Peace Quest Chapter 3: Contexts of Peace

Structural Justice

    By structural justice, I mean stable political, social, and economic patterns that provide for the basic needs and protect the human rights of all people. If needs are not met, if rights are egregiously neglected and violated, this is not peace. Rather, it is what Galtung98 identified as structural violence, and it provokes higher rates of armed violence.99

    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. It is an excellent document, to which the right to a life-sustaining, healthy environment needs to be added. If only the governments and influential financial and business institutions of the world were led by people who truly practiced, rather than occasionally mouthed, the principles of this declaration, we would be living in very different circumstances than at present. Now we have at least 18 million deaths per year due to poverty.100 We live in a world with slavery, prostitution, sweatshops, child labor, high rates of direct violence among the disadvantaged, absurd excesses of wealth for a miniscule privileged minority, and desperation for destitute multitudes.

    Numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), numbering over 30,000 in the U.S. and 100,000 worldwide,100 have taken up particular worthy causes and are laboring nonviolently to end injustices, relieve suffering, meet needs, protect human rights, and give hope. These NGOs are intrinsic and essential parts of the peace movement, even if they are not particularly focused on ending war and other direct violence.102 There can be no peace without structural justice. If we want to contribute to peace, it is important that we be well informed about structural justice issues, and engage in whatever constructive action we can. We cannot rely on the corporately controlled mass media for this, but we can turn to alternative media and to books by independent-minded scholars with a passion for truth, justice, and peace.

    The following conditions are a small sample of the kinds of social policy measures that are ultimately needed to secure structural justice.

• Guaranteed jobs or income with no stigmatizing of people who need public assistance because they cannot find adequate work;

• Universal health care insurance and ready access to a full range of needed medical services;

•Guaranteed food and housing for all;

• Forgiveness of debts incurred by third world nations so they can use their resources for social development and environmental protection;

• Free education at all levels so that the children of less wealthy families can attain whatever professional preparation their talents and motivations allow;

•The right of workers to unionize and engage in collective bargaining.



Beyond Group Narcissism

    From a biological perspective, all human beings are one race, but the essential, earth-dwelling, water-drinking, air-breathing, love-needing commonality of humanity is obscured by racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, sexism, classism, and religious or ideological intolerance of different belief systems and life styles. Growing beyond such instances of group narcissism to solidarity with humanity is a necessity for peace. Parents and educators who express universal humanistic values and who befriend people from diverse backgrounds can contribute to their children’s growing up free of the dehumanizing, dualistic delusions that arbitrarily divide people so tragically as does racism.103 When children are well loved and supported by empathic parents, they will grow with the intrinsic self-esteem that will immunize them from risk of falling ill with disdain for others who are different and infatuation with inflated and false collective self-images, as exemplified in racism.



Peace with Other Species

    While I have been writing about the foundations of peace among human beings, I have not forgotten the non-human animals whose fates as individuals and species are so dependent on human attitudes and actions. Except for infections from microorganisms or extremely rare attacks by predators such as sharks and tigers, humans are safe from non-human aggression. However, our fellow sentient beings of the land, water, and sky are themselves far from safe from human destructiveness. Whole species, such as cattle, have been enslaved through so-called domestication. Every year billions of animals are slaughtered with little regard for their suffering to yield meat and such byproducts as fur and hides for human consumption. The philosophers of animal rights have argued that such exploitation of animals is ethically indefensible.104 Moreover, historians have shown connections between the exploitation and abuse of non-human animals and that of other humans.105

    When people are openly empathic and compassionate toward other human beings, it is possible, perhaps likely, for them to feel similarly toward non-human animals. Our very capacity to feel is housed in the limbic, or mammalian, portion of the brain, with which humans and all other mammals are endowed. There are continuities of feeling among humans and other animals. The nursing calf separated from her mother is distressed just as the human infant is.

    As a young trainee for Peace Corps service, I was obliged to witness the slaughter of a lamb, under the justification that this would prepare our group for the raw conditions in which we’d be stationed in Africa. When I saw the panic, terror, despair, and ensuing dullness of death take over that lamb’s previously bright, lively, and trusting eyes, it made a lasting impression on me and was a formative influence on my subsequent vegetarianism for several years and eschewing the eating of the flesh of mammals. That the lamb wanted to live just as much as I did and that she suffered as a human would in such circumstances was undeniable because of the evidence of my senses.

    I believe that one of the ways children and adults are brutalized and inured to the suffering of others is the exploitation and slaughter of non-human animals. Throughout the multi-cultural history of violent atrocities, slavery, wars, and genocides, the perpetrators have demeaned their victims by comparing them to other animal species.106 If the moral status of animals is affirmed in theory, and if their rights are respected in practice, humans will be taking an important step toward building peace with one another as well. Peace with non-human animals means treating them nonviolently and compassionately, and this is an important part of peace.



Ecological Peace and Justice

    The movements for environmental protection and justice are essential initiatives for building a culture of peace. If we awaken to our interdependent, earthly reality, we realize we cannot fully enjoy the physical and emotional safety that defines peace while the ecological basis of life is being destroyed. With every breath, sip of water, mouthful of food, and step we take, we are inseparable from the environment. The 80,000 synthetic chemicals in circulation infiltrate our bodies and eventually wreak havoc, as do unnatural concentrations of microwaves and other invisible radiations. War itself is an enormous waste of natural resources and diversion of potential talent from constructive, peaceful ends.

    New technologies are making warfare even more destructive of the earth and of the life chances of unborn generations of human and other species, as in the case of depleted uranium 238 (DU). Because this radioactive material greatly enhances the armor-piercing, bunker-penetrating characteristics of missile and artillery shells, it is now a standard aspect of the U.S. arsenal. As a toxic legacy of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. left from 300 to 800 tons of DU-contaminated shells on the battlegrounds of Kuwait, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. These radioactive wastes have been implicated in the epidemic increases of childhood cancers, leukemia, and birth defects, at rates from six to 12 times higher than they had been prior to the war. With a half-life of 4.5 billion years, DU will adversely affect countless generations of humans, animals, and plants.107

    We cannot expect people who feel no restraints about slaughtering tens of thousands of humans in irrationally motivated wars to care about the earth or unborn children. Such people are lacking in empathy and compassion. These feelings, when present, extend to all of life, human and non-human, born and unborn, near and far, familiar and foreign.  Therefore, the causes of ecological peace and justice, in all their multifarious nuances, can be best served in the long term through the raising of children who feel reverence for life naturally because they themselves were well loved and because their parents and teachers also instill in them, by example, a strong ecological ethic. In the present, the struggles for protecting the environment call for the active engagement of those who love life on earth and who understand the interdependence of all living beings and the full extent of human responsibility.