Study Peace

March marks the 8^th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and we have not completed that war.  In October, we will have 10 years at war in Afghanistan, and we have yet to begin the draw down of combat operations there.  The total cost of these wars is above $1.16 trillion and counting, over $700 million a day by conservative estimates. It is millions more if considering all the associated costs of maintaining the military industrial complex and repairing the damage caused by war.  Leaving aside for a moment the social and moral costs of war, can we afford this kind of expense when we have such looming unsolved economic problems here?  

Consider health care so costly that many of our citizens can’t afford it even with the Affordable Health Care Act that is under threat, state budgets in so much trouble they are threatening massive layoffs and cuts in essential social services and infrastructure to avoid bankruptcy, a national debt that exceeds $14 trillion, rampant and uncontrolled greed in our financial institutions that caused a massive recession and that show no signs I have seen of reforming or being reformed, an environment increasingly at risk, increased taxes on the lower middle-class while taxes are cut for the most wealthy.   No, we can’t afford the mounting costs of resorting to war to resolve our security problems and international disputes. 

And now--war in Libya!?!

We study and learn the practice of war.  We pour our best resources into improving our military capability.  Imagine what would happen if we began to draw down our commitment to war and turned those abilities and resources to learning and practicing peaceful conflict resolution.  For that we need moral commitment from citizens and institutions together.  A better, more peaceful world will not happen only by individuals just improving themselves, though that is a good and necessary thing to do.  But then, like Buddha, or Christ, or Mohammed, the individual needs to take some responsibility for improving the world. 

©Alice Bolstridge, 2011. 

A pre-Libya version of this post was published as a Letter to the Editor

in The Star Herald, Presque Isle, Maine, 2-16-2011.

Stigma

            The American Heritage Dictionary says an archaic meaning of stigma is “a mark burned into the skin of a criminal or slave; brand;” the term has evolved to connote attitudes of disgrace or disrespect toward social abnormalities and “inferiors.”  However, the plural stigmata carries very different connotations of religious honor and high esteem: “Marks or sores corresponding to and resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus, sometimes occurring in religious ecstasy or hysteria.” 

            St. Francis of Assisi received stigmata, and the church canonized him as well as other bearers of stigmata.  Hysteria suggests the disrespect with which our modern culture generally views such phenomena, the beliefs that have surrounded them in the past, and the stigma that has always been and continues to be attached to mental illnesses: “abnormalities” of thinking, feeling, and behaving that “normals” shy away from, ridicule, or punish.  One constant in the evolution of the term, is that the bearer of stigmata—criminal, slave, or saint—suffers. 

            I was five years old, my first year in a small rural school, when an early memory of feeling stigmatized was formed.  It was in the spring of the year before a town meeting, likely part of a Social Studies lesson.  I can still see vividly that setting:  gray-haired teacher sitting in a chair, half-glasses perched on her nose,  children clustered around, most sitting at their desks, a few like me standing close to her, looking at the annual town report from which she read the list of town poor.  Our family’s name was first on the list. 

            I remember nothing else about the occasion except the shame I felt so promptly and profoundly that it must have been conditioned by earlier economically shameful events that I have no conscious memory of.  I knew that poverty so great as to get your name listed in a public report was a disgrace.

            The mark that left has never left me.  Regardless of whatever success or failure or financial security I attain, I suffer, at times, a sense that I am suffocating at the bottom of whatever social heap I find myself, that I am trying to squirm my way up—ambition—into what I imagine is the fresh air at the top, or squirm my way out—isolation—and escape the confines of the heap entirely.  Though I often force myself to act on the former rather than the latter urges, I mostly want to do the latter whenever I feel that flush of shame at some seemingly inconsequential slight.  Family born into, school, family created, work, community, nation, world— all are social heaps, and the larger the heap I imagine the greater the suffocation feelings, at times. 

We carry many stigmata imposed by culture:  shames about gender, sexual orientation, and other preferred sexual behaviors; shames about race,  ethnicity, religion;  shames about a variety of disabilities considered abnormal.  Some of my most troubling shames concern events associated with mental illnesses in my family and the stigma that surrounds them.    Over the more than three decades since my son was diagnosed with schizophrenia, I have worked very hard at refusing to allow social image to govern my feelings and actions with him.  Still, I am often too embarrassed to appear in some public places with him when he is most acutely suffering symptoms—poor hygiene, gesturing to his voices, laughing loudly at “jokes God tells.”  In allowing my behavior to be controlled by shame, I not only bear stigma, I support it and pass it on.  That adds to my shame, and it breaks my heart.  

Normalcy is a social construct; it requires early and sustained training.  We all mostly grow up and mostly learn to suppress and repress, to manage our image, to pretend we are fine all the time. We do this so successfully that we lose touch with our most basic desires, and the stigmata do not show much in what the world sees.  We lose our selves. We become normal and stigmatize the abnormal. This makes all of life tragic.  But those afflicted with a chronic and disabling mental illness are, by definition, unable to conform; and they are routinely stigmatized for their poverty as well as for behavior.   They squirm their way to the outer edges of the heap where they are ignored, harassed, or abused.  They suffer more from stigma than from the economic, mental, or emotional effects of their condition.  They isolate, neglect self-care, and retreat more and more into beliefs that are at odds with social norms.  Their most important and intimate relationships are wounded by stigma effects in ways that are never fully healed.

The persistent stigmatization of the poor and the mentally ill costs the whole society.  It costs money, a lot of money, for life-long care of these disabled many of whom, but for the effects of stigma, could be taxpayers.  And it costs in feelings of despair and powerlessness of them, their families, and all who would like to care for them.  It costs the world in the dreams of power through violence that it spawns and that some like Jared Lee Laughner act out.  When normals will react violently in protest against dehumanizing and disrespectful treatment, is it any wonder that some of the mentally ill will do the same and become the highly visible ones in the media—criminals, chronic drug addicts, sex offenders, serial killers, child or parent killers? 

The wonder is that, statistically, people with mental illness are not more violent than the “normal” population.  However, the statistics only consider criminal violence.  If socially sanctioned violence is considered—war; abusive treatment in asylums, jails, and prisons including capital punishment; institutionally hidden and thus socially sanctioned sexual assault; political assassination—socially normal people with power to exercise are far more dangerous than the stigmatized mentally ill. 

Surely these costs are known to all who think seriously about this issue, and yet stigma is still the primal glue of social cohesion.  Paradoxically, it affects behavior in ways that keep the glue cracking.   Slaves, ethnic and religious minorities, women, homosexuals, the jobless—all publicly revolt against cultural norms at great personal and social costs.  History provides a record of social infrastructures continuously coming unglued by such revolts. 

Families feud and break up.  Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies show the disastrous effects:  Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear are all ashamed and enraged by suspected betrayal of family-loyalty expectations.  Churches splinter, and nations war and fracture.  Fundamentalists of all faiths often torture nonconformists.  Wars all over the Middle East and the West continue an ancient family feud among the descendents of Abraham—Jews, Christians, Muslims—about revolting from approved ways.  Hitler and his Nazi followers, ashamed and enraged at suspected impurities, exterminated them as fast as they could.  That war divided nations all over Europe and the Middle East.  The painful hangovers continue with revolutionary protests now occurring all over the Middle East.

But surely we are making progress as a species with these social ills, aren’t we?  Women, homosexuals, blacks, and other racial and ethnic minorities, for instance, in this country are no longer routinely stigmatized institutionally by our laws.  At least not as much and not as overtly?   We have a black president.  And consciousness raising has turned the tables by stigmatizing insulting and disrespectful behavior and language directed at certain classes so that at least some groups of people enjoy some respite from the most overt ridicule and abuse that was normal practice only 60 years ago.  Things are slowly getting better, aren’t they?  Shouldn’t we be patient with the slow pace of social evolution? 

We ought to rest uneasily on any progress laurels, for there are compelling reasons to retain moral vigilance.  The numbers in the largest and costliest classes of people—the destitute poor, the mentally disabled, the criminal population—are not declining; they are increasing.  Who constitutes the largest numbers among the poor?  Women, children, racial and ethnic minorities, the mentally ill.   Who constitutes the largest numbers among the criminal population?  Men, minorities, the mentally ill.  That covers a lot of human territory. 

I seem to be on a tirade here, cursing the darkness of human suffering.  I hoped, as I always do, that this post would light at least one candle of understanding that could illuminate a direction at least, if not a genuine path, toward change in the way we socialize our children, and in the way we treat our unsocialized.  Perhaps the next post, or the next book, or . . .

Here, a very early memory, among my earliest:  A consequence of being poor and on welfare is that the state nurse visited us regularly when I was very small.  She pronounced my outie navel a rupture and taped a coin or button on it every time she came.  As soon as I could get away, I ripped it off.  If it was a whole quarter, I rushed to the village store and bought a Peppermint Patty and Orange Crush—ecstasy.  I never wore that cure.  My navel remained abnormal until I gave birth the first time whereupon it became normal on its own.  It has remained so to this day, except for later months of other pregnancies at which time it is normal to have an outie.  I enjoy this memory.  I see it as a time when I acted naturally instead of normally, when I simply tore away the patch on my abnormality and let it protrude. 

The suffering of stigma comes from the terrible tensions between social requirements and natural impulses as Sigmund Freud so eloquently explains in Civilization and its Discontents.  I yearn to put myself and my world in harmony with nature by doing something as simple as tearing away the patchwork.  Simple but not easy.  What is difficult is the willingness to change ourselves, to tear away our own prejudices without waiting for applause from the crowd, and then to pass on our experience whenever and wherever we can.  Thus we might, one by one, become a crowd and transform the world.

Comments Problems on This Site

I thought I had fixed the problem with comments not showing on this site, but they are still not showing up.  This morning I was reading through a copy of "The Liberal Drift of History" that I had copied off the site and pasted into a Word document.  At the end, I found 2 wonderful comments.  Amazing to me that I can copy and paste them when they don't show up on the site, and the Comments manager keeps informing me there are 0 commments.  I will keep trying to fix the problem.

In the meantime, to all of you who have tried to post comments and gotten no response, I will also be working on copying and pasting and READING.  This post will likely be continued as I go through that process.  Thank you so much. 

Is Peace Probable?

I conclude from exploring the question “Is Peace Possible?” 1 & 2 in January posts, and in observations of many people around me who live most of their lives without trying to solve problems with violence or force, that peace is clearly possible.  Yet, I am still haunted by vexing questions.  An old billboard on a side street on the other side of town says in stark white on a background of black, War is over if you want it.  Why do we choose war?  Why don’t we, individually and collectively, want peace enough to make it happen?

Decision makers cite a variety of reasons to choose war.  Force is necessary, they say, to create or keep the peace, to maintain law and order, to bring justice to the oppressed and afflicted, to defend ourselves when attacked, to combat thugs, ruthless dictators, and other evil-doers who attack our allies or other noncombatants.   Such justifications have been developed and codified by just-war theory that goes back, as outlined by Paul Christopher in The Ethics of War and Peace, as early as 600 BC in China and extended around the ancient world. 

I think it goes back much further, at least to the epic Gilgamesh.  Gilgamesh was an actual historical king in the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk, near the present-day Baghdad, Iraq around 2700 BC.  In the epic, he is also a great warrior and a terrorist who brutalizes his own subjects and soldiers as well as battlefield enemies.  He rapes and pillages with impunity, without conscience.   Enkidu, a wild man raised by animals and civilized by the temple prostitute, hears about the atrocities of Gilgamesh and vows to challenge him.  He finds Gilgamesh and fights him.  Gilgamesh wins the fight, but they form an enduring friendship.  In a series of adventures together, Enkidu tames and humanizes Gilgamesh’s ferocity and inspires the development of his conscience. 

The early record of just-war thinking indicates that war was already well established and that its horrors were even then concerning reformers, likely even before writing was invented to record it.  The theory attempts to prescribe rules for deciding to go to war and for waging it in a way that should make it more humane. It has evolved through the centuries to incorporate different applications for proliferating religious and political ideologies.  And it has attempted to move decision makers from using subjective and personal criteria for choosing war such as honor and glory in Gilgamesh and divine retribution in the Old Testament to supposedly more objective ones in our modern age. Thus four major criteria for humanitarian intervention are proposed by Christopher:  1.  “There Must Be a Just Cause.”  2.  “The Political Objective [Must] Be Publicly Declared by Lawful Authority in Advance.”  3.  “Humanitarian Intervention Must Be a Last Resort.”   4.  “The Costs Must be Proportional to the Expected Objectives.” 

For criteria to be objective, it must be capable of being applied in any situation at any time.  Consider the decision to go to war in Iraq.  The publicly declared assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which constituted a direct threat to the security of the United States was the just-cause rationale.  Accompanying that assertion, a rumor was circulated and believed widely that Hussein’s regime was linked with AlQueda and thus responsible for the 911 attack.  In addition, humanitarian intervention supported the just-cause argument for war because Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people and they were in need of liberation.  There was disagreement about how much of a last resort it was, the United Nations arguing that their interventions needed more time to work and the U. S. with its allies arguing that Hussein had been given too long already to mend his ways.  From this perspective, it looks like the costs and proportionality did not figure much in the public debate about the issue at the time of the decision, but aside from this, these reasons look like they fit Christopher’s criteria for just-war, humanitarian intervention. 

However, the WMDs were never found.  It turned out that Hussein had no links to AlQueda.   The people of Iraq were clearly in need of liberation from Hussein’s tyranny.  But in terms of their suffering, the costs of the war to the Iraqi people would at this point seem to be out of proportion to the benefits they have so far gained. For decision makers, all wars are just wars, with or without reference to any particular just-war theorist.  Both the Israelis and the Palestinians make a just claim to the disputed areas of their lands.  Both the totalitarian Taliban and the U. S. make a just claim to absolutist moral authority, the Taliban to divine authority and the U. S. to humanitarian ideals of democracy and human rights. 

In all its time of development, just-war theory has not made war more preventable, nor more humane.  Instead, it appears to provide a tool-box for justifying war that can rationalize, with the aid of lies, secrets, and rumors, unjust causes.  It has helped to make war the preferred choice in the face of inevitable and seemingly irresolvable conflict driven by differences.  It is much easier and more comfortable to do what we collectively know, can justify, and have practiced and prepared for throughout so much of our history that it feels natural.  It thus is one reason I’m persuaded peace is not probable.  

Another reason peace is likely more improbable now than before WWW II is the growth of the “military industrial complex” in the U. S. that President Eisenhower warned about.  Just-war excuses are used to justify this growth that demands war to sustain the complex and that has led to our military involvement all over the world.  That involvement is responsible for what some are aptly calling an empire.  In searching President Obama’s State of the Union Address, I found only one mention of peace: “This [policies toward Iran and North Korea] is just a part of how we are shaping a world that favors peace and prosperity.”  The linking of peace and prosperity with the sense of empire building (“shaping a world”) is very disappointing, to put it mildly.   Obama is the best choice we have, or had, and he is compromising on the most important liberal values for peace (See http://uppitynegronetwork.com/2011/01/27/we-do-big-things-celebrating-obama-as-head-of-empire-redux/#comment-3720.)  Such compromises do not resolve conflicts; they keep them alive.

All through this current national debate on what to do about the deplorable deficit, only the liberal left pays any attention to military costs.  So little major media attention goes to it that it appears to the public our military budget is justified as protection for our safety, our liberty, our democracy, our pocket books and the American way of life.  A military way of life is so well established and is so deeply embedded in our economy and politics that it will require a major reformation of national priorities and institutions to uproot it, and it is a major barrier to peace. 

A third reason peace is improbable is that what we get from war, with the help of just-war theory and the military industrial complex, is individually and collectively more immediately and intensely satisfying or pleasurable than the work of building peace, a fix of adrenaline excitement from patriotic or religious fervor, from anticipation of profit or power, or from other complex primal feelings. 

I remember intense feelings of the few times in my life I have resorted to violence, slapping the face of someone who insulted me.  Those times were decades ago, but I still remember vividly the power thrill of the spontaneous and unthinking rage and reaction.  The thrill was momentary, followed immediately in its wake by the flood of guilty conscience and a frantic rush to justify the violation of my own values for peaceful resolution of conflict.  

Like the emotions of the drug addict, the buzz of violent reaction can be irresistible, can drown out moral will, can even drown out the will to live.  In War and Peace, Tolstoy dramatizes some of these feelings of what he calls in the epilogue “the spirit of the army.”  In Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker explores such feelings in characters fighting in WW I.  Commander of a platoon of combat soldiers, Lieutenant Billy Pryor is being treated for shell shock.  When pressed for weeks by his psychiatrist to explain his feelings in combat, Billy finally says, “It’s sexy.”  He is eager to go back to battle. 

Billy means literally sexy, i.e. accompanied by physiological sexual arousal.  The sexual context of Barker’s trilogy and the pervasive practice of rape in time of war supports that he is being literal, not just metaphorical.  I don’t believe the contemporary common assertion, “Rape is not about sex.”  I do believe the follow-up assertion, “It is about power.”  Rape is about sex and power.  Though just-war theory would have “lust for battle” as well as rape condemned as motives, war, both the decision and the action are fed by complex personal emotions that largely go unacknowledged, at least in part because just war theory condemns such motives.  In our media culture saturated with sexuality, it paradoxically almost seems like a taboo, especially in relation to war and just-war theory, to discuss seriously the role of such motivating feelings in war and other forms of violence except to condemn them, which means we don’t understand them. 

With Billy’s pronouncement, Barker makes it explicit that there is a link.  In War and Peace, Victorian Tolstoy implies with the happy marriage of Pierre and Natasha that the answer to creating a lasting peace is to create domestic bliss in the home.   In this case, the benevolent despot Pierre as head of the household implies the link with power which leaves me unsatisfied with that part of Tolstoy’s solution.  Enkidu, the wild man, is civilized by sex with a woman.  Gilgamesh’s ferocious violence is pacified by the love of Enkidu. 

From studying in literature this relationship among sex, power, and violence for some time, I conclude that cultural attitudes toward sexuality and the relationship between sexual partners plays an important role, however unconscious, in motivating war and preventing peace.  Yet, I still do not understand it in a satisfying way.  I read American Taliban:  How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right, hoping to get some fresh insight.  The book is a persuasive rant about how the American right so much resembles the Taliban in its attitudes and actions.  Markos Moulitsas is preaching to a member of the choir in me, and he convinces me that the parallels he describes are accurate, so I enjoy reading it.  But I hoped for more insight into the dynamics of how personal motivations—sex, power, greed, etc.—apparently feed into and are fed by institutional and cultural violence in a feedback loop that makes peace very difficult and thus improbable to achieve without some dramatic rupture of the cycle.

A final, for this post, vexing question and barrier to peace is this:  Short of war or other means of violent force, what are we to do in the face of a Hitler, an Osama bin Laden, a Saddam Hussein, ruthless leaders who will murder, torture, enslave, rape, or commit any other atrocity to any number of people to accomplish their purposes?   The response of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and the Egyptian people of taking to the streets in mass protest seems to be the only effective answer we have, but Bin Laden is no Mubarack.  And while waiting for a less ruthless leader or other conditions to be right for mass protest to be effective, innocent noncombatants continue to suffer consequences of such leaders that affect the economy, the political stability, the personal lives and mental health of millions for generations and continue to feed the forces that rush to war.  

Peace in our time is improbable because of all of these complex reasons:  justifications we know and trust from a long and pervasive history fueled by feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, and intensity we crave in our every day lives that obscure the personal and unconscious motivations for war. Peaceful conflict resolution is hard work, it is not widely taught, and its rewards are delayed gratification with, apparently, nowhere near the intense excitement that violent conflict provides.  I myself, lifelong pacifist, kept falling asleep recently reading The Eight Essential Steps to Conflict Resolution.  I kept telling myself that it was because of the textbook style.  And it was partly that, but it was also and more because the examples described of the process and results of conflict resolution are not exciting in the way the drama of war is in the fiction of Tolstoy, Barker, Shakespeare, and numerous others.

Still, I continue to hope for increasing probability of peace.  Is it simply by faith that I maintain hope?  No, I have rational reasons, too.

Perhaps, the best hope of just-war theory is its failure either to prevent war or to make it more humane.  For, as the theory becomes more convoluted, logically complicated, supposedly objective and remote from the emotional base of personal life, it fails to justify war at all.  

The pace, strength and power of technological advancement, so much of it initiated and developed by the military industrial complex, paradoxically makes it harder to keep the secrets that support the choice to make war.  Whistle blowers such as Wiki Leaks increasingly expose the underpinnings of vengence, hipocrisy, greed, rationalizing, lies, and fear mongering that motivate decisions to go to war. 

The increasing proliferation of documentary films like Why we Fight also help to expose the secret unethical underpinnings of war.  In this film, the story of a Viet Nam vet’s grief about losing his son in the 911 attack on the World Trade Center is woven throughout the film.   It is a poignant reminder of the personal complicity of individual citizens in the decision to go to war.  He believed, along with most of the rest of the population, that Iraq was directly implicated in his son’s death, and he was a fervent supporter of the decision to attack.  His desire for vengeance (frequently called justice, and the distinction is often fuzzy) compelled him to request his son’s name be written on one of the first bombs to strike Baghdad.  He felt great satisfaction that his request was granted.  And then, as more information was gradually leaked that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, that the Iraq regime was not responsible for the bombings, he felt a betrayal that completely wiped out his sense of satisfaction and left him with his grief amplified by the loss of faith in his country and in its ability to make wise decisions.    

This story dramatizes important links between personal life and cultural institutions that suggests another reason for me to hope that peace will become more probable as we come to understand these links better.  The Web of Violence, eds. Jennifer Turpin and Lester R. Kurtz, did keep me awake and alert in spite of its textbook style.  This collection of essays focuses on linkages between the psychology of the subjective individual and the collective society, on the necessity to consider these linkages in understanding the causes of war, and on the things that can be done to create lasting peace: 

Cycles of violence cannot be solved either by transforming individuals on a case by case basis or by imposing nonviolent dictums from above but through a complex process of cultural and individual transformation. [. . .]  Historic cultural changes, however, do not take place without the courageous action of individuals who contradict existing cultural frames.    

Peaceful movements and leaders of my own lifetime have increased in numbers and strength.  The first formal academic programs in peace studies only began in the mid 20^th century.  Since then peace-studies programs at institutions and universities have proliferated:  “The existence of 200 peace studies programs on college campuses in North America and Western Europe provides powerful testimony for the desire of human beings to avoid Armageddon by studying peaceful ways to resolve conflicts”  (http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol3_1/Harris.htm).  More and more people speak about peace, study it, write about it, and join with others in actions to protest war and to promote peace.   

Because of these reasons and because I have the human ability to imagine, I have a vision of masses of people all over the world who come to desire peace so much that they take to the streets as we witnessed the people of Egypt do these last few weeks.    I have a vision of a war-free future, one in which peaceful conflict resolution and problem solving will replace war to resolve disagreements;  forgiveness and compassion will replace vengeance and hate in dealing with oppressors, tyrants, and greedy grabbers.  As the world becomes a kinder, gentler place to live, it will breed fewer and fewer Hitlers or Bin Ladens.  And those it does breed will have fewer and fewer followers and thus less and less strength.   War is over if and when enough of us want it and join in the chorus of voices demanding it. 

Is Peace Possible? 2

In the fall semester of 2002, as I do at the beginning of every class, I instructed students in World Literature to choose a topic for their term paper.  About one fourth of them chose to research war literature.  In the six years I had then taught these classes, I rarely had a student choose war literature. I asked them, one by one, “Why?” Most said they were motivated by interest in some variety of patriotic feeling:  honor, freedom, love of country and democracy, all culturally conditioned motives.  One said he wanted to explore how soldiers are affected by watching killing and killing in combat.  One, already destined for ROTC, said he didn’t know why.  When asked why he was in ROTC, he said, “For the education.”  Not one said he was motivated by anxiety or other feelings about the coming war with Iraq.  I wondered, Are they freely, rationally, and consciously choosing their topics? 

A lifelong pacifist, I was at that time an uneasy one for several reasons.  I felt that I did not do enough to support my beliefs with action.  I wondered what to do about leaders who unleash such terrible violence upon the world as suicide bombing, the holocaust, and the atomic bomb if we don’t fight such acts by force; and, most of all, I wasn’t then entirely persuaded that violence isn’t such a strong part of human nature that pacifism cannot be more than a fringe ideal of human culture.  In short, I was uneasy because I thought my pacifist will was weak, mostly confined to my beliefs, a mere phenomenon of consciousness as insubstantial as dreams, all in my head.   

           

That fall I read for the first time Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and was confronted with his extensive and persuasive argument that individual free will plays virtually no role in the fate or actions of human life.  He believes that human fate, both personal and public, is predetermined by innumerable forces beyond individual human will and knowledge, such as unconscious human emotions and desires, family and social expectations, history and the pressure of culture.   If he were to be writing in today’s scientific climate, he would also likely include genetics in that list.

           

The final pages of the philosophizing epilogue which follows the dramatic action of War and Peace contain a definitive argument for determinism of individual human destiny.    In those pages, Tolstoy explains apparent contradictions in his argument for determinism:

The problem lies in the fact that if we regard man as a subject for observation from whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical or philosophic—we find the universal law of necessity to which he (like everything else that exists) is subject.  But looking upon man from within ourselves—man as the object of our own inner consciousness of self—we feel ourselves to be free.

The final words in the novel are, “It is [. . .] necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist and to recognize a dependence of which we are not personally conscious.” 

If we do not have free will, how then can we be morally responsible as Tolstoy advocates?   Wouldn’t morality itself be as illusory as free will?  And if we do not have the free will to choose peaceful alternatives to violence and war in a world that teaches violence as a way of solving problems, how can peace be possible? 

There are other perplexing problems that complicate the issue of free will.  The evidence so far indicates that Jared Lee Loughner could and did act with a conscious and reasoning free will, made a decision, planned the attack, acquired the weapon.  Yet he is held to be not responsible by reason of insanity.  Paradoxically, many examples of people who do good things and act with impressive moral responsibility, such as those who attacked Loughner,  seem to get there by something innate and wild, something beyond conscious thought and reasoning.  Indeed, they often deny they are heroic because they did not think consciously about it.  I have myself argued elsewhere that “a wild pulse drives civilization as surely as it drives our human heart and passions, a pulse that beats to the rhythms of weather, trees, the smallest animals, and spiraling galaxies.”  At the time I wrote this, I didn’t think of this belief as determinist, but after reading Tolstoy I felt unsure and discovered one more belief to be uneasy about. 

In denying free will any meaningful place in human fate—personal or historical—Tolstoy is a determinist in what he sees as an orderly chain of causation.  The problem of free will and determinism is an old philosophical one that resists resolution.  A variety of philosophers have argued just as persuasively as Tolstoy that free will does exist and can affect human behavior.  In “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin gives an intriguing explanation of the contradictions inherent in Tolstoy’s world view:

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” [. . .] There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, [. . .] and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated, and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way [. . . .] Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second. [. . .] Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog. 

Berlin has an extensive discussion of the paradox of free will in War and Peace and of Tolstoy’s obsessive struggle to deny either heroes or villains a significant willful role in public affairs.   He says that Tolstoy never does resolve the dilemmas he has discovered, perhaps set up for himself, in his dedication to finding and telling the “truth” about human life: 

The primacy of [. . .] private experiences and relationships and virtues presupposes that vision of life, with its sense of personal responsibility, and belief in freedom and the possibility of spontaneous action, to which the best pages of War and Peace are devoted and which is the very illusion to be exorcised, if the truth is to be faced.

This terrible dilemma is never finally resolved. [. . .] Since we are not, in fact, free but could not live without the conviction that we are, what are we to do?  Tolstoy arrives at no clear conclusion [. . . .]

           

In denying free will, Tolstoy is following his hedgehog vision.  In insisting on moral responsibility, he is the unconscious fox, for choosing moral responsibility is an act of free will, and it yields a multiplicity of moral truths, beliefs, and faiths that drive actions as diverse as those of Mother Theresa’s or a Muslim suicide bomber’s. 

           

Though Einstein insisted that “God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” quantum mechanics is discovering a strange universe where events are not ruled by deterministic laws.  In “Free Will,” Sidney Calahan sees this brave new world as affirming the reality of mental phenomena:

Science [. . .] brings us face to face with a universe filled with randomness, variability, chaos theory, and odd quantum effects.  At the same time, psychology has experienced its own postbehavioral revolutions, “the cognitive revolution” followed by the “consciousness revolution.”  People think!  People muse, imagine and plan.  (Calahan)

And people weigh the pros and cons of alternative actions.  They choose, decide, act on their decisions, and monitor consequences.             So, in Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl describes his survival of the Holocaust by mental activity, his exercise of “spiritual freedom” (47) and “will to meaning”:

We watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints.  Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. 

           

Tolstoy himself dramatizes one of the most memorable acts of freedom in all of literature in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.  A few hours before his death, Ivan questions the meaning his life, and then he grows quiet and listens and discovers the answer:  that he has lived his whole life for all the wrong reasons, that love is the answer to the meaning of life.  His final acts are mere gestures, but they are gestures of love he appears to freely choose after about the most intense moral and mental deliberation that we are likely ever to make.  And Tolstoy justifies the civil disobedient act of refusing military service and payment of taxes for military service.  Such a morally responsible act that violates the law must, it seems to me, come from free choice.

But not everyone is able to act on such consciously moral decision making processes as Frankl does,  and not everyone who is able to do so does all the time.  Ivan Illyich does not do so until he, too, has to face a challenge that his customary responses fail to prepare him for.   Even someone as morally righteous as Job fails to become self reflective and self evaluative enough to be truly morally responsible until he is challenged by severe traumatic stress.  But we cannot assume that challenge and stress always leads to freedom.  We know now that many who are traumatically challenged end up with post traumatic stress syndrome and a weakened will rather than a strengthened one. 

The long-standing debate testifies that the existence of free will is hard to prove by empirical methods which depend on experiment and observation of data from the senses or from logic.   But as a mental phenomenon, freedom is as real as all the other abstractions that we find difficult to define precisely or locate in empirical reality, such as citizenship, patriotism, belief, faith, peace.   We will believe by the evidence of common sense and introspection that such phenomena of consciousness are real and influential realities that affect the course of human life and destiny.   Free will is an experience as real as love and rage and dreams. 

           

I have something of a hedgehog in me, and in my hedgehog ideals I would sweep up all the young soldiers headed for Iraq, Afganistan, or any other war-torn area and carry them away to some safe and remote Eden, but that is just daydream.  In my pacifist actions, I remain an uneasy and wary fox, my moral responsibility and free will continuously tested by experience of the world as it is, a reality more like a night dream, an unpredictable and scary place in which we must often navigate in the dark with senses beyond the five available to consciousness.          

Even so, I exercise my insubstantial free will, join the small band of peace paraders at the bridge every Sunday, work with the county and state Democratic Committees, write for peace, and teach from the perspective that we have free will—the mental faculty to choose from alternatives, to decide, and to act on a decision—and that, like muscles, that faculty must be exercised to be healthy.  We can believe peace is possible because we can imagine the impossible, and we can act on that belief.  We can attempt to influence others to believe and act.  By that process, our free acts can enter the possibly determinist chain of causation and, possibly, change its direction.

© Alice Bolstridge, 2011.

Is Peace Possible? 1

Sarah Palin’s map using cross hairs to target supporters of the Affordable Health Care Act is one of the most stunning images coming from the media coverage of the Tucson shooting aimed at Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her guests.   The explanation that the cross hairs were never meant to suggest rifle sightings is not convincing.  Palin’s follow-up tweet, “Don’t retreat, reload” persuades me that the criticism of her imagery and language is justified.   Nevertheless, it won’t help to scapegoat her or the right wing.  Such rhetoric, the first amendment assures us, that uses images of violence cannot be held responsible for pulling the trigger that killed or wounded those people however stunning and persuasive the image appears after the fact.  

People with the kind of serious mental illness that Jared Lee Loughner appears to have are also, by the legal definition of “insane,” not responsible for their acts.  He may have never heard of Palin’s map and still could have found the cultural ammunition to justify in his fragile mind the crime. 

When profiles of Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive - and creative - political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill - while intoning, "I'll take dead aim at [it]" - he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

Did Manchin push Loughner over the top? Did Emanuel's little Mafia imitation create a climate for political violence? The very questions are absurd - unless you're the New York Times and you substitute the name Sarah Palin.   (Charles Krauthammer, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011106068.html)

Yes, Charles Krauthammer, Emmuel’s little Mafia imitation does, along with all other such metaphors and acts of violence (legal and illegal), create a climate for political violence.  The question is not absurd.  What is absurd is the assumption that any person, especially those with severe mental illnesses, can act totally outside of the influences of culture.  After the civil rights movements with their consciousness raising, most of us no longer question the centrality of language in creating a climate that influences all of our behavior.  Most of us have learned to moderate our language when speaking of civil rights issues.    Certainly, we ought not to scapegoat Sarah Palin, nor Emmanuel, and we must forgive them; they too are cultural creatures.  But we should not excuse them, and we should judge their language. 

People like Loughner are like canaries in the mine.  They point to the vulnerabilities and dangers of our whole cultural climate.  Loughner does not act in isolation but rather within a cultural context of language, stories, images, policies, and practices, from both the left and the right, that encourages the use of violence.  From the macro global to the micro local, war, assassination, suicide bombings, torture, talk show hosts, Internet games, abusive political talk, and a seemingly infinite stream of imagery persuade too many that violence is not only effective to resolve fears and solve problems; it is also, in the power fix it can give, sexy and fun.  It sells.  It makes a lone gunman famous.

We may never know all the specific motivations of Jared Loughner, but we can already make educated guesses from what has been released about him that he was culturally influenced.  He feared the government, a fear he shares with a large and public segment of the population. With a semiautomatic pistol, a cultural tool, he claimed at least one moment of power over at least one government representative and her local entourage, and he gained quite a few moments of fame.  He forced the world to acknowledge him.  Who knows how many images from movies, TV, Internet games, and other media outlets feed into and support his actions, but it is safe to assume the number is huge.  How could it not influence him?

~

In view of the pervasive cultural climate of violence, is peace possible, or must we accept a large measure of violence as part of the human condition?  A number of people have attempted to discourage my pacifist activity with some version of the assertion, “You can’t change human nature,” an old refrain that began likely with the original-sin doctrine and underlies the insistence that life is a dualistic fight between good and evil.  Thinkers in the study of human nature have argued various positions about the nature-versus-nurture controversy.  Konrad Lorenz believes violence is deeply rooted in human nature and it has survival value.  Ashley Montague says no behavior is instinctual in human beings, that every action is affected by learning.  Margaret Mead uses field studies to support her argument that war is an invention practiced to resolve international conflict because a better solution has not yet been invented.  Edward O. Wilson says we are products of “bio-cultural evolution,” and all human behavior is affected as much, maybe more, by culture which is learned as by genetic inheritance.   Recent brain studies show that the brain is a plastic organ subject to change throughout life.  Its structure, chemistry, and activity are all affected by experience and learning.   Both Wilson’s work and brain research suggest to me that even a person with serious mental illness and impulses toward violence will make more peaceful choices if there is no cultural encouragement for violence and if there is powerful cultural encouragement for peace.  

My own analysis after reading widely in the area is that 100% of limits and possibilities of human behavior is determined by genes, and 100 % of human action is determined by the interaction of biology, experience, learning, culture, and choice.   Many argue, the famous pacifist Leo Tolstoy among them, that choice itself is not possible because human will is not, contrary to the teaching of the Judeo Christian Bible and promises of our constitution, free.  But that is a subject for another blog post.  Until I see better evidence than I have thus far seen, I will act as if I have free will.  And I will argue that culture has a powerful and in many cases determining effect on human behavior.  When Sarah Palin’s spokesperson asserts that there was no intention of suggesting rifle sights in that map, and when Jared Loughner selects a congresswoman to target and pulls the trigger, it is hard for me doubt that both the map’s composition and the shooting were affected by powerful and likely unconscious cultural influences that support and sustain violent action. 

It looks like peace is not possible without a sweeping global transformation of culture.  But transformation is possible because all of culture is learned.  Human nature can and does change.   The moderation of language that accompanied the civil rights movement has helped to change the culture in a more peaceful direction, at least in some areas.  So I will continue my pacifist activity, and it doesn’t matter if I will likely not see much transformation happen in my lifetime.  It doesn’t matter because I can not think of anything better to do with my life.

© Alice Bolstridge, 1-11-11

States' Rights

 Our newly-elected governor of Maine, Paul LePage, promises to protect states’ rights and get the federal government out of regulating how the state spends the federal money collected from its taxpayers and given back to the state in the form of social welfare and health care reimbursements, social security and veterans’ benefits, defense contracts, educational and infrastructure grants grants (Maine Sunday Telegram 12-05-2010).   Across the nation, the mantra of states’ rights echoes from the right which won landside victories in the recent election.  

I get mad at government, too.  Beginning with family, that primal dispenser of civilization’s control, and fanning out to community institutions—church, school, town, state, nation—I get mad at them all at times.  That is Sigmund Freud's point in Civilization and its Discontents.  The great impediment to human happiness is the control exercised by civilization over individual action, desires, and impulses.  He doesn't see a solution to the problem, and neither do I.  But does state government do a better job of providing for the people’s interests and individual happiness than the federal government?  There appears to be plenty of blame to go all around in our history. 

From Columbus onward Native Americans were viewed as an inferior race but good for work.  When they resisted attempts to enslave them, the federal government made war on them, attempted to get them out of the way, made promises via treaties which were not kept, forced the removal of children from their homes to boarding schools where they attempted to educate their culture out of them, squeezed them on to reservations, forced thousands on a long-distance trek in the dead of winter from the East Coast all the way to Oklahoma along the infamous Trail of Tears. 

The states have an even sorrier record with their legal practice of racism.  The secession of the south that led to civil war was a states’-rights issue.  It took federal intervention to abolish slavery.  And it took more federal intervention and over 100 years to abolish the subsequent segregation (Jim Crow) laws that continued to oppress Afro–Americans. See http://uppitynegronetwork.com/2010/11/24/modern-day-dixiecrats-the-tea-party-movement/#comment-3609. 

We still live with the unhappy hangover of legally sanctioned racism and sexism by both Federal and State Government.  The recent DREAM Act proposed by Congress would have provided a path to citizenship for children of immigrants, most of them Latinos, who have lived here most of their lives if they go to college or join the military.  It failed to pass.  Women did not have a legal right to vote until well into the 20^th century.  And, first proposed in 1923 and passed through Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment for women has still not been ratified by the needed 2/3 majority of the states to become law. 

When it comes to social justice issues, neither states nor feds by themselves have a great record.  But they can be and have been influenced by grass-roots movements that led to the major advances in civil rights legislation of the 20^th Century.  It takes great numbers of morally committed and passionate individuals and leaders to make such advances.  And it requires continuous vigilance and struggle against the forces of greed and power lust that strive to dominate governments.

Judging by the rhetoric from tea partiers and others on the far right responsible for President Obama’s shellacking, I suspect that those currently seeking to take back states’ rights from federal control, including our governor-elect Paul LePage, are driven by forces of greed and power and not by a moral commitment to seek equality and justice for all.   They are opposed to the DREAM Act, opposed to gay rights, opposed to meaningful health-care reform that might reduce profits of insurance companies, opposed to spending and taxing priorities that seek opportunity and justice for all that includes poor, differently abled, disenfranchised.  Do I sound here like an advocate for someone you know, or should know:  “the poor,” “the meek,” “the persecuted,” the peacemakers?”  I hope so.  I’m not trying to be original.

For better or worse, until something better comes along, we need government.  Rather than fighting over turf, I would like to see better cooperation between states and feds and much more public dialogue about the morality of governmental attitudes and actions on all levels.  I would like to see a “trickle-down” theory of morality put into practice, one that promotes peace, justice, and equality for all.

© Alice Bolstridge, 12-27-10