Reclaiming Our Human Sanity: Anthropologist Doug Fry on War, Peace, and the Stories We Tell
We are living in a time when cruelty is normalized, war is justified as inevitable, and violence is often explained away as simply “human nature.”
But what if that story is wrong?
On this episode of Nonviolence Radio, we speak with peace anthropologist Doug Fry about the evidence — archaeological, cross-cultural, and contemporary — that challenges the assumption that humans are wired for war. Drawing on decades of research, Fry explores peace systems, restraint, interdependence, and the ways societies have sustained nonviolence across history.
If war had conditions that gave rise to it, then it is not destiny. And if peace has deeper roots in our human story than we’ve been taught, then reclaiming human sanity may begin with reclaiming the truth about who we are.
As Fry reminds us, the task is not to debate whether change is possible — but to act:
“I don’t waste my time thinking whether this is possible or not. Take steps to try to get it done. I fail or I succeed. And if I fail, back to the drawing board. Try something else. Do it. Do it better. Do something different.”
Transcript:
(With gratitude to Elizabeth High for this transcript.)
Stephanie Van Hook: Greetings and good morning, everybody. You are here at Nonviolence Radio. I'm your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I'm here in the studio with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. And we're from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California. On the show, we like to explore all different angles of nonviolence: research, activism, science; just learning lessons about what this capacity that we all have, how it's available to us, and how we can expand our world and mind and selves in knowing more about it. So, Michael, welcome to the show this morning. How are you doing?
Michael Nagler: Oh, I'm just doing fine. Stephanie, thanks very much– eager to address our topic today.
Stephanie: Yeah, well, our topic is peace anthropology. And it's really about who we are and the story that we've been telling ourselves for a long time. We hear people: politicians or, you know, just casually drop, "Well, humans have been warring since time immemorial," or "humans are always just– we're violent because of our biology."
And it turns out that these claims are factually incorrect and that there are people doing research to show that, including our guest today. He's an anthropologist, but he's a peace anthropologist. But before we get to Doug Fry, who is our guest, Michael and I usually have these conversations coming over to the studio. Michael learned as a young person that a human being is "a primate with flat fingernails." So I called him that. I said, "you're just a primate with flat fingernails." And I think it really, really hit you hard when I said that to him.
Michael: Well, look, I don't deny that I'm a primate with flat fingernails, but I do deny that that's all I am.
Stephanie: . Right. Yeah. Well, and this is a topic that, of peace anthropology, of knowing our human nature; it's really, you've been pushing this for a really long time as well. So my interest in it has definitely stemmed from your passion for it as well, Michael. And I think for many people who follow Nonviolence Radio and follow the Metta Center, they're learning this from you.
So let me say a few words about Doug Fry. He's a peace anthropologist, and we explore questions of peace systems, nonviolence, and the interplay of human nature in conflict. And we examine how societies navigate conflict and really what it means about our capacity for peace. And what I'm really struck by in this interview is just how much research there still is to do, that if anybody going into university today is looking for a field, peace is really the field to get into. There is so much still left to discover, uncover, recover about ourselves. Doug Fry is a Senior Associate Research Scholar for the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity called AC4 at the Climate School in Columbia University. And he's also Professor Emeritus of Peace and Conflict Studies at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. And he's an author. He's written numerous articles and book chapters and books, including Beyond War, Nurturing Our Humanity with Riane Eisler, there's an anthology: War, Peace and Human Nature, and he's currently working on a book called Advanced Conflict Resolution. So let's just jump in right now to our interview with peace anthropologist Doug Fry.
Michael: What is peace anthropology?
Doug Fry: Well, I wish there was more peace anthropology, I'll say first. There's not so many folks doing it. I'm not sure it even qualifies as a subfield or subdiscipline at this point, I'm really sorry to say, but maybe it will develop into something. I certainly know a lot of people appreciate the idea. It's a little bit ironic. If I have my memory turned on correctly, I think it was Steven Pinker who talked about peace anthropology. And in a very convoluted through a series of sort of strange steps in his book, Better Angels of Our Nature, somehow I was alluded to, but never cited or quoted as a peace anthropologist. So at first I was a little bit miffed. Academics like to be given credit for their ideas. But then I thought, "oh, well, what the heck?"
So peace anthropology, what is it? Well, it's an anthropological perspective on peace. And that's many things I would argue. because anthropology is after all the study of humankind and anthropology looks across cultural space and then of course it looks across time going backwards; and to a lesser degree thinking about the future in the sense of human potentials where could we go.
So in that sense it's a very broad encompassing discipline, and you could split the pie in different ways. For instance, in biological or sometimes called physical anthropology, traditionally, we have disciplines like primatology, study of non-human primates, a study of evolutionary processes, cultural ecology– evolutionary ecology, I should say. Then there's sociocultural anthropology, which, as the name implies, tends to focus on existing cultures.
So when you apply peace to the mix, give it a good stir: in physical or biological anthropology, there's been huge controversies and debates about human warlike nature. Are we like killer chimpanzees? You know, chimpanzees making war, humans make war, and so forth. I've been personally very critical of that type of argument, and maybe I'm getting a little ahead, but I want to make sure that I don't forget. My colleague and friend Brian Ferguson has written a book recently called Chimpanzees, War, and History, and this is really an excellent book because it pretty much demolishes this whole idea that war is an adaptation in chimpanzees, and he also talks about humans and is critical of this idea for humans as well so it fits very much into your overall theme of nonviolence being pervasive and so that's one specific element of anthropology that you could put in the category of peace anthropology, re-looking at the non-human primate data and seeing what it shows.
And then going back in time, of course, we have archaeology as another major sub-discipline. And archaeology has played a very big role in both war anthropology and peace anthropology, put it that way, because probably too much to go into too much history of this. But let me just say, there's been some very recent good studies that we would put into the peace anthropology category. For instance, archaeologist David Dye from the University of Memphis wrote a book about 10 years ago called War Paths, Peace Paths, and I hope this develops more solidly into a peace archaeology but basically archaeologists have ignored looking for peace. And ironically, there was a big hullabaloo 40 years ago that archaeologists have ignored war. And so a whole lot of archaeologists went running off to try to find war. And they found it sometimes, and other times they didn't, but tried to believe they did. And other times they argue that they don't, I have not found it. So archaeology relates to the idea of peace anthropology also.
And one question, which is just sort of perennial up for debate, is how old is war? And peace archaeologists feel pretty confident in looking at the archaeology and saying it really doesn't go back very far at all. It has to do with major shifts in human social organization and other changes. The traditional one has, of course, been agriculture coming in at about 10,000 years ago. That's very recent, 10,000 years ago, more or less, right? But more recently, this archaeologist, peace archaeologists and others have talked about a second path towards social complexification, and that actually involves a hunter-gatherer style of life. But the complex hunter-gatherers, unlike the nomadic foragers, which all humanity lived as nomadic foragers for 99 point whatever percent you choose of our existence. The complex foragers are also very recent, coming in recently, and they tend to be very different. They tend to have hierarchies, inegalitarian social organizations, be settled down, hence no longer nomadic. Their population densities go up, they're a very different type of society, leadership evolves; leaders get egos and have vested interests and guess what almost always war comes in when you get this huge change in social organization.
So fundamentally in peace anthropology we're trying to point out and solidify, with data obviously, drawing on a lot of archaeological data, that the past, the long span of past where we're in nomadic lived in small bands, was very largely peaceful and largely non-warring that's what the evidence shows and with huge changes in complexity that happened relatively recently, war came in by either the agricultural route or by the complexification of foragers as a different and alternative path towards war and other social changes.
So I've talked a little bit about some of the disciplines and how this relates, I'll just mention sociocultural, because of course that's a huge… Excuse me, before I mentioned sociocultural, indulge me with one more archaeological piece, archaeological comment, because I find this intriguing that no one will touch it. There are actually, around the planet, many sequences that show a state of no war, and then complexification, and then war comes in, along with a host of other differences, some of which I've just talked about: population increase, settling down, loss of mobility therefore. Very often it relates to there being key resources that are in a particular place. These are not spread out equally across a large environment as in the nomadic sense, but rather they are like a salmon run, for instance, or ability to collect a large number of aquatic resources out of the lake. And I find this intriguing, but in nearly all cases, not all cases, but nearly all cases, there have to be rich aquatic resources for this type of complexification to occur.
And lo and behold, war doesn't come in immediately, but you see progressions in these different sequences. So in the big grand scheme of "let's look for patterns," you see a pattern. You see no war, settling down and complexification developing, and you see war coming in. And that conclusion is pretty strong. I think that you see multiple origins of war all relatively recently in the human grand picture of things, and this speaks very much against the idea that as Brian Ferguson says "war goes forever backwards." It totally contradicts that idea. War does not go forever backwards there are particular preconditions or causes for it that come in relatively recently. So that's the archaeological side of peace anthropology. Again, very data based. Do you have a comment or a question, Michael?
Michael: Yes, Doug. Thank you. When you mentioned peace archaeology, my mind goes immediately to Marija Gimbutas and the discoveries that, you know, the conditions that you mentioned as providing the basic conditions for war to develop doesn't mean that war is inevitable. Because you have the societies that she's researched, which for thousands of years don't show these Kurgan burials, and the big macho surrounded by weapons and servants and so forth. So can you work that in?
Doug: Well, that's sort of a nice segue for me into the sociocultural, where, first of all, if you look cross-culturally, not all societies make war at all. My colleague and friend, Bruce Bonta, now unfortunately has left the planet a few years ago, his last book has come out in this series, it's called Peaceful Societies: Alternative to War. I'm not sure if this had been on your radar. It came out just a couple of years ago. But I imagine you have heard of Bruce Bonta and all his work with peaceful societies and his peaceful society website and so forth.
Peaceful societies are, you know, you can sort of look at them two ways or both. And one is, are they internally peaceful? And as many of these societies that have very, very low levels of aggression, and interestingly, the other part of this is they tend to have belief systems and values which are nonviolent. So one reinforces the other: behavior and largely in congruence with the nonviolent beliefs and so forth. And Bruce was the first person to make this observation back in the 1990s on the basis of looking across these peaceful societies. The other way to look at peaceful societies, non-warring societies. And so this is all part of, again, the first question and part of a peace anthropology, to look at non-warring societies, look at internally peaceful societies is what I like to call them, and some are both, but not all, and try to figure out, "well, what's going on here? How do they manage to maintain this high level of nonviolence in their daily social life? Or how do they avoid war?" And I'd be remiss not to mention at this point, also a higher level of non-warring.
And that's what my colleagues and I are calling peace systems, which are then not just a single non-warring society, but clusters of neighboring societies that don't make war with each other. And sometimes they don't make war at all. But for our definition, it's good enough for a peace system if they're not making war with each other. So this could be like a minimum of three or more, sometimes 10 neighbors, 10 neighboring societies. And they exist across different types of social organization as well, from the nomadic bands, that's pretty easy because we already talked about how they tend not to be very warlike anyway. But then moving on up to neighboring tribes, such as in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil, there's approximately 10 tribes. They haven't warred for a long time. There's no history of warring amongst themselves. They will engage in defensive war to protect themselves from more hostile groups outside. So that's interesting as well. So we have examples basically going right on up to nations and then even regional systems.
And I'll mention two regional systems, which are pretty solidly classifiable as peace systems: one is the European Union, which is a really fascinating example of how a continent that engaged in regular warfare over history totally shifted gears in the course of seventy some years and became a integrated united non-warring system. The other one is slightly overlapping, but not totally. And that's the five Nordic countries and other Nordic regions. They haven't warred with each other within that system of five Nordic nations for over 200 years.
And hardly anybody knows this. That shows the bias against understanding there's peace, and there's peace systems, and it's possible because here it is, it exists. And Michael, you mentioned Costa Rica when we were doing a little preliminary chatting. That's an interesting case as well. Costa Rica abolished their army, I believe it was 1947, and has been doing just fine in terms of security and devoting their resources more towards human well-being and good social needs, such as education and health care for their country. And there are, in fact, many nations that just don't have armies. So If we're talking non-warring societies, they exist even as current nations. Again, something that very few people actually have on their radar, something that exists. I see, Stephanie, you were signaling to me that you might have a question or two.
Stephanie: I have so many questions and comments, but the one that just came up is when you mentioned the European Union. I'm thinking, moving from nomadic forager societies to being more agricultural and staying in one place. And then that can lead to tensions among groups that can lead to violent conflict and war. And then we have processes that lead us into creating larger group identities, which then emerge into things called nation states, which are one step along the way to larger peace systems that we're seeing at this point. The nation states have become warring. And so then we have something like the European Union. And so it seems like there's more to that process, that it's not just enough of trying to go beyond our identity in place or a larger identity, but we have to understand our interdependence with one another across divides and differences. So can you speak to this? Do you think that interdependence has an important role in the creation of peace societies?
Doug: Yes, I do. And I actually have some data from a study we did that supports exactly this. So what we did in this study, we were curious, what are some of the features, the important variables that peace systems have, that these clusters of neighboring societies that don't make war with each other hold at a higher level or have compared to societies that are not parts of peace systems? So this was really a team effort involving some colleagues at Columbia University, some of our former students, I was at that point at University of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB, and we put together a team of students and more degree-heavy individuals and did a lot of work, it was very data-intensive, to look at a lot of ethnographies and code these ethnographies for various elements that we thought would be important for peace. And interdependence was one of them.
And additionally, we broke interdependence down into different subcategories, for instance, environmental or ecological interdependence; economic interdependence is how it often plays out, and so forth. And so when we crunched all these numbers, we had… I shall say first, we had a relatively small sample of peace systems, 16 of them in this case. I'm certain there's many more peace systems out there, but since they've hardly been looked at by anybody and the term has hardly been applied, you have to really beat the bushes and find them. And it's fun and exciting when you find a new peace system or when more typically you think "I think it might be a peace system." And then you dig deeper and you find out it is a good case or not such a good case after all. In any case, we had 16 peace systems and we compared them with a larger number of non-peace system representatives because they're easy to find. And we wanted to try to get enough in our sample or overall sample that we might get some significant numbers out of this.
And we got very significant numbers so that the peace systems were more interdependent with each other than the non-peace systems. They also had a strong overarching identity, meaning that they did not just have a local parochial identity, but they had this larger concept. Again, I mentioned the Upper Xingu River Basin tribes, 10 tribes. They perceive themselves, according to the ethnographic data, which there's a substantial amount by different ethnographers, as members of this larger system. So they may be Mehinaku, but they also are more generally Xingu. And so that's a feature of peace systems more generally.
It's interesting, let's jump to the European Union. I've lived in Finland previously for 19 years, so it would have been soft ethnography in Europe. And now I'm living in France and I've traveled a lot and I've read up on this. It's really interesting to me, more anecdotally or anthropologically ethnography than data that I know of, but in the younger generations in Europe, they've got this additional level of overarching identity. It's been emerging over the last decades. So as I taught numerous international exchange students from Europe and Finland, they start talking, just dropping off their tongues, "We're European. We're European. We're European."
So it's somewhat similar, actually, to the history of our own United States, if you look at it that way. Back at the times of the Revolution, they were Virginians and there were people from New Hampshire, right? We know this story. And now, oh yeah, of course, we're still from New Hampshire, but we also have the overarching level of the federal idea of United States, plural. So this is something that peace systems tend to have more developed than non-peace systems.
And going on down the list, one of the really important factors is a variety of cultural beliefs, norms, and values. In fact, norms were the most important influencer of peace. And I just found that lovely because we're so typically brainwashed that it's some sort of you know economic materialist idea but in fact in this case norms, having a nonviolent norm system was really important, or I should say non-warring because we're talking peace systems values that were also along these lines, the peace values; and as an anthropologist I made sure that as we collected data, we paid attention to how norms and values would be enacted in the society.
So what sort of symbols do they have in the society? Do they have peace symbols or do they have war symbols? Do they have myths that talk about the great war or do they have myths that talk about the arrival of the great peacemakers, you know, and so on and so forth. So we looked at myths and legends and rituals. You get the idea, narratives, stories. And that again, no surprise here, but again, these types of things supported the whole idea that the peace systems were different and much more peaceful than the non-peace systems.
So the other side of this, and I won't belabor it, but just out of curiosity, we're gathering all this data. We also looked across all the societies for what are their war values. Do they have war values and norms? Leadership was another one. Do they have peace leadership or do they have war leadership? One of the, I won't say surprising, but interesting, facts that came out is peace systems sometimes had some more leadership, but not as much as the other group. The other group sometimes had some potentials for peace in there, but more war than peace.
So in a way, it's like a crossing graph. If peace systems are high on peace leadership and peace norms and peace values and rituals and interconnected and all this stuff, all these great peace qualities, it doesn't mean they're absolutely, totally devoid of some of the war elements as well. And then the lines cross, right? So you go over to the societies, some were countries and some were tribes and some were states and blah, blah. The societies and the comparison group, they tended to have higher levels of the war variables, but sometimes also some peace variables. So war and peace is not something that's just all or none or mutually exclusive one way or the other, which, again, I think is interesting. And once you sort of think about it, it starts to make sense.
Stephanie: You emphasize the importance of restraint in your peace research, I believe. And it seems to me that, well, I think of Gandhi, Michael, who said, you know, in order to be capable of nonviolence, you also have to know your capacity for violence, essentially. And so to know that I'm capable of violence, but I also, what makes me strong is my understanding of my capacity to restrain that and to convert it into something different and then to have the social support system for that.
Doug: When I was doing fieldwork long ago for my doctoral dissertation, I was living in two different Zapotec communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, peasant communities at this point. And I've written quite a bit about these. It's all back in the anthropological archives, you know, the journal articles and such. But many interesting things came out of the comparison of two different communities. One was much more nonviolent and peaceful than the other. And in some way similar to the peace systems research I'm just talking about, core values were a bit different. Everybody in both communities talked about the importance of respect. What was intriguing to me is the more peaceful place, which I call La Paz, peace. They actually lived in accordance with these ideas of "you respect other people, you're polite, you don't argue, you don't fight, engage in aggression," and so forth. Whereas in the other community, I tried to find a neutral term, you know, San Andreas, a neutral name, pseudonym for that community. They didn't so much. There was wife-beating, there was five times more murders over time, and so forth. And so that sort of reinforces the idea of community differences, behaviorally corresponding with attitudes.
But when it came to restraint, I realized whenever I saw something aggressive, which was three times in La Paz, one of the persons on his own accord, that were men, on his own accord, just backed away and left, showed that restraint. For example, leaving a wedding party where people had been drinking and so forth, two guys were miffed with each other. One guy came and kicked the other guy on his butt as he was walking away. The guy turned, just looked, and then walked away. Now I was thinking, if this had been San Andreas, we would have a fist fight right now, because the San Andreas pattern shows a different pattern of the fights. The onlookers, there were always onlookers, would observe and watch and just see how this went, not necessarily cheer anybody on, maybe even try to squelch it a little bit verbally. But then when things got too out of hand, immediately the controllers moved in and separated these two guys who were typically drunk, but not necessarily always drunk, but typically pulled them apart and broke up the fight. I think, well, that's really interesting. In San Andreas, they're lacking this self-restraint. They get into the fights, And then it took it to another level. Well, they also understand that what's going to happen here, my cousin's over there and the other guy's going, "yeah, my brother's over there." They're going to come in not to join the melee as an ally. They're going to come in and pull me out of this mess. So that sort of gives them the free license to swear a lot and throw wild punches. But as soon as one guy goes down in the dirt and the other one jumps on top, "oh, nope, you're out of here. We're pulling you off. Stop this now."
So that's one element of restraint, which is very interesting when you're thinking about nonviolence and violence. I wrote in one of my books, War, Peace, and Human Nature is the name of that book, it came out in 2013, with one of my students at that point, Anna Szala. We worked together on a chapter all about restraint. And we started with mammals. We talked a lot about non-human primates, and then we went on to humans. And the argument that I think is really important and so much neglected is that animals tend not to kill each other when they're of the same species. It can happen. It can be an accident, it can be a fluke. There are a few species that do do this somewhat regularly. But for the most part, animals of the same species don't kill members of their own species, which I find really intriguing and very important when we're talking about nonviolence. So three years after this book came out and Anna and I had sort of presented a theoretical argument that restraint is really, really important. And that, in fact, you can look at stages of aggression. They don't engage at all, they just display. And then they might make some noises and ruffle feathers and whatnot, but still no contact. And then there's contact, but nobody actually gets hurt because there's the restraint. They're not biting to actually puncture skin or to cause damage. They're just, you know, and then finally, there's really all out fighting. The all-out fighting with perhaps intent to kill is so rare in mammals. And I say for all mammals, non-human primates included.
So three years later, after this book came out, 2016, a Spanish group of researchers provided what I thought was just a wonderful study. They looked at over 1,000 mammals, 1,000 mammalian species, and the average across this is a member of the same species kills another member of that species, about one-third of 1% of all the deaths, one-third of 1%. across mammals. Some mammals don't, you know, no recorded killings ever. Others kill a little bit higher, so that's an average, right? And then primates are a little bit higher than this. Actually, about 2% of all the deaths across the order primates, of which we are a member, humans are a member, is 2%. And the researchers think they figured out why this would be. One thing is that many primates tend to be territorial, and in that sense, they were at higher killing levels, defending territories. And the other one is that primates tend to be social. And when you have more individuals interacting, more stuff happens, for good and for bad.
So it was still like one death in 50, that's 2%, right? Which is pretty low, higher than the mammalian average. So of course, the next question that the researchers asked, and I was eager to read about, was, well, what about humans? And they determined that humans were right on the phylogenetically expected level for primates, about 2%. They looked at archaeological data, historical data, old data, different types of social organizations and so forth, current crime statistics across nations, across cultures, and it averaged out to about 2%.
Wow, here comes the power of interpretation of this stuff. I got asked by some places like, I think it was Los Angeles Times and some other ones, what did I think of this study? And I said, "I think it's fantastic. You know, this is what I would predict. This is what Anna and I just wrote three years ago that mammals tend not to kill each other. And here it is. And even for humans, primates, pretty low rate." Meanwhile, I find an article where Steven Pinker is quoted, who made a study claiming that the killing rate is much higher: 14, 15, 16, I forget exactly what it is, but in that neighborhood. He says, "I'm vindicated. See, killing is in the gene." So throw up your hands. This is where the peace anthropology just really is important, I think, to serve as a counter to some of these old narratives and false narratives. To me, 2% is a pretty big difference from 15%, and the explanations for it are also very different.
So I should say, relevant to this conversation that we're having, that it's not like my colleagues and I would argue that humans never kill. Of course, humans kill. We won't argue that humans are never violent. Of course, there's plenty of examples of violent humans, but the violence gets so much attention, that's the one thing, it gets blown up and exaggerated as we just saw in this example with the Pinker statement, that's another thing, and then we end up with a narrative being constructed so that everything wants to be put into this narrative of how violent humans are, and that's part of why I think why we're in the mess that we're in on this planet today, is that too many of us are just stuck in this totally erroneous view of ourselves and our human potential to be nonviolent, to get along, to cooperate, to resolve our conflicts in nonviolent ways. And we're stuck in this trap.
And I did have a chance to take a look at this wonderful movie that you sent me to look at. And one thing I flashed, I flashed on many things, but one is there where you're talking about the Old Story and the New Story. And I thought, "yeah, exactly. The Old Story is we're all killers and nastier than Cain and Abel and the New Story is very, very different." I see if we look at how you phrased it in the film that I very much have been working on developing the New Story and finding concrete evidence for this across different fields and subfields, of which there's bountiful evidence.
Michael: A real question I wanted to ask you though, Doug, is this fascinating research that you've been talking about that you've been doing lately: Is it or will it be available in forms where non-professional anthropologists or non-professionals generally will be able to have access to it? Because it seems to me this could be game-changing. This could shift the direction of our culture.
Doug: I sure hope you're right, because we desperately need a shift in culture. I think we all agree about that one. So, yes, in a nutshell. And I'll be a little more specific. I made it a personal goal in my writing to write very clearly and straightforwardly and avoid academic jargon. And when I have to use some term to define it for folks and so forth, and to try to write so that just somebody who's an interested layperson would be able to understand what it is I'm writing.
And I guess the best example of this would be a book that I did, in 2007 is when it came out, Beyond War, which really was written as a trade book. And you say new projects, yes, my wife and I, Genevieve Souillac and I, are working on not just a revised edition of Beyond War but update of much of that material and argument, again clearly written. 2007 was almost 20 years ago, so a lot has happened in anthropology and related fields which could be included. But my wife, Genevieve, is a philosopher. And what we're going to do in this book, which will be new and interesting, I think, is to try our best to apply some philosophy of science to this whole perspective.
Now, when I wrote earlier books, Beyond War and Human Potential for Peace, I didn't start with the idea that cultural beliefs were making such a big impact on how people saw things, but that came out of my research. And I realized time and again, "here's the bias towards war, here's the bias towards violence." Same type of thing we were just talking about. Swashbuckling. Here's the swashbuckling hypothesis again. And so that became a theme of those books, to try to point that out and call that out. But I think actually we could take it to a different level, so to speak, a very interesting, different level by exploring some of the ideas about perception and what is truth and how do we do good science and falsifiability is an interesting concept as well. How do we actually falsify things? So it's an interesting book and we're working on it right now and I'm hoping it will come out in about a year and a half because we're trying to get it to the publisher this summer. And it usually takes about a year to go through, you know, the process. So that's one thing.
And finally, this is not necessarily the best source in the sense that this magazine actually wants you to pay $5 or 5 euros to get articles. But I've written a couple of articles, some with Genevieve, some of my own, for Irenaut, The Irenaut, which is a new online magazine, I think it's been out about two years now. And for instance, in that, I've written about peace systems, again, in a very friendly way, a very casual way.
I just will shamefully plug my latest book, which will come out next month, this March. And it might even be a little earlier than scheduled, I found out just last week. So this one doesn't sound so interesting by the title, but I think readers would find it actually very interesting. It's called Advanced Introduction to Conflict Resolution. And I had a lot of fun writing this one. It's a short book, and it's very anthropological, very cross-cultural. So one of the points that I make early on is there's been, again, as typical, a Western bias in this field. And even worse than that, in some cases, a real paternalistic attitude that the Western model of conflict resolution can be applied willy-nilly elsewhere and should be. And that's sort of the myth of what is a great white savior coming in and taking care of other people's problems. So there's that theme in there.
But another one is, and this again, I saw the connection to your wonderful film that I just watched this afternoon, of, Michael, you said right at the end, sort of a little epilogue comment about is nonviolence really the essence of humans? And the parallel theme that I'm making is there is human conflict resolution. It's something that humans just naturally do. And it's nonviolent. When I say human conflict resolution, I'm not talking about grabbing an axe– it's not really conflict resolution. And if you look across cultures, every culture has forms of nonviolent conflict resolution. And some cultures, many cultures also, have forms of violent self-redress, right? So the violence is there. It's a big problem.
But again, this is interesting that why is violence the problem? Why is violence something that people try so hard individually and collectively to avoid and prevent and squelch if it starts to occur. So again, actually the irony is that when violence breaks out, people's response to it reinforces the idea that this is not a good thing and it's not something that is appreciated socially, psychologically, individually.
But I hope I've answered your question. I really try to communicate well to people to try to get this message across whenever possible. Here's a little fun. Let me read you the chapter titles and see if you recognize the theme coming through: Resolution of Conflict, Reciprocity, The Golden Rule Meets Conflict Resolution, Relationships, Minding and Mending our Interconnections, Respect for the Rights of Others, Norms, Values, and an Inclination to Get Along, Redress and Remedies, Recompense, Reconciliation, Revenge. This one says The Dark Side of Reciprocity, two wrongs can make a right, but it's probably going to cost you. And finally, the conclusion is Recapulation and Reflections.
One of the other messages, or I should say a conclusion for me from this book, is conflict resolution means to go back to the state where things were working well, go back to the condition where people were getting along, go back to relationships that were functioning well. So it's sort of a nice little message to go through the book, and I hope I don't beat people on the head with it. And why even mention this at all? Because I think many folks in conflict resolution have not played with this word, and they perceive that you start with the conflict. But that's not what most indigenous societies think. They don't start with the conflict. They start with what was going on normally and well before the conflict, and they want to go back to that prior condition. As opposed to in the West where all of a sudden we start with the problem. Oh, okay. We try to solve the problem too, but it's a different way of looking at things, I guess. And it's sort of a sweet way of looking at things.
Stephanie: One last question to sort of wrap this up. It's more of a personal question for you, Doug, because I don't imagine you can be in this line of work without having strong feelings about why you're doing the work you're doing. And with the global rise of authoritarianism, you alluded earlier in the interview that we need a New Story. So from your personal perspective, how are you interpreting world events at this time?
Doug: So to the substance of that, yes, I'm very personally involved in this. I would like humanity to continue and survive. I think that's a very worthwhile goal. That motivates me. I must say, to compress a lot into a short answer, I was just a little bit too young to be part of Vietnam War protests. I was just barely not drafted into that war. I had to reflect a great deal early on then, in age 17, 18, about could I kill someone? and questions which was actually a beneficial effect of these times swirling around me at that point. And I concluded I couldn't and filed conscientious objector status it never came up for review as I just sort of dodged it by timing; but I'm convinced later on I never would have gotten it because I'm not a Quaker or some other religious group; they would have just, I gather, just wanted to ship me off somewhere.
So this has been an important issue for me for a long time, thinking about nonviolence and violence, which led naturally to the questions that we're talking about today. What is human nature? Are we nonviolent by nature, aggressive by nature, some of both? you know, the big questions. So I also started grappling with this early on. And to my absolute delight, I found anthropology. And I've been in love with anthropology ever since, in case you didn't gather, because it allows me to ask these big questions and play with the big ideas and to stray in whatever direction that my curiosity and my questions lead me.
So what I'm writing this week, I think, pertains to this. I got invited by Roland Joseph to write a chapter for a book that he's doing through this Center for Global Nonkilling series. The Bruce Bonta book is that, Les Sponsel has a variety of books. They're available free, by the way, I should mention this. You can buy them for about $15 if you want a hard copy book, which I like, but they're also available as PDFs free from the Center for Global Nonkilling.
And in this particular book, as I usually do, I had to reflect a bit, well, what am I going to do to talk about disarmament, basically, nuclear disarmament and non-killing? So I've been playing with the idea, but it occurred to me that let's take this head on. Let's look for some examples of how huge social changes have occurred. Let's look at something big and see if we can learn or distill some lessons from this that would help with this huge problem of nuclear weapons disarmament, and in fact, abolition of war. So you see big questions again, right? And that's what motivates me is to try to address some of these big questions.
So what I found was my good old friend, Jean Monnet, who I never met, but I feel like I know him well. I highly recommend his memoirs. They're just filled with wonderful ideas. Now, Jean Monnet is generally credited to be the father of the European Union, and he would right away protest that and say, well, maybe grandfather, but by the way, it's always cooperative. I always work with other people, and he did. He always worked with many other people towards European integration. So look at this. I'm thinking, okay, so Jean Monnet and colleagues basically managed to shift a war system, Europe, into a peace system through a series of steps. So could we then shift from a nuclearized world and a warring world to a peaceful world, to a peace system, a global peace system? So that's the essence of what I'm writing right now as we speak.
And looking to Monnet, for instance, this will sound familiar. He says, first, work together to find what is the big idea. Once you have the big idea and you all agree this is the big idea, for example, denuclearize the planet, that's a great big idea. And build the common interest. You have to cooperate and you have to do what is the common interest because he and many other people subsequently and probably some people before pointed out that people tend to do what they think is in their interest to do. And so his big thing was it is in all of our interest to have a continent that no longer wars with each other.
And I'm saying, well, let's learn from Monnet. It's in all of our interests not to have omnicide by nuclear Armageddon. That just doesn't make any sense at all. So there should be, in theory, right, and hopefully in practice, a huge common interest, a huge agreement that this is what we need to do. So Monnet says, don't get hung up on the details. "Oh, what about verification? Well, how many this and that and all?" No, forget all of that. That comes later. You have to get the groundswell to share the common vision, develop the common vision, I should say, together, people buy into it, and then you're off and running. Then you're talking to each other, right? Yeah, then you're talking to each other, and then you get more specific.
And one thing I've learned from Monnet, he really is a genius, I think, and he's certainly one of my personal heroes, equality. He emphasized over and over again: members at the table must be inclusively equal. And he'd learned from the disasters of World War I and the Versailles Treaty, which punished Germany. And then we see where that got us 20 years later: World War II, of course. And so he was instrumental in making that positive reconciliation between France and Germany just about five to seven years after the war had ended.
And so this is an incredible story with incredible lessons so what really motivates me and excites me is to explore these very practical ideas and hopefully get other people excited that there is a possibility for peace because people do make peace and it's been done before and we can certainly do it again. And there's nothing in our genes or our nature that make warring inevitable. As we just talked about earlier in this discussion, humans basically are very inclined, every culture has conflict resolution and so on. And so there's a whole new view of humanity that has emerged across multiple disciplines, some of which you cover in your very nice film, some of which I've covered in my research very complementarily and somewhat overlapping, right? So it's a total paradigm shift, we could put it that way, in terms of viewing ourselves. Let's get to work here. This is another one of Jean Monnet's points. I don't waste my time thinking whether this is possible or not. Take steps to try to get it done. I fail or I succeed. And if I fail, back to the drawing boards, try something else. Do it. Do it better. Do something different.
Stephanie: You're here at Nonviolence Radio. We were speaking with Doug Fry. He is a peace anthropologist, very passionate about it, as you heard. He's also Senior Associate Research Scholar at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity, AC4, at the Climate School at Columbia University. He's a Professor Emeritus of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, an author of Beyond War, Nurturing Our Humanity with Riane Eisler, War, Peace and Human Nature, Advanced Conflict Resolution, which is forthcoming, and many articles, and definitely check out his work.
Now, we have a little bit of time left. And one thing that Fry said that really caught my attention was that the violence gets so much attention when we look at what's happening in history or what's happening in anthropology or in different fields. The violence gets all the attention. So this is why we reserve a little bit of time every show to talk about the nonviolence in the news with our Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler. So let's turn our attention away from the violence that we see in the news and shift it over to some nonviolence. Thank you very much, Michael.
Michael: Oh, you're so welcome, Stephanie. My head is still spinning from that interview. And I was very grateful to friend and colleague Doug for citing our film, The Third Harmony.
I've been toying with a couple of themes, one the theme of symbolism and the other theme of leadership. And we won't have time to really explore either of them in any depth. But there was a woman artist in Afghanistan who gives her name as KIMIA, K-I-M-I-A, all full caps. She had to flee Afghanistan because she was not allowed to exhibit her beautiful Van Gogh-like tapestries. And they're now on display at Nürtingen in Germany. And a comment came up in connection with her story which struck me. It said, the comment did, when visibility is dangerous, art becomes resistance. So that taps into our symbolism theme. I'm kind of famous or maybe infamous in the nonviolent community for not wanting to push too much emphasis onto symbolism. But of course it does have its place. And we'll be talking about some symbols of that as we go along.
You know, another thing that we don't talk about terribly much on this program is kindness to animals. You know, Porphyry and other ancient philosophers were very clear that if we're unkind to animals, it's only a matter of time before that violence spills over into our personal relationships with one another in this mammalian species that we occupy. So I'm happy to say that in San Francisco Bay, they have recently installed a very high-tech detection system called Whale Safe, and it alerts ships to the presence of nearby whales. And boat collisions are a leading cause of death for these great seagoing mammals. So they have underwater microphones that listen for whale calls. It must be a lot of fun because whales are pretty good singers. And they signal to ships when to slow down or alter course. And in some locations, it has prevented 100 percent of whale collisions.
Now, I'm really jumping around here. I want to talk about something rather different for a moment. That is, in Argentina, there was a serious problem of recidivism. That is, seven out of ten individuals who were released from prison committed another crime within one year. But a program called Liberté, which is a work cooperative, was organized by incarcerated men inside a prison. And they have ended recidivism by sharing skills for carpentry, baking, gardening, and other things. I mean, human beings who feel that they don't have a purpose in life are going to get into serious trouble. Well, out of 104 people who participated in the program and have regained their freedom, not one has returned to prison. Knock wood. And it reminded me that one of the biggest, most effective anti-violence programs called Alternative to Violence Program was started by incarcerated men, I think, in Whitehaven Prison in upstate New York.
Now, touching again on our symbolism theme, sort of, it's been proposed that the 2027 Nobel Peace Prize be given to the Palestinian youth. I mean, God bless these poor kids. I would like everything possible being done to support them. But I do want to point out that it is dangerous to automatically identify victimhood with innocence. In fact, ironically enough, this is what has gotten Israel into this condition of believing, of course, with United States support, that they could get away with anything and has led to the disasters of Gaza that we're seeing right now. So I just want to signal that kind of dangerous, automatic thinking that because one has been victimized that one is innocent. Not necessarily.
So as we move into the months ahead, there's a program called Engaging Nonviolence, which beginning on February 16th, so just a little while ago, it's welcoming a new online cohort of learners who feel called to deepen nonviolent skills and walk this path together.
I'm not sure I have time to do one more item, but I would like to talk about the marches for peace. And at first I thought this is only symbolic, right? All these Buddhist monks, they walked 2,300 miles from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. But in a blog post titled, "Why We Walk," the monks actually addressed my concern. They said, "our walking itself cannot create peace. But when someone encounters us, whether by the roadside, online, or through a friend, when our message touches something deep within them, when it awakens the peace that has always lived quietly in their own heart, something sacred, this is our contribution, not to force peace upon the world, but to help nurture it one awakened heart at a time." The monks have been really widely welcomed by differing religious groups and institutions across the country. And, of course, a lot is owed to Aloka, the stray dog, who adopted them along the way. It reminded me very much of how much attention Gandhi got by having a goat with him because he was drinking goat milk.
Stephanie: It ties back together what you were saying about compassion for animals, too. So that not only did the monk's walk awaken that sense of peace in people who witnessed them, especially in person, but also online; it awakened compassion for animals. There were so many people along the way who helped Aloka along. He got surgery along the way. So many volunteer vets and caretakers, people... Aloka has over a million followers on social media. I don't know how many the monks have. And I think there's a documentary coming out about him, too. I mean, we want to know. Aloka, lead us on.
Thank you, Michael, for that Nonviolence Report, just a little bit, it does help us shift away from the violence and maybe grab our curiosity a little bit. So thank you so much. We want to thank our guest today, Doug Fry, our mother station, KWMR, to Elizabeth High, who will soon be transcribing the show for our archive. You can find that at nonviolenceradio.org as well as syndicated over with our friends at Waging Nonviolence. Thanks so much, Eric, for your help with that. And to you, all of our listeners, we are so happy to be in touch with you and share the message of nonviolence. So until the next time, everybody, please take care of one another and animals, and we will be in touch.