You, Imagineer

Christ, you know it ain't easy...

On back in the day, when I was barely 18, in 1969, the Tet Offensive was slaughtering my buddies in Vietnam even as it was showing the world that imperialism from any quarter would not be tolerated in that "backward" country used to resisting Chinese invasion for literally much of two and a half millennia. The Chinese invaded repeatedly and were replaced in brief attempts by Mongols, French, Japanese and finally Americans. Vietnamese are stubborn. They don't tolerate others occupying their land, telling them how to live, stealing their resources and violating their women and children. What a bunch of weirdos.

Into this mix comes John and Yoko with their marriage in March and their Bed-In for Peace in Amsterdam and then Montreal. Their anthemic Give Peace a Chance was recorded in the hotel room in Canada, with a cast of interesting characters on hand and singing along (e.g., Dick Gregory, Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers). Lennon and Ono were serious about this humor, so to speak, and carried on opposition to the war, producing another anthem in 1971, Imagine. They sang out loud what a peace system would look like to them and asked us all to imagine it.

Gregory Bourne (2011) makes a similar request for a nonkilling world. If we cannot imagine it, he asserts, we cannot achieve it, a very similar claim to what Elise Boulding said in the 1970s, when she imagined how to help other imagine, ultimately creating her Imaging a World Without Weapons movement of workshops with a clear method of helping us do that work. And it all trails Albert Einstein, doesn't it, when he noted that "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

So, in the midst of our hyperactivism, let us not forget to take some spinfree moments to imagine. Maybe you will only imagine one tiny piece of the solution to the problem of violence in our world. Maybe you will only be totally original one tiny time in all your imaging work. And perhaps that one tiny innovation, imagined from your unique mind, will be the crucial peace piece. Don't keep us waiting too long...

References
Bourne, G. (January 01, 2011). In Pursuit of a Killing-Free World. Peace Review, 23, 2, 205-213.

Public peace intellectuals and public opinion

My friend Winslow Myers doesn't consider himself an intellectual nor an academic, but he is. Since 1984 he has been writing op-ed pieces in favor of peace and disarmament, all the while teaching in both high schools and colleges. But his discipline is art and art history, so he bemoans his lack of scholarly credentials in the fields of peace and nonviolence. But his special studies of that field have given him very solid expertise and his ability to write about esoterica and arcana in ways that all of us can understand is valuable indeed. His writings have animated the peace group Beyond War and have provided the primary content studied by groups across the US for many years.

The struggle by some academics to give solid information to the public in digestible form is long and interesting, with some career casualties and reactionary institutions playing antagonistic parts along the way. One interesting strand has been the peace scientists that began their braided journeys of social science research and public peace intellectualism half a century ago in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

These pioneers in peace science include David Singer, Elise Boulding, Herbert Kelman, Paul Kimmel and others. They launched many journals, longitudinal studies, professional associations and have done enough public scholarship--that is, translating their research findings into informed opinion for public consumption--so that the war system's impact has been at least slightly blunted, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to nuclear weaponry to military budgets.

If a certain amount of that scholarly activity has been brought into our public discourse with the effect of helping all of us to learn more, how can we encourage them to continue and offer more? We obviously need it.

Academic freedom is clearly crucial. A friend of mine who taught at Vassar was fired some years ago for nominally unclear reasons. It was no coincidence that he had just written an op-ed for nuclear disarmament.

Time constraints are another issue. Between mandated contractual teaching, committee work, research, grantseeking, publishing and civic engagement, the average scholar is never caught up. Many have told me this is why they don't even try to write for the public.

Counting op-eds for peace as a form of civic engagement would help, and requiring more civic engagement and less administrative work would be a step forward.

Distribution of the work of peace scholars who also write for the public is another solution to the obstacle of getting a piece published. Busy scholars need institutional backing in this regard. PeaceVoice helps but it cannot serve in the same way that an academic institution can. I've been teaching peace and writing about for many years and in the decade I've been at my school I've been contacted only twice by public affairs to participate in media, despite 10 years of war and massive public debate about some of it. Any cursory read of the courses offered would show just a tiny handful of us teaching to that very topic. I do not claim to be a great spokesperson for peace, but my challenge to all our academic institutions is to at least have a few peace people in the contact list to connect with media.

Research, of course, is dismissed by ideologues unless it matches their worldview, but most people are still not so polarized that reason cannot reach them. Time to help bring more science to the service of more peace.

References

Kimmel, P. R. (2011). SPSSI and Peace-Building: A Participant's Perspective. Journal of Social Issues, 67(1), 122-136. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4560.2010.01687.x

Teaching nonviolence: Roots of research

Academic research into nonviolent conflict management began at least fifty years ago with the work ranging from Elise

and Kenneth Boulding (founders of many institutions that survive in some form today, such as the Consortium of Peace Research, Education and Development, which is now the Peace and Justice Studies Association) to Gene Sharp (founder of the Albert Einstein Institution).

The most integrated researchers have come from the mold of the above named. The Bouldings founded COPRED in 1970 with the mission of integrating the knowledge generation of peace researchers, the teaching applications of peace educators, and the work in the field of the peace activists.

By contrast, the Peace Studies Association, founded in 1987, kept a far more narrow mission, that of working only with post-secondary educators, not with K-12 peace educators nor with peace activists.

The two organizations merged in 2000 and PJSA is much closer to the Bouldings' original creation.

PJSA hosts the wide range of those who labor to research, teach and implement constructive conflict methods. Many PJSA members are active in their original disciplinary associations as well, which continues to give PJSA a robust agenda and rich conference context every year. Sociologists study the peace movements and other social movements, political scientists look at the hard-edged operations of governments, philosophers discuss ethical implications of our methods, psychologists examine the role of collective memory and other psychological phenomena on our methods of conflict management, historians parse out new information and analysis of peace and conflict campaigns and campaigners from the past, activists tell their stories, and the cross currents inform each other.

The Albert Einstein Institution is not a membership organization. It provides trainings but is not an activist group. It does research into civil resistance and publishes analysis. Its work is translated into many languages and in print around the world.

Arguably, without these and other organizations, nonviolent conflict management would be far less known and practiced on our poor Earth and more conflicts would be resolved violently.

If each organization stops one war per century, each will be amazingly valuable to humankind. If the next generation of such institutions, such as the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, can stop even more wars, we are on our way to solving the scourge of humanity.

Vision, dreams and fantasies

Without a vision, the people perish.
--Proverbs 29:18

Elise Boulding created a process called Inventing a World without Weapons. She taught much of the peace community to envision and taught us the difference between fantasy, dreams, and visions.

A fantasy is a snapshot of a future you'd love to see. It is naive, unlikely, but fun to mull over.

A dream is a fantasy plus a vague idea that it is possible based on knowing that some other fantasies have been realized when they looked unachievable.

A vision is created and attained by first fantasizing, then dreaming, and then creating a 'future's history," which is a plan resulting from working backward from the fantasy to the present time and then getting busy on the necessary steps. By the time you work backward and create the logical conditions preceding each stage you have carved yourself a line of sight from now until the actualized vision.

The corporate world has used this process to their advantage and the peace side of society needs to be more about envisioning and actualizing than merely hand-wringing on the one hand and living isolated lives of peace on the other.

This is why it's important to engage in collective envisioning. Once an affinity group has worked through a shared vision and future's history, the action steps are all brushed in and only the discipline and mutual support are needed to actualize peace at whatever level the group is capable of achieving it.

My friend Jeanne Larson crossed over a few years ago and all who knew her mourn her passing and miss her still. She was a great peace visioner. One of her lessons to her students was that the images they were creating needed to be sharp and specific.

So one wouldn't say, "Well, in the year 2020 I see everybody loving each other," without numerous details of what that means.

"I will be writing at my little desk, which is made from recycled wood that laborers reclaimed from a home that needed to be removed. No homes are torn down any more; many products are made from the wood and other materials taken from these places. My desk is scarred and battered but serviceable and beautiful for its renewed life. My lamp is made from recycled titanium from the hull of a Trident nuclear submarine, all of which have become artificial hip joints and other valuable bone replacements, but I got this somewhat expensive lamp with the idea of passing down to the generations and I think there is a special light that comes from such a peace conversion."

Jeanne made the best, detailed, and meaningful images, the allure and clarity of which helped teach her students to work hard at similar creations. Once we have that, we can begin to connect and integrate our images systemically with our affinity groups and create a structural vision we can commit to achieving.

How important is this, really? Can't we just do the right thing as it comes to hand?

Sure, if we want to continue to live in Dick Cheney's vision. He had one, based on greed, power and selfishness. He and his elite powerfriends in the neocon movement and the rich overlords of war profiteering figured out how to create the world in which we currently live. Other Donald Rumsfelds and Paul Wolfowitz's are just coming of age, talking together about their visions, coordinating them, making agreements that will pay off later quite handsomely.

Unless, that is, we organize, envision, and establish a creative and concrete beachhead out 10, 20, and 30 years into the future. Our collective power to enforce our vision with nonviolent action will always be greater than their hired guns and their hired guns will always be more powerful than our few participants. The choice is ours.