PARA LA PAZ

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the attacks on Washington and the Twin Towers, it is anticipated that the budgets have to be still greater. ... the threats looming over his security. The panorama ...
Sobre la Educación para la Ciudadanía y los Derechos Humanos. Moisés Lozano. SGEP. Santiago de Compostela. (2007).

Educar Pacificando: Una Pedagogía de los Conflictos. Calo Iglesias. Fundación Cultura de Paz. Santiago de Compostela (2007).

Educación Emocional y Violencia contra la Mujer: Estrategias para el Aula”. VV:AA. Los libros de la Catarata. Madrid,. (2006).

Educar para desaprender la violencia: Materiales Didácticos para promover una Cultura de Paz. VV:AA. Los libros de la Catarata. Madrid, (2005).

Frente a la Guerra y la Violencia construyamos la Paz. Calo Iglesias. Lúdica 7. Santiago de Compostela. (2002).

En son de paz. Documental. Manuel Dios Diz. SAGA TV. Santiago de Compostela (2005)

Paz, ¿utopía, fallida esperanza de la civilización o camino hacia nuevas metas en la evolución humana? Todos estos planteamientos sobre la paz coexisten en la actualidad. También suele decirse que la paz ha muerto o es un (im)posible, en un contexto en que Dios ha muerto y que el hombre, en tanto ser humano, está en tránsito de correr la misma suerte. En mi opinión, juicios tan categóricos contrastan con ciertas informaciones proporcionadas por algunas percepciones de la realidad: siempre existe un sentido y un discurso en y sobre la vida. Esto no es expresión de un exagerado optimismo sino pleno reconocimiento de que ambos están bastante distorsionados, en general, y que la humanidad muestra rostros desencajados de angustia, soledad, alienación, apatía, indiferencia y escepticismo, el grito amargo de un vacío existencial y un exacerbado individualismo que se traducen en distintas formas de violencia. Pero que cohabitan con otros rostros empeñados antitéticamente en mostrar que todavía podemos subvertir el sentido y la orientación de la existencia y que, en la actualidad, el discurso sobre el amor a la vida, el respeto, la tolerancia y la convivencia en armonía, más que ejercicio en pos de una necesaria utopía constituye un imperativo insoslayable.

REDES PARA LA PAZ • Mónica Edwards Schachter

OTRAS PUBLICACIONES EN CASTELLANO DEL SEMINARIO GALEGO DE EDUCACIÓN PARA A PAZ:

PARA LA

PAZ Mónica Edwards

Mónica Edwards Schachter

Seminario Galego de Educación para a Paz Fundación Cultura de Paz

nació en Argentina en 1958 y reside en Valencia desde 1997. Es profesora en ciencias e ingeniera en electrónica. Ha trabajado como docente en diversos niveles educativos desde hace más de 20 años, compatibilizando estas tareas con la investigación y su afición a la escritura. En este tiempo ha recibido varias distinciones literarias. En la última década sus intereses se han ido focalizando hacia la educación para la sostenibilidad y la paz y, más recientemente, el uso de las tecnologías de la comunicación orientadas en este sentido. Sobre estos temas ha publicado más de 60 artículos y ponencias en congresos y seminarios. La obra que aquí se presenta es una versión ampliada del ensayo Redes para la Paz, que recibió el 2º Premio (accésit) del Premi d’assaig “Manuel Castillo” sobre la Pau del Patronat Sud-Nord de la Fundació General de la Universitat de València, el 19 de octubre de 2004.

1 I wrote this essay –Networks for Peace- a decade ago ... but the state of the world has unfortunately been no change for the better …

Peace: utopia, a bankrupt hope of civilization or a way towards new goals in human evolution? Both these standpoints on peace coexist at the present time. It also tends to be said that peace has died or is something (im) possible, in a context in which God has died and man, as human being, is in the process of suffering the same fate. As I see it such categorical opinions contrast with certain information provided by some perceptions of reality: there is always a sense and a discourse in and about life. This is not an expression of exaggerated optimism but simply recognition that both are in general distorted and that humanity displays disjointed faces of anguish, solitude, alienation, apathy, indifference and scepticism, the bitter scream of an existential emptiness and an exacerbated individualism coming out in different forms of violence. All this nevertheless coexists with other aspects antithetically determined to show that we can still subvert the sense and direction of existence and that today the discourse of love of life, respect, tolerance and coexistence in harmony is an unavoidable imperative, rather than a mere exercise in pursuit of a necessary utopia. A great variety of nuances can be observed today as regards God as experience or as a concept: atheism, agnosticism, deism, mythology, religion and superstition. Different representations of peace, its absence or its promise are seen according to each circumstance. Humankind, in theory free and thrown out into the cold from reason, should be concerned with designing the complex engineering of a superior destiny, a true

2 humanization. But the dilemma persists in the realm of praxis. Emulating other ages, God and religions are once more used as a mask or pretext to continue waging war. Just as the century begins the horizon exhibits a new version of the theodicy of death: the Jihad or "Holy War" of Islamic multinational terrorism, and "Operation Infinite Justice" -an expression from the Koran taken by President Bush, changed due to certain misgivings with Allah to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" - of the United States and its western allies. The events of 11th September 2001 would seem to be what unleashed the American reaction against the "Axis of Evil", although many maintain that represents the chronicle of an announced tragedy. As Mayor Zaragoza affirmed in The Gordian Knots, "it is erroneous to pretend that many conflicts that shake the Earth are due to ancestral hatreds and are thus impossible to prevent"1. The Brundtland Report affirmed that environmental hazards are simultaneously the cause and consequence of political tensions and armed conflicts. It also warned that as environmental resources diminish, as is the case with petroleum, disputes over their control could increase. Others forecast that eco-conflicts would take place first in the Middle East2. The Brundtland Report and World Bank reports, among others, have also talked about poverty as a bomb ready to explode at any time. These events are parts of a process. However, we are surprised at a global order (?) which we believe is being abruptly disturbed, perhaps due to the brutality of the specific manifestation of these disasters or to their consequences, almost impossible to

1

Mayor Zaragoza Federico, 1999. Los nudos gordianos [The gordian knots].Galaxia Gutenberg. Círculo de Lectores. Barcelona. Spain. P. 87 2 World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford University Press: Oxford. P. 343. Susan George P., 2001. The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. Pluto Press. P. 27. She comments on the possibility of worsening so-called ecoconflicts, considering they could take place first in the Middle East, the Sahel in Africa and Asia, and later would affect other regions with unpredictable results for the economy.

3 predict. A new cracking of the international structure, the division of the European Union, the splits in NATO, weakening and impotence of the United Nations ... From a broader perspective, war emerges in the middle of this geopolitics of chaos 3 like a symbol of some inherent human destructiveness, a tendency to perpetual war as a Kantian antithesis, to the inexorable and eternal return of Nietzsche 4. The biting doubt arises as to whether these could be the misdeeds of a death instinct never given up which, given the technological instruments available, could lead us to humanicide. What sort of peace can humanity have without saying farewell to arms? The answer is obvious and the very question can be ridiculous, if we consider that according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI’s 5 estimations world-wide military expenses increased by 7%, after one decade of backward movement, reaching 839,000 million dollars in 2002, leading to the ironical insight that this meant 137 dollars for each inhabitant of the planet. The United States invests or squanders, depending on how you see this, 45% of planetary expense on weapons. After the attacks on Washington and the Twin Towers, it is anticipated that the budgets have to be still greater. Comparisons are inadmissible, considering that the World Bank Report on World-wide Development 2004 and the UNDP Report on Human Development 2003 affirm that almost 800 million people, 15 % of the world’s population, suffer from chronic hunger and more than one billion people live below the poverty line of less than

3

Ramonet Ignacio, 1997. Un mundo sin rumbo [A world without course]. Ed. Debate: Madrid. P. 239. Nietzsche Friedrich., 1985. Así hablaba Zaratustra. [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]. Ed. Edaf: Madrid. Pp. 8486 and 166. 5 SIPRI Yearbook 2003. Armaments, disarmament and international security. http://editors.sipri.org/pubs/yb03/pr03.html 4

4 one dollar a day6. To mention another example, the price of a single ballistic submarine (1453 million dollars) is double that of the education budgets of 18 poor countries, with 129 million children to teach. We impotently resign ourselves to living in this singular "terror balance", under the threat represented by weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and the arms race. In a famous exchange of letters maintained in 1932, Einstein asks Freud if there is any way to release humans from the fatality of war, considering that technical progress was becoming more and more urgent and unbearable7. Seventy years later, that question not only has present significance but production and the arms trade have what is more become one of the most profitable businesses for certain countries and companies, maintained by a compliant I + D about which not much tends to be said. Though we can glimpse indirectly and not very easily the costs implied by these developments and their gigantic investments, we do not know what is being planned and investigated in laboratories. We cannot ignore that science and technology increasingly tend to be confused with the human adventure from which they have arisen, since we embody in them ways of thinking, relating with one another, living and perceiving the world and seeing ourselves. This is why it is maintained that we live in a scientific-technological culture or that techno-science has become the myth/religion that most impregnates present cultures. But neither should we ignore that they constitute a powerful and massive institutional system inside society, subsidised, nourished and controlled by economic and political powers.

6

The Report of the World Bank, Report on World-wide Development 2004. Services for the poor men. http://wbln0018.worldbank.org. UNDP. The Report on Human Development 2003. The objectives of development of the Millenium: a pact between the nations to eliminate poverty. http://www.undp.org/hdr2003/

5 In this respect, without ceasing to value the enormous benefits of its contributions in many areas, we are extremely concerned about an economic-scientifictechnological fundamentalism -seen as a tacit agreement with a technological determinism- that undermines social fabric and people’s freedom, reducing human rationality to scientific-technological rationality. Although they try to convince us that the old idea of ‘progress’ and certain dangerous advances of techno-science cannot nor must stop, serious ethical questions arise in relation to how much it affects the very evolution of life in different ways. Hyper-consumption, to which scientific and technological innovations also lend invaluable services, is another deity highly venerated by great masses of the so-called First World’s developed societies and minority groups of the ‘other’ worlds. Excessive consumption that economic globalisation advocates as a mechanism of human development but that in practice not only limits people’s freedom and creates personal unhappiness but also devours future generations’ resources, apart from indifferently cooperating in the eradication of solidarity. Immersed in a seemingly limitless commercialisation of words and things, Homo economicus does not seem to become aware of the tremendous ecological footprint being left by his steps, the abysmal human inequalities generated by his activities and the threats looming over his security. The panorama is not hopeful. We share the complexity and dependency of a globalisation that, under the chaotic materializing of information networks, has altered

7

Einstein Albert and Freud Sigmund, 2001. ¿Por qué la guerra? [Why war?] Ed. Minúscula: Barcelona. P. 63.

6 our form of perceiving space and time. This is a runaway world - Giddens8 says - and its acceleration drags us along. We cannot stop to think, but instead have to do this quickly and in the short term. Peace, the experience of peace, accompanies us when this is possible, like a tacit occurrence in our daily lives. We are too busy, we only want to jump onto the bandwagon of the jet set of success and well-being recommended by the advertising in the mass media, although this is a goal that proves so extremely complicated for the great majority of humankind. An unattainable dream for million of humans who suffer chronic hunger, for millions that can still survive in the ignominy of armed conflicts, for millions of women, men and children who live and work in slavery, for millions of people who do not have access to a worthy job, for millions of refugees, for millions excluded ... Reflection on peace at this point comes inexorably mingled with the core question: nature, society, culture (and thus techno-science), politics and economy, ethics and aesthetics, everything is bound together and forms an indissoluble part of the global environment. To think of the possibility of peace at the present time is to think of the complex and interconnected network of environmental and social problems that are leading to us to planetary un-sustainability and are putting our survival as a species at stake. It means reflecting on the limits that should be imposed on an ailing economic system. It involves questioning the political management and the ethos (character) of our actions and even requires extending the questions to aesthetic spheres, to our perception schemes of the world, including our emotions and forms of sensitivity, to reflect on what we are doing and the direction that we are making our future take.

8

Giddens Anthony, 2000. Un mundo desbocado. Los efectos de la globalización en nuestra vida. . Ed. Taurus: Madrid. (Runaway world. How globalisation is reshaping our lives

7 It means thinking and acting to halt the advance of misery, starvation, urban unhealthiness and insecurity, deterioration of rural areas, diverse forms of contamination, global climatic change, wastefulness and exhaustion of the planet’s resources, the loss of biological and cultural diversity, the widespread deterioration of ecosystems, pandemics like AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria, unemployment, mass emigration, exclusion and discrimination with ethnic, cultural or ideological pretexts, the traffic in arms, drugs and people, money laundering, financial speculation of multinational companies, armed conflicts, terrorism, human rights violation ... There are many different challenges, mostly with multiple causes, closely interconnected and in many cases receiving feedback from their own effects, coming forward in synergetic processes and evolving in time, which is why it is so difficult to demarcate their causes, but which are doubtlessly connected with an economic globalisation model of limitless growth, to overpopulation and demographic imbalances, hyperconsumption, enormous inequalities between human groups and whole countries, massive human misery and starvation and conflicts and violence caused by this same general situation. It was said at the Stockholm Summit and in the Manifesto for Survival in 1972; it was shown in the Brundtland Report, Our Common future, in 1987; it was shown in the studies written for the Club of Rome; it was indicated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992; it was repeated at the Johannesburg World Summit in 2002 and in so many other declarations: humankind is at a crossroads, but it would seem that the great majority of people have not become truly aware of the meaning of this expression nor the gravity of the situation.

8 Accepting this may for many of us be a premeditated attitude of indifference or resignation, I believe that there is a deficit of knowledge and reflection on the state of the world. This is probably due, in the communication apotheosis, to information appearing with such a degree of speed, so highly varied, fragmented and disperse, as well as manipulated, that it becomes very hard to decode messages, to join and make these consistent. On one hand, its excess contributes to disinformation and apart from this; the society of knowledge is only accessible for a sector of humanity. If we consider that over a quarter does not have electricity9; that 50 % of the planet’s inhabitants have never used a telephone and that Internet, in spite of its geometric expansion, is not available for 86% of human beings. What meaning can the ‘information highways’ have for them? How can they participate in decisions about their own destiny? We must also bear in mind that mass media reduce the world vision, which would otherwise be impossible to grasp, but in the process adapt panoramas to suit their own objectives and modalities, to the extent of determining how society sees itself. Never has the expression ‘what is essential is unseen to the eyes’ had greater significance, and we would seem to be willing to see only what they show us. And what can be shown or televised is what has greatest impact on the daily routine, at this same time, also being what sells best. This can euphemistically lead us to think that climatic change is not so serious, the ozone layer already has healed, the planet’s forests are recovering, that hunger and poverty are no longer as impressive as in those pictures of an African country whose name we can’t remember, and that horrors such as the one million Rwandese dead can continue to be tolerated.

9

According to the International Energy Agency, one fourth of the worldwide population, which means about 1600 million people, live without electricity. World Energy Outlook. Energy and Poverty. 2002. In http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org

9 But the problems of our world’s structural violence continue to be there, and although political answers are still very weak - when not utterly non-existent - and progress is too slowing, more than a few people and institutions are putting all their efforts and dedication into seeking clarity and heading forward in search of possible solutions. Undoubtedly the first and most urgent measure involved is to try to surpass the limitation meant by being guided by the knowledge of our immediate circumstances, of becoming aware that we live in glocal surroundings, where the local realm overlaps the global sphere. We must recognize that risks are common to all, that the problems that cause them are our own business, whether or not these are others’ concern. We need to assume the responsibility for all the effects, those of our actions and those of our indifference. This responsibility obviously implies that all or at least a great majority of people must lend a hand to be able to solve them, although we do not do so in the same manner nor to the same extent. Globally, the task seems titanic or unfeasible, but it can be made more tangible if we become aware of our power as social actors, of the importance of our daily actions and if we commit ourselves, mainly, to regenerating a new sense of community. There is an ample consensus indicating that answers have to be sought in the interactive triangle of peace, democracy and sustainable development with the main axis involving education. Until now, Jose Saramago points out, humanity has been educated for war, never for peace. It is necessary to break this order of things and to do so it is essential to know the world in which we are living, to reflect on the world which we want to leave to our descendants; to educate in and for responsibility, to become more conscious of the

10 exercise of our freedom and of our capacity for participation in decision making; to educate in values which enable moral development, which foster respect, solidarity and cooperation: in short, to educate so as to make the construction of a peace culture possible. Only a collective learning process can guide us towards this target where, undeniably, all of us –humankind- are the architects of this transformation, those with the possibility of continuing with our destructive actions or not. The self-understanding of our position in the world, of the purpose of our scientific-technical capacity and of our actions on the medium demands a range of philosophical, political and ethical reflection in which all other fields of reflection and research can reencounter each other to combine efforts and prepare global strategies for change. It is not possible to attain planetary sustainability, nor much less to generalize a peace culture, without laying out inter and intra cultural networks favouring the negotiation of meanings between the Eastern and Western worlds, without consolidating a real democratisation on planetary scale, without envisaging the need to universalise human rights. These constitute essential requirements to advance towards a true internationalisation, with democratic institutions able to guarantee human safety. Human safety understood, as Crocker has it, as "an all encompassing condition in which individual citizens live in freedom, peace and safety and participate fully in the process of governance"10. It also means redirecting the endeavours of scientific-technological innovation towards these aims. For this purpose it is essential to establish a more open and transparent dialogue between techno-science and society, creating interdependent

10

Crocker David A., 2003. Globalization and human development: ethical approaches. In Conill Jesus and Crocker David A. (Eds.). Republicanism and civic education: beyond liberalism? Ed. Coseas: Granada. P. 75.

11 networks with the co-responsible participation of a range of social actors enabling ethical and social evaluation of scientific-technological developments and innovations, with application of the precautionary principle and concretion of ex-ante regulation principles. What we have before us is the option of becoming the individual nodes of networks that we can weave with that new sense of community, looking for common objectives beyond national identities and borders, enabling the fortification of a planetary conscience, a global civil society, a new world order where democracy and justice are integrated as a way to make, decide, enjoy and guarantee human duties and rights. Constructing networks for peace means starting up enthusiasm in the Freudian sense again, as an antidote to war, which must be analysed and studied as a common problem for all human beings. It means erecting a different Eros, less conspiratorial, suggesting, transforming and cultivating responsive bonds of love to one’s fellows, where the fellow man is also the supposed enemy. It means learning to share a common feeling of possession, participating in the construction of general and non-excluding common cultural meanings, extending community limits further and further. The differences that separate us -cultural, ideological, political or of other kindscan be very strong and be felt to be irreconcilable, but there is something basic that can unite us to found networks for peace: commitment. Only commitment can interrupt the vicious circle of violence and its mimetic reiteration. This commitment must be present in the individual networks and also in the institutional ones that stem from these, since if there is no continuity between private behaviour patterns and the conduct of

12 governors and leaders, these transformations will be hard put to become common practice. To sum up, as can be inferred from reading the paragraphs above, reflection on peace in this essay appears under a double perspective: projected towards the microcosm of each human being and towards society as a whole. From the individual world view, an attempt is made to reflect on the meanings of peace, on our possibilities –as cultural animals- of transforming our innate aggressiveness in a positive way and also about what it represents to obtain a truly human development and how we can fight to attain this. Such reflection that extends towards society as a whole, under the dialectic prism between the culture of violence and death that we bear with us like an atavistic burden, not easy to throw off,- and the peace culture yearned for. To this end, we put forward and lay the foundations for a global view of the problems and challenges that we must confront in the present and near future as well as their causes, so closely interrelated, that constitute an obstacle and threat for peace. No less important is the approach to the possible measures to be adopted to overcome these obstacles and the viability of reconstructing the social framework - understood as a complex structuring of socially organized interactions - constructing networks to build a peace culture. In this direction, a good starting point is to ask ourselves what we understand by ‘peace’, what peace is, what sort of peace can make building communitarian networks feasible, a question that we will tackle in the following chapter.