Isn't "War" Human Nature?
Our potential for change. Given our daily news diet of wars, street violence, strikes, lawsuits, and political battles, the conventional picture of human beings as naturally prone to violence is understandable. It misses, however, one fundamental point: Most of the time, most people get along. Although we may not give it much thought, we know this from personal experience. Despite differing temperaments, habits, and communication styles, most husbands, wives, and children manage to live together. Although they may disagree on basic values, most neighbors succeed in living side by side. Despite opposed interests, labor and management work together most of the time. Even with all their disputes, most nations are at peace with one another. The great majority of relationships among individuals, groups, and nation states are characterized far more by coexistence than by ongoing destructive conflict. Even in this most deadly of centuries, most people around the planet have lived most of their lives in a condition of peace, not war. Peace is the norm.
It is time, then, to stop thinking of peaceful coexistence as merely a vision. It is a reality. This is not to belittle the existence or importance of strife and war; far from it. It is just to remind us of the prosaic preponderance of peace.
Seeing human life as peaceful conflict resolution interrupted by periods of strife, rather than the other way, around transforms the challenge from the negative one of ending war to the positive one of extending the peace. Our task is not to change one absolute - war - into another absolute - peace. It is not to go from zero percent peaceful interaction to a hundred percent, but rather to go from something like ninety percent to something like ninety-nine percent.
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