(Closely following Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher and mathematician, I will say: 

I'm sorry. I would have written a shorter post, but I kept getting too emotional to cut anything. 

The following could have been shortened. But the subject is an emotional one for me. Reason meets Passion. A very uneasy meeting.)  

                                                       Hiroshima: August 6, 1945 

                          (credit: US Navy Public Affairs, via Wikimedia Commons) 

War Is Programmable

We could stop the war madness. We have the means. So why don’t we? I think I know.

My dad was a recreational boxer. A middleweight. Trust me; this does connect. He trained and sparred at the YMCA with his friends. He was even a sparring partner for a man who made # 3 in world light heavyweight rankings. Many long years ago.

But Pop was against getting into street fights. “You don’t know which of that guy’s friends may be nearby with a tire iron in his coat ready to hit you from behind. If you can walk away, do it. Or meet the guy later in a ring. But don’t get drawn into a street fight. Think ahead. Walk away if you possibly can.”

I took that lesson to heart.

The difference between acceptable violence and unacceptable violence lies in the exact distinction that my old man was trying to make. Regulated violence – under rules, with a referee and protective equipment – can be instructive. For some people, even fun. And it can involve a lot more than just two persons. An American football team can, in one game, play forty or more guys against the other team. The game is played in a way that requires regulated violence, but also close cooperation from all of those players; it can teach young people useful lessons about fitness, teamwork, focus, and sacrifice for a larger cause.

Regulated violence also teaches youth principles about the real world that are even more basic. You can’t learn to defend yourself from books. You must get in the ring. Similarly, in some sports that don’t involve violence, one can still learn real world truths. You can’t learn to swim from only studying a swimming book. Thus, sport is a useful activity for young people to engage in because it teaches them hard truths. Life is physical. Someday, in the real world, as Pop used to say, being able to swim or to defend yourself might save your life. 

I know that once in a while, unregulated violence as small as a school yard fight or as big as Stalingrad has been unavoidable. It has been so in our world for a long time. Glaringly obvious bullies sometimes had to be stopped the hard way.

Is regulated violence even possible at the national and international levels? Of course. That is what the World Cup and the Olympics are. And there are other international sports contests too. In theory, they pit millions against millions. And there are international Chopin competitions. Acting competitions. Science fairs.

But unregulated violence at the international level, i.e. war, is today neither useful nor unavoidable. It’s the idea of unregulated, big-scale violence, i.e. war, as heroic, adventurous, or even just inevitable that we must stop accepting. We should be reducing unregulated violence in every way that we can. That is the heart of the matter. As John Lennon said: War is over if we want it to be.

We know now that we can change, even as whole societies. Actually, all societies are changing all the time. But in our world today, we could consciously shape at least some of the large trends in that change process. Not just look away and let change run however it will. We have the tools. We could program our young people to behave in ways that would make the chances of wars occurring steadily dwindle down. In fact, our future citizens could live in ways that would reduce the odds of unregulated violence even getting started.

We could teach peace-making skills like mediation to all kids if even the signs of unregulated violence began to appear in the people around them. Our societies could learn to see peace-making skills as being as essential as literacy. If all of the kids had at least some peace-making practice, they would be more and more likely to solve disputes early on, while the disputes were still at the shouting stage.

Logically, teaching peace-making skills would mean that the odds of unregulated violence, over a few generations, would dwindle down to almost nothing. That’s the heart of the matter. Not guaranteeing a peaceful future. No future can be 100% guaranteed. But working at constantly improving odds …that we can do.  

For those who wish to ignore violence and war, let’s review some basics here. We can’t afford another world war. But we can’t eliminate all aggressive urges from our natures either. What we could do is strive in homes and schools to the limits of our powers to reduce the odds of our urges turning into big-scale horror. We could learn to live with, but still control, aggression.

We could reprogram ourselves -- or  more accurately, our next generation -- to manage and channel aggressive drives into useful rather than harmful actions. We now have enough knowledge of how human behavior is created to design our society so that violence gets tamed.

We could give kids more outlets in things like sport, academic competitions, the arts, and even competitive roles in the working world. But these outlets have been around for a long time, you say. They haven’t stopped the madness.

                                                          Boys sparring 

                                     (credit: Arkady Gaidar, via Wikimedia Commons)

What we could add in our world right now is programs put into the schools to teach kids to spot and mediate disputes. We could train our young people to release their own competitive urges safely while we simultaneously train them to spot disputes between other kids. Then, we could train those same kids in mediation skills so they could disarm potentially violent situations and keep them from ever getting out of hand. See anger forming. Mediate and articulate for all parties while the dispute is still small. Keep all forms of violence from boiling over into destructive outcomes. (“There. And we didn’t ruin our sport. We didn’t cheapen it. Now. Shake hands, you two, and let’s go back to the game.”)   

In my lifetime, I saw the USSR go from being a nuclear-armed superpower to gone. The USSR was outrun so badly in the economic realm, and exposed to the truths of democracy so consistently, that, in the end, its leaders just gave up. Surrendered. Without a world war. Those times proved for me that war is obsolete. We can evolve socially without wars. No one can tell me now that war is inevitable. We just have to take this bull by the horns and wrestle him down.  

Do I believe that grade school peace-making skills would translate into greater and greater peace-making skills in the adult world? Yes. And if you think adult disputes are somehow more profound than schoolyard ones, you’re kidding yourself. Study Ukraine right now. Actions due to some more big bully brats.

Why am I hopeful we can tame this monster? Look at the big-scale evidence.  

In these times, we don’t sit and watch a new flu variant advance through our population and do nothing about it. We fund research being done by scientists looking for vaccines to immunize citizens and to prevent the new variant from spreading. We aim to wipe the new variant out or at least reduce its effects on humans until those effects are minor or, better yet, gone. We figured out how to change some of our behaviors, morés, and customs, and we changed.

               Vaccine research (credit: Bonnie Allen, CBC, cbc.ca news) 

We also don’t watch a new pest eat its way through our grain fields or vegetable gardens and bow our heads in helpless resignation. Or face a year of minimal rainfall and watch our crops wither and die. We fund research by entomologists who are looking for ways to halt every new pest’s spread. We dam rivers to store water for dry years. We store grains in silos, freeze vegetables and meat, and can or dehydrate other foods so that we have a strategic food reserve. We face pests and droughts without having to face famines because we have learned a whole range of actions which make our food supply more secure than was the case even two generations ago. We adjust our patterns of behavior, our morés, and our customs, and we survive.

These are learned behaviors; they are not written into us by our genes. Why they got established in our forebears and passed down culturally to us is easy to see: they were behaviors that enabled citizens in the societies that discovered and practiced them to survive, reproduce, increase in numbers, and spread into new territory. These behaviors once were not parts of our way of life. But they are now. By trial and error, we got subtler in our behaviors, our culture, more capable of nuance, and we survived better than did competing societies over the long haul. Then, most of all, we kept teaching the smarter morés and behaviors to each new generation of kids. Our social ecosystem changed; it evolved.  

So why don’t we get motivated, even urgent, about teaching peace-making skills to our kids, and thus at least improve their chances of staying out of World War Three? Such action would be a lot more rational than what we are doing now, stuck in our habits, moving numbly through the day, doing mostly the same as our forebears did, working, drinking, laughing, ignoring the threat, talking in clichés, and vaguely hoping for the best.

I believe we aren’t doing anything new, hopeful, affirmative, and pro-active to prevent big-scale violence, even WW3, because we have fallen prey to the same old cognitive dissonance pitfalls that generations before us did.

Deep down, we don’t like the idea of setting out to change any part of our way of life because most people generally just don’t like change. It takes us a long time to accept changes to any of our patterns of behavior or concepts or values. 

For example, most people now in semi-rural areas accept that once in a while their farmer neighbors have to apply a spray to their crops. We don’t even know what’s in the spray and most people now make no effort to find out. Food-related morés today trump almost every fear. It took generations to train us to this openness, but we did change. We can do the same with peace-making. 

Furthermore, we do similar things in regard to disease control. We are earlier on in the social conditioning process with vaccines. Many still don't trust them. 

But public health measures are like changed practices in agriculture in one clear way: we used to be entirely suspicious of them. Now, when a farmer is spraying his crops, people in the area hardly even glance at him. Now, when I say I’ve had three Covid shots, people yawn. The statement is no big deal. Gradually, grudgingly, we are changing. 

We’ve accepted that we don’t want to starve, and we don’t want to be sick.

Yet we take little to no action whatsoever against the far more terrible threat posed by stockpiles of nuclear weapons. They could kill over half of us in an afternoon.

I believe that we are lulled partly by the fact that we haven’t had a really big war in a long time. In fact, in contemplating the destruction another really big one would wreak, we look away. Talk about other things. Laugh. Drink. 

In the terms of science, the negative reinforcement for the bad behavior takes too long to arrive. Most of us, in the past, have been too lazy and obtuse to learn the hard lesson: don't let aggression get out of hand.  

That’s exactly what cognitive dissonance reduction looks like.  

The “social vaccine” we could use to teach kids peace-making is controversial. But the destruction that WW3 threatens could be planet-killing.

The evidence from our past says we have kept doing wars for centuries largely because of this same mental malaise. However, “I  don’t like thinking about it”  is not a rational reply to an existential threat. We are going to have to do something more than our forebears did if we are to dodge that WW3 bullet.

We don’t want to change our way of life even though one honest look at our “ways of life” tells us that all “ways of life” are changing all the time. Agricultural sprays, dams, and vaccines say so. They are. Once they were not.

Unfortunately, all humans are programmed in this obstinate way. Our default position on nearly all change is to resist it; be loyal to the past. To the “ways” of our forebears, no matter how irrational those ways might have been. 

But I believe it is very clear that if we do what we have always done, we’re going to get the results we have always got.

Fortunately, it does not have to stay that way. Peace education offers us a very good chance at a practical way out. A curriculum for the kids in our schools. And we’ll experiment with our peace programs and modify them till the evidence shows they work. All of this could be done quite readily. It’s the starting that’s mesmerizing us.

Once a society passed a kind of critical mass of pacifism, the peace memes would nourish themselves. They would spread more easily in each new generation in ways analogous to the ways by which Dawkins’ “selfish genes” spread: effective peace memes, once taught to even a few, would more and more persistently create conditions under which their own future spread would be favored over all competing possibilities.

Kids who grew up in homes and schools learning nuanced peace-making skills would become parents and teachers in the next generation. Solving disputes rationally, while also respecting the rights of others every day as their default practice. Peace-making would become as natural as washing one’s hands.

                                        teaching a child hand-washing (credit: cdc.gov) 

Washing hands isn’t “natural”. It was not programmed into us by our genetics. We acquired handwashing habits by cultural programming because the first people who regularly washed their hands lived healthier lives. Then they taught this “way” to their kids, who did the same.  Similarly, we could learn peace as a way of life. Handle violence if we needed to, but hardly ever need to.                     

The days of war could, and should, be put behind us. We have the knowledge, from Psychology and Sociology, and we have the means, in our school systems.

War may have served human cultural evolution once, but today it serves no useful purpose. We could consciously do for our nations everything that war ever did for them without having wars. Without even one mother having to look out her window to see two army officers coming up to her front door.

Unregulated mass violence – war – today makes as much sense as making work by locking our bulldozers in sheds and giving shovels to dozens of workers. It’s stupid because it is inefficient and obsolete. A pointless waste of young lives.  

I’ll close today with a small salute to the ones in every society who have done their best in the past, and who are doing their best now, to bring about these changes that I envision. I mean teachers, of course.  

I was one for thirty-three years. I strove every day to nudge my students a little further down the road toward mutual courtesy and respect and, thus, toward settling disputes peacefully.

To those of you who are retired, thank you for your service. You were the cadres of sense and decency. To those of you still in service, hang in there. You are the hope of the world. Of you, I am asking, please write peace into every one of your lesson plans.

Even in Math and Science? Yes, even in Math and Science. For example, even the study of numbers has room for digression on Arabic numbers and al jabr and the Mayans having the zero. With sensitivity, we can give higher profiles to all of the world’s cultures in our schools and thus improve the odds of peace. Pro-active peace-making in every subject, plus specific mediation skills courses in all schools.

Peace Education could still save us from the nightmares of Physics. And yes, I really believe that.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a positive day.

                                                       kindergarten class 

                           (credit: woodleywonderworks, via Wikimedia Commons)