AC4’s Peter Coleman in Huff Post: A Vision of Peace for America
“Could America ever imagine itself at peace?”
In the anthropologist Doug Fry’s important new book, War, Peace and Human Nature, he summarizes the findings of decades of research on peaceful societies around the world and argues that assumptions about the war-like nature of humans and the inevitability of war are both erroneous (according to sound archaeological and anthropological data) and deeply ingrained in our culture — and thus need to be countered with a clear alternative vision of a peaceful society. He writes,
The importance of developing an alternative vision is overlooked in many discussions of peace and security. A common assumption is that a dramatic social transformation away from war is not possible. Such an attitude easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having a vision of a new sociopolitical system without war is the first step toward bringing change to a flawed existing system.
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