World Peace: The Role of the Individual-2

The second stage of consciousness development, as seen in the lives of great peace activists, is anger. This was a great surprise to me, as it has been to many of my readers. Reading one autobiography after another, one finds quotations like the following from the autobiography of Nelson Mandela (1994):

"I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise."

According to Martin Luther King, Jr (1968), the harnessing of anger is the greatest of tasks:

"The supreme task is to organize and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force."

Gandhi (1929) also talks about the harnessing of anger as a powerful force for justice:

"I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so, our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world."

Anger, as it turns out from my studies of aggressive behavior, is the natural human response to perceived injustice. This is discussed in detail from a scientific perspective in my book The Aggression Systems (Adams 2003), that is available on the Internet.

On the other hand in my studies, I have found, again to my initial surprise, that anger is not an important motivation for warriors. Instead, it turns out that the training of warriors is designed to enable them to ignore their emotions, especially fear, and to act rationally. This is described for the present day in the book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman of the U.S. Army (1995). And it has apparently always been the case, as shown in my analysis of the warfare by non-state societies in New Guinea (Adams, 1984, There is no instinct for war). A good warrior follows orders and does not get angry at his superior officer, or, in the case of the superior officer, he should not get angry at the men under his charge. For example, at one point during the first Iraq war, it was said that the supreme commander General Schwarzkopf was losing his temper against his officers so often that morale was being undermined and the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had to make a special trip to Saudi Arabia to tell him the equivalent of "One more temper tantrum and you're fired."

Of course, we must not forget that anger can be a destructive as well as a constructive motivation in the lives of individuals. Learning when and how to express anger needs to be an important part of the education of every person, in order to be able to harness the emotions for a productive life. This is especially a challenge for social justice movements. These movements attract new members who are full of righteous indignation against injustice. Thus, they have a higher, not a lower, proportion of "angry people" than in the general population. Unless these movements teach their members how to manage their anger and harness it to constructive action, they face a serious risk of being torn apart by disputes.

There is another related risk, more subtle, that is borne by social justice movements. Many who come to these movements, realizing that they have a high level of anger are so afraid of their own anger that they are greatly inhibited in their actions, fearing that they may offend others. These activists often turn to meditation and other forms of self-discipline, sometimes to the point that they are unable to act freely or to work well with others,

Ironically, the harnessing of "righteous indignation" was a key part of educational systems in the early years of America when education was run by the church. It was only after education came under control of the state after the American Civil War that anger was said to be "bad" and all anger was to be suppressed. This is described in detail in the book, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Stearns and Stearns, 1989). It is probably not by accident that the turning point, around the 1870s corresponded to what was called the "industrial wars" when thousands of federal troops and National Guard were called out to suppress the strikes by industrial workers. It was at this time that the National Guard was founded and headed by the industrialists as described in Internal Military Interventions in the United States (Adams 1995) which is available on my Internet website.

For many years I was greatly influenced by the fallacy that war is based on anger, and therefore part of human nature. My work in brain research, investigating the mechanisms of aggressive behavior, was originally motivated by the mistaken belief that this would contribute to world peace by discovering an instinctive source of war. By the time I wrote a definitive scientific review of the subject after more than a decade of work (Brain Mechanisms for Offense, Defense and Submission, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1979), I had come to realize that my basic premise was wrong. The final words of that scientific paper say that:

"Human aggression has been transformed by many cultural factors such as the development of institutions and economic systems and the elaboration of motor patterns with tools and language. Knowing this, we have a moral obligation to avoid oversimplified phylogenetic extrapolations ( which may be "particularly provocative" as noted by Paul Brain), and we should make it clear that such human phenomena as crime, revolution, and war are not the inevitable results of neural circuitry."

Over the course of my studies it became clear that anger is not the basis for warfare. Warfare, and even more so, the culture of war that underlies it, is a cultural, not a biological phenomenon. The "evolution of war and the culture of war" (Adams, 2008), refers to cultural evolution and not biological evolution.

In a scientific study conducted with the help of one of my students at the university (Adams and Bosch, 1987), we showed how the belief that war is part of human nature makes people less likely to take action for peace because they believe that the cause is hopeless. In their thinking, since war is part of human nature, it is therefore inevitable and cannot be changed. On the other hand, those who understand that war is not part of human nature are more likely to take action because they believe that their actions can have an effect and help to prevent war.

Recognizing this as an important issue, I worked with the International Society for Research on Aggression to organize a high-level conference of scientists from around the world in 1986 in Seville, Spain, to answer the question, "Is war part of human nature?" The scientists came from all the relevant biological and social sciences: genetics, brain research, animal behavior, sociology, psychology and anthropology. We issued the Seville Statement on Violence (Adams 1989, 1991), which considers and rejects the following five arguments:

* that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.

* that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature.

* that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior.

* that humans have a 'violent brain'. * that war is caused by 'instinct' or any single motivation.

The scientists concluded at Seville that "the same species that invented war is capable of inventing peace" paraphrasing a statement published a generation earlier by the great anthropologist Margaret Mead.

The Seville Statement on Violence was subsequently endorsed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as well as many scientific organizations including the American Anthropological, Psychological and Sociological Associations, and it was widely diffused and discussed. In the years since the Seville Statement was published, there has been little change in the scientific evidence, as documented in the online newsletter of the Seville Statement at http://www.culture-of-peace.info/SSOVnews303/page2.html .

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