Building a Culture of Peace

UNITAR Hiroshima Roundtable
Steven Lloyd Leeper
Chairperson, Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation
Hiroshima, 30 August 2007
(English Summary)

"Building a Culture of Peace: the Short-term Priorities"

I have seen and helped to create cultures of peace in families and in companies. For ten years I thought I was becoming a family therapist, then in 1981 I suddenly switched to management consulting. In both occupations, I was working with the same question. How do human beings resolve conflict?

Despite my interest in conflict resolution, I was never interested in large group conflicts. For me, conflict resolution was a personal matter, something that happens within, between or among individuals. I still had that attitude when I first came to Hiroshima in 1984. I had little interest in politics and less in world peace. I was somewhat interested in environmental issues and joined the local chapter of Friends of the Earth, but my work was helping Japanese and Americans learn to work together.

Now, after 23 years in Hiroshima, I am completely involved in politics, with little time for personal peace. However, my earlier experience with conflict resolution does inform my understanding of peace and peace culture. Thanks to families and companies, I know what peace and the resolution of conflict look like.

Since becoming chairman of the Peace Culture Foundation, one of the most common questions I receive is, what is peace? Another common question is, what is peace culture? So before going further, let’s deal with these.

To me, peace is the state of everyone being happy. I often use the analogy of physical health. When all of the cells in our bodies are receiving adequate nutrition and are performing their proper functions, and when we have no significant damage or pain anywhere, we refer to that state as “healthy.” In my philosophy, peace is social health, and any effort to move a group or a society or the world in that direction is a manifestation of peace culture.

Today, about 50% of the world’s population is trying to live on less than two dollars a day. About 24,000 people starve to death every day. Tens of thousands more die of easily curable or preventable diseases. This is not health, and it is not peace.

The question is, why do people starve to death? Why do so many suffer so terribly? Is it a lack of money? Is it a lack of food? Human beings produce twice as much food as we need for everyone to eat well. The US is spending more every year in Iraq than it would cost to provide health care to the whole world. We have plenty of food. We have plenty of money. What we lack is concern or caring or love.

I was amazed to discover that during the Vietnam War the US spent approximately 40,000 dollars per Vietnamese citizen. At that time, 10,000 dollars would have been a fortune to most Vietnamese. If the US had given each Vietnamese 10,000 dollars, they all would have become our friends. Thus, we could have won the love of the Vietnamese for a quarter of what it cost to fight them. But we prefer to fight. This is because we live in a war culture. We have inherited territoriality and empire building from our animal ancestors. We understand and love competition. We find cooperation extremely frustrating and difficult. Many of us, especially economists, actually worship competition. They believe that free competition and a free market will magically solve all our problems.

After the bombing of Hiroshima, Ichiro Moritaki, a Hiroshima University philosophy professor, spent five months recovering in a hospital, where he thought deeply about the meaning of the atomic bomb. He achieved a radical insight. At the deepest level, the meaning of this new weapon is that human beings can no longer resolve their disputes through all-out contests of destructive power. That is, nuclear weapons make war obsolete. Moritaki was among the first to tell us that to survive, human beings will have to graduate from the civilization of power to a civilization of love. These days, we use the terms culture of war and culture of peace, but this is what we mean.

Moritaki derived peace culture from the atomic bomb. Now, however, we are being driven to graduate from the war culture by two main problems. One is nuclear weapons. The other is the environment. These problems cannot be solved by competition. If the human family does not rise rather quickly to far higher levels of cooperation than we have yet achieved, our competition will plunge us to levels of violence and misery we have not experienced since WWII.

Competition itself is becoming a serious problem. Because of competition we are already working too hard and young students are committing suicide, but I don’t have time to go into this issue in depth. I will focus only on the most obvious problem - oil. Just when supplies of oil and other resources are declining or soon will decline, India, China and other countries are demanding ever-larger shares. From what I have heard, the United States, with 4% of the world’s population, still uses about 25% of the world’s oil and emits over 30% of all CO2. This situation is obviously not sustainable, but how is it going to change? Is the US going to voluntarily reduce its share of oil? Is the international community going to take control of oil away from the US? We are standing at a momentous crossroads. Are we going to solve our social, environmental and economic problems through competition or cooperation? Some believe that if we choose competition, the strong will survive and the weak will die, and that is perfectly natural. I believe that if we choose competition, we will all suffer terribly and graduation to a peace culture will be greatly delayed or impossible. We might not be able to recover at all. Thus, one of the short-term priorities facing those of us who would like to live in a
peaceful world is the urgent question of how we are going to share or divide up our resources.

However, even if we decide right now that we want to solve our problems through cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict, I suspect that graduating from today’s war culture to a true peace culture will take at least the rest of this century. Unfortunately, most human beings, especially our current leaders, still do not understand the fundamentals of peace. It will take time to conquer our selfish and violent tendencies. Still, I like to believe that we are evolving in that direction and, if we can just avoid using nuclear weapons, I believe we can make it.

This brings me to our most serious short-term priority. Just yesterday, I received an article by email saying that US Vice President Cheney has already decided to bomb Iran, maybe next month. In July 2006, Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, described plans being developed by the civilian leadership, Cheney’s people, to use nuclear weapons in Iran. In April 2006, Doug Bruder of the Department of Defense said, “There are some very hard targets out there that right now it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to defeat with current conventional weapons. Therefore there are some that would probably require nuclear weapons.” Thus, we know that some powerful people in the US government want to use nuclear weapons in Iran. According to Seymour Hersh, these people are being stopped by General Pace and other high-ranking officers at the Pentagon. However, we also know that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima despite the opposition of US military leadership.

Many people, especially the Iranians I have met, say that even the Bush administration is not stupid enough to attack Iran, and certainly not with nuclear weapons. Such an attack would cause chaos. However, I am afraid they forget that the men guiding the US right now all represent the war industry. They profit from chaos. Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton is a company that needs enemies and war. These people are not afraid of war. They are afraid of peace.

In November 2008, the people now in power will lose that power. I am just guessing, of course, but I suspect that their top priority is to create a situation that will continue to generate profits even while the Democrats are in power. By attacking Iran, they can guarantee another terrorist attack in the US like September 11. Such an attack is just what they need to make sure that the world does not move toward peace while they are out of power. I suspect that within the next five years, the international community will decide whether to eliminate nuclear weapons, or allow them to spread and be used. At the moment, we are allowing them to spread. If we stay on the course we are on today, we are heading toward military and environmental catastrophe.

One of the most serious political problems for peace is the fact that most peace people do not like to fight. We try to keep tensions low and avoid serious confrontations. We like to keep the peace. Today, however, though this may sound like a contradiction in terms, we need peace people to stand up and fight hard for peace. Of course, we do not use violence, but must use every non-violent technique available. Only a spectacular tidal wave of public demand for peace and specifically for the elimination of nuclear weapons can save us from disaster. I hope you will all help to create that tidal wave and force our leaders to give us what we truly want — a sustainable, peaceful, nuclear-weapon-free world.

In the next three years, Mayors for Peace will be working with NGOs around the world on a new global campaign, but right now the best way you can help is to contribute to the PR campaign associated with the 101 A-bomb exhibitions that we will hold in the US between now and the end of 2008. I have distributed a flyer about this project, so please take a look and think about how you can help. Thank you.

— Steven Lloyd Leeper