Seeking Peace Through Love

The current crisis in Ukraine has made clear the fragility of our peace. As the war grinds on, many of us are hard-pressed to turn our thoughts from the images of desperate refugees fleeing the rubble of their once-beautiful cities. Of course, the toll is unimaginably greater for Ukrainians themselves, whether living at home or abroad, and for their friends or colleagues. Peace is threatened—peace in Ukraine, and peace throughout the world. We must hope and pray for a restoration or peace, for an end of warfare, and must aid those in need.

The crisis in Ukraine has perhaps also made clear how often we take peace for granted. Peace has not featured prominently in contemporary Western discussions of psychological wellbeing. While matters of happiness, purpose, relationships, and sometimes mastery, autonomy, or character are given attention, peace, balance, and harmony seem to be more often neglected. We have suggested that when assessing wellbeing, a good place to begin is on those ends which are nearly universally desired. Matters of peace, balance, and harmony arguably fulfill these criteria, but perhaps are given more emphasis in Eastern cultures and traditions, although the return of war to the West has doubtless made many more conscious of the goods of peace and harmony as well.

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Empirical Study of Peace, Balance, and Harmony

The present field of wellbeing studies would certainly benefit from further attention to both the conceptual and empirical aspects of peace, harmony, and balance, and we hope to contribute to this work. We will be including questions on peace and harmony/balance in our Global Flourishing Study. These will, however, be only single-item assessments, so their conceptual depth and coverage will be limited, but the study may, with time, give clues as to what factors tend to give rise to peace at individual and communal levels. We have also carried out some preliminary work on fuller assessments of peace.

However, as part of our collaboration with the Global Wellbeing Initiative and Gallup’s World Poll, we have also recently obtained some preliminary cross-sectional data on peace and balance from 113 countries throughout the world. We have reported simple descriptive statistics, comparisons with life satisfaction, and associations with a handful of other variables in a chapter in the recently released 2022 World Happiness Report. The assessment for peace was as follows: “In general, do you feel at peace with your life, or not?” and also “Did you experience… feeling [calmness] during a lot of the day yesterday?” The assessment for harmony or balance was “In general, do you feel the various aspects of your life are in balance, or not?” While the word “balance” is often understood as equilibrium between two poles, “harmony” more generally connotes right relations among multiple aspects of life, so the item used in the Gallup World Poll arguably contains aspects of both.

In contrast with happiness (concerning which European countries tend to dominate the rankings), the countries which reported the highest proportions of feeling at peace were somewhat more diverse. Leading the list were Netherlands (97.6 percent), followed by Iceland (97.3 percent), Taiwan (95.6 percent), Finland (95.1 percent), Norway (94.9 percent), Lithuania (94.6 percent), Saudi Arabia (94.6 percent), and Malta (94.4 percent).

For calmness, by contrast, Vietnam (94.7 percent) topped the rankings, followed by Jamaica (93.8 percent), the Philippines (92.7 percent), Kyrgyzstan (91.8 percent), Finland (89.7 percent), Romania (88.8 percent), Estonia (88.8 percent), Portugal (88.2 percent), and Ghana (88.0 percent).

The countries topping the list for balance/harmony were somewhat more similar, though not identical, to happiness rankings, and all were European. The peace and calmness assessments were also notably more weakly correlated with GDP than were the balance/harmony or happiness assessments.

Several other interesting patterns emerged. First, when asked about preferences for a calm life versus an exciting life, 74.3 percent of respondents across the globe preferred a calm life, and only 17.3 percent an exciting life (8 percent said both, 0.4 percent said neither). Perhaps unsurprisingly, calmness and peace do clearly seem to be widely desired. Second, rankings of peace, calmness, and balance were, somewhat contrary to our expectations, not notably higher in East Asian countries than elsewhere. This does not necessarily mean that they are not given greater emphasis in the cultural, philosophical, and religious traditions there —and moreover, all of these assessments must be taken with a grain of salt, as standards for peace and harmony may differ—but in any case, the rankings above were not entirely what we had anticipated. Third, there was only a modest correlation of happiness/life evaluation with balance (0.25), calmness (0.11), and peace (0.25). These do seem like distinct aspects of well-being.

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Love and Peace

How might we bring about a more peaceful harmonious world? Our chapter did also look at various social, demographic, national, and behavioral correlates of peace and harmony, but, since the data was cross-sectional, it is difficult to draw any firm causal conclusions. Nevertheless, one of the strongest correlates with peace was freedom; another was friendship support. Much work, however, remains in studying these relationships and the determinants of peace and harmony.

Thomas Aquinas proposed that peace is an effect of charity, the love of God and neighbor. If our principal desires are aimed at both enjoying the good we find in others, and also in seeking the good for others, we will be more likely to attain peace. Well-ordered love helps us to be at peace with ourselves and also, in turn, to bring peace to others, even—or perhaps especially—in the face of grave injustice and danger. It is indeed arguably the lack of love, including a lack of proper respect for our neighbor, that is at the root of the war in Ukraine. It is a violation of love for neighbor that has brought about the war.

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The justification of war, if any, is, of course, a disputed topic, but classical just war theory specifies, among the conditions for a morally justified war, (i) just cause, (ii) just intent, and (iii) just conduct. All three seem to be violated in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Strikingly, Aquinas discusses war within his broader discussion of love (among the vices opposed to love). Aggression without just cause such as self-defense; without just intent to advance the good, restore peace and avoid evil; and without just conduct (e.g., the non-targeting of civilians) violates love of neighbor. It is wrong.

The war in Ukraine creates a host of political, economic, and humanitarian complexities—complexities and dilemmas that must be faced without easy answers. However, looking forward, we should additionally think about prevention, about preserving peace, about how to avoid such crises in the years to come. These are arguably not only political or strategic questions, but also questions of character, of leadership, of what might be required to promote love of neighbor amongst leaders, and within society.

If Aquinas is right that peace is itself the effect of love, then this topic needs greater attention both in our academic research and in our public discourse. We need to better understand how to preserve and promote peace and harmony, and if we are to promote peace, we also need to better understand how to promote love.

Tyler J. VanderWeele, Director, Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University