We recognize the us/them buttons that politicians push, and their manipulation of our natural impulse to defend ourselves when threatened. When Shakespeare wrote the phrase, “let loose the dogs of war,” he knew that war releases instincts that can become uncontrollable, and that feed on themselves. A pack of violent dogs is a self-reinforcing mechanism. Humans can rationalize and compartmentalize, and so appear to themselves rational even when they aren’t. Humans also can escalate violence beyond anything a pack of vicious dogs can accomplish, and justify it with the logic of attack and counterattack, with defense soon becoming pay-back and vengeance. War fever is not even assuaged by victory, for there are always new groups to be defined as enemies, and to conquer.

But war itself does not necessarily start the brutalization process that can result in war, or determines how that war is conducted. During the brutality of the Vietnam war, an immense dialogue took place on the meaning of war as well as that particular war. It found in history a long list of voices crying out against the futility of war, the needless brutality and its ineffectiveness in solving problems. It demanded that war be evaluated not just with numbers and geopolitical theories, but by suffering, especially of the innocent, and the brutalizing effect on those who inflicted this suffering as well as its victims. As the soldiers in World War I learned, they are often the same people.

This dialogue was central but also other dialogues were part of it. The Civil Rights movement sensitized us to the racial and ethnic component of the us/them equation, to the fear of difference, of the alien. Prejudices of the past were recalled, and the images of those Other racial groups that by then were obviously false. The examination of socially supported gender roles and their implication in violence and oppression began even before the feminist movement, and men reevaluated what it meant to be a man. Many started on a journey then to revive and refine techniques for solving problems without violence, and to develop new ones.

Today there are thousands of Americans involved in developing, learning and using what I call the Skills of Peace. I divide these interrelated skills into outer (learning about cultures and histories), inner (learning about ourselves, our responses and motivations, as well as cultivating attitudes and learning skills to clarify our relationship to the world) and interface (methods of communication, negotiation; skills of mediation and conflict management and resolution.)

The skills of peace are applicable in our families, schools and neighborhoods, in our political and on-line associations, as well as in international war and peace. They give the lie to the cliché that although “we all want peace” it is unattainable, or we don’t have any idea of how to achieve it.

Our society and our culture spends billions on the skills of war and conflict. We pay little official attention to the skills of peace. We even send soldiers into “peace-keeping” situations with little or no training in how to keep the peace, other than waving weapons, storming homes and conducting interrogations. We do essentially nothing to counter the brutalizing effects on society, or the psychological traumas suffered by the children we turn into killers, and the resulting impact on their families and society. But then, we’ve been notoriously lax in even tending to their physical injuries.

We spend a disproportionate amount of money and time on the skills of war, and that disproportion is one of the causes of brutalization. The self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing, and naturally escalating violence unleashed by war is another. But brutalization can also begin in political choices.