I've spent about six weeks now unfolding a philosophical perspective that humanity will evolve, and we will eventually come to a condition of universal peace. I've also carefully inserted the notion that it is within our collective power to hasten that eventuality. Indeed, that being the premise, it becomes our collective duty to hasten universal peace..
Now how do we go about the business of peacemaking? Shall we all find a stage and act as if we've won a beauty contest, and say that we pray for world peace? If you have access to an audience, and feel inspired to do so, I encourage your sentiment, but I'm skeptical that you will accomplish much.
What is needed is a disciplined, organized approach. Specifically, a group working for peace should have good statistical knowledge of the society they wish to act upon, and the obstacles to peace which are presented. The group must develop a plan with acheivable and measurable objectives, and monitor progress, thereby developing a process which will drive improvements in the peaceful actions of that society. When the objectives are met, they should be reviewed, the processes continously improved via statistical control.
If you've been reading along in my posts, this activity sounds like nothing I have said so far. If you've been involved in peace movements in the past it probably sounds unfamiliar as well. This isn't a call for building an enormous rally in a city park and chanting slogans. In fact, it sounds like dreadfully dull, uninspired stuff. Happily, while it sounds like a dreadful process, it will simply manifest as a set of actions which will be oriented toward acheivable goals and pointed toward an ever improving peace dynamic. It will have dull bits, because it entails some hard work and some statistical work, but it will be uplifting and inspiring work as goals are met.
This sounds so utterly foreign to traditional peace organizing because it is, in fact, business theory. I had the pleasure of spending several years at a small but prominent business school, where I was introduced to the theories of W. Edwards Deming, a well-known statististicial and business innovator, who advocated a statistically driven continuous improvement method, which revolutionized several industries. In the years since I completed my studies there, I have come to realize that his model can be almost universally applied to human endeavors. Peacemaking, I believe, is especially well-suited to the model. Apparently Dr. Deming also felt this way; shortly before his death, he formed the Deming Institiute, dedicated to innovations for commerce, prosperity and peace.
One of the hard things about approaching peace with anything like a statistical approach is that we commonly see peace, and peacemaking as a 'fuzzy' concept, where the difference between peace and a state of non-peace (which I hope you agree is far broader that the presence of war) is hard to define. In fact, it will probably take several posts to get through definitions, and we might have some give and take over those definitions. For now, I'll leave you one of the best data sources for conflicts around the world, the Uppsala Conflict Database Project (UCDP), which has information on virtually every conflict since 1946 in the world. Please take a look at it at http://www.ucdp.uu.se/gpdatabase/search.php . By the way Uppsala is an elite Swedish University (and city), which devotes a great amount of it's resources to peace studies.
In my next post, I hope to give you an illustration of what I'm talking about, by using a hypothetical example of organizing a peace organization in a US congressional district. Hopefully, my illustration will clarify the way I propose to organize the peace process.
Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment