Preface........................................................................................................

Part I: THE PEACE THAT IS A PROBLEM

Introduction: What might peace be?.............................................................
1. The Obscured and the Glimmering.....................................................................
2. Against Tranquility and Concord.......................................................................
3. Peace as Absence...............................................................................................
4. The Pervasive Presence: Conflict.......................................................................

PART II: THE CULTURE OF CONFLICT

Introduction: How Do We See Differences?...............................................
5. The Strife of Reason in Defending Claims
(And What I learned Near the Broccoli Dip)......................................................
6. The Fires Inside
Feeling, Passion, Emotion, and Desire...............................................................
7. A World of Fact and Preference
Galilean Science and Instrumental Action..........................................................
8. The Practice of These Preachings:
The Institutionalization of Conflict Assumptions..............................................

PART III: THE CONTEXT OF PEACE:
SOCIAL REALITY, UNDERSTANDING, AND ACTION

Introduction................................................................................................
9. How Social Reality Is Intended To Be Understood..........................................
10. Holism in the Parts............................................................................................
11. Participation in the Whole.................................................................................
12. The Understanding Required for Peace:
Critical Participatory Research..........................................................................
13. The Process of Action:
Rational Activity as Cultivation.........................................................................

PART IV: THE PROCESS OF PEACE

14. The Opening Way..............................................................................................
15. How Should We Define Peace? The Peace That Is a Way................................
16. Three Ways of Practicing Peace.........................................................................
17. The Horizons of Peace:
Violence, Faiths, and Trans-Historical Objective Values....................................
EPILOGUE

18. The Hands of the Future: What Peace Might Disclose.......................................

Appendix A: Building a Peace Academy...................................................
Appendix B: Some Resources....................................................................
Notes...........................................................................................................

This book is for people who are interested in the problems connected with peace and with questions about how those problems relate to ways we talk and act in our culture. It deals with ways in which peace is related to practices that affect our private lives at home and our public lives throughout the world at large.
There are many things we should cherish dearly and be ready to sacrifice a great deal for--even, at times, our lives. We should not blindly prefer peace at any price--especially if it is the kind of peace which may require us to accept injustice and oppression in order to avoid conflict and violence. But there are many kinds of peace besides the sort under which people suffer when they have been "pacified." We can conceive of peace in many different ways, and these differences are related to a variety of assumptions and practices we can adopt in our culture. This book is about those differences.
Part I describes the ways in which we usually talk about peace. It argues that our conception is fundamentally obscure. We do not know what peace is and we do not know how to promote it. Part II develops an explanation of how peace has been obscured. It has been obscured by a network of beliefs and institutions in our culture. Part III critically evaluates some key parts of this cultural web and argues that there is an alternative cluster of assumptions and practices which we ought to adopt. It is a cluster which is intrinsically better--regardless of whatever it may imply about peace. Part IV argues that it happens to imply that we should think of peace as an activity--a practice we can cultivate at high levels of excellent performance.
This book is intended for a broad audience that includes parents, diplomats, social scientists, lawyers, labor/business mediators, social activists, philosophers, military officers, educators, theologians, and politicians. Its style is meant to provide good reading that is illustrated with meaningful examples. Its arguments aim to be intellectually compelling without being academic. It is not meant to be lightly breezed through in order to glean a few key ideas or insights, though people who read it that way should find themselves satisfied. It is meant to be read critically and reflectively and it is meant to be read as a whole.
One notion worth reflecting on at the start is the idea that our culture may be hiding or obscuring peace. What does it mean to say that our culture has "hidden" something or "obscured" it?
Think, for a moment, of a field agent who has been trained to scout land for a timber agency. In walking through the woods she can, of course, "miss the forest for the trees." But notice also she can "miss the trees for the lumber." The concepts of board footage, cord wood, and marketable lumber may fit into a conceptual perspective that makes her think about oaks and hemlocks in a distinctive way and makes her actually experience seeing the trees differently than you or I would--or than a landscape painter or a Druid would.
To take another example, think of a marriage that has gone completely sour. It may be impossible for either spouse to communicate any feelings of love or generosity. Every issue is viewed in terms of conflict, every gesture is interpreted as a hostile look or a manipulative trick. Even a confession of guilt gets turned around. The response it yields is the thought: "Great. So he's willing to admit he made a mistake. So what is he trying to make me take the blame for?"
When things have reached this point, hostility hangs in the air. Every look, word, and gesture gets flung back in anger-- regardless of how lovingly it was intended. The spouses have bought into a network of antagonizing habits, perceptions that picture the other as hostile, and categories that conceive of the situation in terms of opposition and conflict. This will obscure the true nature of any genuinely loving gesture the other may try to offer.
Relations between nations can degenerate in a similar way. Before the nuclear bomb was invented, there was a rather straightforward way to resolve a situation like that. Nations that could no longer talk could go to war. But developments in physics, chemistry, and biology have changed things in a radical way and we have entered a new era. It is an era that is often said to require new modes of thought. And this is true.
Modern weaponry has made warfare between superpowers a matter of Mutually Assured Destruction. Prior to our age, governments relied on war as an alternative to negotiation. When mutual consent could not resolve differences, military force served as the ultimate arbiter, the final sanction. But insofar as international conflict has become "MAD," war can no longer serve this function and we do not know what can. Nations stumble and grope, like sports teams without referees, living in fear that a brouhaha will break out-- one in which the playing field and the players will all be destroyed. And the world is becoming more mad each year. Before long a score more nations will find both the means and the motive to use nuclear weapons--as well as chemical and biological ones-- to make their enemies face mutually assured destruction.
There is some reason to hope that in the long run these weapons will prove to have been a blessing. Practically speaking, they pose enormous dangers, but in theory, they offer the promise of bringing an end to the wars that have cost humankind so dearly. They offer this promise precisely because they turn war into a god-like Ares who can not award any spoils to the victor-- they make war function like an umpire who ends the game by making all players absolute losers. From a theoretical point of view, however, a problem arises: How do you play without umpires? When nations are in deep conflict, how can they settle their disputes without appeal to war?
The easy answer is, of course, diplomacy. In point of fact, most international disputes have been settled this way. But traditional practices of diplomacy were developed in a context in which war remained the final court of appeal. Baron von Clausewitz, a nineteenth century military strategist, characterized the tightness of this connection by saying that war was politics carried on by other means. But it would have been just as accurate to say the reverse was true. Diplomacy was conceived of as "war carried on by other means." New practices need to be developed to deal with these new contexts in which war cannot be carried on at all.
An analogy may help drive the point home. Our Anglo-Saxon legal system of two party advocacy is structured around courts which have police at their disposal. Judges can command armed officer to enforce decisions. Whether legal cases are decided by a judge or settled out of court (as most are) these armed police remain a reality that structures the ways in which lawyer argue and disputes get resolved. An easy way to see the significance of this is to simply try supposing that there were no police. Suppose judges had no one to send off to force people to submit to giving testimony, undergoing arrest, paying fines, or enduring imprisonment. What would happen? The whole practice of law would have to be radically restructured. Even the standard line "Do it or I'll see you in court!" would have to be dropped--or else be used to offer an invitation instead of a threat.
This is something like the situation in which nations are coming to find themselves. It is a situation that traditional diplomacy was not designed to cope with and is unable to deal with effectively.
It is an international situation which poses a very difficult task. Jonathan Schell's description of it in The Fate of the Earth is somewhat apocalyptic but essentially correct. We find ourselves in a situation in which nations have to "replace the mechanism by which political decisions, whatever they may be, are reached. In sum, the task is nothing less than to reinvent politics; to reinvent the world."1
What would such a "reinvented" world be like? How would its politics be performed?
We might say that what is required is a world of "peace" governed by a politics of "non-violence." But what do these two terms mean? They are generally taken to mean simply the lack of armed or violent conflict. Poke the question "What is peace?" at people and about eight times out of ten they will reply : "It is the absence of war." It is not just the non-academic laity who give such a reply. As we shall see, this is the sort of definition rather uniformly adopted by philosophers and social scientists with professional interests in the question.
But picture a born again Socrates sitting near and perking up his ears in response to this answer. You can imagine what he might say:

The question our friend has asked you interests me greatly, and I am glad that you propose to answer it. I too would like to know what peace is, as would all, I think, who truly care to seek to live rightly. But I am not sure I have understood you properly. Do you mean to say that peace is a kind of state or relationship between people in which there is not war?
Yes.
So you define peace by saying what it is not--that is, that it is not war?
Yes.
But then you have not answered our friend's question, it seems, for you have only told us what peace is not, whereas the question was: What is it that peace is?

Most of us would find it difficult to define peace for Socrates. We might well have as much difficulty as the Greeks of his own day had in trying to define courage, piety, and justice.
This is not because we are dull-witted. It is because central features of our dominant post-Renaissance conceptual scheme radically obscure the nature of peace. To eliminate this obscurity we shall need to think out a reconstruction of our own culture, one that would fundamentally transform our conceptions of reason, social knowledge, and rational action--as well as the institutions and practices that reflect these conceptions and are reflected by them.
Violence has often been used successfully to defend things worth cherishing. In particular, war, despite all its horrors, has on repeated occasions been a vehicle of justice. It has liberated the oppressed and secured the life and culture of peoples threatened with extinction. On our own continent today, war can be argued to have just these merits (though there is a difference of opinion, of course, as to which sides are the ones we should join). Is there an activity of peace which can perform these functions and do so more efficiently and justly than war? When? To what extent?
Realistic answers to these sorts of questions are needed. Yet it is not even clear here as to what "realism" itself means. Is it a matter of being tough minded about what we are willing to do to others or a matter of being courageous about what we will make as personal sacrifices? Is it a matter of accepting the reality of present social norms or disciplining ourselves to deal effectively with long-term problems? Is it a matter of having an accurate picture of the way the world is or a question of sticking fast to moral values that let us see how it truly ought to be?
Our concepts of realism, like our concepts of peace, are rooted in culture and history. They are intimately tied to ways in which we talk about that "little peace and quiet" sought at home, the bigger "peace in our streets" sought in cities, and that "peace with justice" (or "peace and freedom") sought around the globe.
Our concepts of realism and peace have undergone profound changes before and they may do so again. "Realistic" views of family life, race relations, and spheres of influence have changed a great deal in the last two hundred years and they have not yet become stable or non-controversial. Our ideas of peace in these contexts have also shifted in fundamental ways. We no longer understand the peace of wedded bliss in the same way in which we did when "a man's home was his castle." Peace in "our colonies abroad" was different from the kind of peace now sought in the third world.
We need to examine our concepts of reality and peace critically and reflect upon them with care. Both reality and peace stand before us as open questions.

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