Reflection on Violence, War, and Peace: A New and Early Approach to Violence Prevention

By Teferi Fantahun

Reflection on Violence☹ War ☹ and Peace☺: A New and Early Approach to Violence Prevention is a reflection on human conditions and our relationships with each other and with the natural world.

In this book, you will discover:

•How Genes, evolution, and the environment interact with each other to determine how we perceive and react to threats.
•Why some young westernized Muslims are attracted to Isis.
•How individuals, groups, and institutions exploit fear.
•How advances in communication technology and the Internet are increasing cross-cultural interaction to unknown end.
•How your brain determines who you are and how it constructs a reality for you.
•How important it is to expose your child to divers life-enhancing skills and experiences during childhood.
•Ideas as to how human violent behavior and war can be prevented, and cooperation, creativity, and coexistence can be enhanced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Teferi Fantahun
• Release date: Dec 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370758326

Teferi Fantahun

Teferi Fantahun is a freelance trainer and human rights activist. He is the author of Ginbot 7 Ethiopian National Election and Its Aftermath as well as Reflection on Violence, War, and Peace. Mr. Fantahun live in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Reflection on Violence, War , and Peace: A New and Early Approach to Violence Prevention

Teferi Fantahun

© Copyright Teferi Fantahun 2018. All rights reserved

For ebook visit Amazon.com or smashwords.com

Also by Teferi Fantahun

Ginbot 7 Ethiopian National Election and Its Aftermath: How and Why The 2005 Democratic Election in Ethiopia Turned Violent

There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children

- Nelson Mandela

To Devon/Fikre-selam & the Global Youth

Introduction

When we humans look back to our evolutionary history, violent conflicts have been a part of our past experiences. Our human ancestors first fought for survival as individuals and, later, as groups. In the process, we have developed a habit of resolving our differences by way of violence. Even today, we continue to wage war and use violence against each other in order to alter human behavior.

The goal of this writing is to promote ideas as to how we can construct a nonviolent society by means of intervention at the earliest stages of a child’s neural development.

In fact, our violent behavior and bad stewardship of the planet Earth has been a big problem for our planet and its inhabitants. We humans are in conflict with the natural world and its inhabitants, over which we seek to have total domination. Our efficacy at altering the global climate, which affects our planet negatively, has become so alarming that international treaties had to be crafted and signed by international communities in order to combat global warming.

Above all, war remains a major concern of humanity and yet humanity’s passion for war has continued to be as strong as it has always been. Our passion for war appears to be as strong as our innate desire to be alive.

Even in our own time, war appears to invoke our deepest and darkest emotions, and passions. War seems to unleash powerful forces within us. In hindsight, the source of our passion for war ostensibly points to the love or hate we might claim to have for certain people, ideology, places, religion, or things or ideas we cherish. However, the true culprit and the passion we exhibit for violence and war seems to be driven by the will to be alive: our survival instinct, a raw and untainted ancient psyche.

In fact, the kind of blood-boiling passion and raw emotions which we experience in time of war, perhaps, is driven by our natural response to threats: our survival instincts and its desire to keep us alive. For example, in time of war, political or social crisis, we feel agitated and reactive to any semblance of threats, because our brains often amplify the threat’s level and compel us to respond to it. We might feel we no longer have control over our emotional states or our minds and overreact to any type of threats whether such threats are real or unreal. Thus, no matter how prepared we might be for unanticipated disasters, the outbreak of war appears to produce complex emotional states and cognitive cacophonies in our head, which we often recognize the turbulent nature of the states of our minds after the fact and once our minds get control of the cognitive turmoil and incoherent noises of its own mental faculties.

And yet, sometimes war brings out the best in us too. As ancient and contemporary history has shown, humans do show kindness, camaraderie, compassion, and empathy for one another in time of war. However, for some reason, such kindness is not widely recognized and written about. Instead, humanity’s acts of cruelty (action of the warriors) often are widely documented and passed on from generations to generations. But why do we document and pass on the horror of war and the cruelty of men? Who records, documents, and tells about war? What is the role of the hidden brain and how much does it influence historians in the process of recoding and discussing war and its horrific impacts? These questions need to be raised.

Observing how people around the world react to the outbreak of war and the horrifying images we see online, on TV and other electronic devices, one could conclude that war does not just boil our blood, it also disrupts the emotional balance, maturity, and civility we often exhibit in our normal state of existence or during peacetime. War snatches our self-assured and socially-sanctioned proper personality traits and suddenly disrupts our inner balance and emotional equanimity. The outbreak of war often returns us back to our natural state of existence: We either become predator or prey.

In other words, war snatches our deeply known self-identity or the familial self from us. The disruption of our somewhat orderly emotional state and its replacement with the unfamiliar, erratic, and mercurial emotions initiate cognitive discords. Conflicting thoughts about war and how to cope and survive it emerge suddenly. Unlike ideas professed by Samuel Huntington in the clash of civilizations, the clash war sparks within a person’s mind often ignites intense debate between, and among, neurons and circuitries. This mental clash might be a result of disagreement between different regions of the brain—the old (reptilian brain) and the new one (neocortex)—as each is attempting to respond to life-threatening situations.

The internal struggle between the body and the different regions of the brain or between functionally-connected neurons or circuitries could produce emotional instability in individuals. Generally speaking, the struggle between the old and the new brains is expressed by means of neurochemicals and electrical signals as each is attempting to influence the other. Such neural competitions can be characterized as the struggle between the rational brain (neocortex) and the survival instincts (the reptilian brain).

Although most humans are capable of reasoning and desire to be rational, when it comes to the issue of war and survival, the old brain appears to have the upper hand. In other words, the old brain makes the final call when it comes to issues affecting the survival of the organisms. For example, when a fire broke out at the Grenfell Tower in London, it was reported that some people jumped out of their apartment to escape from a burning building. It is also reported that in a desperate attempt to save the life of their child, some parents wrapped their children with blankets and threw them out of their windows.

Thus the mercurial emotional instability we experience in time of war, as well as the desperate actions we take to save life, is a natural phenomenon which we often have no control over: our actions are instinctive. That is why our passion and reaction, for example, to an outbreak of war cannot merely be explained by social, cultural, political, or economic theories alone. Survival instinct, I think, also plays a major role in our passionate and self-preservative reactions, for example, in time of war or other life-threatening situations.

Thus, the traditional explanations of how humans react to war and why they wage war against each other are incomplete. It is incomplete because these explanations are primarily relying on non-biological evidence of human violent behavior and war. It doesn’t fully consider the biological aspects of human violent behavior and the deepest reason of human war making: survival and the fight-or-flight instinct.

Thus, this treatise is an attempt to expand our understanding of human violent behavior and human passion for war from a biological perspective: the role of our instincts and our human brains. By applying current multidisciplinary studies and findings from genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and psychology, computation, and social science among others, this study would attempt to provide a biological explanation of humans’ proclivity to violence and our passions for war. I will also provide suggestions and recommendations as to how each and every one of us can consciously try to either control or assuage the activities of our own autonomous fight-or-flight response system in order to curb its undesirable reactions.

I will also provide ideas as to how we could train children both at home and in school in order to enhance their mental capacities, and the control they can assert over their minds. Through Early Child Brain Development Initiative Techniques (ECBD-IT), we could help the next generation of global citizens to be intuitive thinkers, critical analysts, collaborators, creative problem-solvers, and effective decision-makers. By applying ECBD-IT during early childhood, one might be able to minimize humanity’s propensity for violence and prevent future violent conflicts and war. The early child brain development intervention techniques are also designed to train children in the arts of cooperation, collaboration, fairness, sharing, empathy and collective decision-making skills.

CHAPTER One

The Journey

Evolutionarily speaking, modern forms of humans have only been around for about 200,000 years. It is astonishing to observe that in a very short period of time, humans were able to transform themselves from prey into the most vicious predator and then ascend to dominance. Although this transformation was not easy for our human ancestors, today modern humans are the indisputable winner against their competitors, which includes wild animals and microscopic organisms. Humans are also the most vicious predator against their own kind.

Although initially our ancestors were biologically inferior compared to most wild animals and microorganisms with which they interacted in the forest, by sheer chance humans were able to survive and reproduce in large number. So far, there appears to be no sufficient explanation why humans, from among all other species existing 200,000 years ago, are able to survive, thrive, and dominate the natural world other than pure chance.

The exponential growth of the human population and the hegemony of mankind over other life forms can only be attributed to pure chance, since chance is the only evolutionary advantage humans had that compares to other species. It is a fact that all life forms do inherently care about their own survival and the reproduction of their own species’ genotype and phenotype and this biological process is no exception for humans. And recent studies seem to suggest that survival and reproduction appear to be the primary algorithms (multi-objective programming) written in the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of all life forms. One doesn’t have to be a naturalist to observe the importance of survival and reproduction for organisms: all organisms do care about their own survival and reproduction and it is not any different for humans, either.

For example, if you look at the human sexual reproductive process, this process seems to show both what it takes to survive and reproduce. Let’s look at the journey human spermatozoa, for example, have to take to reach and meet their reproductive partner: the female egg. A spermatozoon has to navigate very treacherous terrain in order to meet its biological complementary match. Once it survives the journey and reaches the ova, it has to pierce the egg’s protective membranes in order to initiate the process of procreation.

On the other hand, thousands of male sperm die while attempting to reach the female egg. As a result, their DNA are permanently annihilated: taking all the genetic information with them. For the lucky one or two sperm that made it into the female egg, the genetic information will get another chance to replicate itself and to transfer its ancient genetic information to the next generation of genes.

Thus, human life begins with a meeting of male-female elements that is followed by a biochemical merge which exchanges ancient chemical information between the surviving sperm and a well-protected egg: a marriage between their DNA affirms the continuity of life in accordance with the law of nature.

All life forms seem to be governed by and obey two algorithms: survival and reproduction. The twin processes of survival and reproduction are nature’s algorithms encoded in our DNA. These two algorithms appear to be significant for humans, too. For instance, threats against life and its processes of procreation and its survival schemes have always been considered by humans, as well as by any other life forms, as a clear and present danger. Any threat against life demands reaction and adaptation, and, in some cases, it requires sacrifice in order to preserve life and to ensure genetic continuity. The selfish gene, as Richard Dawkins suggests, cares only about its own survival and its continuity; other than that, nothing else matters to it. It is now clear that life’s resolve to survive and to reproduce itself is an evolutionarily-determined biological phenomenon.

The will to live also has been a human phenomenon. There is historical evidence to suggest that when