590 Aggression, Violence, Evil, and Peace
Oliner’s (1988) inquiry into the background of people who
risked helping Jews during the Holocaust reveals a family
background that combined both warmth and caring within
the family with the welcoming of people from different
groups into the family. Both these factors seem important in
Hannon’s (1990) study of a sample of 21 Boston peace ac-
tivists. He found that many had some sort of religious social-
ization that provided a moral basis that was challenged by
radicalizing college experiences. He argued for an identity
crisis that could in part be understood in terms of Erikson’s
(1963) fifth stage, in which the adolescent seeks an ideology
that can be affirmed by peers and that defines what is good
and evil. However, in these activists the resolution of the cri-
sis also involved a transition to Kohlberg’s (1973) postcon-
ventional moral reasoning and Fowler’s (1981) transition
from conventional to individualistic/reflective faith. This was
often influenced by one or more adults who served as a sort
of sponsor to the new identity, which usually also involved
participation in a network of like-minded peers. In their study
of 28 moral exemplars, Colby and Damon (1999) reported
that the exemplars did not begin as exceptional people but be-
came increasingly caring as their goals were transformed by
their interactions with others. They found that the exemplars
were characterized by an absence of conflict between selfish
and moral goals. In accord with Macmurray’s (1961) concep-
tualization, the absence of the more typical split between self
and other coincided with a faith in the eventual triumph of
goodness for humanity.
The Use of Imagination
Boulding (1988) pointed out that action is guided by a vision
of the future and that many people lack a vision of what a
peaceful world would be like. (In my own experience, students
find it much easier to imagine alien abductions than a peaceful
world.) Accordingly, she has experimented with workshops in
which people are asked to imagine a future world that is peace-
ful. She has found that such a world needs to be placed about
30 years in the future so that it seems possible but not too re-
mote. After imagining some of the details of a peaceful world,
participants are asked to imagine the steps that enabled such a
world to come into being and, finally, to come up with a plan
for the steps they might personally take.
Working from a neo-Jungian perspective, Watkins (1988)
postulated that the imagination needed to work for peace is
checked by a conflict with other aspects of the self. She asked
persons to imagine the part of them that wants to work for
peace and to construct a character to represent that part (Is it
a man or a woman, rich or poor, how old, how dressed?).
Similarly, persons create a character to represent the part of
them that has other interests and things to do. Watkins postu-
lated that it is the relationship between these characters that
governs whether a person’s energy is available for peace
work. Accordingly, she asked her subjects to imagine the two
characters meeting each other and attempts to structure these
meetings so that the two accept rather than reject one another.
Preliminary evidence suggests that when persons are able to
imagine a friendly meeting, they are more likely to engage in
actions that promote peace.
Macy (1983) used imagination in still other ways in the
course of the workshops she has created to deal with the de-
spair that she believes prevents many persons from taking
action to stop the use of nuclear weapons. After exercises de-
signed to help people feel and express pain and despair, she
involved participants in empowering exercises. For example,
persons may be asked to imagine themselves before they
were born, looking at the earth and deciding to help. They ev-
idently choose a particular time to be born, a nation and fam-
ily to be born into, and a specific gender and personality so
that they could act for peace. Next, they were asked to re-
member why they made the choices they did. What are they
here to do? Although Macy’s and Boulding’s workshops have
clear immediate effects, we lack data on whether they affect
long-term commitments.Developing Cultures of PeaceEach of the four paths toward peace may be seen as ways to
develop cultures of peace that could replace the cultures of
violence that exist in many contemporary societies. Although
such a goal is idealistic, it is not unrealistic. Peaceful cultures
have existed in the past, and there are small peaceful cultures
that exist today. An examination of such cultures reveals a
number of interesting characteristics. Bonta’s (1993) anno-
tated bibliography describes over 60 traditional peoples and
contemporary subcultures. Although they differ in many
ways, they all emphasize cooperative rather than competitive
relationships, dislike power and downplay individual recog-
nition and wealth, have many ways to prevent and resolve
conflict, value group harmony over abstract concepts of jus-
tice, and think of themselves as essentially peaceful.
Ross (1993), who has contrasted the extent of conflict in a
sample of 90 preindustrial societies, showed that the level of
conflict is related to socialization practices. Cultures without
much conflict tend to place a high value on children, are high
in warmth and affection, and are low in male gender identity
conflict. These psycho-cultural roots of peace are orthogonal
with the way a society is structured, and Ross showed that the
extent to which aggression is directed out at external targets,
rather than expressed within the society, depends on the ex-
tent to which there are strong cross-cutting interest ties within
the society.