The fact of human essential goodness is our greatest hope—the foundation we rely on—for ultimately abolishing the despicable habit of war

by Judith Hand

• First, Mohandas Gandhi, the master student of social transformation, built his program for nonviolent social transformation on a fundamental belief about us: that humans are essentially good. Actually, I believe Gandhi would have said we are all part of the divine, and he would probably have included our rare sociopaths, which I would not. His technique, called satyagraha, relies on using love and understanding to bring out the best in others, to win them over to a better, less violent way, to empathize with them and in return gain their empathy.
• Second, to transform warrior, dominator cultures into more egalitarian, just, and less violent ones free from war we’ll have to use nonviolent means. We can’t build a peaceful future using violence, most certainly not the violence of war. And so our ending-war campaign, like Gandhi’s campaign to win India’s independence, will also be built on the foundation that people are at heart empathetic, altruistic, and caring…in short, that they are at heart “good.”
• And third, the essay stressed then current research available about human nature…whether it is in fact selfish or altruistic, mean or caring.

That essay is still available on the AFWW website.

In the intervening two years, support for this positive view of our nature has begun to pour in. The news is GOOD indeed.

Allomother Sarah Hrdy & Shanika Jayasuriya - Photo by Dr. Anula Jayasuriya

Frans de Waal

Not long after, out came another book, by anthropologist, Frans de Waal, (director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta). In The Age of Empathy. Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, De Waal approaches this question of our nature from his studies of primates: monkeys and apes.His work was among the very first, if not the first, to point out that even primates such as chimpanzees can empathize with other chimpanzees, and that they in fact have social mechanisms designed to repair relationships between individuals that become damaged because of social conflicts.

While some students of human behavior still argue for the provocative and violence-as-a-way-of-life “man-the-warrior” model of human ancestry, in an essay about the discovery of our very oldest ancestor known so far, Ardipithecus ramidus, I propose a “humans-as-cooperators” model. As noted by the specialists who did the arduous work of reconstructing what we know about Ardi, Ardipithecus ramidus has physical traits, especially their un-chimp-like teeth, that suggest they were socially very different from violence-prone chimpanzees. The males of Ardi’s kind were more likely to have been cooperators in the hunt for food to provision females and developing young and quite incapable of using their teeth to kill others in battles, as chimps do.

Douglas Fry

Another anthropologist who in the past few years is challenging the notion that we’re incurably violent and warlike and our ancestors always have been is Douglas Fry. His first book on this subject, The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence, strongly influenced my thinking, and the AFWW website provides a review of his second book, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace. Fry takes a critical look at artifacts that have been used to suggest that war goes into our deep past. He also presents careful analysis of nonviolent cultures studied by anthropologists, some of them entirely without war, to see how they resolve their conflicts.

Datcher Keltner - photo by Wendy Edelstein

Now on 8 December 2009 on the PhysOrg.com website comes a posting describing the work of researchers at Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits. They call it “survival of the kindest.”

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin firmly believed that competition was a critical component of natural selection, but it was his followers who invented the phrase “Nature red in tooth and claw” and applied it to our species. Darwin himself was convinced that our defining traits were cooperation and sympathy.

Which brings us to the current President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He, too, believes we are essentially good, each of us possessing an innate morality. I quote from his speech:

“The nonviolence practiced by men like Gandhi and [Martin Luther] King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached—their fundamental faith in human progress—that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey. For if we lose that faith—if we dismiss it as silly or naïve, if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace—then we lose what’s best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.”

Barack Obama

Will Obama live up to his promise? Will he fully earn that Nobel Peace Prize? The entire world waits expectantly to see, and many pray that history has delivered to us the right man for our troubled time.

While the daily news seems dire, and many of us suffer from a sense of hopelessness and now and then feel that maybe we’re just too stupid and violent and selfish to survive….it seems that may not be at all true of us. We may simply have got stuck for a time, out of ignorance of how to prevent it, in the destructive habit of war. With better understanding of our nature and of the causes of war, (www.afww.org), perhaps we can break the habit. For humanity, greater and better days may actually BE our destiny.

A fact that is little known to most people is that there are many societies that live virtually free of violence and quite a few that live without war.

The Human Potential for Peace - Douglas Fry, Ph.D.

A fascinating map of the centers of distribution of over 60 such socieites is taken from the book by the anthropologist Douglas Fry entitled “The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence.”

Fry also has written a second book, “Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace” and there is a good review of it on the AFWW website.

On this same subject of nonviolent cultures, another extremely interesting and useful resource is the website Peaceful Socieities.

Fry’s work and the very existence of these cultures that have found ways to deal with our inevitable human conflicts using nonviolent means….and certianly never resorting to war…offer insight. Clearly war is not primarly the result of our biology. It’s the result of the kind of cultures we have created and in which we now reside. And they offer hope, because if war isn’t a built-in spect of human nature, and there are people who manage quite well without it, then we can hope that by understanding what’s wrong with the way we are currently living we might shape a better, less violent future for our children and generations beyond.

Hadza Man

In a recent National Geographic (December 2009) you can feast on a marvous article by Michael Finkel, with photographs by Martin Schoeller, about an honest-to-goodness modern-day hunter-gatherer culture, the Hadza of Tanzania. How do they live? What do they do for fun? What, if any, are their rituals? What is their view of gods and how do they think about an afterlife? Finkel’s description of a night-time baboon hunt with bows and arrows is a gripping page-turner. And what part of the baboon is considered most delicious…which part did the author find like eating an eraser.

The point here about the Hadza is the peaceful and comparatively stress-free nature of their ways.

“A wealthy man is one who earns $100.00 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.”
H. L. Mencken

                            What Makes People Happy?

The following summary of what does and does not make people happy is based on the book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard. His book incorporates years of cross-cultural studies by numerous investigators that reveal common human traits with respect to happiness.

Happiness - Richard Layard

At first thought one might expect that happiness, like love, can’t be measured. But in fact, self-reporting schemes do allow us to assess how happy people think they are. And that, after all, is what is important. How happy do people consider themselves?

For years researchers have given surveys to people from countries all over the globe, asking how happy people feel at the moment and what makes them happy in general.

For example, Harvard students were asked to choose between two possible worlds and asked which they would prefer. Here are the choices:

In the first world, you would get $50 thousand a year, while other people get $25 thousand (average).
In the second world, you get $100 thousand a year, while other people get $250 thousand (average).
The majority of students preferred the first world. The same result is found across classes and cultures.

What this simple study shows is that we feel wealthy in comparison to those around us, regardless of how much we actually make. Whether you’re happy depends on how your income compares with the norm. If you earn an average or higher income, you are likely to be happy with your financial condition. If you fall well below the average, you are more likely to rate yourself as not happy. And the measuring stick we use is people around us: not paupers, film stars, or corporation heads.

This is why economic growth does NOT improve happiness: as incomes rise, the norm by which we judge our own position also rises. The United States, for example, is the richest country in the world, but because we compare ourselves to those around us, U.S. citizens are not any more or less happy than people in less wealthy countries.

Moreover, the happiest people are those who always compare down, not up. When things are looking miserable, mothers often tell their children to consider others who are even less well off. These mothers are teaching a lesson in happiness.

For example, in the Olympics, bronze medallists rate themselves as much happier than silver medallists.

Olympic Medals - China 2009

Why? Because the bronze medallists have a medal. They are comparing themselves to all the others who have no medals at all. They likely didn’t expect to beat the top competitor. Silver medalists, on the other hand, compare themselves to the holder of the gold, feeling unhappy because they were close—but not quite up to winning the gold.

“I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”

Based on these studies, we might be surprised to discover some of the things that do not relate to happiness. These include:

Age
Gender
Looks
IQ
Education (except to the extent that it affects income)

Some of the things that do make us happy include:

Family relationships—these are more important than any other single factor
Financial situation, not luxuries, but how we stack up next to those around us
Work, when meaningful, can be more important than the money
Community and friends
Personal freedom
Personal values, our inner self and attitudes and philosophy of life

To create a world in which people are so happy that they cannot be moved to make war, we will need to:

• foster connectedness to family, community, and friends,
• create and sustain a large middle class (see Spread Democracy) where vast numbers of people can compare themselves down to others of less wealth and at the same time, realistically hope to move up,
•  spread liberal democracy and the sense of personal freedom it provides (see Spread Democracy), and
• teach our young people positive attitudes of mind. Teach them how to be happy (see Foster Connectedness).

“People are as happy as they decide to be.”
Abraham Lincoln

The Single Most Important Idea Needed to End War is the Belief that it is Possible

When the AFWW website was first envisioned (2003), most people were highly skeptical that humanity could ever escape the curse of war. If asked, “Do you believe it is possible for humans to create a future without war,” the overwhelming majority of people answered, No.

They said it was a wonderful concept, something they could wish for, but not realistically possible.

AFWW Logo - 9 Cornerstones

No man gives generously of his hard-won financial resources to the bottomless pit of a lost cause.

No woman works tirelessly to reach a goal her heart believes can never be reached.

No one passionately reaches out to enlist others in a campaign that’s a fool’s dream.

No politicians will wage a campaign to end wars if they judge the idea to be ridiculous. We may admire Don Quixote’s willingness and unswerving determination to dream the impossible dream, but we don’t want to be him.

WPBP - Male/Female Partnership Peace Dove

We can never build something magnificent if we don’t believe in its value and in our ability to accomplish the task. To end wars, we must believe it is possible.

• to highlight the importance of belief (see Embrace The Goal)
• to briefly describe nine cornerstones upon which a campaign strategy to end war must be built (see Nine Cornerstones)
• to place this effort in its historical context (see How Far We Have Come)
• to suggest a vision to guide a campaign to end wars (see The Vision Thing)
• to indicate the nature of an essential Secret Ingredient and catalyst for change, and
• to indicate how long this campaign might take (see How Long It Will Take)

Explore all of these essays at the website, and others as well, and you’ll have a better sense of why and how a campaign to abolish war can succeed in two generations or less from the time we resolve to do it.

When we have done our work and we have generated a critical mass of believers, nothing will be able to stop this “idea whose time has come.” Human cultures can change with amazing speed. Less than 100 years ago women of high status in China had their feet bound — the bones broken and the flesh pinched — to suit an ideal of beauty that was deeply embedded in Chinese customs. Barely 100 years ago women in New Zealand won the right to vote — we now have women at the highest levels of government in many countries around the globe. For thousands of years slavery — the owning of one human by another — was considered necessary, normal, acceptable. Great and famous people owned many slaves. In Britain the abolitionists ended the slave trade and in so doing, they delegitimized slavery, hopefully forever.

In fact, huge changes can occur in a generation or less when we really put our mind and resources to it. One of the greatest and most rapid changes ever accomplished was achieved in a wide variety of places as the Catholic Church Christianized entire cutlures, sometimes in less than a generation. 

What is the great challenge of our generation?  It is to put an end to war. In the process we put in place the rule of cooperation, collaboration, negotiation, and compromise.

And we need to be quick about it, because an avalanché of massive problems–social, political, and ecological–is descending upon us.

by Judith Hand

Liberian Women Rock!

Liberian Women's Peace Movement

Are you a skeptic, quite sure it would be impossible to abolish war?  Maybe you think there is no way for a nonviolent strategy to succeed in changing how we live for the better if it means ending war.

Skeptics tend to feel nonviolence can’t work for a variety of reasons. In a great many cases it’s because they’re unaware of successful applications. The media do not place much emphasis on nonviolent successes. A remarkable contemporary example comes out of Liberia, a small country in West Africa.

Liberia isn’t a “natural” African nation. It was formed when freed slaves from America returned to Africa at the end of the U.S. civil war. This movement didn’t last very long, but it resulted in a country with a constitution, a democracy, and a name.

Things did not go well.  Over time, Liberia degenerated into a tyrannical dictatorship, most recently under the presidency of Charles Taylor. In 1999, a “second civil war” broke out. This set off the barbaric use of rape, mutilation, and murder, something seen elsewhere in Africa as well. Some studies indicate that 90% of Liberian girls and women would experience rape in the lifetime.

After eight years of this mayhem, social activist Leymah Gbowee had a dream one night and when she awoke, she decided to call the women of her church together to pray for the end of the war.

Leymah Gbowee

By the end of the meeting the women had pretty much decided that something more than prayer was necessary. They decided to begin a campaign, a nonviolent campaign, in which they would seek to have an audience with Taylor, to convince him to join in peace negotiations. They would wear white T-shirts and turbans, they would stake out the road along which his caravan drove each day, and they would stake out the market. They would not give up until Taylor conceded to see them.

Then a woman stood up to say that, the fact was, she wasn’t a Christian. She was a Muslim, and she knew a lot of Muslim women who felt exactly the same way. Women of the two faiths joined together and began their “action.”

It was said of Charles Taylor, who put on a great show of piety,  that he was so evil that he could “pray the devil out of hell.” An inspiring film entitled “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” documents how things worked out, including how the women of Liberia held their men hostage until a peace agreement was signed. But that’s not the end of the story. When it came time for the next election, the women of Liberia helped elect Harvard Educated Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as the first elected women head of state on the African continent.

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

At this time (2009), Johnson-Sirleaf and Liberia’s men and women struggle to build on this wonderful transformation in a land that is bitterly poor and crippled with a debilitating history of strife. But clearly, a determined and savvy application of nonviolence could cut through a nasty, brutal, violent civil war even in this day and age.

If the nonviolent techniques described by Henry David Thoreau and perfected by Mohandas Gandhi could change the world, why haven’t they already done so?

Hope or Terror - by Michael Nagler

But history seems to suggest that they don’t work. Certainly not on a large scale.  Sure a skirmish is won nonviolently here and there.  Women in the U.S. get the vote.  Racial segregation is ended in the southern U.S.  But our warring and violent cultures seem pretty much stuck on mayhem. One step forward and two steps back, right?

“To Date, Nonviolence Movements Were Before Their Time. Now They Are Poised to Change History.”  This essay by Judith L. Hand is devoted to the subject of nonviolent movements for social transformation … why they have so far failed to transform the world … and why they are poised to do so now.

Alice Paul

 We learn a bit about:

• nonviolence pioneers like the suffragist Alice Paul, Mohandas Ghandhi himself, and the extraordinary Muslim, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, often called Badshah Khan.
• successful nonviolent actions around the globe, noteworthy since most folks are unaware of just how very many there have been.
• how and why human nature has so far defeated the very best human attempts to end the extraordinarily bad habit of war, something most likely caused by putting hunter-gatherer males into a brand new environment, viz. settled living
• how a series of major historical changes, from the Reformation to the invention of the Internet has brought us to a unique window in time during which we could at last transform our violent cultures, if we choose to do the work and make the sacrifices necessary to achieve succees.
• how we have in front of us a vista of great hope.
  

  Gandhi and Khan

Having offered hope, however, the essay provides a warning, introduced as follows:

“With all of this positive promise going for us, the very worst thing we can be is complacent, so buoyed by the positive that we overlook the negative, and thereby ultimately loose the struggle. Nonviolence is a powerful positive force. Equally powerful negative forces arrayed against us never sleep. They don’t take time out for vacations. They certainly don’t take time out to smell the roses. Principle among these I would list the spreading sickness of terrorism, the persistence of ignorance, the ease of sloth or indifference, the potential social and cultural breakdown as negative consequences of global climate change assail us, and the extraordinarily motivating force and deeply entrenched culture of violence and greed. We are in a race, a terrible race, and the stakes could not be higher.”

Treat yourself, educate yourself, with this interesting, informative, and hope-filled essay.

by  Judith L. Hand

A Film Written, Produced, and Directed by Michael Moore

Cutting to the bottom line immediately, AFWW urges that every citizen of the USA who loves the country and believes it still has the capacity to reclaim its democratic roots and liberating ideals needs to consider it a responsibility to see Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story“—maybe more than once, to ensure full understanding.

One of AFWW’s nine cornerstones emphasizes that any campaign to end war must include the spreading of fully mature[i], liberal democracies and their preservation from degeneration.

AFWW Logo - 9 Cornerstones

Liberal democracies[ii] are the best means humans living at high densities have invented thus far to prevent leaders of any stripe from launching a war. An essay on the AFWW website explores why this is so, as does the book, Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace.

Democracy alone, however, can’t prevent the success of war-mongering, as citizens of the United States who were persuaded to invade Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction know all too well. Nevertheless, leaders who must answer to the people in order to stay in power are better restrained in a healthy, liberal democracy.

Having said that, it must also be said that it’s unfortunate that the documentary film maker resorted, in order to make his case, to redefining capitalism. Moore’s essential message is that “capitalism” is evil. Not flawed, but evil. An evil that doesn’t need to be tweaked, but totally eliminated.  

Now the sad mess Moore so compellingly portrays is evil, if evil is defined as a system that slowly bleeds and crushes the masses in order to fatten the elite.  If evil if defined as corruption of legislators so that they legislate in ways that enrich the elite at the expense of the common good. 

Adam Smith

Yes, THAT “capitalism” is evil. But what has evolved in the USA in the over 230 years since Adam Smith wrote about free markets is NOT capitalism.

Moore at one brief point essentially concedes this when he names our system a plutonomy – basically a system in which 99% of the people work to provide vast riches to 1% of the people.

When a proponent, in order to make his or her point, redefines a familiar word, one with a widely recognized meaning, the result tends to be confusion, not enlightenment. Capitalism, as described by Adam Smith and as originally embraced by the USA and as general understood by most folks, is in fact a great creator of wealth for the many and an incentive engine for creativity.[iii] Capitalism as originally conceived and properly regulated isn’t evil.  Ask the many women around the world who have been granted microloans just how helpful a little capital can be. Or how vital it is to be able to own your own land (something forbidden to women in many countries). Moore would have been more accurate had he not faulted “capitalism” as the evil but the plutonomy that over time has replaced it.

Had Moore taken that tack, it would have been true and would more importantly have illustrated the phenomenon to which AFWW refers repeatedly: over time, any system of governing or economics that is run by males only will ultimately reflect characteristic human male urges for dominance, for the gathering of power into the hands of a few at the top. And the longer any male-only system persists, the deeper it sinks into the inequality that we all sense is inherently repugnant to our shared sense of fairness as human beings.

What Moore urges at the end, with a stirring call to action, is that what Americans who are mad-as-hell-and-aren’t-going-to-take-this-any-more should do is to embrace “democracy.” Not democracy as the process of deciding political leaders, but democracy in the workplace. As used in the film, democracy represents conditions in which “the people” reclaim power and have a share in the ownership of the businesses they work in, businesses in which CEO’s and workers have a shared stake in the rewards of success…and the perils of failure.

Moore’s depiction of the slow death of unions, which were a means to give people a voice in their workplaces, is masterful. His depiction of the accretion of power by Wall Street is clear and compelling.  In this film, Moore seeks to reach hearts and minds with insight into the disaster that has happened to capitalism, and the dangers that this disastrous consolidation of power into the hands of the few poses for our democracy.

It’s clear how this should be important to U.S. citizens who love the USA’s founding ideals: that government should be of the people, by the people, and for the people so that they can pursue happiness.  But how does all of this concern AFWW? How does this massive concentration of power in the hands of the few relate to AFWW’s mission to lay out a convincing case for the abolition of war? 

One of AFWW’s nine pillars, or cornerstones, of a strategy to create a warfare transition is that we must “Spread Liberal Democracy.”  As already stated, democracy, when fully mature, is the single best means we have yet devised for curbing the ambitions of over-weaning war-mongers.[iv] Leaders determined to make war can override the will or good sense of the people, especially if those leaders control the flow of information, but in a democracy it is more difficult to gain and keep public support for a war.  Most people, it turns out, don’t like to send their sons (and now daughters) off to fight and die elsewhere, so if given the choice to use other means to resolve conflicts, the people will choose other means.

The significance for AFWW is that if our democracies do not survive and fully mature, if democratic rule does not spread globally—if ultimately the democracies fall by terrorist means, by social disintegration due to the ravages of climate change, by devolution into tyrannies, or by any unforeseen cause—one of the necessary pillars of abolishing war will collapse and our cause will fail.  Rome fell. We dare not be complacent.

Can this great nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people” reclaim that youthful and profound heritage, or will it continue to slip down the infamous “slippery slope” to imperialism and ultimately tyranny?

“Capitalism: A Love Story” provides all of “the people” with a compelling and urgent wake-up call to action.

 [i]  A “fully mature” democracy: one in which men and women are represented in roughly equal numbers in governing bodies and where all subsets of the population have a share in representation that is roughly proportional to their numbers. Length of existence is not the deciding factor for maturity.

 [ii] “Liberal democracy”: voting alone will not produce a democracy able to restrain hyper-alpha males. People can freely elect illiberal, authoritarian leaders (Hitler’s Germany, Russia of 2000-2008). A liberal democracy must include many features, among them the rule of law protected by a constitution, independent and impartial courts, separation of state from religions, equality for all under the law, freedom of speech, and protection of property rights.

 [iii] Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital good, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market

 [iv] As of 2001, no democracies were yet fully mature;  Sweden, with 42.7% of the representatives in their parliament being women and women in substantial numbers in other governing bodies, was perhaps coming closest (see data from the International Parliamentary Union:  http://www.ipu.org/english/Whatipu.htm) or go to the website of the Inter-parliamentary Union and follow the links for Women in Parliaments: http://www.ipu.org/wmn-e/world.htm.  The overwhelming majority of the world’ democracies remained light-years from full parity in governing.

Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn

Empowered women, it turns out, are the catalysts for abolishing poverty and spurring a community’s or nation’s economic development.

Half the Sky, the book by NY Times Reporter Nicholas Kristoff and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, lays out examples and data to compellingly support the truth of this powerful “woman effect.”

For years, books, papers, and studies have pointed to this same critical point….that empowering women is good for us. Think of the work of the Heifer Foundation and its loans of the means to make a decent living to women in poor, developing countries, or the micro-loan system developed by Nobel Prize Winner, Muhammad Yunis, in which roughly 96% of loans were made to women.

Each of these projects found that giving small aid to women, rather than men, had a better overall outcome for the recipient’s family or community. Reduced to simplest terms, creating social stability in their community, AFWW argues, is a strong female motivator, and women in general spend and use their resources accordingly. For men, the equally strong motivator is to achieve or maintain status, and men in general tend to spend their resources accordingly. The results documented by these groups and in Half the Sky reflect these very fundamental male/female differences.

While others have attempted to make the same point, that empowered women can be economic powerhouses, this husband and wife team have gathered so many statistics and personal stories into one place that it makes an especially compelling case. This book is, for all of us, Good News.

But empowering women isn’t only good for ending poverty and improving the economic conditions of developing nations. One of AFWW’s major efforts is to convince a critical mass of the earth’s citizens who are people of good will that empowering women so that they are full partners with men in our governing bodies is also the key catalyst to abolishing war.

And BTW, as we travel the path to the goal of ending war, we’ll also vastly improve social conditions in our communities and countries.

Ardipithecus ramidus female

From early speculation in “Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace” (2003) about a possible nonviolent and women-centered Minoan civilization and the physical similarities humans share with bonobos, such as hidden ovulation, continuous sexual receptivity, and frontal sexual intercourse, to more recent essays, Dr. Hand, and AFWW, has been inclined to say it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that we have not always made war!   

Book (FREE download): Women, Power, Biology of Peace

Essay: Nonviolence Movements Before Their Time

Two other scientists offering work suggesting that warfare may be a recent behavior for Homo sapiens have been featured on the AFWW website, including reviews of their books: 

        Douglas Fry – Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace  This book reviews studies of hunter-gatherer cultures, many of which are nonviolent, and concludes that war is not universal or inevitable.

        Sarah Blaffer Hrdy – Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding  This book looks at the origins of human capacities for altruism, cooperation, sharing, and caring. It suggests that the need to care for extremely dependent young lies at the root of such behavior, and that raising of such dependent young is more likely than war to have been the basis from which our amazing feats of cooperation spring.

Now comes more good news in the form of discovery of the oldest primate ancestor of Homo sapiens, a fossil species called Ardipithecus ramidus that is 4.4 million years old. What is so remarkable about Ardi when trying to reconstruct the origins of war is that at least two traits in this fossil hominid are quite unlike the chimpanzees, the highly aggressive human relative that has been extensively used as the model from which to speculate on human evolution.

Unlike chimpanzees, the canine teeth (eye teeth) of Ardipithecus males are small and blunt, clearly not the long and sharp fighting weapons of chimpanzees. Given that Ardi lived in a period of time before the use of even stone tools, let alone weapons, the idea of warfare resembling the skirmishes of chimpanzees, in which canines are the weapons, seems highly unlikely given those reduced teeth.  And in body size, male Ardipithecus are not much larger than females…there is very little size dimorphism. Chimpanzee males are significantly larger than females, and chimpanzee males dominate females.

Ardipithecus ramidus. 4.4 MYO. Illustration: Jay Matternes, Science Magazine

The relatively small degree of size dimorphism and those small male eye teeth suggest that male Ardipithecus did not fight with each other for access to females.  It also hints that perhaps female Ardipithcus, like living female bonobos, were either equal in dominance status to the males or perhaps even dominated the males. 

 Another notable anthropologist, Frans de Waal, is now toying with the notion that perhaps we have not always made war, nor do the roots of war go into our deep past. He has a new book, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, which explores our more peaceable side.  Use this link to check out his thoughts about Ardi. 

While certainly not proving that ancestors in our deep deep past did not make war, Ardi puts to rest the notion that chimpanzees are acceptable models. It looks like perhaps we humans have in fact have much more in common with the “peaceable bonobo” than the aggressive chimpanzee.

For those of us fighting to put an end to war, this shift in the scientific paradigm offers increasing support that we are NOT genetically predetermined to always kill each other. That war is a culturally induced phenomenon, most likely the result of putting male hunter-gatherers into the brand new environment of settled living.

Egyptian Plowman Mural

The result of taking up settled living argues Dr. Hand, based in part on Fry’s analysis, was the subsequent development over many generations and long periods of time of several very negative, unintended consequences: the emergence of dominance hierarchies with males dominating females, the loss of female power in community decision-making, extensive overuse of local environmental resources, and the emergence of war.

Bottom line: new data and reanalysis of old data is moving perceptions of the essence of our origins in the direction of stressing “humans-the-cooperators” rather than “man-the-warrior.”

This is our first “Good News” item, and Tops the List!

U.S. President Barack Obama

The world at large didn’t much question the choice. The world at large is enthusiastically aware of how much Barack Obama accomplished in the last year to advance peace. Most notably, by his night-to-day change of tone on public and global relations to emphasize cooperation and dialogue, and by his aggressive movement to begin eliminating nuclear weapons.

In the United States, however, controversy reigned. In part due to extreme political polarization of the electorate. But also because even folks who like the President are used to Nobel Prizes being awarded for actual accomplishments. Accomplishment is always obvious in other categories such as Physics, Medicine and Physiology, and even Literature.

But individuals who are not world travelers or have not been abroad in the last year have been unable to see and feel the hopeful, joyful impact globally of this U.S. President. For folks who are more or less insulated inside the U.S., it’s easily possible not to “get it.” They don’t feel that he has accomplished much yet….only that his administration holds promise.

For the rest of the world, though, no single person in the last year has done as much to forward the cause of peace. As one of the Nobel committee members pointed out, that’s exactly what Alfred Nobel intended the prize to reward: the person that in each category who has “within the last year accomplished the greatest benefit for humanity.”

Obama richly deserves the Prize, and for those of us wanting to abolish war, the hope his administration offers is very good news.