[Peace-discuss] on empathy and the abolition of war - David Swanson reviews Paul Chappell "The Cosmic Ocean"

Thu Jan 28 16:31:44 EST 2016

David Swanson reviews a book by Paul Chappell, "The Cosmic Ocean". A 
quote (from Swanson):

    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.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[ufpj-activist] Turning Trauma into the Abolition of War
Date: 	Thu, 28 Jan 2016 16:10:36 -0500
From: 	David Swanson <davidcnswanson at gmail.com>
To: 	David Swanson <david at davidswanson.org>

  Turning Trauma into the Abolition of War
  <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=>

cosmicocean 
<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=>

By David Swanson, World Beyond War, http://worldbeyondwar.org/6993-2/ 
<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=>

'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.'

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.

Chappell's latest book, /The Cosmic Ocean: New Answers to Big 
Questions/, 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?

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.

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.

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.

'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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.'

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-- 

*/War Is A Lie: Second Edition /will be published by Just World Books on 
April 5, 2016. Please buy it online that day.
*

*David Swanson *is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He 
is director of WorldBeyondWar.org 
<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=> 
and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org 
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Swanson's books include /War Is A Lie 
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He blogs at DavidSwanson.org 
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and WarIsACrime.org 
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He hosts Talk Nation Radio 
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is a 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee 
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Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson 
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