Images of Peace

Chapter Two

IMAGES OF PEACE

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) gives a range of meanings for the word, "peace":

1. Freedom from, or cessation of, war or hostilities; that condition of a nation or community in which it is not at war with another. b. (With article) A ratification or treaty of peace between two powers previously at war. c. (With possessive or of). A state of peace, concord and amity with a person.

2. Freedom from civil commotion; public order and security.

3. Freedom from disturbance or perturbation (esp. as a condition in which an individual is); quiet, tranquillity, b. In or after Biblical use, in expressions of salutations, etc.

4. Freedom from quarrels or dissension between individuals; concord, amity, b. (transf.) An author or maintainer of concord.

5. Freedom from mental or spiritual disturbance or conflict arising from passion, sense of guilt, etc.

6. Absence of noise, movement, or activity; stillness, quiet, b. (ellipt.) as exclam.

7. In generalized sense.¹

Definitions and Concepts of Peace

I find that when I ask people for a definition of peace, the first response is usually "not war", or some variant on this theme. This is a negatively framed definition, which leaves the positive content of the concept undefined. The SOED definition offers positively framed understandings of peace, in terms of security, order, harmony and concord. The concept of peace as stillness begins to return us to a negatively framed definition, as stillness can be defined by the absence of noise, commotion and disturbance.

These strands of meaning are abstract, and are applied to a range of human situations, from the global and international, through the communal and local, to the domestic and inter-personal, and finally including the intra-psychic experience of one person. Peace is said to

be a state of amity or friendship between nations, communities or persons; negatively, it is the absence of a state of war or conflict between them. It is a state of public order and security, free from civil strife and commotion. It is a state of quietness and tranquillity, both in the more physical sense of an absence of noise, and in the more personal sense of an inner harmony with ourselves. One problem in applying this very general concept to our experience is that we can usually find continuing elements of conflict in our most harmonious times. Our concept of peace therefore seems equivocal in practical usage, giving rise to paradox, irony and contradiction.

Definition involves drawing semi-arbitrary lines around a concept to distinguish it from all that it is not. We can then find ways to indicate what falls inside and outside these lines, and to indicate the common characteristics of each group. Definitions reflect real differences in the world, but they also reflect those real differences that we happen to find significant; and other definitions, reflecting other perceptions of difference, are always possible, however entrenched and habitual our current perceptions may be.

We learn what apples are through direct experience of apples, and from the use of the word "apple" by those from whom we learn language. We develop ways of recognizing apples and distinguishing them from pears, oranges, peaches, nectarines and everything else. We have direct acquaintance with what is being defined, and negative indications as to what it is not. With more abstract words such as "peace", we need a similar mix of recognition and distinction if we are to achieve a well-founded understanding. The words "negative" and "positive" are themselves abstract, and cover a range of meanings; which has confused the debate about the respective merits of negatively and positively framed definitions of peace.2 I see three distinct strands of meaning in this pair of opposing concepts, which could be called the logical, the substantive and the evaluative senses of these concepts. The logical sense merely refers to the framing of definitions; identification of the essence or common characteristics of the concept to be defined is positive, and identification of the concept by reference to what it is not, is negative. Negatively framed definitions are helpful in locating concepts on our conceptual map; their defect is their imprecision in indicating the nature of the experiences to which the concept does refer.

A negative image of peace is created when we define it as the opposite of war and conflict, but do not specify our experience of a war-and-conflict-free state. I do not doubt that I have had experiences of peace, but I know that they have always been in the context of a wider world in which conflict continues unabated, so that I feel diffident about claiming to have experienced a peace that not only seems free of war and conflict, but actually is so. The shadow over a general, positively framed conception of peace is that it seems to vanish into a realm of perfection that is completely beyond our experience. Yet we do have experiences of peace, and it is to these that we must turn for

guidance in formulating a positive understanding of peace.

A positive conception of peace, in the second or substantive sense, will refer to the nature of peaceful experience that provides the content of the concept of peace. It requires a degree of self-awareness to identify the essence of our peaceful experience; peace is not an object alongside other objects, and is peculiarly vulnerable to shifting perceptions and therefore definitions. Our liking for objective images shows up in ideas of peace as a relationship of harmony between various elements. Ideas of "soul force" refer to aspects of experience even harder to define in purely objective terms which involve elements such as love, commitment and non-violent truthfulness.

Substantively, peace can co-exist with struggle, particularly in the deeper and more serious senses of the term. Peaceful scenes frequently appear flat and unreal because of a perceived lack of tension. Hitherto unrevealed aspects of our experience are vividly apparent to us in situations of conflict; for a conscious appreciation of how diverse elements can be harmonized into an overall peaceful balance, we seem to require experience of breakdown, conflict, opposition and struggle. The power and impressiveness of a peaceful scene is commensurate with the degree of tension apparent among the elements of that scene. Peace can be thought of as an active and dynamic process that constantly seeks to incorporate challenges and elements of disharmony within itself, so that they become essential parts of such a peace.

Thirdly, values can be characterized as negative, implying that they are destructive or self-defeating, or as positive, implying that they are constructive or life-enhancing. In general, I would want to reject the former and embrace the latter, and in this way the words "negative" and "positive" come to acquire clear evaluative significance. Part of the discomfort that I feel with definitions of peace that are identified as "negative" (perhaps on purely formal and logical grounds) lies in this arbitrary association with values deemed destructive and self-defeating. Most commonly, a negatively framed definition of peace can lead us to lose sight of any reality to peace outside the immediate situation of conflict and our hope that the conflict will cease. One paradoxical consequence of this conceptual situation is that when we think of peace as "not war'; we are thinking negatively in the logical sense, and yet positively in the evaluative sense, assuming that we judge war to be more destructive than peace.

Our yearning is for there to be no war (leaving aside the question about the ways in which we might want war), yet when we work only with a negatively framed definition of peace in terms of "not war", our conception of that for which we yearn involves a necessary reference to war, thereby invoking the very reality that we wish to banish. This can show up in our behavior when our self-image as peace activists requires the existence of consciously bloody-minded warmongers. I may attribute warmongering motives to other people unjustly, and otherwise act to ensure that warmongers are seen to be completely

evil, so that my stance (quite ineffective in preventing the continuing conflict) can continue to seem pure and good. This is clearly a travesty of peace-making, however common in practice.

Peace refers predominantly to states of human relationship and order, yet non-human references are not excluded; when we say that a still day is peaceful, we refer to the balanced and harmonious atmosphere as well as to the feelings of tranquillity that this stillness can evoke in us. Peace can refer to the actual state of affairs without reference to human responsibility, as well as to states of affairs for which human beings are responsible. For all human situations of war and peace, there seem to be elements of activity, struggle and striving for which we are directly responsible, and elements of fate and destiny that include, but are not controlled by, our conscious intentions. In peace and war, human intentionality interacts with an ongoing, wider state of affairs that combines humanly intended and unintended happenings. Nevertheless, conflict becomes dramatically more intense and destructive when it is adopted as a matter of conscious policy; with a similar commitment to research and development, we can choose to promote peace with a similar hope for effectiveness.

War, even allowing for the importance of fate and accident, is not a blind force of nature. People can mimic the inexorable fury of the hurricane, or the explosive ferocity of the volcano, but peace is always a possible option, no matter how entrenched and long-standing the conflict. The so-called causes of war are factors influencing the decisions of people who go to war; it is logically always the case that other decisions were possible. War is chosen by people on the basis that the perceived consequences of the other options are deemed less preferable. I emphasize peace-making because it is a choice that is always, in some form, within our power. There is a destiny that will befall us, which can only be recognized and accepted; but we influence our destiny by our choices and the shape of our living, which is what a responsible awareness can change.

Once a war is launched, a decision for peace becomes very much harder, short of military victory or defeat. It is hard to restore mutual human acceptance and recognition between parties who have been actively seeking each other's extermination. Part of this difficulty lies in the images that people have of themselves as heroic, with martyred comrades whose sacrifice must somehow be justified, and of their enemies as evil, murderous people who should be executed for their crimes. The fact that such images are usually mutual does little to alter their power to prolong a war. We often feel powerless to achieve what we want in the face of the powerful choices made by others, and we need to see our sense of powerlessness, however realistic, as a part of the problem. There are agonizing questions here, which are difficult for us all, and which will need to be directly addressed by peace educators.

Behind our definitions of peace lie our part-forgotten experiences and those of our community. This vast body of

experience is somehow coordinated through images, which have a close and symbiotic relationship with words. The word “peace” connects with more than is contained in the definitions offered by the SOED, and further exploration will suggest further questions for our peace education agenda.

Calm

The center of the cyclone is that rising quiet central low-pressure place in which one can learn to live eternally. Just outside of this Center is the rotating storm of one's own ego, competing with other egos in a furious high-velocity circular dance. As one leaves center, the roar of the rotating wind deafens one more and more as one joins this dance. (John Lilly)³

I remember one morning of a weekend at Phillip Island 4 when I arose early and went for a walk on the beach. The sun was rising, the weather was completely calm, and as I walked, I seemed to take all of that inside me, so that I felt thoroughly in tune with my world. I had the time to myself, and I could enjoy being alive; indeed, I was free to notice my own being. I was at peace with myself and my world, close to the centre beyond the small self of which John Lilly writes, although I was not particularly aware of it at the time. I like being calm, and being free to receive what the present moment has for me; but there are usually difficulties and conflicts to negotiate, which is why I remember this morning as being different.

One basic image of peace, outer and inner, is calm. We think of the storm as violent because it is capable of causing damage, and because energies are let loose; we think of the stillness before and after it as calm and peaceful, by contrast with the tumult of the storm. This sort of calm can be thought of as one end of a spectrum defined by varying amounts of air movements and electrical energy. When peace is identified with the low-energy end of a spectrum, it ceases to have any intrinsic value; sailing ships normally require steady winds in the .{middle of the spectrum, and avoid both storms and calm when they can. Also, calm weather does not last, and it regularly gives way to other weather. We lack control over the weather, so that we tend to think of meteorological peace as an occasional and unreliable happening; we welcome it, but do not seek it or depend upon it.

When the weather is calm, and our surroundings are undemanding and quiet, we are more easily able to relax; we experience the peace that is in rest and relaxation. I find that I carry a set of worries with me that create physical tensions in my body, and I experience relief when I can let go of the worries and the physical tensions for a while. Outward calm, including the absence of demands, can help me to stop worrying, to stop the inward generation of demands, and to begin to experience inward calm. There is peace in

this experience, and I find this highly desirable, even though I expect to welcome new demands and tensions at some stage. One source of trouble here is in my sense of dependence upon outward calm, conceived as the absence of winds and storms, which indicates a lack of power to produce inward calm at will. When the external demands upon me reassert themselves, I can find it very difficult to maintain my sense of calm. This connects with the common view that peace is the name for the time when the fighting has stopped. Where peace is understood to mean not fighting, and not fighting implies not working to resolve the issues that are troubling people, there will be alienation and frustration in a frozen state of (alleged) peace ; the unresolved issues will press upon us without easy possibility of action and resolution. This is the grain of truth in the common view that peace is boring; the issues need to be resolved, even when the only real problem is our own inner restlessness.

The inadequacy of this view of peace lies in the way it is blind to our own personal and subjective contribution to peace, which is independent of the outward situation. When we have come to terms with silence, and with our own thoughts, we cease to need to avoid and repress uncomfortable thoughts. We are constantly generating internal activity in the form of images, thoughts and feelings, whatever the state of our outward activity, so that we are not completely dependent upon outward sources of stimulation. It is therefore inadequate to identify peace (as calm) with an absence of activity. It is much more appropriate to identify peace as an inner calm that has its own characteristic energy (or soul-force), and which coexists with all our activities. Calm is incompatible with responsible life only when it is understood as a negative state that is completely vulnerable to external factors over which we have no control.

Where an activity is physically harmonious, as in a dance, or in riding or running without undue effort, or in making music, there can be a centering of the person through the activity, and even a heightened state of awareness, in which an experience of peace becomes apparent. This kind of positive and harmonious quality can appear in any of our activities, and it indicates that we are centered in an inner calm. In this way we can experience peace in the middle of conflict of all kinds without ceasing to be fully involved as participants in the conflict.

The calm that makes for peace co-exists with both high-energy and low-energy states. Calm can spread across the whole scene, or it can be concentrated into the centre of the cyclone, but it is still calm. High-energy states are dramatic, and are, by definition, more powerful than low-energy states. We therefore need a calm that is powerful if we are to maintain it in the midst of inner and outer storms. The zone of calm air at the very centre of the cyclone or hurricane is an image of a kind of calm that has power to co-ordinate our energetic activities. When our awareness does not rest in this calm centre, we can be swept away by powerful winds, vainly seeking balance and wholeness. One aspect of our experience of peace is this calm at the centre of our

harmonious activities, however energetic.

The King's Peace

In Mary Stewart's novel The Last Enchantment,⁵ which is one of a series retelling the story of Merlin and King Arthur, there is a small incident that captures something central about the idea of peace through righteous military strength. Merlin, an old man, is journeying towards Camelot, and is expecting to meet Arthur on the road. Instead, he encounters three men who decide to rob him. Merlin is unable to deal with them himself, and is at their mercy. Arthur arrives, and after a swift and savage fight, kills all three men. The High King is pledged to the protection of travelers on the roads of his kingdom, and he is particularly angered by the attack upon Merlin, his teacher and counselor.

The phrase "the king's peace" came to refer to the geographical area within which travel on the highways was relatively safe, due to the protection afforded by the king against brigands. The threat of conflict was removed from weak travelers, and was assumed by the king's soldiers, who would fight the brigands whenever and wherever they appeared. The peace refers to the area protected by the armed forces of the king. This image is one of righteous strength that protects the weak by eliminating or subduing evil disturbers of the peace. This is the familiar pattern of the pax romana, the peace of the roman empire, in which the roman legions subdue all internal revolts and defend the frontiers against enemy incursions, so that roman law and order may prevail throughout the empire. In this image of the king's peace, it is order that enables community life to flourish, and it is this flourishing of community life that confirms this as an image of peace.

This pattern of peace lies at the basis of all empires and nations to this day, and so requires careful attention. Traditional thinking stresses that this order prescribes duties for governor and governed alike, which is politically viable when there is general agreement about the nature of this order and its ultimate origin with God. When this agreement breaks down, it could be argued that the chief casualty is a viable notion of righteous authority. Hobbes,⁶ writing in a time of political breakdown, argued strenuously for the rationality of creating a single sovereign with a monopoly of political and military power, and a duty of protection to its subjects. He argued the merits of this arrangement from the fact of our human vulnerability, as individuals, to any organized group that may find a reason to attack us. Citizens are defined as powerless, and have no significant recourse against unrighteous behavior by the sovereign. Can we agree with Hobbes that our needs for political unity (averting endemic war) and protection against predators (through a monopoly of coercive power vested in the sovereign) justify the inequalities structured into sovereignty?

There is an unattractive brutality in King Arthur's justice. Even though he fights three single-handed, killing troublesome people is a swift and merciless resolution that cannot be an acceptable solution to all political problems. The righteousness of regimes that kill those they deem evil must be questionable, if righteousness involves the conversion and repentance of sinners rather than their extermination for the benefit of others.

The ideal seems to be flawed, perhaps inevitably, by the perceived necessity for the use of coercive force for the maintenance of order, and by the entrenched imbalances of power and status that are required. Coercive force can win a measure of outward conformity, and this can be important; but we must recognize that coercive force also confirms the sharpness of the disunity, and may harden it into destructive conflict. Similarly, the sovereign's monopoly on the use of coercive force inevitably confirms the weakness and dependency of the travelers. It is the travelers who will experience the ill-effects of official corruption, and it is therefore the travelers who will need to be able to take action to correct it. When travelers are better able to stand up for themselves, official corruption becomes less possible.

We need to recognize the existence of forms of power other than physically coercive force. I have already referred to wisdom and understanding, and these provide us with knowledge of our world, particularly of groups other than our own. Co-operation requires the free agreement between independent parties for arrangements that they perceive to be worthwhile. Cooperation increases power, and our challenge is to find ways of preventing such increases in power from slipping back into the old divisive patterns. For this, we need visionary images of the unity of our world and the harmony that can exist between people who are really different; we need the power to relate and to connect in ways that establish peace.

The power of King Arthur to stir our imagination lies in the way in which he personifies the combination of justice with strength. His story lies at the foundation of the British state, and he is endowed with the aura of projected hopes for good government. There is tragedy when human imperfections corrupt and destroy the authority of the supposedly righteous ruler. In the latter part of Arthur's story, there is the tragic falling apart of the requirements of justice and of strength; even the legendary righteous ruler is unable to find a solution to the love between Guinevere and Lancelot that combines justice to them with a result that maintains his authority with all his followers.

Present political conflicts seem constantly to press towards an apparently inevitable choice between political effectiveness and a proper adherence to ideals of justice. Our world community has an existing order that is shot through with elements of injustice; there are pressures to preserve it for its relative and selective benefits, and counter-pressures to change it for a more just order, with the risk that we lose more than we gain. The danger in the romantic image of the

righteous ruler is that it invites us to protect our hopes and longings onto some political figure in unrealistic ways, thereby avoiding the need for our own responsible actions. The archetypal power of such projections has been vividly illustrated by “personality cults” in communist states, and the media packaging of politicians for election in western democracies.

This tendency to seek our inner idealized image of righteous authority in outward leaders is matched by our willingness to see all who are opposed to us or to our savior-leader as evil. This identification of evil has fateful significance in the process of turning opponents (internal and external) into enemies against whom a war of extermination is justified. The danger is that, in our fanaticism, we shall fail to recognize the humanity of our opponents; when the hero can do no wrong, the hero's opponents can do no good. We need to take responsibility for our perceptions, as part of reclaiming all that we have projected onto our righteous ruler hero figure. Our world cannot afford the continuing divisiveness of the fanatical projection of goodness onto our leaders and of evil onto other groups.

Where I think the image of the king's peace is most helpful to us today is in reflection on continuing elements of anarchy in our global political order. In a situation of social anarchy, the king's peace was felt to be a blessing, on the grounds that it created a degree of order that made life more calculable and less anxious. To the extent to which our global situation is anarchic, the image of an agreed source of global authority, preferably with ways of dealing with order-breaking, becomes relevant. Our present formation into the two super-power-dominated blocs of nations can function as a step towards increased global integration, provided that catastrophe and totalitarianism can be avoided, and more cooperative and multi-lateral forms of authority can be created and strengthened.

For our global community, there are no external enemies apart from what may emerge from the as-yet-empty realms of outer space. Our enemies are ourselves, due to our slowness to learn how to share our occupancy of this wonderful planet earth with each other, and to nurture its life-support systems so that our societies return to a more sustainable state. What we need is an order in which we all can find an acceptable place, as well as the courage and the strength to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve such an order. These requirements form basic questions for our peace education agenda.

Order

Permaculture is a word we have coined for an integrative, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man. It is, in essence, a complete agricultural ecosystem, modelled on existing but simpler examples...

We jointly evolved the system in the first place as an attempt to

improve extant agricultural practices, both those of Western agribusiness, and the peasant grain culture of the third world. The former system is energy-expensive, mechanistic, and destructive of soil structure and quality. The latter makes drudges of men, and combined with itinerant herding, deserts of what once were forests. Perhaps we seek the Garden of Eden, and why not? We believe that a low-energy, high-yielding agriculture is a possible aim for the whole world, and that it needs only human energy and intellect to achieve this. (Bill Mollison and David Holmgren)⁷

Permaculture, or permanent agriculture, contains a vision of a sustainable harmony between humanity and the rest of nature that speaks to me of peaceful order. Permaculture involves learning from the land as well as importing combinations of species that have done well elsewhere, so that it is an evolving theory and practice. The principles of permaculture design are ecological in character, and therefore open-ended and flexible. The idea is to find practical ways of designing human living in combination with plants and animals so that everything supports everything else, ourselves included. There is now a burgeoning international permaculture network, including permaculture consultants who will offer a design for permanent agriculture on whatever land you have. They think in terms of transition from what you have now to the envisioned reality, and seek to reduce the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers to zero.

The principles of this order include human responsibility, the acceptance of ourselves and our needs as a part of nature, and the acceptance of the positive value of diversity. For permaculture, enemy species are those for which we have yet to find an acceptable place; natural predilections and differences are seen positively. The challenge is to achieve that harmonious balance in which our needs are met, our wastes are recycled, and the ecosystem is alive and well within its wider environment. This vision is, as they say, of a return to the Garden of Eden, to an environment that will support us, and provide us with a sustainable home; it leads us away from our dependence upon the gigantic economic machine that seems to be inextricably connected to the global war machine. The words "ecosystem" and "ecology", which inform the permacultural vision, are derived from the Greek word oikos, meaning "household". We need a global order in which we can all be at home in our cosmic habitat, an order capable of dealing positively with domestic violence and family squabbles.

I am struck by the critique of monoculture, the widespread practice of working with only one species of crop or animal. Fertility and vitality come from diversity; monoculture reduces natural diversity, and comes to require artificial inputs of fertilizer (replacing lost nutrients) and pesticides (to deal with predators attracted by the abundant crop). Practical situations are always more rich and complex than ideological constructions suggest; yet ideas do offer illumination. I find the permaculture vision helpful in its combination of ecological principles of diversity and mutual support with the self-conscious

inclusion of ourselves in the picture. Yet permaculture is ordered, and explicitly avoids chaos as well as monoculture. Peaceful human order needs to integrate human control with chaos, or spontaneity. Too much human control leads to dehumanizing rigidity and repression; too much spontaneity leads to chaos and the dissipation of resources.

The principles of this critique of monoculture can be applied to social, political and intellectual systems. Orthodoxy, understood as a system of right answers, is monocultural in structure. Unless explicit principles of toleration and dialogue are affirmed, the structure of orthodoxy as such requires conformity to its truth. Opposition to its claim to a monopoly of truth can trigger a crusading mentality (as a matter of historical fact as well as of logic). For orthodoxy, we already have the right answers, so that we have no intrinsic need for the maintenance of alternative views and opinions. Intellectual monoculture seems open to intolerance and therefore to the possibility of crusades. By contrast, an intellectual permaculture would involve an open-ended thought-world with evolving structures that promote learning from the facts of our experience with nature, while also maintaining a commitment to human worth and meaning.

Monoculture is based in monologue, while permaculture is based in dialogue. Monologue sets up a tyrannical structure in which communication and power is all one way. Repressive socio-political orders taint the notion of order by requiring unquestioning conformity. Simplicity is achieved by removing whatever does not fit, either physically or by driving it underground. The classical image here is the bed of Procrustes. Most hosts seek to provide beds that fit their guests; Procrustes adopted the simple, but grotesquely anti-human, policy of altering the physical length of his guests to fit his bed. Imposed human order can be as destructively simple as this, which can lead us to doubt that order can have positive value. We need living and breathing forms of order that avoid the extremes of chaos and of monoculture.

There is a simplicity in permaculture, but it is at the level of harmonious practice and reflection, not at the level of ideological content. Any one idea, followed as if it were the sole truth about reality, will lead to situations in which we encounter its limits. At that point, the choice to continue to insist on our simple truth is a sign of our own lack of imagination. When we experience contradictions, paradoxes and frustrations, we know that we have reached the limit of our present ideas, and so need to find new ideas and new practices.

Peace is sometimes conceived as harmony within a completely unified collective structure. The sub-human aspects of this conception emerge in the image of society as an ant colony, or as a machine. Ants, which are at least alive, appear active and purposeful, with myriads of workers foraging freely across the environment, with an overall co-ordination that suggests total co-operation between individual ants. There is no such inevitable harmony between the ant colony and other entities, as I am vividly aware through my attempts to restrain

their foraging across our kitchen. Whatever the detailed explanation of ant behavior, the ant colony symbolizes for me a state of complete and perfect subordination of individuals to the organizing requirements of the collective, and it suggests that we are all programmed by a combination of instincts and propaganda that subvert the meaningfulness of our choices and of our lives except in purely collective terms.

Individual ants appear to be completely altruistic in their devoted activity for the good of the collective, even though we believe that they lack imagination to be anything else. They can appear to be courageous in continuing with their activity "unto death", so that they show, not only the harmony of coordinated action, but the price of that harmony in an apparent willingness to sacrifice themselves for the wider good. This connects with the Christian ideal of altruistic love that I have imbibed with mother's milk." Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). My ambivalence about this ideal can be expressed as an attraction to the nobility of such sacrifice, and a deep sense of being fulfilled by participating in collective harmony, but a related anxiety that my sacrifice might be as meaningless as the death of this ant.

To be truly peaceful, collective harmony must fulfill its members and enhance the meaning of their lives. If I am to make sacrifice for collective harmony, which will always be necessary in practice, then the collective harmony must somehow justify such sacrifice. The specific nightmarish quality of the ant colony image is not simply the enslavement, but the self-chosen, willing enslavement, of members to the collective. This connects with our fear of the siren song of propaganda, which seeks to solicit our willing complicity in our own enslavement. Peaceful order requires responsible and thoughtful human support, not meaningless and mechanical conformity; it is not an inhuman harmony, but the successful result of human attempts to harmonize.

There are very basic and important questions here about the meaningfulness of our lives, without which humanly acceptable order would seem impossible. There are also practical questions about how we balance our need for order against our need for novelty and change. The order of permaculture is emergent, and is a synthesis of its pre-existing elements; perhaps the living and breathing forms of human order that we need are also emergent, and are more than the sum of their parts. My question is how to rehabilitate a notion of order that is not bureaucratic, legalistic and rigid, and which recognizes the kind of order that is implicit in free and spontaneous movement. Our world community has urgent need of this kind of order.

Conflict

"Why of the sheep do you not learn peace?”

"Because I don't want you to shear my fleece."

(William Blake)⁸

Peace-making in situations of conflicting interests requires the honest expression of differences and the search for resolutions. There is an uneasy peace when a well-defined conflict has not yet erupted into destructive battle, and non-violent solutions remain open. I recognize that my thinking about conflict has changed greatly over time. I grew up in a family that saw conflict as a threat to family harmony. I later experienced conflict as something that other, evil, ill-willed people imposed on me when I could not escape it. Even later, I became aware of the positive value of anger in challenging some things. My wife, Fay, and my children, Rebecca and Martin, have taught me that conflict is not the end of harmony, except temporarily, and that arguments allow us all to say what needs to be said. I now feel able to affirm conflict as necessary for the negotiation of differences.

Everyday life seems full of inevitable conflicts of interest that are given with our differing identities and with the scarcity of the available resources. We live in a world in which some have very much more access to food, shelter, information and power than others. It is in my interests as a property-owner to pay lower rates, although I accept the argument that I benefit when everybody is looked after so that nobody needs to break into my house. Some conflicts of interest are resolvable through negotiation, where goals and interests that we have in common can be used as a basis for deals and compromises; but some sets of identities provide so little common ground that acceptable mutual accommodation seems impossible. In general, conflicts can be resolved by negotiation and sharing if all involved, particularly the more powerful individuals and groups, are willing to negotiate and share.

Conflict seems essential to choice. If there is no sense that alternatives are possible, we have no choice. Where two or more alternatives are genuinely open, we struggle to find a way of recognizing superior value in one so that we can choose it. There is necessarily a conflict between these alternative possibilities, whether they are represented by different people, or by different trains of thought in our own minds. Where there is uncertainty, there is conflict. I believe in the reality of genuine alternatives, of real human freedom, and therefore welcome conflict as an essential aspect of this freedom. In general, areas of conflict would seem to be limited only by human ingenuity (in finding possible alternatives to promote) and human intransigence (in persisting with possibilities already rejected by others). This is good news, as it indicates that we do collectively have power to resolve conflict through creative negotiation with each other, whatever our overt ideologies may tell us.

Our choices, once made, generate their own necessities and conflicts, leading to a need for rethinking and further choice. Conflict and decision are necessary when we accept contradictory elements into our thinking, particularly when we try to act in the knowledge of such elements. I see wisdom in recognizing the validity in contradictory views, so that we do not narrow our view of reality by artificially

excluding one side; but we need ways of organizing the resulting confusion and conflict. Analogously, there is clear contradiction in ideologies of multi-culturalism such as we have developed in Australia, because some cultural values repudiate other cultural values as evil. I see value in affirming all the cultures of the world, but this cannot mean an adherence to them all, because this is quite literally impossible.

Traditional societies have a clear set of values that prescribe cultural norms; these values make co-operation possible, but usually on a basis which proscribes and punishes deviance. Our world is heir to all these more narrow traditions, and they all co-exist uneasily within a pragmatic frame of multi-culturalism or cultural pluralism. Each tradition is threatened with dissolution, and is offered only the meager hope of contributing to a new (bland?) synthesis that may be emerging. Each group needs space of their own, and forms of compromise in public life that recognize their sensitivities and differences; and there is pain and struggle as the compromises are created. Either people are virgins when they marry or they are not. Either people are free for friendship with all other groups or they are not. Real contradictions make both conflict and resolution desirable; our world is uneasily caught between respect for entrenched traditional values and the needs of a more inclusive human community.

The definition of who we are, which is open to change through reflection, also defines who our opponents will be. The space that we occupy in the world, our life needs and our aspirations all form our identity and therefore our interests, which include the resources to which we lay claim in order to meet these needs and goals. Interests conflict when resources are insufficient; the terms on which insufficient resources will be shared is one classic focus for political struggle and negotiation. When resources are insufficient even for people's life needs, the choices reduce to swift co-operation to provide more resources, to the self-sacrifice of some so that others may survive, or to a fight for the means of survival. Of these alternatives for our global situation, I have little difficulty in preferring a cooperative world order in which we create the resources to meet the life needs of all, and I do wonder why we, as a world community, are not more clear and whole-hearted in making such a commitment.

We turn opponents into enemies when we divide the world into us" and "them". It is not the fact of difference that is crucial to the creation of enmity, but the fact that this difference comes to seem all-important. We define ourselves in terms of what distinguishes us from others; I am white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, male, tertiary-educated, employed and Australian. Each of these descriptors provides the basis for dividing the world into those like me in that respect, and those unlike me. Our sense of identity is involved, and, whatever our stand on war, there will always be a part of us that can hear the call from our group that summons us to the defense of what is ours. I conclude that we need to counterbalance the value of our similarities with an

appreciation of the value of our differences. People who are just like me confirm me in who I have been; people who are different can show me new realities to which I might choose to relate. There is no human enemy who cannot become a friend, because we are both human; this is a process that either party can initiate, but which cannot be complete without the full concurrence of both parties.

It is a shock to recognize the element of arbitrariness at work in the sense of identity given us by the cultural world in which we grew up. I remember hearing that American Indian tribes placed such a high value upon hospitality that any possession that a guest admired was forthwith given to that guest. The impact of this story upon me was in its radical challenge to my own culturally conditioned sense of having personal possessions that I needed to augment and defend. I remember imagining my own embarrassment at the idea of being presented with the tribal peace pipe because I had innocently admired it. I think it was in hearing such stories that I became aware of the ways in which our sense of reality is socially constructed.9 Western societies choose to make private property into a fact of social life and then to forget that such a choice has ever been made.

Conflict sounds civilized when it is a matter of identifying issues; but there are real losers in our conflicts, and it is hard to avoid destructive conflict when our own survival is threatened. At the most basic physical level, our lives require that we take up space in the world, and that we consume resources such as food. At the most basic psychic level, we have a self-image that we seek to maintain. We believe these to be commitments essential to the maintenance of our lives, and they provide an ample basis for conflict with ourselves (over how best to achieve these goals) and with others. At these basic levels, we do appear to be compelled to fight to secure the necessities of life for ourselves; yet even these necessities are not universally acknowledged, however incredible this may be to western common sense.

Buddhist, Hindu and Christian traditions have stories of saints and gurus who have lived for years without eating; there are also stories of disincarnate beings who now live without taking up space in the world.10 I take these stories seriously, not because I know them to be true in any literal sense, but because they suggest areas of uncertainty at the boundaries of our experience, which call our supposed necessities into question. I loathe the idea that we might use such stories to justify a lack of concern for the sufferings of the starving; the gifts of grace challenge our lack of love for others, and cannot validly be used as a vehicle for this lack of love.

Hindus and Buddhists teach that it is the inner self that is real, that our egos demand gratifications that are quite illusory, and that we require liberation from the net of illusion that leads us to believe in the substantial reality of the material world. Christian ideas about dying to self, though less sanguine about the material consequences, have a similar impact upon our behavior and attitudes. While it is

disorienting to find that the foundations of our sense of identity can be thus challenged, it seems important to recognize that there is no universal agreement that any particular thing is necessary to life. I find this good news, as it suggests that we have some freedom in choosing how we shall live, even if a spiritually virtuous life can seem suicidal from an ordinary, secular perspective.

Conflict provides us with an image of peace in its challenge to us to grow. In conflict, we are challenged by, and joined to, some part of our world with which we do not relate well. Conflict is best resolved when all involved can learn the lessons and make changes. Conflict is a tense, demanding and dangerous form of peace; but it is a form of peace.

Justice

...one hour's global military expenditure would more than suffice to immunize the 3.5 million children destined to die annually from preventable infectious disease. James Grant, Director of Unicef, has posed the question whether the world would tolerate a Hiroshima-like catastrophe every three days. This, in fact, is now happening, for every three days 120,000 children die unnecessarily - the very toll of casualties following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Indeed the children of the world are already living in the rubble of World War III. (Bernard Lown)¹¹

While such comparisons are necessarily artificial, it does seem quite clear that the nuclear arms race in particular, and the militarization of politics in general, represents a massive diversion of resources away from the needs of the poor, which collectively amounts to murderous theft. Peace is insubstantial while injustice persists. Yet perceptions of justice can differ, and the fanatical pursuit of our idea of justice can easily create further injustice. Peace is substantial when past injustice has been adequately redressed, so that it ceases to be a cause of conflict in the present; yet the adequacy of such redress is essentially a matter for judgement by all involved. Further confusion is created by the variety of the standards and ideals of justice that exist. Just resolutions of conflict are profoundly peaceful; yet the absence of a resolution perceived as just by all involved can prolong a conflict indefinitely.

I am of the generation that grew up on anti-nazi stories, and a part of me has absolutely no question about the justice of the allied war effort. That same part of me is stirred by stories of right-wing dictatorships whose police have been trained in torture techniques as a matter of official policy, just as it is stirred by the novels of Solzhenitsyn. I have to admit that war, at all levels of human relationships, remains on the edge of my awareness as an extreme, ugly possibility that I dare not completely reject. I see no honest way

of arguing that conflicts, which are endemic to all aspects of inner and outer life, can never descend into this violent and destructive form. There do seem to be evils that we, if we are to remain human, must seek to destroy; yet this entrenches and perpetuates the dynamics of destructive conflict in a way that I find deeply unsatisfactory and disturbing.

Once we humans believe that we have located evil, we feel duty-bound to destroy it. There is another part of me that is coolly aware that we all tend to see evil out there in others, while protecting ourselves from the knowledge of similar evil, potential or actual, in ourselves. This part of me identifies as evil precisely this willingness for zealous destruction, and I see value in a complete prohibition on the destruction of others as a compensation against our tendency to demonize other human beings. I see hope in the peace-making strategy of seeking to contact the human being within our enemies, and even within cruel people whose deeds are quite abominable, as this helps us to own that shadow part of ourselves that we have projected onto them. Yet this imaginative approach seems unacceptably passive and collusive when we consider the sufferings of the victims. The nuclear arms race is evil in its preparation of mass destruction for merely national ends and in its misuse of the earth's resources to entrench enmity rather than to build a peaceful global community. How can these evils of enmity and violence be overcome?

The general justification for initiating conflict would seem to be the entrenched evil of particular situations. A family in which the husband has shown a willingness to beat his wife and children when they fail to meet his requirements may reach a stage of apparent peace; the wife and children are terrorized by the man, and make every effort to pacify the tyrant. There may even be an absence of overt violence once this situation has become established; the wife and children learn the signs of the man's impending anger, and scurry to appease him. Whatever the details, the coercive use of terror is an evil that poisons the life of this family. It shows how outward calm and harmony may occur in a profoundly unpeaceful situation. A proper peace would seem to require that the intimidated family members somehow find the strength to stand up for themselves.

The central factor in hopeful change in such situations will be the self-assertion of the erstwhile victims. This may take the form of counter-violence, leading to chronic, sporadic fighting without any resolution, or to the definitive defeat of the wife and children, or to the defeat or even death of the tyrannical husband. These various possibilities all contain substantial elements of human loss. The more ideal and Utopian solutions lie along the lines of a discovery of non-coercive forms of power. Where people can make their statement without unacceptable impositions on others, and find strength to hold to it under attack, there is space given to the other people involved to reflect and to change. There is deep and serious struggle here, but there is also hope of success in achieving more respectful and positive

family relationships. Tyrant and victim travel different pathways towards this goal, but the goal is the same for both; each can stand tall on the basis of their own resources with, eventually, mutual respect.

Our inward sense of powerlessness is one of the central ingredients of a low self-image, and a major obstacle to the successful breaking of unpeaceful silences. We need to recognize how our existing sense of powerlessness will be intensified by the nuclear nightmare. To the extent to which we feel powerless (and there is an obviously rational basis for such feelings), we are vulnerable to a lowering of our self-esteem, and thus to the build-up of those feelings of frustration, which, particularly when unrecognized, can predispose us for despairing and unproductive violence. Peace-making here requires the overcoming of the powerlessness of the weak. Terrorized silences of all kinds must be broken if peaceful relationships are to be achieved. Fighting. for peace is, paradoxically, required by the existence of injustice.

Tyrants who find their sense of power in the humiliation of others may themselves suffer from a low self-image, which they seek to bolster through feelings of superiority over those whom they degrade. There is sickness here, as such humiliations are incapable of creating self-acceptance; damaged people continue to cause damage. Similarly, there is sickness as well as anxious insecurity in competition for world domination, and we need to understand the psychological basis for this kind of power-sickness. All human powers have limits, and therefore real elements of powerlessness. Self-perceptions of powerlessness, the "helpless giant" syndrome, tend to lower the restraints on destructive violence by the powerful, so that it is not only the powerlessness of the weak that peacemakers need to address.

Real justice needs to be done, and seen to be done, and acknowledged as having been done, by competent and responsible people. The demands of justice stand in judgement on all aspects of our history, highlighting unpeaceful elements that need to change. The inexorability that seems to characterize the demands of justice is somehow built into the structuring of human community. Once we accept people as dialogue partners, our conversation presses us inevitably towards accepting as valid the sense of justice that is built into their historical experience - unless we withdraw from the conversation, reverting to an antagonistic and potentially violent stance. Conversational struggle over issues of justice is crucial to the creation of a world community that can live in peace.

Non-violence

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth; whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. (Frantz Fanon)¹²

The general justice of anti-colonial struggle is clear; what is not clear

is the compatibility of violence with peace-making. I see violence, unlike conflict, as being essentially opposed to peace-making. The non-violent prosecution of just conflicts, such as Gandhi's contributions to the struggle for the independence of India, or Martin Luther King's leadership of campaigns for the civil rights of black Americans, offers us profound images of peace in the midst of conflict, hatred and injustice. Non-violent action is inherently more capable than violent action of creating change that is both just and peaceful. Yet violence is profoundly human, and contains elements, however flawed, that aspire to the making of peace.

Fanon's account of anti-colonial warfare is based on his experience of the bitter liberation struggles in Algeria. I understand the argument that a colonial regime imposed and maintained by military force is hardly likely to melt away because some local people ask it to go, although something like this has happened in other cases of decolonization (in Papua New Guinea, for example). Fanon quotes the biblical saying," The last shall be first and the fast last" as a description of decolonization, and there is indeed justice in the self-affirmation and self-assertion of people who have been defined as non-people, or as second-class citizens, in their own land. Rollo May14 writing on the basis of his experience as a psychiatrist working in the USA, also sees this fateful connection between a low self-image, a sense of personal impotence, and the capacity for violent actions, although his focus is upon valid ways for individual people to avoid the need for destructive violence.

Violent revolution is hardly peaceful; and yet it is essential that injustice be challenged and overcome if a proper peace is to be established. In human terms, I understand the simple attractions of meeting violence with counter-violence, and terror with counter-terror. Yet there is a dreary inevitability about our human decisions to do as we have been done by, and about our conservative belief that the only reliable pathway to political power requires the deployment of military force. Where I part company with Fanon (and I recognize that this reflects my life experience, which is very different from his) is in wanting to separate the psychic energy of the violence (the anger at the evil of colonial prejudice and exploitation and the self-affirming break with powerlessness and silence) from the physical killing and maiming of people.

Non-violent resistance demands change from the powerful, but not their death. Anger and resentment do not provide an adequate basis for a new society; more positive and constructive energies will be needed after the colonialists have been thrown out. The history of post-colonial regimes suggests that anger and resentment can lead to a continuing need for enemies against whom to be angry, so that when the colonialists are thrown out, tribal or other divisions become the new focus of antagonism. Ideas of the purification of society by the murder of unacceptable or unnecessary people are themselves unacceptably murderous, whether couched in the ideology of Hitler or Pol Pot. Non-violent resistance establishes the dynamics of peaceful order; its main drawback has been the relentless requirement that its proponents be prepared to be powerless and vulnerable to their enemies.

As a member of a well-entrenched "settler" society myself, I hardly feel in a position to criticize decisions for armed struggle by oppressed peoples. White Australians continue to exploit the patience and weaknesses of aborigines by failing to deal with the fact of their prior occupancy of Australia. I feel the continuing pain of this historic injustice, from which I and my community continue to benefit. There is hope for change and for justice through the political consolidation of aboriginal communities and organizations, but I see a need for international as well as national support for their voice. Aboriginal people can tell of the pain and the powerlessness of being a conquered people whose culture has not been respected by their conquerors, and they know despair as well as hope. One recent disappointment has been the retreat by labor governments from national land rights legislation, partly because of an expensive anti-land rights campaign by mining interests.

People do need to live in a culture that they own, and colonized peoples have been deeply deprived at this level. The first step is to break the silence of apparent powerlessness and to reclaim identity. I understand this to be central to the demands for land rights by many indigenous peoples. The self-affirmation of such demands seems positive to me; the unresolved question is how culturally different groups can live in the same country on a basis of mutual respect and justice. There is an intractability to these situations of injustice and basic communal differences that makes peacemaking change very difficult, while still very necessary.

I conclude from these reflections that education for peace has major tasks in this area, and that one central aim will be to help people to find their sense of power in themselves, thus addressing the source of the sense of impotence and encouraging the development of a more positive self-image. This cannot be done without addressing the despairing questions of our actual powers, and of whether there are hopeful ways forward. For peacemaking, we need self-affirming people who have the inner strength to acknowledge areas of their own powerlessness without being manipulated by it into destructive counter-violence, and who have energy for supporting peaceful relationships at all levels. Peace requires emergence from denial, ignorance, resignation and despair, just as it requires control over our anger, our blaming, and our tendencies to coerce people. Peace-making requires that we stand on our own two feet and deal honestly with our world, both in initiating conflict and in seeking non-violent changes that deal with injustices.

Understanding

Nuclear weapons by themselves do not pose any danger. It is the mind behind these weapons which constitutes the danger that threatens us all. Genuine disarmament involves a fundamental change in our attitudes. It means that each and every one of us is responsible to one another, and to the world. Genuine disarmament is the realization that everyone wants happiness and does not want suffering; genuine disarmament includes

the cultivation of the good heart, which, even though it is not in a position to help others, does not harm them. The idea of universal responsibility and the good heart are not unique to Buddhism. They are universal, and are taught by all great religions. In fact, through the centuries, the great teachers rose, who spread the universal message of peace and compassion. In order to realize peace on earth, it is necessary that individuals, whose collective ideas make up the conscience of our world, must first cultivate a peaceful mental disposition. For many, this may sound rather far-fetched; but if we are to draw any lesson from the facts of life and history, it is this: that the individual counts, that his ideas and actions can make a difference in the cause of the world peace, that change in the attitude of one individual will constitute a victory for the cause of world peace, in the continuing war between survival and destruction. Signed: The Dalai Lama.¹⁵

This Buddhist vision of the path to a peaceful world has the virtue of simplicity. We collectively set the rules for social life; we collectively dominate and reshape the natural environment through our technology. Nuclear armaments and other technologically created perils provide us with an excellent reason for seeking self-knowledge. Human control of humanly generated problems is possible, provided we understand ourselves well enough, and provided that we can exercise a collectively coordinated control. Unfortunately, we remain vulnerable to our entrenched divisions and our greeds and hatreds. World peace is humanly possible, but it remains to be invented; understanding ourselves will therefore be central to the creation of a viable world peace.

The word "understanding" has the dual senses of "knowledge" and "support". Both meanings connect with my experience of peace, and both are embodied in the image of Atlas, who carries the world on his shoulders. Atlas literally stands under the world, completely supporting it, and he has direct knowledge of it through the muscles of his body. Atlas is a mythological figure who can symbolize a spiritual power that holds the world in being by knowing it intimately. The SOED uses the words "comprehend" and "apprehend" in defining understanding.16 These both derive from the Latin word prehendere, meaning "to grasp, seize." This also connects with the Atlas image; apprehension involves the visual and mental fixing on something at a distance from ourselves in order to grasp it, and comprehension involves the integration of what we have grasped with ourselves.

Atlas is so integrated with his world that destructive violence against anything in this world is also directed against Atlas. Deep conflicts between parts of this world would seem to be experienced by Atlas as a form of self-division, which, if allowed to progress, would eventually lead to self-mutilation. Perhaps we can see the two super-powers as the two arms of an Atlas gone mad, and about to tear the world into pieces. The key to changing this destructive strength into the supportive strength of the traditional Atlas image lies in contacting the unifying source that lies in the rest of the body, and rebuilding the unity of our collective human

understanding until this is achieved. The choice for self-mutilation is possible to us; yet it is bizarre, and speaks of self-division and of a lack of self-acceptance. The existence of understanding does not preclude a choice for destructive violence or self-mutilation, but it does weigh the scales of our judgment against it.

Western culture has a rich history of struggle to know what is to be known about our world, particularly the outer world of physical nature. As a participant in this culture, I am happy to celebrate and value the understanding that we have achieved, even while I regret the serious limitations on our understanding of our humanity. Technical reason may prescribe perfect means for achieving a given end; but this merely increases the threat when the end is itself mad or bad, as it is with the arms race. We need to understand why we fail to live up to our own avowed ideals, and why our global socio-political life does not reflect more of the wisdom that is there in our various cultural traditions. We seem to have great difficulty in dealing well with our own blind spots and with our more destructive energies.

Understanding provides the inner basis for the creation and maintenance of a peaceful order. We call the result of a successful negotiation between conflicting parties an understanding that they have reached, and the enhancement of our collective understanding is the indispensable prerequisite for creating and maintaining the world peace for which we yearn. At a personal level, I find peace in the intimacy created by the sharing of significant experiences, and in the sense of understanding, and being understood, to which such sharing leads. At a communal level, there is peace in understanding the various rationales that groups have for their own self-chosen ways; this encourages us to project positive images onto each other, and not negative images based upon unrecognized aspects of ourselves, that encourage us to victimize and destroy other human beings.

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,

Night and morning with my tears;

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,

Till it bore an apple bright;

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole

When the night had veiled the pole:

In the morning glad I see

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.¹⁷

(William Blake)

There is in this poem a recognition of the choice to hold a grudge. I hear Blake asking whether my wrath against my foe would have ended if I had been able to tell it. I also hear the echoes of an underlying remorse for the triumph of my wrath against my foe, and for the quite literally murderous decision to maintain enmity until the destructive climax is reached. The spirit is fierce, implacable, devious and inexorable. We can all do it; we are, in varying degrees, all doing it. I feel amazed and baffled by the deep wells of hatred that we have in our hearts, and I wonder how we can learn to deal with all these hatreds without letting them run their murderous course. This poem shows very clearly how self-knowledge can contribute to peace-making.

Understanding of a similarly painful nature is found by the victims of violence and oppression as they reflect on their experiences. As we move out of a colonized mentality, in which we accept a view of reality that justifies our suffering as inevitable, we can become aware of the ways in which powerful oppressors make unjust choices and camouflage their actions with lying propaganda. At this stage, a recognition of how we hurt is usefully connected with anger against our oppressors; we need the self-affirmation that it brings. Yet there is also need for an understanding of what is really going on, of what we want for our world, and of how we can most productively act to bring that about. The way out of powerlessness is to become powerful, but this does not mean that we must become oppressive in our turn because of our hatred of real wrongdoing.

In the public arena, peace-making will require a critical awareness of propaganda. Advertisers and governments know the power of manipulating our behavior through manipulating our awareness, and building up a favorable image for their product. If we are to avoid being manipulated, we need to develop a critical awareness of reality that includes knowledge of the ways in which our perceptions can be directed and controlled. This is difficult, and can lead us into a paranoid state of mind in which we learn to mistrust every communication that comes our way; yet we cannot avoid trusting some communications if we are to be able to judge that others are unreliable. It is therefore not sufficient to know that manipulation can occur; we also need our own independent knowledge of reality to inform our critical awareness. It seems that we choose the kind of reality that we want to inhabit in choosing which people to accept as reliable sources of information.

Governments know the importance of directing public uneasiness against targets other than themselves. The traditional scapegoats have been foreign enemies and marginalized domestic groups that are in some Way different. A selection of factually accurate news stories is sometimes

sufficient to achieve these ends, but if the target groups prove uncooperative in creating a bad image for themselves, many political groups have not been above producing the required images without then-assistance. As an example of what I mean, I quote a newspaper account of a speech by Ralph McGehee, who worked for the american CIA for 25 years before becoming disillusioned and resigning.

First, create the threat.

Second, hysterically warn that the threat must be stopped.

Third, condemn anyone who doesn't acknowledge the threat. Label him a dupe, a communist or even a wimp.

That's the basic, simple technique of the Central Intelligence Agency, the US secret service which expanded the theory to make and overthrow governments, destroy characters and has led to the deaths of countless people throughout the world.

Ralph McGehee knows the technique well. For 25 years he worked for the CIA - a world of deception, fantasy, paranoia and extraordinary covert activities.

Mr. McGehee is in Australia to warn of the dangers of a disturbing formula - an unfettered CIA feeding lies to an extremely gullible US president.

But he readily admits in the early days he fully believed it all. (Sun News-Pictorial)¹⁸

There is here a choice to maintain enmity that is reminiscent of Blake's poisoned tree. I do not doubt that the soviet KGB and the intelligence agencies of other governments operate in similarly oppressive ways. It is still hard to know which stories to believe; I find McGehee's account credible because it is consistent with a range of published information,19 because it conforms to my image of secret service activities culled from spy novels, and because Mr. McGehee seems a credible figure. I am well aware that none of these reasons is conclusive; when we hear stories from secret worlds, complete checks are impossible. What I find important is to listen to the stories and to learn to look behind the surface of public affairs.

The logic of propagandist suggestion is to exploit objective uncertainty. For example, what conceivable state of the world would refute the assertion that Russia is a military threat? Clearly, only a fully disarmed Russia, proven to be so, would be a sufficient refutation. The notion of threat slides from the fact that Russia is "capable of aggression" to the assertion that Russia is "intending aggression", which is a non sequitur. The United States, or any other powerful body, can be pictured in the same way. Propaganda images exploit our fears of what we don't know, and invite us to project images of evil aggression onto our opponents, thereby turning them into enemies. We can foil this tactic in part by knowing our fears and recognizing manipulative messages; but without a counterbalancing understanding of the humanity of the Russian people, anti-soviet

propaganda can have a marked effect upon us, even while we attempt to be critical of it.

Ancient traditions of human sacrifice to propitiate the gods were rejected by the Jewish prophetic tradition as a misunderstanding of the sacred. There are two major steps in this story, that of replacing human sacrifice with animal sacrifice, as we see in the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah (Genesis 22:1-19), and that of replacing animal sacrifice with the inner, moral sacrifices that are involved in the sanctification of our behavior (c(f. Amos 5:21-4, Micah 6:6-8). With these steps went a changed view of the location of the sacred, from some divine realm above the human sphere that is approached only through special "sacred sites", to a recognition of sacredness in all areas of this-worldly life. Ancient traditions believed in giving their best to the divine by removing it from earth through death; Judeo-Christian traditions have come to believe in giving their best to the divine by offering it for the wholeness of earthly life. I affirm this vision of the sacredness of this world, rightly seen.

I accept the genuineness of the sacrifice made by the anzacs, whatever their private motivations and shortcomings may have been. I do not accept that we Australians must be forever bound by the

necessities that bound them. Their story testifies to the horror, cruelty and senselessness of war and of empire-building; I resist seeing them as foundation stones in the walls around fortress Australia. Nevertheless, I recognize the overwhelming way in which some Australians have fused the loss and the horror of that experience with their vision of Australia. Such people sometimes accuse those with a divergent vision of betraying the sacrifice of those who died to defend Australia. Such deeply felt accusations carry religious overtones, and we can respond most appropriately from our own deepest convictions. For myself, I see a purity of sacrifice in the death of Christ, and I accept the Christian conviction that this sacrifice is sufficient. While I understand that it is in some sense true that some have died that we might have life in a free nation, I reject the view that this can require of us an unthinking conformity to their vision rather than our own.

The flaw in merely national visions of peace is that, particularly in the modern world, the security of one is not possible apart from the security of all. There is a global unity in our common human situation of being embodied people inhabiting planet earth. While these things can lead us into conflict when we perceive ourselves as being in competition with others for scarce resources, they give a firm basis for co-operation on global family problems such as the threats of environmental degradation and the arms race itself. Kellas22 distinguishes between heavenly peace, which is based on an unlimited willingness to sacrifice ourselves, and peace on earth, which is based on sufficient sacrifice to ensure the maintenance of co-operation. Heavenly peace is not a possible choice for states, as it involves a willingness to decide to cease taking up space in the world, which is contrary to the constitution of a state. This leaves all too many states trimming their degree of sacrifice as close as possible to the point where co-operation breaks down because of their narrow perceptions of advantage and gain. How can we achieve mutual co-operation while such subversion takes place?

It seems to me that sacrifice is essential to peace-making. It is through sacrifice that we become contributors to the peace that is being built. When we identify sacrifice as losing, we make sacrifices grudgingly, in a spirit of reluctance and failure; yet sacrifice is real losing, which becomes a gift through the conscious choice of the giver. It is through the creativity of our gifts that we contribute most directly to peace. Much of the impurity that hangs around notions of sacrifice has to do with stories of people not giving, but bargaining, or manipulatively inducing others to give. We can only give what is really ours to give, and impure sacrifice is not likely to succeed in making peace.

In western culture, dominated as we have been by secular assumptions, we lack clarity about the sacred. Perhaps we can think of the sacred as that wider reality of which our common sense and secular reality is a part, so that sacred perspectives include the secular, but secular perspectives do not include the sacred, except in insignificant

and powerless forms, or at the edges of perception. Within the sacred we can distinguish the demonic, which may lead to overwhelming evil, from the holy, in which is wholeness, transcendence and peace. There are mysteries about how peace is made in our world; and it seems to me that where there are boundaries that resist our inquisitive consciousness, we are close to the sacred.

I think all this was somehow caught up for me in Auden's statement that no secular wall will safely stand without a cement of innocent human blood. In the earlier part of the poem, there is the marvelously anti pathetical encounter between himself as an Arcadian and the other as an Utopian; in human terms, no treaty, let alone community, is possible between Eden and New Jerusalem. It is only through the in-breaking of a transcendent dimension of reality, the sacred, that an order is forged that can include such conflicting people. Auden suggests that secular society is held together in spite of itself by forces that manifest themselves as sacrifice and gift, and which are strictly incomprehensible in secular thought forms.

God's Peace

Show a gentle attitude towards everyone. The Lord is coming soon. Don't worry about anything, but in all your prayers ask God for what you need, always asking him with a thankful heart. And God's peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:5-7)

There is a stark contrast between the images of God's peace that these words suggest, and the various forms of peace and security offered us by the modern nation-state. A state that has made the choice to possess nuclear weapons, to say nothing of other weapon systems, can hardly be suspected of "showing a gentle attitude towards everyone". The slogan "if you want peace, prepare for war" is more typical of the idea we have had of peace between the nations; the main justification offered by the western nations for the continuing deployment of nuclear weapons is that they contribute to a state of stable deterrence, which has, so it is claimed, forestalled a global war since 1945. Deterrence is obviously incompatible with a fully gentle attitude; the nations will presumably argue that Paul was addressing Christian believers and not them.

There is the further tantalizing statement that God's peace is beyond human understanding. This does not mean that it has no impact upon human experience, as we are told that this incomprehensible peace will keep the hearts and minds of believers safe in union with Christ Jesus. It does suggest that the fullness of peace goes beyond the reach of our ability to know. This can be seen as comforting, as it indicates a depth to reality that sustains itself independently of our perception of it. The image that I have here is of our minds as feeble

little searchlights that are trying unsuccessfully to illuminate some distant moon, while unrecognized by us the cosmic forces maintain our planetary home safe and sound.

In days to come the mountain where the Temple stands will be the highest one of all, towering above all the hills. Many nations will come streaming to it, and their people will say, "Let us go up the hill of the Lord, to the Temple of Israel's God. He will teach us what he wants us to do; we will walk in the paths he has chosen. For the Lord's teaching comes from Jerusalem; from Zion he speaks to his people." He will settle disputes among great nations. They will hammer their swords into ploughs and their spears into pruning knives. Nation will never again prepare for war, never prepare for battle again. (Isaiah 2:2-4)

It can be said that this is a theocratic vision that rests upon the justice of God's arbitration and the willingness of the great nations to rely upon it rather than upon armies and weapons of war. It can also be said that it is a Judeo – centric vision that makes Jerusalem the dominant power in the world, though a power without coercive sanctions. God's peace will be effective through a mysterious universal allegiance to the collective order that somehow removes anarchic violence and answers the heartfelt desire of people for peace and not war. God's peace is beyond our understanding, even when it is actively powerful in our experience.

The visionary message about God's peace speaks to the deep anxieties and fears that arise for us in confronting the nuclear arms race and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This message affirms the reality of a truly just authority that can guarantee, somehow, the humanity of the nations, despite the duplicity and violence of world history that suggests otherwise. There are human efforts that move in this direction, such as the United Nations, which has the potential to generate just global authority. The frequent frustration of UN initiatives by the non-co-operation of powerful nations has led to doubt and even despair about the worth of continuing international efforts for peace. The question remains: what power or powers are capable of establishing an order sufficiently just to win the free and un-coerced allegiance of the overwhelming majority of nations and peoples, so that war can become a bad dream of the vanished, never-to-be-revived past?

This vision of universal peace through making the tools of war into the tools of peace also occurs in the collection of sayings attributed to the prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah. As the words are almost identical, we can assume that we are dealing with a common fragment of traditional material that has found its way into these two collections. What I find interesting about Micah's version is that he adds the following words to those quoted above.

Everyone will live in peace among his own vineyards and fig-trees, and no-one will make him afraid. The Lord Almighty has promised this. (Micah 4:4)

It can be said that this is an unacceptably patriarchal vision of family life, and that it can be no more than nostalgic romanticism for citizens of a post-industrial megalopolis. Yet this addition makes a decisive connection between the level of national and international politics, and that of personal and domestic experience. We don't have to like grapes or figs to hear in these words the promise of a peace that can somehow cope with the nuclear nightmare. It does seem to me that a hopeful vision needs to include this personal and domestic dimension if it is to address us where we are deeply anxious, just as it needs to deal with the reality of international conflict. The domestic level, which here includes the life-sustaining work of caring for the fruit-trees, is the level of our daily, personal living. The promise here is that no one will make us afraid. There is a fullness of life in this image that I find profoundly attractive, and it is basic to the idea of peace contained in the Hebrew word shalom.

The word eirene (peace) in classical Greek is primarily negative, denoting absence or end of war... But generally the biblical sense of "peace" is determined by the positive conception of the Hebrew word shalom...

Shalom is a comprehensive word, covering the manifold relationships of daily life, and expressing the ideal state of life in Israel. Fundamental meaning is "totality" (the adjective shalem is translated "whole"), "well-being", "harmony", with stress on material prosperity untouched by violence or misfortune... Peace is the normal and proper condition of men [sic] in relationship with one another, enjoyed most intimately in the family (Gen.l3.~8), and extended to others by a covenant (1 Sam. 20:42) which determines relationships and is so a "covenant of peace"...The source of peace in all its forms is Jehovah, the God of peace (Judg. 6:24, Isa. 45:7), who overcomes the forces of disharmony in the heavens (Job 25:2), who blesses Israel (Lev. 26:6, Num. 6:26, Ps. 29:11, 85:3-12), the house of David (1 Kings 2:33), the priesthood (Mal. 2:5), the faithful Israelite (Ps. 4:8) with peace.

Peace is central to the preaching of the prophets, who from Micaiah to Ezekiel engage in conflict with false prophets on the question of Peace or No Peace (1 Kings 22, Micah 3:5-11, Jer. 6:13f., 14:13-18, 23:16ff., Ezek. 13:1-16). They interpreted the political and social turmoil as the necessary judgment of God, in the face of which to prophesy security is to pass over sin. Only after the judgment has taken place can Jeremiah write to the exiles that Jehovah now cherishes thoughts of peace towards them (Jer. 29:11)... A final peace as the gift of God in the coming age is constituent of OT eschatology, and is envisaged either as the abolition of war and the rule over the

nations of Israel's messianic king (Isa. 9:2-7, Zech. 9:9 f., Micah 5:5, Haggai 2:7-9), or as a paradisal existence in which all forms of strife will have been removed (Isa.11:1ff., 2:2-4, 65:25, Ezek. 34:25-28). This long-awaited gift of the last days (Rom. 2:10), which is deliverance from the enemies of life and the establishment of righteousness, begins to be a present fact-with the birth of the Baptist (Luke 1:79,71) and of Jesus (Luke 2:14,29:30)... peace describes the removal of estrangement and the new relationship with God secured through the obedience, righteousness and death of Christ for those who respond (Rom. 5). Peace is thus almost synonymous with eternal life, in contrast to the sinful life of the flesh which leads to death (Rom. 8:6-11), is the calling and present possession of Christians, arbitrating in favor of decisions and actions which produce freedom and love (1 Cor. 7:15, Col. 3:15), is to be pursued in company with fellow Christians (Heb. 12:14,2 Tim. 2:22) and beggars description because it mounts guards over them and preserves them in their inner being until the Parousia (Phil. 4:7). (C.F. Evans)²³

The Judeo-Christian conception is that peace is the fullness of this-worldly life which has its source in God, and that there is promised a fulfillment of all things, in which God will be all in all. Our present experiences of a peace which is substantial are fragmentary glimpses of this fulfilled state. I understand, but do not accept, the sense of realism of those who reject notions of God's peace as an irrelevant distraction. It is clearly important to work with human possibilities; but it is also important to listen to the possibilities that are suggested by visionary experiences. As long as the non-existence of God is not decisively proven, I see no point in succumbing to the drastic shrinking of the horizons of possibility that atheism propounds. When we are looking at the threat of annihilation (of ourselves, our people, our civilization, our world), it becomes very important to find somewhere to stand that is not going to crumble under us in the face of the crisis. This prophetic promise of everlasting peace and fulfillment can provide us with a place to stand, even while we admit that this peace has not yet come, and that present appearances are against it.

I accept that people do have visionary experiences that are not to be easily dismissed as insignificant. I believe this both because people report such experiences, and because I have had a few such experiences myself. Visionary experiences are characterized by heightened awareness, in which we encounter something of the deeper, sacred dimensions of reality that are silent in more everyday experiences. It is not possible to wield such experiences like a sword against the infidels, with the possible exception of the infidel inside myself; but neither is it possible to believe, except on the basis of arbitrary ideological choice, that they have no significance.

As an image of divine peace-making, I see a calm and purposeful

person walking into the chaos and darkness of a turbulent situation; this person calms the troublemakers so that the disturbance subsides and its causes settle. This can be an everyday experience in school classrooms, where youthful high spirits and respect for the disciplinary powers of teachers may be all that is involved; or it may seem miraculous when we recognize our own incapacity to achieve this peaceful result. Inner calm is most clearly involved where the person lacks all coercive power, and relies on a combination of personal effrontery and persuasive contact with hidden possibilities in the chaotic people. The mysterious story of Jesus out in a boat with his disciples,, stilling a terrifying storm (Matthew 8:23-7, Mark 4:35-41, and Luke 8:22-5), expresses something of this image, as does the story of St. Francis befriending and rebuking the wild wolf of Gubbio. Where there is power and success that surprises us in such stories, we may think magic, or we may think the power of love, but the full cost, and the risk, remains unknown.

Through the Son, then, God decided to bring the whole universe back to himself. God made peace through his Son's death on the cross and so brought back to himself all things, both on earth and in heaven. (Colossians 1:20)

In Christian terms, Christ's death on the cross is central to God's peace for us and our world. Precisely how this works is indeed beyond our understanding. There is something here about Christ heading into the darkness of death and hell, eventually to emerge on the other side clothed in resurrection light. There is something here about confronting the powers of evil, which do their worst against this innocent victim, so that their evil nature is revealed for all to reject. There is something here about Christ's solidarity with all the innocent victims of history, and the interpenetration of their narrow darkness with the divine presence. There is something here about a powerful and self-giving love that claims every aspect of human experience for goodness, so that all forms of evil can be shed. God's peace, into which we are invited, is somehow, shockingly, founded in pain, betrayal and death. The necessities that we thought separated us from God and from each other are here remade into strong building blocks for peace. This peace turns the world upside down, and blows open all the doors that we have spent our lives in trying to keep shut. The point of escape from our darkness is the darkest place of all. Paradoxes pile on top of each other as God's peace gathers us in.

It is hard to write too clearly about something which is indeed beyond our understanding, and which we can at best begin to grasp on the far edge of our imaginative and intuitive suggestions. Nevertheless, I know myself to be unreasonably hopeful in the face of nuclear and other threats, not because I deny the substance of the threat, but because I know enough of God's peace to feel that life's meaning remains, even if all the threats that I have ever feared were to happen at once.