The Human Potential For Peace

Is Pace An Option?

In The Human Potential for Peace, Douglas Fry challenges the belief that humans are prone to violence by nature. He convincingly argues against theories that believe humans will inevitably be violent and that societies will always seek warfare. He proves his beliefs by giving examples of peaceful societies that once existed and that currently exist. He also shows how thesepeaceful societies can be imitated to create global peace.
Fry points out there are theories against his claim for the human potential for peace. Scientists and scholars such as Thomas Hobbes, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Huxley, and even Sigmund Freud believe that humans (especially males) are war like by nature. Some advocates of this belief even forge a tight link between chimpanzeeaggressiveness and human violence. For example, in the book Demonic Males argues that human aggressiveness and violence has ancient evolutionary roots “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, 5-million year habit of lethal aggression.”
Philosophers and Scientist such as Thomas Hobbs and William James believed that all humansare born like beasts and are selfish at birth. The book The Dark Side of Man explains that “human recorded history, including hundreds of ethnographies of tribal cultures around the globe, reveals male coalitional warfare to be a pervasive across cultures worldwide.” Other researchers believe humanity is warlike and warfare is an ancient practice.
Non-warring societies are dismissed asvirtually or totally non-existent. Fry explains that these beliefs are well entrenched in western thinking and that cultural beliefs about naturalness of war are passed down by generations (Fry’s example of the Zapotec communities of La Paz and San Andres). Scientist Quincy Wright explains that societies engage in war because there is simply no alternative to peace or non-warring. He states that “whenthe learned and shared beliefs of a culture hold that humans are innately pugnacious, inevitably violent, instinctively warlike, and so on, the people socialized in such settings.”
In order to talk about peaceful societies around the world, one must know the definition of a peaceful society and what entails. According to the information obtained at Peaceful Societies Organization (web), thepeople of a peaceful society try to live in harmony and avoid violence; they shun aggressive behavior and refuse to fight wars. They build interpersonal harmony and avoid conflict between each other. These societies occur all around the world, in different continents, islands, different regions, they happen everywhere. They have many different historical backgrounds, geographical settings, beliefsystems, social practices, and ways of life. The only common element that unites them is that they have firm convictions about the importance of maintaining peaceful lives, and they are, to a greater or lesser degree, successful in living according to those beliefs. Few people in the peaceful societies glorify individualism, ego-satisfaction, or material self-interest. They do not approach other humanbeings in a confrontational, aggressive, or violent fashion. Instead, they tend to relate to others, at least within their own societies, in a harmonious, nonviolent manner. A good example of a peaceful society in our country is the Amish. There are nearly 250,000 of Amish people in living peacefully the United States. They believe in simplicity, humility, and obedience in contrast with modernideal of personal fulfillment. Their religious beliefs forbid violence and war. If attacked they do not counteract. They experience almost no violence or crime in their society.
Fry also gives examples of peaceful societies in his book such as Sweden, a country that has not had a war in over hundred and seventy years, Switzerland known for its neutrality and aided by natural barriers, it has not...