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David Swanson reviews a book by Paul Chappell, "The Cosmic Ocean".
A quote (from Swanson):<br>
<br>
<blockquote>I generally object to investigations into 'human nature'
as I believe the concept primarily serves as an excuse for nasty
behavior, and I'm unaware of any empirical means of determining
what actions do and do not qualify as 'human nature.' But Chappell
is not trying to identify a mystically correct moral behavior in
order to insist that we imitate it. He's trying to accurately
grasp the motivations of even the most damaging actions, in part
in order to enlarge our capacity for empathy ' and in part in
order to re-classify certain types of behavior as illness. He's
also exposing the use of 'human nature' as an excuse.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Subject:
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<td>[ufpj-activist] Turning Trauma into the Abolition of War</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Date: </th>
<td>Thu, 28 Jan 2016 16:10:36 -0500</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">From: </th>
<td>David Swanson <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:davidcnswanson@gmail.com"><davidcnswanson@gmail.com></a></td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">To: </th>
<td>David Swanson <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:david@davidswanson.org"><david@davidswanson.org></a></td>
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<h1 class=""><a moz-do-not-send="true"
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rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Turning Trauma into
the Abolition of War">Turning Trauma into the Abolition of
War</a></h1>
<span class=""> <span class=""></span></span>
<p><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__worldbeyondwar.org_wp-2Dcontent_uploads_2016_01_cosmicocean.jpg&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=z1f2mPVVmxYuH5wMYbUGeH17AgT6Yhe4x-KNkViRxTg&e="><img
moz-do-not-send="true" class=""
src="http://worldbeyondwar.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/cosmicocean-194x300.jpg"
alt="cosmicocean" height="300" width="194"></a></p>
<p>By David Swanson, World Beyond War, <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__worldbeyondwar.org_6993-2D2_&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=J3Ddm_a7CrTNc12p9BhENXSkFciiCA9Et0iUh59rLOA&e="><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://worldbeyondwar.org/6993-2/">http://worldbeyondwar.org/6993-2/</a></a><br>
</p>
<p>'I was sleeping peacefully late one night when I felt someone
grab my leg and drag me from my bed onto the floor. My leg was
pulled so hard I heard my pajama pants rip down the middle.
Looking up and seeing my father, I began to panic as he pulled
my hair and told me he was going to kill me.'</p>
<p>Paul Chappell is recounting an incident from when he was four
years old. The terror of such unpredictable attacks in the
years that followed traumatized him. Chappell's father had
been traumatized by war, and Chappell would also end up
joining the military. But over the years, Paul managed to turn
his childhood trauma, not into a continued cycle of violence
but rather into a means of gaining insight into how the
institution of mass violence might be ended.</p>
<p>Chappell's latest book, <em>The Cosmic Ocean: New Answers
to Big Questions</em>, is the fifth in a projected
seven-part series. Like a sculptor pounding out variations on
a theme, Chappell each year produces a newer, thicker, wiser,
and more illuminating take on the questions that tear at his
heart: How can we be so kind and cause such suffering? How can
we fail to care about others just like ourselves? What sort of
change is possible and how can it be brought about?</p>
<p>I'm usually wary of anything that could be repetitive or
pedantic, as life is just too short and I just too rebellious.
But Chappell is repetitive because he is a teacher, and he is
becoming a better teacher every year. He wants us to
understand important truths in a variety of contexts, to
remember them, and to act on them. As with his previous books,
I once again recommend the latest one as the best, but
encourage reading them all. Skip a presidential debate or two
if you have to.</p>
<p>I'm always wary of efforts to solve war by finding inner
peace. 'Does the Pentagon give a flying f' if you've got
inner peace?!' I've been known to scream, very unpeacefully.
'Will your forgiving of your obnoxious neighbor and your
spreading of harmony through your neighborhood stop Raytheon
and Boeing and Lockheed from profiting off another war on
Libya?' But, in fact, Chappell is examining the reasons people
become violent and accepting of violence at least in part in
order to understand what it would take to create a society in
which Donald Trump would speak to entirely empty coliseums,
and any Congress member who failed to end a war would be
confronted by a unanimous constituency insisting on peace.
Chappell's point is not to shut out the world, but to
understand better how to change it.</p>
<p>I generally object to investigations into 'human nature' as I
believe the concept primarily serves as an excuse for nasty
behavior, and I'm unaware of any empirical means of
determining what actions do and do not qualify as 'human
nature.' But Chappell is not trying to identify a mystically
correct moral behavior in order to insist that we imitate it.
He's trying to accurately grasp the motivations of even the
most damaging actions, in part in order to enlarge our
capacity for empathy ' and in part in order to re-classify
certain types of behavior as illness. He's also exposing the
use of 'human nature' as an excuse.</p>
<p>'When someone gets malaria, cancer, or HIV,' writes Chappell,
'I have never heard anyone say, 'Oh, that's just human
nature,' because people realize something has gone wrong
with the human body. But if someone becomes violent, people
often say, 'Oh that's just human nature,' which assumes
that violence is an essential part of being human (like eating
and sleeping), rather than the result of something that has
gone wrong. But what if violence, like an illness, has a cause
that we can understand and prevent?' Chappell includes among
such causes, 'poverty, desperation, injustice, dehumanization,
ignorance, bullying, and trauma.'</p>
<p>Of course it's a choice we make to categorize something as
an illness, not an eternal discovery about 'human nature,' but
it is a wise choice when we're talking about violence and
war.</p>
<p>A traumatized person, Chappell writes, wants others to
understand the trauma and sympathize with their suffering. But
how can they communicate the trauma? They can try ordinary
speech or art, but often another medium appears superior:
violence. By making others feel the same pain, a traumatized
person can finally make himself understood. As a sophomore in
college, Chappell happened to mention to his classmates that
when he'd been bored in high school he'd fantasized about
killing all of his fellow students. Chappell assumed that this
was universal, but his college friends reacted with horror.</p>
<p>Chappell came to understand that a desire for violence can
arise out of trauma, and that it was not typical. 'Cruel
actions, if we define them as inflicting, watching, and
enjoying the suffering of a living creature (without that
creature's consent), are relatively rare in the world,' he
writes. A member of an ancient culture who believed that a
child sacrifice would appease the god or gods and save a
society might, and in various accounts did, deeply regret
having to kill a child, but acted on the basis of a false
belief.</p>
<p>I might add that most religious believers these days don't
act on their beliefs in ways that conflict with broader
society. Exceptions include, on the plus side, those who
protest at drone bases in the name of Jesus, and on the
negative side, those who sacrifice chickens, deny their kids
medicine, or disregard climate change on the grounds that
it's not in the Bible. Willful ignorance can muddy up the
question of feeling empathy for someone acting from within a
particular worldview, but only slightly. As we develop a habit
of empathizing, it should reach more and more people and
behaviors. Empathizing is, of course, a different thing than
supporting, justifying, or excusing.</p>
<p>Chappell suggests, however, that building empathy depends on
building accuracy: 'When we search for the underlying causes
of problems and arrive at inaccurate answers, it can silence
our empathy. For example, if you believe a baby girl is born
with a disability because she is cursed by the gods or paying
back bad karma from a past life, it can reduce your empathy
not only for her, but also her family.'</p>
<p>Empathizing with more individuals, Chappell argues, can also
result in greater feelings of empathy for humanity as a whole,
and as a result greater confidence in the ability of great
masses of humanity to improve our ways: '[W]hen we believe
that humanity is born evil, naturally violent, and destined to
forever wage war, it can silence our empathy, but the
scientific understanding that violence is instead caused by
trauma and other preventable factors offers us a more accurate
(and empathetic) understanding of human beings.'</p>
<p>Another route toward empathizing with humanity all over the
earth today (and perhaps even losing the need to 'humanize'
each new person before we can care about them) is learning to
empathize with human generations long past: 'The reason I am
discussing the enormous challenges our ancestors overcame is
because we must strengthen our respect, empathy, and
appreciation for human beings and stop viewing ourselves as a
cancer or virus upon the earth.'</p>
<p>But aren't we a virus upon the earth? Haven't we launched
a mass extinction of millions of beautiful species, possibly
including our own? Perhaps we have. But we won't avoid it,
assuming we can avoid it, by viewing ourselves as cancer.
That's a recipe for hopelessness, and also for cruelty and
war ' which can only make matters dramatically worse. If we
are to save ourselves we have to understand that we are worth
saving, and that even our virus-like activities are generally
well-intended.</p>
<p>That we mean well does not suggest that our government in
Washington, D.C., means well ' although many members of that
government often do, in some ways at least, have much better
intentions than the results convey. It also does not mean that
humans aren't engaged in horrible activities, first among
them being war: 'Many people today have a condescending
attitude toward those who practiced human sacrifice thousands
of years ago, but what if we are not so different from them?
What if people in the modern world continue to die in massive
ceremonies of human sacrifice? What if you supported the
ritual of human sacrifice at some point in your life, without
even realizing it?' Chappell is referring to war, that
institution to which U.S. parents continue to send their
offspring.</p>
<p>War, in fact, has become a U.S. religion, Chappell writes.
War has heretics and behaviors that are seen as sacrilegious.
Many people display more reverence for Veterans' Day than
for Christmas. One might add that war has holy objects, such
as flags, that must never be desecrated, although human beings
can be desecrated in large numbers for the good of the flag.</p>
<p>How does empathy get us out of this fix? Chappell turns, late
in the book, to the topic of beauty, arguing not just against
the often criticized standards of the beauty products
industry, but for truly seeing all humans as beautiful,
regardless of their age, health, race, or culture. We should
have a reverence for life, he writes, using language that has,
I'm afraid, been damagingly taken over by the abortion
debate.</p>
<p>Chappell has a vision of people someday seeing, not just that
little black boys and black girls in Alabama are able to join
hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and
brothers, but seeing every person on the whole earth as part
of their own family: 'When a baby is born anywhere on earth,
even to people whose skin color differs from yours, about 99.9
percent of your DNA is passed on.' You want biological
descendants? There's no need to have eight kids. There's a
need to protect your human family.</p>
<p>The term 'racism,' Chappell writes, dates only to the 1930s,
and 'sexism' to the 1960s. Here's one more we might add:
'American exceptionalism.' I've read somewhere that it dates
to 1929. Perhaps it will be a thing of the past by 2029.
Perhaps if it isn't we all will be.</p>
<p> </p>
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-- <br>
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<p><b><i>War Is A Lie: Second Edition </i>will
be published by Just World Books on
April 5, 2016. Please buy it online
that day.<br>
</b></p>
<p><b>David Swanson </b>is an author,
activist, journalist, and radio host.
He is director of <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__WorldBeyondWar.org&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=kli-SVYDVWg01EIlFB-K_dCJ38Ih-N0ZJlvgRRXKljU&e="
target="_blank">WorldBeyondWar.org</a>
and campaign coordinator for <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__RootsAction.org&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=zig9sDqnjJHjx3d8msmhGUUrsEXKDMNMoCP7fCszSgE&e="
target="_blank">RootsAction.org</a>.
Swanson's books include <i><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__warisalie.org_&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=WsmUY6lw_sA2b9seLmQqUygV5NSsTlIJZBI4Q9bKP_Y&e="
target="_blank">War Is A Lie</a></i>.
He blogs at <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__davidswanson.org_&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=HE6RYCgvL691tfT4JRP-6G1X6qR19zaQEz0nliwOHao&e="
target="_blank">DavidSwanson.org</a>
and <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__warisacrime.org_&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=-2kYC-4e1fTymRanw3qRbrbzx7wjZi41ExOcmkftFIo&e="
target="_blank">WarIsACrime.org</a>.
He hosts <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__davidswanson.org_taxonomy_term_41&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=no6eJ5uZdU8zAJZu89G7_cLo7pcf1qzp85_GPpx_jc8&e="
target="_blank">Talk Nation Radio</a>.<b>
</b>He is a <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__davidswanson.org_node_4682&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=dX3NziRym62FjQmnBoqVZ_W9gBzm8uBX8H5S--xhsP4&e="
target="_blank">2015 Nobel Peace
Prize Nominee</a>.<br>
</p>
<p>Follow him on Twitter: <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__twitter.com_davidcnswanson&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=3npr46DwyNRtrw-j3MOBoV-qSFfW7HGLCY0vw6rLNXg&e="
target="_blank">@davidcnswanson</a>
and <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.facebook.com_pages_David-2DSwanson_297768373319-23&d=BQMFaQ&c=8hUWFZcy2Z-Za5rBPlktOQ&r=_iuwmBDMEAIAz6k1h--JVoji6x5mlDiImSbbdIp2zWg&m=FeU9mN69bfcRi9bUBY3cQS4tLzMZ2DSF_9LEASRa4cg&s=8Itl547-F7teHOIvOQy6svRzb0yS9ZAVWNoD4i2XwgY&e="
target="_blank">FaceBook</a>. <br>
</p>
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