Prismatic Peace

What does it mean today to 'give peace a chance?'

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A few weeks ago I struggled to get to sleep after hearing a statement by the person now sadly favourite to be the next leader of the free world. I think of this person as Donald-the-Trump, not becuase he is a trump in the sense of surpassing other things of value, but because the association with Nellie-the-elephant makes him less scary.

Nellie-the-elephant Donald Trump remarked that he would not protect Nato countries from Russian aggression if they were behind on their bills and this kind of statement poses an epistemic challenge. On the one hand, we are advised to take authoritarian personalities at their word even when, and especially when, they say outlandish things. However, Nellie-the-elephant Trump says so many things, not all coherent or consistent, so we can’t take him at face value either.

In any case, his comment led me into one of those *oh shit this really could happen* mindsets and led me to imagine the leaders of major world powers including Trump and Putin worked together against Europe, while Xi got busy occupying Taiwan without any US response. It was a dark and still unlikely scenario, but it did seem possible and even darkly plausible. I began to wonder what it would mean for peace in Western Europe where I live. I even wondered whether my older son Kailash, now 15, might soon be called up for military service, and his future stolen from him. That night the future felt bleak, even though I knew my mind was indulging in its worst fears.

We are not there, but this is only one scenario of many where the world intensifies the war it is already waging on itself. As indicated previously, we are in a new phase of historical time where war is not just an internecine or international phenomenon but also an intra-planetary phenomenon. Today there are still wars within and between nation-states, but the deeper battle is the war on nature waged by unfettered capitalist logic, and the war on truth waged by deep fakes and real algorithms. In that wider war, we need to refashion our idea of peace to better keep pace with the growing fragility and interdependence of the world system.

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There’s a saying that the best time to plant a tree was thirty years ago, and the second best is now. I think the same can be said about making peace.

We tend to think of peace as something to seek when war is already underway - and that’s true, but it’s already too late. In the academic literature on peace, they distinguish between peace as the absence of violence and positive peace as the presence of peaceful interactions and institutions. I am interested in preemptive positive peace, namely what we are called upon to do and be to prevent World War Three. I believe that kind of work - inspired and informed by the idea of preemptive positive peace - may also help us deal with ecological collapse, technological servitude, democratic decline and economic precarity.

We can also think of preemptive positive peace as ‘structural peace’. If we frame Galtung’s idea of structural violence as features of social and economic structure that cause avoidable harm; structural peace will be the opposite, namely features of social and economic structure that seek to reduce and minimize or even eliminate avoidable harm. Structural peace is another name for the design principles of a viable 21st-century civilisation.

Better still, I think what I am drawn towards is ‘prismatic peace’. Peace is prismatic in the sense that when you seek out a richer conception of preemptive positive peace and then look through that idea as far as possible, we can see the world differently, and perhaps more clearly, and discern which ideas are merely interesting and which are actually important. By trying to find and make peace we might oblige ourselves to unlearn and reimagine our conventional ways of seeing and knowing.

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Regular readers will have noticed that I seem to be running a few minutes about half a year late on finishing the last of four promised posts on the future of peace. My apologies. To do the concluding reflection justice I need more time than I currently have to investigate developments in Ukraine, AI and Climate Change and link them to the thesis outlined in the first post on The Future of Peace. There I argue that we do not seem to have a theory and practice of peacemaking worthy of 21st-century challenges and that this should be a focal point of inquiry for anyone concerned with The Inner Life of the Future which I believe is best understood as a relationship within and between the relationships of The Third Attractor, The Third Horizon and The Third Reality.

To state the point more simply, most extrapolations from the present to the future imply a growing likelihood of escalating war and oppressive attempts to impose order to prevent war or even as a pretext to perpetuate war, and we need a preemptive vision and practice of peace to create alternative pathways. In a nutshell: No peace, no future.

To buy me another six months just a little more time I’m sharing a few thoughts prompted by a short talk I gave on Monday at St. Ethelburga’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, and some reflections prompted by giving the talk and a 27-minute audio recording for paid subscribers at the end.

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The Monday event was for a relatively small group of people who have been supported by The Fetzer Institute, and it was held in the wonderfully surprising Bedouin tent tucked inside the walls of the centre, a refuge from the ambient skyscrapers in part of London’s financial district. I have no photos from the day, so this seems as good a moment as any to share another photo of St. Ethelburga’s from a Perspectiva event with Daniel Schmachtenberger in November 2022, which gives you some feeling for the beauty of the place.

I was reminded of this event now because I came to the idea of ‘The Third Attractor’ through a video monologue by Daniel. The open question is what a viable future(third attractor) might look like, given that the attractors of collapse (attractor one) and dystopia (attractor two) are so strong. Daniel does not connect his analysis to peace directly, but somewhere along the way, I realised that peace is the Sine Qua Non of any third attractor, namely the thing that makes the thing the thing.

Since that penny dropped I have been reading about peace and thinking about what it might mean programmatically to develop an inquiry into peace in the 21st century.

From that vantage point, I see the classic protest song “Give Peace a Chance” with fresh eyes. I sometimes think that’s where all this metacrisis work has taken me, to the question of what it means to “give peace a chance” - not in 1969, but in 2024 and beyond.

Do take 5 minutes to listen - it’s an energising song and the idea stays with you.

The second half of this post is for paid subscribers and includes a reflection on Monday’s event and the audio recording of my talk there. If you would like to read on and listen to the talk but genuinely cannot afford to take out a paid subscription, please let me know through Substack notes, LinkedIn or Twitter and I’'ll arrange ‘a Comp’. If you can afford to become a paid subscriber, it is much appreciated, and will allow me to continue writing here rather than spending that time doing chess tuition.