Quests of the Human Spirit (X): The Quest for Peace, part 2, 1962 May 13
Thurman, Howard, 1900-1981
In Thurman’s second lecture on peace, he focuses on the collective experience of harmony in a world context. While human beings are deeply embedded within the ambitions and structures of governments and states, it is essential for the individual to establish a sense of being separate and distinct from the world in which one is nourished. Amid Cold War politics nearly twenty years after the use of the first atomic bomb, Thurman considers the meaning of thinking about peace in light of the threat of nuclear war and mass death within human populations. Calling for a moral revolution, Thurman explains that we exist within a collective moral web that connects all people. Individual commitment to peace must, then, transcend the self, participate in the shared fate of our world and society, and become felt within the highest reaches of power.
