Peace Is the Work of Keeping Life Possible
A society is kept alive through relationships that must be renewed: food must arrive, care must reach someone, knowledge must be passed on, and conflicts must remain liveable. These activities change the circumstances in which they will happen again. A decision alters people’s options; their responses alter expectations; those expectations influence the next decision. What we recognise as persons, institutions and societies takes shape within this continuing organisation of difference. Their identities persist through changing relations. The philosophical question becomes practical: how should this activity be organised so that life continues, difference remains possible, and the work of sustaining both can itself continue?
Self-regulation grows through discovering ways to keep shared activity working. People repeat, modify and abandon practices in response to what those practices do. Expectations and obligations develop, directing attention and making some actions easier to repeat than others. Maturana and Varela’s account of self-producing organisation provides an important intellectual precedent (1980). The social application here concerns how recurring relationships renew the habits that sustain them while also changing what people can do next. A workable arrangement gradually carries part of its coordination in shared experience. People remember how to respond, and their responses change what there will be to remember.
A person’s freedom develops through this shared activity. Language, memory, material support and relationships with others give us ways to act; our actions then change those relationships. Agency becomes real through the difference our participation makes. This asks something psychologically difficult of anyone who equates significance with being indispensable: people develop ways of working together that carry their own coordination, without every decision returning to a commanding ego. The stronger a role depends on appearing indispensable, the harder it becomes to recognise cooperation that no longer requires its supervision. Leadership participates alongside expertise and individual responsibility. Its work is to help people judge, cooperate and respond. People with decision-making power remain answerable for what they do and for the relationships their decisions sustain.
The fact that an arrangement keeps going does not make it good. Coercion, neglect and exploitation also reproduce themselves. The ethical commitment here is to sustaining life and people’s ability to participate, disagree and change how they live. This provides a standard across political allegiances. How value is defined shapes whose experience counts, which activities receive support and what becomes worth repeating. Consider a service that treats an abandoned application as resolved demand. Exhaustion drives someone away; their disappearance improves the recorded figures; the figures justify keeping the procedure. When preserving a procedure takes precedence over resolving a need, each difficulty gives the procedure another reason to repeat itself. Institutional success and personal hardship continually remake one another through an unequal relation. These returning effects shape what happens next. Unmet need must have enough practical force to change the process through which it keeps being produced.
Peace is the continuing work of keeping conflict within relations that sustain coexistence. It requires mediation, restraint, protection and repair, renewed as circumstances change. Difference supplies perspectives through which a society encounters its own limits. Its timing matters: a reply arrives after trust has weakened; an old grievance returns inside a new dispute; a familiar accusation gathers force through repetition. Opposing political positions become mutually sustaining when each draws identity and authority from the repeated return of the other. Each response reshapes what the other side expects and how it will respond in turn. Peace involves changing these patterns while preserving people’s ability to disagree. A pause that allows judgement and a delay that withholds urgent help have different consequences. The task is to organise their timing in relation to the lives involved.
Wiener developed the study of feedback and regulation (1948); Ashby showed why a system needs enough different responses to deal with the different disturbances it faces (1956). The application here is to preserve informed judgement and the power to act on it. Where essential resources and channels of decision become concentrated, fewer perspectives shape what happens next, while more lives depend on choices they cannot influence. Ostrom’s research on polycentric governance provides a practical counterpart: people develop workable arrangements through overlapping centres of responsibility, shared rules and learning from consequences (2010). An arrangement that admits only the responses it already recognises loses the ability to learn from what is changing. Local judgement needs resources and protection against local domination. Wider authorities must coordinate shared risks and guarantee access to help and redress. A society learns when experience changes decisions and those decisions improve the circumstances in which further judgement occurs.
Technocracy reaches everyday life through government provision of social services, including care and support delivered by private contractors. Records, platforms, classifications and technical expertise support coordination and carry knowledge through changes of personnel. They also organise who becomes visible, which needs count and how authorities respond. Alston’s report on digital welfare documented exclusion and obstacles to understanding and challenging decisions (2019). When access requires people to fit a technical process that cannot respond to their circumstances, administrative work is pushed onto those seeking help. Compulsory upgrades, insecure infrastructure and dependence on suppliers add further burdens. Repeated changes consume attention otherwise available for care. Technology should strengthen continuity of service, preserve usable knowledge and make correction possible.
Where government-funded social services are delivered by shareholder-owned companies, payment, contract completion and returns to shareholders shape what providers repeat, what gets counted and what remains unresolved. A completed contract earns payment; a person left without support still has to live with the unmet need. The financial return becomes a reason to repeat the process, while its practical consequences reshape the lives on which future demand depends. For the recipient, value lies in the support that arrives and what it makes possible in their life. The contractor’s timetable becomes part of the rhythm imposed on everyone else. Public agencies and private contractors must remain answerable to whether support actually reaches people and what it enables them to do next.
These relations extend across societies. Food, energy, finance, knowledge and technical infrastructure connect local decisions to consequences elsewhere, which return through changed prices, risks, expectations and dependencies. National boundaries organise these exchanges; the exchanges also reshape what nations can do and become. Dewey located the public in the extensive consequences through which people become affected by one another’s actions (1927). The implication developed here is that responsibility must follow those consequences across the boundaries through which they travel. A country that secures its prosperity by degrading the ecological or material basis of another is changing the wider relations on which its own future depends. Cooperation must coordinate shared risks while preserving room for different societies to respond through their own circumstances.
The practical work is to make care, cooperation and the revision of mistakes more likely to regenerate themselves. That requires material security, places where disagreement has an effect, people with authority to respond, and time to judge what is unfolding. A useful intervention changes a harmful pattern while protecting the relationships through which people can recover and act differently. Sometimes that means responding immediately; sometimes it means slowing an escalating exchange or allowing a local arrangement to develop. Maintenance carries knowledge forward; adaptation changes how it is used. Both alter what becomes possible next. Society is this continuing service of sustaining life, including the freedom to live differently. Its institutions earn their continuity through their contribution to that work.
Difference is axiomatic here because any explanation of identity, change or persistence already requires distinctions between states, relations or possibilities. What we recognise as things takes shape through the recurring organisation of these differences, which sustains and transforms their identities over time.
References
Alston, P. (2019) Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. United Nations General Assembly, A/74/493.
Ashby, W.R. (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall.
Dewey, J. (1927) The Public and Its Problems. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Ostrom, E. (2010) ‘Beyond markets and states: polycentric governance of complex economic systems’, American Economic Review, 100(3), pp. 641–672.
Wiener, N. (1948) Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
