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 19th
Century, people still believed in the possibility of building their utopias,
but that during the 20th 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!
For further information on this and similar topics by the same author, please click here.
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