Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War

Abstract

PEACE EDUCATION: HOW WE COME TO LOVE AND HATE WAR N. Noddings Cambridge University Press, 2012 Unlike hundreds of books giving considerable space to the meaning of peace and what it means to live in peace, Noddings' newest book explores the psychological factors that support war. Her aim is to find an answer to the salient question: "Despite the huge volume of work on peace, why do we so often choose to go enthusiastically to war?" Addressing such a question, Noddings' book successfully sheds light on the "centrality of war" in human life and provides helpful insights towards educating students on the psychology of war and peace. For this reason, Peace Education should be required reading for peace advocates and educators, for it offers a broad perspective on peace. Noddings' primary emphases are on nationalistic biases, masculinity, patriotism, hatred, religion's frequent support of war, women's opposition to war, and war as an arena for the discovery of many existential meanings which are otherwise neglected. Rightly believing that, despite the efforts of individuals and organizations devoted to peace, little has been done to change the culture of war. Noddings begins her discussion with the centrality of war in history. As the author describes, beyond armed conflict between nations, war is a form of organized violence. As violence has always been part of human life, she suggests that understanding the biological legacy of violence is vital if one aims to create educational theories and practices to counteract it. In an effort to explain why war has been so central in human history, Noddings purports that both philosophy and religion have supported war, showing war to be the "engine of a state's or nation's success" (p. 10) further encouraging the attitude that peace can be achieved by particular sorts of wars. Given the common view that the "manliness" of a society is judged by the courage and stamina of its military, it is natural that cultural expectations and socialization have promoted pride in fighting. Addressing the possibility of changing this view, Noddings suggests that war might be displaced from its cultural center by encouraging critical thinking on patriotism, masculinity (and femininity), religion, the psychology of war, and love of place and home. Furthermore, emphasizing the connection between language and war, Noddings illustrates how war, for all of its horrors, takes on a positive connotation when it is conducted against some perceived evil (e.g., the war on drugs, on poverty, and on terrorism). Considering that birth is the original violence that all human beings go through, Noddings gives credit to Walzer (1997) for the argument that nonviolent resistance to aggression will rarely reduce the violence of aggressors. Rather, Noddings states that in writing Peace Education her aim is to explore how to "help young people to understand the psychology of war, how easily they can be swept into it, and what sustains the war mentality in our culture" (p. 18). Although Noddings hopes that many of the world's nations have reached the end of this horrific history by rejecting war between nations, she also warns that this hope may be premature as civil wars and other forms of organized violence continue to threaten the planet. Despite the absence of major wars between developed nations since the mid-twentieth century (which has led to the common notion that "we have come to the end of history"), Noddings' caution deserves to be highlighted--especially given that we witnessed 31 wars in 2005, all of which were "armed conflicts within nations between communities divided by ethnicity, language, religion, and/or geography" (Cortright, 2008). Noddings writes, "wars have not stopped, but they changed" (p. 102). Noddings explores war's destruction mainly because government-sanctioned war has not been fought within the boundaries of the United States for over a century and a half. …