PEACEMAKING PRIMER Hal Pepinsky pepinsky@indiana.edu Criminal Justice Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 USA 1995 (To appear in Peace and Conflict Studies) About This Primer My dreams of becoming involved in international diplomacy were fulfilled by an intense 8-week stint as a legal intern on East Asian Affairs in the U.S. State Department in the summer of 1967, between my second and third years of law school. Old hands in the Legal Adviser's Office and I reached a tacit understanding that I was unfit for a career there. I turned to academia, from law school to doctoral studies in sociology. My bridge to sociology was criminology. I have been teaching and studying criminal justice for a quarter century. My interest in diplomacy remains strong. I come to peace studies as one most thoroughly grounded in everyday, domestic violence--in our prisons, in our homes and schools, on our streets and in our courts. At all moments in my attempts to theorize as to how to make peace rather than war out of violence, I look for parallel processes we human beings go through which in like manner either amplify violence or build trust and community, at every level from that of child to parent and warden to prisoner, to national leadership to national leadership. As I see it, mine is the study of "social control," of how we try to build safety and security for ourselves in the midst of violence, and of how we succeed and fail in the attempt. A decade ago I noticed what a miserably negative field I was in. We criminologists specialize in pointing out what makes people do the wrong thing--citizens or those sworn to police them. I have asked my students: "Suppose we succeeded in eliminating crime. Now what do you want from those around you?" The modal response is: "I want to be left alone." This speaks to a vast area of human ignorance. We have virtually no experience of putting words to celebration of getting things we value from one another, notably of celebrating how others make us feel safer and more secure. My focus the past decade has been to draw out, verbalize, and try to converse about how we make peace with one another, of how we become valued with one another for the security we offer one another. I have found that indeed the art and science of what I call peacemaking is well verbalized in every religious/political tradition I explore; metaphorically, all of us belong to one or more traditions of celebrating our right brains' activity as well as our left. Last spring I set out to write up, in the plainest personal language I could muster, what how peacemaking is made to happen when it happens. I even told an inquiring editor I would have a book manuscript for him. Instead, the Peacemaking Primer which follows came out of me, and I finished what I had to say far short of booklength. Each section flows logically from its predecessor, but as readers of drafts of this primer have discovered, there is no particular logic to which section comes where. I do begin and end with a statement of four steps which when followed in interaction produce what peace we achieve, whatever the context. You can read these steps as those taken by diplomats who in Roger Fisher's terms mean that warring nations are as his book title suggests "Getting to Yes." They can be read as a guide to being a judge, or a parent, or a child for that matter, and doing what stands to make oneself and others safer and more secure in one another's presence. Recently, I came to the conclusion that this primer can be boiled down to a single simple principle: Starting conversations about violence sooner rather than later brings peace sooner rather than later. In informal circulation thus far, this primer has been taken by some activists especially to be a self-help guide. It is profoundly true that this primer is about how the reader can apply the propositions to gain her or his own social control. This distinguishes peacemaking from its "left brain" counterpart in our social control thought and action, what I call "warmaking," in which our findings point blame and fault at others for not doing their jobs, and leave us feeling personally helpless to bring about the change we seek. Warmaking is a magical fatalistic form of thinking which understandably, in criminology, has produced the catch phrase: "Nothing works." Obviously, if something works, the ultimate test is that you can make it work. That, in scientific jargon, is known as "replicability." And so I invite readers to test these propositions against their own experience, and let me know what does not work. This I consider the ultimate empirical test of propositions about how we can achieve social control--achieve a greater sense of safety and security in one another's presence. To that end, I give the author's permission to anyone to use, copy, reprint this primer freely, and invite response. I list the more than 40 section headings in the primer below, so that readers may find a proposition of interest and read it straightaway. Since my own starting point in the primer is arbitrary, yours is as good as mine. Examples I use in the primer come predominantly from my experience working and teaching with parents who are trying mightily to get their children out from under the threat of familial sexual abuse. These cases have only made it into the courts at all in the last 20 years as a product of the growing power of women to escape battering marriages. Some readers have been skeptical of the compromises I celebrate mothers making. I want to clarify one reality these mothers live: If, in custody/visitation proceedings, one parent presents evidence that a child is being sexually assaulted by the other, the first official response the parent will receive is an unfounding of the allegation most of the time. Once one official has rejected the allegation, all others will follow. Judges will virtually always switch custody from these "protective" parents to the accused abuser if the protective parent resists court-ordered visitation or transfer of custody in any fashion. The protective parent will be legally deemed the primary threat to the child's well-being, and further protest will lead to termination of contact between the child and the protective parent, and often land the protective parent in jail too. This happens literally in thousands of cases a year in the United States. The protective parents whose actions I describe in this text are more experienced and versed in that reality than I am; indeed they have helped me put my seminar on children's rights and safety together. I must say I have discovered U.S. home life to be grimmer than I had imagined by far, and legal response to the grimness to remain one of near total denial. Nowhere is the failure to protect against serious, widespread personal victimization of innocents greater than in our own homes, and in our public dismissal of children's complaints about the abuse they suffer there. This very hot war against our children is the toughest reality I have yet come across for testing what safety and security a human being can help establish in the midst of violence. List of Contents INTRODUCTION: Mediating Power Imbalances 1. Peacemaking is an Attitude 2. In a Patriarchal World, Peacemaking is Women's Talk 3. The Peacemaker's Control is the Warrior's Weakness 4. Peacemaking Requires Self-Possession 5. Peacemaking is All the Social Control We Have 6. Social Security Lies in the Strength of Empathic Social Fabrics We Weave 7. Honest Trust Relieves Anxiety 8. Forgiving is Openly Remembering 9. First Step to Social Control: Pause to Survey What You Know and Feel 10. Power Imbalances are Our True External Enemy 11. Co-Dependency is Our True Inner Enemy 12. Being Offended by Speech is YOUR Problem 13. Look Down, Dump Up 14. Peacemaking's Four Steps 15. 'Tis a Blessing for Anger to be Open 16. Little Acts of Peacemaking Make Life Utterly Worthwhile 17. Control Grows as Your Fear of Death Wanes 18. Peacemaking is Joyful Too 19. Peacemakers Know the World is Far More Dangerous than Warriors Let Themselves Imagine 20. Power Over Others is Essentially Suspect 21. Your Own Actions are Your Primary Concern 22. All Proposed "Solutions" are Final and Dangerous 23. Cultural Change is Too Slow to be Noticed in a Single Lifetime 24. Friendship is a Safer Investment than Wall Street 25. Prescriptions are Made to be Bent and Broken 26. Getting to "Yes" 27. Life in the Seat of a Falling Empire 28. Policy and Planning Bears No Safety 29. The Cooler You Remain, the Safer You Are 30. Your Power of Control Rests First On Balancing Your Own Emotional Energy 31. Let Others Do THEIR OWN Work 32. For Everyone's Safety, Enjoy Life 33. Forcing Yourself or Anyone to Make Peace is Oxymoronic 34. Peace is Always a Pleasant Surprise; What We Expect of Others Misleads Us 35. Say Your Own "Yeses" and "Noes" 36. Peacemaking Begins Anywhere You Are 37. Control Requires Taking the Long View 38. Your Primary Social Duty is to Account for Your Own Interests 39. Tell Others How Their Actions Make You Feel, Not Who or What They Are 40. Recap: Peacemaking is Just Four Steps from One Social Moment to the Next 41. Respect Yourself Most of All 42. Potential for Global Change 43. Large Cultures of Peacemaking Do Exist 44. Anyone Can Engage in Peacemaking, But No Mortal Human is a Pure Peacemaker 45. Everything I Now Know About Control I Had Learned by Kindergarten INTRODUCTION: Mediating Power Imbalances Peacemaking is one of two ways we have of approaching social control. "Social control" most basically means achieving a sense of greater trust and social safety among one's associates, as manifested in the feeling of being happier and more secure in the next moment than one is at present. The other approach is what I call "warmaking." Warmaking entails the axiom that our social insecurity and danger can be traced to identifiable persons, who individually or in groups act out of evil or psychopathic motives. The task at hand in making war on one's social insecurities is first to identify one's enemies by establishing their blame, and then subduing their evil ways, by killing them, separating them from the social fabric in which one lives, or intimidating them into staying in their proper places and conforming to the social roles their betters prescribe for them. It is axiomatic to peacemaking that all our social danger arises from imbalances of power to blame and subdue one another among those whose actions affect our lives. In the peacemaking frame of mind, all imbalances of power OVER others (as against power WITH others) are defined, operationally, as "violence." A state of peace by contrast manifests itself as harmony or resonance in human interaction. In this state, each of us can without threat of being cut from the social fabric freely, honestly tell others how their actions empower or threaten our security. At one extreme we are increasingly aware that imbalances of power are global, as between mega-capitalist corporate blocs and poor women and children of color. We see ever greater urgency in mediating, cutting across, reducing these imbalances for the very sake of human survival on mother earth. At the other extreme we are increasingly aware of endemic interpersonal power imbalances. In recent years through association with victims and survivors I have become aware that very live warfare has been waged against women and children at home for more than four millenia, since the rise of national political patriarchies, beginning as far as I can see on a grand scale in Egypt. At its gruesomest, this warfare extends to endemic ritual homicide and cannibalism against the smallest of us, infants and children, most of all. It is also axiomatic to peacemaking that anyone's capacity for achieving social control/safety/security rests exclusively on one's power to choose among one's own options for how to act next in any social setting. Ultimately, all peacemaking boils down to having the self-possession to live social life as a series of four steps of thought and action. First, you take time enough out to review your feelings and impulses, so that you have a choice. My friend Bill Breeden, a peace activist who is the only one ever to do jail time for the Iran-Contra affair, illustrates CHOICE thus: It is human nature for us to be born with the urge to poop in our pants. It is also human nature for us not to take long to learn to hold the urge to put our poop in the right place in order to enjoy the happy company of other human beings. It is human nature for us to have conflicting urges, and all our conscious power to live and learn together rests on our capacity to notice we have choices in the first place. The second of the four steps of thought and action is to CHOOSE next to identify and introduce oneself to those most blamed and subdued in whatever violence threatens one most. Next you make a conscious attempt to draw them out, to hear them tell you what scares and threatens them most, and to indicate what they would like to have happen next. Finally, you join them in confronting the greatest powerholders in the situation with how they threaten and ignore the needs and interests of the weaker folk whose fears and aspirations you have learned. You become an advocate for the less powerful to the faces of the more powerful. This, ultimately, is how you MEDIATE power imbalances. At this point, in the social interaction at hand, you have tilted social power back on itself like on a teeter- totter. Mediation requires you listen empathetically and respectfully to the powerholders' response, and ultimately, listen most carefully and respectfully to your own harshest or most immediate critics. As at each alternating moment of interaction you LEARN what "opposing" parties' interests are, you have your own direct and vicarious experience of choices to TEACH each party to include on her or his repertoire of options. These four steps are elaborated and inferred from peacemaking premises below in the text of this primer at sections 14 ("Peacemaking's Four Steps") and 40 ("Recap: Peacemaking is Just Fourt Steps from One Social Moment to the Next"), which appear in the list of contents above. Ultimately peacemaking presupposes that there is nothing more or less to becoming more socially secure together than for each of us to exercise her or his own power to live by these four steps rather than by blaming and attacking one's enemies, also cast by oneself as incompetents, irresponsible parasites, ignoramuses, or just too poor and downtrodden to know any better. My paid identity is "criminologist." I have received a full-time salary for teaching and studying criminal justice for a quarter century now. You will see that slice of my own experience heavily drawn upon in this primer. In this introduction, I will make a point of explicitly citing several works of contemporary criminologists which I myself find particularly inspiring and instructive. I have noticed that the only practical, manifest evidence we receive of whether any of us has even taken the first step of choosing to act out peacemaking's four steps instead of blaming and attacking lies in the second. If you can recognize that power imbalances themselves are enough of a problem for you to take the time to know and speak on behalf of victims, I become pretty confident you are in a peacemaking frame of mind. By contrast, when I or someone else is in a violent frame of mind, I notice that the victims on whose behalf one speaks are abstractions, not real people to whose problems and outlook one personally has become closely involved. A common corollary of such evidence of being in a warmaking frame of mind is that one will remain stoic and avoid describing one's own problems. By contrast, everyone who loved the first edition and in some cases is already sharing it with others is either a victim/survivor of severe legal and personal battering or hangs out with those who are. This is not merely a matter of choosing whom to hang with. It is also a matter of being prepared, unlike my critic, to acknowledge power imbalances in the relations that matter most personally. One essay by known famous worldwide among criminologists is Richard Quinney's argument that our capacity to end suffering rests on our capacity to acknowledge the suffering of others (the lead chapter in the volume he and I edited together, Criminology as Peacemaking, Indiana University Press, 1991). Richard happens to be a practicing Buddhist, and in this essay, he refers to the life power that comes from acknowledging the suffering of others as "compassion." There are many words for it in all political and religious traditions, including secular humanism ("justice"). One major source of inspiration for peacemaking in criminal justice these days, as in the new juvenile justice acts in New Zealand and Australia, is indigenous customs for responding to what we otherwise call "crimes" (see New Zealand Anglican priest/activist Jim Consedine's review of indigenous practices around the globe, in Restorative Justice: Healing the Effects of Crime, Lyttelton, New Zealand: Ploughshares Publications, 1995). Denial or avoidance of getting into one's own victimization is the looking-glass self of failing to get close to other victims as victims. In section 33 below ("Forcing Yourself or Anyone to Make Peace is Oxymoronic"), I try to explain the proposition that it is self-defeating to try to coerce or threaten anyone into acknowledging and confronting others' and one's own victimization. But among those of us prepared to validate victimization, we see ourselves as making choices our warmaking friends are telling us they themselves do not have. That is that for all we ever know until someone's references to victimization become personal. Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie is renowned among criminologists worldwide for observing, succinctly, that insofar as we allow ourselves to know anyone in many personal respects, we lose our capacity to inflict pain upon them (in Limits to Pain, 1981, currently out of print). This includes knowing and acknowledging the painful or shameful sides of ourselves in balance with acknowledging our positive value in others' lives. I find myself in a warmaking frame of mind constantly to this day. The greater my capacity to listen to and accommodate those most threatened by my own actions, the faster I can correct my own threats their security, and in the social fabric we share, threats equally to my own security. Letting oneself make, apologize for and address one's own mistakes quickly becomes its own reward to anyone who tries acknowledging personal victimization of others. When these days I notice people letting themselves start to get personally, publicly close to victimization, I tell them with confidence that they will never be able to turn back. For instance for years now in a feminist justice seminar I teach, students regularly write me that they notice sexism and agism on tv, in print media, and in things friends say as never before. Once you have let suffering of power imbalances this far into your consciousness, you cannot repress it. Either it will come out in leftist/liberal guilt, self-pity, and recrimination against this or that person or group who should be taking care of the victimization but aren't. Such awareness of victimization haunts many people who are close to me, and by now has even driven many friends and acquaintances of mine to suicide, or just giving up on belonging in any social fabric, in despair. My friend Jeanette Westbrook, a social worker in Louisville who was forced by her father to kill and eat people among other horrors, says that as long as you remain in this position, you remain a VICTIM. When you can stop blaming yourself for your own victimization by unashamedly and freely discussing it with other, when you confront your worst personal nightmares, and in so doing gain a command of choosing how to discuss and respond to them, you become a SURVIVOR. I still more than once a week reach episodes of despair, of feeling that I and mine are victimized beyond hope. I also know these feelings pass. We who have been validated enough and loved during and after our own victimization achieve self-esteem thereby. We commonly feel a practical and moral need to pass on our own sense of security to others. Powerholders who persist systematically in violence or abuse lack this gift of personal validation by others fully as much as despairing victims. I notice therefore that concerted, happy peacemakers, the ones Jeanette calls survivors, therefore readily mix appreciation for powerholders' openness and strength with the criticism of powerholders' actions, and avoid character attacks when confronting powerholders with pain and fear they are causing. We all need and deserve personal validation. Our own safety and those of all victims rest on the personal validation of redeeming qualities and actions of abusers fully as much as of the victims. Or as many of us also put it, abusers are victims too. When you are trying to weave oppressors and victims separated by violence back into a trustworthy social fabric, everybody deserves personal respect and compassion. I try not to dwell on criticism of warmaking in this primer. Like Canadian Quaker criminal justice activist Ruth Morris, whom I consider the mother of international conferences on penal abolition, in her latest book, Penal Abolition: The Practical Choice (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' Press, 1995), I want to stress the safety/security benefits of making peace. This primer is less a complaint than a celebration of the fruits peacemaking offers us all. I expect to continue to be challenged by critics who find peacemaking unreal. I thank the honest critics who already have helped me appreciate how unreal and incomprehensible peacemaking seems. I recognize even in myself at all social moments the lingering question whether trying to achieve social control by making war or peace is the real utopian fantasy. Let me know what works for you. Peacemaking is an Attitude Peacemaking is the art and science of weaving and reweaving oneself with others into a social fabric of mutual love, respect and concern. It is one of two ways, one of two attitudes with which we enter any social interaction. The other attitude is that of working to win wars against personal enemies, those one tries to identify, isolate, and subdue for the sake of one's own and one's loved ones' safety. I call that attitude warmaking. We are all familiar with the art and science of warmaking. We all well know what deterrence is, for instance. We quite commonly apply the science of deterrence to our own children, for instance. Some of us may believe that swiftness and sureness of sanction are more important than, and run at cross purposes with, severity of punishment; others of us believe that the overwhelming mastery of right we demonstrate by severity of punishment makes all of us safer. Whichever side of any warmaking debate we are on, the debate itself--whether over raising children, dealing with terrorists, or competing in the market economy, whatever the setting--is a ritual of public discourse familiar to people particularly in my home country, the United States. Peacemaking is Women's Talk By contrast, I find precious little space in public debate over how to get along to talk about how to make peace. My wife, Jill Bystydzienski, a student of women in politics, and many of our feminist friends have raised my awareness that peacemaking dialogue is found disproportionately among politically marginalized groups-- among women in all populations, and also for instance among Native American and African-American traditionalists. Peacemaking is the language of people who cannot pass the buck to anyone else for the problems they share with their loved ones. In patriarchal discourse, we blame single mothers for the sins of and poverty of their children, and when on that pretext we deny aid to dependent children, the mothers are left to try against all "public welfare" forces to feed and shelter their children. They cannot afford to indulge in recrimination. They cannot imagine feeding their children by blowing up the welfare office. Rage has to be translated into action. The kids need to eat. This is known among feminists as "women's way of knowing." It is among such heroes who are trying to take care of their children or of prisoners, of anyone who is publicly abandoned, that I find peacemaking to be practiced in its highest form, both as mastery of art and as having learned a lot from sad and frustrating experience. Those surviving on the edge tend to find peacemaking a necessity. The Peacemaker's Control is the Warrior's Weakness I offer stories of my relations with people I have known to illustrate how peacemaking can and does make us more secure, and how warmaking tears us all from the social fabric in which we trust others and feel safe. Here's my first: These last two years I have had wideranging and intense experience in connection with a seminar on children's rights and safety which parents who are trying to save their children from sexual abuse have offered with me. One "protective mother" I have come to know and admire is a survivor of repeated rape by an older brother and grandfather. She has forsaken the alcohol, drugs and bad marriage she retreated to in adolescence. She has driven me and friends to demonstrations on behalf of children's rights, boosting our spirits all the way. For several years now she has purposely refrained from legal protest against her two children's unsupervised visits with a father who has attacked and raped them. Familiarity with thousands of cases like hers has convinced her (and me too) that if she made any formal move even to have visitation supervised, she would probably lose all contact with the children. By failing to launch a legal war on behalf of her children, she gets to help them recover from whatever fear and pain they suffer on visits. She calculates that the two of them together have by now grown big and united enough to fend off attacks. From a warmaking frame of mind, she is morally bound to report the abuse and move to have the state give dad "consequences." She has certainly weighed that option. When she or anyone takes a peacemaking approach s/he still has all the rage, and impulses for legal redress that the rest of us would share. She knows too that she as a divorced custodial mother will in patriarchal discourse be blamed for whatever goes wrong before anyone else. In adopting the attitude of peacemaking, this mother has weighed and discussed all these feelings and options, particularly with those whose fate hangs in her hands, foremost her children. She sees as her primary duty doing not a ritual public display of what good intentions require but what in fact will give her children the greatest sense of security and control over the threat of abuse that she and they together can muster. Talk of reporting and pressing for prosecution has become a distraction to her-- something she is quite willing to explain and talk over, something she has with pure practicality thought through. Sure she blames dad for hurting their children. Sure she is mad. She is also aware that blaming someone else may feel right, but that her children stand overwhelming odds of losing what safety they now enjoy if she acts on the feeling. The buck stops with her. It will not do her children any good for her to feel she reported the abuse and did the right thing, not unless other things happen, which theoretically and empirically in this real legal word of ours are highly improbable. Peacemaking Requires Self-Possession The attitude of peacemaking is one of self-possession, the same kind that keeps us from pooping until we get to the toilet. It entails first personal reflection on one's own multitude of contradictory feelings and desires, in an attempt to sort out the confusion and foresee what in fact will happen if one acts on this feeling or impulse rather than that, this way or that. You look through doing what feels good or right in the next instant to foresee results you will probably reap. Railing against others for doing the assaults or for not doing their jobs is in this frame of reference a waste of energy; it just lets those who anger you take over your remaining capacity for personal control. Peacemaking is All the Social Control We Have This primer is all about social control. Ultimately, social control means weaving oneself and others of concern more tightly and intimately into a social fabric grounded in honesty and trust. The task at hand whenever violence threatens to rip us or others further out of such a social fabric is to identify where trust and personal empowerment can be created among a range of possibilities via one's own next action. Social Security Lies in the Strength of Empathic Social Fabrics We Weave The most proximate enemy of our capacity for self- possession is to feel powerless because of pain and fear to do anything but let go and lash out. This is classically true of those who cyclically engage in domestic violence. I have another friend who is in prison as I write, primarily because he made a false statement that the woman he has since married planned to take her children from their father to Brazil. He is addicted to gambling, and had stolen over a thousand dollars from the woman. When he failed to repay any of the money, she reported him to his commanding officer in the U.S. Army. He flipped out into abuse. At that moment the woman was the one he loved most and felt safest with, the most probably target for anyone's personal abuse. As he tells it, his post-traumatic stress disorder caused him to gamble and steal. When she reported him, he went to the father of her children and to a state police officer and prosecutor who had already jailed the woman on bogus charges earlier, and told the lie. When I heard that, I myself advised the woman to call the local police and file a theft report against her lover. She did. When I last spoke with him about the train of events, he insisted that he made up the story because the woman had reported him, because she had made him mad. He could not grasp the horror and terror the woman, her mother, and I had felt together when I-- pacifist and anarchist that I might be--urged her to call in the police herself. I now trust the marriage of this man and woman as the center of what power they have to watch over and restrain one another, as well as to love and understand one another. I trust it not because the man is autonomously rehabilitated, but because he is woven into a relationship with a woman who stood up to him, and has recanted and apologized for the harm caused by his lie publicly, because for instance I know he jokes about and abides by the $20 gambling allowance his wife gives him when he is outside prison. It is the fabric I trust, not the strength of any individual set of threads within the fabric. To isolate an offender and trying to remake him or her into an autonomously responsible person apart from any enduring social fabric is like trying to clap with one hand, an absurd attempt. Practically speaking, any time and any way someone is doing violence or letting it happen, you have no empirical, practical grounds to trust the offender to refrain from re- offending all by him-/herself other than that person's demonstrated empathy and understanding of the pain and terror visited upon the victims. I don't mean just feeling bad about it and guilty, as in a honeymoon period. I mean actually being able to verbalize how your victim(s) felt when you lost control. It is that conscious, publicly expressed and practiced self-awareness alone which unlocks us from any of our own patterns and cycles of violence, or from those visited upon us from violent "caregivers." Honest Trust Relieves Anxiety We perpetuate a lie on ourselves when we adopt the warmaker's premise that there are two ways to trust an offender: watch and contain him/her, or do nothing. It is also a lie to ourselves that anyone ever merits being trusted now and for all time, unconditionally. Trust has to keep being reciprocated and renewed to stay alive. The potential of peacemaking is that with this or that person you can turn your back where empathy for your interests has been demonstrated, and not worry about the danger presented when you or some officer of state stops monitoring the person's behavior. I trust for instance that if the man whose lies to police I have described should start abusing his wife again, I'll hear about it from her, for she-- autonomous as her decisions are--is like a sister to me. I don't have to be asking whether he has beaten her lately. In this respect I feel a lot more secure about these two friends of mine than many of our mutual friends. I stop worrying about this matter. I am thereby freed to attend to other matters at hand. The fabric that makes the man and the woman safer and safer among us grows of its own accord. Forgiving is Openly Remembering I forgive the man for his abuse of the woman, but forgiving is remembering, not forgetting. Foregiveness rests on their knowing not only that I celebrate the trust I do have, but that at no time is my trust blind, and that it can always be betrayed anew. Furthermore, peacemaking presumes that betrayal of trust and violence can begin to come from any of us, any time, and that our capacity for reweaving victims and offenders back into social security among us rests in confronting it openly and promptly, and in remembering to take care that the lapse not recur. First Step to Social Control: Pause to Survey What You Know and Feel Your entire capacity for helping do what it takes to make you and those you care about safe from any threat of violence rests on your allowing yourself a first moment for reflection, to consider your options as to where and how to express your urge to poop on those who piss you off. In the next moment, that of action, your course of greatest safety lies in immediate confrontation of the pain and fear people are feeling in the situation, in the same moment. In the peacemaker's frame of reference--all that room for action lying outside the choice between subduing offenders and doing nothing--the potential for violence in the next moment is the sum of power imbalances underlying the discourse about the violence that has already taken place. Power Imbalances are Our True External Enemy Reweaving victims, offenders and bystanders back into a trustworthy social fabric is threatened by power imbalances as reflected as you see them in the discourse; the task at hand is to identify those imbalances and take the biggest or most fundamental one at hand and mediate it, cut through it, speak with and draw out the weakest voices in the dialogue first. In this situation I look for who spoke last (making it someone else's turn to be heard) and for the smallest, quietest party in the lot. This is a pretty good operating definition for how to identify and listen first to victims. You try to pick up someone else's thread. As an attempt to make it safe enough for victims to lay their anger and fear before you, you presume you are obliged to explain yourself, your feelings, your desire for the moment simply to listen, to understand, to regard what the victim does with his/her story in the next moment as his/her decision rather than yours. Co-Dependency is Our True Inner Enemy Your own greatest enemy at that moment is the inner voices, let alone outer ones, telling you you are to step in and solve the victim's problems. Fighting other people's battles is a warmaking premise; balancing physically and emotionally oppressive voices and acts is a matter first and foremost of helping victims gain control over the telling of their own stories. Trust emerges only from what we decide to do ourselves, not from what we decide for others. Look Down, Dump Up After what I call "looking down" and listening to the quietest voices of the apparently least heard and most isolated and violated at the moment, one may offer and with the victim's blessing tell the victim's story to others. As Gandhi preached satyagraha--"holding truth," refusing to cooperate with power imbalances--confrontation turns from listening to going straight, personally to the oppressor, to tell the oppressor of your concern insofar as you believe the victim, and to invite response. I call that "dumping up." Peacemaking's Four Steps In sequence, peacemaking in the face of violence requires as its first four steps: reflection on one's own feelings, introducing oneself to the apparently weakest, or quietest victim (recognizing that ultimately, all violence is some more or less obscure, more or less ritualized, form of retaliation for one's own sense of victimization), listen to the victim's fear and pain, try to understand and empathize if the victim wants to listen after having let go, and then offer and invite ways one might confront the scariest people in the situation next. 'Tis a Blessing for Anger to be Open Once as a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, as I spoke of the kind of self-discipline peacemaking requires, one graduate student tried to side with me, and another sitting beside me with his wife, passed prolonged suffering at the fellow student's arrogance and threatened to break his jaw. As I told both of them after the event, when the first student backed off verbal retaliation and taunting following the second student's threat, I knew the second student was now at virtually no risk to swing as his oppressor because he had said how he felt openly, in front of us others, instead. Violence breaks out when we can't safely express and be validated for the anger and fear first. Cycles of violence take hold of us precisely as the underlying fears of ourselves and others which drive us remain nonshareable beforehand. So when I'm self-possessed enough to hold out hope and continue trying for peace, I welcome honest, open, public utterances of anger and frustration, I welcome heating up debate to its angriest, most fearsome sources, because the sooner and more directly the anger and fear comes out, the safer we all become. It is to my peacemaking mind absurd to ask young angry singers to tone down their rhetoric. Better to welcome the rhetoric and take the time to talk it over with the angry singers and their fans, rather than forcing people to endure the fears they resonate to in the music to bear them in isolation, in hiding, until they explode into blinds acts of pain and devastation. Being Offended by Speech is YOUR Problem While I am aware of my own defensiveness, and sometimes give way to it, when someone verbally attacks me and blames me for something, it is by now virtually reflex for me to sort out my more practical room for gratitude that the anger is where I can face it, instead of somewhere out there behind my back. It is no longer paradoxical to me that severely abused and threatened children and adult survivors and victims are remarkably forgiving, albeit seldom forgetting, because they know they feel reduced to taking what comfort they can get. Little Acts of Peacemaking Make Life Utterly Worthwhile A corollary is that if you persist trying to make peace with victims who come along in your life, you will probably soon enjoy the satisfaction of hearing that something very small and insignificant to you has transformed a victim into an active, significantly safer survivor. For instance one friend of mine who had spent years as a political prisoner tells me a one-page letter I wrote to a judge who turned down his habeas corpus request flat, eventually carried enough weight simply by its existence to make his parole board release him. He tells me, "You got me out of prison, Hal." From a warmaking perspective, the letter I took less than an hour to write and send, which put me at no personal risk, was a worthless, insignificant action which got legally stomped. From a peacemaking perspective, the fact that I did it anyway turned out to give me more sense of having made a difference in someone's life than most of us-- even us high achievers--get in a lifetime. Control Grows as Your Fear of Death Wanes Having by now had a generous supply of such magic moments of personal validation, I have much less fear of my own death itself than I had even not long ago, as in the panic attacks that took me to the hospital when I turned forty. As mystics, theologians, and therapists the world over tell us, freedom from fear of one's own death allows one the most fundamental self-possession, and earthly security, of all. Peacemaking is Joyful Too Oppressed as many of my consciously, actively peacemaking friends may remain, I am struck on the whole by how full, rich and fulfilling virtually all of them also feel life has been. That makes these friends correspondingly free and generous in their expressions of appreciation for small favors, especially those I have given freely and simply. Survivors and activists spend a lot of time laughing together, I notice. Peacemakers Know the World is Far More Dangerous than Warriors Let Themselves Imagine Since peacemaking requires confronting our most basic denial first in the face of violence, we who have for some time consciously tried to make peace with violence have learned from victims and survivors that the world is far, far, more dangerous and corrupt than warriors ever acknowledge as they lead us into battle. Power Over Others is Essentially Suspect We know it to be an elemental natural law of fear translated into organized action that those we let fight our battles for us are likely to become more violent, dangerous and oppressive than the enemy we send them off to fight. It is mundane reality to me that while police officers and soldiers are diverse and defy stereotypes, on the whole police, soldiers, judges and so on are more dangerous, more in need of watching and requiring explanation of their actions, than the subjects of their law enforcement. On the whole for instance, I am warier of actions F.B.I. agents take than of actions Militia members take in my country these days. This implies condemnation of no one. It is merely a watchful attitude, where I feel as obliged to be open and forthright about my areas of distrust--to air them publicly too--as to celebrate and recognize the actions I do trust. Your Own Actions are Your Primary Concern When you opt to try to make peace rather than war in the face of violence, you accept that your exclusive duty is to identify where among power imbalances you find yourself, and to figure out what bid for control you yourself make in the next moment. Any talk of who else ought to be doing this or that simply lies outside this realm of discourse, lies instead in the realm, basically, of going through life deciding who to trust to play god for us and take care of our victims and offenders for us. All Proposed "Solutions" are Final and Dangerous While in peacemaking one acknowledges far more injustice, pain and fear than when at war, and while one acknowledges by extension that no program or leader is at all likely to come forward and sweep away the most fearsome threats to our sense of personal and social security, I advocate trying to make peace because of the personal trust, and personal security and validation I find there. I regard all programmatic promises that injustices and social problems will be "solved" as false and dangerously misleading. Any time and attention we invest in helping someone else's program get carried out is time and attention away from figuring out what I do in the next moment with the victims and offenders closest at hand in my own life. Cultural Change is Too Slow to be Noticed in a Single Lifetime Indigenous people and the Old Testament tell us that significant change in any political culture takes seven generations of concerted, personal, intergenerational transmission of peacemaking. My own inquiry into Norwegians' transition from Viking empire to post- Napoleonic, locally democratic pacifism indicates that the change from peak of military empire to what Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie calls a "tight" social fabric took a generation squared, twenty-odd generations of twenty- odd years apiece. Friendship is a Safer Investment than Wall Street Meanwhile, though, I have noticed that peacemaking makes me and friends of mine more personally and socially secure in short order. I don't need to pay a therapist because I keep finding people who will let me vent and validate me for free. I have friends who grow their own food and build their own homes, who would even take me in if I were bedridden and provide for me no matter how hard economic depression or something like hard drinking hit me. That takes a lot of the edge off my concern over whether my pension fund will be liquid when I'm old and feeble enough to retire, assuming I live so long. Prescriptions are Made to be Bent and Broken I am a recovering, now "inactive" lawyer who has drawn a salary for teaching criminal justice in universities for a quarter century. As a child I read the speeches, closing arguments, and cross-examination of witnesses conducted by the early twentieth-century socialist lawyer Clarence Darrow. How eloquent and penetrating he was! My dream of becoming a lawyer like him drove me all the way into and through law school. There, and in intervening years, I have by degrees given up my faith in the rule of law. It is not only that the relatively absolute power we give lawgivers and law enforcers tends to corrupt these powerholders absolutely. It is that imposing a preexisting law or rule on someone literally amounts to letting one's prejudices override one's capacity to hear the many and various explanations and desires parties to litigation have. The healing and trustworthy exercises of personal responsibility we look for in every crime or civil wrong requires precisely that those we find we can trust have made up their own ways of responding to the threat, the fear and the pain at hand. The self-possession to make peace rests on preparedness to be guided by what the parties at hand want to do and to have done, not on what some distant legislator imagined might turn out to be in their best interests. I gain a sense of security from having only those rules of law prevail which free and open evidence and dialogue over the threat at hand. (Thus, I am inherently fond of insisting on rights provided by public records/freedom of information/sunshine/open meeting laws.) Anthropologists report that many indigenous tribunals begin by letting complainants and the accused take turns expressing their feelings, fears and wants freely, unrestrained by rules of evidence. This is how all peacemaking proceeds. Getting to "Yes" Insofar as I believe in peacemaking enough to enjoy its fruits, I attend to interests at hand, figuring legal positions can be adjusted to suit them once the interests are out on the table for discussion. Harvard Law professor and renowned international mediator Roger Fisher calls this process "getting to yes." Like deterrence in warmaking thought, what makes us more or less secure at the interpersonal level is no different from what makes international leaders and power figures come to terms or continue sending their troops out shooting. Whoever formally we are or are not, our capacity to create trust, security, peace rests on being self-possessed enough to listen, empathize and be guided by honest, open expression of the real, most fundamental interests and fears at hand. All a warmaker can hope for in a crackdown is to impose social restraint and bottle fear, anger and defiance up for the moment, until like a speeding crackdown people go back to speeding and getting away with it, or in a moment as long as a generation, a nation brought together by a charismatic figure like Gandhi or Tito can degenerate into attempted genocide, into fighting over national boundaries. Life in the Seat of a Falling Empire It is my lot to have grown up in a country that formally became the most globally hegemonic military/economic empire this old world can ever know. Humanity cannot survive a higher military victory than that the United States gained in World War II. Humanity cannot survive everyone's consuming and laying waste to as many of the earth's resources as the average U.S. inhabitant consumes. No, we cannot grow into everyone living at the U.S. level of consumption. If we try hard enough, we'll die trying. If we acknowledge our chutzbah and cool it fast enough, we'll live and may prosper globally as never before. Prophecy and Planning Bears No Safety In making war one tends to rely on prophecies as to which of such opposing forces will prevail. Prepared as I am to die at any moment I myself don't plan, the world could quite possibly blow up and obliterate itself tomorrow for all I know or am prepared to act on guessing. Meanwhile, hope for human survival rests exclusively on personal human capacity to let go of retaliating and gain greater measures of self-possession. Then and only then, figuratively and literally, we can stop defecating on one another. Meanwhile, too, I go to bed each night more secure insofar as I have held onto my own self-possession during the preceding day, and attended primarily and directly to my own role in any conflict I face. The Cooler You Remain, the Safer You Are This degree of attention to one's own social control business takes energy. It is harder to listen to quiet voices and to notice quiet despair when you let rage and fear take over your own conscious attention. Peacemaking rests on our capacity to act like the putative martial arts master who cools out fights before they begin. I cannot imagine how adding heat to conflict makes it safer. If for instance I were to face someone pointing a gun at me, I would like that person to know I'm safely unarmed. I find that in order not to start getting frantic and losing my sense of control, I need to start off each day slowly and alone, and to allow myself liberal time almost daily for quiet, mindless reflection or diversion like music and idle reading. Your Power of Control Rests First on Balancing Your Own Emotional Energy I find I need to attend closely to limiting my involvement in any single dispute, to resisting the urge to promise that I'll try to take care of some horror or problem someone presents to me. Let Others Do THEIR OWN Work I find often that it is best to attend to other matters in the moments when others in the dispute are not (yet) taking care of their own business. I constantly, consciously restrain my own impulses to follow up when others don't get back to me, or are not doing something they indicated they would. By now in virtually any dispute in which I become involved, there are long intervals, up to years' long, before I hear that my efforts have born some fruit, let alone hear back that other people are quite happily taking care of their own business, or could use some form of intervention by me. For Everyone's Safety, Enjoy Life Native American traditionalists tell us we have a primary duty to enjoy life. Marilyn French tells us all peace and justice follow from the honest pursuit of personal fulfillment and happiness. I say all social security arises from the experience of trust and happiness. In my long period of trying to figure out how we achieve social control, how we genuinely achieve trust and social security, I have found that enjoying one's right to be open and honest, feeling and doing what you will instead of what you must, lies at the root of all security I and all others enjoy for all I can see. That's the primary reinforcer of my commitment to trying to make peace. Forcing Yourself or Anyone to Make Peace is Oxymoronic There's no sense in acting out of moral obligation to make peace, other than taking time to reflect and introduce oneself and seeking to know what silent voices have to say. We sew trust into our social fabrics when the threads we weave into our dialogue with disputants carry no strings of demand that someone fulfill our expectations rather than her or his own. When self-possession gives way to trying to possess the soul of anyone else's actions, to relying on others to live out one's own expectations, all one's capacity for control is lost to fatalistic playing out of role of requited lover or victim of another's malfeasance or nonfeasance. Peace is Always a Pleasant Surprise; What We Expect of Others Misleads Us The happy surprise of allowing others to come through for oneself in unanticipated, wondrous ways comes only when we let go of our own urge to make others do the right thing or give us our due. I can only enjoy the success of the marriage that has resulted from how an abuser and his victim--my "sister"--are relating on their own by letting go of my prejudice that any relationship like this is bad news both in enabling the abuser and in compounding the woman's victimization. Any convictions I impose on dialogue with people based on my assessment of whether they are the kind of people to be trusted, or arranged, situated or employed in a trustworthy way, become noise that obscures my awareness of HOW people manage to build trust when they do it their own, honest way. Moreover, any act that is done because someone else thinks or might think it is the right thing to do is a lie when I myself do it. Honesty, the force that keeps all threads of any social fabric from breaking. I can trust only what I perceive to reflect what someone else honestly wants or chooses to do, not what is done because one must. We cannot be trusted to continue doing what we must when our surveillance of one another drops. Surveillance is a drag. A goal of peacemaking is to manage to do without it. Say Your Own "Yeses" and "Noes" The late medical missionary Thomas Merton wrote that failure to say our own "yeses" and "noes" is the source of all human violence. If you make a decision to fail to intervene to help someone or decision to intervene to impose a reward or punishment on someone, peacemaking requires you have the honesty and respect to say quite openly, "I'm doing this because it makes me feel good, and because anything else I can see doing would make me feel worse. If this be punishment, I hope to god it hurts." And I ought to be prepared to laugh at any suffering I inflict, or regret it enough to describe the pain and fear I have caused and take steps to do otherwise when similarly provoked in the future. One fellow I had sat beside during a campus disciplinary hearing comes to mind. The president of the hearing body announced to my friend that all the hearing officers found him likable, and that their finding that he did an evil deed was nothing personal, but that they believed he was the kind of person who would do such a thing, and accordingly the rules dictated he be "held" responsible (which of course denied him any room for assuming responsibility for his own response to the problem). It has since the Nuremberg war crimes trials become well recognized globally that acting on someone else's feelings or agenda, following someone else's orders, is the surest way to give in to the impulse to hurt and kill people. This hearing officer sent chills down my spine. As the world of how peace is truly rather than purportedly secured unfolds to me, I recognize that no single person or group is a greater obstacle to peace than any other. Where once I blamed judges or reporters for failure to do what evidence at hand manifestly required by law or otherwise, I no longer expect them to be any different from any other group of us who feel powerless. Powerholding carries its own fear of failure to do one's duty, which means that in a political culture dominated by warmaking discourse, powerholders will become as personally un-self-possessed as those they oppress and violate. Peacemaking Begins Anywhere You Are Given that changes in the culture sufficient to make judges or reporters on the whole more reliable will take generations to become noticeable, the change we create by doing what it takes to make peace with anyone, anywhere, anytime, on the streets or in the sweets, is no more or less logical a starting place for you or me or anyone else to initiate peace than somewhere or someone else. Meanwhile I will continue to notice people getting away with murder, and for all I can see, powerless at the moment do to more than express an objection to a friend. If I am prepared to accept these severe limits on the human capacity to achieve social control, to gain security, if I can live with doing my own things on purely personal authority, I stand to achieve abundant personal social security and to enjoy plenty of honest trust in the life that ensues. Control Requires Taking the Long View In any interaction we gain control by looking past the vicissitudes of the moment further ahead, tempering our urges to lash out or to say the polite and proper thing with conscious self-awareness of what tenor of response we can anticipate. I offer this simple illustration of control you can try yourself if you haven't already noticed it. Compare how much you have to brake and how tightly you have to grip and move the steering wheel as you roll through an exit ramp from an expressway, when (a) you look as close down at the road in front of the hood of the car as you can, versus (b) focusing your eyes at the farthest away point on the exit ramp you can see ahead of you. You will fight for control the first way, and by contrast cruise comfortably through the curve the other way, I promise. Control requires you to take time to acknowledge your feelings and consider where you and yours will get next if you do this rather than that, fundamentally, if you try bashing an enemy rather than taking time to introduce yourself and listen to what parties you want to control themselves feel and want. Peacemaking requires being self- possessed enough to figure out which of the four steps in peacemaking you are due to take next, and how. You have to let go of concern for making things happen to attend to choosing a response to things that in fact are happening. Herein lies the only power to attain personal safety and security you or anyone else has. Your Primary Social Duty is to Account for Your Own Interests Every time I find myself holding back telling someone I worry about his or her behavior, for instance on the pretext that s/he can't understand anyway, I know I also have failed to provide the quid pro quo of every desire to know where others honestly stand: They want equally to know where I stand. I owe it to myself and my reliability to others not to plead ignorance or wanting to impose my opinions and feelings on others. Not even the smallest child, from a peacemaking vantage point, deserves that kind of patronization. Holding back honest misgivings I have about what others tell me or ask me is not only a disservice to and devaluation of myself; it also forecloses anyone else addressing my real concerns with hers or his except by blind luck. I become trustworthy with anyone insofar as I convey empathy and that my actions accommodate the other's concerns, and neither of us can know this has happened unless we both have heard me tell where I stood before and accounted in that person's terms for how I have listened and shifted where I stand now. Tell Others How Their Actions Make You Feel, Not Who or What They Are I don't have to call anyone names. I don't have to presuppose that anyone's response to me will confirm my prejudices against his or her trustworthiness. I can choose my words carefully to connote no more than my own feelings and (dis)inclinations. I can attend to threats to the honor of someone I will confront, I can balance criticism and fears with mention of things I trust and value, but I cannot take for granted I am trusted and not lied to by those who do not know roughly where I stand for good and for ill. Such openness also forecloses resentment over my failure to meet expectations when I can warn against false ones. Recap: Peacemaking is Just Four Steps from One Social Moment to the Next I call this a peacemaking primer. Let me recap the simple process faith in one's own capacity to make peace gets acted out: It leads you (1) to pause to reflect upon and survey the range of your own feelings as you enter any conflict, (2) to introduce where your interests lie at the moment to anyone you seek information from, and then among parties to the conflict (3) first to look down and (4) then to dump, if at all, up next, with uncompromising, open honesty about what you fear and trust, acting always in the name of your own feelings and judgment alone, with reference to others but without attributing your own actions to any of them. That's all peacemaking entails. You cannot figure out what you need to do in any conflict until you have listened to what other parties know and feel about it, and until they indicate which interests are guiding their response. Any prior speculation about what you had better be prepared to do is harmless as long as you keep the speculation in the idle perspective it deserves, practically speaking. When you let your duty to your own promise of "consequences" or to someone else's rules take precedence over stopping, looking and listening to parties' own honest accounts of themselves in the situation at hand, you may win the war but you will lose all your power to learn from the parties how they and you can comfortably weave a social fabric in concert, harmoniously rather than in unison. You lose your entire capacity to make your world safer for yourself and others in the reality of each conflictual moment you face. You become prisoner to the performance of others, prisoner to engaging in your own "societally" given script. You are reduced to acting like any pure machine, and you become a threat to everyone's security including your own. You stop being able to notice that even you yourself are hurting others; you lose your capacity to care and respond. Respect Yourself Most of All You never deserve abuse. Your capacity to make peace rests ultimately on taking care of yourself. Insofar as you let someone impose unfairly or more than you can stand in the guise of obtaining your help, you transform their role into having to take care of your problems as well as his or her own. If you are tired in a struggle, withdraw from it until you feel emotionally and physically strong enough to resume your efforts. No real construction of peace depends on any single person to make it happen; and when peace breaks out, it is the concertedness of everyone's resonant and mutually accommodating actions that makes it so insofar as it trust and feelings of security ever truly are warranted. Potential for Global Change Insofar as we create trust and true security by making peace with one another despite the warmaking systems in which we live and work, our warmaking systems will die down of disuse by definition. So in my field of criminal justice where just about everyone seems to want to know what we can do with all these prisoners of ours, I know from experience that any time parties to even the most violent of crimes or of repeated rape have by the time the victims have healed significantly and gained renewed security, everyone involved in the discussion has gotten past thinking anyone really needs to have a hundred-thousand-dollar maximum-security cell to put a former and potentially future violent assailant in, to tear the offender so profoundly and physically from any social fabric. Too many other straightforward ways to weave victims and offenders into social fabrics have by then emerged to fear that the offender will just be abandoned to her or his violent obsessions. Large Cultures of Peacemaking Do Exist In matters of economic security, the basic idea of empowering powerless would-be workers for pay has been translated into a multitude of cooperative lending and ownership/operation arrangements. The community of some two hundred worker owned-and-operated enterprises spawned by a cooperative bank, with its own owner-entrepreneur training program, in the Basque region of Spain, called Mondragon, is particularly impressive. Since a liberationist priest dreamed up the bank and got it started in 1959, none of the carefully planned enterprises has failed. Initially, the corporate charters of the bank and enterprises are quite elaborately thought through. On its face, the justification for each element of the rules governing these enterprises is that it represents the simple rules of making peace I have just laid out in a social sympathy of morally autonomous, equally authoritative actors. Anyone Can Engage in Peacemaking, But No Mortal Human Being is a Pure Peacemaker We are always learning new ways to discern what we cannot rely upon in the face of other people's actions. I don't claim to have managed to learn to stay self-possessed myself, let alone to have dreamed up a program for getting us all there at once. But I do think we would surprise ourselves by concentrating on following the simple steps that comprise peacemaking in its entirety, and letting the result accrue for themselves. Everything I Now Know About Control I Had Learned by Kindergarten Amazing isn't it? After years and booksful of analysis of the complex literature of crime and punishment, and of war and peace, this is all that remains of what I know of how to achieve social control. Try it and let me know how it works out. Conclusion People cannot talk and listen together and fight one another at the same time. Peacemaking is a matter of injecting quanta of conversation into our social space-- conversation which embraces the greatest victims and most powerful oppressors of the moment. The sooner the conversation begins, the less explosive violent relations have a chance to grow to be, the sooner power imbalances will be mediated, the sooner peace will be made. This primer is but a guide to starting and carrying on those conversations.