Peace Books Worth Reading

Some brave users of the force of nonviolence gathered in November 1998 at the University of Virginia for two days of dialogue and reflection. They were nine Nobel Peace Prize winners: Oscar Arias, the Dalai Lama, Rigoberta Menchu, Bobby Muller, Jose Ramos-Horta, Desmond Tutu, Betty Williams, Jody Williams and Harn Yawnghwe speaking for Aung San See Kyi. In The Moral Architecture of World Peace: Nobel Laureates Discuss Our Future, (University Press of Virginia) Helen Cobban, a seasoned author whose global affairs column bolsters the Christian Science Monitor, brings to life the people behind the aura that a Nobel Peace Prize can create.

Cobban includes selections from the speeches of the nine, plus excerpts from exchanges among them. Some, like Jody Williams of Vermont, are natural storytellers, while others, including Oscar Arias, the Costa Rican, are theorists. The relevant ideas range from ways to demilitarize the world economy to bringing aid to the victims of weapons made and sold by defense contractors.

Not that anyone should strain to read global affairs columnists and their tepid prescriptions for ending international violence, but Cobban is almost alone in her analysis of current thinking by national security policymakers: few “propose doing much beyond fiddling at the margins of the world system as we know it today. Few ask the deeper questions about what kinds of responsibilities people in different human groups should have toward each other. Few even start to tackle the complex problems raised by the issue of state sovereignty; few question the state-dominated, political assumptions on which most of the Western theory of international relations has been built until now….few, therefore have done anything that can be said to contribute to sketching out the moral architecture of a future world at peace.”

Readers looking for an intellectual feast served up by peacebuilders who understand, and live by, the philosophy of nonviolence can find it in abundance in these pages. Sophisticates—first cousins to sophists—are likely to mock the laureates for denouncing militarism and nationalism as impractical. Oscar Arias, from an enlightened country that abolished its army 40 years ago and put the savings into true security—an educated, healthy and wealth-sharing population—agrees. Seeking peace and justice is impractical, all right—“”impractical because it puts concern for human life before a free market drive for profits. Impractical because it listens to the poor who are crying out for schools and doctors, rather than the dictators who demand guns and fighters. Yes, in an age of cynicism and greed, all just ideas are considered impractical. You are discouraged if you say that we can live in peace. You are mocked for insisting that we can be more humane.”

Many citizens of impractical bents earn the praising attention of Robert Coles in Lives of Moral Leadership (Random House, $23.95). In cant-free prose and understated commentary that reveals his meditative side that has marked his writing for some four decades in his more than 50 books, Coles is that rarity: a moralist who doesn’t moralize, a religious man who avoids religiosity, a person of political vision who takes on political shortsightedness.

Longtime readers of Coles will find him returning again in these pages to people and events that shaped his conscience as a young psychiatrist. He gives ample space to his visits with Ralph McGill and Lillian Smith, progressive Georgians in the civil rights years. He goes back to his many conversations—taped—with Dorothy Day, Robert F. Kennedy, Erik Erikson. Equally compelling is what he learned from interviewing an elementary school teacher caught in the desegregation turmoil of New Orleans in the l960s, and a Boston school bus driver amid the same chaos when it was the North’s turn to reform.

For Coles, these are women and men who did no more than use their gifts for peacemaking, people who “can bring us all up morally….They hand us along, become a source of moral encouragement to us, arouse us and stir us, move us to do things when we might otherwise not be provoked, and they have the will to act in pursuit of purposes we have come to regard as important.”

Now in his early 70s, Coles’ own life—as husband, father, writer, and teacher-mentor to thousands of students at Harvard, Duke and elsewhere—is one of selfless generosity and kindness. The authenticity of his writing is traceable to those quiet expressions of moral leadership.

Anyone who breaks from the ethic of violence is a convert. In The Last Trek: A New Beginning (Pan Books, $19.95 paper), F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa from 1989 to 1994, presents the story of his life before, during and after his renunciations of apartheid. For his conversion, de Klerk jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 with Nelson Mandela.

If he became a dove, de Klerk retained a sharp beak. He portrays Mandela as a double-talking glory-seeker. Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconcilation Commission aimed “to discredit and humiliate me.” He claims that at the Nobel ceremonies his “Norwegian hosts were charming but decidedly and openly biased in favor of [Mandela and] the African National Congress.”

These self-indulgent carpings decrease the luster of what otherwise is a readable and detailed account of one politician’s awakening to justice.