiro has built close, meaningful, informative relationships with many Muslim-American, Arab-American, Palestinian Christian, and Jewish community leaders all across Pennsylvania,” Bonder said. “The governor greatly values their perspectives and the experiences he has learned from over the years — and as a result, as with many issues, his views on the Middle East have evolved into the position he holds today.”

In remarks to reporters Friday, Shapiro reiterated that the column does not represent his beliefs today.

“I was 20,” he said at an unrelated news conference in Delaware County . “I have said for years, years before October 7, that I favor a two-state solution — Israelis and Palestinians living peacefully side-by-side, being able to determine their own futures and their own destiny.”

» READ MORE: Would Josh Shapiro’s stances on Israel help or hurt Kamala Harris’ ticket?

As Shapiro has emerged as one of the front-runners for the vice presidential nomination, some pro-Palestine groups have opposed him, citing his views on the war in Gaza. He has been a steadfast supporter of Israel , condemning protests in December outside an Israeli-owned falafel restaurant as antisemitic and calling for police in May to end a protest encampment at the University of Pennsylvania .

Shapiro has also been deeply critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has described as “a dangerous and destructive force” and “one of the worst leaders of all time.” In remarks to reporters last week, he said widespread suffering in Gaza is unacceptable, and has advocated for a two-state solution.

“I’m someone who has always been hopeful that peace would come to the Middle East,” Shapiro said.

Several prominent Democrats have in recent days denounced some of the opposition to Shapiro as antisemitic. The governor’s stances on the conflict are generally in line with those of Harris and with other Democrats in contention for the vice presidential nomination.

“Singling him out, or applying a double standard to him over the war in Gaza, is antisemitic and wrong,” U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), a candidate for U.S. Senate who is Jewish.

Shapiro wrote the college newspaper op-ed in September 1993, days after the first Oslo Accord was signed and outlined a potential pathway to end conflict in the region. His piece came just after the famous handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, on the White House lawn as President Bill Clinton looked on.

In the article, Shapiro said Arafat was “an egotistical, power-hungry tyrant who is in danger of being assassinated by his fellow belligerent Arabs because he does not represent the majority opinion.”

He continued, writing that “the only way a ‘peace plan’ will be successful is if the Palestinians do not ruin it.”

“I find it impractical to believe that factions of Arabs can miraculously unite in peace as Palestinians, so they can coexist with Israel,” he wrote.

Shapiro concluded, writing, “Despite my skepticism as a Jew and a past volunteer in the Israeli army, I strongly hope and pray that this ‘peace plan’ will be successful. History is not made by diplomatic handshakes between two political leaders but rather when two age-old foes can have the courage to stop hating, begin healing and exist in peace and tranquility.”

Bonder, Shapiro’s spokesperson, said Shapiro never engaged in military activities. He said Shapiro completed a program in high school that included a variety of service projects in Israel, including on an Israeli army base. He also worked on a farm and at a fishery in a kibbutz, Bonder said.

Khalil Jahshan, executive director of The Arab Center Washington D.C., a nonpartisan think tank, said Shapiro’s views expressed in the article would have been considered “right wing” at the time, and that the prevailing sentiment then was excitement about the possibility of a two-state solution.

He said the language used “smacks of intolerance and a bit of racism.”

“I don’t believe in litmus tests,” Jahshan said, acknowledging that the article is three decades old. “But at the same time, it is his own words ... His name is on it. He has to assume responsibility for it. If he is indeed, as everybody knows, espousing different ideas, then it’s his responsibility to explain that.”

The Oslo Accords, reached after years of armed conflict, were deeply controversial through the nineties — both in the Middle East and the United States — and did not bring lasting peace.

The first accord was a “declaration of principles” that was secretly negotiated in Norway and outlined a path to a two-state solution. Under the terms of the mutual recognition agreement, Arafat renounced terrorism and violence against Israel, and Rabin pledged to initiate a withdrawal from Gaza and part of the West Bank.

Clinton at the time hailed the accord as historic, thanking Rabin and Arafat for their “tenacity and vision” and vowing in a speech that the United States would assist “in marshaling the resources necessary to implement the difficult details that will make real the principles to which you commit yourselves today.”

Polls conducted in 1993 showed a majority of Jewish Americans were hopeful at the time that the accord would lead to an end to conflict in the region, but were still skeptical.

More than 8 in 10 respondents to an American Jewish Committee survey said they supported the Israeli government’s handling of the secret negotiations, and 57% supported establishing a Palestinian state. Only a third thought the PLO could be relied on to “refrain from terrorist attacks against Israel.”

The full op-ed can be found here.

Staff writer Gillian McGoldrick contributed to this article.

This story was updated to include a comment from Shapiro’s spokesperson regarding his volunteering work on an Israeli army base.

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With a six-figure, multi-year grant from The Colorado Trust, Regis University will deepen its service to Spanish-speaking children and families

• August 07, 2024

Last month, Regis University was among 83 entities awarded a multi-year grant from The Colorado Trust, one of the state’s largest foundations and a long-time Regis advocate. Regis will receive more than $328,000 to support training for five bilingual play therapists serving the Spanish-speaking immigrant community in Metro Denver. With this support, students in Regis’ Master of Arts in Counseling Program will provide, under the guidance and supervision of faculty, no-cost play and family therapy sessions to migrant children and their families.   By addressing the wellness of children and their families, we care for the whole person, honoring their humanity and right to live healthy, balanced lives. As an example of how we live our mission and put our Jesuit Catholic values into action, the program reaffirms our commitment as a Hispanic Serving Institution by incorporating bilingual programming into our curriculum and by welcoming Spanish-speaking newcomers to Colorado into the Regis community. Through inclusive play and connection, we invite healing and joy.  We are deeply grateful that The Colorado Trust recognizes the value of this work, which aims to increase and improve access to quality mental and behavioral health care for those who face barriers to living long and healthy lives. The Colorado Trust’s mission resonates deeply with our own. In its new strategic plan, the Trust is focused on enhancing access to food, housing, and mental and behavioral health, particularly among communities that have “faced disruptions resulting from economic downturns, social turbulence, public health crises, or a lack of coherent or effective public policy,” as described in the grant announcement. Regis was one of 600 nonprofit organizations to apply for the Trust’s “Community Resilience” grants. Our selection is a testament to our outstanding faculty and staff and the quality and impact of our academic programs. It also highlights the breadth and depth of hundreds of nonprofit organizations working to serve and support the people in Colorado. We are truly blessed to work among so many dedicated individuals who engage in helping those in need. Our thanks to The Colorado Trust, and to the incredible students, faculty and staff who will engage with our community and serve the newest members of our extended Regis family.

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Has the Long Friendship of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett Reached Its Final Act?

Growing tensions between the two billionaires, over issues both substantive and stylistic, have roiled the world of philanthropy.

By Anupreeta Das

Anupreeta Das is the author of the forthcoming book “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King,” from which this article is adapted.

In the summer of 1991, Mary Gates, the mother of the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, convinced her workaholic 35-year-old son to spend the July 4 holiday at Hood Canal, a scenic, outdoorsy location about two hours from Seattle that had long been the family getaway.

The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, was among the guests. When Mrs. Gates tried to introduce her son to Mr. Buffett, however, he brushed her off, saying that he didn’t want to meet a “stockbroker.”

But the two men hit it off immediately. Settling into a patterned couch, Mr. Buffett, dressed in a red polo shirt and dark trousers, his left foot propped up against the coffee table, and Mr. Gates in a tennis outfit — shorts and a white shirt, his white socks coming up to mid-calf, his mop of hair tousled — talked for 11 hours straight. The other guests had to pull them apart. Mr. Gates was surprised by the penetrating questions Mr. Buffett directed at him about the software business, and found himself warming to the avuncular Midwestern billionaire.

The two have been close friends ever since. Once, recounting the story of their meeting to students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Mr. Gates called it an “unbelievable friendship.” Mr. Buffett quipped, “The moral of that is, listen to your mother.”

Theirs has been an unusual friendship. Mr. Buffett is folksy and outgoing, and never passes up an opportunity to crack a joke. He likes to speak in aphorisms. He enjoys breaking down complex investing principles into simple nuggets that anyone could understand. When he meets new people, Mr. Buffett is genuinely curious about their backgrounds. He asks them questions and listens intently, eyebrows furrowed, to the answers. Banter comes to him easily.

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Hamas seeks Iran-friendly leader to help post-war recovery

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• Deliberations under way in Hamas succession, official says
• Meshaal chances dimmed by past friction with Iran, its allies
• Good ties with Tehran put top negotiator Hayya in frame

HAYYA SAYS HAMAS LEADERSHIP UNITED

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A senior correspondent with nearly 25 years’ experience covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including several wars and the signing of the first historic peace accord between the two sides.

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