I would like to begin with two anecdotal and seemingly unrelated incidents from my life. The first incident happened in early 2016. I took my Philosophy of Art class to a local wetlands where the master landscape architect talked with us about the meanings behind the design of Japanese gardens, including the one we were visiting. One of the things he noted was that the paths in the garden were not straight lines leading from Point A to Point B. Rather they were winding, meandering paths that were designed intentionally to prompt people to pay attention to their surroundings and be open to what they might discover around the corner.
The second incident happened much earlier in my life. When I was in the second grade I read a short story in class one day. The story, written by Gracye Dodge White, was called, “Muscle Magic.” It was about a young boy named Peter, who wanted big muscles. He asked various adults what he could do in order to get big muscles. Nothing seemed to do the trick and so he ended up asking Old Mr. Zeke, who was “the laziest man in town” but also supposedly “the wisest.” When Peter met with Mr. Zeke and asked him how he could get big muscles, Mr. Zeke said he would have to think about it for a while, but in the meantime, he asked if Peter could cut up and stack a bunch of firewood for him while he came up with an idea. Peter did this not just once, but multiple times over the course of several weeks. After a while the large pile of wood was all cut and stacked, but Peter was frustrated because, over the course of those weeks, Mr. Zeke had not told Peter how to get big muscles. When Peter finally expressed his frustration, Mr. Zeke replied, “Good land! Haven’t you got that muscle yet?” Much to Peter’s surprise and delight, when he flexed his arm, there was a muscle “as big as a hen’s egg.”
When I read this story, I was thunderstruck. I thought to myself that Mr. Zeke knew all along what he was doing and that he was helping Peter get those muscles even if Peter didn’t know it. I was thunderstruck because I realized that what Peter thought he was doing—just cutting and stacking wood—was not all that he was doing; he was also getting muscles and Mr. Zeke knew this all along. So, what might I be doing and yet not realizing that I was really doing something else? Yes, as a second-grade kid I wondered what I might be
1
These two incidents came to mind for me as I pondered a series of letters that I received and that later I came to relate to the issue of peace building. I titled this chapter “Letters from the Messiah” because it so happens that for six years, between 2007–2013, I had the privilege of serving as the cpp Executive Director, and during those years—actually during late 2010 to the end of 2012—I received 140 letters that were signed as “The Messiah.” I should amend that: most of them were signed “The Messiah,” however, about one third of them were signed “Jesus Christ” and a few were signed “Jesus Christ ii.” These letters came at a rate of slightly more than one per week. They were addressed not to me personally, but to “Concerned Philosophers for Peace,” and sent to my university mailing address. While one per week might seem like a lot, if what The Messiah said in those letters is true, then this was a drop in the bucket, because The Messiah claimed to have sent out more than 100,000 such letters since 1979. These were sent to multiple newspapers, academic organizations, and prominent individuals. (As an aside, each of the letters I received bore a postage stamp, so sending out 100,000 of these would have cost The Messiah about $40,000. Apparently, money and time were not a concern.) For what it’s worth, all of the letters were postmarked from Tampa/St. Petersburg, so, although I cannot say for sure that The Messiah actually lives in Florida, at least that’s where the letters were mailed from.
What did The Messiah have to say? On the one hand, quite a bit, but on the other hand, what was said was repeated over and over and over. Sometimes the remarks were general in nature, such as “World peace will become reality when humanity adopts the Golden Rule as its sole religion” or “All nuclear weapons are to be destroyed.” Sometimes the remarks were quite specific in nature, such as “Second-hand smoke must be outlawed,” or “The governors of Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, Florida, South Dakota, and Indiana shall be recalled,” or “The nation must adopt single payer health care, with Dr. Andrew Weil as the medical czar.” When I say that some of what was said was repeated over and over and over, an example is that the “no nukes” remark
- −World peace will become reality when humanity adopts the Golden Rule as its sole religion
- −The Dalai Lama is the Prince of Peace
- −To better the human condition: defense budgets alleviate hunger, poverty, and disease
- −Global warming is addressed without regard for commercial interests
- −Recreational violence that is now lawful is prohibited globally (except for theater and opera)
- −Non-medicinal drugs, tobacco, gambling, and prostitution are illegal worldwide
- −Liquor is rationed to prevent unnecessary injuries and death
- −Unlimited access to contraceptives and abortion (this enables couples to generate wanted progeny)
- −Nuclear weapons, armaments, and firearms are destroyed
- −Personal income that exceeds $500,000 (usd) per annum is donated to education, social services, and the arts
- −Avowed proponents of violence shall be excluded from peace talks
- −Healthy adults who receive welfare or unemployment benefits shall clean and beautify public property
- −Non-lethal tasers shall replace firearms
- −The use of cell phones by noncommercial drivers of moving vehicles is prohibited
- −Live voices answer government, commercial, and physician telephones during business hours
- −Congress enacts single payer health care (with Dr. Andrew Weil as its medical czar)
- −All students K-12 wear uniforms in school
(As an aside, I’m not sure quite how to characterize remarks by The Messiah: Are they suggestions, recommendations, edicts, commandments, or what?)
Besides this list of remarks that were repeated in many of the letters, there were other remarks that came up in a number of the letters, such as:
- −There should be a graduated national sales tax offering refunds according to annual net income (below $50,000: 100% refund; $50,000-60,000: 90% refund; $60,000-70,000: 80% refund; and so on down to no refund for incomes greater than $150,000)
−Mozart shall be the only music projected by loudspeakers in malls, hospitals, elevators, and other public places; as a corollary, rock, hip-hop, and other mindless sound is prohibited worldwide - −Second-hand smoke is to be outlawed
- −God has caused unprecedented natural destruction as a warning
- −The simultaneous deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson exactly (to the day) fifty years after they signed the Declaration of Independence is evidence as to Divine participation in the affairs of humankind
- −Broadcast program content is to be approved by nationally recognized experts in education, psychology, etc. appointed by a professional committee
- −Political parties are to be disbanded; voters select primary winners after reading ideas publicized anonymously, with qualified candidates submitting 100 word essays for endorsement by the U.S. League of Women’s Voters in each locality
- −God is Nature; Joplin is Armageddon
(I confess I am totally bewildered by this last one.)
Remember at the start of this chapter, I related two anecdotal incidents: lessons from a walk through a Japanese garden and lessons from a short story I read when I was in second grade. I commented that these incidents came to mind for me as I thought about this chapter, or perhaps more accurately, as I thought about these letters. Was there something profound, insightful, challenging, or informative from them? Do they—would they—lead me to some point of discovery? Well, I’m not sure, but let’s see.
First, although there are obviously a lot of eccentric remarks in these letters, they also—in their own peculiar, perhaps eccentric way—point to a number of important issues and concerns, such as:
- −Rational political reform
- −Reduction/elimination of lethal weapons (including nukes)
- −Questions concerning the relationships between what is good for people and what they have a right to do (or, perhaps in different terms: what is in people’s interests and what they are interested in)
- −Social and economic inequalities
- −The interrelationships between rights and responsibilities
- −Specific means to advance peace
- −The importance of education
- −The importance of the arts
Needless to say, every one of these issues is immense and has been addressed by many thinkers. What I would like to focus on, then, is one of those issues and hope to say why and how I think it speaks to the theme of peace building. The focus I will take here is perhaps the surprising one of the importance of the arts.
2
First, a short disclaimer. Although I will be making the case that the arts can be an important component toward peace building, I recognize that the arts have been and are—and, sadly, will continue to be—used to promote and glorify violence. We can all identify many examples of art in the service of violence (e.g., pornography, stereotyping of groups, war propaganda, etc.). Nevertheless, the arts also have been and are and can be used in the service of peace building, and that is what I want to focus on here.
I will begin with two seemingly trivial examples of the power of the arts as a force for peace building. Both are taken from the course I taught on the Middle East at Pacific University. For that class, I recently used as the core textbook, Jillian Schwedler and Deborah J. Gerner’s Understanding the Contemporary Middle East. The first edition of the book had a wonderful picture on its cover: a Qatari woman bowling. I also showed them photos of Iranian families engaged in downhill skiing in the Alborz Mountains in northern Iran. My students were gobsmacked; it never occurred to them that Middle Easterners (or Muslims) went bowling or skiing. But they responded even more when I played samples of Arab hip hop and rock music for them. They loved it. When—via some simple pictures and some music—they came to see that their peers in the Middle East were in many ways (but certainly not all) like they themselves, they were much more open to listening seriously to the views and concerns of those others and to seeing them more positively.1
So, what can be said about the arts and peace building? Well, there are two components here: (1) the arts and (2) peace building. Starting with the arts, there are various dimensions of them that should be highlighted in order to show their value in peace building. One dimension is that of art as product and art as process. Quite understandably, when we think of art, we often (perhaps usually) think of the product, that is, artworks: paintings, sculptures,
A second dimension of the arts that is relevant to peace building is a focus on art as it relates to (1) the artist and (2) for lack of a better word, the audience. There are aspects of art that are particularly salient in terms of the artist. For instance, we often think of the artistic creative process as a matter of the artist expressing herself and the artistic product (say, a painting or play or musical performance) as the expression of the artist. However, many artists claim that this is an oversimplification and sometimes simply not the case. For one thing, the simple fact of self-expression does not necessarily constitute art. A young child in the midst of throwing a temper tantrum is engaged in self-expression, but that ain’t art! In addition, an artist might be given specific instructions or guidelines for creating a particular artwork and this might involve little self-expression (for instance, being commissioned to paint someone’s portrait in such-and-such a manner). The simple fact that actors can express emotions or thoughts in the context of a dramatic scene does not imply that they feel those emotions or have those thoughts. Rather than thinking of art as simply a matter of self-expression, then, many artists claim that “real” art is a matter of communication with others. Self-expression can be a one-way street; what really matters is the two-way street of connecting with others. For many artists, if that person’s artwork is intended, say, to portray sorrow, but the result is that everyone who encounters the artwork laughs or is bored, then she (the artist) has failed. In particular, for many artists, the real significance of art is to evoke a response in others and, ultimately, to create change. For them, art is a form of activism, and, again, not merely self-expression.
Besides a focus on aspects that are salient from the perspective of the artist, there are aspects of art that are especially salient from the perspective of the audience, or those who encounter artworks. Encountering art is—one hopes—an aesthetic experience. The nature of that experience can well be quite independent of what the artist was attempting to convey or portray or
Just as there are multiple dimensions to art, there are multiple dimensions to peace building, for example, the notions of negative and positive peace. I will mention those, but here I want to focus on the dimension of intrapersonal peace and interpersonal peace. Intrapersonal peace is, of course, the notion of peace within a person, that notion of being at peace with oneself, or, for lack of a better term, the notion of spiritual peace. Interpersonal peace is, of course, the notion of peace between persons, being at peace with others. These two notions are obviously intimately intertwined; it is difficult to be at peace with others if one is at war within oneself, and likewise it is difficult to find internal peace if one is suffering violence from others. As we know, violence can be in many forms, not merely open warfare, but racism, sexism, intolerance, disrespect, poverty, etc. Violence can be in the form of acts that are committed (such as open hostility) or by “acts” not just of commission, but also of omission (such as not having access to food or shelter or opportunities to live meaningfully). So, again, there are multiple dimensions of peace, but here I will touch on how I see the arts as peace building with respect to intrapersonal peace and interpersonal peace. I focus on this dimension for two reasons. The first is simply the space limitations for what can be said in a single chapter. The second is that by focusing on this dimension, salient issues and concerns from the artist’s perspective and the audience’s perspective can be highlighted. By starting “at home,” so to speak—that is, from the perspective of individuals creating or experiencing art—we can, I think, get a good and accessible grasp of how arts and peace interrelate.
First, with respect to intrapersonal peace, what is it about the arts that can be peace building from the perspective of the artist? There is actually a lot of literature on the power of the arts for personal growth and empowerment (e.g., the work of Maxine Greene). The process of creating art can be an act of reflection and understanding and even transformation. Having spoken with numerous artists, I can attest to many of them claiming that the process of
Along this line of the empowering aspect of art for intrapersonal peace, there are also aspects, again from the perspective of the artist, of interpersonal peace. Despite the stereotype of the lone artist, say, painting pictures in a garret, much art is collective and collaborative. When it comes to most of the arts, there are multiple artists involved in the creation of an artwork. The performing arts especially—theatre, music, dance, film, etc.—all involve the creative collaboration and cooperation of many artists. Theatre involves actors, script writers, stage managers, costume designers, lighting designers, sound technicians, and others. A dance performance involves dancers, choreographers, regisseurs (i.e., stage directors), musicians, costume designers, lighting designers, and so on. The point is that for the creative process to work, this involves collective collaboration, working well with others. To that extent, it is the practice of interpersonal peace.
From the perspective of the audience, that is again, the perspective not of the creative artist but of those who encounter artworks and have an aesthetic experience, there are also aspects that relate to both intrapersonal peace and interpersonal peace. Above I mentioned that my students responded immediately and unhesitatingly to Arab hip hop and rock music. It spoke to them. By experiencing an artwork, they felt a connection that they did not feel nearly as much given my lectures on the history and geography and politics of the region. For lack of a better term, I will say that there was a response of empathy. From the perspective of the receiver of art, because of the nature of aesthetic response, there was a direct emotional connection. Suddenly, Middle Easterners and Muslims (at least some of them) did not seem so foreign or “Other” as they had before. There was, I want to claim, personal growth and transformation for these students, not as artists/creators of artworks, but as receivers and experiencers at the level of aesthetics.
It is perhaps because art is an engagement with the world that is largely, although certainly not completely, non-cognitive, that it has the transformative power that it has. Art certainly is not “merely emotional.” We all know the phrase that artists themselves say: it is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. Creating art is hard work and usually involves going over and over one’s efforts: revising, altering, editing until a product emerges from that creative process. Nonetheless, for the receivers of art, the aesthetic connection with the product is largely non-cognitive. A song or photograph or painting or dance performance just hits you. And it is universal, in the sense that aesthetic experience is something that crosses time and place and culture. It is inborn; from early childhood, children just naturally want to draw, sing, dance, pretend (i.e., act), etc. As humans we engage in artistic activities. In addition, we respond to it. Of course, we do not all have the same aesthetic response—again, the film that I find to be sad and moving you might find to be maudlin and sappy—but humans everywhere engage in and respond to art. It is this universality that is one feature of art that makes it capable of being a tool for peace building. Because the arts are so basic to us as humans and because it touches us at such a deep, non-cognitive level, it has the potential to allow us to connect as humans, regardless of whether or not we are Israeli or Arab, Hindu or Christian, Democrat or Republican, Coloradan or New Yorker.
As a quick addendum, I would like to note that there are several existing programs that explicitly make connections between peace building and the arts. One in particular is at Brandeis University, where students can minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation. That program has a two-volume publication entitled, Acting Together: Performance and the Creative Transformation of Conflict, edited by Cynthia E. Cohen, Roberto Gutiérrez Varea, and Polly O. Walker. There are also programs at the United States Institute of Peace and York St. John University (in York, England).
3
So, as one form of pacifist action, I think, we can and should speak up for a greater respect for the arts and be stronger advocates for funding them. (As we all know, when the time comes for education budget cuts, the arts are usually first on the chopping block because they are seen as less important than other areas.) Let us turn our swords not only into plowshares, but also into paintings and dances and music. Make love, not war? You bet! But let’s also make movies about love, not war. This notion—art as a means of social and political activism—is certainly not new. It is as old as Aristophanes, writing
In the end, then, although I am not thrilled with The Messiah’s edict that “Mozart shall be the only music projected by loudspeakers in malls, hospitals, elevators, and other public places; as a corollary, rock, hip-hop, and other mindless sound is prohibited worldwide,” I do share The Messiah’s concern that the arts are a significant component for the advancement of peace. Perhaps, having read through dozens of letters from The Messiah—a metaphoric Japanese garden—I have been led not from Point A to Point B, but to paying more attention to the journey and my surroundings. Perhaps, The Messiah, like Mr. Zeke, was helping me (us?) to develop pacifist muscles even though I didn’t recognize it at the time.
While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, there are aspects of this example that speak to feminist issues and concerns. One of the aspects is that the response to these pictures was one of empathy, both from the male students in the class and the female students (even though, for many people, empathy is seen as a “female” trait or response). These photos also led to a brief discussion, which was dealt with later in the course in much greater detail and depth, of the status and treatment of women in the Middle East and with respect to Islam. One point that was raised at the time was that there have been a number of women heads of government in predominantly Muslim countries, while there has never been a woman president of the United States. Among the women heads of government in those countries were Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan) in the 1980s, Khaleda Zia (Bangladesh) in the 1990s, and Tansu Çiller (Turkey) in the 1990s. Of course, this fact does not address the complexities of feminist issues or concerns that are relevant here, but, again, a full treatment of those complexities is beyond the present scope of this chapter.