Is Peace Possible?, originally published in 1957, is the second title in Marginalian Editions. Below is my foreword to the new edition as it appears in on its pages.

How ungenerous our culture has been in portraying science as cold, unfeeling, and aloof from the human sphere. No — to live a life of science is to live so wonder-smitten by reality, by the majesty and mystery of nature, that the willful destruction of any fragment of it becomes unconscionable. It is impossible to study the building blocks of life without reverence for life itself, impossible to devote one’s days to the enigma of a single element or elementary particle without venerating the inviolable cohesion of the universe. There is a kind of innocent exhilaration to this sense of wonder, and a quiet ethic. It may well be our greatest antidote to self-destruction.

This exuberance drove Kathleen Lonsdale (1903–1971) to regularly run the last few yards to her laboratory, to puzzle over differential equations throughout her pregnancies and take her calculations into the maternity ward.

The tenth child in a Quaker household without electricity, she was born in Ireland the year the Wright brothers built and flew humanity’s first successful flying machine heavier than air. Her home was still lit by gas when she first began studying science — in a school for boys, because no such subjects figured into the curriculum of the local girls’ school. By the time she was a teenager, living outside London, she watched gas-filled zeppelins rain bombs and death from the air. She watched them plummet in flames, shot down by British weapons. She watched her mother cry with the knowledge that piloting them were German boys not much older than Kathleen.

After attaining a higher score in physics than any London University student ever had, she joined the Cambridge laboratory of J. D. Bernal — the first scientist to apply X-ray crystallography to the molecules of life. He came to see how beneath her quiet, unassuming manner lay “such an underlying strength of character that she became from the outset the presiding genius of the place.” Soon, she was pioneering uses of X-ray crystallography that would fuel the chemistry of the century to come: still in her twenties, Lonsdale illuminated the shape, dimensions, and atomic structure of the benzene ring that had mystified chemists since Michael Faraday discovered benzene a century earlier.

The first woman tenured at London’s most venerated research university and the first female president of both the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Union of Crystallography, Lonsdale was also one of the twentieth century’s most lucid, impassioned, and indefatigable activists against our civilizational cult of war and the military industrial complex’s funding its planet-sized house of worship. By the time the next World War broke out, Lonsdale — by then one of the world’s preeminent scientists — was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to military conscription. She went on to become one of Europe’s most influential prison reformers, recognizing that the prison industrial complex is the price societies governed by the military industrial complex pay for the inequalities and injustices stemming from that foundational cult.

Lonsdale wrote Is Peace Possible? in 1957 as part of a Penguin series that invited some of the era’s most lucid and luminous minds to reckon with some of the era’s most urgent questions. It is perspectival and prophetic. “History teaches us that time can bring about reconciliations that seemed at another time impossible, but only when violence has ceased, whether by agreement or through exhaustion,” Lonsdale writes in the middle of the Cold War that never erupted into the nuclear holocaust it could have been, largely thanks to the Pugwash Conference for nuclear disarmament, in which she was involved and which reached agreements thought unimaginable. It is difficult today to imagine how real the doom felt to the children ducking under school desks, how improbable its aversion given the geopolitical forces at play — and yet here we are, survivors of an abated apocalypse, here to tell its story: the story of the triumph of the possible over the probable, the triumph of peace.

Bridging the spiritual ethos of her upbringing with the scientific worldview of her calling and training, Lonsdale challenges the misconception of pacifism as the simplistic idea that a perfect and peaceful world is merely a matter of individuals refusing to fight. “Truisms based on Utopias are poor arguments,” she observes, instead invoking the style of pacifism native to the Quaker tradition and its original formulation in 1660 as the refusal to partake of “all outward wars and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatever.” Peace, she argues, is the product of the recognition “that war is spiritually degrading, that it is the wrong way to settle disputes between classes or nations, the wrong way to meet aggression or oppression, the wrong way to preserve national or personal ideals.” It is wrong not merely in a philosophical sense but in a practical sense, for we are far too interdependent to harm another without harming ourselves. To illustrate the interleaving of lives across the artificial pickets of national borders, she looks back on the 1947 cholera epidemic that quickly came to claim five hundred lives per day in Egypt but was also quickly curbed after twenty nations cooperated on a supply line for vaccines. In a sentiment of staggering timeliness in the wake of the twenty-first century’s deadliest pandemic, Lonsdale observes that “plagues are no respecters of sovereignty,” nor are the far-reaching economic, moral, spiritual, and radioactive consequences of war.

Ultimately, Lonsdale indicts the underlying reason for the existence of war lurking beneath all surface conflicts: Military alliances and international treaties only gauze the open wound of widespread inequality and injustice that colonialism and capitalism have inflicted on our world. “Real security can only be found, if at all, in a world without the injustices that now exist, and without arms,” she insists. At the heart of her slender masterwork of moral courage is a vision for how such a world might be possible:

There are two ways in which such changes might come. One is the way of the compulsion of experience, the whip and spur of historical inevitability, the coercion of facts. That is the hard and bitter way. The other is the way of foresight, of preparation, of imagination. It is also the way of moral compulsion. It may be no less hard but it is not bitter.

Lonsdale’s words abide, indict, incite:

Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.