Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
September 26, 2004
The Cultivation of Peace
The old lie. The old, old lie; perhaps humanity's oldest self-deception - older than "of course I will respect you in the morning"; older surely than "the check is in the mail". The immortal lie, that we can almost never see, when it is being told to us in all its shining power. The illusion that blinds us with promises of glory, and meaning; that takes our capacity for altruism and sacrifice, and uses it against us; that twists the essence of what is most noble in our humanity, to make us perform the greatest horrors we are capable of imagining. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. Dangle that bait in front of us, and we will bite, every time. No matter what promises we have made, no matter what wisdom has been bequeathed to us, no matter what memories of irredeemable suffering our culture carries. No matter what our mothers have shown us of the precious value of tenderness, no matter what inner anguish we may recognize in the crippled old men, no matter how graphic the warning stories of the artists and the poets - we will drop everything we know in our rational minds about the utter senselessness and gruesome realities of war in one heartbeat, in one stirring, summoning strain of music, when the old, old lie flashes out and captures our imaginations yet again. Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.
It is as if - It is as if there were hard-wired into human consciousness a hidden door, a door whose lock is fitted uniquely to this concept, so that when the blinding lie comes, that door swings open to reveal a place we never knew was there, inside us. It is sweet, and fitting, to die for your country. It is noble, admirable, to sacrifice yourself for what you believe in, to defend what is most precious - the land, the people, the way of life. How can we not rise to that lure? Like the ancient fish-instincts of the salmon, that cannot help but lunge at a certain bright tickle on the water's surface, we are designed to respond to the concept of valor and the costly victory of righteousness, out of a very primal place. "War," suggests reporter Chris Hedges, who has seen his share and more of it, "is a force that gives us meaning." This morning, as we prepare to conduct elections, and as we observe the United Nations celebration of peace this week, we must acknowledge ourselves to be a nation at war. How shall we celebrate peace? What right have we to talk about peace?
The thing is, we had better talk about it. In fact, there may be no topic that could be more urgently worth our time to consider. When something that is so rationally desirable on both a collective and a personal level as peace, the failure of which has such catastrophic consequences for everyone involved, eludes the entire human race practically from its earliest emergence right down to the present moment, some remarkable phenomenon is going on. By any objective standard, it just doesn't make sense; to conduct war is expensive, requires energy, resources, organization; causes chaos, suffering, destruction. Even if it were possible to leave aside the incalculable toll of human unhappiness that it causes, war is costly in the most purely pragmatic terms; the United States military is spending $130 million dollars every day on the war in Iraq, according to Donald Rumsfeld, and it's not like most of us couldn't think of other things to do with that money. Something incredibly powerful must be going on, that makes human beings repeatedly so willing to cast aside practical self-interest, comfort, safety, and even once deeply held moral principles, to respond to that siren call - Dulce et decorum est...
There is a long-standing argument amongst philosophers and students of human nature as to whether war is a biological inevitability of our species. In 1986, a group of international scholars, including psychologists, biologists, sociologists, anthropologists, neurophysiologists, geneticists, animal behaviorists, and biochemists, gathered under the auspices of UNESCO in Seville, Spain, to address this question from the perspective of their collective disciplines. They issued a joint statement, which said in part,
...It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature. Violence is neither in our evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.
...Warfare is a peculiarly human phenomenon and does not occur in other animals. The fact that warfare has changed so radically over time indicates that it is a product of culture
We conclude that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed in the years to come. Although these tasks are mainly institutional and collective, they also rest upon the consciousness of individual participants. Just as "wars begin in the minds of men," peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.
It seems to me that they are right, these scientists, as far as they go, though clearly their conclusions are formulated with a political agenda in mind. Nevertheless, I would agree with them, that war is not an inevitably instinctual behavior about which we have no options. At the same time, Harvard political scientist Peter Rosen, in his book War and Human Nature, argues that
If you are interested in war, and begin the task of understanding human behavior in war by applying the standard models of rationality, you will find no end of puzzles... It is one of the better established findings in sociology that military organizations can routinely take groups of young people and change their preferences in relatively short periods of time. Armies recruit men and women who care very much about protecting their own lives, and who care nothing about each other in civilian life. They may even have been hostile to each other because they were members of groups that clashed in civilian life. Armies then put these young people through a training process such that they become willing to die for each other, even under circumstances where no superior officer can check up on their behavior and punish slackers... What is going on? The rationalist account cannot give us an adequate explanation of one of the most basic facts about international relations, which is that states can get groups of people to die for each other.
...[Moreover,] no one who has lived through such events would care to defend the proposition that people employ the same decision-making processes when they are safe, well fed, and have had enough sleep as they do when they are being shot at by an enemy force, or the survival of their country is at stake. Why is there this difference, and how does it affect the outcome of the decision-making process?
...Political leaders talk constantly about prestige and status in international relations. Is it just talk? Is such talk a mask for other goals? Or should we take heed of the fact that all primate communities form status hierarchies, and that status competition is a routinely observed characteristic of these communities? Might we not wonder if people who have unusually strong desires for social status might tend to rise to the top of social hierarchies, where they continue to be sensitive to status and prestige?
The decision to investigate the implications of these findings in the biological sciences would be justified simply by the availability of better information about human nature, but in the case of international relations, we have major outstanding puzzles that we have difficulty resolving using standard models of rational choice. This desire to do somewhat better in understanding these puzzles should lead us, at least, to look at the work being done in the biological sciences.
It seems to me that what is built into our evolutionary heritage is not so much the impulse to make war - that decision lies somewhere on the continuum between rational choice and cultural artifact, and is not inevitable. But whether or not a nation shall go to war is, as it happens, a choice that very, very few of us are ever actually in a position to make. Indeed, many of us here can recall clearly the strenuousness with which we lately urged against that choice, and exactly how much effect our expressed preferences had. What is built into our human natures is not so much the urge to make war, as the willingness - the almost necessity - to believe the oldest lie, to assent with tears and prayers and a lump in the throat that dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori. It is in that inevitable human propensity that our danger lurks, and it is that vulnerability, far more than our aggression, that we as ordinary citizens must address, if we are at last indeed to cultivate peace.
When we take into account the fact that homo sapiens have evolved as, and have always been, social creatures, it becomes not that hard to understand that our evolutionary heritage includes the capacity for individuals to sacrifice themselves in the service of the common good. The survival of our personal genetic legacies is for all intents and purposes entirely dependent upon the survival of the community. We cannot merely produce offspring and count on them to continue the lineage; they must be raised through the perilous stages of infancy and dependent childhood; they must be taught to use the only real survival strategy adopted by our species, which is to think. We were never meant to try to do this in isolation; it takes, as the saying goes, a village. And if the village is threatened, it makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective for a few individuals to be lost, so that the rest, including the future generation, might be saved. If a person is just a gene's way of making another gene, then dulce et decorum est is the gene's grand, self-serving lie, programmed at the deepest level of our pre-rational consciousness, waiting to be awakened by the summoning of a community's need.
This capacity, to give ourselves away for the sake of others; to go hungry, to suffer pain, to lay down our very lives, so that someone else, even someone we do not personally know or cherish, may go on in comfort and safety, is one of the best things about us as human beings. It is one of the most basic structures we have for making meaning with our lives; it is at the heart of what we understand as virtue; it, more than anything else, is what makes us noble. We are designed to be moved at our very core by such behavior; to admire it in others, to aspire to it in our own lives, to teach it to our children. Without that willingness to sacrifice ourselves in the service of the common good, what kind of creatures would we be? Monsters of rational self-interest, without dignity or gallantry or heroism, without soul. Who would wish for that?
But like a narcotic, that plugs into receptors designed to receive the brain's natural chemical stimulants, war taps directly into that proclivity to give ourselves away, and to honor the heroes who sacrifice themselves for the greater good. That is why none of us is immune to dulce et decorum, no matter how rational and heart-felt our conscious abhorrence of the human enterprise of war. That is why it is almost impossible to sustain suspicion of those who call upon our better natures, who appeal to our honor with that old, dazzling lie that hypnotizes us every time. War itself is not inherent in our human nature, but this is, this susceptibility, this enchantment, this urge toward so great a love, toward giving the last, full measure of devotion. It is sweet, and comforting, to think that we have laid down our lives for the sake of what we love; to be assured that the dear ones we have lost were spent for glory, and the good of us all. Sometimes it is the only comfort that we have, as is seen in the letter of sympathy allegedly written by Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, a mother who it was thought had lost all five of her sons in the Union army. The letter speaks of "...the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." Who would deny her that sweet anodyne, in the face of such a mother's loss? I do not think I would.
But then what are we to do? The capacity for sacrifice in the service of the common good will always be with us; it is inherent in the human condition, nor would we want to remove it. And war - war is always an option, a choice that leaders and governments have, that nations and cultures have, no matter how destructive and senseless we know it to be. Are we doomed, then, by the very nobility of our own altruism? The horrors of war will always seek to bypass our rational and moral discernments, to connect directly with that visceral assent, that urge in all of us to lay so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of our highest values, and to pay grateful tribute to whoever else does so as well.
If this question were easy to answer, the human race would have laid the scourge of war to rest millennia ago - wiser minds by far than mine have contemplated it throughout the ages. But here is my own best guess: I think if we truly want to cultivate peace, we must give our loyalty preemptively to a higher vision of the common good. We must dedicate the sacrifice of our lives - not our deaths, but the purpose of our living - to the creation of a world better than war; we must be in touch with a force that gives us meaning more powerful than war's addictive counterfeit. Such a loyalty is not to be commanded by the trivialities of our contemporary self-indulgent culture; there is nothing in it to summon us to higher purpose, to touch the hidden springs of our capacity for selflessness, heroism, and honor. It is, I rather suppose, a spiritual task that we must set ourselves; to find a purpose worthy of us, as war can never be; to bind ourselves in communities of such mutual devotion that our willing sacrifices for one another already fill our lives with sweetness and fitting comfort, and leave no room for the ancient lie.
Is it even possible? Is there any force in human experience that can compete with the immediacy and intensity of war? Chris Hedges suggests that there is in his jaded observation only one; you know what it is, we have always known; simple, inevitable, the alternative is love. That's what evolution has designed us for; that's what war simulates in the deep recesses of our nature, releasing all our capacity for sacrifice in the service of destruction instead of creativity. Can we learn, could we ever learn, to be so full of love that we could turn away from dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as the fraud we know it to be? That's the question, I think, and on its answer depends more than we know.