Baha'i Chair Lecture: Being Peace, Making Peace: Can Higher Education Help Us Become Peace?

Why do societies that value peace continue to produce enemies and wage wars? The problem may not be our politics alone, but also a mistaken view of ourselves as persons.

Human nature is typically conceived as selfish and violent or compassionate and peaceful. This lecture reconceptualises human nature as a field of potentialities. We are relational, unfinished, and capable of self-transcendence and transformation.

Being peace begins with the question of who we take ourselves to be. Inner peacefulness involves the recognition of oneself and others as beings of equal intrinsic value, and enmity, when it comes, misdescribes the "us" as surely as it denies the "them."

Making peace is the relational and institutional expression of that recognition: encountering difference without turning it into antagonism, holding tension without reproducing hostility, imagining and sustaining just structural conditions for the flourishing of all.

Peace, thus conceived, is not merely the absence of violence, it is constituted by qualities integral to our well-being. These qualities do not emerge in a vacuum. Education is one of the principal spaces in which we are formed, for good or ill: our attention deepened or distracted, our care for others awakened or diminished. The lecture turns finally to universities, and asks how, through inquiry, dialogue and understanding, we might learn to flourish with other beings on this planet, and so become peace.