“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.

Abolishing war is a massively complex project: the simple designation – Shift Our Economies – covers and lot of ground. In fact, each of the AFWW 9 cornerstones does so. This newsletter zeros in on one of many critical things that must be on our economics “to do” list: budgeting and spending, using the United States as an example. The principles apply, however, to the budgets of all nations, and even the budgets of our individual lives.

Government Spending

The above pie chart lays out the U.S. Budget – discretionary and non-discretionary – for 2009. The segments from the dark blue at the top right going around clockwise to the peacock blue at the bottom left are nondiscretionary spending (social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment/welfare/other, and servicing national debt). These are allocated by law and the spending on them is not optional.

The remaining pie slices are discretionary spending – other things considered sufficiently important to allocate tax money to them.  It is in discretionary spending especially that we learn what our priorities are.

U.S. Discretionary Spending

U.S. Discretionary Spending

What the U.S. spends on war—creating new weapons, producing them, waging wars, caring for the damaged lives of warriors afterwards—is the U.S. military budget, in red and call “Pentagon.”  It is the budget of the Defense Department (or perhaps more correctly called by its original name, the War Department).

The X stands for “emergency” war funding and other “black” projects that are not officially in the Defense budget.

What is spent on preventing wars—foreign aid, diplomacy, education, spreading democracy, nurturing ties with allies—is found in the green sliver at the bottom left and called “International Relations.” It’s the budget of the State Department. It’s the amount the people apparently feel is worth putting into avoiding wars.

Note that the small white wedge to its left is what budgeters feel it’s worth spending to end one of the big causes of war, hunger.

Any person who looks at this allocation and who knows that what you spend your money and time on is what you really care about and who knows that you cannot create a peaceful future by military means immediately knows at gut level that these proportions are totally out of whack if not insane.  They are not rational.  They are way more likely to lead to more wars. Sane people do not want wars—unless they stand to benefit greatly.

The problem is proportion, not eliminating the country’s Defense Department. Our strategy must include living in the world as it is now as we work toward positive transformation. The democracies must remain strong and orderly in a world where opponents want to destroy them. One of AFWW’s cornerstones, for this reason, is called “Provide Security and Order.”

Realistically, the world needs, and into the foreseeable future will need, armed peacekeeping and peacemaking forces. It would be better if this was done by a well-funded international body, but the United Nations so far doesn’t’ adequately fill that task. It often falls to the United States, perhaps with allies, to provide serious peacekeeping services, and these are part of the “defense” budget.

For example, U.S. military ships across the globe are critical to suppress rates of piracy….an increasing problem. Another example: many nations keep their military budgets low and can focus on other priorities (we’d like to think, worthy ones) because they have a defense treaty with the U.S.…they count on America to assist if they are invaded. This has even allowed some to voluntarily take advantage of unilateral demilitarization, most notably Costa Rica.  There is no question that someone has to pay for peacekeeping, and some of what the U.S. spends serves that worthy goal.

To repeat, the question is proportion. The current U.S. budget woefully lacks foresight or any evidence of a serious intent to prevent war. Which means, we need to be asking the question, “Just exactly who benefits greatly from the making of war.”  We need to “follow the money”—the money trail and the desire for power.

And we need to be honest and hard-nosed as we search. To abolish war, we must first understand its true causes.  A major stumbling block, or barrier, in the search for what is true, is our strong human proclivity for either mass shared fantasy or mass self-delusion. The possibilities for its expression for either good or ill cannot be overstated. One delusion shared by many is that by making war it is possible to secure and maintain peace.

Unless we take special care, we can be easily flimflammed. War supporters use the media to distract our attention to superficial or even made-up causes—trunks and leaves—so that we don’t see the sustaining roots: a lust for power, dominance, and control over other people, usually by controlling vital or desirable resources. In warring societies, that drive characterizes a small minority, nearly always men, who are willing to kill to achieve dominant status and are able to convince others to support their agenda. They are the generators of war, a tail that has been wagging the dog for millennia.

It’s time for the people, who in the end do the suffering, to spot these war mongers among us early on, and immediately deny them access to the tools of war. Once the blinders are off, it’s surprisingly easy to recognize them: they are anyone who in essence says, “In order to ‘solve this problem/keep us secure/protect liberty/give us access to the resources we desperately need to survive/spread the light of our religion/et cetera’ we must go kill those other people.” Not talk to them, or negotiate with them, or share the world’s natural wealth with them, or allow them to live as they see fit so long as it is in peace—no, we must kill them.

Our budget priorities reflect our intention.

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.

It’s strange but true that most things are not all good or all bad. We humans can take lemons and make lemon meringue pie.  Here’s the story that goes with the picture below.  In the classic film “The Day the

GORT and Klatu

Earth Stood Still,” Michael Rene played a spaceman who comes to earth, accompanied by a robot he calls GORT.  

     We learn as we watch that GORT has enormous, ominous powers. The spaceman’s task is to deliver the message that the other inhabited worlds that are space voyagers have conquered war (if they ever had it), and they do not tolerate the existence of any planet capable of spaceflight that will not renounce war.

     And the stunner at the film’s end is when the space messenger explains that he will leave, but he will leave GORT behind – that GORT is a kind of galactic policeman, and if the earth does not end the practice of war, GORT will eliminate the planet. Given what the spaceman has already demonstrated that GORT can do, the threat is frighteningly believable.  It’s a powerful message.

     If a viewer is a positive thinker, he or she leaves the theater feeling that at long, long last, humanity will grow up and end war. The point here, however, is that it takes this threat from without to make us behave, to make us pull together.

    On good days, when I’m looking for any possible positive spin on Climate Change, I’m praying that the onrushing environmental disasters we face may serve as our GORT and force us to pull together.  North, East, South, and West. Because we will pull together or civilization as we’ve known it could very well collapse.  Collapse has happened to other societies who doubtless thought they would last forever, and sometimes for the same reason although on a smaller scale…their activities eventually altered their resource base so extensively that they perished.

    Many organizations are working to avert the collapse of our global social order as we face the oncoming tragedies which, regrettably, it is already too late for us to avoid. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore works tirelessly to enlighten and spread the word. There is the Clinton Climate Change Project, and 350.org, and others. Just Google “climate change.” In fact, here we are today, on International Blog Action Day (www.blogactionday.org) highlighting this enormous challenge.

     The raison d’être of A Future Without War (www.afww.org) is to explain, using the perspective of evolutionary biology, why we make war and what will be required of us once we commit to abolishing it. Such a massive paradigm shift, arguably as huge as the Agricultural Revolution, will require what can perhaps best be described as massively distributed collaboration by millions of people and organizations. Even if everyone were to agree that the cause of ending war is worthy, long overdue, and the only sane way for us to proceed into the future, how can we possibly unite so many?

AFWW Logo - 9 Cornerstones

     This is the greatest challenge for AFWW: to convince masses of us that abolishing war is possible, that it’s worth the effort it will take, and then unite us into concerted and focused action.  

     So is there any possible reason to hope that anything could convince millions to unite to end war?  The resources we spend on wars of all sizes—on research for new weapons, on designing and manufacturing weapons, on purchasing weapons, on the waging of wars and the incredible expense of clean up afterward—all of it is frankly grotesque.  As a means of resolving conflicts, war is ineffective and obsolete. 

     It is also dangerously counterproductive to cultural survival. We urgently need those resources, financial and intellectual, focused laser-like on efforts to fend off already visible and ever worsening effects of climate change. Ending war is good business (for all but munitions manufacturers and the war industry). It’s great humanity. Using the resources we now waste on war to fight the worse effects of climate change may in fact make ending war essential to the survival of quality of life for others than just the elite few who will, when all around us collapses, retreat to luxury, defended enclaves.

     So….A Future Without War is hoping that perhaps Global Climate Change may be our GORT.