Peace

I’ve spent the last several days writing and rewriting an essay about the war on Iran, discarding it and starting over again. I have three versions now, each half-finished. Meanwhile, each passing day brings the world closer to disaster. Some part of me thinks, If only I did the right thing—i know, I’ll write an article!—then this war might stop.

That’s quite a grandiose thing to think, and quite a burden to shoulder. But who knows. Maybe my effort, if I put my heart and soul into it, would tip the balance. I imagine a thousand people all pushing on a boulder trying to move it. I cannot move a boulder. But what if they have brought it nearly to a tipping point, and it will topple if I push with all my might?

Or maybe it is quite otherwise. Maybe the boulder cannot be moved by pushing. Maybe the situation calls for something quite different.

Let us be wary of any internal narrative that confers upon oneself some kind of hero status. When I shoulder the responsibility of stopping a war or a genocide or igniting a movement, I assume powers greater than I actually possess, and knowledge beyond my ken. A lot of people are quite sure of the solutions to the world’s problems. No doubt some of them have insight; however, most of the world’s problems are caused by solutions to previous problems. As Yeats, speaking of what happens as things fall apart, famously put it in The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

So I’m stepping back for a moment from the urgency that has seized me the last few days, the urgency of “I’ve got to pull out all the stops and get into high gear and do something about the Iran war.” Pulling back doesn’t mean to adopt a helpless passivity in the face of the world situation. I am here—we all are here—to contribute to the unfolding of life and beauty on earth. But the Iran war is not some sudden, unforeseeable crisis. It, or something else like it, is an inevitable expression of prevailing myths, stories, and psychologies; systems of money and technology; legacies of trauma and loss, and the political situation that has resulted from all of these. It is the inevitable result of a foreign policy orientation and worldview that Republican and Democratic administrations alike have built since at least 1963. We can run around putting out one fire after another, but if in our rush to do so we forget to attend to the conditions that breed fire in the first place, we will face an endless battle. Let me push the metaphor further. Catastrophic forest fires break out with increasing frequency. We purchase more fire helicopters, hire more fire fighters, fill the reservoirs with water, and put the population on constant high alert. But do we look beyond the immediate crisis? Do we inquire about indigenous forest tending practices? Do we ask how beaver extermination and apex predator extermination altered forest ecology? Do we look at the effects of soil erosion and aquifer depletion?

I reached out to my friend Jodie Evans, a founder of Code Pink with 55 years’ experience in peace activism. One thing I got from the conversation (and please understand that these aren’t Jodie’s words, but rather my possibly inaccurate interpretation after digesting them) is that we cannot stop this war. It was baked into the cake long ago. To declare now that we must stop it actually fosters an illusion that we can stop it; a misunderstanding of what we are dealing with. If this war were some kind of foolish aberration, maybe we could talk sense into the people in power. But it is not an aberration. It is how power itself operates. We do not have the power to stop it, not at this late hour, so let’s not pretend that we do. Let’s not pretend to a heroism beyond our capacities. We have to be realistic about how the world works.

We do not have the power to stop the war on Iran, but we do have an even greater power, a power that operates on a longer time scale. Jodie said that we have to build peace communities, local and global groups that hold practices of peace, learn together, and mobilize together. Yes, Code Pink engages in direct action and protests, but these draw from a foundation decades in the making. They don’t paste it all together only when a war breaks out. They join mass mobilizations, but they do not heroically call for them. They understand that we do not create movements. They create us. They are not caused by a push, however mighty. They arise organically, and we join them, and if we are well prepared we might sustain them.

We cannot stop this forest fire. The forest was made a tinderbox through a century of mismanagement and abuse. But maybe we can stop all the ones that would otherwise follow.

I would add to peace community two complementary and synergistic elements: peace consciousness and a peace narrative. Peace consciousness is the inner work to change the mental habits of war. It is synergistic with peace community, because such work can best be done in a community of practice. A peace narrative scaffolds both the community and the inner work, offering a way to perceive and make sense of the world that is aligned with peace.

Many basic assumptions about what is real and how the world works, which masquerade as scientific truths or facts of human nature, are actually just stories. Wars are an inevitable outgrowth of those stories. It helps to illuminate them, because when they are unconscious and invisible, people end up fueling the fire even as they try to put it out: for example, dehumanizing the aggressors in a conflict that originated in dehumanization.

At present, the peace community is far from anything resembling a movement, and its own divisions prevent a peace narrative from taking hold. A huge contingent of the anti-war public abandoned the Democrats in 2024 because of their medical tyranny, disregard for civil liberties, and general complicity with the deep state agenda—which includes military imperialism. It is hard to work together with those who turned on you when you stood up to corporate-government power. Meanwhile, those who remained faithful to the Democratic Party blame us for electing Donald Trump. It is hard to work together with those who seem not to understand that peace is inconsistent with the dehumanizing treatment of migrants or truculent “America first” chauvinism.

When writing about peace it is tempting to throw in some language that will assure party A or party B that this message comes from an acceptable source. I can signal acceptability to one group by making a snide comment about Mr. Trump. I can signal acceptability to another group by disparaging his predecessor. I can make knowing references to capitalism, or white supremacy, or wokeism, or “gender ideology,” or medical fascism, or any number of issues that establish my positionality and therefore my acceptability. Then, maybe, that crowd will listen—but the other won’t. And if I appease none of them, then I’m a fence-sitter and both-sides-ist.

Besides, the mindset that looks first for “which side are you on” is the opposite of peace consciousness.

Cohering a peace movement in the presence of these divisions is like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube that has had some squares painted the wrong color. The puzzle is unsolvable. It brings up the question: Can anything useful be said in the current political environment? Or do we wait until the warring parties stagger forth from the wreckage they have caused, ready to hear another way?

Some will say, “Just speak your truth.” Certainly. But as Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear." Do we even have a common language anymore? It was almost ten years ago that I noticed society splitting into split into multiple, mutually exclusive realities. That trend has only grown more pronounced since. We live in a Babelian society, in the sense described in the Bible where the builders’ project falters because they can no longer understand each others’ speech. So, speak my truth, yes, but in what language do I speak it? I can translate it into the language of intersectionality, the language of post-colonialism, the language of Christianity, the language of anti-wokeism, of libertarianism, of Buddhism, any number of languages. But I cannot translate it into all of them at once.

Many of us face a similar dilemma. On a personal level, the solution is to fall back on the universal language beneath all other languages, the language of the heart. To ask questions rather than provide answers. To tell stories rather than to make arguments. To empathize rather than to persuade. To hold space for evolution rather than to try to force change.

These also happen to be practices of peace. One does not seek to dominate another in a contest of intellectual force. The language of debate abounds in military metaphors: to undermine your arguments, to smash through your defenses, to defend my position.

OK, but shouldn’t the long slow work of building peace community, peace consciousness, and a peace narrative wait until the immediate crisis has passed? The situation is urgent. Right? Or is it? It is no more urgent than it always was. It is only more noticeable. The war reminds us that it always was urgent. It always was urgent to do something about the situation that erupts into our notice today.

What is that “situation” that is ordinarily beneath active notice? It is everything. It is the state of the world and all its people. It is the unfinished development of our souls, that we came here to complete. It is the Story of Separation, control, scarcity, and ascent. The “urge” of the urgency is the impulse to bring love wherever it is forgotten. It is to return to wholeness from the illusion of separation. The war isn’t a departure from an acceptable normalcy. It is a reminder that normalcy is unacceptable.

NOTE: This post is a reworked version of the latest from my other blog, “Letters from Charles Eisenstein,” minus the more personal material.