Peace Quest Conclusion

    Creating a culture of peace is a complex, multi-generational process. It is rooted in the culture’s child rearing practices. These in turn affect and are affected by many factors, including the culture’s prevailing social, political, and economic structures, and its values and beliefs. An individual’s adult proclivities toward peacefulness or bellicosity derive unconsciously from how he or she was treated as a child. Peaceful and peace-seeking adults were either raised supportively and non-punitively or benefited from later opportunities to become conscious and to heal from the traumas of early abuse, neglect, and harsh, loveless treatment. People who make wars or favor them are highly likely to be in denial of their childhood victimization and traumas, which they re-stage, this time in the role of aggressor, in criminal, domestic, or military violence, and in structurally violent economic policies that lead to the impoverishment and premature deaths of masses of human beings.

    Emotionally healthy human beings do not murder others, wage wars, build empires, or seek limitless wealth for their elite circles. Sane people feel empathy and compassion for others and themselves. Therefore, they do not command the conquest of other nations, murdering vast numbers of hapless civilians and sacrificing young soldiers.

    A war-based economic, political, and cultural system is devastatingly destructive to physical, psychological, and environmental health. In the present historical moment, the war culture threatens to breach ecological limits with irreparable consequences. Current threats to the survival of humane culture and of humanity itself are daunting.  Among these dangers, as is well known, are weapons of mass destruction, the depletion of natural resources, climate change, environmental pollution, the extinction of species, population pressures, and the incapacity of political and business leaders to make peace, justice, and ecological viability their utmost priorities.

    For those people with the vision of all that is at stake for future generations and with the will to act courageously, this historical context is an opportunity for nonviolent creativity. Regardless of the obstacles, peace is possible. Promoting a wider understanding of the deep cultural roots of war and peace, as I am seeking to do in my writing, is essential to enhancing the prospects for peace.

    Few people at present recognize the childhood origins of adult political behaviors. Those in denial of their own childhood traumas resist insights about these origins, and the relevant research145 is widely ignored. Peace and justice activists, on the one side, and war-spawning politicians and their followers, on the other, fail to fathom how their ideological adversaries can think and act as they do.

    It behooves those who are more conscious and capable of living and resolving conflicts peacefully—by virtue of either nurturing upbringings or subsequent healing—to comprehend, as compassionately as possible, the rage, fear, and other emotions derived from unhealed trauma that drive the violent people of the world beneath their masks of sanity. Based on such comprehension, nonviolent activists can develop innovative communications and actions to transform their cultures progressively in the direction of peace.

    I have discussed some of the dimensions of the needed innovations. They include peaceful parenting and education; nonviolent communication, play, and entertainment; therapy that heals trauma, insight meditation, and peace and justice activism. As more and more people perceive the deep cultural and psychological roots of peace, new possibilities will arise.

    Each of us can choose to contribute to peace within our own spheres of influence, including our families, friendships, communities, and work contexts. It is empowering when we realize we do have options and can, individually and collectively, make a difference. On the weekend of February 15th and 16th, 2003, around 30 million people throughout the world participated nonviolently in peace demonstrations to voice opposition to the planned U.S. bombing, invasion, and conquest of Iraq. This is a heartening indicator that an enormous number of people recognize that war is both unconscionably cruel and obsolete. Each person who marched probably represents many others who also fervently want peace. On a daily basis, if such a multitude of human beings are nonviolent and just in all our relations, especially with children, we can overcome violence and succeed in cultivating peace within our cultures.

    The perspective I have taken throughout this exposition is that peace is a public health issue. When we commit ourselves to peace, we are engaging in a healing process. A much healthier world is possible, and it depends on loving-kindness in how we raise children and communicate with and treat one another as adults. Peace is both the way and the destiny of individual and collective healing, happiness, and love.