The Complementarity of Fear and Love

COMPLEMENTARITY OF FEAR AND LOVE

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

December 27, 2012

                Many thanks for responses to my blog of December 26, calling for letting the force of love into lives driven by fear.  Let me clarify: I believe that being driven by fear is as vital as being carried away by love.  Life requires giving way to both forces, and striking balances between the two is always a work in progress, across generations work never completed.  I only suggest that we have become so obsessed with “solving” our fears as to obscure our awareness of how we live by love.

                My labels for the life forces I see are arbitrary.  What I call being driven by “fear” others may call being governed by reason, or in certain cases being inspired to greatness, or being achievement motivated.  In this realm, beyond fight-or-flight reflexes or parasympathetically controlled homeostasis, we define tasks or problems as closed systems where actions have purely logical consequences, or as it is often put, we behave rationally.  I many ways we gain awesome power by so doing, like the power I have to turn keystrokes into this blog, following rules of spelling and grammar, and have my laptop convert it into text that I can upload and send round the world almost instantaneously.  Or engineering buildings and cars and bridges that don’t break or collapse.  Or designing production system that allows me to know where to go to get this or that or prepare this or that for a meal.  Or “curing” diseases.  Or at a simpler level learning where to poop other than in our pants (and learning to put on pants in the first place).  Or in formal education these days, systematically making students achieve what “experts” determine to be “grade level” or what can be measured as “competence” of students and teachers.  And in criminology, the default logic is that social order depends on properly enacted and enforced rules, entailing an “evidence-based,” “effective” set of sanctions to “deter” or disable disobedience.  In this world, our problems are assumed to have “solutions.”

                “Solutions” have their limits.  When we close systems to constrain them to perform in specified ways, the force we use expends resources, or in Newton’s terms, creates entropy or heat.  Today we are caught in the collapse of unmitigated economic “growth” or determination to “get ahead” or become wealthier generation by generation.  The US criminal justice has become so massive and efficient as to produce human waste piles known collectively as “incarceration” at world record levels.  The science that led the US Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in 1973 to rate the “stopping power” of a .357 magnum bullet as against a .38 caliber shot and led to an upgrade in police armament has progressed to increased levels of fire and explosive power to destroy and incapacitate our “enemies.”  In theory, my president has for more than half a century had the power to obliterate all of humankind with the press of a button.  And we have long since learned how to concentrate agricultural production to lay waste to vast expanses of fertile ground, and even to generate extreme shifts in climate what we know as permanent unemployment by enhancing industrial “productivity.”  The road to earthly fire and destruction is paved with well-motivated rationality.

                The work we do to conquer and overcome fear is Sisyphean.  It requires materially manifest expenditures including patterns of electrical wattage that show up in the brain.  I speculate that the “letting go” entailed in connecting to the love force, as for instance people report in “meditation,” amounts to short circuiting the fear driven connections to allow the force of love to overtake us.  Thus, for instance, what neuroscientists describe as right-brain activity may actually amount to taking electrical interference out of the left brain, permitting it to detect and be motivated by forces of love that lie beyond the power of our five senses to measure directly.  At this level, artifice and instrumentality in responding to the environment is superseded by spontaneous accommodation to conflict known by such terms as empathy, compassion, maternalism, nurture, stewardship and love.  When it comes to reaching agreement or settlement of conflict, the force of love allows time for the force of logic to translate feelings of trust and reciprocity into concrete, materially detectable and measurable, transitory “solutions.”  It is at the level of awareness of lower voltages that we see leaps of perception that we recognize as wondrous works of art, as analogic rather than as logically dictated, as gestalt rather than as discrete objects, as background rather than as foreground.  I do think that principles of how “peacemaking” by force of love operates can be inferred from experience, just as theoretical physicists infer quantum mechanics.  For instance, when I heard the onbeing.org program on the holy land No More Taking Sides network that I cited in my December 2 blog, I found a description of victim-offender healing—remembering how murder victims lived and what they lived for rather than revisiting their deaths—that I have heard time and again from survivors of violence when their suffering can openly and honestly be heard and shared rather than displaced onto those blamed. 

                All human knowledge is imperfect, as Karl Popper put it, subject to refutation.  What distinguishes learning how love from how “solving” problems works is that discoveries come in unexpected ways and places rather than through controlled study.  When I celebrated and recognized the force I credited with waking me up and inclining me to listen to a radio program on December 2 just as I was trying to figure out how to thank people for mediation week in Trinidad, when I credit for a German anthroposophical hydrologist in Norway for giving visible form to a Norwegian word that I had just translated as “responsiveness,” I am describing a “scientific method” that I supplement what is commonly known as rational inference and action.  Because this kind of knowledge or insight or discovery cannot be engineered but can be amplified and reinforced by human action, it is normally today cast as religious revelation.  Because I give credit to this force for guiding and enhancing my knowledge and grounding my relations, I call myself religious.  Because this force takes on a will of its own when we allow it to overtake us, it never in itself offers us authority to dictate what is right or wrong for one another.  In the realm of love, what we can only account for as supernatural becomes natural.  When my late mentor Les Wilkins assigned students in his advanced research design course to go out and find serendipity, he was recognizing that many of what we consider to have been great scientific discoveries are products of a force of learning that is unplanned, unpredictable, and precious.

                By implication, there is no single logical sequence of human intellectual or moral development, as even Lawrence Kohlberg came to recognize late in his life.  Yes, learning does entail progressions of attaching words to tangible and intangible experience and communicating and interacting in layers of understanding that broaden and deepen with age, but as in the fable of the child who saw that the emperor was naked, a small child can at moments manifest what we rate as advanced wisdom, and we as adults often think and act in ways that we call infantile.  We need not, and do not learn in a fixed sequence; I'm reminded of the mathematician who found he could teach calculus to 6-year-olds.  And in terms of deciding whether a child’s thinking is advanced enough to warrant punishment for doing what s/he is capable of knowing is wrong rather than right, I figure I have learned too much to “know” that an adolescent who shoots someone to death in anger or for gain is more culpable than a person with a joy stick who fires a missile from a drone into someone’s home on a president’s say so.  Such distinctions can only be drawn within politically arbitrary closed systems of human logic.  While our survival depends in part on learning and applying rules of what we find we “must” or “need to” do, cooling off of resultant social heat or friction depends on something else.  We can recognize and gain understanding of how to enter that side of our lives, but there is no god that dictates the right and wrong moment to move either way.  Our lives may be enriched by awareness of a choice of forces to go with, but it doesn’t tell us what balance to draw between the two—a matter which, it seems to me, is always negotiable in principle.  That’s my religion and I’m stickin’ to it—love and peace--hal

The Forces that are With Us

THE FORCES THAT ARE WITH US

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

December 25, 2012

                 I see each of us creatures as bundles of resistance, transforming forces I typically call “love” and “fear” within us into discrete social action .  Together, the forces form an energy field that manifests itself through our bodies as life itself, containing the universe of existence.  From my perspective, we are all born with this full universe of human experience in and around us.  The riddle of will to survive and procreate entails learning to attach language to bits of that universe as shared circumstance allows.

A prevailing, Enlightened, postulate of today’s “social sciences” worldwide is instead that social control is born and dies in individual lives, where children’s brains are born socially empty, whose lives depend on us teaching them the right stuff—what “they need to know.”  Social science caters to dominant social policy, which for instance in my field of criminology, as my late mentor Les Wilkins put it,  limits itself to “treating the problem of crime as the problem of the criminal.”

                While one way of individualizing social problems is to focus on “needs,” another is to focus on “consumption.”  Right now, the planet’s capacity to sustain human “growth” (like a tumor?) is suffering consequences of over-consumption, aka indebtedness to each other and to our ancestors.  We are so addicted to thinking of consumption as healthy that we despair that potential consumers are saving more money to be able to retire some time.  We can agree only that consumption is a problem that trumps even hunger as a “national crisis” at the level of Body Mass Index. Law’n’order IS social order.  We concentrate a lot of our energy drawing on knowledge of how to fight, the same force that moves us to eat and drink—to consume life to live even if it is “only” plant life.  At the physiological level, it is effort we direct to keeping our body burning warm enough to keep on pumping and oxidizing food and drink.  It corresponds to what neuroscientists call left over right brain activity—the part that monitors conscious thought and action, as in carrying out plans of action—heading somewhere, attending to bodily needs, in today’s parlance, rationally or scientifically determined.  It speaks to us of things that must be or have to be or should be done; it calls on us to fight all social “deviance,” to right all personal wrongs.

                The premise that our brains are vessels that need emptying and cleansing is as religious as the premise I share, that the force I call love, the force where one taps into the omnipresent experience of empathy, of compassion, of “intersubjectivity,” of mutual understanding, of unguarded conversation.  As W.I. Thomas put it in his well-known “theorem,” either leap of faith we make in responding to social problems is equally real in its consequences, including what we accept and purvey as “knowledge” that is useful in “the real world.”  I note that the Latin root of “science” is said to be “shared knowledge.”  We live in a world dominated by the view that our very survival as a species, let alone our life expectancy, depends on conquering our fears by campaigns against their human sources.  We have a deep and complex understanding of how to fight and how to avoid losing.  We call that kind of knowledge “empirical,” meaning grounded in tangible experience.  My premise is that we also are born with equal access to experiences of the ways and fruits of the corresponding force field I call love. I concentrate there to fill the void in public discourse of attention and on giving voice to this side of our natural database.

                I like most of us have amply been taught prices of disobedience and learned fighting techniques (including crimefighting) in due social and educational course.  It has taken much more conscious effort to discover how relations progress across a range of learning situations.

                Social circumstance, starting with being born to an interreligious pair of second-generation iconoclastic academicians, have made it hard for me to accept any truth on personal, let alone an institutional authority.  That has translated into a life without preconceptions as to which sources of information I rely on.  Looking back, that has meant that significant shifts in my understanding of how love in action replaces fear have come from a wide array of unexpected, improbable sources—from an exchange with a law professor, from family friends who pointed me toward a law school with Chinese law or later toward sociology, from prisoners, from chance acquaintance as with a visiting anthroposophical hydrologist in a small village far from home, from victims and survivors of extreme sexualized assaults, from a restart of a local volunteer victim-offender mediation program…and including moments with children and with older folks diagnosed as “demented.”  I have learned that my moments of learning, including moments when parties to conflict settle and accommodate differences, happen when for my part I let them happen to me from others rather than making them happen to others.  In that learning process, I have noticed repeatedly that others come along or say things that mirror my own supposedly independent thoughts.  This is one of many ways I have seen and felt coordinated or harmonic relations with my surroundings, human action included.  This sensory/extrasensory experience is my “scientific” guide to addressing problems we address as “crime” and “violence”—no more faith-based than the belief that violence demands counter-violence.

                While on one hand, my own faith that love dictates my epistemology, it coincides with a life that beyond abundant material privilege, has miraculously minimized the personal cost of my many mistakes and misunderstandings, and brought richness and depth to my relations.  Thus, I am in a place where the blessings that happen to me like meeting extraordinary people, enjoying security in a family  and returning home are also seemingly miraculous things that happen to me rather than things I make happen.  If my approach to life has anything to do with such good fortune, I can only imagine that there is a will implicit in the force of love that is somehow enhanced in my relations by my appreciation of it, and thereby reinforces my continued will to try love before fighting as a way of life.  It also offers me the comfort of believing that the life I enjoy was not conceived in my mother’s womb nor will end when my heart stops.

                This is my first published attempt at describing the religious leap of faith that underlies my lifetime of social inquiry and action.  It is a standpoint no more religious than what it taken for secular science—a standpoint which I believe carries religion beyond the political dogma and sense of personal righteousness and rightness implied by faith in individual social determinism.  I am sensitive to the consternation I may have caused by outing the religiosity of science as I experience it.  I hope this first crude attempt to describe my faith helps people who evaluate my claims to knowledge to see beyond religious stereotypes, and to understand the humble obligation I feel, in all honesty, to give thanks for blessings and knowledge I receive from a force beyond human control.  Love and peace--hal

               

academic heresy

ACADEMIC HERESY

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com

December 8, 2012

               

                I outed my religious self in last Sunday’s blog on No More Taking Sides, when I gave thanks for being guided while grounded at home to a radio program that answered that most serious of questions that had just been posed during mediation week in Trinidad: What about murder?  I am now forty years a “professor.”  By attributing my understanding of transformation of violence to superhuman, undetectable energy flows in which the world as I know it exists, the equivalent of declaring that I am guided by my belief in God, I have for the first time in three generations in my family committed academic heresy.  I have believed in the divinity of what people get when they build trust that their relations are respectful and dignified for as long as I can remember.  A primary reason for peer rejections of my manuscripts from the outset was that they were written in the first person and anecdotal.  Early in my studies I explored philosophies of knowledge widely, but I could never “scientifically” justify my “knowledge” beyond claiming that it worked for me and for others.  Basic academic training engrained a separation of science and faith.  In public discourse, I spent a long time trying to defend what I felt I knew on accepted “scientific” grounds.  Some would say that because I have no particular faith in any religious institution, I am spiritual.  I see no reason to separate the two.  Whatever knowledge I have of the ways of human relations is faith based.  I feel no less religious in practice and belief than my clerical sisters and brothers.  Bottom line: my knowledge of all our relations is religious.

                Recent trips tipped me over into “professional” disclosure.  Aleksandras Dobryninas, who had introduced me, closed discussion of my “peacemaking journey” by asking: Are you religious?  And so I said yes, and gave some examples of the supernatural in my own life, which is fortunate, because Aleks well knew that I had called “peacemaking” in criminology a union of religion and rationality in 1991.  Then in Trinidad I found overt invocation of God’s blessing in a remarkably religiously diverse country.  I thought of all the people I know earnestly sharing a calling to understand how to build trust, empathy and compassion who wear overt religious symbols.  And so in a moment of professional recklessness, I have decided to acknowledge that if a religious foundation discredits one’s claims to knowledge in and of itself, I know essentially nothing about violence and its transformation.

                On the other hand, I no longer want to pretend to know more than religious inspiration shows me.  I owe that to sisters and brothers who don’t hide their religiosity either.  I halfway expected how silent the lists to which I sent the last post have become (except for job ads).  I have broken a largely unspoken academic taboo:  I mix religion and science.  It took me a long time to get up the courage to say so in public.    Love and peace--hal

               

1991 Peacemaking Chapter on peacemaking and religion

I haven't looked back at my closing chapter to the 1991 volume Richard Quinney co-edited in at least a decade.  But the fact that I outed my religiosity "professionally" for the first time in my December 3 letter I posted on this blog celebrating peacemaking in Trinidad and the Holy Land, and have gotten no response from any of the number of places I sent save one from a Caribbean mediator, led me to recall that I had been openly called for a reunification of religion and enlightenment "science" as a path toward peace.  I am reminded that the 5th International Conference on Penal Abolition had just ended, a group which was a partial source for the book.  I was surprised to discover that the stories of peacemaking today may be updated, but my belief in what peacemaking entails academically is unchanged.

I have scanned the contents of Criminology as Peacemaking and the first five pages of my vision of peacemaking, which will be familiar I'm sure to those who hear my vision now.  I smile as I read so names so widely recognized today in so many ways.

I am attaching the scan in pdf in e-mail versions of this blog.  I cannot read in pdf on the blog site, so for those of you who read me here, a text version of the scan, which garbles names and such, is here below.  Love and peace--hal

CONTENTS

PREFACE                                                  IX

"''  l'i'JI  by Indiana  University Press

All rights  reserved

No  p 

of Lhis book  may be reproduced or utilized  in any  form or by any  means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any  information storage and  retrieval  system, without permission in writing from  the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this  prohibition.

The paper used  in this  publication meets  the  minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper  for Printed Library  Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

@)TM

Manufactured in the United States  of America

Library  of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Criminclogy as peacemaking I edited by Harold E. Pepinsky and  Richard

Quinney. p.               em. Includes  index.

ISBN 0-25:1-:I!J:\!17-7 (doth); 1 ;1\N ll :'',_\  'lll>'>'lt,  11>1>1-  l

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Part I. Religious and Humanist  Peacemaking

Traditions

1.  The Way of Peace: On Crime,  Suffering, and  Service

Richard Quinney                                                                       3

2.  Radical Criminology and  the Overcoming of Alienation: Perspectives from  Marxian  and  Gandhian Humanism

Kevin Anderson                                                                     14

3.  Reconciliation and  the Mutualist Model  of Community

J. Peter  Cardella                                                                     30

4.  Homelessness and  the Case for Community-Based Initiatives: The Emergence of a Model Shelter as a Short-Term Response to the  Deepening Crisis in Housing

Gregg Barak                                                                           47

5.  Beyond  the Fear of Crime:  Reconciliation  as the Basis for

Criminal Justice  Policy

Russ lmmarigeon                                                                  69

l'orl II.  f'cmiuist Peacemaking Traditions and Women's

Experience

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Contents Contents vii Battering Women  and  Battering Central Americans: A Peacemaking Synthesis 19.  Taking a Bite Out  of Social Injustice: Crime-Control Ideology and  Its Peacemaking Potential Larry L. Tifft and Lyn.  Markham 114 Lloyd Klein, Joan Luxenburg, and John Gunther 280

vi

8.

9.  British Left Realism  on the Abuse of Women:  A Critical

Appraisal

Part  IV. The  Peacemaking Choice

WalterS. DeKeseredy and Martin  D. Schwartz                     154                          20.  Peacemaking in Criminology and  Criminal Justice

10.  Peacemaking in Prisons: A Process                                                                                          Harold E. Pepinsky                                                                                                                                                         299

Lila Rucker                                                                            172

11.  Community Solutions to Sexual  Violence: Feminist/Abolitionist Perspectives

Fay Honey Knopp                                                                   181

12.  Mediation in the Criminal Justice  System: Process, Promises, Problems

Maria R. Volpe                                                                     194

Part  III.   Critical Peacemaking Traditions

13.  Images  of Unity  and  Disunity in the Juridic  Subject  and

Movement toward  the  Peacemaking Community

Dragan Milovanovic                                                               209

14.  The Perpetuation of Violence  through Criminological

Theory: The Ideological Role of Subculture Theory

Susan L. Caulfield                                                                 228

15.  The Role of Education in Peacemaking

Peter L. Sanzen                                                                      239

16.  The WJlie  Horton Fact, Faith, and  Commonsense Theory of Crime

John F. Galliher                                                                      245

17.  Crime  Control as Human Rights f nforn'llwlll

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CONTRIBUTORS                                                                                                     329

INDEX                                                                                                                     334

296                                      Critical  Peacemaking

Mendelsohn, Harold, and  G.  J. O'Keefe. 1984. Taking a Bite Out of Crime: The Impact of a  Mass Media Crime Prevention Campaign. Washington, DC: National Insti­ tute  of Justice.

Newsweek. 1989. "When Tenants Take Charge." 27 November: 44.

New York Times. 1988. "Freeze! You're on TV: How  America's  Most  Wanted  has Led

to the Arrest of 22 Fugitives." Frank  Prial, 25 September, p. 56.

New York Times. 1988a. "Do I Look Like a Criminal?" Op-ed column by Dave Pauli, J

October, p. 22.

"Oprah Winfrey."  1989.  October  program on Citizens Self Help  Groups.

Reiman, Jeffrey  H.  1984.  The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. 2nd  ed.  New

York: Wiley.

Rosenbaum, Dennis (ed.).  1986. Community  Crime Prevention: Does It Work? Beverly

Hills:  Sage.

Rosenbaum, Dennis, Arthur Lurigio,  and  Paul Lavrakas. 1989. "Enhancing Citizl'll

Participation and  Solving  Serious Crime:   A  National Evaluation of  Crinw

Stoppers Programs." Crime and Delinquency 35: 378-400.

Rothman, Jack.  1968.  "Three   Models of  Community  Organization," in  National

Conference on Social Welfare and Social Work Practice, 1968. New York: Columbi.1

University Press.

Rothman, Jack, and  John  E. Tropman. 1987. "Models of Community Organization

and Macro Practice Perspectives: Their  Mixing and  Phasing." In Fred M. Co:-..

John  L. Erlich,   Jack  Rothman, and   John   E.  Tropman  (eds.),   Strategies of

Community  Organization. 4th ed.  Ithasca, Ill.: F. E. Peacock.

Sheley,  Joseph F.  1985.  America's "Crime  Problem": An  Introduction to Criminoloxlt

Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Shearing, Clifford, and  Peter  Stenning. 1987. Private Policing. Newbury Park: Sil)',''

"Sixty  Minutes." 1986, 1987. Segment of Citizen  Empowerment.  November,  i'IHI•.

rebroadcast in July, 1987. Columbia Broadcasting Company.

Skogan, Wesley  G.  1986.  "Disorder, Crime  and  Community Decline." In S 

I.

Marry,  Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood  of Strangers. Philadelphia: Tt'llll d··

University Press.

Time Magazine. 1989. "On  the Front  Lines." 11 September: 14-18.

P     A     R     T

F    0    U R

The Peacemalcing Choice

Harold E. Pepinsky

T W   E N T Y

Peacemaking  in Criminology and

Crin1inal Justice

everal  years  ago,  responding to an early  draft  of a study 1 had  written on "responsiveness" in Norway  (Pepinsky,  1988), Richard  Quinney wrote  me Ihat he thought peacemaking was the  direction criminology ought to move,

I hat  he  sensed  wide   but  scarcely  visible  interest in  the  subject   among

'riminologists, and  that  we ought to do something about it. Kevin Ander­

·.on pitched  in and  did  much  of the  work,  so that over a three-year period

,,.,. had a series  of sessions on  peacemaking at the annual meetings of the

\ llll'fican Society  of Criminology. Richard  and  I called for relevant essays,

'' hich now comprise this volume. Some of the talented authors herein gave

11:. I heir essays  at the outset, enough to show  Indiana University Press  that

'' '· would have a coherent work.  They have since updated and revised their

"' •1k; and   we  thank  them, and   indeed  all  our  contributors,  for  their

1    •.II l<'lll'l'  and  effort.

I :.1 e:pect that these  l'Ssays are a representative sampling of peacemaking

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300                                                                                   The Peacemaking Choice

Fifth  International Conference on  Penal  Abolition (ICOPA),  I discovered that by far the strongest contingent among the hundreds of correspondents are  workers and activists with religious affiliations, notably the  peace churches and  ecumenical peace  groups. Religiously self-identified people cross  all  eight   intellectual traditions which  have  emerged:  academicians and   theorists, activists   and  reformers, feminists, lawmakers, mediators, native traditionalists, peoples of color, and  prisoners. The National  People's of Color  Task Force  on  Criminal Justice  has  simply  merged itself into  the Interreligious Task Force on Criminal Justice; and  one of its former  leaders, the  Reverend Matthew Stephens,  a prison chaplain in Ohio, is its coordi­ nator.   Each  of  the   eight   traditions has  its  own   international networks. ICOPA  participants and  correspondents represent the  pacifists  of criminal

justice.

I find  to my  surprise that  many  of the  peacemaking criminologists and

many ICOPA  people are  completely unaware of  one  another, although among the contributors in this volume, Kay Harris, Russ Immarigeon, and Fay Honey Knopp have also been active in ICOPA. We have paid a price fm specialization and  advanced data-processing capabilities in this informati1 )II age.  If you  look  in  a  standard college   text  for  criminology or  crimin.d justice,  the vast literature cited there will scarcely  if at all include any  nolii ,. of  activities   of  members of  the  ICOPA  network.  For  that  matter, nw:ol ICOPA  members find   little  reason to  read   mainstream  criminology '•I criminal justice  research-journals. The result  is that  most  ICOPA memlw1 :. do  not see  much room  for their  kind  of knowledge and  inquiry on collq•,•· campuses, and  even   the  most  progressive criminologists feel  nothing 1·· being  done to provide alternatives to prison, let alone  punishment. lk t···, tp  the  time  when information and  ideas  are  freely  shared  between  tlw··· communities! The  problem is  not  that  peacemaking in  criminology .t11d criminal justice is new  and  untested; the  problem is our  ignorance ol  tlw vast amount that is being  thought and  done by peacemakers in crimi1wlor.1 and  criminal justice.

We suffer  another level of collective  ignorance-the connection lli'hv•·•·1•

crime and punishment on the one  hand and  war on  the other.  Then· i:, ,,,.,, 1   ·' vast  community of scholars and  activists  in peace  studies, as rcpn·:;o· tlnl for instance by the International Peace Research  Association. I h.tv•· '' ttl I• I •I

no easier either to get criminologists into  peace studies or to gel :>lttd• 'I tl·   •" peace  to  show interest in  criminology than   to gd ICOI';\ JtH'Inlwt·. ·"''' criminologists together. Specialization gets  in llw   way  .1g.ti11  I      I· 1'""  •  d several groups which consistently lr

this hn-.wlt: (I) 1 ,..., • · •  It Ill• (,, (see  the  chapters by CordeiL1  ;md  lmm.Jri)',l'tlll), (:1 )    r.Hh,.d  l<'llllltl·.l· 1     •   • particularly Llw ch<1 span="span">piers  by  I I;1r1 i·;; ( ·.1 n II)', ' ll.1    I." I lott. d.l .111d  I IIIIIIJ .t" t•

Knopp, who  joim. (_ht.tkt•n·;ln "·lilt  io·ltttlll'·llt). (   '.)   ltttiiLIItt·.l·.  (·,, •     II"

dlo j•l•·r l>v  i\IHkt:;oll). .111   

(·I)   .ttt.tt• lt<·.l·.  {·.n   11 ..  •   1,.'1d1·• l•1    I !Ill   ,,.1

1\J.nl· IJ.l!il)   (•,t•   It   11! ilt<",l' )',lllllj•·.   t·.  lll.lll',lll.d (p  ()w  I!Llllt'.lt< ,\Ill l•ooill    Ill

Peacemaking                                                                                              301

peace studies and  in criminology. Each offers a solid, well thought-out, and researched foundation for all groups working for peace to come  together.

Happily, you  will find  that  the  contributors to this  volume  are  broadly

active  and  informed about issues  of peace  and  war. There  is a wealth  of material  herein about related  work which  belongs  in criminology but as yet is  not  often  found  there. We criminologists  just  need   to  begin   to look beyond the end  of our  collective  nose.

What  is the  obvious connection between crime  and  war? Crime  is vio­ lence.  So is punishment, and  so is war. People  who  go to war believe  that violence  works. So do criminals and  people who  want criminals punished. All these believe  violence  works  because  they also believe that domination is necessary. Somebody who is closer  to God,  natural wisdom, or scientific truth has to keep wayward subordinates in line, or social order  goes  to hell. The only  way to tame  the  social  beast  is for everyone to agree (by "social contract": see  Peter  Cardella's chapter) that everyone is at times  "entitled" to  be  subordinated  and   to  be  subordinator -ideally always   to  be  both subordinator and  subordinator in one's  proper place at all times.  This line of thinking appears in all religious and  political traditions: as in Confucianism versus  Taoism;  as  in  bureaucratism versus anarchy; and   as  in  old  Old lestament  worldly retribution versus, for  example,   the  Prophets or  the Sermon  on  the  Mount. It is also  known as  the  idea  of the  existence  of a chosen people   (Galtung, 1987)-in  matters of conflict,  some   people   are

1·ntitled to dictate  terms to some  other  lesser  human beings  and  to kill or

totally incapacitate them, if  necessary, to establish human virtue.

Pacifists in criminology and  criminal  justice can learn  from  one  another hy force of reason. So can retributionists. But to recognize that the kind  of niminologist one  is is fundamentally a matter  of religious preference is to

·;!'e that  reason   cannot dictate  whether a  criminologist chooses to  learn

wilhin  a paradigm of war or a paradigm of peacemaking. In 1967, I sat up l.ttl' one  night  with  a family  friend  whom Ilater  heard  had  been  head  of npt>rations in East  Asia  for the  CIA.  Back and  forth  we argued about  the

•  It •mino theory. Finally, simultaneously, it hit us that unless I could  prove to

I11m  that the Communists would  not eventually land  in San Francisco if we

.ltd not stop  them  at the seventeenth parallel  in Vietnam,  he would find it llltjwrative to stop  the Communists now. And  unless he could  prove  to me iiJol   the  Communists would  land  in  San  Francisco,  I would continue to

.11lvne

our  withdrawal from Southeast Asia. We both knew  that the only

1  '"1nl  of any Lhi ng is hv  tautology, as in pure  math.  We laughed and  gave up

·'II , • . ,·11 ollwr. Tlt.tl wo; .111       i111port.ml experience for me to learn  the limits

td   li'ol  Oil.

.\·,  r. dic,d  lt'ttlllll'.l·.  ""'' I· Ill>II'   (:;o·•·.  lor  <'X   

Brock-Utne,  1989),

llw <· .It•· II\'<>  I· IIHI·. "I  .•  t•  1" •                  :\·. ,.. _.,l,.,j, o :;  tlw cl.1im Ill being  the  true

.. ••·ldt·.l   1111<·11 1·.        ..  I•  "' •         I" .I "" 111·.     11·.1111111)'  " IJ'.tllliltl' ic. ;;onH·Ihinl'

"'  .dJ,I,, Inti,, l11•l1 · "I 1  ... 1  ..". 111   ,_,,JI, .dl1,IJI;,.,.Id  wo y::· VVIw1t  I    ·:.11  1;;

The Peacemaking Choice

Peacemaking

303

1·   .• ·.m·h seminars at the  University of Oslo,  a number of

1      , ... ol   1i1e  criticism  of a survey of introductory-psychology

,,1,.1.  l<>rmation which  had  appeared in a leading U.S. social-

1    ..... ,.d.  "How   Unscientific," they  kept  saying. "The  author

, 1, 1   ,•I   the  students. How  could  he  have  known what  they

,      1,   , d   1    heir responses? Instead he just guessed in his statistical

·   ,   ""111ologist Les Wilkins  once  wrote, "Kings  and  queens have

,   ,      .. 11,  hers should not!" In one approach to knowledge, we make

1                 . "' ,r ·. "subjects" of our  own  definition of the  situation. We don't

" ,  1     ,  "      1   ..11  1    he study is about. We use statistical  traces they  have left to

1,  11   ,1.,.   know about  our subjects, rather  than  getting to know  them

1          ,. .     111  the other  approach, our  informants become our teachers. If

1  ..  1  .n·vent   another Ted  Bundy   from   killing  again,   we  need   to

1         ,         1          , 1,. 1       what Ted Bundy  did. If we badly  need  to understand what Ted

.. 1     ,  11,1    \Vl'  badly  need  to keep  him  alive and  engage in dialogue with

1  111      1·.   not  just  a  matter  of doing truly  scientific  research. It is an

1       1     ,   ,   ,    ,,  11  1,, learning which  permeates the social existence of the believer. It

1          .  11 '·II •:;  because  they  are  free  to engage in openly religious discoursl'

11,   ,1   11,. ·   Mennonites can see the quality of mediation we offer as the key to

.. ,ll•"tllng,  redressing, and  preventing future violence. "Reconciliation"

11      . 11  1·.   lo them a natural way of learning from conflict.  More  than  the form

11    ,  11      which   just  isn't the  same   when it is  sponsored by  the  Nation

111   1111111'  of Justice  (see Maria Volpe's and Joe Scimecca's chapters)-it is tlw

1  •111l    which  guides action  and   science  and  determines whether we  <11 span="span">

1. ·" 11111g  how to make  bigger  and  better wars,  or bigger  and  better  peace.

lh.1t is why  religious and  humanist traditions have been  chosen to ,,.,111

"" in this volume. There  are  ways to talk about  paradigm choice  in cri1111

11ology. I was a little too smug about  dropping the discussion with  my ('It\

1   riend.  We could  not  appeal to one  another by what  radical  feministc; '.dl "male" reasoning. If we  were  to address honestly the  issue  of par we had  to rise to another level of discourse. That is, of cours1·, wh.!l theoretical physicists did  in the  early  part  of this  century as tlwy  lri< ·tl I" grapple with  quantum mechanics. They  turned to mct 

< lid   II" ology, not because  they  had  burned out  and  were dropping out  ol ';''  "'•' • but because  they  had  to rise above  paradigm;1tic dcb;Jlt' tu .1ddresc; i,;:.IH"· •  ol

]l

choice.  They  were  in fact turned  on, .dtlwugh loo III.JIIY "I  II••   111 stopped asking  questions <1nd span="span" style="letter-spacing: 1.7pt;"> used  their  IH"Wiound wisdo111 I<>   l 111d11  1111

dl·

destruction.

M 

Wchl'r is l'riOIH'IlliSiy cikd lur.Jth'tH·.illll)', \',dll<' l••·t·tluill 111 ·,,  "'"' •

lit•  \'.lVI'"  l'"ir  of J,·,·lttn·:; (Ill llw :.11i1l''' I         (\Nt·lwl. I   'I lh)  l11   ..... "'"' 1       .1

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ll'lwllwl   \'   •  ""'" .1 ..

·;ullll'lillll)',  l111l   IIIli ll'lwllwl   \'1111   ·.J,.ndol  llo- .d·., · ..11ol  ll1.d     llw  '' ·., ·"'  l1

11 Ill',  .1·.l· · ..111  llw  II will<" I        "'" 11 .., ..    ,, ... )       < II  lllri<".i.d ,J,   I  '1 '   ' 1  1'

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of every  human being, and  that the choice is primarily a matter  of following one's  heart. Scientists should be  true  to  their  own  hearts. The  object  of religious discourse is to discover  what  truly  lies within  one's  heart.

Religious and  Humanist Traditions

In the  spirit  of confronting and  honestly discussing conflict,  and  at risk of embarrassing my much  esteemed friend  and  coeditor, I heard  many  a criminologist claim  that  Richard  Quinney had  flipped out  when   he  ex­ tended his much  admired and  cited Marxist  work to the theology of crime. Some  Marxists  were  angry that  he had  forsc1kcn them  and  tarnished their respectability. Richard  (who  has been Richard and  not a Marxist or a Christian or a Buddhist alone)  broke  the icc and  gave  many  of us  crimi­ nologists courage as  we  have  dared   ourselves to  become  avowedly   reli­ gious-as seekers rather  than  purveyors of religious truth.

Richard's long  and  extensive search  for  understanding across  religious traditions is revealed in and  informs his chapter. Is he telling  us to be truly Buddhist  or  truly   Christian? Actually,   neither.  I ie  highlights Buddhist learning to show  that  religious  traditions arc essentially different ways of talking  about  the  same  truth.  He echoes the  famous  statement by Eugene V. Debs  that "while  there  is a soul  in prison 1 am not free."  But wait-Debs was an  atheist  socialist,   not  a  Buddhist. That's  the  point. Richard  is  not talking about  what  a Buddhist is; he is tc1lking about  Buddhist insight  into universal human experience.

In an award  acceptance speech at the American Society  of Criminology, criminal  justice  reformer Jerry  Miller  (1988) put  Richard's  m point  this way: There   are  basically   two  kinds   of  criminologists,  those   who   think niminals are different from  themselves and  those  who  don't. You cannot

,;eparate  a  criminal's self-understanding  from  our  understanding of  the niminal. More  than   empathy, understanding  requires our  sympathy­

.dlowing ourselves to feel the offender's pain  and  committing ourselves to

I   rying  to alleviate  the  pain  for  us  both.  Buddhist teachers have  put  this

111 '·ssage  beautifully.

Why cite the  Buddhists? There  are two  reasons at least.  One  is to show ll1o1l   people  on  the  other  side  of the  world  from  the  contributors of this

'<>It llllC  long ago reached the same conclusion as Jerry Miller. It should give

11·.   p.mse  about   labeling   the  home   of  this  tradition "third  world," "less

• 1, '\Tiorwd," "undnd,·v,·lorwd" or"developing." Drawing on faraway  tradi-

1"''•:;  III.JV  )',ivt·  11:; .1  IIIII,·   111""' n·spl'd for the  humanity of their  bearers, ""I  111.d·.•· il  " Ill I  It- I• ..... I •   ,J, ·t.d ,J, · 11 •.11  we livl' wt•ll at their expense. The other I•'·'··"" 1•;  111.11  11'1111,·   ,,.,, 1   f\ldl,.,  , .. 1.111·111)',  .d>t tll hl'ing <1 span="span" style="mso-spacerun: yes;">   

criminologist, the L"ol•lill:.l: .  .Ill' l.dl•".''· ·""'"11 .. '"'··1"'"'-11'  I''"'' .111d :;illq>l!·. ( 'riminologists

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jt";l   WiJIJ

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304                                                                                              The Peacemaking Choice

Peacemaking

305

prosecutors, and  correctional workers be  equitable and   just.  This  is ele­ mental to Buddhists but  not necessarily to current bearers of Greco-Judeo­ Christian tradition.  The  Buddhists tell  it  like  it  is,  not  in  some   crimi­ nological  compartment, but  as  a matter  of how  human beings get  along anywhere, anytime. They  make  a statement that  radical  feminists, anar­ chists, socialists, humanists,  and  members of peace  churches can  readily accept  as one  way of stating  their  own  position.

Those  metaphysical physicists were  concerned with  basic issues of defi­

nition: what  is mass,  what  is energy? Criminologists could  use a good  dose of the  same  reflection. Our  most  basic  issue  is: What  is crime?  And  by extension: Why  do  we  use  that  word? What  do  we feel when we  use  it? What  do  we intend to accomplish by  using  it? Richard  offers  us an  idea: Crime   is  suffering passed on  from  one  person to  another; one  kind  of suffering becomes another; we  have  to suffer  with  the  criminal  to put  an end  to the suffering the criminal  inflicts on others. As long as we persist in trying to make  the criminal  suffer  for us,  the problem will get worse.

East meets West again  in a somewhat different way in Kevin Anderson's

secular humanist analysis of the  eschatological premises of an  avowedly religious revolutionary, Mahatma Gandhi, and  an avowedly atheist  revolu­ tionary, Karl Marx.  It is ludicrous to deny  that  Gandhi, Marx,  and  Ander­ son  are considering fundamental issues of the  ultimate purpose of human existence. It is one  thing to  reject  certain institutional forms of religious expression, another  to  decline   to  discuss issues because   they  are  basic human concerns. Kevin like Richard  aims to free us from  these  bounds 011 discourse in criminology. And  when we do, seemingly opposing position•; may   suddenly  become complementary and   mutually  informing likc· Gandhi's and  Marx's.

The  contrast between  the  "Marxists"  Kevin  criticizes   and   the  radic·.d

humanism he espouses is inherent in his research method. Kevin analF·'·  . the  writings, statements, and  practices of both  men  in  their  entird y,  111 historical perspective,  to  distill  their   personalities and   hence   their  c'l 11 '· beliefs.  The "Marxists" take some  unit  of Marx's many  writings and  l'IH·1" lc · it as  an  independent variable,  whose value  is taken  for  granted. 1<1 span="span" style="letter-spacing: .45pt;"> ·. own   method of learning from  Gandhi and  Marx  is an  exampl1· PI   II"'' people learn  in Gandhi's utopian village and  Marx's utopian commlllll'

In criminal courts as in Kevin's  research, turning crime  into  pc'.lll' ,., 111

essence a matter  of how  people learn. Those  who  assunH· llwy k11ow  '''11.11 this  "normal case"  (Sudnow, 196.5)  means      

w<11tior: span="span" style="letter-spacing: .05pt;"> .11    lw. ri  o111tl     111 action.  Those  who  assume the  need  to undcrst;md niH' .lllollll'r  111  111.cll•'

of  crime   are  more   likely   to  m<1k1 span="span" style="letter-spacing: .7pt;"> 1)(',]('1'.    l(1·vi11,   lik1·   t.-11"'''

'"'"L"" 1

Gandhi and  Marx,  h m.Jd1· llw 1.1111'1 "llwl.qlll\':.lc·,d" •  l1111oc'       ll1·. I''" I"'"

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this,  but for myself I also find that Gandhi is right on one point  of disagree­ ment  with  Marx: Peacemaking must  be evolutionary, built from  the bottom up,  rather   than   imposed by  revolution.  The  method is  the  end.   Kevin observes how  prominent women were  in Gandhi's marches. To the  femi­ nists  whose contributions are  discussed below  recognize, this  is the  ulti­ mate  extension of satyagraha (Gandhi's nonviolent action).  Unless  we can make  peace  in  the  privacy  of our  own  homes, men  with  women, adults with  children and  with  older  people, we cannot build  peace outside in our other  workplaces and  in our  nations. Research  on  peacemaking in crimi­ nology  thus  becomes the study of how  and  where  people manage to make peace,  under the assumption that the principles that create or destroy peace are the same from  the Smith  family kitchen to the Pentagon and  the prison. By these  examples we hope  to be able to create  more  peace of our  own.

This is the very theme of Peter Cardella's chapter. Peter tells us about  the Anabaptists, and  especially about  the  Mennonites, who  as Russ  Immar­ igeon also tells us have pioneered the use of mediation and  reconciliation as an alternative to North American criminal  justice in  their  Victim Offender Reconciliation  Programs (VORPs).

Now  that I've settled in Indiana, I am proud of the tradition of the peace churches in this state.  "Peace churches" refers to Christian sects whose members-as Peter  tells  us-are committed to  one  law  only,  the  law  of agape-to love one's  neighbor as oneself.  Among them  the  Church of the Brethren established  the  first  degree  program  in  peace  studies in  the United  States at Manchester College in 1948.  The Quakers have established an  internationally prominent peace  studies program at Earlham College. The Mennonite Central Committee is in Elkhart. Even in a church that  is not known as a peace church, the Catholics  have established a major  peace studies center just down the road from  Elkhart  at Notre  Dame,  directed by tormer  Ohio  Governor John  Gilligan.  And  good  Amish  people live among

us throughout the  state.

Peter  concludes by  observing that  even  those   peace  church members who live in relative  isolation, like the Hutterites or the  Amish,  live "mutu­

.dist"  lives  not  to  live  perfect  lives  themselves but  to  show people   in  a

I  roubled  world  that  "community lived  in  mutuality is possible." More  to llw point, community lived in mutuality exists and  is substantial even in as

• onservative  a  state   as  Indiana.  We  nonbelievers  just  don't pay  much

.II ftontion  to  it.  Living  a  life committed  to  love  rather   than   violence  is llwrdorc not  ju:;l soml'  utopian romantic idea.  It is a long  accomplished

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