{"id":10764,"date":"2025-05-25T16:29:17","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T20:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/is-peace-possible-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-05-25T16:29:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T20:29:17","slug":"is-peace-possible-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/is-peace-possible-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Peace Possible \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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Is Peace Possible?<\/a>, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions<\/a>. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a>How ungenerous our culture has been in portraying science as cold, unfeeling, and aloof from the human sphere. No \u2014 to live a life of science is to live so wonder-smitten by reality, by the majesty and mystery of nature, that the willful destruction of any fragment of it becomes unconscionable. It is impossible to study the building blocks of life without reverence for life itself, impossible to devote one\u2019s days to the enigma of a single element or elementary particle without venerating the inviolable cohesion of the universe. There is a kind of innocent exhilaration to this sense of wonder, and a quiet ethic. It may well be our greatest antidote to self-destruction.<\/p>\n

This exuberance drove Kathleen Lonsdale (1903\u20131971) to regularly run the last few yards to her laboratory, to puzzle over differential equations throughout her pregnancies and take her calculations into the maternity ward.<\/p>\n

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Dame Kathleen Lonsdale. (Photograph: Walter Stoneman. National Portrait Gallery<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The tenth child in a Quaker household without electricity, she was born in Ireland the year the Wright brothers built and flew humanity\u2019s first successful flying machine heavier than air. Her home was still lit by gas when she first began studying science \u2014 in a school for boys, because no such subjects figured into the curriculum of the local girls\u2019 school. By the time she was a teenager, living outside London, she watched gas-filled zeppelins rain bombs and death from the air. She watched them plummet in flames, shot down by British weapons. She watched her mother cry with the knowledge that piloting them were German boys not much older than Kathleen.<\/p>\n

After attaining a higher score in physics than any London University student ever had, she joined the Cambridge laboratory of J. D. Bernal \u2014 the first scientist to apply X-ray crystallography to the molecules of life. He came to see how beneath her quiet, unassuming manner lay \u201csuch an underlying strength of character that she became from the outset the presiding genius of the place.\u201d Soon, she was pioneering uses of X-ray crystallography that would fuel the chemistry of the century to come: still in her twenties, Lonsdale illuminated the shape, dimensions, and atomic structure of the benzene ring that had mystified chemists since Michael Faraday discovered benzene a century earlier. <\/p>\n

The first woman tenured at London\u2019s most venerated research university and the first female president of both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Union of Crystallography, Lonsdale was also one of the twentieth century\u2019s most lucid, impassioned, and indefatigable activists against our civilizational cult of war and the military industrial complex\u2019s funding its planet-sized house of worship. By the time the next World War broke out, Lonsdale \u2014 by then one of the world\u2019s preeminent scientists \u2014 was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to military conscription. She went on to become one of Europe\u2019s most influential prison reformers, recognizing that the prison industrial complex is the price societies governed by the military industrial complex pay for the inequalities and injustices stemming from that foundational cult.<\/p>\n

Lonsdale wrote Is Peace Possible?<\/em><\/a> in 1957 as part of a Penguin series that invited some of the era\u2019s most lucid and luminous minds to reckon with some of the era\u2019s most urgent questions. It is perspectival and prophetic. \u201cHistory teaches us that time can bring about reconciliations that seemed at another time impossible, but only when violence has ceased, whether by agreement or through exhaustion,\u201d Lonsdale writes in the middle of the Cold War that never erupted into the nuclear holocaust it could have been, largely thanks to the Pugwash Conference for nuclear disarmament, in which she was involved and which reached agreements thought unimaginable. It is difficult today to imagine how real the doom felt to the children ducking under school desks, how improbable its aversion given the geopolitical forces at play \u2014 and yet here we are, survivors of an abated apocalypse, here to tell its story: the story of the triumph of the possible over the probable, the triumph of peace. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art from The Three Astronauts<\/em><\/a> \u2014 Umberto Eco\u2019s vintage semiotic children\u2019s book about world peace<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Bridging the spiritual ethos of her upbringing with the scientific worldview of her calling and training, Lonsdale challenges the misconception of pacifism as the simplistic idea that a perfect and peaceful world is merely a matter of individuals refusing to fight. \u201cTruisms based on Utopias are poor arguments,\u201d she observes, instead invoking the style of pacifism native to the Quaker tradition and its original formulation in 1660 as the refusal to partake of \u201call outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatever.\u201d Peace, she argues, is the product of the recognition \u201cthat war is spiritually degrading, that it is the wrong way to settle disputes between classes or nations, the wrong way to meet aggression or oppression, the wrong way to preserve national or personal ideals.\u201d It is wrong not merely in a philosophical sense but in a practical sense, for we are far too interdependent to harm another without harming ourselves. To illustrate the interleaving of lives across the artificial pickets of national borders, she looks back on the 1947 cholera epidemic that quickly came to claim five hundred lives per day in Egypt but was also quickly curbed after twenty nations cooperated on a supply line for vaccines. In a sentiment of staggering timeliness in the wake of the twenty-first century\u2019s deadliest pandemic, Lonsdale observes that \u201cplagues are no respecters of sovereignty,\u201d nor are the far-reaching economic, moral, spiritual, and radioactive consequences of war.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Lonsdale indicts the underlying reason for the existence of war lurking beneath all surface conflicts: Military alliances and international treaties only gauze the open wound of widespread inequality and injustice that colonialism and capitalism have inflicted on our world. \u201cReal security can only be found, if at all, in a world without the injustices that now exist, and without arms,\u201d she insists. At the heart of her slender masterwork of moral courage is a vision for how such a world might be possible:<\/p>\n

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There are two ways in which such changes might come. One is the way of the compulsion of experience, the whip and spur of historical inevitability, the coercion of facts. That is the hard and bitter way. The other is the way of foresight, of preparation, of imagination. It is also the way of moral compulsion. It may be no less hard but it is not bitter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Lonsdale\u2019s words abide, indict, incite:<\/p>\n

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Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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