Our Nature of Peace and Conflict

“What makes us moral?” Jeffrey Kluger asks in TIME magazine. His article examines the dark savagery as well as the morality and empathy written in humans’ genes. Our service here at Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in the mountains of County Wicklow, Ireland provokes our personal and individual reflection on human nature. Kluger writes:

“If the entire human species were a single individual, that person a long time ago would have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind – though it can be a black and ranging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn’t lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind – one so sublime, we fold it into a larger ‘soul’. The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one instant.”

This profound conclusion is suggested here at Glencree as we listen to staff presentations and contemplate the current political and social developments within the country. In light of our own country’s recent past, and especially as we monitor the current presidential campaign from afar, we wonder where, indeed, is the “hallowed middle ground” that reason so often seeks?

Last evening, a Glencree Haitian long-term volunteer requested my help with her university class project. “What is the difference between attitude and ideology?” Marjorie asked. In my halting reply, I mused on the brilliant irony of me - a white American woman tutoring a black Haitian woman - on such a weighty subject in the Republic of Ireland’s highest regarded peace and reconciliation institution.

Examples of compromise overcoming ideology surround us here. Most notably, the power-sharing unity of Nationalist leader Martin McGuinness and Unionist leader Ian Paisley.

Kluger continues: “We’re a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we’ve visted untold horrors on ourselves – in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, and Amish schoolhouse in Pennylvania – all of these crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species this planet has produced.”

And that, we conclude, is our paradox…. ideologies can often divide us to a greater degree than idealism draws us together. As Glencree CEO David Bloomfield advised in our first day on campus: “Managing conflict is about managing differences.”

Michele Gran, team leader and Global Volunteers co-founder