I wrote a short book about peace

I have published a short book on the web: The Art of Peace. Its subtitle is “On living together without thinking alike.”

The thought came to me during a morning swim in Nago Bay, in Okinawa. I was thinking about how much I love Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and wondering what I might learn by turning the same attention to the preservation of peace. Sun Tzu’s book has thirteen chapters, and so does this one: on peace, difference, boundaries, strength, understanding, sharing, trust, diplomacy, escalation, humility, what we build, repair, and keeping peace. Each holds eight short passages, 104 in all, between an opening and a closing. The brevity comes from Sun Tzu. The warmth and the imagery I was reaching for are those of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

The peace the book describes is not agreement. As the opening puts it, “The peace I seek has room for an unwelcome answer.” It leaves people free to disagree, to change their minds, and sometimes to part. It asks restraint of those who hold power, and protection for those whose refusal would otherwise carry no weight.

I work with computers and build things, and those habits show in the pages: preparing for mistakes, keeping a failure from spreading, sharing what is useful, and making repair possible. The chapter on trust asks how promises are kept and checked between people. That is the question I usually ask of institutions and software, under the topic of trust, put to a household or a workshop instead. The chapter on sharing reads to me like a short guide to maintaining a commons: “Care for the common well includes care for those who clean it.”

This is a first manuscript, developed with AI assistance from my ideas and conversations, and it remains open to revision. The passages are principles to examine and practise, and applying them asks for judgment. You can read it in one piece, open a single chapter, or keep the Markdown copy. The book ends with the instruction I would give for anything I write: “Keep what helps. Question what does not.”

References

• Raffael Schneider, The Art of Peace, first manuscript, 2026. Quotations are from “Before the shore”, chapter VI (“On sharing”, passage 6), and “Returning”.
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
• Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet.