Nonkilling Futures - Visions

Nonkilling Futures - Visions - Edited by James A. Dator Center for Global Nonkilling CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 You are free to share, copy, distribute and transmit this work* Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute this work in the manner specified by the author/licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform or build upon this work. * For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. * Any of the above conditions can be waived if you gain permission from the copyright holders. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the Authors’ moral and legal rights. Parts of this volume have been released under GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 as part of Wikiversity’s School of Nonkilling Studies (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/School:Nonkilling_studies). The Center for Global Nonkilling does not necessarily endorse the views expressed by the authors. Also available for free download at: http://www.nonkilling.org © The Authors, 2012 © Center for Global Nonkilling, 2012 (this edition) First Edition: May 2012 ISBN-13 978-0-9839862-2-5 ISBN-10 0-9839862-2-3 ______________________________________________________ Cataloging in Publication Data (CIP) Nonkilling Futures: Visions / Edited by James A. Dator. ISBN 978-0-9839862-2-5 1. Nonkilling 2. Peace. 3. Nonviolence. I. Title. II. Dator, James A.., ed.. CDU - 172.4 : 327.36 ______________________________________________________ A catalogue record is also available from the Library of Congress. Center for Global Nonkilling 3653 Tantalus Drive Honolulu, Hawaiʻi 96822-5033 United States of America Email: [email protected] http://www.nonkilling.org “Not words of routine this song of mine, but abruptly to question, to leap beyond, yet nearer bring” (Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”, Leaves of Grass, 1855) Contents Introduction Introduction Moving Toward Visions of Nonkilling Futures Jim Dator University of Hawai ʻi I have known, admired, and loved Glenn Paige (and his wife Glenda) for more than 40 years. They have both been a huge inspiration for me in many ways. For many years, Glenn was a very active member of the World Fu- tures Studies Federation, of which I am also a member, offering many talks and symposia primarily on leadership at our regional and world conferences. He also introduced discussions about the possibility of a nonkilling world at those conferences. While I had various concerns about his views on leadership, I have always had nothing but instant and continuing 100% support of his views on the possibility of a nonkilling world. My main academic and personal specialty is futures studies. I do not believe it is possible to predict the future⎯to say exactly what “will be” ⎯but I do believe it is possible and necessary for people to envision and invent pre- ferred futures, and so in my teaching, writing and consulting, I focus on that. Like Glenn, I am a political scientist, and therefore am especially interested in envisioning and inventing new forms of governance since our cur- rent forms are so manifestly, completely, and damagingly inadequate. When I first began teaching courses on governance design, many years ago, I focused on two “complaints”—namely, that all governments are undemocratic and unfuturistic. I sought designs that would result in governance sys- tems that were truly democratic and resolutely futures-oriented. Getting those two things in one design is not easy. Democracies give living people what they want now, while being futures-oriented means balancing the needs of present generations with those of future generations. A tough act. But I soon realized there were other “complaints” about government that I needed to consider, and the one that I incorporated next into my governance design courses was the one that Glenn Paige brought so clearly into my understanding⎯that much of the killing in the world is done by of- 11 12 Nonkilling Futures ficers of the state lawfully carrying out their duties. This is because at the base of the legal definition of a nation-state is the declaration that a nation- state is an organization that has the exclusive right in a specific territory to use and threaten killing force on its own citizens and on anyone who threatens its so-called “sovereignty”. In his careful research, Glenn has shown that a nonkilling state supported by a nonkilling political science is not only desirable but possible if we will simply first believe that it is possible, and then do the many other academic, personal, cultural, social, political, and spiritual things to make it so (Paige, 2009). This is the same basic attitude that futurists take toward the future⎯that in principle anything is possible if you believe it is possible and then do the necessary and often hard and dangerous work to make it so. I have since added a few other “complaints” about the nation-state to those three, but there is no doubt that the hardest thing for most students to even be willing to imagine is a nonkilling government in a nonkilling world. The belief in the necessity, and perhaps even ennobling desirability, of killing for and by the nation-state is very deeply imbedded in the consciousness of far too many people, and it is difficult but necessary to enable them to root it out. At the same time, futurists are not magicians. We do not believe that just wishing and hard work will inevitably cause our dreams to come true. One admonition is that “we can do anything but we can’t do everything.” It is a question of making priorities about what is most important and aim for them first. Thus Glenn wisely and correctly has focused on the narrow but extremely important goal of nonkilling instead of the also highly desirable but much broader and more difficult goal of nonviolence. Unfortunately, not many people easily grasp that distinction and so try to go directly toward nonviolence before achieving nonkilling. Futurists also know that we live in a complex set of dynamically interact- ing institutions, behaviors and beliefs, and that by disturbing one factor we also influence the rest. Therefore, we need to proceed carefully but resolutely toward our nonkilling goal, mindful of what impacts that might have on the rest of the world we live in. As I added other “complaints” to the three of killing, undemocratic, and unfuturistic (namely, that states are too bureaucratic, too nationalistic [meaning, too focused on the nation-state to the exclusion of communities smaller and larger than the nation-state] and patriarchal [privileging “male” behavior and perpetuating the false myth of only two genders]), the web became both more interrelated and dynamic, and much more complex and potentially unstable. Moving Toward Visions of Nonkilling Futures 13 Finally, there are a very large number of forces pushing us from the past and pulling (or approaching) us from the futures that we cannot easily change, or perhaps not change at all. We have to live with them. More importantly, we have to learn how to use them for our advantage. The metaphor I have used for a very long time is that we need to learn how to “surf the tsunami of change”. If, as a society, we had paid serious attention to the waves earlier, we perhaps could have diverted them before they became tsunami, but they are now too close, too big, and no longer divertible. We need to surf them, to use their power to help us go where we want to go, and to enjoy the ride. All of these features, and more, need to be included in our attempts first usefully to envision and then practically to design and move toward a nonkilling world. Which means we are talking about the futures. While there are things we can and should do now, many more things cannot be done im- mediately, but must be carefully planned and provided for, with their achievement in the future while the attainment of a fully nonkilling world might be still further into the future. With this in mind, perhaps, knowing of my interest in futures studies and my contacts in the futures field, Glenn and Joám Evans Pim asked me to edit a book on Nonkilling Futures as part of the Center’s nonkilling series. I put out a call to the list of the World Futures Studies Federation, and got about twenty or so replies from people interested. But as time went by, and these futurists began to see what a challenging task it is to envision and design a nonkilling world, more and more dropped out, and so I am left now with only nine people who were willing to contribute a chapter in a book on envisioning nonkilling futures. They are Guillermina Baena, Terry Beitzel, Karen Hurley, Vahid V. Motlagh, Maorong Jiang, Eleonora Masini, Dennis Morgan, John Sweeney, Au- brey Yee and myself. Guillermina Baena Paz is Professor of Information Sciences and Public Administration in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. Her contribution considers the human emotional basis of killing and nonkilling that thwarts or enables nonkilling futures. Terry Beitzel is Assistant Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. His research in- terests are primarily in nonviolence, restorative justice, human rights, and theoretical development in conflict and peace studies.

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