Stories
Update of Culture of Peace Corporation
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They say that at the moment of death, you have a moment when you can look back clearly at your life and understand its meaning. Writing now about my death, it occurs to me that I should look back at my life and sum it up. Usually that task is left to a biographer, but perhaps I should give it a try now. It comes at a moment when I am packing up all my papers and books from a lifetime and inviting the archivists from Wesleyan to come and get them for their library archives about my life. It all goes back to the moment that I read about King Solomon in reading the full bible aloud with my mother. My life should concentrate on wisdom rather than fame or riches. Hence, this page: my life of wisdom.
I am especially proud of four "discoveries" of general laws. The first two concerned brain evolution. With my students Jon Mink and Rob Blumenschine, we formulated a general law of brain evolution, that the brain attains a size by which it consumes 5-10% of the metabolic energy of the organism. I thought about extending this law to all systems, that they should ideally divide their resources into 5-10% management/administration and 90-95% action/production, for example in business corporations, but never followed up on this. And in comparing motivational systems of rats and monkeys, I was able to forumulate a general law that motivational systems evolve more rapidly in the sensory and motor extremes, but more slowly at the motivational mechanism core.
The other two general laws concern the history of the culture of war. First, I found over the course of history, the nation state has come to monopolize - and essentially become - the culture of war. And second, in recent centuries, as democracy and anti-war consciousness have advanced, the culture of war has increasingly come to rely on the control of information as its principal weapon. Only by manipulating information can they convince voters to support their wars.
Here is a schema for an overview of the encyclopedic studies I have done over the course of my life
(click here for an earlier version of this written ten years ago).
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DAYS/MONTHS | ONE GENERATION |
ALL OF HUMAN
HISTORY |
HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH (both animals and humans) |
| THE BRAIN | Motivational systems of social behavior |
Ratio of CNS to body metabolism in vertebrates Evolution of supraspinal pathways |
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| THE INDIVIDUAL |
Psychology for Peace Activists |
Agonistic behavior in muroid rodents |
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| THE SOCIAL UNIT |
The State of the Culture of Peace in New Haven |
The American Peace Movements |
The History of the Culture of War | The story from a rock |
| HUMANITY (OR SPECIES) AS A WHOLE |
Embrace the fire
CPNN bulletin Blog |
I have seen the promised land UNESO and a Culture of Peace |
The History of the Culture of War Why there are so few womenwarriors |
Motivational systems of social behavior in malerats and stumptailmacaques |
There are a few blanks in the table that I kept meaning to fill:
1) Changes in the brain of an individual over time. The most important change is language. Although language uses a brain mechanism that was evolved for other purposes (the directional system of the forelimbs), its development in the individual comes about by imitation and learning. I have often considered working on this, since, as far as I can tell, there is not yet a good analysis of how this is done in the brain.
2) The individual over the course of days and months. This is a very important question because it includes the question of consciousness-raising which I have dealt with on a longer time-scale in Psychology for Peace Activists. However, the question remains to be explored how this can take place in a short time at key moments of history. A small study that I did with one of my students prior to the Seville Statement showed how this can be approached scientifically.
3) The development of the potential of each individual human over the course of human history. For example, half of humankind now has access to the internet with its capacity for rapid communication and for access to all human knowledge. This has accumulated throughout human history, but has accelerated in recent decades. Now billions of people have access to travel, communication and knowledge greater than that of Alexander the Great at one time. No wonder the culture of war is afraid of people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden who make available to everyone the hidden secrets of the culture of war.
As a result, now, for the first time in history, one can foresee a global movement to change from the culture of war to a culture of peace.
It is this greatly increased access to travel, communication and knowledge that has enabled me, like many others, to develop a global, encyclopedic vision which can be called wisdom.
But there is a price for wisdom. You are able to see into the future - you become a prophet, and that is frustrating as I have expressed in a poem:
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With the global, encyclopedic vision gained from all my studies, I have come to concentrate my efforts on the transition from a culture of war to a culture of peace, as I have set forth in the novella "I have seen the promised land." I work on trying to develop a global network of peace cities that can take over the UN Security Council when the state system crashes. But, as I write each month in my blog, progress is painfully slow, while history is moving much too fast!
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme