Some people will regard this year's United Nations International Day of Peace (21 September) as a bad joke. It comes in the midst of so much war-making, such multifaceted and insoluble wars, and such a rush to go to war in order to stop war.
Those with a feel for history may see the day as an echo of an idealistic age that had experienced long years of war and was determined to shape a better world. To those caught in the fear and violence of war, and promised another ten years of the same, it will come as an insinuating hope against hope, and as a reproach to the world that stirs rather than douses wars.
It is easy to see peace simply as the absence of war. We think that when an end is declared to war, peace by definition follows. But that is too thin a view of peace. It is better to see peace as woven out of a rich interlocking set of relationships, and war as what happens when these relationships are frayed and attenuated. War with all its horrors is an absence of depth and connection.
Peace flourishes when people and institutions look outwards to bring benefit to others as well as to themselves. They make connections and cement relationships. In war people look inwards and are isolated by fear and hatred.
So if we are celebrating the International Day of Peace we need to identify the relationships crucial to a peaceful society and world, and ask ourselves how to strengthen and extend them.
The interlocking relationships we describe as the economy are central. When the economy is seen in terms of individuals seeking their own narrow gain, and economic relationships are ordered to serve the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful, the result is disconnection, the assertion of power over reason and cooperation, and gross inequality. Historically these conditions express themselves in trade wars, conquest and civil war.
When we think of peace we should think first of an economy ordered to secure the common good, not simply the good of individuals or individual nations without respect for others.
To build peace we must also nurture our relationships within the environment of which we are part. Global warming has made us increasingly aware of how our welfare is founded in a very complex and delicate set of relationships between the beings in our world, including human beings. If these