Peace
As the 19th anniversary of the loss of his son approached, Don Goodrich wondered how peace can be achieved in the face of violence and wrote this.
CREATING A CULTURE OF PEACE
IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE
The ultimate microcosm of the peace of which I speak is the well-fed infant sleeping in the secure embrace of a nourished mother with hope.
In this world shrunk by the Internet, social media, inexpensive air travel, cell phones, and global commerce, leaders (secular and religious) can no longer credibly claim that comparing the intimacy of mother and child to a global culture of peace commits the fallacy of composition. The time when members of a population (indigenous, national, religious, ethnic, tribal, corporate, criminal, etc.) can act in excess here or anywhere on the globe without incidental, violent implications for others has gone. To create a culture of peace in the face of violence there must be a new paradigm.
The motives for violence are many, but they can almost always be reduced to five: survival, love, fear, hate and greed. Of these, only survival, protection of those we love and fear of imminent threats are valid justifications for violence. The other motives—hate, greed and fear of distant threats (not just to mortal life but to honor and dignity for the now and, for some, the hereafter)—never justify violence, but it is the curse of humanity that they persist as the animus for it and, sadly, violence will ever be in our midst. There is, however, a direct and proportional relationship between the intensity of the fear of distant threats, hatred and greed and the frequency and magnitude of the violence they spawn. Thus, it is violence driven by excesses of hate, greed and generalized fear (and deceptions that inevitably accompany them) that most threaten peace. How do we create a culture of peace in the face of these kinds of violence?
First, we must always use the vernacular of peace. After all, attaining peace is the only sufficient justification for our leaders to invoking violence. If it were otherwise, the highest aspirations of our forefathers, the great gifts of the Gods of all religions and the foundations of all great civilizations are illusions and every man, woman and child must be armed and violent to survive and preserve their sense of worth. Leaders only make more likely and exacerbate conflict when they use the language of war when the object is peace.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, the discourse of the response to that violence nearly always included the expression “war on terrorism” or a variant of it. That term and its close cousins were political invention with no intrinsic meaning. To proclaim a war on a method of war, “terrorism,” makes no sense. It amounts to no more than a pungent tautology of violence—war on war—evoking thoughtless images of feared and hated ubiquitous “others.”
Then, the “others” were from distant lands. Now, our leaders are using similar war-like language to cast many among us here as enemy “others” and calling for the use of violence to confront, marginalize and suppress them. This is, was and always has been precisely the wrong message for creation of a culture of peace.
Who were the “others” on whom expressions like “war on terror” made its declaration in the aftermath of 9/11? Though terrorism was and is a loathsome method of war and those directly responsible for its use must be condemned and defeated, not all who were associated with it, condoned it, or acquiesced in its planners presence among them were justified recipients of violence (e.g., drone released bombs, torture, indefinite confinement, etc.). Some given the “terrorist” label were as much (in some cases, more) victims as perpetrators, driven by love of their families (intimate and extended) and their and their own survival, deceived and manipulated by the true terrorists. The essential difference between them being their motivations—love, survival, fear of imminent harm on the one hand or hatred, greed and generalized fear on the other—so easily and often misunderstood, masked, disavowed and mischaracterized by our leaders.
What was true in the aftermath of 9/11 is true now as President Trump and Attorney General Barr label demonstrators addressing the systemic conditions that have led to the murders of George Floyd and many others like him as “radical left anarchists,” “violent radical agitators” and “terrorists,” fomenting hatred of them when only a very few among them caused harm, and threatening and using state sanctioned violence against them all—lumping them together as the “other,” deserving of our universal opprobrium and condemnation.
The focus is wrong. Just as war is not, will never be, the antidote to terrorism, the use and threats of use of violence by the privileged in power in response to long suppressed domestic unrest among the disaffected arising from systemic abuse will fail with responsive violence the inevitable consequence.
Such violent responses to unjust uses of power have long been part of the arsenal of the oppressed. Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, employed these tactics against the English in the early 14th Century. While England’s overpowering military was starving his countrymen at the siege of Berwick, he sent troops to slaughter innocent villagers in northern England. The English forces got the message: “if you stay in Scotland starving the Scots, your countrymen will be slaughtered in their homes.” The English abandoned the siege at Berwick and returned to England.
Just as terrorism is a form of speech intended to affect the minds and alter the behaviors of those not injured or killed by the terrorist act itself, so was the violence of the marginalized few, among whom were many struggling to preserve their dignity and survive in an economy, social structure and judicial system tilted against them, who rioted in the aftermath of the death of Mr. Floyd under the knee of his oppressors and the deaths of many others before him and riot still (e.g., after Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back) and since then and since then …. It becomes a perverse form of communication when the response of leaders to the violence of the oppressed is in kind—violence such as we saw ordered by Attorney General William Bar on June 1st in Washington DC and again in Portland Oregon a month later—and concedes to violent actors the domain within which their message will be heard if only we will listen.
At the turn of the last century, George Russell wrote The National Being. In addressing the Irish response to World War I he said,
We have to discover what is fundamental in Irish
character . . . the affections, leanings,
tendencies toward one or more of the eternal
principals which have governed and inspired all
great human effort, all great civilizations from
the dawn of history.
A century later, we have to discover what is fundamental in our character. This cannot be done by violence, its threat, or its rhetoric. Any such attempt will fail and only prove true Russell’s sad assertion that “no law is more eternally sure in its workings than that which condemns us to be as that we condemned.” We must prove false his prophesy that “[a]ll great wars in history, all conquests, all national antagonisms, result in an exchange of characteristics.”
Suppressing the violence of the long oppressed in this country is not the job of the military. Soldiers can and should capture, isolate and, when necessary, kill terrorists in foreign lands who pose imminent threats to us. So too should police apprehend and our judicial system judge and punish those who commit crimes here. But soldiers cannot effect the repudiation of terrorism nor quell civil unrest. These are jobs for civilians. It is they—we—who must, by words and conduct, scorn and reject the deadly voice of terrorist violence and that of our aggrieved citizens. It is only by use of its opposites, the language and conduct of peace, that would-be rioters and terrorists will be dissuaded from using violence to send their messages.
How, then, do we create a culture of peace in the face of violence? We think of what brings peace to the ultimate microcosm of it and look to replicate it on a large scale. For the mother and her little child, the foundation is love. But, love—the ultimate peace maker—is uniquely personal and does not, cannot, exist in its unadulterated form in group settings, though without its underlying force we are lost. So, what are the essential predicates from which groups (which cannot love) and their leaders (who can) move toward peace?
First among them is nutritious food and potable water. There can be no peace for those with empty stomachs. People will fight for their own survival and to sustain their loved ones. This kind of violence does not begin as the violence of hatred and exploitation (greed), though it can end there when influenced by deception and fear. It is the job of all leaders first to eliminate the causes of this king of violence and, if that is not possible in the short term, confine its motivation to its original purpose—survival—as resources are gathered to remove the original cause. Those leaders who have access to an abundance of resources have the first responsibility, for they are the only ones who have the means to eliminate the causes of the suffering that motivates violence in the first place and protect those who suffer from the justified, survival/love/fear violence induced by them. Breaking the cycle early is critical.
Food without security is not enough. It begins with shelter from the elements. Even a mother’s embrace fails to bring peace in the unrelenting wet, cold, and disease that nature can bring. Like starvation, nature’s threats are a great motivator and can produce the same sorts of violence as hunger—the violence of love for and survival of self and family. Here, too, the answer is simple in the abstract: those who can must provide shelter and remove the threat of the use of violence to get it.
Of course, there must be security from human predators who also pose this threat. To survive, they can and will use violence to deprive others of the food, water and shelter those others require for their own survival. Here, sadly, violence does have a place, not because the predators are hateful or greedy, but because of the imminent threat that their prey (who may also be starving) will do the same to them for love of themselves and their families. In these circumstances our leaders must intervene to break these inevitable cycles of justified violence and, of course, refrain from producing the conditions that cause them. But, the interventions must have at the ready the necessities for both sides of the survival conflict that triggered the justified violence in the first place and then only use the violence necessary to break the cycle.
Nature is a good teacher. A mother bear with cubs does not threaten to or attack an approaching human out of hate for the human. She does it out of nature’s equivalent of what we call “love” for her offspring. And, she is less likely to do harm if her fear for herself and her cubs is lessened. Nor does she respond with violence to generalized (non-imminent) threats. Our leaders could learn from mother bears. Those facing a lack of food and shelter can quickly change their response motive from survival to hate. History records too many instances of poor management of these volatile conditions and late interventions, only after excessive fear and hate, often combined with excessive greed, have become the dominant motives for the violence with lives, sometimes hundreds of thousands, lost.
Beginning on April 6, 1994 and continuing for the next hundred days as many as, perhaps more than, one million Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia in Rwanda.
Neither food nor security without hope is enough to contain violence. Hopelessness is the breeding ground of fear and hate. This is particularly so when the hopeless believe that the opulence around them has been bought at their expense. The hopeless fear short lives without dignity for themselves and their loved ones and can come to hate the opulent and arrogant who they believe have denied them. This is particularly so where the disparities of wealth and opportunity are great.
Among the first words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity . .
of all members of the human family is the
foundation of . . peace in the world . ..
And in the only place in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights where the root word “duty” is used, it proclaims:
Everyone has duties to the community in which
alone the free and full development of his
personality is possible.
Without dignity – the free and full development of personality – made possible by the duty owed by everyone, most particularly our leaders, to the community, hope is not possible.
When hope is denied in this world, the hopeless will look for it in the next. To what deity they will look for the dignity given them at their souls’ beginnings and denied them in their mortal lives will differ. Where the differences are extreme, violence can result.
The Glorious Triumph Over A Perfidious Race
On August 24, 1572, and the days following, some say as many as 100,000 Huguenots were slaughtered by Catholics in France in what has come to be known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The history of the massacre, its underlying causes and most proximate instigators is unclear. Some say it arose from a struggle for ownership and control of land. Others blame disparities in wealth between the common people and the newly successful Huguenots. Some claim it occurred because of Catholic fear of reprisals by Huguenots who hated them for past violence. Some attribute it to differences in religious beliefs arising out of the Protestant Reformation. It is clear, however, that when news of the massacre reached the Vatican, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a Te Deum to be sung as a special thanksgiving, had a medal struck with the motto Ugonottorum strages 1572 (Huguenot Slaughter 1572) showing an angel bearing a cross and sword next to slaughtered Protestants and commissioned Italian artiste Vasari to paint a mural of the massacre (shown above). In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Charles IX condemned it and threatened the Guise family with royal justice for causing it. But he later took credit for it when he thought it in his interest not to alienate the Guise family, thus joining with the Pope in applauding it.
Whatever the attributions of cause, there was a failure of leadership, secular and religious, (if the leaders themselves were not complicit) to take steps to prevent the slaughter; not by interfering in the religious beliefs of the protagonists, but by relieving the tensions created by the excesses that historians believe caused it—greed, hatred and generalized fear of the “other,” coupled with leadership dishonesty.
Fear, greed, hatred and lies are among the frailties of the human condition, that neither government, nor law, nor religion can eradicate. But it is the responsibility of leaders not to fall prey to them themselves and to limit them in their degrees of excess in others, for it is in these excesses that violence finds its outlet. Here again, they can learn from nature. Differences in air temperatures produce the gentle rains essential to all life. But extreme air temperature disparities can result in terrible, destructive violence producing lightning with temperatures in excess of those on the surface of the sun and winds no exposed living thing can survive. Our leaders, particularly those with access to such power, must understand, avoid and control excess using the kind of care of the swinger of birches described in Robert Frost’s poem, Birches, as “Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, whose only play was what he found himself, summer or winter, and could play alone” about whom Frost wrote:
He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
They would do well to read this poem and other great literature before they unleash their arsenals of influence on the lives of millions.
What is the new paradigm for this shrinking world that will create a culture of peace in the face of violence? Our leaders must change the way they think and talk about themselves and the people over whom they have power, and more importantly, about those about whom they know little (in some cases nothing). They must avoid and control excesses of fear, hatred and greed in word and in action, in themselves and in others. Like the swinger of birches, they must always keep their poise to the top branches of thought, climbing carefully toward a culture of peace. And, since the focus here is “culture,” we ordinary citizens must do the same.
It is easy to say that people living among us and in foreign lands with histories and cultures little known to us have it all wrong and should learn about us, the way we think, the way we live, the way we govern. It is harder to accept responsibility for what we do, and do not do, to and for them and to educate ourselves about them. Marcel Proust expressed this well in, In Search of Lost Time
Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be
so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a
state, had she been able to discern in herself,
as in everyone, that indifference which,
whatever other names one may give it, is the
terrible and permanent form of cruelty.”
Who are these people with whom we must join in creating a culture of peace? They are immersed in their own histories and traditions and are proud of them. The cultural energy upon which they rely has allowed for their survival and that of their ancestors over centuries. Unless we educate ourselves about these people, we have no hope of educating them about us. To suggest otherwise is the sort of arrogance that stymies the exchange of ideas necessary for the discovery of cultural common ground. Thus, the civilian populations put at risk by violence—all of us—have no choice but to open our minds to other ways of thinking about the world and its people. Only if we make this choice will their minds, some with notions of peace and violence very different from ours, be open to us.
In many cultures, where peace has been overwhelmed by violence, people are poor, disillusioned and disheartened. In some, the absence of the infrastructures of education, commerce, justice, security and hope produce Hobson’s choices that yield disregard of conventional norms and use of power (even and most notably among their putative protectors) with more violence and loss of hope. It is foolish to think that we can simply say to them, “Look at us. This is how we do it. You must try it or you will never have peace.”
They don’t want to look at and behave like us. They want to be who they are, reflections of their religions, histories, and cultures and of ancestors of whom they are proud. To paraphrase the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every one of us has a duty to the world community in which alone the free and full development of each other member’s personality is possible. This free and full development of personality of people whose customs are alien to us cannot be integrated into a culture of peace unless we educate ourselves about them.
And we, who would and can, cannot even help them until we understand them. Whatever we try will have unintended consequences born of our ignorance and their disdainful awareness of it. So, even those of us who have an excess of wealth and choose to share it with them will have doubtful success, even tragic failure, unless we know and understand them.
By “share” I mean become partners with and give strength to those on the cusp of violence. As counter intuitive as this appears, it is a risk we must take. Many of these potentially violent actors have never known peace and have no hope for it. They trust no one and, sadly, with good reason.
It all comes down to trust, which is impossible without communication, which is impossible without education—cross knowledge of history, literature, religion and culture. And these must precede any attempt to look to any “Rule of Law” for solutions. What law?
The law in the United States has its origins in the Huguenots who survived the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The law in Israel has its origins in its statehood less than a century ago and the more than 3000-year history of the Jewish people. The law in Afghanistan has its origins in Islam, its tribes and the survival of invasions going back to and even before Genghis Khan and in the United States going back to England and the arrival of slaves on our shores in 1619. And India and China and Haiti and Sudan. What law?
It is not any “Rule of Law,” national or international, that will matter, for it can be no better than the trust had in it. All that really will matter is the trust we have in, based on our knowledge of, each other. How do we come to have that trust?
This is no mean task and it cannot be done without leadership at all levels of our public and private institutions. Immigration and educational admission policies across the globe must encourage student exchanges, particularly from and to developing countries with few and poor educational opportunities. Those countries cannot be expected to develop leaders able to confront the complexities of the modern world, curb the excesses that produce violence and create cultures of peace in illiterate and under-educated populations. We must learn the native languages of the people whose trust we need. Foreign officers, including military personnel, need to spend more time in their countries of assignment and increase their exposures to indigenous languages and populations, particularly in rural areas. Our food, water and security assistance to needy populations must be timely and independent of donor self-interest.
What must be done internationally must be done domestically. Each of us needs to learn from and better understand those among us who are different, particularly populations marginalized by their skin color, national origin, religious conviction, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The human dignity of all over whom control is exercised must be honored.
Our secular leaders must do these things with a focus on peace and as much honesty as the harsh demands of governing permit. We citizens must make them possible by our support. Our religious leaders must search for common themes of peace in their beliefs and never deceive their followers. There can be no culture of peace with leadership dishonesty and unrelenting excesses of cultural and religious myopia and isolation.
Finally, we must have hope that we can create a culture of peace in the face of violence if we are to have it. I mean the kind of hope of which Vaclav Havel spoke when he said:
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world . . .
Either we have hope or we don’t; it is a
dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially
dependent on some particular observation of the
world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an
orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the
heart; it transcends the world that is
immediately experienced, and is anchored
somewhere beyond its horizons . . .
Hope is definitely not the same thing as
optimism. It is not the conviction that
something will turn out well, but the certainty
that something makes sense, regardless of how it
turns out.
The English poet, Ralph Hodgson, observed: “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” The elements of the cultures of the world which replicate the peace of the well-fed child in the secure embrace of a nourished and hopeful mother’s love are among us. It is only for lack of imagination, focus, courage and leadership they have not yet been seen and imbedded in the fabric of the global conscience from which a culture of peace in the face of violence can emerge.
CREATING A CULTURE OF PEACE
IN THE FACE OF VIOLENCE
The ultimate microcosm of the peace of which I speak is the well-fed infant sleeping in the secure embrace of a nourished mother with hope.
In this world shrunk by the Internet, social media, inexpensive air travel, cell phones, and global commerce, leaders (secular and religious) can no longer credibly claim that comparing the intimacy of mother and child to a global culture of peace commits the fallacy of composition. The time when members of a population (indigenous, national, religious, ethnic, tribal, corporate, criminal, etc.) can act in excess here or anywhere on the globe without incidental, violent implications for others has gone. To create a culture of peace in the face of violence there must be a new paradigm.
The motives for violence are many, but they can almost always be reduced to five: survival, love, fear, hate and greed. Of these, only survival, protection of those we love and fear of imminent threats are valid justifications for violence. The other motives—hate, greed and fear of distant threats (not just to mortal life but to honor and dignity for the now and, for some, the hereafter)—never justify violence, but it is the curse of humanity that they persist as the animus for it and, sadly, violence will ever be in our midst. There is, however, a direct and proportional relationship between the intensity of the fear of distant threats, hatred and greed and the frequency and magnitude of the violence they spawn. Thus, it is violence driven by excesses of hate, greed and generalized fear (and deceptions that inevitably accompany them) that most threaten peace. How do we create a culture of peace in the face of these kinds of violence?
First, we must always use the vernacular of peace. After all, attaining peace is the only sufficient justification for our leaders to invoking violence. If it were otherwise, the highest aspirations of our forefathers, the great gifts of the Gods of all religions and the foundations of all great civilizations are illusions and every man, woman and child must be armed and violent to survive and preserve their sense of worth. Leaders only make more likely and exacerbate conflict when they use the language of war when the object is peace.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, the discourse of the response to that violence nearly always included the expression “war on terrorism” or a variant of it. That term and its close cousins were political invention with no intrinsic meaning. To proclaim a war on a method of war, “terrorism,” makes no sense. It amounts to no more than a pungent tautology of violence—war on war—evoking thoughtless images of feared and hated ubiquitous “others.”
Then, the “others” were from distant lands. Now, our leaders are using similar war-like language to cast many among us here as enemy “others” and calling for the use of violence to confront, marginalize and suppress them. This is, was and always has been precisely the wrong message for creation of a culture of peace.
Who were the “others” on whom expressions like “war on terror” made its declaration in the aftermath of 9/11? Though terrorism was and is a loathsome method of war and those directly responsible for its use must be condemned and defeated, not all who were associated with it, condoned it, or acquiesced in its planners presence among them were justified recipients of violence (e.g., drone released bombs, torture, indefinite confinement, etc.). Some given the “terrorist” label were as much (in some cases, more) victims as perpetrators, driven by love of their families (intimate and extended) and their and their own survival, deceived and manipulated by the true terrorists. The essential difference between them being their motivations—love, survival, fear of imminent harm on the one hand or hatred, greed and generalized fear on the other—so easily and often misunderstood, masked, disavowed and mischaracterized by our leaders.
What was true in the aftermath of 9/11 is true now as President Trump and Attorney General Barr label demonstrators addressing the systemic conditions that have led to the murders of George Floyd and many others like him as “radical left anarchists,” “violent radical agitators” and “terrorists,” fomenting hatred of them when only a very few among them caused harm, and threatening and using state sanctioned violence against them all—lumping them together as the “other,” deserving of our universal opprobrium and condemnation.
The focus is wrong. Just as war is not, will never be, the antidote to terrorism, the use and threats of use of violence by the privileged in power in response to long suppressed domestic unrest among the disaffected arising from systemic abuse will fail with responsive violence the inevitable consequence.
Such violent responses to unjust uses of power have long been part of the arsenal of the oppressed. Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, employed these tactics against the English in the early 14th Century. While England’s overpowering military was starving his countrymen at the siege of Berwick, he sent troops to slaughter innocent villagers in northern England. The English forces got the message: “if you stay in Scotland starving the Scots, your countrymen will be slaughtered in their homes.” The English abandoned the siege at Berwick and returned to England.
Just as terrorism is a form of speech intended to affect the minds and alter the behaviors of those not injured or killed by the terrorist act itself, so was the violence of the marginalized few, among whom were many struggling to preserve their dignity and survive in an economy, social structure and judicial system tilted against them, who rioted in the aftermath of the death of Mr. Floyd under the knee of his oppressors and the deaths of many others before him and riot still (e.g., after Jacob Blake was shot seven times in the back) and since then and since then …. It becomes a perverse form of communication when the response of leaders to the violence of the oppressed is in kind—violence such as we saw ordered by Attorney General William Bar on June 1st in Washington DC and again in Portland Oregon a month later—and concedes to violent actors the domain within which their message will be heard if only we will listen.
At the turn of the last century, George Russell wrote The National Being. In addressing the Irish response to World War I he said,
We have to discover what is fundamental in Irish
character . . . the affections, leanings,
tendencies toward one or more of the eternal
principals which have governed and inspired all
great human effort, all great civilizations from
the dawn of history.
A century later, we have to discover what is fundamental in our character. This cannot be done by violence, its threat, or its rhetoric. Any such attempt will fail and only prove true Russell’s sad assertion that “no law is more eternally sure in its workings than that which condemns us to be as that we condemned.” We must prove false his prophesy that “[a]ll great wars in history, all conquests, all national antagonisms, result in an exchange of characteristics.”
Suppressing the violence of the long oppressed in this country is not the job of the military. Soldiers can and should capture, isolate and, when necessary, kill terrorists in foreign lands who pose imminent threats to us. So too should police apprehend and our judicial system judge and punish those who commit crimes here. But soldiers cannot effect the repudiation of terrorism nor quell civil unrest. These are jobs for civilians. It is they—we—who must, by words and conduct, scorn and reject the deadly voice of terrorist violence and that of our aggrieved citizens. It is only by use of its opposites, the language and conduct of peace, that would-be rioters and terrorists will be dissuaded from using violence to send their messages.
How, then, do we create a culture of peace in the face of violence? We think of what brings peace to the ultimate microcosm of it and look to replicate it on a large scale. For the mother and her little child, the foundation is love. But, love—the ultimate peace maker—is uniquely personal and does not, cannot, exist in its unadulterated form in group settings, though without its underlying force we are lost. So, what are the essential predicates from which groups (which cannot love) and their leaders (who can) move toward peace?
First among them is nutritious food and potable water. There can be no peace for those with empty stomachs. People will fight for their own survival and to sustain their loved ones. This kind of violence does not begin as the violence of hatred and exploitation (greed), though it can end there when influenced by deception and fear. It is the job of all leaders first to eliminate the causes of this king of violence and, if that is not possible in the short term, confine its motivation to its original purpose—survival—as resources are gathered to remove the original cause. Those leaders who have access to an abundance of resources have the first responsibility, for they are the only ones who have the means to eliminate the causes of the suffering that motivates violence in the first place and protect those who suffer from the justified, survival/love/fear violence induced by them. Breaking the cycle early is critical.
Food without security is not enough. It begins with shelter from the elements. Even a mother’s embrace fails to bring peace in the unrelenting wet, cold, and disease that nature can bring. Like starvation, nature’s threats are a great motivator and can produce the same sorts of violence as hunger—the violence of love for and survival of self and family. Here, too, the answer is simple in the abstract: those who can must provide shelter and remove the threat of the use of violence to get it.
Of course, there must be security from human predators who also pose this threat. To survive, they can and will use violence to deprive others of the food, water and shelter those others require for their own survival. Here, sadly, violence does have a place, not because the predators are hateful or greedy, but because of the imminent threat that their prey (who may also be starving) will do the same to them for love of themselves and their families. In these circumstances our leaders must intervene to break these inevitable cycles of justified violence and, of course, refrain from producing the conditions that cause them. But, the interventions must have at the ready the necessities for both sides of the survival conflict that triggered the justified violence in the first place and then only use the violence necessary to break the cycle.
Nature is a good teacher. A mother bear with cubs does not threaten to or attack an approaching human out of hate for the human. She does it out of nature’s equivalent of what we call “love” for her offspring. And, she is less likely to do harm if her fear for herself and her cubs is lessened. Nor does she respond with violence to generalized (non-imminent) threats. Our leaders could learn from mother bears. Those facing a lack of food and shelter can quickly change their response motive from survival to hate. History records too many instances of poor management of these volatile conditions and late interventions, only after excessive fear and hate, often combined with excessive greed, have become the dominant motives for the violence with lives, sometimes hundreds of thousands, lost.
Beginning on April 6, 1994 and continuing for the next hundred days as many as, perhaps more than, one million Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia in Rwanda.
Neither food nor security without hope is enough to contain violence. Hopelessness is the breeding ground of fear and hate. This is particularly so when the hopeless believe that the opulence around them has been bought at their expense. The hopeless fear short lives without dignity for themselves and their loved ones and can come to hate the opulent and arrogant who they believe have denied them. This is particularly so where the disparities of wealth and opportunity are great.
Among the first words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity . .
of all members of the human family is the
foundation of . . peace in the world . ..
And in the only place in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights where the root word “duty” is used, it proclaims:
Everyone has duties to the community in which
alone the free and full development of his
personality is possible.
Without dignity – the free and full development of personality – made possible by the duty owed by everyone, most particularly our leaders, to the community, hope is not possible.
When hope is denied in this world, the hopeless will look for it in the next. To what deity they will look for the dignity given them at their souls’ beginnings and denied them in their mortal lives will differ. Where the differences are extreme, violence can result.
On August 24, 1572, and the days following, some say as many as 100,000 Huguenots were slaughtered by Catholics in France in what has come to be known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The history of the massacre, its underlying causes and most proximate instigators is unclear. Some say it arose from a struggle for ownership and control of land. Others blame disparities in wealth between the common people and the newly successful Huguenots. Some claim it occurred because of Catholic fear of reprisals by Huguenots who hated them for past violence. Some attribute it to differences in religious beliefs arising out of the Protestant Reformation. It is clear, however, that when news of the massacre reached the Vatican, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a Te Deum to be sung as a special thanksgiving, had a medal struck with the motto Ugonottorum strages 1572 (Huguenot Slaughter 1572) showing an angel bearing a cross and sword next to slaughtered Protestants and commissioned Italian artiste Vasari to paint a mural of the massacre (shown above). In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Charles IX condemned it and threatened the Guise family with royal justice for causing it. But he later took credit for it when he thought it in his interest not to alienate the Guise family, thus joining with the Pope in applauding it.
Whatever the attributions of cause, there was a failure of leadership, secular and religious, (if the leaders themselves were not complicit) to take steps to prevent the slaughter; not by interfering in the religious beliefs of the protagonists, but by relieving the tensions created by the excesses that historians believe caused it—greed, hatred and generalized fear of the “other,” coupled with leadership dishonesty.
Fear, greed, hatred and lies are among the frailties of the human condition, that neither government, nor law, nor religion can eradicate. But it is the responsibility of leaders not to fall prey to them themselves and to limit them in their degrees of excess in others, for it is in these excesses that violence finds its outlet. Here again, they can learn from nature. Differences in air temperatures produce the gentle rains essential to all life. But extreme air temperature disparities can result in terrible, destructive violence producing lightning with temperatures in excess of those on the surface of the sun and winds no exposed living thing can survive. Our leaders, particularly those with access to such power, must understand, avoid and control excess using the kind of care of the swinger of birches described in Robert Frost’s poem, Birches, as “Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, whose only play was what he found himself, summer or winter, and could play alone” about whom Frost wrote:
He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
They would do well to read this poem and other great literature before they unleash their arsenals of influence on the lives of millions.
What is the new paradigm for this shrinking world that will create a culture of peace in the face of violence? Our leaders must change the way they think and talk about themselves and the people over whom they have power, and more importantly, about those about whom they know little (in some cases nothing). They must avoid and control excesses of fear, hatred and greed in word and in action, in themselves and in others. Like the swinger of birches, they must always keep their poise to the top branches of thought, climbing carefully toward a culture of peace. And, since the focus here is “culture,” we ordinary citizens must do the same.
It is easy to say that people living among us and in foreign lands with histories and cultures little known to us have it all wrong and should learn about us, the way we think, the way we live, the way we govern. It is harder to accept responsibility for what we do, and do not do, to and for them and to educate ourselves about them. Marcel Proust expressed this well in, In Search of Lost Time
Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be
so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a
state, had she been able to discern in herself,
as in everyone, that indifference which,
whatever other names one may give it, is the
terrible and permanent form of cruelty.”
Who are these people with whom we must join in creating a culture of peace? They are immersed in their own histories and traditions and are proud of them. The cultural energy upon which they rely has allowed for their survival and that of their ancestors over centuries. Unless we educate ourselves about these people, we have no hope of educating them about us. To suggest otherwise is the sort of arrogance that stymies the exchange of ideas necessary for the discovery of cultural common ground. Thus, the civilian populations put at risk by violence—all of us—have no choice but to open our minds to other ways of thinking about the world and its people. Only if we make this choice will their minds, some with notions of peace and violence very different from ours, be open to us.
In many cultures, where peace has been overwhelmed by violence, people are poor, disillusioned and disheartened. In some, the absence of the infrastructures of education, commerce, justice, security and hope produce Hobson’s choices that yield disregard of conventional norms and use of power (even and most notably among their putative protectors) with more violence and loss of hope. It is foolish to think that we can simply say to them, “Look at us. This is how we do it. You must try it or you will never have peace.”
They don’t want to look at and behave like us. They want to be who they are, reflections of their religions, histories, and cultures and of ancestors of whom they are proud. To paraphrase the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every one of us has a duty to the world community in which alone the free and full development of each other member’s personality is possible. This free and full development of personality of people whose customs are alien to us cannot be integrated into a culture of peace unless we educate ourselves about them.
And we, who would and can, cannot even help them until we understand them. Whatever we try will have unintended consequences born of our ignorance and their disdainful awareness of it. So, even those of us who have an excess of wealth and choose to share it with them will have doubtful success, even tragic failure, unless we know and understand them.
By “share” I mean become partners with and give strength to those on the cusp of violence. As counter intuitive as this appears, it is a risk we must take. Many of these potentially violent actors have never known peace and have no hope for it. They trust no one and, sadly, with good reason.
It all comes down to trust, which is impossible without communication, which is impossible without education—cross knowledge of history, literature, religion and culture. And these must precede any attempt to look to any “Rule of Law” for solutions. What law?
The law in the United States has its origins in the Huguenots who survived the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The law in Israel has its origins in its statehood less than a century ago and the more than 3000-year history of the Jewish people. The law in Afghanistan has its origins in Islam, its tribes and the survival of invasions going back to and even before Genghis Khan and in the United States going back to England and the arrival of slaves on our shores in 1619. And India and China and Haiti and Sudan. What law?
It is not any “Rule of Law,” national or international, that will matter, for it can be no better than the trust had in it. All that really will matter is the trust we have in, based on our knowledge of, each other. How do we come to have that trust?
This is no mean task and it cannot be done without leadership at all levels of our public and private institutions. Immigration and educational admission policies across the globe must encourage student exchanges, particularly from and to developing countries with few and poor educational opportunities. Those countries cannot be expected to develop leaders able to confront the complexities of the modern world, curb the excesses that produce violence and create cultures of peace in illiterate and under-educated populations. We must learn the native languages of the people whose trust we need. Foreign officers, including military personnel, need to spend more time in their countries of assignment and increase their exposures to indigenous languages and populations, particularly in rural areas. Our food, water and security assistance to needy populations must be timely and independent of donor self-interest.
What must be done internationally must be done domestically. Each of us needs to learn from and better understand those among us who are different, particularly populations marginalized by their skin color, national origin, religious conviction, ethnicity or sexual orientation. The human dignity of all over whom control is exercised must be honored.
Our secular leaders must do these things with a focus on peace and as much honesty as the harsh demands of governing permit. We citizens must make them possible by our support. Our religious leaders must search for common themes of peace in their beliefs and never deceive their followers. There can be no culture of peace with leadership dishonesty and unrelenting excesses of cultural and religious myopia and isolation.
Finally, we must have hope that we can create a culture of peace in the face of violence if we are to have it. I mean the kind of hope of which Vaclav Havel spoke when he said:
Hope is a state of mind, not of the world . . .
Either we have hope or we don’t; it is a
dimension of the soul, and it’s not essentially
dependent on some particular observation of the
world or estimate of the situation.
Hope is not prognostication. It is an
orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the
heart; it transcends the world that is
immediately experienced, and is anchored
somewhere beyond its horizons . . .
Hope is definitely not the same thing as
optimism. It is not the conviction that
something will turn out well, but the certainty
that something makes sense, regardless of how it
turns out.
The English poet, Ralph Hodgson, observed: “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” The elements of the cultures of the world which replicate the peace of the well-fed child in the secure embrace of a nourished and hopeful mother’s love are among us. It is only for lack of imagination, focus, courage and leadership they have not yet been seen and imbedded in the fabric of the global conscience from which a culture of peace in the face of violence can emerge.