Peace Quest: Introduction

Defining Peace
Some years ago, as part of a research project, I asked people for their definitions of peace. Here are some of the answers I got. When my youngest children, Pierre and Geoffrey, were seven and four years old respectively, I asked, “Can you tell me what peace is?”  “That’s easy,” Pierre said. “It’s being friends and not hurting each other.”  Geoffrey added, “And quiet.”1 Glen Leet, co-founder of the philanthropic Trickle Up Program, said peace prevails when a group has values that exclude hurting anyone, and when a group will stop someone from causing harm to others.2 Mildred, his wife and partner in helping poor people start sustainable small businesses, said peace is the absence of violence where people have learned to live with respect for one another and have discovered that peace is more productive than arguing and warring.3 For Dr. Thynn Thynn, a Burmese-born teacher of Buddhist insight meditation in daily living, peace is the innate nature of our own minds that we discover when we become quiet, stop seeking external distractions, and turn our attention inward.4  More recently, a friend told me he views traffic as a meaningful metaphor for peace. Motor vehicles are extremely dangerous, but drivers mostly abide by the rules of the road because it is to everyone’s mutual benefit.5 We drive among strangers, and our driving conduct doesn’t depend on whether we would like one another or approve of one another’s views if we became acquainted. We all can get to our destinations safely by agreeing to follow the law. In this friend’s view, humans need to manage peace like traffic through the enforcement of laws. Each of these diverse views has merits, and they are just a sampling of possibilities.

    Here is my definition: Peace is a condition of physical and emotional safety that prevails when people are reliably nonviolent in how they relate to one another and resolve their conflicts. Nonviolent attitudes and behaviors cause no harm to self or others and are either beneficial or neutral in their effects. Peace depends on respect in individual actions and also on cultural patterns and social structures that protect the human rights of all people equally and that provide for the fulfillment of human needs. The antithesis of peace is found in war, terrorism, oppression, exploitation, and structures of inequality— based on class or caste—that impoverish, demean, or neglect the needs of some groups of humans.

Present Non-peaceful Conditions and the Pathology of Violence
At the present historical moment, ordinary citizens in many lands are at risk of becoming the random victims of lethal attacks. These may come from any number of sources, including ideologically motivated terrorists, rival factions warring for power, rapacious military units enacting policies of state terrorism, or the most heavily armed governments’ bombing and invading the territories of their adversaries with high-tech devilry, as well as from civil criminal activities (murder, muggings, road rage, etc.). For people who are open to humane feelings, all of this destruction is heartbreaking and scary. For survivors in conflict zones, it is also traumatizing.

    Just as the majority of murderers think their criminal violence is justified,6 those who plan actions that will injure or kill on a massive scale—whether they preside in the White House or run clandestine terrorist cells—adamantly consider themselves agents of just causes. They rarely feel guilty for the suffering they cause. Ninety percent of the casualties of warfare since World War II have been non-combatant civilians,7 and if nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction are deployed in the wars by which we are all being threatened, the percentage will undoubtedly rise. Violence, war, and the rationalizations of those who kill sadistically or oppressively—or command others to do so—violate the boundaries of mental health and human compassion. Violence may be common, but it is not normal. Its justifications in speeches by political demagogues may be couched to sound logical, but they are really pathological. Emotionally healthy human beings do not wage wars, but, to the contrary, practice peace. Despite the prevalence and scope of contemporary violence, we can take heart from the fact that most humans do not personally maim or kill others.

Human Nature as Primarily Peaceful
    Human nature, when it benefits from humane nurture, is primarily sociable and nonviolent. Although this is a scientifically credible assertion,8 many widespread cultural assumptions and theories hold the opposite view, namely, that we as a species are intrinsically violent. Our beliefs on this question greatly influence our actions, relations, and social organization. Like all other animals on this planet, we are innately endowed with the capacity to defend ourselves by fighting or fleeing when endangered.  However, healthy self-defense is a far cry from predatory murderousness, oppression, abuse, and warfare. These latter behaviors are pathological and result from traceable, and largely social, causes.9 Killing does not come easily to most humans, with the chilling exception of sociopaths, so military training often necessitates conditioning that brutalizes and desensitizes soldiers to get them traumatized enough so they will kill.10 Violence is not the biological destiny of our species, but a deviation from our evolutionary path toward lives of loving-kindness. We need a critical mass of conscious people to engage in myriad ways in transforming cultures—including their social, political, and economic components—into viable systems of peace and justice.



Culture, Character, and Peace

    Just as some individuals are more peaceful than others, so are some cultures.11 Anthropological data cogently demonstrate that relatively peaceful cultures —as indicated by low rates of murder, rape, and warfare —have certain key features in common that distinguish them from more violent ones. These peace-building norms and folkways include gentle, physically affectionate, non-punitive child rearing; tolerance for consensual sexual play among adolescents; equality, mutual respect, and cooperation between males and females; very little, if any, hierarchy or dominance of one caste or class over others; and provision for the economic sustenance of all members.12

    Cultures, whether peaceful or violent, are complex. They reflect the character structures of the people who create and sustain them and, at the same time, influence those character structures. For good or ill, character is shaped significantly by early childhood relations with primary caregivers, and is encoded in relatively enduring neural pathways in the limbic brain.13 Therefore, the most pivotal way to create a culture of peace is to promote nurturing child rearing so that people with peaceful character structures are formed. They will grow up to be individuals with the skills, attitudes, and motivation to reorganize their culture and its institutions into peace-building patterns.14 This is admittedly a long-term, multi-generational vision of the issues of war and peace, but I don’t know of any other view that makes ultimate sense. I also believe it is needed to give us perspective on current urgent concerns, on what adults who want peace, but may not have had ideal childhoods, can do, on why too many political leaders make war rather than peace, and on why too many citizens follow those leaders’ destructive directions.

Violence in the Culture of the United States
    Before proposing what we can do practically, here and now, to build a more peaceful culture, I want to discuss the culture of the United States, since this is the most likely contextual field of action for readers of this booklet. Among the approximately 280 million U.S. citizens, huge gaps of information and understanding exist about our government’s role in the world and our country’s social realities. The United States is, by many measures, an extremely violent culture, although not the only one on earth and arguably not even the most violent, despite being the most powerful. To some, the violent character of U.S. culture is obvious, and the underlying facts are well known. To others, probably the majority, this characterization may sound offensive and unpatriotic. The evidence, alas, speaks clearly in support of this unhappy profile. Consider the following information, which I am stating as succinctly as possible in support of my contention that ours is, unfortunately, a violent culture in need of more peaceful transformations:

• The homicide rate in the U.S. is 5 to 20 times higher than that of any other industrial or post-industrial democracy.15

• Since 1945, the U.S. has so far intervened violently in other countries 67 times.  These interventions included bombings in 25 cases, attempted or successful assassination of leaders in 35 cases, assisting torture in 11 countries, interfering with democratic elections in 23 countries.16

• The U.S. has armed and supported nefarious despots, including Mobutu in Zaire (a.k.a. Congo), Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, and, before turning against them, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Noriega in Panama, Hussein in Iraq, and the Taliban rulers (abetted by Osama bin Laden) in Afghanistan, to name only a few.

• U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Madeleine Albright, with foreknowledge of impending massacres, vetoed the Security Council’s option to send to Rwanda a peacekeeping mission that could have prevented the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.17

• Fifty-two percent of the federal budget goes to the military while we experience high rates of domestic social decay, including homelessness, crime, environmental destruction, unemployment, hunger, inadequate education for many, lack of universal medical insurance and quality health care, youth gangs….

• The U.S. military budget is 10 times larger than the next largest military budget and larger than that of the next 15 nations combined.18 It amounted in 2002 to $410 billion, half of the world’s total military spending, and larger than the total national budgets of all but 13 countries.19

• The U.S. has refused to ratify international treaties and conventions that promote peace, human rights, and environmental protection. These include the convention on women’s rights, the international children’s rights convention, the ban on land mines, the International Criminal Court to try those accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the prohibition against using the death penalty for crimes by children, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, and the convention against torture, among others.20

•  U.S. weapons sales account for about half of all weapons sold in the world —$18.6 billion in contracts in 2000.21

•  The U.S. regularly sells weapons to undemocratic governments that violate human rights. Examples include Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and a succession of military dictatorships in the Americas.22

• The U.S. is the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons against civilian populations and threatens to do so in the future.

• The U.S. has by far the largest stockpiles of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction but threatens to invade other nations that might possibly develop similar lethal capacities.

• In its military campaigns, the U.S. is bombing with shells hardened by depleted uranium 238 (D.U.) that, due to the long-lasting radioactivity they release into the environment, continue to wage war on children who have not yet been conceived or born. Birth defects and cancers among children in southern Iraq, for example, have risen by 400% since the D.U. shelling by the U.S. in the1991 Gulf War, and D.U. is the probable cause.23

• The United Nations Committee against Torture cited the U.S. criminal justice system, in which 2 million people are incarcerated at any given time, for violations of the U.N.’s Minimum Standards for the Treatment of Prisoners.24

• Under the euphemisms of globalization and free trade, the U.S. is engaging in a foreign policy for the benefit of wealthy corporate elites that leads to the impoverishment, illness, and early deaths of millions of people around the world.  This is a policy of structural violence.25

• In 1998, 35 American children were murder victims in their schools, killed by other kids, and a quarter of a million children suffered serious injuries inflicted by their peers.26

• About 2 million teenagers are armed with guns, clubs, or razors, and 135,000 carry such weapons into their schools each day.27

• The average American child watches 3 to 4 hours of television per day.28 By the end of 6th grade, the average American child will have viewed 100,000 acts of violence, including 8,000 murders, on television. Children’s programs show about 20 violent acts per hour.29 Over 1,000 studies show televised violence influences children to be less sensitive to the suffering of others, more fearful of the world, more aggressive, and more likely to consider violence an appropriate reaction to conflict.

    The facts cited above are disquieting and alarming. Activists and participants in numerous non-profit organizations, along with investigative journalists and other authors, artists, and speakers, have been striving to increase popular awareness of such issues and to bring about pro-social changes that increase peace and justice. It is one of the redeeming virtues of thisculture that many creative and altruistic initiatives act as countervailing forces to violence. This has been our good fortune so far, although I am writing at a time when the executive branch of the federal government has been diminishing many of our precious civil liberties under the mantle of national security.  Unless we can transform our culture into one that congruently advances the causes of peace, freedom, human rights, and equality—at home and abroad—we shall experience only more insecurity.

Quixotic Aspects of Writing about Peace
    Writing to promote peace may be a quixotic venture for reasons I’ll briefly discuss, but it is nonetheless worthwhile, despite the obstacles. Unfortunately, few people in our culture read. In fact, only 6% of American adults read one or more books per year, including pulp fiction, and 60% have never read a book.30 Therefore, the demographic reach of writing, particularly of nonfiction, is limited. The following story illustrates a moment when I was faced with the problematical nature of trying to contribute to peace through writing.

    In 1970, while working in Paris as a peace movement organizer for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, I attended a UNESCO conference on the origins of human aggression. Over the course of a few days, social scientists from around the world presented reports on their research. I felt inspired by many of their recommendations for how to reduce levels of violence.

    One of my French friends worked at UNESCO. I went to his office and enthusiastically expressed my hope that the results from the conference would become widely known because I believed they could contribute to a more peaceful world. He looked at me soberly, and then invited me to walk with him along the corridors of this massive, modern building. He called my attention to the floor-to-ceiling lockers lining the hallways, asking if I knew what they contained. I did not. He opened one after another.  They were all full of neatly arranged, printed papers. He concisely informed me, “These are reports from the hundreds of other conferences in which intelligent solutions to all the world’s problems have been analyzed. But nothing changes!”

    As I engage in this writing about the sources of peace, I remember that incident from over thirty years ago.  Since then, more valuable research has been conducted. The origins of violence have become better understood by those conversant with the relevant literature. However, the world continues to hemorrhage from wars and social violence.  Therefore, at vulnerable moments I ponder what possible good could be accomplished by my writing this essay when so many relevant books and studies are all but forgotten. I can answer this only by affirming my belief in the ongoing, collaborative, multi-generational work of building peace in whatever ways we can. Also, I hope that some may find in these pages valuable information and references, support for their own insights, inspiration for constructive action, and a dialogue between author and readers that helps us feel less alone with our concerns and encourages us to pursue peace.

Peace and the Limbic Brain
    Another reality further makes writing about peace problematical. Books engage the intellect, which is anatomically centered in the neocortex. However, living and relating to others peacefully cannot be learned from reading. These abilities are housed in the deeper limbic level of the brain where feelings are monitored and generated. The linguistic and problem-solving activities of the neocortex are also highly engaged with peacemaking, of course. Yet, for optimal engagement, these cognitive functions need to be rooted in underlying feelings, in limbic trust and tact in human connection. Books can affect the limbic brain only to a limited degree, alas, and it cannot be transformed through the solitary activity of reading. Limbic learning occurs through significant, sustained relationships, for better or worse.

    The earliest relationships imprint our limbic brains with enduring patterns of expectation, reaction, and perception.31 For this reason, the lessons of peacemaking begin in the nursery if our primary caregivers consistently responded appropriately to us, according to our real needs and utter dependency, with loving kindness and acceptance. If we were not fortunate enough to begin learning peace-building skills from our early role models, if our caregivers were often incapable of empathy and did not accept our feelings, we can start later, provided we want to do so. In that case, we will need sustained relationships that help us learn and transform our social abilities. Although this is difficult, it is possible.  The relationships may be with friends, lovers, spouses, teachers, therapists, or colleagues who are emotionally healthy and skilled in living peacefully. Companion animals can also be helpful.32 Books can point in the direction we need to go to cultivate peacemaking skills. This direction is for us to associate in meaningful ways with others who are already peaceful people, whether they think of themselves in these terms or not. It also involves activities that contribute to peace.