CULTURE OF PEACE

I. S. Agustiani Agoestian

A peace culture is a culture that promotes peaceable diversity. Such a culture includes lifeways, patterns of belief, values, behavior, and accompanying institutional arrangements that promote mutual caring and well-being as well as an equality that includes appreciation of difference, stewardship, and equitable sharing of the earth’s resources among its members and with all living beings. It offers mutual security for humankind in all its diversity through a profound sense of species identity as well as kinship with the living earth. There is no need for violence. In other words, peaceableness is an action concept, involving a constant shaping and reshaping of understandings, situations, and behaviors in a constantly changing lifeworld, to sustain well-being for all.

This is a far cry from stereotyped notions of peace as a dull, unchanging end state. A static image of peace, as reflecting human inactivity, is dramatically opposed to the characterization of peace as process, of peacebuilding as adventure, exploration, and willingness to venture into the unknown. Pacifism, which literally refers to the making of peace (from pace and facere) is often mistakenly understood as passivism. One major attitudinal obstacle to the acceptance of peaceableness as a desirable social norm is the connotation of inactivity associated with it.

Society does not exist apart from the activities and environments that sustain, shape, and reshape it. The ceaseless culture-creating activity that characterizes the social body involves interaction at every level, from the intrapersonal (the inner life of the individual human being) to the interpersonal – in household, neighborhood, and community, on through successive levels of civic organization from city to the United Nations, and finally to interaction with the planetary lifeworlds of which we are a part. Because there is constant interpenetration of levels, the societal capacity for aggression or peacebuilding depends on patterns developed in every domain, from the individual and the interpersonal to the national, and interenvironmental, for dealing with the ever-present conflicts that arise from the great diversity of human and more-than-human wants and needs.

It is how we deal with difference that determines how peaceable society is. Nature never repeats herself. Therefore, no two human beings are alike. Difference is a basic fact of life. Among the needs every person is born with are two of special importance to our capacity for peaceableness. One is the need for bonding, for closeness to and acceptance by other human beings. The other basic need is the need for space, separateness from others, room to be one’s own self, to be autonomous. A society with only bonding relationships would be a passive, dull, enclosed society.

A society in which separateness predominated would be an aggressive society in which everyone would be concerned with their own space. When groups of humans hold the need for bonding and autonomy in balance – nurturing one another, engaging in many cooperative activities, but also giving each other space – then we find the conditions for peace culture. Another very important dimension of that peace culture is bonding with, feeling at home in, the living bioregion that the members of that culture inhabit. Groups characterized by power struggles, patterns of domination of the strong over the weak, of men over women, by frequent physical violence and constant competition, and seeing nature as something to be conquered can be thought of as warrior cultures. We will not find peace cultures or warrior cultures in a ‘pure’ form. Peaceable societies will have some conflictual behavior, and war-prone societies have some patterns of nurturant behavior in certain settings and under certain conditions.

In general, societies tend to be a blend of peaceable and warrior culture themes – the balance between the themes varying from society to society and from historical moment to historical moment. In our time, the tensions between the two themes have become a heavy social burden as a worldwide military forcing system linked to a destructive, planet-harming mode of industrialization and urbanization is distorting the human capability for creative and peaceful change. Indeed we can’t ovoid the violence in society but through understanding the peace culture and culture of peace, hope the peace can be applied in daily life.

It is there, but not well reported. The tendency of planners and policymakers to prepare for worst-case scenarios leaves societies unprepared for the opportunities involved in best-case scenarios. Nevertheless, the longing for peace has not gone away. The hiddenness, and the longing, create an urgency to understand what works to strengthen one of the two cultures and what works to weaken the other. We are not helpless. We have at our fingertips an incredible storehouse of wisdom and knowledge from the past and new knowledge, new wisdom, new science and technology from our discovery-minded present that, together, offer great resources for the rebuilding of peaceful lifeways for the planet as a whole. A richer and more diversified peace culture than any of us can now easily imagine, an interconnected global peace culture, is there to be built out of the languages and lifeways and knowledge and experience worlds of the ’10,000 societies’ now spread across the 185 states of today’s world. The possibilities for the transformation of our current war- and violence-prone international system into an interconnected localist world of adventurous but peaceful problem solvers, using technology to nurture the planet rather than to stress it, exist all around us.

Slowly, we are learning from many sources that monocultures are dangerous both for humans and for the natural environment. Cultural diversity is as important as biodiversity for the survival of the planet