Think Peace - Part 1

Peace - a way of choosing life

The first of six articles exploring the meaning of peace.

Waking up

On one side the Garden, on one side the Flame.

Terry Callier, 'Lazarus Man'

In 1995, I was one of five thousand people taking part in a demonstration near Glasgow against the new M77 motorway, which was cutting through ancient woodland. The march from the city centre lasted all day, and it was dusk when we finally reached a place where the motorway and the threatened forest met. This place was on a hill that afforded a view of miles around.

On one side, the motorway snaked towards us from the distant horizon. Its incision into the forest seemed to reflect spiritual blindness and indifference to the world. At issue was not only the physical harm to the life of the forest, although that was bad enough; it was also the apparent thoughtlessness behind it. I felt that our protest was as much about the sprawling thoughtlessness behind the road as it was about the road itself.

Looking to the other side, the protesters, who had been living in the forest for months in tree houses and the like, could be seen clambering over the trees. They were clearly passionate about the life of the forest and all that it meant for them, seeming to stand in alliance with it. Yet their stand meant more than defending the forest from destruction, important though this was. It seemed that with their act of defiance they were standing up for life itself and I felt challenged to do the same.

Between the abundant life of the forest and the empty thoughtlessness of the unnecessary road, I felt that on one side was life, and on the other death, and that I was pressed to choose between them. These stark sentiments seem simplistic now, but they have a resonant truth nonetheless: that we stand within our peculiarly human drama, in which a precarious tension between the abundance of life on the one hand, and the suffering of a hollow existence on the other, touches everything we are and do. Life itself is at stake, and whether we are delivered or damned hangs on the choices that we make every day.

So, a fundamental question is, how will we live? A faith-based commitment to peace, as this series of articles will suggest, is a way of answering this question affirmatively - choosing life.

The world we are

The abundance of existence exhausts wonder, let alone understanding. Life - in its mystery and profuse diversity - seems to affirm itself in an otherwise barren universe. The character of the human species in particular - the peculiar fact of the personal - is more subtle and wondrous still. The kaleidoscopic character of the personal - expressed in our creativity, love, our wealth of thoughts and feelings, and abiding eternally and in every culture - embodies life's affirmation in what is surely the deepest and happiest of mysteries, inviting humility, wonder and love.

Yet the suffering that afflicts our world also eludes even the most attentive efforts to comprehend it. Its forms are too many; its causes run too deep. Perhaps most mysterious of all is that we have inflicted most suffering on ourselves or on one another through the ways we lead our lives and govern our societies. This 'mystery of iniquity', as William Dewsbury called it, is just as staggering and just as great a cause for wonder as life's unfathomable abundance.

Whatever its causes, the reality of our world is truly twofold, in which the abundant wholeness of life stands in tension with the fragmentation and oppression of suffering and death. Since these forces have shaped our world into what it is today, it is worth meditating, in turn, on the forms fragmentation and suffering, as well as those of the flourishing vitality that also characterise our world.

Broken and breaking

Taken as a whole, history has been tempestuously violent. Over 100 million people were killed in violent conflict in the last century, with hundreds of millions more maimed and billions bereaved and severely traumatised. At the global level, chronic insecurity and violence are now affecting us all, one way or another. The future shows no signs of change in the short-term, as a culture that lauds violence as redemptive pervades almost every corner of the world.

Besides violent conflict and entwined with it, the structural violence of global poverty is a form of systemic genocide. We are complicit in this every time we indulge in the convenience that the Western world is a gated community feeding from the wilderness of poverty around it. Globally, the divide between rich and poor is widening, not least because transnational corporations and many millions of world citizens crave an excess of material resources, relatively careless of the billions of people whose basic needs are going unmet. This year, the violence of poverty will kill 11 million children - one every three seconds - who will perish from preventable causes mostly related to malnutrition.

A third kind of global violence is our desecration of the natural environment and the global climate system in particular. Citizens and governments alike have mostly treated climate change as an economic and political inconvenience, rather than the humanitarian and ecological emergency that it is. The loss of topsoil, biodiversity and natural resources are other dimensions of the environmental crisis that are going largely unchecked.

These three forms of global violence are driving wedges between the peoples of the world with the risk of cataclysmic, even apocalyptic results.

The same problems are reflected at national and local levels, too. Even richer countries like our own are experiencing social division and exclusion (or often trying not to). The UK is the fourth richest nation in the world, yet 100,000 families are homeless.

At a local level, we now appear to feel more alienated from our neighbour, let alone the stranger. The social integrity of communities and families seems to have been breaking down across generations. Shopping malls the size of cathedrals have become the focal points of municipal life, while the financial interests that dominate popular culture have degraded our cultural fabric.

These are only some of the forms of fragmentation and oppression that characterise our world. However, while this bleak perspective is valid, a true picture of society would not be a hopeless one. To cast it as such would be to invite despair and may reinforce the indifference and alienation underlying the problems. We often find it easier to see what is going wrong than what is going right, especially if this helps us to pursue some agenda of our own.

Whole and healing

Besides our problems, there are many signs of sustained progress towards a more abundant, more just society. At the global level, if the United Nations had not been providing humanitarian aid, supporting sustainable development, facilitating international discussion and agreement and administrating international law over a period of over 50 years now, the world would be in far worse shape than it is. Alongside the UN, thousands of local and international activists, academics and some national governments are taking seriously problems like climate change, the proliferation of arms and global poverty, and are working hard to get on top of them. Citizens worldwide are probably more aware than ever before of global issues such as physical security, environmental sustainability and economic citizenship. New thinking is emerging about preventing violent conflict, building sustainable global security, reforming world trade rules, conserving natural resources and protecting biodiversity. Global protests against war over Iraq in 2003 show just how hard it can be for our governments to justify their wars to the people, whereas 200 years ago, European leaders could send working people off to war with impunity and on little more than a whim. Partly thanks to the global communications revolution, now is also a time of widespread inter-cultural encounters and learning, and even tensions that are often productive rather than destructive. The 'global citizen' is emerging. These trends are causes for hope that redemption is a present reality in process that invites us to join it.

At a national level in a society such as Britain's, signs of hope include a greater awareness of our equality as human beings, each in relation to another, and the sanctity of each person. Consider that in the last 200 years, we have abolished slavery and capital punishment and established equal voting rights for men and women. We have established the right, at least in principle, of education, health and social security for all, and have explicitly recognised a raft of civil liberties, such as the right to worship, freedom of conscience and the right to protest. Many activities that we now recognise as rights were capital offences two centuries ago. Signs of progress also include the recent introduction of the minimum wage, while persistent challenges to many forms of social discrimination are making some progress. We also appear more sensitive to our impact on our ecological context than we used to be. Although our negative impact on the environment has grown exponentially, the environmental, animal rights and animal welfare movements have also grown to challenge effectively our presumption of the right to dominate the natural world. In the cultural sphere, our passions for festivals, carnivals, learning, religious traditions, literature and the arts all flourish, often in ways that defy conditions of material and spiritual poverty.

Just as examples of a fragmented world abound, so examples of where we are flourishing in wholeness together are also real and enduring. They will grow if they matter to us enough, and we will grow with them.

It is dizzying to mind and heart that abject suffering and abundant joy co-exist but they do, and both form the context for an active commitment to peace. The powers of life and death are more subtly blended than I have suggested here and are not always easy to separate from one another. Even so, here we stand within and amongst them, 'on one side the Garden; on one side the Flame', and we really do face a choice between them. We choose the flourishing abundance and wholeness of life - relational integrity and health - and our world reflects that. We choose the way of deeper division and fragmentation - pathological breakdown of relationships - and the world reflects that. We choose both, and the world looks the way it does today, with everything precariously in the balance.

Peace

'Peace', as the word we use to translate the Arabic salaam or Hebrew shalom, means wholeness and integrity - personally, socially and between communities and nations. [foot note1] In the Abrahamic traditions, peace is the genuine goal of humanity and God's will for the world. As a political goal, peace means to live in larger freedom in relation to one another such that a genuine, inclusive prosperity is possible. As a commitment, peace means to resist the disintegration of our lives and world and support what redeems, heals and makes the world and us whole.

This article explores how a commitment to peace might begin with a kind of jolt to our existence, in which we are shaken awake to what it is to be human and alive and responding to the world as it really is. The second article explores the possible religious significance of this, while subsequent pieces work through these ideas in terms of personal and social healing, and our fundamentally social existence. The sixth and final article applies some of these ideas to an understanding of peace as a political concern and commitment.

Shaken up

In the experience of many activists and religious people, the reasonableness of peace is not an adequate foundation for a life commitment to it. Rather, such commitment consists primarily in a form of inspiration, in which the nature of our existence becomes personally important to us. Commonly, this inspiration results from encounters with violence and injustice or simply a desire to affirm the blessing of life and its integrity. Either way, a commitment to peace emerges as one part of a comprehensive transformation of the individual and their community, in which our relationship with the universe slowly changes. As William Penn described the earliest Quakers:

They were changed men [sic] themselves before they went about to change others. Their hearts were rent as well as their garments; and they knew the power and work of God upon them. [footnote 2]

My short account of the road protest above is not unusual. Many activists and religious people have similar stories to tell of feeling jolted to the core by the way the world is, and challenged to question our attitude to where we stand in relation to it. At other times, the jolts may be more everyday, less profound, but nonetheless real and affecting. Watching the television news, listening to music, or talking with others - any moment might make a claim upon our lives, asking us to listen, pay attention and respond.

The theologian Andrew Shanks believes that existential jolts such as these have great, perhaps central, religious and political significance. He describes individuals and communities who respond to these jolts as the 'shaken', and writes that our peace, environmental and human rights movements emerge from a shared experience of 'shakenness'. [footnote 3] For example, we might attribute the inspiration for the original Live Aid concert to shakenness in response to the famine in Ethiopia. Similarly, people from all over the world have felt shaken (and prompted to act) as we have witnessed the appalling suffering caused by the Asian tsunami in 2004.

The Czech philosopher Jan Patochka was the first to coin the term 'shaken' in this political sense, Shanks says, to describe the Charter 77 movement for democratic freedom. Significantly, the shared experience of 'shakenness' was a core condition of the movement's formation.

According to Shanks, the existential importance of 'shakenness' is that the experience orientates our lives in a specific direction: away from living 'within a lie' and towards living 'within the truth', whatever we might experience it to be. [footnote 4] As the unquestioned prejudices of our cultural condition are brought into relief and challenged, it feels progressively more inauthentic to live within the lie that many of our social norms represent. The experience of being shaken, in this sense, is clearly one of something happening to us; of being spiritually and politically woken up by a power of truth that we encounter often unexpectedly. This leaves a mark on the shaken that can move and transform them - and the world - towards redemption and salvation.

John Lynes' description of how his peace commitment was deepened through experience illustrates Shanks' point well, I believe, and uses similar language:

What shook me was a map of the world. In black were the principal arms exporting nations - in red were the areas where major wars had been fought since 1945. The black and the red areas did not overlap. This was my road to Damascus. Then and there I saw where my choice lay; with the Crucified or with the crucifiers. [footnote 5]

In a similar vein, Helen Steven told a 1984 court hearing why she had entered the nuclear weapons base at Faslane in Scotland. Like John, she also explained her action in terms of a choice between two opposing realities, in this case characterised as love on the one hand and extinction on the other:

This beautiful world in all its infinite wonder is threatened with extinction. That to me is blasphemy … out of love, love of my goddaughter, love of my world, I had to act.[footnote 6]

Both writers use religious language to frame their experiences and reflect their meaning. For Helen Steven, to threaten extinction is not only wrong, but defiance of God; for John Lynes, to resist the arms trade is to recall and reflect Jesus Christ's solidarity with humanity.

The Quakers' founder George Fox was also shaken by the cultural, political and religious upheaval of his time, as his Journal shows. In 1647, he wrote about his choice between two opposing realities making a claim on his life. Through the encounter with this twofold truth, he became opened to the love of God:

All creation gave unto me another smell … I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. And in that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings. [footnote 7]

The transformation of 'the shaken'

I think that these stories illustrate 'shakenness', to use Shanks' term, in that the writers are responding to their experiences of fragmentation - personal, social, ecological. In their ways, the stories tell of the disturbing effect of these experiences on the writers' lives and how they prompted practical responses that might redeem, heal and make whole - that is, to bring peace, as shalom. As such, the stories illustrate how a commitment to peace might be born out of 'shakenness' and develop in virtue of it. In this light, it is worth exploring the transforming effect of 'shakenness' a little further.

First, each writer is trying to live 'within the truth' - that is, to live authentically. In other words, all the stories appear to share a guiding interest in how, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt expresses it, we might become and remain fully alive as individuals and as a society. [footnote 8] In the words of the writers, the authentic option is to stand with the Crucified, not with the crucifiers; with love, not extinction; with life, not death. In their view, it seems that shalom, as the wholeness and integrity of existence, is a necessary goal of the authentic life and society. The stories seem to support the view that a core condition of a commitment to peace is a guiding interest in living authentically.

Second, within the meaning of authentic living, the writers are concerned with being in right relationship with the world. Each insists upon a relation with others that affirms the dignity of all people and the living world in general. In other words, an authentic life is concerned with authentic relationships, which are mutual and equal, rather than domination-centred. Hence, the authentic life is one that stands in right relation to others, and as this series of articles will argue, this is the primary concern of peace.

Third, if the authentic life means standing in right relation to others, and if this relation is an affirmative one, then a witness to peace means the peace of us all, rather than the individual alone. Hence, to be in right relation with the world is to move beyond the experience of 'I matter alone' to that of 'I matter, you matter, and we matter together'. In other words, it involves a loyalty that embraces the greater body of life to which we belong, including our family, community, nation, humanity and ecosphere. We can think of a peace commitment, therefore, as an existential loyalty. What this means is that a person committed to peace is loyal to the interests of their own existence, to that of their immediate group, to their culture, to humanity and, if we are prepared to take the idea so far, to the living world in general, and perhaps to the integrity of existence itself. Hence, a commitment to peace expresses an existential loyalty to one another that is held by people trying to live authentic lives.

Fourth, although this commitment certainly involves personal sacrifices, our own well-being as individuals is important within the meaning of peace. I suggest that peace involves holding our personal interests in a 'creative tension' with those of wider society. Whilst we share responsibility for one another, no-one has more responsibility for our own well-being than ourselves. There is nothing in Jesus' saying 'Love your neighbour as yourself' that tells us to love our neighbour instead of ourselves. And as Meister Eckhart observes, love of one's self and love of others are inescapably mutual:

If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally. [footnote 9]

Peace - a journey from experience to commitment

To draw these themes together, I am suggesting that encountering the world as it really is results in 'shakenness', as Andrew Shanks describes it. That is, the experience of standing between 'the Garden and the Flame' is inwardly disturbing, and bears upon the meaning of our existence. In particular, it inspires a desire to live more authentically, especially in the ways we relate to ourselves and to others. To become more authentic is to become more genuinely and deeply loyal to ourselves, to one another, and to the body of life to which we belong. As such, it involves valuing the wholeness and integrity of us all, flourishing in relation to one another - in other words, it involves valuing peace, as shalom. To value peace is to be changed by it and to express it in the way we live.

The peace journey is thus one that moves from personal experience through personal transformation to political commitment (and from the common experience of a community to shared commitment). The Quaker term testimony refers to this journey from experience to commitment; it is when our lives genuinely testify to the power of love and truth within and among us.

What, then, would a testimony to shalom value and involve?

Peace - valuing diversity

A vital ingredient of shalom, as 'wholeness', is the diversity of what constitutes it. At a social level, for example, the plurality of our national and ethnic cultures and religious traditions is to be affirmed within the meaning of peace. As such, a diverse church is a positive; as is the diversity of the world's religious traditions. Similarly, a multicultural society that respects the dignity of each cultural group is also a positive within the meaning of shalom.

For example, as a specific religious community, the dignity and integrity of the Quaker movement are important in their own right. It is important that Quakers are distinct from other groups in order to make a contribution of unique value to the wider church and society. This has nothing to do with being better than others; there is more than one way to live in the truth and each tradition has something to teach and learn. Other groups have their unique contribution to make, too, and the whole is served well when Quakers are like Quakers, Catholics like Catholics and so on.

Peace - valuing unity

Within the meaning of shalom, diversity goes hand-in-hand with unity. If we do not affirm the unity of persons and peoples - a unity in which we are all radically equal with one another - we are likely to assert our own selves antagonistically in relation to others. By contrast, within a context of unity it is possible to celebrate one's own nationality, for example, while loving another country and its people.
Physical violence reflects a failure to affirm the unity of persons, for it always involves placing the interests of one person or group above those of another. In war, for example, the lives of our own nationals are always considered more valuable than others - a fact that undermines humanitarian justifications for war.

Peace - unity with diversity

As John Donne famously observed, we do well to uphold the dignity of the individual or individual group along with the integrity of the greater whole of life - our unity and our diversity.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. [footnote 10]

In this spirit, being loyal to ourselves, to one another, and to the wider body of life to which we belong - that is, being committed to shalom - involves holding our own interests in a creative tension with those of others.

Peace - true social instrumentality

If loyalty to ourselves and to the wider body of life to which we belong are both important within the meaning of peace, then we cannot merely think of ourselves as individual agents in society, in which we consider only our own interests to be important in isolation from others. Rather, the broader scope of our loyalty will lead us into relating to others in ways that are instrumental in the service of wider society. For example, when the third violinist plays her line, she is not only playing for herself but also helping to fulfil the whole orchestra's purpose and so she is instrumental of the group to which she belongs.

Similarly, those who protect the habitats of endangered species are instrumental in the service of the ecosphere. Taxation in general offers another example of social instrumentality, despite its shortcomings as a system, for it allows a portion of the fruits of each individual's labour to become a common vehicle for the social good. We are more socially instrumental every day than we often care to realise.

Insofar as a commitment to peace is a service to the wider body of life to which we belong, then it is socially instrumental.

However, if we emphasise social instrumentality (or ecological instrumentality) to the detriment of the individual as agent, then the creative tension between the individual and society is lost and shalom is absent. In the extreme, this failure has been reflected in stifling totalitarian regimes such as Stalinist Russia and, in many ways, Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In these societies, the government sought to define the worth of an individual almost entirely in terms of their service to society, and the dignity of the individual as a free agent was barely recognised as such. This is a form of violence, and one of the telling failures of Stalin's and Saddam's leadership is that they exempted themselves from their own regimes.

The converse failure is to emphasise the dignity of individual agency at the expense of our social and ecological instrumentality, such that the wants and needs of the individual are privileged to the detriment of the group or society. In the extreme, this invites the 'nasty, brutish and short' Hobbesian nightmare, in which a rampant, dog-eat-dog individualism is the force that shapes society. The ideology of Thatcherism affirmed the individual as the primary, or even only, political object, for example. This is a moral failure because whilst the liberty of the individual is a fundamental good, it is a form of violence to society to dilute the responsibility on all of us to serve and respect one another.

In conclusion, peace affirms both our responsibility to be socially instrumental and our rights as individual agents - that is, it values what unifies us in community and what makes each of us unique. Together, the moral failures involved in totalitarianism and liberal capitalism teach that society can only flourish if we value and express the needs and desires of the group and those of the individual - each in creative tension with the other.

Church and peace

We might think of the foundation of 'church', if we broadly understand this as 'people of God', as those people who are drawn together through shared life choices in the service of a transcendent life-giving power. To reiterate Shanks' point, true church is the solidarity of those who are shaken into turning from 'life within a lie' towards a journey of 'life within the truth'. Church is formed when individuals inspired to choose life, in the sense described here, enter or deepen their relations with like-minded others, so forming communities that are oriented likewise. These communities are conducive for the individuals within them to continue to embody further their life choices and for the community itself to grow in the same way. The church is therefore a natural engine of peace and peacebuilding, as Sandra Cronk observes from a Quaker perspective:

Those who respond to the movement of Christ's spirit in their lives are drawn together into a community of caring, sharing and proclamation. The community is the church. One of its most important functions is that of a school for peacemakers. For it is in the church community that God's gift of peace is learned, practiced and nurtured. [footnote 11]

Whilst this article has described peace and the 'transformation of the shaken' in secular terms, the same matters of inspiration, authenticity and loyalty are also common themes in what we might call the 'religious journey'. The next article in this series asks whether a religious framework of meaning can enrich our understanding of peace, as shalom, and strengthen our commitment to it.

David Gee
Quaker Peace & Social Witness

Questions for reflection and discussion

Have you ever felt 'shaken' in the sense described here? When, what was it like, and did it change you?
Do you take a gloomy view of the prospects for peace or a hopeful one, and why?
What can you most strongly agree with in the article and what do you disagree with?

What do you think peace means?

The purpose of this article is to help feed a conversation about the meaning of peace. Please tell us what you think about this article or send your own views about what peace means.

Write to Disarm, Quaker Peace & Social Witness, Friends House, 173-177 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ
Email disarm@quaker.org.uk
Fax 020 7663 1049

Notes

1. Shalom and salaam share the same Semitic root. The context for these articles is the Judaeo-Christian tradition and for the sake of brevity, the Hebrew version of the term is used. However, the meaning of peace as wholeness and well-being is also significant within other traditions, including Islam, and this commonality provides rich potential for conversation between the faiths that share this understanding. [Go back to text]

2. Cited in Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends: 'Quaker Faith & Practice' (London: Britain Yearly Meeting, 1995), 19.48 [Go back to text]

3. Andrew Shanks, 'God and Modernity: A new and better way to do theology' (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 4 [Go back to text]

4. ibid. [Go back to text]

5. Cited in Northern Friends Peace Board: 'The Peace Papers' (2000-02) [Go back to text]

6. Reprinted in Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, 'Quaker Faith & Practice' (London: Britain Yearly Meeting, 1995), Chapter 24 [Go back to text]

7. ibid., Chapter 19 [Go back to text]

8. Cited in Curtis, Kimberley: 'Our Sense of The Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics' (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p.7 [Go back to text]

9. Blakeny, R B (trans.): 'Meister Eckhart' (London: Watkins, 1955), cited in Fromm, Erich: 'The Art of Loving' (London: Unwin, 1957) [Go back to text]

10.. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624 [Go back to text]

11. Cronk, Sandra L: 'Peace Be with You: A study of the spiritual basis of the Friends peace testimony' (Philadelphia, PA, USA: The Tract Association of Friends, no date given) [Go back to text]

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