Big Ideas

In one last late night look at a few news sites for a sense of what Friday morning's stories might be, I happened on a live TV feed from Stockholm, announcing the Nobel Peace Prize.  It went to an organization, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, known as ICAN.

By the time I checked my usual list of news sites on late Friday afternoon, there was no trace of the story on most of their front pages, including the NY Times and Washington Post, nor on the Google aggregator.  The Guardian, which had followed the announcement with a live blog for its UK and European readers, had its story buried deep in the front page weeds.  Even the BBC, which had room for butterflies and pandas, didn't front page it.

The only US site I saw that had a story was the New Yorker, with Robin Wright's report entitled The Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Anti-Bomb Idealists. Though the piece itself is informative, the tone of the headline and the opening sentence ("The dreamers won") seem dismissive.  It is after all an organization that works with nearly 500 other non-governmental groups in 101 countries, and scored a success with a UN treaty banning nuclear weapons, currently being ratified by the more than 120 nations that voted for it.  "Anti-Bomb Activists" might seem more appropriate and less condescending. But then again, ICAN's budget is a meager one million dollars a year.

If the sneer that seems implied is discounted, the active representation of this ideal is precisely why the group deserves the award.  They are advocating for an idea, a Big Idea, and it is with such big ideas that nearly every step forward in civilization has begun.

The ideas come first, and then stated in some major way, and a society embraces them.  In American history, it was the bold idea that we are all created equal, appearing in the Declaration of Independence as the primary rationale for a new and self-governing nation.

Once these ideas are so embraced, they become accepted standards that seem to have always existed.  They also make hypocrisy possible when people and nations don't live up to them and businesses find creative ways of circumventing them, which leads to outrage, condescension and cynicism, as well as activism and change.

That we are all equal under the law was not a given, not even an idea or an ideal, for much of western history alone.  Now we have arguments about whether lots of money makes you more equal than others even in court, but we wouldn't have that or any other argument unless the principle existed, and was enshrined in our highest laws.

Slavery was a legal and accepted business practice for much of American history. At one time, the idea that it is wrong was a new idea that was met with fierce opposition as well as condescension.  It was outlawed in England, and in the midst of a war in which it was the primary issue, the Emancipation Proclamation began the process of ending it in America.

A great deal has followed from that idea, based on human equality, and it has echoed through our age, from civil rights to the end of legal discrimination based on sexual orientation.  The idea has not been fully applied, obvious retrenchment is being attempted today, just as new forms of slavery have arisen and spread all over the world.  But slavery and racism and other forms of discrimination are no longer accepted as legitimate.  They are societially shameful.

In the 20th century a new idea painfully emerged: the world.  International treaties began to codify rights and relationships among nations not based on empire or any coercion.  An international organization formed and for the first time, lasted and grew to a global organization: the United Nations.  It promoted some awfully big ideas.

One was universal human rights, beyond the borders of any one nation. Together with others in England,  H.G. Wells, who made the case for world government throughout his long career, devoted the last years of his life to the cause of codifying such rights--which had never been done before--and insisting that the international body that would be formed at the end of World War II formally adopt them.

Others (among them, Eleanor Roosevelt) negotiated such a document, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was considered by the UN in 1946, its first year of existence, and formally adopted in 1948.  It is the basis for further codifications and declarations, and of UN policies and actions, such as those that the UN and member states took to end apartheid in South Africa, and in so doing, end that idea as a normal right of the state.

But as Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, noted in awarding the Peace Prize to ICAN on Friday morning, one of the UN's very first resolutions in 1946 was to establish a commission to deal with the problems of atomic energy, including nuclear weapons.  The historic treaty in the 1960s banning atmospheric nuclear tests led to a complete cessation of such tests.  And as Reiss-Andersen also noted the non-proliferation treaties of the 1970s committed nuclear nations to eventual nuclear disarmament.

The 2017 UN resolution legally binds the signatories to prohibit nuclear weapons completely, with 123 nations voting in favor of it.  None of the nuclear nations or their close allies were among them, but the idea has been stated and supported by a majority of world governments.  It means something a bit more than a dream.  It sets a standard that every nation must deal with.  Nuclear weapons, like chemical weapons, are outside the norms of current civilization.

Such ideas, even when officially stated at the highest levels, and even when enshrined in law, can be violated, and often are.  But we don't call laws against murder no more than addled idealism by naive dreamers just because people continue to kill each other.  Not even when they get away with it.

Another big example of a big idea is war itself.  Louis Menand wrote a New Yorker piece called What Happens When War is Outlawed.  It begins with a little known international treaty, eventually signed by every significant nation in the world, that outlawed war between nations as an instrument of policy.  It was the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War.

It has been completely lost to history, Menand notes, principally because the last nations signed it in 1934, just a few years before the largest war in human history began.  So once again, at best, an embarrassingly naive expression of misplaced idealism (like the celebrated 1939 New York Worlds Fair), if not cynical to begin with.  A hard-headed realist Cold War foreign policy expert called it "Childish, just childish." Certainly ineffective.

But was it really?  Menand points out:

"And yet since 1945 nations have gone to war against other nations very few times. When they have, most of the rest of the world has regarded the war as illegitimate and, frequently, has organized to sanction or otherwise punish the aggressor. In only a handful of mostly minor cases since 1945—the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014 being a flagrant exception—has a nation been able to hold on to territory it acquired by conquest."

The rest of the piece goes into various contributing reasons why this has been so, the most recent of which is globalization, when international trade is too essential to disrupt with warfare.  But my conclusion would include the very fact of the spread of the big idea represented by that treaty outlawing war, which is that war is no longer considered to be a normal, legitimate instrument of policy.  Whereas for centuries before, it was.

The latest Big Idea to emerge in a big way was expressed in the Paris climate agreement.  For the first time in human history, official representatives of nearly every human on the planet agreed to take responsibility for fixing what humanity had done to destroy that planet.

 Like every other such statement, the actual accord may be flawed and not immediately effective, and backsliding will occur.  But the response to its rejection by the current White House incumbent by other nations as well as states, cities, businesses and citizens of the US shows it is still a powerful Big Idea, inspiring passion and determination.

The idea is now Big, and humanity has agreed on it.  It may well happen that the damage to the planet will doom civilization and the Earth as we know it before humanity can fully live up to this idea.  But even in the event of that ultimate tragedy, there is at least this expression of the best in humanity and human civilization.

We have enough evidence of human weakness and evil to tempt all of us to consider these as the essence of human nature.  We have to remind ourselves that, just as individual humans do exhibit such contrary traits as goodness, intelligence, courage, kindness, fairness and self-sacrifice, human civilization has had some awfully good Big Ideas and they have changed things for the better.  The Nobel Peace Prize shines a light on one of the most important of those Big Ideas today.

Addressing the Future

President Obama made two (or at least two) significant speeches last week, both to the United Nations.

On September 23, he spoke  about the climate crisis to the UN Climate Summit.  (Here's the video.  Here's the transcript.)

He began: "For all the immediate challenges that we gather to address this week -- terrorism, instability, inequality, disease-- there’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate."


"So the climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it. The alarm bells keep ringing. Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we do not hear them. We have to answer the call. We know what we have to do to avoid irreparable harm. We have to cut carbon pollution in our own countries to prevent the worst effects of climate change. We have to adapt to the impacts that, unfortunately, we can no longer avoid. And we have to work together as a global community to tackle this global threat before it is too late.

We cannot condemn our children, and their children, to a future that is beyond their capacity to repair. Not when we have the means -- the technological innovation and the scientific imagination -- to begin the work of repairing it right now.

As one of America’s governors has said, “We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.”

After describing US efforts and successes in his administration, he challenged his audience: And today, I call on all countries to join us -– not next year, or the year after, but right now, because no nation can meet this global threat alone.

"Yes, this is hard. But there should be no question that the United States of America is stepping up to the plate. We recognize our role in creating this problem; we embrace our responsibility to combat it. We will do our part, and we will help developing nations do theirs. But we can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation –- developed and developing alike. Nobody gets a pass."

"For I believe, in the words of Dr. King, that there is such a thing as being too late. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate while we still can."

He ended his speech, which contained many specifics, by returning to the necessary perspective:

"This challenge demands our ambition. Our children deserve such ambition. And if we act now, if we can look beyond the swarm of current events and some of the economic challenges and political challenges involved, if we place the air that our children will breathe and the food that they will eat and the hopes and dreams of all posterity above our own short-term interests, we may not be too late for them.

While you and I may not live to see all the fruits of our labor, we can act to see that the century ahead is marked not by conflict, but by cooperation; not by human suffering, but by human progress; and that the world we leave to our children, and our children’s children, will be cleaner and healthier, and more prosperous and secure."

On September 25, President Obama addressed the General Assembly with a vision of the world and its future.  (Here's a summary with the video at the bottom.  Here's the transcript.)  This speech was widely praised (for example by Thomas Wright at the Brookings Institute who calls it a major turning point, and conservative NY Times columnist David Brooks, who calls it "one of the finest speeches of his presidency.")

After listing the positive change in the postwar era, President Obama called to account "the failure of our international system to keep pace with an interconnected world. We, collectively, have not invested adequately in the public health capacity of developing countries. Too often, we have failed to enforce international norms when it’s inconvenient to do so. And we have not confronted forcefully enough the intolerance, sectarianism, and hopelessness that feeds violent extremism in too many parts of the globe.

"Fellow delegates, we come together as united nations with a choice to make. We can renew the international system that has enabled so much progress, or we can allow ourselves to be pulled back by an undertow of instability. We can reaffirm our collective responsibility to confront global problems, or be swamped by more and more outbreaks of instability. And for America, the choice is clear: We choose hope over fear. We see the future not as something out of our control, but as something we can shape for the better through concerted and collective effort. We reject fatalism or cynicism when it comes to human affairs. We choose to work for the world as it should be, as our children deserve it to be."

He spoke of the specific challenges of the Ukraine, ISIL and Ebola, about Iran and spread of nuclear weapons, about eradicating poverty, returning to the climate crisis before returning in detail to terrorism.

"In other words, on issue after issue, we cannot rely on a rule book written for a different century. If we lift our eyes beyond our borders -- if we think globally and if we act cooperatively -- we can shape the course of this century, as our predecessors shaped the post-World War II age."

He spoke of the threat of violent terrorism, acknowledged the breeding grounds of poverty, economic travail and hopelessness but repeated his comdemnation of ISIL and its savagery: "No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions. There can be no reasoning -- no negotiation -- with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death." 

He spoke not only of military force but of exposing, confronting and refuting hate-filled propaganda using the Internet as they do, and other efforts.

"It is one of the tasks of all great religions to accommodate devout faith with a modern, multicultural world. No children are born hating, and no children -- anywhere -- should be educated to hate other people. There should be no more tolerance of so-called clerics who call upon people to harm innocents because they’re Jewish, or because they're Christian, or because they're Muslim. It is time for a new compact among the civilized peoples of this world to eradicate war at its most fundamental source, and that is the corruption of young minds by violent ideology."

He continued with a sophisticated analysis and plan of action for confronting and ending intolerance.  He spoke of the heartless folly of sectarian violence, and the international and political responsibilities to encourage and build inclusive institutions.  "Cynics may argue that such an outcome can never come to pass. But there is no other way for this madness to end -- whether one year from now or ten."

He spoke directly to the young in the Middle East, beginning with a sincere and accurate appeal to the best of their history: "You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder. Those who call you away from this path are betraying this tradition, not defending it."

He gave examples of successful collaborations in creating inclusive institutions in the Middle East.  He was blunt is saying that the present situation with Israel and Palestine is not sustainable.

 He admitted (much to the chagrin of Fox News) that America itself is not perfect.
"But we welcome the scrutiny of the world -- because what you see in America is a country that has steadily worked to address our problems, to make our union more perfect, to bridge the divides that existed at the founding of this nation. America is not the same as it was 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, or even a decade ago. Because we fight for our ideals, and we are willing to criticize ourselves when we fall short."

He closed again with his sights on the future, and on the changing attitudes of young people.  "Around the world, young people are moving forward hungry for a better world. Around the world, in small places, they're overcoming hatred and bigotry and sectarianism. And they're learning to respect each other, despite differences."

"The people of the world now look to us, here, to be as decent, and as dignified, and as courageous as they are trying to be in their daily lives. And at this crossroads, I can promise you that the United States of America will not be distracted or deterred from what must be done. We are heirs to a proud legacy of freedom, and we’re prepared to do what is necessary to secure that legacy for generations to come. I ask that you join us in this common mission, for today’s children and tomorrow’s."

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

"Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships--the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together in the same world, at peace."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in his last speech, as World War II was ending, while the atomic age was gestating, and decades before the Climate Crisis showed signs of becoming the ultimate test of human civilization.

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

“Peace begins in thought. Thoughts enworded go from mind to mind, and mind makes the world. Peace, illusive, abstract, negative Yin, dream, would take a long writing-out to make real. Its book has to be longer than war books—longer than a bumper sticker, longer than a sound bite. As we read, neuropeptides in the brain grow longer, longer than in nonreaders. Thought becomes body. Sudden fast change is a method of war. The logic of peace has to be spoken out at length.”

Maxine Hong Kingston
The Fifth Book of Peace

The Message of Stonehenge

Stonehenge has tantalized and mystified generations.  These monumental stones were not only arrayed in some incomprehensible pattern--the stones came from many different locations, some of them very far away.  What was its purpose?

A ten year archaeological investigation has resulted in a conclusion: Stonehenge was "a monument to unify the peoples of Britain after a long period of conflict and regional differences."

When Stonehenge was built,” said Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, “there was a growing island-wide culture – the same styles of houses, pottery and other material forms were used from Orkney to the south coast. This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries. Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as far away as west Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification.”

This all happened some 5,000 years ago., at about the midpoint (so far) in the history of human civilization.

The people who built Stonehenge selected a site of particular importance--because like monuments thousands of miles away (in the U.S. for instance) it does align with solar and lunar events. Professor Parker Pearson said: “When we stumbled across this extraordinary natural arrangement of the sun’s path being marked in the land, we realized that prehistoric people selected this place to build Stonehenge because of its pre-ordained significance. This might explain why there are eight monuments in the Stonehenge area with solstitial alignments, a number unmatched anywhere else. Perhaps they saw this place as the centre of the world.”

The particulars of this history are so far lost to us.  Only so much can be inferred from surviving evidence.  In a way it is as mythical as the United Federation of Planets posited in the Star Trek future: another instance of peoples coming together after a self-destructive time. 

But it is the kind of myth we need.  We can guess that within us there is the possibility of coming together to solve our common problems.  It is worth something to suggest that even on this scale, humans have done so before.  That they may have done so by affirming the natural, the cosmic rightness of it, is perhaps the most heartening of all.

[The bottom photo is an official White House photo of President Obama with Nichelle Nichols, who not only played Uhura on Star Trek, but successfully recruited minority astronauts for NASA.  The photo was taken some months ago but posted recently by Nichelle.]

A Longer View

These days, the days events support the feeling that we are spiraling down rapidly into madness and a new Dark Age.  The medium term view--when people my age look back several decades--provides some solace, but not much.  Back in the 60s we sang a song with the refrain "when will they ever learn?" and it seems just about everyday we get the answer, "Probably never, or at least, not yet."  For example, the GOPer madness of a Clinton impeachment repeated on a smaller scale (so far) with the GOPer House committee's contempt citation against Attorney General Eric Holder.  Rachel Maddow argued persuasively that this is yet another scary example of GOPer Rabid Right madness (fixating on guns), while I doubt I'm alone is seeing the racist component: in a time when a new GOP racist treatment of President Obama arises somewhere nearly every day, GOPers try to take down the first black Attorney General of the first black President.  

But maybe there is some solace in the longer view.  At least that's according to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, who makes the case that over the centuries, violence of all kind has decreased.  I wouldn't entertain what he says without pairing it with psychologist James Hillman's views in his book, The Terrible Love of War, which looks at the archetypal needs that war addresses, but there is some common ground: I think both would agree that institutionalizing  non-lethal ways of addressing those needs is both possible and desirable--or frankly, necessary.

It seems to me that Pinker very ably sums up his thesis in the first two answers, the first two paragraphs of his interview with The European:   

    
The European: Your current book addresses the question of violence. What is the focus of your argument?
Pinker: That violence has declined over the course of history on multiple scales of magnitude and time. Homicide, war, genocide, rape, corporal and capital punishments, and the harsh treatment of children and animals have all become less frequent. It’s not that human nature has changed during these transitions. But human nature is a complex system with many parts. Some tempt us towards violence – exploitation, dominance, revenge – and others can inhibit us from being violent – self-control, empathy, moral norms and reason. My goal was to identify the historical forces that have increasingly favored “the better angels of our nature,” as Abraham Lincoln called them.

The European: What historical forces can be causally linked to a decline in violence?
Pinker: A major one is the rise of effective government, which helped to pacify society, just as Thomas Hobbes had predicted in his theory of the “Leviathan.” Governments removed the incentives for exploitative violence on one side, and thereby reduced the temptation for pre-emptive attack and for violent retaliation on the other. Another force was the expansion of trade and commerce, which made it cheaper to buy things than to steal them, and meant that other people were worth more alive than dead. A third was the rise of cosmopolitan forces like literacy and travel, which expanded people’s circle of empathy. At the same time, reason and free speech were enhanced, which encouraged people to become cleverer to treat violence as a problem to be solved."

The GOPer threat to effective government is a clear and present danger, and this suggests what one result might well be if they succeed.  Two other trends seem likely to continue as long as civilization does: trade and commerce, literacy and travel (if you include storytelling by any form in the "literacy" category.)  Reason and free speech are always threatened, and today the internal threat is coming from the overthrow of consciousness by the raging unconscious of way too many Americans. 

The point here--which actually comports with my medium term view--is that positive trends that are supported by institutions and partly through them by culture can make a difference in what aspects of human nature are emphasized more often and with greater, wider effect.  And therein lies the hope of the future: through individuals certainly, their consciousness of themselves and their commitments to the kind of person they want to be and the kind of society they want to support.  By also through the norms supported by the important institutions of the time, over time, beyond the medium term of one individual life into the long term. 

War and the American Electorate

Before the State of the Union and its focus on the economy, I wanted to say something about foreign policy issues, and particularly the issue of war and peace.  The GOPer debates are showing clearly that their candidates (except for Ron St. Paul) are clueless Cheny clones, pandering to a delusional and perhaps illusional base.  The candidates' generally warmongering attitudes could very well plunge the world into more wars, even nuclear wars, while bankrupting the country in the process.

That's the good news.

Because part of their cluelessness is totally misreading the majority of American voters, who are clearly sick of stupid wars and all their costs.  Barack Obama won the presidency largely on his promise to end the war in Iraq.  He ended the war in Iraq, and that's going to be a major reason he will win reelection.

The GOP candidates arguments are the same as the Cheneyites, except cruder, if that's possible.  But this time the counter-arguments are going to be made by the real President and the real Secretary of State, with solid foreign policy accomplishments, including one that has to be obvious even to the generally uninterested voter: they got rid of Osama bin Laden and crippled al Queda and its ability to harm this country or its citizens.  Less obvious--though just as ignored by the GOPer candidates whose only possible tactic is lying, which they do regularly--is the success so far of U.S. strategy on Iran.  It's still a dangerous situation, but efforts short of war now underway are effective.  A little demonstration of that, and it will bolster the public's clear opposition to engaging in another war.

The Obama administration hasn't been perfect.  They haven't succeeded in closing Guantanamo, and it remains a stain and a scandal and a moral tragedy. Many of the excesses of the Patriot Act and so-called anti-terrorism tactics that violate civil rights, human rights and any civilized conscience, still remain.  But it's interesting that a journalist has chronicled President Obama's relationship with the military hierarchy, a story of progress resulting in reasserting civilian control after eight years of abuse.  Other parts of the bureaucracy have changed slowly and unevenly to match actions with the goals and principles the Obama administration brought with them.  I have high hopes for real progress on all these matters in a second term.

In a way it is similar to another story--by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker-- which purports to follow President Obama's learning curve on the limitations of presidential power.  As a student of history, I doubt he was entirely surprised by either the power of the generals or the lack of presidential power, although it's likely that the lessons are a lot more impressive in reality.  But at least in the abstract, I understood these as a teenager avidly following the Kennedy administration.

 Newsmagazines followed JFK's disenchantment with the generals after the Bay of Pigs, and his amazement at their Doctor Strangelove-like advice during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Between the two he learned to trust his own judgment and assert his control.

In end of the year interviews--I think even after the first year, and certainly the second--he stressed the limitations of presidential power.  It was a theme of two popular political books of the time, which I eagerly read, naturally, and still have: Presidental Power  by Richard E. Neustadt and Decision-Making in the White House by his own long-time advisor and presidential assistant, Theodore Sorensen.  (Since Sorensen also supported Obama and they met, I'd assume he knows of this book.)

 Yet it was after understanding these limitations (and successfully defying the generals in the Cuban Missile Crisis), that JFK engineered his two boldest initiatives: the successful effort to get the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed and ratified, and introducing the Civil Rights legislation that became the basis for the historic laws passed after his assassination.  Both changed America and American politics.

So there are two points here, I suppose: President Obama will be an even better President in the next four years, having learned what he learned in the first four.  That's not unusual, but in our times, it could be very important for the country and the world.

But the point I started with is this: Americans are for all intents and purposes anti-war.  If the economy offers some hope, President Obama will be re-elected simply on the strength of his record in ending the war in Iraq, winding down the war in Afghanistan, and his largely successful efforts to achieve justifiable American goals without the bluster and bullying and especially the whine of bullets.   GOPer candidates are on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of the electorate on this.

A Fitting Memorial



Paul Chappell in Iraq

In college, Paul Chappell learned that socialism was practical.  He read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, and believed that the Iraq war violated international law and the Nuremberg Principles. He studied Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Paul Chappell's college was West Point, where Chomsky was asked to lecture on whether Iraq was a just war.  Chappell became an officer stationed in Iraq, installing a defensive system to counteract mortars and artillery.  Today he is the author of The End of War and an advocate for waging peace.  In an interview in the April issue of The Sun (part of which is online here):  "Yes, West Point teaches that war is so dangerous, it should be used only as a last resort. I learned that the United States needs to rely more on diplomacy; that politicians don’t understand war and are too quick to use it as a means of conflict resolution. West Point also teaches that if you want to understand war, you have to understand its limitations and unpredictability. World War i and World War ii both started out as limited conflicts and grew into global blood baths. War is like a natural disaster. You can’t control it."

People who must fight the wars know what letting loose the dogs of war means.  Many times over the years some soldiers who returned spoke and wrote eloquently about that reality.  Erich Maria Remarque's relentless evocations of the first World War in All Quiet on the Western Front and Spark of Life told of the realities of modern war from the soldiers point of view, long after governments on both sides had comforted their citizens with exhibits of spacious bunkers and luxurious trenches.  Not much has changed.

Chapell's lessons in socialism, by the way, were of West Point itself, and the U.S. Army: "If I said to most Americans that we should have a society that gives everyone three meals a day, shelter, healthcare, and a college education, and that it should be based on selflessness, sacrifice, and service rather than greed, they’d say, “That’s socialism.” But that’s the U.S. military. A lot of conservative Republicans who think socialism is the ultimate evil admire the military."


Paul Chappell today

 The military isn't a utopia, Chapell says, but the ethical basis of socialism and the ethics soldiers learn--to depend on each other--are the same: "When I try to persuade people that America should have universal healthcare, I say, “You know, in the military we have universal healthcare, and the military believes that you should never leave a fallen comrade behind. You take care of everyone.”

On the day to remember those who gave their lives in this country's name, it is appropriate to announce again the goal of ending such deaths, especially the needless.  Right now in particular this world has no more time,  no resources, and no more capable and idealistic young people to give to war.

Skills of Peace Today

Peace does not happen by magic. It is not the mere absense of war. This world is never without conflict. Waging peace requires at least as many skills as waging war does.

The kind of organization, dedication to service and discipline developed over too many centuries to wage war could in some ways be applied to waging peace. Some of those functions are in fact falling to the armed forces--the "peace-keeping" and humanitarian and "nation-building" missions.

When such missions became most prominent in Bosnia, military leaders looked around and noticed that they had no training for them, and nowhere to get that training. Presumably this has changed, because in his commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy, President Obama said this:

"Marines, we need you to defeat the insurgent and the extremist. But we also need you to work with the tribal sheik and local leaders from Anbar to Kandahar who want to build a better future for their people.

Naval aviators and flight officers, we need you to dominate the airspace in times of conflict, but also to deliver food and medicine in times of humanitarian crisis. And surface warfare officers and submariners, we need you to project American power across the vast oceans, but also to protect American principles and values when you pull into that foreign port, because for so many people around the world, you are the face of America."

This only hints at the new roles that, sometimes by default, the U.S. military must undertake, and let's hope their training is adapting to those roles.

Someday the essence of military organization and the best ideals--of service, self-sacrifice, discipline, applying skills and attention to the greater good--may well result in an "army" that fights the effects of the Climate Crisis, feeds the hungry, brings medicine to the afflicted, helps to resolve conflicts and build community. This army--or indeed the existing military-- will need to learn from those who are right now working on perfecting and teaching the skills of peace--from large-scale peacekeeping and diplomatic efforts, to interpersonal conflict management, to the skills of individual inner peace that make all the rest easier and more fulfilling.

Remembering those who sacrificed their lives in war should not be only the occasion for picnics and TV war movie marathons. It is another moment to focus on the skills of peace, and their study, and the hope to study war no more.

Happy Birthday

Today is the 50th birthday of the peace symbol.
It was first used for an anti-nuclear demonstration
in London, designed by Gerald Holtom on February
21, 1958.

One of its most dramatic uses: a living peace

symbol, in a demonstration against Iraq in

Budapest 2006.

another living peace symbol, this
time in Antarctica.

Beginning With Mindfulness

Largely unheralded in the daily media, schools have been successfully experimenting with various methods for resolving conflicts, and preventing violence. I mention several in my original Skills of Peace article. They include such innovations as the "jigsaw" and Peace Games.

But outer peace and the interface of communication to reach it require inner work as well. The self-knowledge that allows for psychological awareness, for example. And the ability to calm the mind, to center and concentrate. The New York Times writes about one school in Oakland, California using a very ancient technique: meditation.

In their case, it is derived directly from Buddhist practice. The Times story starts:

The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness. With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.

Just another Bay Area fad? Well, first of all, Oakland is not San Francisco. The school is mostly black and Latino. And more to the point, real results are in the very next paragraph, from out of a student's mouth:

I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

The story continues: Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

Years ago, Jon Kobat-Zinn revolutionized medicine with his program of meditation and yoga applied to the most intractable back pain patients at the University of Massachusetts. Now these efforts in schools are adapting his methods.

Like the back pain efforts, this also zeroes in on a felt need: the ability of students to concentrate. “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a [Stanford] researcher. “But we never teach them how.”

It also applies to other problems students have, caused by anxieties and peer pressure. Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said.

The mindfulness program didn't begin in Oakland. Although mindful education may seem like a New Yorker caricature of West Coast life, the school district with possibly the best experience has been Lancaster, Pa., where mindfulness is taught in 25 classes a week at eight schools. The district has a substantial poverty rate, with 75 percent of students qualifying for free lunch.

Teachers report mixed success, which wouldn't surprise anyone who has tried to meditate. Even those who have been meditating for many years have problems--it is a vital part of the process, which is not always obvious to the inexperienced. But the need is so great in a generation surrounded by violence, even among their peers, that even a small help constitutes progress. Above all, linking outer peace with inner change is a crucial step forward toward equipping us all with effective skills of peace.

When Will We Ever Learn?

Once again, we had no phony Memorial Day around here. All the false and misguided pieties can't obscure the conviction that a people that truly cares about fallen soldiers would be intent on making sure needless war never takes another. We're very far from that these days.

The reflex to call such sentiments pacificism and ask the sophomoric question about standing by while your grandmother gets attacked is so bitterly out of place these days, in view of the kind of war we're sending soldiers to die in. And dying they are, at record speed. All you need to know about the disposition of this war now is in this report on what soldiers in Iraq told a blind warhawk senator and his response. That this war is so obviously wrongheaded that even soldiers are speaking out, and that this war was founded on lies from the start--the most recently one to be exposed being that the "intelligence" was faulty.

The soldier defending the homeland from attack is so seldom the actual cause of war--and hasn't been in the wars America has fought since at least World War II, not counting at least the intent of military action in Afghanistan. The cynicism of those in power who speak piously of patriotism and supporting the troops for political and monetary advantage and nothing else is disgusting. The awful truth is that many if not most warfare is to make the rich richer, and for that, the non-rich will die and be maimed, and their families and the rest of the non-rich are tricked and manipulated into believing it's all for a noble cause.

The noble cause is developing, acquiring and using the skills of peace. It is facing the real threat to our people, like the climate crisis. It is facing the future together, rather than repeating the terrible patterns of the past that benefit the undeserving few.

The Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 1)

Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 1)

The challenges of the Climate Crisis are formidable. Getting enough awareness, then political will just to begin addressing it here in the U.S. has been difficult enough, and still is. Then there are the conceptual challenges previous posts here have alluded to, and the challenge of overcoming the either/or mentality to accept the "Fix It" need to address now-inevitable effects that global heating will cause for the next generation or more, at the same time going forward with the "Stop It" efforts to severely scale back greenhouse gases and taking other steps to save the farther future from what could become an unstoppable apocalypse.

But the greatest challenge may be the one that nobody wants to talk about. It is the possibility, and perhaps the likelihood, that while conflicts among politicians, corporations and various interest groups prevent effective action or even attention to either track of the Climate Crisis, human civilization will add to its woes with warfare precipitated by effects of global heating. That warfare could easily become so severe that it would swamp positive efforts to address the crises themselves.

Why is war possible? For one thing: water. The Climate Crisis is shifting precipitation patterns, so more places are mired in floods and droughts which threaten to become longterm. Historically, changes in climate that affect food production and living conditions cause migration and warfare as one group moves in on the territory of another. That may well have been behind the fall of the Roman Empire before barbarian tribes, driven away by cold and drought. And spreading drought--probably related to global heating-- may very well now be a contributing factor to the genocide in Darfur.

But consider this as well: all over the world, high mountain glaciers are melting and disappearing. They are the source of water for billions. As Al Gore points out in An Inconvenient Truth, melting of the Himalayan glaciers, among the most affected by global heating so far, threatens the water supply of fully 40% of the world's population. Most of the countries in the world that now possess nuclear weapons are threatened by climatic changes already beginning to occur, and border each other or are near neighbors.

But in order to address the Climate Crisis, the world needs to do more than avoid war--it must engage in unprecedented international cooperation. Some countries are starting to engage in directly addressing global heating issues together, beyond Kyoto, with the notable exception of the U.S. But when the U.S. joins the international community again, that won't in itself solve the problems. One major issue that will soon arise is the role of the developing world, both the growing economic powers of China and India, and the poorer nations. Indeed, in his essay "An Inconvenient Truth Part II,"Tom Athanasiou writes that addressing global poverty is essential to addressing the Climate Crisis (the 2 degree line he refers to is the total temperature rise point of no return--beyond it, civilization is toast):

It will take a heroic effort and almost unimaginable internationalcooperation to hold the 2°C line, but it is still physically possible to do so. This is because already existing technologies, if developed and disseminated with true “global Manhattan Project” urgency, would support huge, rapid efficiency increases and emissions reductions, and buy us time to decarbonize our infrastructures, adopt fairer ,lower-consumption lifestyles and, of course, develop better technologies.The real need here is what Americans, in particular, might call a Global New Deal.

Like the original, it would focus on stabilizing and improving the lives of the vulnerable, restless poor. But this time the institution building and the politics would be global, and this time the background crisis – the threat that demands cooperation and, by so doing, animates the whole effort – would be as much social-ecological as it is socio-economic.

These issues of international cooperation are going to become more and more acute with each passing year, and the need to avoid climate-based warfare could arise at any time, but almost certainly will in the next 30 years. Apart from the conflicts sown by the greedy and the fearful, we have a couple of basic problems here. We don't have the skills. And we're still moving in the wrong direction.

"We don't have the skills" is a bit of an overstatement, because just like people who have been working diligently, even when reviled and mostly out of public notice, on alternative energy and on the Climate Crisis science itself for decades, there are thousands of people who have been working on developing the Skills of Peace--the skills of resolving conflicts through knowledge and communication, of ways of becoming more conscious of the personal and societal psychology that fosters unnecessary violence and ways of dealing with it, and of the skills of cooperation, and dedicated service to the common good.

But in terms of our leadership, and our institutions, we have largely ignored those skills, including even the possibility of developing, acquiring and using them. We don't for a moment dispute that skills are necessary for conducting warfare. We spend vast treasures on developing those skills and training people to use them. We know that war requires strategies, knowledge and communication of all kinds. But when it comes to peace, we seem to think it arises by magic or not at all.

This is partly a product of a dominant view of human nature derived from a perverse Social Darwinist interpretation of natural selection: the dog eats dog, survival of the fittest view. Such a view may even add to the violence, providing excuses to those who foment it, or who enable it with trade in weapons that constantly become more deadly and easier to obtain and use. But that dark view is unbalanced--it simply ignores the contrary evidence we see everyday in our lives and in the natural world, where cooperation, nurture, giving and compassion are as natural and at least as necessary as anything else.

Even science has not escaped the blinders of this bias, which is why these days are suddenly discovering animal behavior they thought impossible, everything from animal empathy to tool use. It's not like animals have just started doing this stuff. It's that human scientists weren't looking for it because they didn't believe it was there.

But this post is getting long, so let's take a photo break and meet on the other side.

The Climate Crisis and the Skills of Peace (part 2)

There's a lot of violence in the world, although the destruction of civilized societies by the power of modern weapons we see around the world today is perhaps a lesson more in technology and profit than in human nature. Civilization depends on peaceful means to address differences, disputes and conflicts, but we don't seem to understand or value this until it is threatened. Too bad, because the Climate Crisis is going to test the potential of civilization to generate even greater skills of peace, and apply them to a global community. Or else civilization, along with most of humankind and the ecosystem that nurtured us, will disappear.

Part of our problem is how routinely our violent instincts are exploited. Leaders exploiting our fears, defining them in simplistic us-or-them terms, and convincing us that they are our only protectors, is the obvious and often repeated example, though having fallen for that again in the 21st century is not an encouraging sign.

This exploitation has become something of a foundation for our culture and economy. As a species, we become instantly alert to threat, poised to fight or flee, because instant recognition of threat and instant impulse to action is a survival instinct. Because threat gets our chemicals going, even the artificial threats of movies and TV shows, they are ideal for grabbing our attention, which is what's needed to sell tickets and commercials. The guaranteed attention and glandular response is one primary reason that our "entertainment" is mostly violent, and that violence not only convinces us the real world is like that (despite much of our everyday experience) but it supports the societal dogma that conflicts are settled by violence.

Of course we have other survival instincts, and survival strategies. They just aren't as easy to exploit to sell us, although that doesn't stop merchandizers and politicians from using them as well.

We are so institutionally addicted to violence that we're killing ourselves with it. Even after more than a decade in which our armed forces are called upon to do what is called "peace keeping" as a significant part of their duties, we still have no significant training for these duties. Instead we devote all our efforts to the tragic transformation of young Americans into killers. It's only one of many tragedies being played out in Iraq, but it's a significant one.

Now when we are going to need these skills of peace more than ever, we are turning in the opposite direction. Experts know that violence alone is never going to stop terrorism. Yet the cowardly use of 9-11 to sow fear and justify needless warfare and torture is the most flagrant evidence of our deterioration. Despite even the military's insistence that torture doesn't work, it has become not only national policy but national entertainment. There were no depictions of torture on U.S. television in 1996 and 1997, but more than 200 in 2003 and at least a hundred in each of 2004 and 2005, most of them on the very popular series, "24," but not exclusively. Conspicuously (and stupidly) violent commercials were noticeably prevalent during this year's Super Bowl.

So far the 2008 presidential campaign doesn't look promising in this regard. Despite all the theories blaming warfare and violence on testosterone and "the patriarchy," the presence of a woman candidate in the race who feels she has to talk tough and rattle sabers to show she's qualified only perpetuates the emphasis on violent approaches to conflict over other possible solutions.

The Skills of Peace allow us to approach conflict with appropriate means. Most of us can conceive of situations in which violence seems necessary, but the point is that it is automatically used in far more conflicts than it is necessary or even useful, partly for lack of commitment, knowledge and skills in employing alternative and more appropriate means. Even the means and moods we've accepted and used for generations are endangered today, especially in our civic life. I was struck by a particularly appropriate example in a news story, about a conflict over the Climate Crisis itself, and Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, nominated for an Oscar to be awarded later today.

When a small town school in Washington state wanted to show An Inconvenient Truth in a 7th grade science class, a parent objected. Not an alarming or impossible to resolve conflict in itself, but the violent terms of it and how it quickly spiraled into a panic have become all too familiar. First, the extreme terms of the objection. According to the Washington Post article, :

"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardison wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.

Out of all the ways the School Board could have chosen to respond, they reacted by not only cancelling the film for that particular class, but for the entire school district, and informing the teacher who had scheduled the film she would receive a disciplinary letter for not clearing a "controversial" film first.

When this hit the news, the public response was swift, national and extreme. According to the Post, "Members of the school board say they have been bombarded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls, many of them hurtful and obscene, accusing them of scientific ignorance, pandering to religion and imposing prior restraint on free speech."

At that point the school board could have reacted by digging in their heels, but they didn't. One member made an impassioned speech, "I am here to foster healing in our community," he said, while noting with sadness that "civility and honest discourse are dying in our country." In the end the teacher was permitted to show Gore's film as long as it was accompanied by "other views" of equal scientific merit, which she apparently was having a lot of trouble finding.

Some may characterize that school board's final decision as backing down under pressure, or perhaps it was only coming to its senses (whether it was being disingenuous or hypocritical in the first place is another question), but it did at least make a plea for civility. The extreme views and extreme demands of the parent are very alarming, but so too was the response, if indeed it was "obscene" and extreme (such claims have been made falsely, but I've seen blogosphere responses to similiar situations that suggest the claims could well be true.) There is no scientific validity to Climate Crisis denying, and the threats to separation of church and state was real. But it's worth recalling that the initial Fundamentalist opposition to Darwinian evolution in the 19th century was the fear that it was being used to devalue the worth of the individual, particularly those who weren't naturally selected to be rich and powerful. They weren't entirely wrong.

People who fear that science can be used to oppress them are not crazy. Science has often been used to oppress people. Science unintentionally created the very Climate Crisis that science now warns us may well destroy us. There are plenty of ironies to go around. The Skills of Peace cannot be successful without an attempt at mutual understanding, the commonly held rules of civility, and the acknowledgement of compassion as a human quality and a human strength. We're going to feel it differently, but the Climate Crisis affects everyone and everything: the whole world, the whole future. It's global, remember? We're all in this together. We're going to have to solve it together. It's civilization's ultimate test, in more ways than one.

Today in Washington. New York Times photo.

Today in Washington

A soldier's boot and a coffin symbolize all the soldiers needlessly killed and maimed, physically and psychologically, by the Iraq war, launched on false pretenses and continued in self-delusion and willed ignorance. Photo: New York Times.

Today in Washington

But not just soldiers have been killed and maimed in the Iraq war. These shoes, being prepared for today's Washington demonstration, symbolize the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians killed since the U.S. invaded Iraq. Photo: New York Times.

The Long March

“I grew up during the Vietnam War, but I never protested it and never had my lottery number called to go fight,” said David Quinly, a 54-year-old carpenter from Prairie Village, Kan., who arrived here Friday night with about 50 others after a 23-hour bus ride
.
“In my view, this one is a war of choice and a war for profit against a culture and people we don’t understand,” Mr. Quinly said. “I knew I had to speak up this time.”

That's from the New York Times report on today's antiwar demonstration in Washington, where "tens of thousands" of protestors focused on the Iraq war. From the podium, Susan Surandon said, according to the Times:

“We need to be talking not just about defunding the war but also about funding the vets,” Ms. Sarandon said, adding that more than 50,000 veterans had been injured while benefits for them continue to be cut.

The Washington Post has this quote:

"When I served in the war, I thought I was serving honorably. Instead, I was sent to war ... for causes that have proved fraudulent," said Iraq war veteran Garett Reppenhagen.

Reuters reports that similiar demonstrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco today were attended by thousands.