Turning Up the Heat on World Peace By Jacob Cook
I get hangry. At certain times of day, or in periods of bodily neglect, a notable edginess creeps into my temperament. Doing her best to support my commitment to peacemaking, my wife Abigail secretly slips snacks into my briefcase and often keeps something else on standby “just in case.”
han·ger (hæŋger) n. A strong feeling of displeasure or hostility as a result of hunger pangs. And hanger is only one physiological possibility for throwing me off balance. Graduate students know these phenomena all too well. For instance, students routinely deprive themselves of sleep, trying to burn the last drops of productivity out of the pre-deadline midnight oil. And how does that play out over the next few days? Dull or slow cognition for a day or two following a stress-filled energy binge,
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at which point caffeine can scarcely sharpen the edge. Weather can mess with me too. I believed the fables about wonderful weather year-round in southern California for about one month after Abigail and I moved to Pasadena. By late-August that year, the temperature had climbed so high that LA’s official thermometer broke, and we had to buy our first-ever window air-conditioning unit. (I’m from the Midwest, where central air is ubiquitous.) Before that purchase, it had been so hard to sleep that I could hardly think straight. Far too regularly, I ignore my body’s basic needs, and rarely if ever does this lead to my benefit. Willing as the spirit may be, my flesh has a perilous degree of executive override authority. Perhaps this is why I struggle with the concept of fasting in the Lenten season. If I don’t really take care of myself throughout the year, giving up something simply does not carry the mean-
ing it should. Chronic abuse of one’s own body can create an environment that is not very conducive to growing the Spirit’s fruit. Not surprisingly, such problems do not diminish as they scale. Take the “Quantifying the influence of climate on human conflict” study 1 released over the summer by a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Princeton. The piece in Science Magazine has been making waves for its bold claim of a strong correlation between violence and climate change. This claim does not proceed from a new theory; in fact, the researchers analyzed some 60 studies into the matter since 1986, re-crunching data from 10,000 BCE onward with updated methods and models. The researchers do not mean to overblow their claims, and are quick to note that climate change is not the only, or even the primary, cause of violence; rather, whatever sociopolitical or interpersonal tensions already exist are simply exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, namely heat waves and extreme rainfall events. Heat is directly linkable to agitation and increased risk for personal violence; whereas droughts and/or heavy rains are more likely to affect agricultural regions, messing up yields and creating (1) the need for cross-community assistance and/or (2) reason for cross-community conflict. All said, climate change is linkable to 1. My information on the “Quantifying the influence of climate on human conflict” study in Science Magazine came from two staff-written articles in the August 15, 2013, edition of Space Daily: “Cool heads likely won’t prevail in a hotter, wetter world” and “Climate strongly affects human conflict and violence worldwide.”
each three kinds of violence studied – personal violence and crime, intergroup violence and political instability, and institutional breakdowns – without regard to societal wealth, geography, or time in history. In an interview with staff from Space Daily, UC Berkeley professor Edward
Whatever sociopolitical or interpersonal tensions already exist are simply exacerbated by extreme weather conditions, namely heat waves and extreme rainfall events. Miguel, who was a part of the research team, concluded, “The climate appears to be a critical factor sustaining peace and wellbeing across human societies.” And the researchers all seemed to hope that policymakers would notice their data and grapple with the underlying issues. Following on the heels of this publication was last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which indicates that the odds of human-caused climate change are 19:1 and that heat waves and extreme rainfall events are “very likely” to become more frequent. In a rather unscientific survey a couple of weeks ago, I asked a group of students from the local Peace and Justice
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Academy, who were visiting the Just Peacemaking Initiative to prepare for the International Day of Peace, whether they felt more motivated and/or more content on sunny days or overcast/ rainy ones. Surprise: the students were pretty evenly split in their preferences. Following up, I tested on them my hypothesis, that such preferences and
perhaps it would be more in line with Michael Scott’s tactic (The Office): dress in layers under your suit, turn the temperature down in your office, and invite an ill-prepared adversary in to negotiate. The same convoluted species of logic funds support of torture: make someone suffer and they will give you the accurate information
If we want to take seriously embodied people as we know them in this world, then we must understand something about human physiology, affect and loyalties, engrained patterns of reasoning/justification. overall physical comfort would affect their motivation/capacity to make peace in a conflict situation. Half of them didn’t believe me, and it being a cloudy day, half of them contested it sharply.
you want. (Studies have yielded really mixed results on this score. “Enhanced interrogation” will often lead the victim to divulge bad/false data to make the torture stop.)
I’m mostly kidding. But I don’t think any of them believed me. Many Westerners are taught from an early age that moral reasoning leads to moral behavior, or poor reasoning leads to bad behavior. Human minds control human behaviors. Physiological and environmental factors, not to mention emotions and loyalties, are neglected for their influence on real-time decision-making.
If we want to take seriously embodied people as we know them in this world, then we must understand something about human physiology, affect and loyalties, engrained patterns of reasoning/justification. Conscious thought plays a significant role, sure. But so much of our day-in, day-out behavior is contingent upon our character formation and our physiological state, which is responsive to our physical environment.
Sometimes, and quite to the contrary, conventional wisdom has suggested that people who are uncomfortable tend to work faster toward a resolution. This could show up in Jack Donaghy’s hostile negotiation book (30 Rock), or
What does the Bible say about all of this? Well, have you ever wondered how the story might have gone had Jesus snacked on some delicious figs in Mark 11? Perhaps he could have shown a little more restraint in the Temple
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that afternoon. Okay, maybe that is not really how I want to support my thesis. But it should be said that the Gospels are full of stories that demonstrate God’s concern for our physiological state, not the least of which being Jesus’ concern for the “least of these” in Matthew 25. He fed thousands of people on multiple occasions, gave them water and wine, healed them of diseases and injuries, and even raised some from the dead. We also read that he calmed storms (and nerves with them) and took time in solitude to commune with God and, I would argue, to preserve the kind of homeostasis that would sustain his way of nonviolence and peacemaking.
mote an ecological order that is hospitable to all human life. Meeting such basic needs can clear the pipelines for higher-level motivations, like a vision of God’s peace and justice in the world.
Please don’t read me as promoting some kind of hedonism. I am simply proposing that we do our best to meet our own basic needs (spiritual ones too) and those of our neighbors so that we are all as sharp as possible for the tasks put before us. During the winter of the year that the city’s thermometer broke, Abigail and I were packing our bags to visit family for Christmas. By that time, it had rained so much that the ceiling in our Ford Place apartment was falling in on us. Our neighbors came through for us in a huge way while we were gone, checking in on our place each night and emptying the buckets that we had catching water. They made sure we would not return to a huge mess. Part of meeting our neighbors’ needs (and our own) is rethinking our way of inhabiting the world so that we pro-
Jacob Cook is a Kansas native, born and raised just a stone’s throw from the Yellow Brick Road. Some of his and Abigail’s favorite things are playing with Apollo Creed (their puppy), good conversation around a well-made cup of coffee, and rolling up their sleeves to make their corner of the world a better place. He currently serves as associate director of the Just Peacemaking Initiative at Fuller (justpeacemaking.org).
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