Can Peace be Taught?
By Colman McCarthy
Can peace be taught? And learned? And practiced? And bring about the kind of peaceable society that every government claims it wants and every human heart yearns for?
When I asked those questions 20 years ago, I responded like a journalist. Phone the academic experts, get their take and write about it. But after listening to the experts, and hearing them talk much and say little, I had another idea. Go to the public high school nearest my office in downtown Washington and volunteer to teach a course titled “Alternatives to Violence.”
It went well. The 25 juniors and seniors were able to grasp intellectually what they already knew instinctively: we aren’t helpless against the force of violence, no matter the form. The students were hungry to explore the uncharted landscape of pacifism, nonviolence and conflict management. They knew also that unless we teach our children peace, someone else will teach them violence.
I’ve had more than 6,000 students in my classes these past 20 years-- at that downtown high school and at Georgetown Law and Georgetown undergraduate, American University , the University of Maryland, a prison, and three high schools.
Peace is the result of love, and if love were easy we’d all be good at it. All we should try to do, Dorothy Day often said, is “to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other.” Violence is a learned behavior, as is peacemaking. We have the capacity to go either way.
Even before children are in kindergarten, they have had two educators in conflict management: the adults at home and the television If violence—verbal, physical, emotional—is practiced by the parents, or if they settle their differences with kindness, dialogue and trust, the child learns that method. Outside the home and school, other non-classroom educators are at work. In 2001, 59 wars or conflicts were raging, with each side insisting its violence was just, the other’s unjust. Each side claims God is with them, and the other side evildoers..
Wars across the living room are waged with the same delusional vigor as wars across the ocean. The word war itself comes from the Old High German, meaning “organized confusion.” As estimated 40,000 people are month are dying in the wars and conflicts, mostly poor people killing poor people. In our homes, the leading cause of injury among American women is being beaten by someone they know: husband, ex-husband, boyfriend, ex-boyfriend.
Unless solutions are personalized, little chance exists that violence can be decreased or peace increased. Tolstoy wrote in “The Kingdom of God Is Within You”: “Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing themselves.” Gandhi of India offered the same thought: “If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself not another.” Jim Douglass, the American pacifist, put it this way: “The first things be disrupted by our commitment to nonviolence will be not the system but our own lives.”
Two types of violence exist: hot and cold.
Hot violence is visual, visceral, emotional, well-reported by the media, of a wrenching kind calling for immediate reaction: 9/11, the Columbine high school massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing, the sniper killings in Washington.
Cold violence is out of sight, unfelt,, unreported,, distant, disconnected: the 35,000 to 40,000 people who die everyday of hunger-related or preventable diseases, executions on death row, the taking of fetal lives, the slaughtering of 12 million animals a day for the American table.
But can any moral difference really be found between hot and cold violence? It’s the same victimization. Yet we tend to be selective. Let’s take action to bring the 9/11 killers to justice, but let’s not do much about getting the world’s hungry to the meal table.
The world is a family that will either be enhanced or demeaned by individual members. In my classes, I ask students to read “Reverence for Life” by Albert Schweitzer. In it he writes: “No one has the right to take for granted his own advantages over others in health, in talents, in ability, in success, in a happy childhood or congenial home. One must pay a price for all these boons. What one owes in return is a special responsibility for other lives.”
The enemy to this idea is divisive nationalism and false patriotism. When chest-thumping political leaders announce “you’re either with us or against us,” they are dismissing the reality that this planet has no “they’s,” “we’s” or “uses” but only, as Martin Luther King, Jr., argued, “brothers and sisters, all children of God, all sacred and dignified.”
What this belief leads to is the taking on of economic violence—the hoarding of wealth by many First World countries as Third World people suffer famine, drought, preventable diseases and early death. In a Boston speech in late2002, Desmond Tutu of South Africa said: “The war against terrorism will not be won as long as there are people desperate with disease and living in poverty and squalor. Sharing our prosperity is the best weapon against terrorism.” Is the U.S. government doing that? By latest count, its percentage of foreign to developing countries is at the bottom of industrialized nations.
We end up either problem-describers or solution-finders. For me, a major solution is the classroom. More than 50 million students are in them everyday—in 31,000 high schools, 78,000 elementary schools and more than 3,000 colleges and graduate schools. Beginning in kindergarten, all schools should be teaching the basic of peacemaking, mediation and conflict resolution. Otherwise, what chance is there? Too many school process their students as though they’re slabs of cheese going to Velveeta Elementary, on their way Cheddar High and Parmesan U.
Albert Einstein saw schools as a hope: “We must begin to inoculate our children against militarism by education them in the spirit of pacifism. Our schoolbooks glorify war and conceal its horrors. I would rather teach peace than war, love rather than hate.”
Peace through violence has failed. Yet the just war theory is routinely invoked when the bugles blow and flags wave. But would it be that way if the phrase were changed to “the just slaughter theory,” because slaughtering is the main rite of war. Why don’t we use honest and accurate language and talk about the First World Slaughter, the Korean Slaughter, the Vietnam Slaughter, the Persian Gulf Slaughter.
The current U.S. military budget is $355 billion, a number too large to grasp unless you’re an astronomer. It breaks down to about $970 million a day, which is four times greater the Peace Corps budget for a year. Further, it comes to $11,000 a second. And in the range of $2,000 per person in military taxes. The Bush administration has proposed raising military spending to $400 billion for 2004, and $500 billion by the end of the decade. At the same, time the Census Bureau reports that the number of Americans living in poverty continues to grow. Mayors report that 2002 brought the largest increase in demand for emergency shelter in a decade.
How to change that, as well as all forms of violence? Political awareness is needed, which leads to accountability of public officials. For others, there is social justice work. For some, the raising of generous-hearted children, which can be the most revolutionary act of all. For some, the enduring witness of civil disobedience as practiced by Dorothy Day and the Berrigans.
The callings are many, with all of them tied together by the truth that few of us will ever be called on to great things, while all of us can do small things in a great way.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace. His recent book is “I’d Rather Teach Peace” (Orbis). Large numbers of high schools and universities currently use his two anthologies of peace essays: “Solutions to Violence” and “Strength Through Peace: the Ideas and People of Nonviolence.”