Beyond Eternity, Inevitability, and Catastrophe: The Promise of World Peace and the Recovery of Human Agency

In its message of 1985 to the peoples of the world, the Universal House of Justice declared that world peace is "not only possible but inevitable," yet insisted that whether it arrives through unimaginable suffering or through consultative will is the choice before all of humanity. The apparent tension between inevitability and choice dissolves once we recognize how the Promise of World Peace rejects three historical orientations that Timothy Snyder identifies as presently infecting our politics. These are the politics of eternity, which traps us in a mythical past; the politics of inevitability, which traps us in a complacent present; and the politics of catastrophe, which forecloses the future through despair. Each is rooted in two pervasive habits of mind—the proclivity to totalize reality and the proclivity to fragment it. The Promise counters these by grounding hope and action in an inclusive historical consciousness that understands humanity as inevitably maturing toward oneness—a destiny that is assured, but whose cost depends entirely on our consultative will.