|
The Peace Report, Issue #4
By Louise Diamond, Ph.D.
Welcome to The Peace Report, an occasional set of reflections on world and national affairs in these times of change and challenge, as seen through a peace lens.
Peace: Big, Bold, and Strategic
Some years ago I realized that we could work to stop one war, but shortly there would be another and another. I turned my attention to changing the underlying mentality and behavioral norms that allow violence in all its many forms to flourish so pervasively in our society. This requires a massive social change process in this country toward a culture of peace. To accomplish this, we must think big, act boldly, and be highly strategic in our methods.
Thus, when I was given the chance to create a 2-day conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico for May 16-17, 2007, I knew immediately that we could use that opportunity to convene a global inquiry on the question: What would it take to transform the current culture of violence in our society to a true culture of peace?
Now that Building a Culture of Peace Conference is ready for registration, and I am inviting you all to come participate in this big, bold, and very strategic event. Five hundred peace leaders from New Mexico and around the nation and the world will gather. Arun Gandhi, Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchu Tum and Jody Williams, and
H.H. the Dalai Lama (by video) will be our plenary speakers.
Inspired by them, we will spend the rest of our time together in Five Peace Councils:
- Our Youth, Our Promise
- Demilitarization and a Peace Economy
- Knowing the Other as Ourselves
- The Living Spirit of Peace
- The Politics of Peace
Using an Open Space technology that allows for all participants to consider the issues they are passionate about, each Council will spend two days exploring the leading edge questions related to their Council and our overall topic. They will be encouraged to identify best practices, share information and resources, generate new ideas, build alliances and partnerships, and commit to strategic action steps.
The output from the conference – the plenary talks, data from the Councils, interviews, videos, action plans, etc. – will be collected and made globally available online, as a next step toward a larger process of further galvanizing the culture of peace movement.
Please go to www.santafepeace.org to learn more about the conference and to register (and register early, as places are limited). And please pass this email along to all your friends and colleagues, so that friends of peace everywhere will know about this rich and rare opportunity.
What is a Culture of Peace?
By Louise Diamond, Ph.D.
We live in a world where violence is not only rampant; it is normative. War as a staple of foreign policy; violence against women; the often-invisible violence of poverty, racism, and all forms of discrimination; political and religious polarization with demonization of ‘the other;’ a dehumanizing penal system; the degradation of the environment; and the glorification of violence in our media and popular culture are taken for granted as just the way things are. It doesn’t have to be like this. We can do better. We must do better.
We stand at a critical choice point in human evolution. World events are rapidly spinning us into a zone of grave danger for the whole human family. We see clearly that the old ways do not work, and could lead to global destruction. Do we continue down the war path, or do we craft another way to be together on this one planet we all call home? Around the world, many are choosing the peace path, and working at the very foundations of society to change basic assumptions, norms, and behaviors, and to build new institutions, methodologies, and alliances– in short, to build a culture of peace.
The United Nations declared the years 2001-2010 as the UN Decade of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World. As we near the end of this decade, we have the opportunity to accelerate our efforts on behalf of this mission. Certainly world events are escalating the need for this. But first we must know, ‘What is a culture of peace? What are we trying to establish?’
A working definition of peace with help with this quest. I have adapted the following from what I wrote in The Peace Book: 108 Ways to Create a More Peaceful World, (The Peace Company; pp. xvi-xvii) some years ago:
Peace is more than the absence of war, violence, or conflict, though that is an important first step. Peace is a presence--the presence of connection.
Inner peace is about connection with our true and natural self, and a sense of being part of something larger. This connection gives rise to serenity, balance, and a feeling of well-being. We connect to the living spirit of life itself that allows us to know all people as our brothers and sisters, and every living being – including the earth – a relative.
Peace with others is about our connection with the open heart, through which we remember our shared humanness. This brings us to the practice of conflict resolution, forgiveness, and reconciliation. We connect to the power of love that transcends fear, anger, sorrow, and aggression, and leads us to compassion and a desire to end the suffering of all.
Peace in our communities and in the world requires a connection to respect for our multiple differences, and for the right of all people to justice, freedom, and dignity. This leads to trust, community, and co-existence. We understand we are all in this together, that all people have the same basic needs and desires, and so we act for the common good rather than for the benefit of a few.
Peace is a state of mind and a path of action. It is a concept, a goal, an experience, a path. Peace is an ideal. It is both intangible and concrete; complex and simple; exciting and calming. Peace is personal and political; it is spiritual and practical; local and global. It is a process and an outcome, and, above all, a way of being.
Ultimately peace is about the quality of our relationships--with ourselves and with others. How can we live together, in the smallest individual and family unit and in the largest network of peoples and nations, in ways that honor who we are as dignified human beings?
A culture of peace results when we order our individual and collective lives at the political, institutional, and social/individual levels on these principles and understandings. For when we do that, war, poverty, oppression, injustice, and the degradation of the environment become aberrant rather than normative. The time has come to both inquire deeply into and strategize boldly about how to make this so. We are looking for no less than a movement for a massive shift in our society, to see a culture of peace embedded in the fabric of our lives. This is the evolutionary challenge and opportunity of our times.
The Five Peace Councils
The Building a Culture of Peace Conference is organized into five Peace Councils, each holding leading-edge questions about areas critical to the growth of a peace culture in our society. These five are by no means the only ones we could choose to address; however, they are a good starting place. If you are able to attend this conference, you will have the chance to explore these issues in-depth.
Even if you are not able to attend the conference in person, perhaps simply reading about these issues will spark your interest and your action. Please feel free to email me with comments, thoughts, and successful approaches in these five areas, and in that way participate virtually in the larger inquiry. diamond@LouiseDiamond.com
- Our Youth, Our Promise
The culture of violence in our society is so deeply rooted that it will take time to change. Our first job is to insure our children are not socialized into that culture, but are raised with a peace consciousness and all the life skills that support it. In this way, the culture shift we are aiming for happens in part through a turnover of generations.
To that end we need to be inquiring deeply into the question, What would it take to raise a new generation of youth who are conscious and committed peacebuilders? To explore that, we also need to ask such things as: How do we create a new, peace-oriented, story for living in the world, and share that with our youth in ways that capture their attention and imagination? How to we awaken them to the interdependence with each other and the natural world that is at the heart of peace consciousness, and give them the tools to live peacefully and sustainably? How do we establish our schools and our families as communities for learning and living a culture of peace?
We know about change that we must always start with where we are. The youth of today, unfortunately, are already swimming in a popular culture where violence permeates their social environment. Although the youngest of our children are exposed early to the gentle ways of Barney and Sesame Street, by the time they reach upper elementary grades violent video games, music, movies, and television shows are part of their daily fare. (One study showed that by the time the average American child reaches 18, he or she will have watched 200,000 acts of violence on television, not counting news shows, 75% of which go unpunished.) They may also, by then, be exposed to bullying, mean cliques, gangs, drugs, alcohol, school or street violence, and internet pornography. If they are poor, or if they are people of color, they may also experience the violence of poverty and/or discrimination. And if they should happen to pay attention to the news, crime and war dominate the scene. What are they to think of their world, given the constant presence of violence in and around their lives?
Our first imperative, then, is not only to start out our children with the assumptions, values, and skills of peace, but to also help them as they grow older to deal effectively with the violence in the world around them. This means a re-education of parents, teachers, and other adults in their lives, for children learn most from watching the grown-ups around them, and these too are caught in the current culture of violence.
So our inquiry into building a culture of peace in the area of Our Youth, Our Promise will take us deeply into the worlds of parenting, schools, popular youth culture, and the way our children make sense of the world around them. It will require us to listen empathically to the voices of young people, and engage them in leading the process for social change. It will require that we consciously co-create with our youth leaders a new set of educational tools, behavioral skills, values and norms – indeed a whole new popular culture – that will define a path of peace that our children are so excited to follow that a critical mass shift can occur in our youth culture. For the hope of a world at peace in the future, this is job one.
- Demilitarization and a Peace Economy
The culture of violence in our society is most graphically expressed through the militarization that permeates our lives. The military-industrial-political complex completely dominates our economy, our national discourse and priorities, and our place in the world. Our defense spending equals more than that of all the other countries in the world combined. War is seen as a natural and inevitable instrument of foreign policy, while dialogue with our ‘enemies’ (i.e., the way of peace) is considered weak. Force, aggression, competition, the imposition of our values on others, and the assumption of our superiority, are accepted as appropriate, even desired, ways to behave, among ourselves and with other nations.
In addition, the glorification of violence through the manufacture of war-related toys; of violent video games, music, movies, and television shows insures that our citizens, and especially our youth, experience violence as entertainment. Our massive and punitive prison system and adherence to the death penalty, and a media that considers crime front-page news and top-notch subjects for hit television series, insures that we are kept in a state of fear and loathing of (and also fascination with) the ‘criminals’ among us.
The implicit assumptions underlying these violence industries are so deeply rooted in our national consciousness that we don’t even realize how militarized our minds and daily lives have become. When we seek to build a culture of peace, then, we must first confront this massive accumulation of energy (money, images, products, values) supporting and supported by violence that permeates our lives so profoundly and insidiously that most of us simply take for granted that ‘that’s just how things are.’
Buckminster Fuller famously said, "You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Therefore we must consider how we can build an alternative peace economy, supported by a demilitarized mindset, that can gradually shift us into a new way of being and of structuring our society. While this may feel daunting, given the size and power of the war machine, we do have some models of success. In just 30-40 years, for instance, the whole subject of environmental sustainability has gone from a fringe movement to a mainstream topic that not only engages our political discourse globally but is supported by a growing economic sector of goods and services, technologies and infrastructure.
So our inquiry into building a culture of peace in the area of Demilitarization and a Peace Economy will lead us to explore how we can create a peace economy. To this end we must ask, What would it take to transform our lives so that we are supporting and supported by peace rather than war and violence? What are the elements of a peace economy? How can we insure that peace work is financially viable for those who undertake it? What products, services, technologies, jobs and institutions can we create that serve peace and are economically valuable? How can we withdraw energy from the production and proliferation of weapons and from violence as entertainment, and channel or convert that energy for peace? And how can we demilitarize our hearts and minds so that this becomes a priority? How can we transform our understanding of and approach to poverty so that meeting the needs of all people becomes the foundation of a peace economy? These questions take us to the very edge of our human experience, and spur us on to create a whole new way of being together in this world.
- Knowing the Other as Ourselves
The culture of violence in our society is graphically demonstrated in the polarization that permeates our political discourse, the adversarial nature of our interactions, and the antagonism that infuses our inter-group relations. We separate ourselves into factions based on a variety of categories, and see our own group as better-than, more worthy than, the ‘other.’ In its extreme, this syndrome posits the ‘other’ as the evil enemy or as not truly human.
Once in this separation mindset, we dehumanize the ‘other.’ We exist in a world of ‘them and us,’ ‘right versus wrong,’ ‘either for us or against us.’ Once we see each other as separate, we assume our differences mean that one is entitled to dominate the other. We then exist in a world where force and ‘power over’ become acceptable modes of operating, with oppression, the suppression of human rights, and ultimately war or genocide not far behind.
Our nation is foundationally wounded by the ways this mindset played out historically. The European conquest of the Native peoples of this land, the institution of slavery, and the cycles of hatred and discrimination toward various immigrant groups have left scars and chasms that linger in today’s society and cry out for healing. At home, our red/blue, left/right/ conservative/liberal political conversation is increasingly contentious, and occasionally violent. On a global scale, similar splits are triggers for political, ethnic and religious unrest, clashes, and sometimes wars or terrorist actions.
Our task then, in exploring a culture of peace, becomes one of asking, How can we move from a separation mindset to one of interdependence and unity? How can we heal the existing historical wounds? Reach across the beliefs and experiences that divide us to find common ground? Re-humanize the ‘other’ so we can recognize and build on our shared humanity? Realizing that what hurts one hurts all, how can we develop appreciation for those who are different, compassion for their suffering, and skillful means of apology and forgiveness to bring reconciliation? How can we displace the negative images and prejudices we carry about the ‘other,’ and learn to truly celebrate our diversity? How can we learn to use the power of co-creativity (power with, power for, and power to rather than power over) to assure the basic needs of all are satisfied?
So our inquiry into a culture of peace by Knowing the Other as Ourselves takes us into the territory of inter-personal and inter-group relations. We must explore the methods of dialogue and the process of reconciliation. We must examine how we can develop compassion, appreciation, and empathy so that we see and feel and care about the experience of others. And we must consider how to break the cycle of violence and revenge, to create allies and partners out of enemies and seek joint solutions to shared problems. And, of course, we must explore how we can inculcate these skills and values in our youth, so this new way of relating becomes normative.
Ultimately, this journey takes us into the realm of relationship, and the love, respect, appreciation, and caring that lie at the heart of healthy relating. For relationship is the natural expression of our unity and interdependence, and our oneness is the central principle of peace, upon which all else is built.
- The Living Spirit of Peace
In the culture of violence that permeates our society, violence is seen as normative, and peace or nonviolence as at worst an aberration, at best, the idealistic dream of a few. People are seen as hotwired for violence and competition. Yet people are hotwired for peace as well – it is embedded in our spiritual DNA, waiting to be enlivened by our choice. If that were not so, all of our major religions would not hold peace as one of the highest spiritual ideals for humanity.
“Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me’ could well be the theme song for a culture of peace movement. Our task is to recognize that peace does begin within each and every one of us, and radiates out, both as an energy wave and through our words and actions. We realize that the responsibility for peace on earth starts with self, not with the ‘bad guys’ out there. Yoga, meditation, and other practices teach us how to find that place of inner peace deep within, and how to move in the world from that center and with that vibration.
We have many inspirational figures who have shown us the living spirit of peace in action – Mother Theresa, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela, to name a few. They have tapped into that spiritual wellspring to work nonviolently, with love and compassion, for the larger good, and we honor them because we recognize that potential in ourselves and all humanity.
The living spirit of peace also resides in the earth herself. The Gaia principle, that the earth is a living being; that there is only one web of life on this planet and indeed in the universe, is a critical foundation for a culture of peace, for by recognizing our inter-connectedness we understand that what hurts one, hurts all. Indigenous peoples understand this, and those of us who have come far from our indigenous roots need to remember this core truth. Our scientists are also coming to this realization, with perhaps a different languaging of it, but with the same realization that we share one energy field, and so every thought and action resonates through that field to impact all others.
So our inquiry into The Living Spirit of Peace brings us to ask, How can we awaken the seed of peace that lies within us all, and translate it into action that serves the whole family of life? This exploration will take us to regions of the spirit, so we can find that place of harmony, serenity, and clarity within. It will activate our commitments to work with our own inner battles, so we can radiate peace from the inside out. It will carry us into the indigenous world of respect for Mother Earth and all our relations, which has great implications for our relationship to the environment, nature, and all that earth provides – what we call our natural resources. It asks us to re-examine our faith traditions, to study and practice their peace teachings. It explores nonviolence and compassion as methods of social change as well as patterns for living. And it invites us to consider who and what most inspires us to peace, and how we can become more like our role models, and translate that inspiration and aspiration into peace-full action to serve the whole of life.
- The Politics of Peace
The culture of violence in our society is most graphically visible on the screen of our political life. Indeed, our two-party political system has become the epitome of an adversarial model of ‘us against them.’ We have a Defense Department with a budget of trillions, four military academies, and several other war-related institutions. We have a State Department, charged with insuring peace, whose senior members are not even necessarily trained in negotiation skills. Currently we have a national leader who prides himself on being a self-designated ‘War President.’ And indeed, our political ideologies have taken us into many wars of invasion and dominion over the years, and have led us to arm and support warring factions in several others.
Globally, we have institutions for peace such as the United Nations and its various agencies and programs, including a new Human Rights Commission; the International Criminal Court; various Truth and Reconciliation projects, and others. Yet these too are easily politicized by those with power and powerful ideologies they seek to impose or secure.
Meanwhile, our civil liberties at home are threatened in the name of war and security. Regimes around the world routinely oppress their citizens and commit atrocious acts of human rights abuse; the sex trade flourishes; the gap between rich and poor widens; women are treated as property or worse; and injustices of all sorts flourish.
As long as the assumption about power that has fueled these ills, as well as centuries of imperialism, colonialism, racism and gender discrimination (i.e., that one group has the right to impose its will on and dominate another), that assumption will translate into the halls of governance and politics, where it is enacted in its various forms. The critical question for this part of the inquiry, then, is How do we shift our understanding of power, from domination (power over) to partnership, equality, and co-creation (power with, to, and for)?
So our inquiry into a culture of peace by way of The Politics of Peace will take us into a consideration of power – what it is, really; how we use and abuse it. It will require us to delve into the workings of our national and global institutions, to see how we can improve them and build new systems to support a peace perspective. It will encourage us to look carefully at the grassroots activist response to issues of war and peace, justice and oppression, violence and nonviolence. It will take us into an exploration of our political systems, and how they can be influenced toward a culture of peace.
This inquiry is deeply challenging, as it takes us into that place in humanity where the worst in human nature dwells. It asks us to confront a seemingly unassailable, monolithic worldview that does great harm to both those who impose suffering on others and those on whom suffering is imposed. And it asks us to be infinitely creative in building revolutionary partnerships, new institutions, and new avenues of influence to insure that a culture of peace becomes the driving force and underlying basis for our political life.
A Systems Surge for Peace
Our war president is calling for a military surge in Iraq, as if more troops, more fighting, will pacify the inflamed passions set loose by our invasion there. I believe our calling in this time is to create a different kind of surge, a surge for peace. To do this, we must join our energies toward a common goal. First we need see ourselves as a whole system.
In planning the Building a Culture of Peace conference, I have had the opportunity to speak with many wonderful peacebuilders doing all kinds of excellent work to make a more peaceful world. Recently, I spoke with one such gentleman with an especially fine global program, who kept using the term ‘the peace movement’ when referring primarily to the activist community, as if that were the sector holding the primary (and only significant) approach to peace.
I found myself wanting to pry open that definition to the broader, holistic perspective that I first articulated nearly 20 years ago, in the book that I wrote (with Ambassador John McDonald, my mentor, friend, partner, and co-founder at The Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy) called Multi-Track Diplomacy: A Systems Approach to Peace.
As a systems thinker, I am always considering the larger whole within which we operate. In that early book we identified nine ‘tracks’ or areas where people are, and must be, working toward a peaceful world: Government, Conflict Resolution; Business, Grassroots/Non-Profits, Education, Activism, Religion/Spirituality, Philanthropy, and Media and the Arts. Now, so much later, I still find those arenas to be a good description of that larger whole, though surely there are many others as well. What interests me still is wondering, What would happen if all of us in these various sectors would actually see ourselves as a coherent system, operating together, to promote peace, justice, and the well-being of all the family of life.
What power might we unleash if we could work more together? If we could stop seeing those in fields other than our own as somehow ‘different’ or ‘the other.’ If we could make revolutionary partnerships between, say, businesses and anti-racism work, or faith congregations and positive media? If we could harness the passion and commitment of the anti-war activists for building consensus for what we are for, not only what we are against. If we could see the global aid workers as operating for the same goal as the environmentalist?
What change we might foster in our society if we could understand that the teacher developing an anti-bullying program in her 6th grade classroom and the conflict resolution specialist training dialogue leaders in Israel and Palestine are partners; that a UN Peacekeeping force and the local community effort for a living wage are in this together; that the meditator seeking inner peace and the mediator building a bridge between two opposing (and perhaps warring) factions are in the same game; that an activist organizing a rally against the Iraq war and an artist creating a peace sculptor are working for the same ultimate aim?
One definition of a system is of various component parts that are both a whole in themselves and simultaneously part of a larger whole, acting toward a common goal. It seems to me the thread that weaves through all the parts of the peace system is our shared vision: to create that better world, where violence, oppression, poverty, discrimination, hatred, war, corruption, and injustice become things of the past, and where peace, and harmony flourish and the basic needs of all are satisfied. When we concentrate only on the whole that we are in ourselves, and forget that we are part of the larger whole, we short-circuit the profound potential that we have together for making a difference.
No one ‘owns’ the right way to peace; each of us has an essential note to sound in the larger symphony. So whether we call ourselves a peace movement, a pro-peace movement, a culture of peace movement, a peace community, or a peace path, let us recognize that we need each other to succeed in our noble mission, and let’s both give each other grace as we play our unique part in the system and at the same time consider how we might pool our resources for our collective success.
This Building a Culture of Peace conference, in bringing together elements of this larger peace system, has the opportunity to create the peace surge we need in these times. When we put our hearts and minds together, who knows what creative possibilities might emerge?
Hummingbird Recommends…
Pema Chodron’s book, Practicing Peace in Times of War (Shambhala, 2006), lays out her premise in the very first sentence: “War and peace start in the hearts of individuals.” She goes on to talk about how, when we harden our hearts, through fear or hatred, pain or anger, we contribute to the escalation of conflict that can result in violence and aggression. She then gives the antidotes: patience and fearlessness; non-reactivity and releasing attachment; staying present with our pain and insecurity to awaken the heart of compassion; and the relationship of our inner work to global affairs. She doesn’t stop with naming these steps, though – she even shows us how to accomplish them. And all of this in a small, short, and eminently readable book.
In a time when world affairs are increasingly threatening, and people of conscience and caring are seeking ways to make a difference, this elegantly simple book provides as clear a path as any I’ve seen for how we can keep our sanity and walk the peace path for the benefit of ourselves and others.
There are some who feel that giving our energy to the inner work of peace is a cop-out when so many dangers and injustices assail us in the world. For them, the only important thing is to address what’s happening ‘out there.’ For Pema Chodron, and for me, the ‘out there’ begins in the individual and ultimately the collective ‘in here.’ I believe that both are important simultaneously. My own experience in war zones has taught me that the inner work makes the outer work that much more effective, and conversely, changes to what’s happening in the world will not become sustainable until on a large scale we change our mindset, learn to work differently with our emotions, and understand the relationship of our every thought, word, and deed to the events around us.
For those of you not familiar with Pema Chodron’s writings and teachings, I strongly recommend this and all of her books. She has a way of taking very complex notions from Tibetan Buddhist philosophy and practice, and putting them into simple, everyday language applicable to anyone, regardless of their spiritual path. In a world sick with the delusions of war and violence, this book is like the doctor who not only prescribes the medicine, but also lays a cooling hand on our fevered brow to calm and reassure us that the path to wellness is close at hand.
Interesting Peace Websites
I love it when the things that concern those of us who love peace become mainstream. One of the issues I think is critical to changing this nation’s war path is when the American people can relate directly to the experience of the victims of war – including especially the children, the non-combatant civilians, and the soldiers. As long as the war in Iraq remains a political debate, we can keep it at a distance from ourselves. But when we understand the human impact, we have a different reaction.
My hat off this month to Newsweek magazine, for carrying some stories that bring home to our society some of the human consequences of what’s happening in Iraq. I suggest you access the following:
www.xtra.newsweek.com. Scroll down the left-hand column and click on War in Iraq. There you will find many useful articles. I especially recommend:
- ‘Black Hawk Down: The True Cost of the Iraq War;’ which details the impact of one US helicopter crash in Iraq on the soldiers and their families;
- ‘The Next Jihadists; Iraq’s Lost Children,’ which tells the story of how the young people in Iraq are being caught up in the fighting (and when you finish that, you can ‘google’ child soldiers and learn more about the abomination of getting children to fight in our wars;
- Anything by Fareed Zakaria, an incredibly wise commentator.
I also encourage letters to the editor of Newsweek, congratulating them on bringing these critical issues to the attention of middle America.
www.veteransforamerica.org/Module1D244. Referenced in the above article on Iraq’s children, this site describes the work of a project called War Kids Relief. You might want to read other parts of this site as well, as it is all about what our veterans of the Iraq war are doing to make a difference.
www.santafepeace.org. If you haven’t already done so, please read this site and register for the Building a Culture of Peace conference. Your voice and your presence can make a difference. By the way, most conferences of this sort typically would cost well over $200. In the interest of making this available to all, we have set the registration fee at a modest $45. We are also offering full scholarships for those for whom this amount is a financial hardship. When you register, please consider checking the option to provide an additional $45 to the scholarship fund. In this way we look out for one another and make it possible for people from all walks of life to attend this special event. Thank you!
|
