Positive Futures or at Least the Cultivation of Optimism

Although good fences make good neighbors, sometimes, fences themselves can also index bad neighbors, distrust, even fear—past, present, and future. Fences can fence in or fence out, or both, or neither.

It appears that history is riddled with rhymes, unheeded ones. Humans do not have a good track record when it comes to learning from “mistakes.” At the same time, in al­most every age, scholars recite recurring litanies of woes. Besides regular complaints about the intolerable deportment of children, the erosion of the family, the faltering state of schooling, proliferating bureaucrats in general, politicians everywhere, and “armed conflict,” or war—citizens everywhere voice their increasing concerns about violence, adrift from the outriggers of old. Religion enters the scenes of these crimes often as per­petrator, occasionally as mediator, seldom as solution (cf. Fox 1999, Girard 1977/1972, Kakar 1996, Mahmood 1996, Smith-Christopher 1998, Stern 2003), and ethnicity can endow protective identity as well as fuel inter-ethnic conflict (cf. Ahmed 1995, Appa- durai 1998, Fox 2002). Sometimes reflecting on the alarms of the past trivializes those ills, comparing them with the enormity and proliferation of today's problems, which really are deadly serious.

One might surmise that global pathologies call for global counter-measures. Yet global pathologies manifest themselves locally even as they are masked there—which is to say, here. Global pathologies include excesses of population, pollution, displacements, disparities, drug trafficking, other criminality, terror, disregard of human rights, and globalization itself—all merging with, without causing, local and intimate suffering (Barber 1996, Bauman 1998, Natrajan 2003). It makes no sense to defer to and wait for international or national or municipal bodies or heads of households to act or react when most problems are so immediate, and especially when some problems implicate those more inclusive bodies as perpetrators. As a most sobering example, the International Criminal Court has been endorsed by only 90 governments, and considers its mandate to deal with the overlapping categories of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against human- ity—but only after the fact. Too late.

Institutions particularly charged with the shaping (both limiting and enabling) of fu­ture behavior in many societies may rely on negative feedback almost to the exclusion of positive feedback. This pattern may be manifest in the family and education as well as in any military, and with pets and livestock. Taking one more step, it is worth mentioning that we may not think in terms of the responsive behavior toward and of the natural envi­ronment or of material culture, whether it be collected or crafted, yet negative “feedback” to material culture does hasten its demise. Some cultural observers regard the care that extends the “life” of natural and artifactual material culture to foster habits applicable to the living world. The attention afforded houses, tools, toys, gardens, orchards, pets, and livestock may be extended to children and others—and/or vice-versa.

Permissive child-rearing and traditional immersive learning, as practiced among the Saami and many smaller-scale societies, will not mesh smoothly when a larger entity imposes a social, commercial, or military establishment. Even where the family may be organized hierarchically in some societies, military recruits are strained to meld into a rigid military organization, as exemplified by the subjects of Ben-Ari and Moore (respec­tively, chapters XV and XVI). The soldier is shaped through disciplined violence to exe­cute violent discipline upon an enemy. The connotations of noun and adjective contrast with what is perceived by the recruit as “violence” vis-a-vis what is perceived by the indoctrinated recruit and larger system as being unfortunately, but legitimately, “violent,” although in a routine which merely controls, domesticates, or disciplines a situation. Sel­dom does one hear warfare summed up as mutual killing.

The particular mix of hierarchic and heterarchic organization in much contemporary violence does not reduce to any finite number of hypothetical variables, either, although the interplay of long-term civil strife and a population (especially of males) otherwise underoccupied suggests certain endemic flash points.

It's not surprising that violence in culture, in general and in the specific, has been ad­dressed almost as often as it has been noticed, sometimes with satisfaction but seldom satisfactorily. Individuals and societies, operating inductively, deductively, and abduc- tively, have amended the settings and conditions generating malaise (Sullivan and Kuo 1996), have amputated the diseased members of society, have voted for peace and quiet (Hunt 2002), justice and equity (Farmer 2003, McGovern 1964), forgiveness and recon­ciliation (Abu-Nimer 2001, Avruch and Vejarano 2001), and prevention of violence has focused on breaking pernicious habits and their positive feedback loops (Leatherman et al.

In the academy, research programs emerge to emphasize the potential positive, as the Living Beyond Conflict applied anthropology seminar at the University of Uppsala, Sweden (LBC 2001, 2002). More and more universities everywhere have peace studies available as a major or minor. Scholars have also looked afield for inspirations coming from other cultures and eras (Montagu 1978, Sponsel and Gregor 1994); “Respect for the rights of others is peace,” Douglas Fry reports from the Zapotec (1992). Some observers defer to the violent actors themselves to generate their own solutions (e.g., Hoffman 2001). Others look to “human nature” itself, with its potential for creative health and healing (Kohn 1990, Ridley 1997). Finally, abstinence—the absence of violence—may result from a commission of a positive act or an omission, of abstinence (Nagler 2003).

Nothing can compare with establishing an actual community of peace, especially if it is self-sufficient, taking root in the eye of a violent storm. That describes the utopian settlement of Gaviotas in Colombia (Schorlemmer 2003). Even though in real dynamical systems, neither successful nor unsuccessful experiments can be replicated, learning about utopias can captivate the imagination.

Assuming, perhaps, that while meditating on a mantra one can do no harm, many persons like to dwell on their favorite texts—perhaps utopian, perhaps religious, perhaps mythical, and sometimes pragmatic. Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) and The Cost of Living (1999) keep coming up in some circles. Academicians feel better feeding at the trough of tough love, seeking the latest words from a respected authority such as Johan Galthung in his most recent co-authored academic book, Searching or Peace: The Road to Transcend (Galtung, with Jacobsen and Brand-Jacobsen 2002/2000).

Still and all, generations of efforts of the pen and pulpit promoting nonviolence have not enjoyed even minimal rewards. No wonder that one politician, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, wrote Talking Peace for young people (1995/1993), and another scholar, Johan Galtung, has addressed his latest book to very young children. Perhaps there, with younger generations, one can begin to make a difference that is, indeed, a difference. Galtung, whose thoughts on violence and its prevention have been brought up both above and in the introduction (chapter I), published his children's book in May 2003, in Norwegian (En Flyveappelsin Forteller), and it immediately had to be reprinted. If in glancing around, anyone notices an aerial edible fruit darting about, sharing wisdom about peace and justice, it will be Galtung's book in translation, a fable about a wise and adventurous orange. Whether oranges translate well into every language and culture won't matter; in Norway itself, oranges are imported, yet commonplace. Why not a fly­ing apple? In the Middle East, a date? In the Pacific, a breadfruit? A piece of peace for everyone.