The Perplexities of Peace

“Let There Be Peace on Earth, and Let It Begin with Me” became my favorite hymn when one of my neighbors and best friends sang it on 9/11 at a candlelight vigil. Some 500 people joined in singing it together at my dad’s funeral two years ago, and it remains my favorite hymn today. Dad made peace one person at a time, and he did so by listening and then tweaking perspectives through humor.  He was and remains the wisest of the many good people I’ve met, liked, and loved.

In the second week of July this year, as Dad’s daughter I attended a peace conference that started in Halifax and continued in Pugwash, Nova Scotia.  Hosted by Mount Saint Vincent University, “Being the Change: Building a Culture of Peace” was sponsored by twelve organizations, one of which was the Cyrus Eaton Foundation, and many were mindful that it was being held exactly 53 years after the first of the Pugwash Peace Conferences Mr. Eaton made possible.  I’m also an Eaton family friend.

In 1957, the gathering was one of the scientific elite — twenty-three world-renowned scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain met to talk about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and how to create peace and avert humankind’s annihilation in another world war.  The conference was, in brief, as “top down” as it could get, and publicity was minimal.  We were, after all, in the fiery midst of the Cold War. In 2010, the gathering was a “bottom up” effort to build and energize a grass-root citizens’ movement with a special focus on women.  The other two foci were on nuclear non-proliferation and on teaching peace.

I am an ardent believer in the possibility and power of teaching peace. Peace probably starts one individual at a time, within a country before it can spread stably among countries.

One of the many reasons my four children attended Cornerstone Montessori School until high school is its emphasis on building community through “grace and courtesy”.  Kindness can be taught right along side math, grammar, history, soccer and art, and so can peace.  The first of its basic ingredients is respect for diversity that goes much deeper than appearance, delving into different perspectives and life lessons and trying to understand or at least work with them.  The second is listening.

Listening is one of the most active pursuits in which humans can engage.  And yet it is dreadfully underestimated in this country, where it’s often taken to be passive or uninvolved.  Feminists worry that girls don’t talk as much in class as boys; does anyone think about who’s listening?  Educational innovators dismiss lectures as “spoon feeding”.  They, too, undervalue the importance and difficulty of listening in learning.

A grass-roots effort to establish and maintain global peace makes its most sense in a democracy, its least sense in a dictatorship.  But even “Being the Change” showed how difficult it is really to change. Commentary in one session applauded President Carter’s conciliatory efforts with Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, denigrated Bush 43 and his “belligerence”, and dismissed “Republicans” with just that one word uttered in the snarkiest of tones.  So, we’re to talk with everyone outside the country, no matter how murderous or oppressive, but feel superior to and dismiss those within who have different opinions from our own?  Only Dad’s sense of humor and the related appreciation of irony would have prevented him from being discouraged at this point.

And what are we to do when dictatorships abroad develop nuclear weapons and threaten to use them?  Here’s more irony: the first book I edited was a collection of papers from a conference on “The Political Economy of Nuclear Proliferation”.  One thread was that we were long overdue for a world war, probably because the proliferation of nuclear weapons was so ominous that it proved a strong and enduring deterrent.  In other words,  it may not be peaceful understanding but rather awareness, and a wariness, of brute force  that has prevented conflicts from  accelerating into destruction on a global level.

Bertrand Russell begged us to “remember [our] humanity”.  We should also retain our humility.  We must build a vested interest in peace, not just in Henry Kissinger’s mode through economic trade but also through an open exchange of ideas and respect, listening at least twice as much as we talk.  And while we’re building peace, we should listen to military and foreign policy experts who talk about deterrents.  We’d rather not start from here, but here we are.

Some time ago, I told my father that I was thinking about becoming a vegetarian because I hate killing animals.  “So, you want to be gentle like nature, dear?” he responded.  A carnivore I remain. I love animals but hate watching animal shows.  They seem all about procreating, eating and killing.  And we share significant parts of their brains. Does it ever seem that your brain is at odds with your heart? I’m very conflicted by the issue of weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation.  Aren’t you?