Why Peace is Elusive

So the question is, why is peace elusive? And the reason is complex, but not totally incomprehensible. And so I hope to show you why peace is elusive and why the work that you do is so powerful. The basic thrust of why peace is elusive has to do with evolutionary biology. Which leads us into the brain and the actual biology of the human brain, which leads us into behaviors, which leads us into dysfunction, which leads us into social norms and culture, which leads us into conflict. So all these different layers are very important in understanding why peace is elusive. So we start with evolutionary biology. The first thing thing to understand about the human brain is that it evolved to solve problems while highly mobile in extreme weather conditions and in a very dangerous environment. And it was also designed— the human brain evolved to work with small groups, clients, small clans, small families, groups of less than 10. When you think about it, think about 150,000 years ago and that's— or even 10,000 years ago and that— or even 1,000 years ago, that's what most human beings had to deal with. You know, the decision-making was pretty complex. What am I gonna have for breakfast this morning? Look in the pot. Well, what did I cook last night? And that's gonna, you know, I mean, it's that kind of simple decision-making. And our brains have not changed at all in the last 150,000 years. And that's a really, really important thing to understand because our brains Although we have a very complex culture and we live in a very complex society, which in many ways is highly collaborative and highly cooperative, our brains are exactly the same genetically, structurally, and physiologically as they were 150,000 years ago. Our brains have not evolved as fast as our culture and society, and this has many, many important implications for us as peacemakers, mediators, and collaborative lawyers. When we talk about reproductive fitness, the ability to pass the genome onto future generations. There is a tremendous advantage to having biomass. That means how big you are. Look at the dinosaurs, how successful they were. If it weren't for the asteroids, they'd still be ruling the Earth and we wouldn't even be here. The more biomass you can accumulate, the more likely it is that you're going to be able to dominate your environmental niche, succeed in passing your genome onto the future. Well, the problem with human beings is that we're— Although we're big mammals, we're not gonna get a whole lot bigger physically and be efficient. So it's not like little lizard becomes a big dinosaur. That just wasn't gonna happen. So we evolved a different strategy for generating biomass. If I go out and chase down the woolly mammoth, well, that's just Doug Noll against the woolly mammoth. But if I get Fred and Julie, McDaniels over there, all my buddies, and we team up, and we go after the woolly mammoth, all of a sudden, my biomass has doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled, like that. So what that meant was that we had to learn to do two things. We had to learn how to cooperate, and we had to learn how to trust. Because by trusting and cooperating and forming groups, we could leverage our biomass to be more successful in terms of hunting, raising children, and surviving in a very hostile environment. So the capacity for cooperation became very paramount. We have incredible capacity for cooperation. Think about what it takes to negotiate a 4-way stop sign. I mean, think about how much cooperation that takes. And if we weren't able to cooperate, I mean, there are laws that tell us what to do and there are rules that tell us what to do, but we all obey the rules. Even though we may be the last one to the stop sign, we go around in a circle. Right? And everybody kind of— you kind of figure out what you're going to do. And we're able to come down the 405 at— not tonight— at 80 miles an hour with bumper to bumper, and we're able to negotiate that without too much craziness and chaos. So we do have a tremendous capacity for cooperation and collaboration. The other thing that comes out of this idea of collaboration is the idea of Identity protection. And so one of the things that happens is, imagine that you're in a clan 150,000 years ago, your family unit, and you see people walking across the savanna toward you. Are they friends or are they foes? Your ability to make a snap judgment and decide immediately how you're going to respond to these other beings coming across who may be competitors of yours or may be friends means, will depend upon whether or not your genome gets passed down or not. Those people who were too friendly and too cooperative and too collaborative and too nice got cleaned out of the gene pool and left us with a bunch of paranoid genes. And so there's this tension that exists between collaboration and cooperation in our brains and the fear response system, which I'll talk about in a second.