Does Human Nature Preclude a Culture of Peace?

The following was originally prepared for a panel discussion on Culture of Peace at the Catholic University of Quito, Ecuador. It was then translated into English for a presentation given to the Unitarian Universalists through the virtual media afforded by Second Life.

Over the course of several years of search into the question as to whether it is humanly possible to build a culture of peace, the answers I found have shaken the very foundations of my inherited worldviews, and torn to shreds some of the most immovable axioms that I was taught from childhood. And this is what I would like to invite the reader to experience, if you will free yourself for a moment from preconceived notions, suspend judgment and approach these words with an open mind.

Introduction:

Traditionally, peace was understood as one of two extremes – either the absence of war or inner peace. The first was out of the reach of most social change agents, as it depended primarily on the will of the great powers. The second was also seen as untouchable, as is depended mostly on each individual.

The global movement for a culture of peace – headed by UNESCO since the late ‘90s – has come to fill the void between these two extremes, and make peace something that everyone can contribute to. It includes education for peace, sustainable socioeconomic development, respect for human rights, equality of women and men, democratic participation, tolerance and solidarity, the free flow of information, and international security. This, then, is fertile ground for everyone to contribute something as an agent of change.

However, many still doubt whether a culture of peace is possible, due to the assumption that human beings are inherently competitive and conflictual, selfish and greedy, aggressive and even violent by nature. This is because a culture of peace requires deep transformations, not only in the way we think, act and interact as individuals, but also in the very structures of our society and institutions.

Some Examples:

For example, to educate for peace, we must know whether it is possible, not to merely ‘condition’ human behavior, but to actually learn prosocial attitudes and virtues such as altruism, cooperation, systemic thinking, tolerance and openness towards others, appreciation for human diversity, humility, and many others.

Sustainable development requires knowing whether we can build an economic model based on minimizing production and consumption instead of maximizing it; reducing our material desires and increasing our spiritual aspirations and contentment; making the economy a tool for human growth for all, instead of the masses being an instrument of economic growth for a few; a system based not on competition or win-lose relations, but on cooperation or win-win relations; in which both extremes are reduced – both extreme poverty, with its waste of human lives, and extreme wealth, which affords disproportionate power in both politics and the market.

As for participatory democracy, we need to know whether human beings are capable of building a system of governance based not merely on representation, but on full participation; not on power over and against, but on power with and for, i.e., mutual empowerment to meet our common goals; not on the divisionism of party politics, with its debilitating electoral contests and power struggles between government and opposition, but aligned with the shared interests of all humankind, with unity of purpose, thought and action; not dominated by economic power, as in today’s plutocracies paraded as democracies, but with the separation of corporation and state.

The issue of human rights challenges us to go beyond legalistic conceptions and the fight for one’s own rights, to nurture a new global ethos of advocating and furthering the rights of others, of acknowledging the stewardship principle put forth at the recent Rio +20 Conference, according to which "Each one of us enters the world as a trust of the whole, and in turn bears a measure of responsibility for the welfare of all."

Disarmament requires eliminating the need to seek deterrence through the arms race and its consequential development of a powerful industrial military complex which has taken on a life of its own. We now know that this is a practical impossibility within the current paradigm of the ‘national security system’ based on the unlimited sovereignty of the nation-state. However, is the human race capable of taking the next step in its sociopolitical evolution to build a world state – a global federation of nations, governed by a system of shared sovereignty to achieve collective security, a true planetary democracy to replace the current war-generating situation of international anarchy?

Three Strategies:

The different responses to the above challenges posed by the culture of peace movement can be grouped into three large categories: strategic, structural and motivational. Strategic solutions seek to mitigate the negative effects of today’s institutions – political, economic, environmental, geopolitical, etc. – while avoiding any radical changes in the way they are structured, i.e., without changing the “rules of the game.” Giving charity to the poor instead of reforming the system that generates poverty is an example of this.

Structural proposals, on the other hand, seek deep-seated reforms in the way our economic, political and geopolitical systems are conceived and built – primarily as win-lose relationships – to replace them with new systems grounded on win-win relations. In the words of Don Tapscott, a co-author of ‘Macrowikinomics’, we need to “re-boot all the old models, approaches and structures or risk institutional paralysis or even collapse.”

However, it is here where doubts arise as to whether the necessary reforms would be contrary to human nature and therefore impossible to implement by democratic means, i.e., without imposition by a totalitarian regime which by definition would be anathema to a culture of peace. And it is the third category of proposals – the motivational ones – that addresses the matter of whether human beings are selfish and aggressive by nature, whether they are inherently peaceful and altruistic, or whether they are simply educable.

Deconstructing Theories:

In my 30-year career as a teacher, I have specialized in education for peace, particularly training agents of social change to build a culture of peace. And through the years, I have repeatedly heard arguments to the effect that the transformations being proposed – whether individual, interpersonal or socio-structural – were impossible to achieve because human beings were inherently selfish and competitive, greedy and aggressive by nature. So I decided to study the origins of these theories and beliefs, and to find out if any research had been done that challenged them.

What I found was surprising! Most of the theories according to which human beings were inherently selfish and violent by nature were formulated a hundred years ago or more. Furthermore, many of them were not actually ‘theories’ in a scientific sense, but mere speculations from behind a desk. Some of them did not even qualify as hypotheses, as they were plagued with fallacies such as not being falsifiable, and none had been tested out through scientific research.

Rather, both field and laboratory research had concluded quite the opposite: that human beings were not only capable of peaceful, altruistic attitudes and behaviors, but even show a certain predisposition towards them from early childhood. The astonishing thing was that this research was not even being studied in most universities, much less permeating the popular culture. Rather, most seemed bent on repeating the old, unquestioned assumptions ad nauseum, despite the fact that science had already gone beyond them. This, of course, was serving the best interests of the status quo, but not those of humanity as a whole.

I found, for example, that the old 'law of the jungle', traditionally defined as conflict and competition for limited resources, had been replaced by ecology with a new concept of inter-species cooperation, mutual aid, symbiosis, and generation of abundance within an ecosystem.

I discovered that the ‘survival of the fittest’ had not favored the most aggressive, conflictual, greedy men, but rather more adaptive behaviors like cooperation, altruism, tolerance, reconciliation, and the ability to live together in peace, which had enabled the human race to survive and progress in the face of great natural hurdles and our lack of natural defenses.

I learned that the evolution of the species through ‘natural selection’ was not necessarily a competitive process, and that a much more significant mechanism than genetic mutation had been ‘symbiogenesis’, generating new species by combining and integrating diverse beings into more complex organisms through a process of cooperation and mutual aid.

I realized that normal human beings have neither a ‘killer instinct’ nor a ‘violent brain’, but rather that we seem to be wired to recoil from doing harm to our fellow beings and actually prefer to help them. Despite the tremendous efforts made in boot camp to turn young men into killing machines, research has shown that most soldiers never shoot their weapons in battle or else miss on purpose, and that when they actually do kill, many are traumatized by the experience.

I found that the belief that “there have always been wars and always will be” arose because we are taught history as a long series of wars, leaving out the long periods – years, decades, centuries and even millennia – of peace, prosperity and happiness, which according to some authors made up more than 90 % of human history; that war is not a normal condition of humanity, but rather represents a disease that can occasionally attack a healthy body politic.

I discovered that, despite the wide-spread myth that human beings are inherently selfish, greedy, and motivated primarily by immediate personal interests, actual research points to an innate capacity for prosocial, altruistic, generous attitudes, and motivation primarily by intrinsic factors such as justice, excellence and belonging.

I learned that competition, defined as a win-lose relationship, is not more productive than cooperation, understood as a win-win situation; that cooperative games and sports, in which everyone wins and nobody loses, can be at least as challenging and fun as competitive ones; that competition does not build character but rather damages it; and that in the classroom and the workplace, cooperating in teams is preferred by most over competing among peers.

I realized that ‘politics’ is not a power struggle by definition, but rather the science and art of properly managing public affairs, and that perhaps one of the worst ways of managing public affairs is to turn them into a power struggle; that relations of domination–submission can be transformed into relationships of reciprocity and mutualism; that ‘power’ means capacity, which is not necessarily exercised over or against others, but in many cultures is exercised with and in favor of others, in a relationship of mutual empowerment.

I found that unity does not necessarily imply uniformity, that diversity does not necessarily lead to division, but that unity in diversity is a fundamental law that governs all systems, from human bodies to ecosystems, and from the scientific enterprise to the functioning of markets; that unity does not necessarily require a loss of identity, but rather that the process of moral maturation means identifying with ever broader units – family, community, state or province, country, and finally the world as a whole.

I discovered that in the 19^th Century, people still believed in the possibility of building their utopias, but that during the 20^th Century, following the horrors of two world wars, the excesses of various dictators, holocausts, atom bombs, and economic meltdowns, people came to doubt any vision of a better world and began instead to expect a total collapse of society or even the complete annihilation of the human race. I realized that we urgently need to recover the capacity to dream and to build our utopias, because “without vision, the people perish.”

Conclusions:

Finally, I learned that all of these theories and beliefs were no more than cultural constructs that have been naturalized and reproduced from generation to generation; that they do not serve the best interests of the whole of humanity, but only the short-term material interests of a small minority that benefits from win-lose relations in economics and politics and makes a hefty profit from the military industry to the detriment of the wellbeing and tranquility, the peace and security of humankind as a whole.

Through this research, I realized that there is nothing in the nature of human beings or of society as a whole that could be deemed an insurmountable obstacle to achieving a culture of peace, cooperation and mutualism. The only real challenge is the actual existence of the present culture of violence, fighting, competition, and contest. And the good news is that cultures are not engraved in stone; nor are they static pieces in a museum; they can change, do change and, in this case, must change!

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