The Possibility of Ending War
I was watching a CNN show about the future as I exercised at the gym on the eliptical machine. The show featured several commentators talking about what the future will look like, the promises it holds for longer life for human beings, great advances in health and healing, the end of hunger, extraordinary leaps in technology. The only guest I recognized was Ray Kurzweil. I have read his new book, The Singularity is Near. When the moderator asked the question, "Will human beings still have war in the future?" I paid attention. I wanted to see if perhaps Kurzweil had evolved from his negative position on the future of warfare that he takes in the book. As I had thought, Kurzweil stuck to the same position that he takes in his book, and asserted that despite all the utopian and miraculous dreams of healing coming true in the future (the blind shall see, the crippled shall walk!), you guessed it folks, we will still have wars. But wait! In the future our wars are going to be conducted by robots and cyborgs and by all kinds of smart weaponry and our guys (the good guys) will have to hardly shed any blood at all! What was amazing to me was that the other guests on the show accepted Kurzweil's position as the guru of the future unblinkingly and didn't question this assumption. No one on the program called him on it! There was an unspoken assumption that the people who would be dumb enough to make war would be inferior to us technologically and of course, we would win because our weapons would be far superior to theirs. There is something very crazy going on here and I want to take this apart and look at it.
I came away from the program shaking my head in bafflement and amazement. Amazed at the degree of cynicism and resignation among human beings about armed warfare and the utter impossibility of ever giving it up. What's up with that? All anyone with half a brain has to do is look at the body count from armed conflicts in the twentieth century alone, to know that war is not a good thing for human beings on this planet. But that's the simple and facile answer. I'm not going there. I'm interested in inquiring into the much more difficult and complex question of why we human beings hold onto a behavior that causes us so much pain, grief, suffering and loss. But we can't help it! We're just born that way! Human beings are just naturally violent! That's the way we are and we have to accept it. Oh give me a break. The people who used to kill each other and eat each other for breakfast said the same thing and they don't do it anymore. We used to keep slaves too and we told ourselves that was natural and normal and we finally woke up and saw there was nothing natural about it. We have evolved as a species. We have decided to give up those forms of behaviors because they no longer serve us. Neither does war.
There is nothing obligatory about violence. Humans don't have to solve problems by hurting each other. That is just plain crazy. I've been working in the field of mental health and conflict resolution for the past twenty five years or so and I can tell you that it's just a story that people have made up to justify and excuse their behavior and keep it going. Just ask a couple of domestic violence perpetrators why they beat up on their wives and when they get honest with you they'll tell you: because they can and the law doesn't stop them. When people want to stop their violence and choose to stop it, they do. That's the wonder of having a will and intention. That kind of acting without thinking may have made sense in the earliest days of humankind when isolated communities were literally fighting for their survival from armed marauders. We're not there anymore. At this point in our evolution, our violence to each other is more a threat to our continued existence on this planet than anything else and if we want to survive here we have to get a handle on it. If we don't deal with it soon, we're not even going to be around to deal with global warming because this planet will be gone, gone, gone.
Human beings have a brain and we understand today how that brain works. We know how the mid-brain works and sets off cascades of emotion and we know how these cascades of emotion are triggered by thoughts that are usually triggered by stories and interpretations that we have about things that happened in our past. Someone says something that we don't like; they remind us of someone from our past and wham! we've decked the guy or at least stored up a grudge or a resentment for the future. It's totally possible for human beings to learn the skills of how to live with the kind of brain we have, to cooperate as it were, with being in a body that has storms of emotion and makes meaning in a language making brain. We can learn how to calm ourselves down. We can learn how to take the meaning out of stories that we made up about people. We can learn how to forgive people and live peacefully in family and in community. We don't have to go to war. I recently heard a story about a tribe in Africa (I don't know the tribe or the location, perhaps it's apocryphal), where anytime someone does something wrong in the tribe everthing stops and a ceremony is held. During this ceremony everyone tells the wrongdoer everything good he or she has ever done in their life. The ceremony continues for days and days until every one runs out of memories. Needless to say, they don't have many wrongdoers and they don't have these ceremonies very often. I don't know if this story is literally true or if is something that used to happen in the past. It's hard to imagine such a thing still happening in an Africa beset by globalization, poverty and AIDS. However, whether it is or isn't true, it presents an extraordinary model for what could be true, for a way of life that we could invent for being together based on making each other right rather than making each other wrong, based on inclusion, rather than on exclusion.
I used to volunteer in a maximum security prison with men who had committed murder and I have known men who have utterly transformed themselves into some of the most peaceful beings you will ever want to know, men who go to sleep at night with the picture of their victims by their bed. We can end intractable conflicts with people we thought we hated. It's entirely possible. We could stop violence on this planet if we chose to, if we got that it was in our self-interest to stop it. But we have not chosen to do that because our thinking about it is too confused and conflicted and we have never gotten completely straight about the price and the cost we are paying to keep it going. We would also have to get real and completely honest about how much we love war (come on, tell the truth now---it's glorious, isn't it?). I think the reason that human beings have never had a straight conversation about ending armed warfare on this planet is that we are terrified of what we might find if we honestly looked into it and told the truth about it. Underneath it all is, in the end, such a deep well of despair, that people just don't want to tap into it. To have such a conversation would tear us apart, bring up enormous pain, cause us to question how we spend huge, vast sums of money in our national budget and armaments industries, and tear people apart, having them question sacrifices that they or their loved ones have made. It might evoke or bring up deep and dark fears. It's a conversation we don't want to have. It's too terrifying. It's a conversation we ought to have.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. What's positive and wonderful about war? How do we fall in love with it and get hooked into going to war time and time again, even if we've sworn "never again"?
2. What's the personal cost you have paid in being present in or to violent conflict in your lifetime or from hearing about it from people you know or watching it on television/movies/etc?
3. What's the cost in grief, loss, anguish, injury and thirst for revenge among other people who have been violated or victims of violent conflict? How does the circle of violence repeat itself over and over and over again?
4. What is the financial cost of war? Why are we willing to support the miliatry/armaments/gun and weapons industries not just in the US but all over the world? What if all that money went to building things rather than tearing them down?
I came away from the program shaking my head in bafflement and amazement. Amazed at the degree of cynicism and resignation among human beings about armed warfare and the utter impossibility of ever giving it up. What's up with that? All anyone with half a brain has to do is look at the body count from armed conflicts in the twentieth century alone, to know that war is not a good thing for human beings on this planet. But that's the simple and facile answer. I'm not going there. I'm interested in inquiring into the much more difficult and complex question of why we human beings hold onto a behavior that causes us so much pain, grief, suffering and loss. But we can't help it! We're just born that way! Human beings are just naturally violent! That's the way we are and we have to accept it. Oh give me a break. The people who used to kill each other and eat each other for breakfast said the same thing and they don't do it anymore. We used to keep slaves too and we told ourselves that was natural and normal and we finally woke up and saw there was nothing natural about it. We have evolved as a species. We have decided to give up those forms of behaviors because they no longer serve us. Neither does war.
There is nothing obligatory about violence. Humans don't have to solve problems by hurting each other. That is just plain crazy. I've been working in the field of mental health and conflict resolution for the past twenty five years or so and I can tell you that it's just a story that people have made up to justify and excuse their behavior and keep it going. Just ask a couple of domestic violence perpetrators why they beat up on their wives and when they get honest with you they'll tell you: because they can and the law doesn't stop them. When people want to stop their violence and choose to stop it, they do. That's the wonder of having a will and intention. That kind of acting without thinking may have made sense in the earliest days of humankind when isolated communities were literally fighting for their survival from armed marauders. We're not there anymore. At this point in our evolution, our violence to each other is more a threat to our continued existence on this planet than anything else and if we want to survive here we have to get a handle on it. If we don't deal with it soon, we're not even going to be around to deal with global warming because this planet will be gone, gone, gone.
Human beings have a brain and we understand today how that brain works. We know how the mid-brain works and sets off cascades of emotion and we know how these cascades of emotion are triggered by thoughts that are usually triggered by stories and interpretations that we have about things that happened in our past. Someone says something that we don't like; they remind us of someone from our past and wham! we've decked the guy or at least stored up a grudge or a resentment for the future. It's totally possible for human beings to learn the skills of how to live with the kind of brain we have, to cooperate as it were, with being in a body that has storms of emotion and makes meaning in a language making brain. We can learn how to calm ourselves down. We can learn how to take the meaning out of stories that we made up about people. We can learn how to forgive people and live peacefully in family and in community. We don't have to go to war. I recently heard a story about a tribe in Africa (I don't know the tribe or the location, perhaps it's apocryphal), where anytime someone does something wrong in the tribe everthing stops and a ceremony is held. During this ceremony everyone tells the wrongdoer everything good he or she has ever done in their life. The ceremony continues for days and days until every one runs out of memories. Needless to say, they don't have many wrongdoers and they don't have these ceremonies very often. I don't know if this story is literally true or if is something that used to happen in the past. It's hard to imagine such a thing still happening in an Africa beset by globalization, poverty and AIDS. However, whether it is or isn't true, it presents an extraordinary model for what could be true, for a way of life that we could invent for being together based on making each other right rather than making each other wrong, based on inclusion, rather than on exclusion.
I used to volunteer in a maximum security prison with men who had committed murder and I have known men who have utterly transformed themselves into some of the most peaceful beings you will ever want to know, men who go to sleep at night with the picture of their victims by their bed. We can end intractable conflicts with people we thought we hated. It's entirely possible. We could stop violence on this planet if we chose to, if we got that it was in our self-interest to stop it. But we have not chosen to do that because our thinking about it is too confused and conflicted and we have never gotten completely straight about the price and the cost we are paying to keep it going. We would also have to get real and completely honest about how much we love war (come on, tell the truth now---it's glorious, isn't it?). I think the reason that human beings have never had a straight conversation about ending armed warfare on this planet is that we are terrified of what we might find if we honestly looked into it and told the truth about it. Underneath it all is, in the end, such a deep well of despair, that people just don't want to tap into it. To have such a conversation would tear us apart, bring up enormous pain, cause us to question how we spend huge, vast sums of money in our national budget and armaments industries, and tear people apart, having them question sacrifices that they or their loved ones have made. It might evoke or bring up deep and dark fears. It's a conversation we don't want to have. It's too terrifying. It's a conversation we ought to have.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. What's positive and wonderful about war? How do we fall in love with it and get hooked into going to war time and time again, even if we've sworn "never again"?
2. What's the personal cost you have paid in being present in or to violent conflict in your lifetime or from hearing about it from people you know or watching it on television/movies/etc?
3. What's the cost in grief, loss, anguish, injury and thirst for revenge among other people who have been violated or victims of violent conflict? How does the circle of violence repeat itself over and over and over again?
4. What is the financial cost of war? Why are we willing to support the miliatry/armaments/gun and weapons industries not just in the US but all over the world? What if all that money went to building things rather than tearing them down?
posted by Joy at 4:00 PM
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