ABSTRACT
The second axiom of the historical imagination is that we need to ‘image’ or visualise peace as the rightful goal of politics and the rightful possession of the human community as a whole. In ancient Greece, Israel, China, and India, religious and philosophical thinkers visualised a state of general peace. The example of the ‘Axial Age’ suggests that civilisational values can change for the better over time and that such changes can be sustained over long periods. As the rules of society become more responsive to considerations of justice, they are more readily ‘internalised’ by the members of society, who enjoy, as a result, a stronger sense of freedom and shared well-being. Such freedom is oriented, at least in part, towards the needs and purposes of society: it is not the mere absence of obligation. Something that they have in common links all situations in which justice and hope are at stake. We have an urgent need, as the 21st century advances, to visualise a ‘counterpart’ at the global level to the processes we want to see happen in the Middle East, the Korean peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, and other situations of conflict or potential conflict. In a culturally integrated world, a vacuum of values at the ‘macro’ level impacts on the prospects for peace in each individual context. International organisations should engage with religious communities and all others whose commitment to justice is based on a life-stance, in joint efforts to transform habits and assumptions and to ‘image’ peace; but not – or not now – as a means to a single form of government on a planetary scale.
