Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
•What will it take to move the world beyond war?
The way the world will leave war behind is the same way the world outgrew slavery. Two hundred years ago, a few people voiced their conviction that slavery was wrong. At the time, moving beyond human slavery seemed impossible. It was woven tightly into every cultural and economic institution. But as we know, the abolition movement won in the end. While there are still huge issues with human trafficking in the modern world, slavery has been consigned to the dustbin of history. We can decide to do the same with war.
Another salutary example is the European Union. For hundreds of years, Europe was an endless battleground, culminating in the horrendous slaughters of two world wars. Today, because of the hard work of a few forward-looking visionaries, Europe as a region has moved beyond war.
What is required is a shift in thinking, a shift from assuming that war can ensure security and resolve conflicts to the realization that war never solves anything and is a potential extinction machine. It doesn't take everyone in the world making this shift for it to become a mainstream understanding.
Stanford professor Everett Rogers researched the way new ideas move through society. He found that the adoption of innovations always follows a similar "S-shaped" curve. If 5% of the population adheres to the new idea, it is embedded—here to stay. If only 20% takes up the idea, its adoption by everyone becomes inevitable. That is hopeful!
How wide is the influence of Beyond War?
As wide as you and I can help make it. Beyond War in 2011 is a small but growing movement. Beyond War in the 1980s proved the appeal of its ideas by enrolling 24,000 members and reaching literally millions of people with its spectacular continent-spanning spacebridges. Beyond War brought together Soviet and American scientists to write a book together about accidental nuclear war. Gorbachev’s science advisor read the book and had Gorbachev himself study it. That is influence!
With the end of the Cold War in 1989, many people understandably concluded that the work of ending war was substantially finished. Now, of course, we know differently. It will take a generation of hard work to build enough agreement about new principle to overcome the planetary habits of "enemy imaging" and turning to violence as the most convenient way of resolving conflict.
How do electoral politics and Beyond War thinking come together to make positive change?
As a 501-c3 tax-exempt non-profit, Beyond War the organization is prohibited from advocating for specific candidates or legislation. We are about providing safe, non-polarized forums for people to form relationships, think deeply, and learn from each other.
The primary reality of the contemporary American cultural landscape is polarization, whether political, religious, or economic. The ultimate effect is that our system is becoming close to unworkable. The larger picture of our common fate gets lost. This prevents us from moving into a future where all stakeholders can work together not only to resolve conflicts domestically, but internationally.
What really is the best way for our powerful country, which uses a third of the earth's total resources, to contribute to the well being of the planet as a whole? If Eisenhower was right about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, how can citizens and their elected representatives move our economy in a more constructive direction?
In the end, when the American people really understand how connected we are to the rest of the world, "us and them" thinking will dissolve. Instead of over-reacting and attacking a random country as we did after 9-11, we will consider more measured and pro-active responses, responses that meet real human needs, address the root causes of terrorist alienation, and aid in the building of democratic structures abroad.
Is Beyond War a pacifist organization?
No—if what we mean by pacifism is a passive lying down and letting events roll over us like a bulldozer. Building a world beyond war, by contrast, requires much more activist definitions of pacifism, such as peacekeeping or peacebuilding. Being an "everyday peacebuilder" in our own personal or work life requires as just as much courage, initiative, and creativity as being a soldier in war.
Humans are quick to see the negative aspects of conflict, rather than the opportunity conflict can provide for all parties to learn from diverse points of view. We live in a world where violent solutions to conflict are the norm—though that is changing as people understand more and more that proven alternatives to war exist at every level from the domestic to the international.
Societies need police who are trained to de-escalate conflicts and reduce the risk of tragedy. Likewise, when Beyond War sponsored the coming together of American and Soviet scientists to explore our common desire to prevent accidental nuclear war, this was not pacifism, but an active, creative attempt to engage people who shared a common desire to de-escalate from holocaust.
The basic principle at work is that of interdependence, expressed in all major religions as the Golden Rule. The question is not only how to avoid getting sucked into vicious cycles of violence with no constructive exit, but more importantly how to establish virtuous cycles that allow all of us a way forward.
Doesn't the notion of ending all war seem like off-in-the-poppies idealism?
The ending of war will be a gradual, decades-long process of confidence-building measures and reciprocal agreements, carried forward with a clear awareness of the unacceptable alternatives to such agreements: chaos, immense civilian suffering, futile attempts at revenge, and further near-approaches to the nuclear brink. It begins with knowing that it must be done and believing that it can be done.
What is really idealistic is what nations are trying, and failing, to do right now with misguided attempts to achieve real security by means of grotesque military spending, endless arms races, and episodic wars of questionable motivation. What is realistic is to spread the word as quickly as possible that if we go on preparing for a third world war based in environmental scarcity, that is exactly what we will get. What is realistic is to admit that we are all in this together, and the planet has become too small for war.
Does it make any real difference to "expand my identification" to include the whole earth and all that lives on the earth? Can I still be a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew?
Each of us can make an "altitude adjustment," where we can pull away from the earth in our imaginations and experience the full sweep of time and space of which we are an emergent part. The 13.7 billion year history of the universe is a profound resource for all of us, no matter what our beliefs, a new kind of compass by which to orient ourselves. It is dynamic, evolving, mysterious, and unfathomably beautiful. It preceded the sacred texts of all our religions. It is itself the primary text, the context for everything we do, everything we are—and everything our children will become.
Can we take this in and still remain a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu? Of course! But the interior atmosphere we breathe might be a little more spacious, clarified by a realization of what the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh aptly calls "interbeing." We all came from the same great source. What if that abiding truth allowed "enemies" to see past each other's superficial differences to the many things they share, including the desire for meaningful survival? From the perspective of the total system, I have no enemies.
What if I feel I don't know enough to get up in front of other people and speak?
One of the inhibitors to becoming active everyday peacebuilders can be the fear that we simply don’t know enough. But we don’t have to have the answer to every thorny question in order to try out what it feels like to live beyond war. The poet Rilke advised us to “live the questions.” In similar fashion Sam Keen wrote that the questions we choose to wrestle with imply what “quest you’re on.”
"I don't know" is not only a legitimate answer to a question; it is often an admirably humble one. As world events unfold at a more and more rapid pace, it is often impossible to know what may be the outcome of a given policy.
For example, the United States and NATO intervened in Libya with the best of intentions—to help citizens overthrow a corrupt dictator. Yet after months of fighting, the situation turned into something history has seen all too much of—yet another civil war. In addition, the implicit message to other countries is: obtain nuclear weapons in order to be safe from invasion.
As we learn over and over again that war rarely solves anything, an inner confidence builds about the truth that war really is obsolete, and we become able to hold the door open to, and even advocate for, better alternatives.
Not everyone is inclined to public speaking or leading a roomful of people in discussion. Fortunately there are many ways we can be involved in helping to change the way people think. We can volunteer our time for clerical tasks that need to be done. We can give money, fulfilling a supremely necessary and important need. And most importantly of all, we can quietly try to live beyond war.