The US will have a woman President – Using the media for change.

Fox TV’s hit show “24” will cast a woman, Cherry Jones, as the U.S. President in the upcoming season. This is good news because, as the astronomer Carl Sagan once said, people have to experience chance in the stories they tell before actual change can happen. The TV show “Commander in Chief,” starring Geena Davis, was considered unusual. Having a woman President on 24 will still be seen as unusual. But the more frequently we see a woman in this role, the sooner it can happen in reality. (EW) The White House Project newsletter, 24 July 2007

India Elects it’s First Woman President

Last week, India chose its first female president, 72 year old Pratibha Patil, a lawyer, congresswoman and former governor. Although the position is largely ceremonial, her post, which brings visibility, is a win for the country, where gender discrimination has long been a problem. (EW) The White House Project newsletter, 24 July 2007

Big Subsidies for Coal Process

A New York Times article reports that there is a big push for providing subsides for companies working on coal-to-liquid fuels technology. The article stresses that this reflects a tension between slowing global warming and reducing dependence on foreign oil. But from the AFWW point of view, this is also a way to shift our economy to provide work for people and profits for employers that is not built on the war industry. (SOE) New York Times, 29 May 2007, Edmund L. Andrews, “Big Subsidies for Coal Process.”

Liberia is Allowed to Export Diamonds

The enlightened ex-president of Botswana made certain that the diamond resources of that country would fund improvements in the life of his people, which they have done. The newly elected president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, also wants to do the same for desperately poor Liberia, and she persisted and has convinced the U.N. Security Council to lift a 6-year-old ban on Liberian diamond exports. The ban, aimed at stopping blood or conflict diamonds from reaching the market, was lifted because of Liberia’s significant progress in setting up control on its diamonds. (IER, SD, SOE). Los Angeles Times, 28 April 2007, New in Brief: “Liberia allowed to export diamonds.”

AFWW Book Video

An AFWW Report: World Peace Conference, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 16-17 May, 2007

Keeping up with the movers and shakers in the peace movement! The World Peace Conference uplifted and encouraged five hundred of us from all parts of the planet (except, sadly, the Middle East) in the kind of coming together that’s essential for workers in any campaign. We refreshed our vision, absorbed energy and new ideas, and experienced critical opportunities for networking. Sponsored by the New Mexico Department of Tourism and organized by conference producer Majorie Mann and conference designer and activist Louise Diamond, this WPC offered high profile speakers and a fresh approach to group management. The rousing concert by the Indigo Girls at the beautiful outdoor Santa Fe Opera house, accompanied by lightning and rain climaxed in a perfect ending to a new beginning of the ever-growing groundswell of change.

A crucial ingredient became apparent in the view of AFWW, and should take on new focus as we create the momentum of paradigm shift. We peace-seekers do not yet share an agreed-upon, united front with specific, measurable goals toward which all of us are working. We need a plan, one that embraces all of the elements described on the AFWW website, and leaders to keep us all on track.

Ending war, in the view of AFWW, is a task equivalent in complexity and difficulty to putting a working, permanent human base on Mars: a vast challenge, but doable. It will require that we create the international equivalent of a NASA if we are to succeed. There are around this globe, many thousands of government, grassroots, and international organizations working on various aspects of this great campaign, but we do not yet have an overarching focus: we are thousands of organizations pulling separately. We need to be thousands pulling together.

When that finally happens to a critical mass of the world’s peace-seekers, nothing will be able to stop us from achieving the goal of ending war and much, much more.

The outstanding keynote speakers offered dynamic insight and challenge. Nobel Laureate Jodie Williams was awarded the prize having brought together 1400 NGOs to focus on a campaign to ban land mines. Another Nobel Laureate, Rigoberta Menchu Tum, showed that a single powerless young girl can bring powerful forces into action, such as in her crusade for indigenous people’s rights and subsequent candidacy for the President of Guatamala. Via video, the Dali Lama (spiritual leader for a nonviolent campaign to free Tibet, offered practical perspective and spiritual focus, and nonviolence exemplar and activist, Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, gave us a role-playing task that quickly revealed the culturally transmitted attitude of aggressive thought that colors even simple transactions—unless we learn to truly think non-violently in our own corners of the world. All were inspiring in their own unique way.

For those interested in group dynamics, the program structure itself was new to us, a technique called “Open Space Technology.” Under the guidance of trained facilitators, this technique allowed the hundred of participants to self-select topics of interest to them in five general areas: Our Youth, Our Promise; Demilitarization and a Peace Economy; Knowing the Other as Ourselves; The Living Spirit of Peace; and The Politics of Peace. AFWW representatives attended the sections on Demilitarization and a Peace Economy and The Politics of Peace where they met other conference attendees with similar concerns.

At the associated Peace Fair, several dozen groups presented their wares or their cause, from Amnesty International USA, to Mediators Without Borders, to Americans for a Department of Peace and Nonviolence, to Vajra Dakini Nunnery. AFWW also had a table, featuring Judith’s books, the AFWW website, and … a novel.
A novel? Yes. AFWW gave away forty promotional copies of a novel that needs a publisher. Carl Sagan once said, and AFWW also believes, that before people embrace a huge change in their lives—in this case, the paradigm shift to peace that all the conference attendees seek—they must first experience the vision of that reality in their stories. So Judith and her colleague, Peggy Lang, have written a political suspense novel, ASSASSIN’S ROSE. It features a heroine, Claire Alden, whose philosophical commitment is to nonviolent means of conflict resolution and using aggressive nonviolence as demonstrated by Gandhi and Martin Luther King as the means to achieve social justice and a better world.

Claire is challenged to run for the U.S. Presidency, and should she be elected, she commits herself to immediately appoint a Secretary of Peace and Nonviolence, greatly expand the scope and budget of America’s Peace Institute, and appoint a parity government cabinet with equal numbers of men and women. A charismatic leader who profoundly threatens the status quo stirs us assassins. Reviewers give the story high marks as a fast-paced tale of suspense with an intriguing love story. The hope is that by sharing the book with other activists who are interested in ending war, word of mouth may help ASSASSIN’S ROSE find that necessary publisher.

The world’s peace-seekers may not yet be united by a shared vision and plan, but networking conferences like the one in Santa Fe are critical to moving us closer to the day when we do put a shared plan into action.

The People of Bhutan Practice Their First Democratic Vote—With Apprehension

 

Next year, guided by the enlightened vision of the King of Bhutan, the people in this faraway, Switzerland-sized kingdom of 700,000 will cast their first real votes in a momentous shift to democracy, and during the weekend of 25 April 2007 they held a practice—but according to correspondent Barbara Crossette, with much anxiety. Many Bhutanese think democracy may be a big mistake. The good news is that they will move into the 21st century and be granted the ideal of equality under law with all the hope and promise that entails. The bad news they fear, however, arises from examples of the countries around them: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka – all are “democracies” and all are wracked by violence. Simply giving people the right to vote isn’t the kind of democracy that will end violence and war; to end war we need liberal democracies, which includes sexual equality, something not true of any of Bhutan’s violence-plagued neighbors. According to Crossette, however, Bhutan’s “women have considerable equality.” Maybe in this sheltered world a true liberal democracy will flourish and the Bhutanese, who already have a fine record for environmental protection and where living standards are rising rapidly, will achieve even further enlightenment and a nonviolent future. (EW, SD)
Los Angeles Times, 25 April 2007, Barbara Crossette, “Bhutan’s democratic doubts.”

Muslims in Southern California Unite to Foster Unity

Leading Southern California Muslims, including prominent Shiite and Sunni clerics, recently signed of “code of honor” offering strategies for overcoming and preventing disharmony in the Muslim community. Important provisions are: 1) no one should use, spread, or tolerate takfir (judging others Muslims as nonbelievers), 2) all should respect the people, places, and events that other Muslims recognize, even if they disagree, 3) scholarly groups should examine Muslim history, creed, and laws to further better understanding and reconciliation, and 4) U.S. Muslims should work to stress their commonalities (see full text at www.mpac.org). This reconciliation effort began at the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, and it is hoped that adoption of the code and the efforts a harmony will spread. AFWW hopes it will spread globally. (FC)
Los Angeles Times, 23 April 2007, Rebecca Trounson, “Area Muslims Promote New Code of Unity.”

The Threat of Global Warming – A Cause that Can Unite Us

In the classic movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” a spaceman comes to earth accompanied by a fearsome robot, Gort. By the end of the film we learn that the spaceman is a messenger from all spacefaring worlds and he brings the earth’s people a message. These worlds have resolved and agreed to ensure that no planet is allowed to exist that will not renounce war. They will not tolerate war to be brought off-world. And Gort is a kind of galactic policeman they have created to enforce this edict. Unless humans stop making war, the spaceman tells the world’s best minds just before he leaves and leaves Gort behind, Gort will destroy earth. The message of the movie is that it may take a dire threat from without to unite humanity at last. As we now concede, unless we unite to shift our economies in ways the decrease the production of greenhouse gasses, our civilizations as we know them will collapse. Millions of people will be displaced and in urgent need for basic necessities, diseases will spread, the oceans will wither. Perhaps by uniting to prevent such a catastrophe, we will find better things to do with our resources than fight enormously expensive and destructive wars. Maybe Global Warming will be our Gort, that threat that unites us. If you would like to add your concerned voice to the signatures of politicians, business leaders, and ordinary citizens around the globe, visit and sign at www.nextgenerationearth.org. (PSO, SOE).
Time Magazine, 19 March 2007, Jeffry D. Sachs, “A Climate for Change”

Arab and U.S. Women Scientists Build a Network

On 8-10 January 2007 at the Arab Organization Headquarters Building in Kuwait, a group of more than 200 scientists and engineers from 18 nations in the Middle East and Northern Africa and a delegation of about 20 from the United States held a landmark forum—and virtually all participants were women. The conference was under the patronage of Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Al Mohammed Al Ahmed Al Sabah and organized by the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research and several other organizations, including the U.S. State Department and AAAS (The American Organizations for the Advancement of Science). In February 2007, a symposium on the role of women and innovation in the Arab world was held at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Said one of the opening address speakers in Kuwait: women “are becoming an important asset” to the development of Kuwait, and “We want more women to take part in the developmental process of the nation through their contributions to the society on firmly rational grounds…” Arab women in great numbers are seeking advanced degrees in many Arab countries…but they face huge hurdles afterward. Many Arab women had never experienced anything like the Kuwait conference and the contacts made there will enable women of the east and west to connect on many levels. (EW, FC)
Science, 23 February 2007, Becky Ham, “Arab, U.S. Women Scientists Build Network at Landmark Kuwait Forum.”

Essential Human Goodness

Normal humans are neither born ethical blank slates, nor brutes at heart. As the fine book, Primates and Philosophers, and others by the noted primatologist, Frans de Waal, details, antecedents of a sense of fairness and morality are present in pre-human ancestors. These ethical senses are something we have inherited from our deep, biological past. The author also explains how the operation of such senses is associated with our ability to empathize … to be able to sense what other individuals with whom we are interacting are probably feeling. Studies of sociopaths—individuals lacking empathy—reveal that their actions are not guided by senses of fairness or morality but by self-interest and utility.

It was this “innate sense of goodness and morality” to which Gandhi referred when he developed the use of satyagraha. Satyagraha is a nonviolent means to draw out the best in others premised on Gandhi’s conviction that people are basically good.

Other recent research in how the human mind works, and how the brains of humans who show empathy or who lack it work, has uncovered the existence of “mirror neurons.” In essence, when a normal human sees another human do something, their own brain neurons fire similarly … apparently allowing the seer to experience, at least in part, what the doer is feeling. We can truly share the joy and pain of others in some degree because of these “mirror neurons.” And by living joyfully and lovingly, we foster these feelings in others around us. These neurophysiological discoveries bolster our understanding of the physical basis upon which human goodness is built.

A recent theoretical article in the prestigious journal “Science” is enlightening and heartening in its reference to the universal importance of cooperation as opposed to cut-throat competition. It is entitled “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” The author, Martin Nowak, works in the Departments of Mathematics and Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Cooperation, he explains, is needed for evolution to construct new, more complex, level of organizations. “Genomes, cells, multicellular organisms, social insects, and human society are all based on cooperation … Cooperation is the secret behind the open-endedness of the evolutionary process. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world.”

To many, this view of cooperation as the general pattern in nature rather than violence might come as a surprise. “Isn’t evolution supposed to be all about a struggle for survival? Nature, red in tooth and claw?” But Darwin himself sensed, and wrote, that the altruism and cooperation we see in humans may well have developed because tribes of humans in which individuals cooperated with their tribe mates might have been more successful in the struggle for survival than tribes in which the human members were NOT good cooperators. Traits such as the ability to be empathetic, to have a sense of fairness and justice, are genetically based, and if tribes having members with these traits were better at cooperating and hence better at survival, these traits and the trait of cooperation would be passed on.

In his book, Beyond War, anthropologist Douglas Fry looks across time and across many cultures and thoroughly debunks the myth that humans are essentially violent and aggressive. He provides concrete examples of the human propensity to find nonviolent solutions to our conflicts and to work together to maintain social harmony when possible. In Michael Shermer’s book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and Scientific American columnist makes a case that human morality evolved as first an individual and then a species-wide mechanism for survival.

On this reality of essentially cooperative and empathetic human good nature—something once explored by philosophers and mystics and now being explored by primatologists, evolutionary biologists, and mathematicians—we can hang our hopes to create a future without war. Inventing these essentials or even teaching them from scratch to children or adults is not required to create a warless future.

What will be required of us, though, is to nurture these traits and create social conditions in which they flourish so the selfish drives that are also a part of our complex nature are subordinated. My books and website, written from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist—Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace, and A Future Without War—outline key social conditions we inadvertently created several millennia ago, roughly at the time of the transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer life to settled communities. I discuss how these changes resulted in our present state of seemingly endless cycles of war, and what conditions must be changed to move us rapidly beyond war, to create what can be called a warfare transition.

Making this change is possible because the overwhelming majority of humanity shares a fundamental sense of goodness, and longs to live by it.

References:

DeWaal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fry, Douglas P. 2007. Beyond War. NY:Oxford University Press.

Hand, J. L. 2003. Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace. San Diego, CA: Questpath Publishing
2006. A Future Without War. San Diego, CA: Questpath Publishing.

Nowak, Martin A. 2006. “Five rules for the evolution of cooperation.” Science 314:1560-1563)

Shermer, Michael. 2004. The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule. Times Books

The Human Journey into Space

Six separate private ventures are racing to lift our visions of what can be while lifting our bodies into space and making a profit (eventually). As these projects grow, they’ll provide work for legions who might otherwise be making war weapons—a way to help shift our economy from dependence on war for employment—and provide inspiration for young people, especially young men who need to be part of something exciting and grand and even a bit dangerous. From Sir Richard Branson’s “Virgin Galactic” to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s “Blue Origin,” these visionaries intend to grasp the glory and wealth to be had by making space access available to Everyman and Everywoman. The 100 first tickets on “Virgin Galactic” are already sold out at $200,000.00 a pop. Branson plans to make the first flight himself, taking his two kids and his mom and dad with him. Space also happens to be literally and figuratively a gold mine: comets and asteroids contain water and minerals, more gold than all the gold on earth and hydrogen and oxygen, the basics for rocket fuel. At last count, at least seven plans for spaceports for tourism and exploration have emerged, from New Mexico to West Texas to Wisconsin. Elon Musk operates his SpaceX from old shops and warehouses in El Segundo, CA, and has hired talent from Boeing, Grumman, and Silicon Valley. (EYM, SOE).

Time Magaine, 5 March 2007, Cathy Booth Thomas, “The Space Cowboys.”

Democracy in Action – An “Immediate-Action Alert” and a Long-term Goal

<P>If you live in California, here’s something extraordinarily easy you can do to advance the campaign to end war: lend your support to the establishment of a U.S. Department of Peace and Nonviolence. For maximum effect, you need to act within the next few days. If you live outside California, don’t feel left out. You can contact your own Congressperson and Senators, now and frequently.</P>

<P>The Goal is to urge California Senator Barbara Boxer to sponsor or co-sponsor a bill in the Senate to authorize the establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Peace and Nonviolence by having at least 1000 postcards and hundreds of phone calls reach the Senator immediately.</P>

<P>This movement is well under way. In San Diego and across the country there are growing numbers of local chapters of the DOP movement. And perhaps most exciting, young people are getting involved. Danielle Gram, a San Diego high school student recently took postcards for Senator Boxer with her to school. If you want to read something exciting and encouraging, read Danielle’s e-mail to her fellow DoP supporters describing her experience with sharing her enthusiasm with her fellow students. Feel free to forward her letter to friends who could use encouragement.</P>

Anglican Bishop Plans ‘U-2-charist’

“Rock music can be a vehicle of immense spirituality,” said Timothy Ellis, the Bishop of Grantham. He was announcing that a live band would play U2 classics such as “Beautiful Day” and “Mysterious Ways” with special sing-along lyrics in the English town of Lincoln in May. People will also be able to dance and wave their hands, and their focus is to be on the Millennium Development Goals of the UN, a plan to alleviate world poverty. The sharing of music powerfully binds people together and A Future Without War looks forward to more similar concerts staged world-wide where the focus will be an ending war for all time. (FC)
<P>Los Angeles Times, 30 January 2007, “Anglican bishop plans ‘U2-charist’”</p>

Rates of Rape in the U.S. Are Declining

In an opinion piece, Mike Males, senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice describes the decline. Crime reports, victimization surveys, and public health measures consistently reveal large declines in the percentages of young women reporting sexual violence against them and of young men committing rape and other violent crimes. “The most likely explanation involves impressive generational developments,” especially the growing empowerment of women. In 1970, for example, women were only 33% of all college students while today they are 57%. “Women’s rapidly rising status and economic independence in the larger society fostered new attitudes and laws that rejected violence against women.” “The youngest teenagers (presumably those raised with the most modern attitudes) show the biggest declines of all. Over the last 30 years, rape arrest rates have fallen by 8-% among Californians under age 15.” (EW)
<P>Los Angeles Times, 18 February 2007, Mike Males, “The decline of rape.”</P>