What’s in the Background?…

What’s in the Background?…

By BETH STYLES | Producer, Composer, Artist

If you’re a fan for life of “The Wizard of Oz” like me, you’re probably familiar with the ‘big reveal’ (spoiler alert…), that moment – when Dorothy’s little dog Toto discovers an inconspicuous booth (how did we not see it earlier?) in the corner, exposing the “man behind the curtain” aka, the “Wizard” (‘Great & Terrible’ Oz) aka an ordinary man (ok, he was a circus magician…) from Nebraska, whose air balloon sailed off course into a land that had never witnessed such a spectacle.  Alas, he found himself being worshiped as a great sorcerer, and then painfully doing his best to sustain the myth.  Maybe it felt euphoric to be so admired at first, but keeping up the charade had to feel increasingly lonely and bleak… it’s no wonder he morphed into a frightening version of himself…  Anyway… THEN… miraculously, Toto steps in as protagonist at this major turning point, barking to the rescue, saving our beloved foursome, the land of Oz, the Wizard, and all of us, if we’re up for it…

Perhaps this ‘historical’ metaphor begs the question, what’s behind the “curtain” for each of us?  What possible myths or burdens are we carrying?  Maybe the physical masks we grew accustomed to wearing over the past few years helped us sneak and ‘hide out’ more easily… but chances are, we were already skillful in our very own styles of ‘sorcery’ ;).  While the lists of possible errs we may torture ourselves with replenish ongoingly, some of what we may be withholding are our biggest, brightest, and highest dreams.  If we could only get beyond that ‘curtain’… (where’s Toto?!).

For those who are experiencing a space of healthy mind and spirit, ready to invent new possibilities and adventure in life, here’s what could be a fun perspective on loosening up that “curtain”.   Many top life coaches, philosophers, and transformational self-help education courses note, that recognizing the ‘background’ chatter in our minds; our thoughts and feelings – both positive and negative, is one of the first steps in clearing the way for manifesting our highest dreams.  And so, as we rise and do our best to shine each new day, tackling our ‘to do’ lists and fulfilling our commitments at work, home, and to ourselves… what’s in the background?

The first step is to recognize the phenomenon itself, that the brain has an ongoing background ‘conversation’, basically on automatic, reacting to whatever stimuli pops up, every waking hour.  Sometimes described as the “little voice” in our heads (if you’re saying to yourself “what voice?” you just found it…), it ironically has a mind of its own.  In a nutshell, we may not be thinking our own thoughts.  But don’t panic… there’s excellent news!!  That background chatter is not the actual representative of who we really are.  Toto will help us reveal who that is in a moment…

The pickle we find ourselves in as human beings, is that without recognizing the background chatter AND keeping an eye on what it’s saying, our little voice can sometimes go rogue and play a bit of a saboteur.  It may have ‘good intentions’ to protect us, and of course we must listen and trust our gut about real danger – but being the rascal that it is – it can often wind up judging life, others, ourselves – misinterpreting the meaning of past experiences, and developing “theories” about the world, that don’t serve our best interests.  Without noticing, our background theories can potentially become the lens through which we view all of life.   Imagine putting on a pair of glasses with emerald green lenses.  After a while, if we forget we have them on, theoretically, we might begin to believe that everything we see is emerald green. If our saboteur has its way, this emerald view of life might have us feeling like we’re stuck in a glop of… SLIME?  However, when we give ourselves the lead voice, our view can be a clear path to the Emerald City itself, while sipping a shiny Shamrock Shake!

Becoming aware of what’s in the background – intervening, and showing our chatter who’s boss, can make way for the most freeing, new and bold experiences of our lives.  We will continue proving our theories right, but they can be the theories we design. Anything becomes possible.  Segue back to Oz… At last – we become our inner Toto, pulling back the curtain… Huzzah!

The Unseen

The Unseen

By John Bickart, Phd | 20 Opportunities to Transform Yourself While Teaching | “Reawakening Your Love for Teaching” 

What do you do when something terrible happens? Do you think of taking care of yourself first? You should. Then, do you seek the students? That’s what they want. After trauma, we all seek predictable, kind environments – in each other’s company – and teachers are nothing less than pure gold, here. Do you constantly love teaching? Or are you like the rest of us – falling in and out of love? We teachers need forgiveness, accolades, compassion, and understanding. How will we get this? By looking through the eyes of our students!

I don’t know about you, but I went to the school of hard knocks. When I was very young, everything looked good. As I got older, not so much. I guess the hard knocks got to me. Life brought difficulties, responsibilities, good days, and hard ones, too. Then, I started teaching. The youth I taught have given me a fresh start! If I consciously use their eyes to perceive the world, I have a window into the beautiful and the good. Yes, I have to make the effort, but it works. I believe that it works because the world is inherently good and the youth are innately wise enough to know this. They have a spiritual knowing that is true. They KNOW that the world is good. So, when I need to reawaken my love of teaching, I look into their eyes and through their eyes … and there it is – the knowing that I had temporarily forgotten.

The Unseen.

Helen Keller said, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” So today, I’m going to tell you a story that I told at the wonderful Rainbow Community School, here in Asheville, NC in 2017. I was guest teaching science lessons and a science club. One day, we paused doing science experiments for the following story. It’s one of my favorites. It was first told to me in a room full of adults. So, it was told to adults, but it’s about a story told to children. It comes, inspired by a story from Laurens Van der Post in his book The Heart of the Hunter (1961). But I’ve changed it over the years and for almost half a century now, I’ve been telling this story to children. It’s my absolute favorite story. I’ve also told it to adults, so I’m telling it to you today. It’s about the unseen.

 

“The Milk Maiden”

Once, there was a story. The story was for adults, but in the story, you hear about another story that was told to children. It was told over and over. It was told by a babysitter in the Kalahari, a semi-arid desert in Southern Africa. Every time the babysitter came, the children asked her to tell their favorite story. Now, I will tell you the one she told the children.

Once upon a time, there was a young farm boy. His job was to watch over the cows as they grazed. Every day, he took the cows to the same place. It was a pasture up on the side of the mountain. Over the pasture was a cliff that hung in the air just above the cows. Every day, the boy brought the cows and looked up at the rock cliff to wonder what lay beyond. On the whole, he was happy. But then there came this one different day. Today, the boy brought the cows to the pasture, as he had always done, without any knowledge that on this occasion, his life would change forever.

The pasture looked the same. The cows started to graze as they always did. The boy sat down as he usually would, but then a singular event occurred. A rope descended from the rock cliff just above the pasture. Then, to the boy’s continuing amazement, a young girl started to climb down the rope. She was holding a stool and a bucket. 

The boy hid behind a large rock in the pasture. The girl reached the pasture floor, walked over to the cows, and sat on her stool, placing her bucket under a cow, and coaxed the milk from the cow. When the cow had filled her bucket, she proceeded to the rope and ascended. The boy watched with incredulity.  All the rest of that day and into that night, the boy wondered about the strange girl from the cliff above. What was she doing? Where was she from? Why would she take the milk from the cows – milk that clearly belonged to someone else? Finally, after turning these ideas over and over in his mind, he resolved to watch and wait for the milk maiden to see if she would come back. 

She did. The very next day, just after he arrived at the pasture, she came down the rope and milked a cow. Then, she left as abruptly as she came.  On the third day, the boy’s observational focus had become extreme. He was now making up his mind that if she came again, he would detain her. He genuinely needed to find out what was going on. 

She came. The boy leaped out from his hiding rock and apprehended her.  “What are you doing? That is the milk of the farmer,” he said, “and you are just taking it without permission. “The milk maiden said nothing. She looked intently into the farm boy’s eyes for what seemed like an eternity, then simply said, “I will come to live with you, if you allow me to go back up the rope once more.”  The boy did not know what to say. He was not expecting this. She would live with him? He did not ask this. He just wanted to know what she was doing? After all, she was stealing milk. And now, instead of explaining herself, she said that she would live with him? So, the boy just stood and stared. Suddenly, he found his mouth saying, “Alright.”

So, the girl proceeded to milk a cow and go back up the rope.  Another day passed, then another. On the third day, she came back. This time she climbed down the rope without the milking pail or the stool. But she did have a small box, about the size of a book. She came over to the boy and explained, “I will stay with you as long as you do not look into this box until I say.” The boy agreed, and so they lived together … in the same room, for quite some time.

On many days, the girl would leave the room and the boy would stare at the box she had brought and wonder what it contained. But he never, never looked inside, until this one day.  She was gone and the boy could wait no longer. He crossed the room, opened the box, and looked inside. Afraid that she would come into the room and see him, he quickly closed the box and put it back just as it had been.

The girl came back into the room, looked at the boy, then the box, then spoke directly to the boy, saying, “I must leave.” Taking up the box, she walked out toward the setting sun and was never seen again.

____________________

 At this point the babysitter would always say to the children, “And do you know why the milk maiden left?” The she would add emphatically, “It was not because the farm boy looked into the box!” Then, with a dramatic pause, she would finish, “It was because he didn’t see anything in the box.”

____________________

With that, the babysitter was finished. Now, I personally need to add something. When I was told this story, I was in a room of adults. I’m pretty sure that none of us knew exactly what the story meant. And I’m also pretty sure that we all had the same questions. First of all, how did she know he had looked in the box. Was there something or things in the box? If there was, why didn’t he see anything? And most of all, why would his not seeing be grounds for her to leave?

____________________

This beautiful, mysterious story has stirred in me for almost half a century, now. So, I give it to you. I don’t have the answers. But it makes me respect the unseen and watch and look at life even more carefully than ever before. It causes me to wonder. 

____________________

References

Van der Post, L. (1961). The Heart of the Hunter … With drawings by Maurice Wilson. Pp. 254. Hogarth Press: London.

 

Grandma Ach

Grandma Ach

By JOHN BICKART, Ph.D | Science Education and Spiritual Transformation | “Can a Science Lesson on Bread be Spiritually Transformative?”

In two science classes on March 20, 2023 at the wonderful Rainbow Community School in Asheville, NC, I taught some thirty plus seventh and eight graders a lesson on the chemistry of bread, then we made my Grandma’s famous ‘crisps’ – fried pizza dough that you dip in powdered sugar. The lesson was a celebration that followed a very successful school-wide science fair. The lesson went something like this …

A Break in History
My Grandma Ach (Achinapura), my mother’s mother, was born on November 18, 1888 in Italy. She came to America, got married at an early age, and had 14 children. My father’s mother, Grandma Bickart, was born in America on the exact, same day, month, and year. When my mom and dad fell in love and found this out, they felt like star-crossed lovers.

I used to shadow Grandma Ach when she cooked, which was basically all the time. I asked a million questions. Not everyone likes a million questions, like my friends and teachers and aunts and uncles and parents and siblings and cousins; but Grandma didn’t seem to mind. One of my favorite times to learn from Grandma and ask questions was when she made pizza dough for frying (which she called ‘crisps’) or paprika chicken or tomato sauce. I would watch very carefully and ask her why she did what she did. If no one else was around and I had Grandma all to myself, I would also ask her questions about what it was like in the 1800s.

“The 1800s? Well, it was very different from now, Johnny. Instead of getting around with cars, we used our legs and horses. Instead of getting news from television and telephone, you had to go out of your house and talk to your neighbor.”

From the time I was young I loved hearing about the 1800s because I was slowly forming a theory that, as it turns out, I would write about for the rest of my life. My theory was that the human daily routine has been remarkably similar throughout history – until now. Isn’t it true that some of our main activities is to walk and talk? We walk around to get somewhere, and we talk to find out what is happening. The basic methods of transportation and communication have been SURPRISINGLY EQUIVALENT FOR ALL OF RECORDED HISTORY – and most probably for pre-historic times – up until now. Now, if you currently live in a technological culture, the world you are born into is experiencing something for the first time in history. Therefore, that makes Grandma’s generation the last generation to live daily life like every generation for all time as far as we know. She, and any cultures that still use foot and animal for transportation, and word of mouth for communication, share this with the ancestors.

Let me note here that some say that there were groups of humans that lived in far distant epochs that predate even our anthropological ancestors, ones that came before what we generally call pre-historic humankind. If these groups existed, I would be fascinated to find their means of transportation and communication. For now, I will concentrate on Grandma’s and my world. Our well-known world holds plenty of mystery for me at the moment.

The reason I have been thinking about this break in history for my whole life is that I see an incredible opportunity. Just as Grandma is the last generation to have a major commonality with our ancestors, those of us born into a culture with technology do not have that commonality. This means any of us ‘firsts’ have a major disconnect with our ancestors. Every generation before us did most of their living according to tradition and routine – ‘the way it had always been done.’ We do not. We create new ways every other day. We are untethered, unhooked. We are boats floating about in the sea of time without anchors.

And this must mean two things. First, we have lost something. Second, we may therefore be able to gain something new.

Seize the Moment
Grandma saw this. She would tell me, “Johnny, everything is always new with you young people. You don’t even follow your own routines; you keep changing faster and faster.”

But somewhere in my 40s, about thirty years ago, I realized that although we must have lost something; perhaps we also have an opportunity that no generation has ever had in the entire life of humankind. The freedom from historical, traditional, parental, conventional expectation.

Charles Lindbergh is credited with observing, after his first flight across the Atlantic, that the pioneer has the eyes of the poet – the ability to see meaning that followers may never get to see. My theory is that maybe, just maybe, in this moment of history, we are Lindbergh’s pioneer-poets. We are the generation that has been born into a new world that is radically different than the old one. We have been given a world full of individuals who, because of technology, can know what people all over the planet are doing – and can reach out to them. We can visit them and talk to them at the drop of a hat. This presents two very different opportunities. It’s a world where a few terrorists can hurt large a multitude; but contrastingly, a few school children can save a nation. We have a moment, here, now. And the traditions and routines of our ancestors do not necessarily frame answers to our problems. Our past does not always suggest specific ways of being for our future. We are new. We are free. We are poets of the next version of humankind without limiting perceptions and patterns of the past. I don’t know about you, but for me this virginal moment is frightening, liberating, sober, intoxicating, and perhaps even gloriously deliberate.

Can Science be Spiritually Transformative?
So here I am, teaching 7th and 8th graders about the chemistry of bread.

Suddenly – not from any lesson plan – I find myself saying, “You know class, the opposite of photosynthesis occurs when a human is eating a carbohydrate and breathing in oxygen. It is the exact opposite of when trees and plants are breathing in carbon dioxide and drinking water. Here is an equation that represents a typical carbohydrate being added to oxygen (eaten with of course, our necessary breath). If you translate the following chemical equation into language it might read, “Humans (or animals) are eating a plant while breathing (respiration), then exhaling and sweating (transpiration).”

carbohydrate + breathing in —> breathing out + transpiration
C6H12O6    +       O2          —>           CO2        +       H2O

That typical carbohydrate (C6H12O6), or more generally, (CnH2nOn) could have been:

– typically sweet food with a high sugar content (like apples, oranges, berries, honey),
– or typically starchy food (like potatoes, bread, rice, pasta),
– or typically cellulose food (like celery, carrots, beans).

When nature is making bread (or also, making wine), it is similar to when a human being is eating a carbohydrate. Look at the chemical equations together and you can see that one takes a carbohydrate and adds oxygen and the other without. Humans or animals eating is an aerobic process, which means it is fueled by oxygen. Bread or alcohol making is an anaerobic process called fermentation, which does not use oxygen.

Humans Eating/Breathing:
C6H12O6 + O2 —> CO2 + H2O

Making Bread/Alcohol:
C6H12O6 (with yeast present) —> C2H5OH + CO2

This shows that bread and alcohol are extremely related to our very physical act of living. To make bread or alcohol, you take the same ingredients and breathe life into one and the other becomes the bread/alcohol of life.

After we did a little chemistry on the white board, we cooked the crisps and I asked the students if they liked them. They did. So, I taught them that bread is basic to life. It went something like this …

You can see that bread is very special to life from at least three vantage points. You just saw a chemical view. You tasted it and thus got the physical view. But you can also see this from what I call a spiritual view – something that inspires and causes wonder.

I told you how you are the absolutely new individuals that have the opportunity to take humankind places we have never, ever been. Well, here is perhaps a place to start. You have just learned about bread – a part of life that has NOT changed in ingredients or the process of making it – for all of history. It also the same across just about every culture across the whole earth. Almost all communities on the planet take their local carbohydrate grain and combine water and yeast to make bread. And what is more, just about every plant-covered area of the earth has natural carbohydrates covered with wild yeast spores that are airborne and pervasive. This means that there is fermentation to make completely organic alcohol and bread all over the woods. Yes. A completely wild sort of bread and alcohol exist everywhere. Take a walk in the fall and smell the fallen leaves fermenting and breathe in the same fresh air that is in a kitchen making real bread.

So, while you are the new generations – without anything from the past to hold you back – you also have the chance, if you wish to use it, to keep some things which are natural, delicious and good. And if you choose, as totally free individuals, to be kind en masse … give me a call … I’ll walk a mile to see that.

 

#133 Speaking in Fables

There once was a magical place. If people who could speak normally went in, they were changed while they were inside, then they came out SPEAKING IN FABLES. What does that mean, you say? Well, to speak in fables one must take an ordinary situation and then see something extra. Then, one must put the extra with the ordinary to come out with something EXTRAORDINARY! That’s hard to understand, so I’ll give you a simple example. 

An ordinary way to speak about a candle is to say that we see it every day and we light it in order to see better or we light it just for fun. But to speak in fables, one must observe the flame so carefully that you notice that flames are hot and always go up. It is as if they are little droplets of Sun, going up to return to their home. And if you continue speaking in fables, you would follow such an extraordinary comparison with more observations. You would trace the origin of the candle all of the way back to the Sun. You would say that the flame came from burning wick and wax. The wax came from the Earth, which came from decaying plants, which grew from sunlight. And so, to speak in fables, one might end with thanks to the Sun for every flame – the small droplets of Sun on Earth.

Oh yes, and where is that magical place where one learns to speak in fables? It is called a school.

LEARN TO SPEAK IN FABLES

___________________________

References
Bickart, J. (2020). Bickart’s Just-in-Time Fables (Vol. 3). Asheville, NC: Red Shirt Interactive Group.

Students Engage in Community Service at the Dakota Zoo

Students Engage in Community Service at the Dakota Zoo

By KAYLIN McGLOTHEN | KX NEWS

Bismarck Public Schools is teaching their students that giving back is key.

With the weather steadily growing colder, there is work that needs to be done to clean outdoor recreation areas. Two groups of Wachter Middle School- 8th grade students made their way to the Dakota Zoo to help in their clean up efforts.

While at the zoo they helped to rake leaves. Over the course of two days, 300 students were able to take part in the project. The school hosts a community service event every year around this time. Wachter Middle School teacher, Kevin Schmitcke, says this is a great opportunity for kids to work together outside the classroom.

“Kids have fun working together so it’s a good team building activity,” says Schmitcke.

Indigenous Youth at COP26 to Influence Policy

Indigenous Youth at COP26 to Influence Policy

By ARI SHAPIRO, ASHLEY BROWN, NOAH CALDWELL, MIA VENKAT | NPR

In a crowded house above a pub in Scotland, Ruth Miller is busy planning her next move.

The 24-year-old Climate Justice Director for the Alaska-based grassroots group, Native Movement, is one of nine young people squeezed into the four-bedroom rental in between attending events at the COP26 UN climate summit.

But even having to stay an hour’s drive outside of the main conference venue, they are among the activists who are insisting the politicians, dignitaries, and negotiators hear their stories, voices, and expertise.

Miller grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and is native Dena’ina Athabascan. Some of her roommates here are from New Zealand, or islands in the South Pacific.

They’re hanging out in a living room with low wooden furniture covered in mustard-colored velvet cushions, joking about some of their shared experiences as kids who grew up in native communities.

Without planning on it, they all brought different kinds of smoked fish to Scotland: Salmon from Alaska, eel from New Zealand.

But of course, their connections go much deeper than food. They came here with a shared view of how lands and waters are connected, and how to care for them.

“It does seem less like learning new things and more like meeting a long-lost family member that you haven’t seen in quite some time,” Miller says of the gathering.

Everyone squeezes around the dining table for a family-style meal of takeout Thai food while 23-year-old Tiana Jakicevich leads everyone in a blessing.

Everyone in the house gathers for dinner ahead of another packed day at the COP26 summit.

Mia Venkat

Then they talk about logistics for the next day’s events — planning how to get to and from the conference site.

They had to raise their own money for this trip and staying in Glasgow was way too expensive.

In some ways, it’s a metaphor for their experience of the conference itself. Even though they have had meetings with top officials, these activists are sometimes on the outside looking in, trying to carve out space for their people.

“Being an Indigenous youth at COP is extraordinarily limiting and tokenizing in a number of ways, both by nature of being Indigenous and by being youth,” Miller says.

Miller and Jakicevich talk candidly about their shared experience, including of a warming planet. From the Arctic, where Miller is from, to the Southern Hemisphere, where Jakicevich lives.

“While Ruth’s ice is melting, our seas are rising. So we are intrinsically connected to the earth and each other through that,” Jakicevich says.

Jakicevich woke up recently to news that her small town was in a state of emergency after three months’ worth of rain fell in 48 hours. And she has seen more gradual climate-caused changes at home too.

“When I was little we used to go down to the beach and collect Tua Tua,” she says.

“It’s like a little shellfish and you used to just dig in the sand for them. And every year we kept going back and they moved every year, and then about five years ago we couldn’t find them.

“So at this point in time, where we’ve always been able to collect Tua Tua from, we no longer can any more.”

That’s in New Zealand. And Alaska is heating up much faster than the rest of the planet.

Miller has seen record-setting wildfires and relocations from land that her people have lived on for generations.

“But, of course, you can’t relocate your grandparents’ graves. You can’t relocate your ancient sacred sites,” she says.

“You can’t adapt to the places that are lost due to climate change.

“This past year, when I was forced to watch our sitka, our salmon, dying in streams of heatstroke, it was heartbreaking.”

That’s why these activists put in the work, raised the money, and risked their health to fly to Scotland during a pandemic.

But now that they’re at the conference, they say it sometimes feels like everyone wants to put them in a box and force them to conform to standards with a history of colonialism.

When asked how that can play out, Miller says by “whitening our speech and whitening the way that we behave and wearing blazers and such.”

“I mean, if we do bring our whole Indigenous selves, it gets translated as a photo opportunity in COP spaces,” she says.

Sometimes, Miller adds, they are invited to panels where they feel like organizers only want them to demonstrate victimhood. And they show up with more than stories of suffering.

“A number of us are extremely well versed in the substantive content of particularly Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, of a number of negotiating platforms,” Miller said.

Article 6 is about carbon markets: a system that lets companies buy or sell credits towards a specified amount of CO2 emissions. The activists here see it as a gift to big business and a plan that endorses systems of capitalism that created these problems in the first place.

“We work in these fields as well as being youth. And yet, most of what I’ve talked about is how difficult it is for youth to be heard. We don’t even get to talk about what we would talk about if we were heard,” Miller says.

They would also like to see plans to protect human rights and Indigenous rights spelled out in the text of the COP agreement.

Last week, Miller says she was offered a platform where she could have raised some of these ideas.

She was invited to speak at an Indigenous Peoples event with Alok Sharma, the President of COP26. Then, the schedule ran long and the meeting abruptly ended before she could speak.

COP26 President Alok Sharma discusses the outcomes of the youth climate summit on day six of the COP26 in Glasgow.

Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

Sitting in the rental house outside Glasgow, Miller outlines what she would have said if she had been given the opportunity.

“I would remind [Sharma] of our Indigenous diplomats and the ways that we call in deep community,” she says.

And she would have offered him a traditional song.

“My people come from volcanoes, and this song was gifted to me in a time of great need,” she says.

“It is a song of deep, deep earth and of ancestors that are older than human. It is a song that reminds me of embers and the way that we tend to our fires.

“But what I would have reminded him of is … our embers are not ones that easily go out or fade away.

“The embers of our Indigenous voices, if they are neglected or ignored, they tend to start fires.”

What Can We Learn from the World’s Most Peaceful Societies?

What Can We Learn from the World’s Most Peaceful Societies?

By PETER T. COLEMANDOUGLAS P. FRY | Greater Good Magazine

A multidisciplinary team of researchers is discovering what makes some societies more peaceful than others.

Given the grinding wars and toxic political divisions that dominate the news, it might come as a surprise to hear that there are also a multitude of sustainably peaceful societies thriving across the globe today. These are communities that have managed to figure out how to live together in peace—internally within their borders, externally with neighbors, or both—for 50, 100, even several hundred years. This simple fact directly refutes the widely held and often self-fulfilling belief that humans are innately territorial and hardwired for war.

What does it take to live in peace? The Sustaining Peace Project is finding out.

The international community has struggled with a similar attention-to-peace deficit disorder. In fact, the United Nations has been attempting for decades to pivot from crisis management to its primary mandate to “sustain international peace in all its dimensions.” Yet by its own account, “the key Charter task of sustaining peace remains critically under-recognized, under-prioritized, and under-resourced globally and within the United Nations.”

Science could play a crucial role in specifying the aspects of community life that contribute to sustaining peace. Unfortunately, our understanding of more pacific societies is limited by the fact that they are rarely studied. Humans mostly study the things we fear—cancer, depression, violence, and war—and so we have mostly studied peace in the context or aftermath of war. When peaceful places are studied, researchers (much like the U.N.) tend to focus primarily on negative peace, or the circumstances that keep violence at bay, to the neglect of positive peace, or the things that promote and sustain more just, harmonious, prosocial relations. As a result, we know much more about how to get out of war than we do about how to build thriving, peaceful communities.

In response to this gap in our understanding of how to sustain peace, an eclectic group of scholars started gathering together in 2014. We are psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, astrophysicists, environmental scientists, political scientists, data scientists, and communications experts, who are interested in gaining a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of lasting peace. We also share an appreciation of the benefits of using methods from complexity science to better visualize and model the complex dynamics of such societies, and as a platform for communicating with one another across such different disciplines to develop a shared understanding of stable, peaceful societies and of peace systems.

Peace systems are clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, and anthropological and historical cases of such non-warring social systems exist across time and around the globe. None of the five Nordic nations, for instance, have met one another on the battlefield for over 200 years. Other examples of peace systems include 10 neighboring tribes of the Brazilian Upper Xingu River basin, the Swiss cantons that unified to form Switzerland in 1848, the Iroquois Confederation, and the E.U.

The mere existence of peace systems challenges the assumption that societies everywhere are prone to wage war with their neighbors—and what we have gleaned from studying these societies is promising.

Finding the seeds of peace

Our journey to date has been circuitous but fruitful. It began with a dive into the published science on peacefulness, which helped us to identify some of the more influential scholars in this area. We then surveyed this group to identify their sense of the most central components of achieving lasting peace (74 experts from 35 disciplines responded), and then invited the respondents to a day-long workshop to make sense of the findings. Next, our core team worked with this information to develop a basic conceptual model of sustaining peace.

The focus of our model is simple. It views the central dynamic responsible for the emergence of sustainably peaceful relations in communities as the thousands or millions of daily reciprocal interactions that happen between members of different groups in those communities, and the degree to which more positive interactions outweigh more negative. That’s it. The more positive reciprocity and the less negative reciprocity between members of different groups, the more sustainable the peace.

In other words, peace is not just an absence of violence and war, but also people and groups getting along prosocially with each other: the cooperation, sharing, and kindness that we see in everyday society. Sustaining peace happens through positive reciprocity: I show you a kindness and you do me a favor in return, multiplied throughout the social world a million times over.

Next, we started gathering together all the relevant science on positive or negative intergroup reciprocity. For example, studies on Mauritius, the most peaceful nation in Africa, have found intentionality in how members of different ethnic groups speak with one another in public. Mauritians of all stripes tend to be respectful and careful in their daily encounters with others. This even translates to differences in how journalists and editors report the news, and how teachers, politicians, and clergy take up their roles in society. These findings suggest that the citizens of this highly diverse nation do not take their peacefulness for granted—they recognize that it must be cultivated and protected.

We then organized these variables by three levels (individual, group, and society) and by their dominant effects (promoting peacefulness or preventing violence). Here are the elements we found promoted peace and nonviolence in individuals (the micro level):

 

EVIDENCE ON PEACE-PROMOTING (INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS) EVIDENCE ON NONVIOLENCE (INDIVIDUAL ELEMENTS)
Motives

  • Endorsement of self-transcendent values
  • Endorsement of openness
  • Endorsement of cooperative orientation
  • Endorsement of peace beliefs

Cognitions

  • Strength of moral reasoning and a broad moral scope
  • Degree to which intergroup beliefs are malleable
  • Degree of neural plasticity
  • Fluency of language for peacefulness
  • Strength of global identity

Affect

  • Levels of empathy and compassion
  • Level of hopefulness and positivity
  • Level of general trust

Behavior

  • Degree of willingness to compromise
  • Level of mindfulness
Motives

  • Endorsement of nonviolent values and attitudes
  • Low levels of authoritarianism
  • Low endorsement of ethnocentrism
  • Degree to which basic needs are met

Cognitions

  • Level of social identity complexity
  • Level of constructive conflict resolution skills
  • Level of integrative complexity

Affect

  • Low levels of fear, anger, and negativity reservoirs
  • Low levels of humiliation
  • Low level of perceived threat

Behavior

  • Active positive engagement with members of outgroups
  • Degree of perspective taking
  • Level of outgroup tolerance
  • Degree of self-regulation
  • Level of capacity for forgiveness

Here are the factors that promote peace and nonviolence on the family and community (or “meso”) level:

 

EVIDENCE ON PEACE-PROMOTING (COMMUNITY ELEMENTS) EVIDENCE ON NONVIOLENCE (COMMUNITY ELEMENTS)
  • Degree to which parenting norms stress warmth, caring, and nurturance
  • Degree of physical synchronization across groups
  • High ratios of positivity-to-negativity in parenting
  • High levels of education and literacy
  • Degree of cooperative task, goal, and reward structures
  • Degree to which meaningful superordinate identity groups unify across differences
  • Level of a strong shared identity as a peaceful community
  • Degree of peaceful language in media and daily discourse
  • Degree of early access to tolerance and multiculturalism in education
  • Degree of peace ceremonies and symbols
  • Strength of shared peace vision and understanding
  • Degree to which leaders model peaceful values
  • Degree of shared egalitarian values and norms
  • Degree of open and comprehensive collective remembering
  • Strength of taboos against violence
  • Respect for gender equity
  • Levels of effective mechanisms for procedural and distributive justice
  • Degree of access to crosscutting structures
  • Level of access to mechanisms for constructive conflict resolution
  • Degree to which human rights are respected
  • Degree of effective treatment of past trauma
  • Levels of equitability of opportunity structures
  • Degree of economic equality across groups

And, finally, at the macro level of society and internationally, we found these qualities that promote positive intergroup interactions—and those that prevent or mitigate negative relations:

 

EVIDENCE ON PEACE-PROMOTING (MACRO ELEMENTS) EVIDENCE ON NONVIOLENCE (MACRO ELEMENTS)
Effectiveness and resilience of civil society

  • Degree of free flow of information
  • Degree to which transcultural elite model constructive, nonviolent action
  • Level of gender parity in leadership
  • Strength of norms regarding territorial acquisition and decolonization
  • Degree to which governance structures tend toward integration, egalitarianism, and democracy
  • Degree of economic interdependence
  • Levels of cultural and civilian exchanges
  • Degree of good governance that emphasizes unity, integrity, and fairness
  • Degree of transparency of institutions
  • Levels of coordination between local governments, civil society, and international organizations
  • Presence and effectiveness of a social safety net
  • Presence and effectiveness of early warning systems
  • Degree of minority inclusion
  • Commitment to a fair, healthy, and functioning economy
  • Degree to which media offer accurate, nuanced accounts
  • Strength of the Rule of Law
  • Commitment to sustainable development policies and practices
  • Effectiveness of regional organizations that support peace
  • Effectiveness and function of global organizations and institutions

We then began to map the effects that each of these variables have on positive and negative group interactions, and on the other variables in the system. This is called causal-loop diagramming, and entails synthesizing the findings from hundreds of studies on dozens of variables to understand one simple dynamic: how they increase the chances that members of in-groups treat members of out-groups positively and inclusively rather than negatively and exclusively. This visualization gives us a coherent, birds-eye view of a larger system of peace dynamics.

At this point, our in-house astrophysicist, Larry Liebovitch, went rogue one long weekend and decided to mathematize this model (I believe with the aid of lots of caffeinated soda), developing an algorithm that captured its core dynamics. This allowed us to build a computer simulation that invites us (and you) to play with the different variables in the model to see how increasing or decreasing them might change patterns in this complex system.

Through this work, we’ve found that sustaining peace can be understood as a high ratio of positive intergroup reciprocity to negative intergroup reciprocity that is stable over time. In fact, this is exactly the type of interpersonal dynamic that researchers have found to lead to more thriving, stable marriages and families. This simple micro-dynamic of peacefulness has allowed us to begin to connect the dots between the multitude of variables investigated in thousands of studies across dozens of disciplines relevant to sustaining peace. This more basic and comprehensive approach to thinking about peace offers scholars, policymakers, and the public a sense of its complexity and simplicity, as well as (with the aid of the math model) insight into how particular policies and programs may result in intended, unintended, and even quite harmful consequences.

In parallel to building the math model, Doug Fry and Geneviève Souillac went back into the tomes of ethnographic studies that they had compiled over decades on peaceful societies and peace systems, and with their students coded for variables that they had found through previous research to be prominent in these societies. This allowed them to conduct a comparison study between 16 peace systems (such as the Nordic countries since 1815 and the Orang Asli of Malaysia) and 30 non-peace systems.

During this time, another subgroup of the team began developing new ways of measuring trends relevant to sustaining peace. The most promising of these forays to date has been working with data scientists on the development of two types of word lexicons: one for peace speech and one for conflict speech. This has been done by employing machine learning and natural language processing methods to comb through millions of newspaper articles published within highly peaceful and highly conflictual societies. The goal of this initiative is to fill the gap that currently exists for metrics that allow us to better track and therefore promote positive peace.

Finally, we have also been engaging directly with peaceful communities and those struggling to find peace. This has entailed building local partnerships and holding dialogues between our scientists and community stakeholders.

This work began in the Basque region of Spain, a society recently emerging from civil war and hungry for peace, but currently involves working with diverse sets of stakeholders living in Mauritius and Costa Rica. This has taught us about the critical importance of local understanding of some of the key variables.

For example, religious differences can be a source of great divisiveness in many communities. However, in Mauritius, a highly religious nation with large populations of Hindus, Christians, and Muslims, religiosity is tempered by tolerance and taboos around proselytizing, as well as a general belief in the value of spirituality, no matter the denomination. Such contextualization of variables highlights the limitations of the current inclination to employ top-down, one-size-fits-all indices to track and rank national peacefulness, and the need for more locally informed methods.

What peaceful societies have in common

Even a cursory glimpse at our causal-loop diagram of the science on sustaining peace gives you a sense of the highly complex nature of the system of drivers. We have found that there are many different paths to peacefulness through both our review of the science and our conversations with community members living in peace. In fact, most of the societies that currently rank as highly peaceful—the Nordic nations, New Zealand and Australia, Costa Rica, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, the Czech Republic, Canada, and Qatar—came to peace through very different processes and maintain it through distinct means.

However, when our team systematically compared a sample of peace systems with a randomly selected comparison group, we discovered that peace systems tend to share certain commonalities:

  • Overarching common identities, such as shared national or regional identities (like Africans, Latin Americans, or Christians) that emphasize commonalities between different ethnic groups.
  • Greater positive interconnectedness and independence in the realms of economics, ecology, and security. In other words, they have public spaces, institutions, and activities that bring members of different groups together and help them realize that their fates are closely linked.
  • Stronger non-warring norms, values, rituals, and symbols, like commemorations of successful peacemakers and monuments that celebrate the prevention of war. In fact, using a machine learning technique called Random Forest, we discovered that the single most important contributor to peace is non-warring norms, followed in decreasing importance by non-warring rituals, non-warring values, mutual security dependencies, superordinate institutions, and economic interdependence. This suggests that developing norms that are supportive of positive reciprocal social relationships may be more important for peace than previously assumed.
  • Peace language in the press. We have been developing a technique to help us measure and track the power of peace speech—peaceable language for building and maintaining more peaceful communities. Our preliminary findings are promising, suggesting that the distinct qualities of conflict vs. peace words in our lexicons are related to the relative “tightness/ordered” versus “looseness/creative” nature of the terms. In other words, journalism in peaceful places seems to employ language of a looser, more open, playful nature, while reporting from non-peaceful societies reflects tighter, more closed, or bureaucratic language.
  • A greater degree of peace leadership from politicians, corporations, clergy, and community activists who help establish a vision and set a course toward peace. Peace leadership occurred, for instance, when the Iroquois peace prophet unified five warring tribes and replaced the weapons of war with dialogue and consensus-seeking. Other bastions of peacefulness like Costa Rica and the E.U. have evidenced similar visionary leadership for peace.

Ultimately, we have found that when these different peace variables align and reinforce one another, virtuous cycles are often created that become more resistant to changing conditions. This, we suggest, is the essence of sustainability.

There is still much to learn. We recently launched a short video and a public website that provides an overview of the project and the team, which includes a map locating contemporary societies sustaining peace, an interactive version of the causal-loop diagram that allows users to explore the evidence behind it, and an interactive version of the mathematical model that encourages users to plug in values and play with the model.

In the end, it is vital to remember that peace exists today in pockets all around the globe, and that the more we study and learn from such societies, the higher our chances of building a global peace system for all. Peace is possible—and the more we understand, the more probable it becomes.