Global Health Care Justice: A National Symposium

Hiram College, Hiram Ohio, June 22-25, 2006

Plenary, June 24, 2006

Lorraine Bonner, (c) 2006

Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago

This is who we are: this is a fossil skull of one of our earliest ancestors, Homo erectus, dating back about 1.8 million years. What is remarkable about this skull is that the individual was toothless, and had been toothless for some time before his death. He was well nourished enough for the bone of his jaw to remodel. Think about it. This person was able to eat with no teeth about a million years before humans even began to use fire. How could this be?

Someone in his band of hunter gatherers pre-chewed his food for him. These were our ancestors.

Homo sapiens, today

This is what we have become. These individuals are starving in India, despite the existence of enormous resources in their country and the presence of someone right in front of them wealthy enough to be able to photograph them.

How did we get from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens? What is in that blue box?

The Mess

Sharif Abdullah, 1999

Global heath care injustice does not exist in isolation. In his book, Creating a World that Works for All , Sharif Abdullah describes what he calls "The Mess." These are some of its components. Global health care injustice is a part of The Mess, as is environmental injustice, the distortion of the education system, religious intolerance, the capitalistic economic system, and so on and so on. None of these problems can be solved in isolation from the others, and they are all aspects of the same underlying process, original human nature as modified by that opaque box. I would like to spend some time trying to look inside that box.

I want to say at the outset that many people whose work I deeply respect, who are actively engaged in transforming the world, have looked at that box and said that it doesn't really matter what is inside. They say that starting from where we are, we must work on what we can change now in both our internal and external worlds, and not waste time wondering about what we probably can never know for sure and cannot change.

They are creating a groundswell of non-violent, community based activism, ranging from personal awakening from the delusion of separateness, to changing the charters of multinational corporations. These activists are building the foundation of a new world, in which each of us will contribute the best of who we are and what we do, and will receive all of what we need. This work is essential. This conference is a part of that work.

For myself, however, I have been drawn to that box. I do want to know what happened, how we got from Homo erectus tenderly feeding an elder to Homo sapiens allowing millions to starve. I think an examination of what happened will help us to anticipate and develop strategies to deal with the barriers to change. There are many things about our world that we are not going to be able to change, for example the 6 billion plus population or the unstoppable trajectory of climate change. Some people might even say that human nature is unchangeable. But I believe that if we examine what happened in that box we will find that the most fundamental human core is worth returning to as we change our society and ourselves.

For millions of years our ancestors knew themselves to be a part of the planetary web of life and consciousness. Most of us living now have only rarely felt that deep knowledge, and I think that its loss is one of the most painful that human beings have had to bear.   We will know that our work of transformation is progressing by the degree to which we once again can rest in that web.

Many of you may have read Jared Diamond's very interesting book, Guns, Germs and Steel , which offers a thoughtful and detailed exploration of the environmental factors that led to the development of food production, as opposed to foraging and hunting, and subsequently, to guns, germs, steel and the metastatic spread of certain cultures at the expense of others.

What Diamond doesn't explore is how the evolution of food production gave rise to domination as an interpersonal strategy.   He describes many times the basically peaceful and egalitarian nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and the non-violent way in which they met the food producing invaders. Hunter-gatherers recognized themselves as part of the natural world, younger sibling of the animals, as many Native American cultures put it, with clear obligations to one another. In hunter-gatherer societies of today, no one is left out in the sharing of resources.

This sense of mutual recognition and support is the evolutionary bedrock, the foundation of our social selves, which we are coming more and more to recognize, thanks to genetic and neurobiological research, is hardwired into us. We recognize it in ourselves when, seeing some violent atrocity, we exclaim, " How can someone do something like that to another human being? " Yet Diamond does not seem to find it remarkable or in need of explanation that food production fundamentally changed this interpersonal dynamic. He takes it for granted that food surpluses give rise, inevitably, to domination, war and injustice.

Diamond focuses on agriculture, which only began within the last 10 thousand years, a blink of an eye compared to the nearly two million years since Homo erectus, the first of the hunters, pre-chewed their elder's raw mammoth meat. Before agriculture, our ancestors trusted that the earth would provide what was needed for their sustenance. Agriculture probably began as an accident, as people noticed that melons grew more luxuriously in the place where they went to the bathroom, or that certain ways of harvesting tubers seemed to result in more tubers the next season. But agriculture eventually changed our ancestors' relationship to the earth, becoming an expression of mistrust in the earth's freely given abundance, a self-reinforcing cycle as crop growth depleted the soil and reduced biodiversity. Agriculture, especially the cereal grains whose cultivation is the cornerstone of what we know as civilization, was the first step in the attempt to control and dominate the earth, the first link in the chain that has left us with The Mess.

The hunter-gatherers lived in an ecosystem of diversity where some food source was always available, at hand or within walking distance. Their territory sustained them for generations, millennia. They lived in an environment of abundance. When drought struck, the hunter-gatherers switched to eating foods which were not affected by drought. The agriculturalists saw their crops whither, went hungry, and then, responding to this failure of control with more control, developed irrigation. When monoculture invited insect invasions, agriculturalists tried to control the insects. When the soil became depleted, they developed fertilizers to control the soil itself.

We cannot turn back the clock and return to a hunter-gatherer way of feeding ourselves. But if the essence of what was healthy about that way of life was the trusting relationship with the earth, the sense of the unity of all beings within the spirit of the planet, we can restore that relationship even within the context of agriculture. The organic food movement, farmers' markets and urban gardens in the inner cities, and programs which bring city youth out into the country, where they can feel the living presence of the earth that supports us, are all part of this restorative effort in industrialized countries.

In exploited countries, (I use the word exploited rather than developing, because most of these countries were quite well developed in their own right before the European invasion underdeveloped them, and most of the policies imposed on these countries by the Euro-American multinationals are designed to further de-develop them) the overemphasis on cash crops and the concentration of farmland in the hands of a few wealthy owners contribute more to malnutrition than does the inadequacy of food. Movements promoting land reform and debt forgiveness are crucial to restoring abundance and justice.

With the beginning of agriculture, populations increased, because of the increased caloric intake made possible by grains, and because the sedentary lifestyle shortened the birthing interval. More people made it possible to grow more food in a self-reinforcing cycle. It is in this context that we begin to see the development of hierarchical social structures and domination by force. Once there was a surplus, not everyone had to work directly at obtaining food. Perhaps some people were more skilled at certain tasks, such as tool making, or pottery, or wisely guiding the group's activities. They began to devote more time to those activities, and others supported them by sharing their grain. These early divisions of labor were not intrinsically dominating. Archeologists excavating early agricultural sites find evidence of social equality.

But at some point violence arose, probably, like most other evolutionary changes, as a random accident. Once its effectiveness at controlling the behaviors of others was noticed, it began to be selected for. Diamond states that one specialized class made possible by the surpluses of agriculture were soldiers, at first employed raiding and taking over the land of others. Over time, violence became more widespread, more internalized, more normal. In our times, it is perhaps the most powerful influence on the health of populations worldwide.

Is this kind of violence innate in human beings? While aggression is a trait essential to hunting and self-defense, seen in virtually all animals, wholesale slaughter within a species is rarely seen outside the human realm. In his book, On Killing , Lt. Col. Dave Grossman offers extensive evidence that aggression in human beings is instinctively organized, as it is in all other vertebrates, around display, posturing and submission. Across the board, aggression between members of the same species is designed to be non-lethal, and humans are no exception. According to Grossman, for the majority of soldiers, killing occurs only after intense conditioning, or at a distance, or when the other side has turned to run. I will address this question of the transformation of aggression from posturing to killing in more detail in a moment.

In the beginning, of course, no one realized the downsides of agriculture, and much of human interaction remained the same, probably for many generations. But I believe that something was happening on a subtle level, having to do with empathy. I think that one way we can look at that picture of the starving Indian family is to see it as the end result of a massive failure of empathy, and that empathic failure may be the single most important factor in creating "The Mess."

I believe that we are born with a capacity to feel, not just to know, but to feel, in our own body, the feelings and experiences of other beings around us. There are studies of brain activity using functional MRI that support this idea when applied to actions that one person can see another perform, but I think that properly designed studies will show that some people, and perhaps all people, are able to know the feelings of others, perhaps even when out of sight.

The things I am going to say now about empathy have not yet been scientifically proven. Much of what I am about to say is purely speculative. While there are many anecdotes describing the phenomenon of information transfer by means other than the five known senses, in the absence of an observable organ of empathy, or an accepted mechanism of action, it is difficult to know for sure if this form of communication even exists. But I do believe that there is a physiological substrate to empathy, and speculations such as these will hopefully lead to appropriate hypothesis testing and theory formation.

I think that before language developed, empathic sensitivity at a very high level was the way that all beings, humans, animals and plants, communicated with one another. This is the basis, I believe, of the many stories from indigenous people and the Judeo-Christian Bible, of a time when all people spoke the same language, and animals, plants and even mountains and rivers spoke to human beings and taught them.

This level of telepathic empathy, or what I call radical empathy, became less important after the development of language. Language offered a major survival advantage, but did not completely extinguish the capacity for radical empathy. Today we tap into the matrix of radical empathy when we receive information from dreams and intuition, and some of us are able to access an even wider array of empathic communication.

If there is a physiological basis to empathy, then we can assume that there is natural variation, just as there is with any other biological trait. We know, for example, with depression, that certain enzymes that break down the serotonin molecule vary in structural details from one person to another, and that this variation accounts for some of the different susceptibility of people to depression in response to life stresses. Of equal significance, this biological variation in depression can be completely compensated for by adequately nurturant parenting, in people and animals.

I would like to suggest that the nurturing conditions for infants in hunter-gatherer communities may have normalized the development of empathic capacity even in individuals who might have been genetically at a disadvantage, and that people raised in communities that have developed since then may not be exposed to the same kind of compensatory environmental influences.

Looking at a different aspect of empathy, while the information we receive from the eyes and the ears is gathered and focused in the head, the kind of empathy I am discussing I think of as being predominantly body-based, as feelings, both sensation-type feelings and feelings as emotions, and I would like to say a few words about the body.

We say that we live in a "materialistic" culture, and that the root of our problems is "materialism." I think that if we unpack the word materialism, we are in fact the opposite of a material culture, and if we were more materialistic, a lot of The Mess wouldn't be happening.

The word material goes back to the Latin "mater" which means mother. It pertains to the earth and the body. If we were truly a materialistic culture, mothers would be honored and supported, our bodies would be given only the most nutritious foods and appropriate exercise, and the earth would be treated tenderly and with respect, not ravaged as she is today. Money has only symbolic meaning, it is an idea, not itself material. Although we exchange it for material goods to support our material bodies, the excesses of possession which are usually referred to as "materialistic" are likewise symbolic. A status symbol does not fill an actual material body need.

In order to eat or behave in ways that are injurious to your own body, you must have developed a strong capacity to not hear it, and to give preference to what the mind is telling you, what the advertisers tell you, what the adults in your childhood told you, what your friends say, anything but what your body knows it needs. This overriding of the body's desires is a most fundamental injustice. Our health would greatly improve if we could return ourselves to a greater degree of sensitivity to body communications.

This shutting down to the needs of the body begins in infancy, even at birth, where a baby who doesn't cry is hurt until he or she does. American pediatricians routinely tell parents that it is normal for babies to cry for an average of two hours a day, signifying in my mind, at least, an amazing amount of pain, at a time when the developing nervous system is building an internal representation of the world. Many babies live with even more suffering, such as those left to cry themselves to sleep.   A baby who spends two hours a day in so much discomfort that they are crying is going to have to learn how to shut down to their feelings, just to survive. It's "normal." An empathic baby in a hospital nursery full of crying babies is going to feel their pain also, and do what they can to shut them out.

This is all standard Euro-American childrearing, essential for our adaptation to our Euro-American way of life. We don't even notice it. I would probably not have noticed myself, but for the fact that my first child was born and raised for the first year of her life in Africa, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, about 35 years ago. Many of our neighbors had babies, and it was extremely rare for their babies to cry. One time, when our baby, who had the misfortune of being raised by Americans who knew nothing, cried for about 30 seconds, several people came running to our room, asking, "what's wrong with the baby?" they thought she must have fallen or had some other injury.

The babies I raised my daughter with in Dar es Salaam rarely or never cried, because people interacted with them in ways that they found pleasurable and interesting, and not painful or frustrating. They were always being held by another human being, whereas babies in America spend much of their time in strollers, car seats and carriers.   The most common way that people in Africa played with babies was to give them objects to hold. In America it is much more common to see people take things away from babies. The babies in Dar didn't even have to worry about wet diapers, because their mothers were so tuned into them that when the baby had to go to the bathroom, the mom would straddle them over her legs and let the baby do their business on the ground. I once asked one of my neighbors how she knew when her baby needed to go to the bathroom. She looked at me like I was simple and said, "how can you not know?"

These were not hunter-gatherer women, they were urban people, with close ties to agriculturalists back in the village. They just felt their babies. I wish they were writing the pediatric textbooks.

There is an idea that there is an optimal size for human and other primate groups, called the Dunbar number, related to the size of the brain. Groups are held together by a sort of social glue, which in primates is grooming, and in humans, language, and become unstable as they approach their respective Dunbar number. According to this hypothesis, human groups in natural settings, such as villages, neighborhoods, military structures, schools, tend to become less effective when they exceed 150 individuals, and spontaneously regroup above that size.

People tend to form themselves into these small groups, even in the large cities, even in the empires. Where I grew up, we may not have chewed the elders' meat for them, but on our block, elders and children were everyone's responsibility, and this was in the middle of New York City. Even in the context of the 6 billion of us on this planet, the Dunbar number suggests that interacting in small, village sized, block sized, neighborhood sized groups may be an essential ingredient of global health care justice.

I am going to propose an hypothesis here. I would suggest that the Dunbar number represents the limit to the amount of empathic stimulation a human being can process. Furthermore, I would like to suggest that individuals with a reduced empathic capacity, whether genetic or acquired, may have a greater tolerance for larger settlement sizes. And finally, that those with reduced empathic capacity might also be those who would tend to be able to inflict violence on others with the least psychic harm to themselves, and so rise to the top of their communities by force or threat of force, physical or otherwise. In short, I am proposing that the relationship between settlement size and empathy is crucial to the transformation of aggression from posture and display into violence, and therefore to the emergence of injustice in human history.

With these ideas in mind, I would like to share some thoughts on how to go from where we are today to a world of greater justice.

The achievement of justice depends on the elimination of oppression in all forms. To eliminate oppression we have to study it. In her book, Trauma and Recovery , Judith Herman shows the parallels between individual acts of abuse, such as incest and other forms of child abuse, and large scale political acts of violence, such as wars and the Holocaust. The effects of the trauma, denial and amnesia, dissociation, shame, and toxic residue on identity and relationships, as well as the process of recovery, which begins with telling the story to an empathic witness, these elements are the same, regardless of the size of the trauma.

Studying the Perpetrator

This is a sculpture called " Studying the Perpetrator " which I created as a part of my recovery from extreme sexual abuse which occurred throughout my childhood. At the time I began my recovery there were many 12 Step programs, built on the foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous, addressing a wide range of problems, including incest. In the incest survivor program, a perpetrator of incest was defined as one who violates the trust of another. In early childhood, empathic receptivity, trust and trustworthiness are essential to survival, and experiences in which trust is violated are extremely traumatizing. We are born with an expectation of trust so fundamental that its violation can create a lifetime of disability.

As a physician I found that when I began routinely asking all my patients about personal experiences of childhood abuse, or exposure to abusive or addicted people at any time in their lives, the people in whom such violations of trust had occurred were most often the people I could predict would have health problems. As I reflected on these observations and my own experiences and memories, I began naming many disparate experiences as acts of perpetration, violations of trust, and a series of artwork examining perpetration emerged.

I want to say that I do not consider merely participating in the system we have been given to be an act of perpetration, although there are overlapping and grey areas. Perpetration adds an indifference to consequences, even when these have been pointed out. This emotional impunity is an important feature of perpetration.

Studying the Perpetrator begins an inquiry. Who is the perpetrator, and how is it that, superficially, at least, they look so much like ourselves?

Internalized Perpetration                                             detail

I would like to spend a moment on the word victim. There seems to be a backlash against the use of the term victim, and I think it is part of the effort of perpetrators to make themselves invisible. One of the strongest weapons perpetrators have is their capacity to deny the reality experienced by their victims, even to the point of denying they are victims, or that anything harmful is occurring at all. One of the most insidious forms that this takes is expressed in the statement, "this is for your own good." When you hear someone say that, you may be sure they are about to do something cruel, something that, if they were empathically competent, they would never be able to carry out.

If a person is down and out, they will have different feelings about their situation and plan different strategies for getting back up if they believe they are down because of their own inherent weakness, on the one hand, or because someone bigger and stronger has knocked them down, on the other, especially if that person continues to stand nearby. For example, generations of African Americans have devoted their lives to "racial upliftment," as if there were some flaw which, if remedied, would allow us full entry into American life. In fact, there is nothing wrong with African Americans, it is racism that keeps knocking us down time after time, no matter how educated, how polite, how moral, how patriotic we are, or what perfect standard English we speak or respectable clothes we wear.

Perpetrators want us to believe that violence, domination and injustice are fundamental to our own human nature, and only strict rules and severe punishment will prevent disintegration and chaos. If we believe them, how can we help but despair of any hope for change, for a society that feels good to live in?

Inescapable

This piece is called Inescapable . It is typical of victims of perpetration that they lose their voice, the enormity of the violation of trust is so great that there is no way to verbalize it. Add to this the perpetrator's denial that anything is happening, the control that the perpetrator exerts over language, and the shame that victims feel, and it is pretty amazing that any survivors ever tell their stories.

Memories                                                         Detail

What is more common is that the memories are lodged in the body like the stones in this piece, called Memories . This is where perpetration, betrayal of trust, and empathic impairment enter the world of medicine. These victims are everywhere. Something like 25% or more of American women remember and are willing to report experiences of sexual and physical victimization in their childhood. The figures are probably similar in men. At least one third of American women report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend. In some inner cities in the US, over 90% of adolescents have been exposed to violence. Corporal punishment of children is virtually universal. The health care system is just awakening to the health impact of these acts of perpetration.

This is a world-wide problem, and of course, much worse in countries at war. We know that dissociation, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, and a variety of chronic physical illnesses are common among survivors of trauma. Perpetration itself can be contagious, as victims learn to become perpetrators. We are looking at a global pandemic of these conditions, kept under the radar by the denial generated by the perpetrators, who tell us the problem is the terrorists, or the immigrants, the Communists, the gays, video games or hip hop music. Anyone but the ones who, right now, today, are violating our trust.

And who are these perpetrators? This is where it gets even more interesting, because although there is now a respectable amount of research being done on victims, there is little known about perpetrators. Perpetrators don't think there is anything wrong with them, so they don't show up at their doctor's office to be treated or in research projects to be studied.   Most emergency rooms now screen for victims of domestic violence, but I am not aware of any screening tool that is available for identifying perpetrators. I was taught in my medical training that if a patient became angry at me for questioning their alcohol use patterns, especially if I felt afraid, that that was a sign I was dealing with an alcoholic. I wonder how much more true that must be of perpetrators of violence. Perhaps this is why they are so little studied. Perhaps people are afraid of them.

Even worse, perpetrators have set the rules, and we are so conditioned to injustice that it may seem self evident that a billionaire is a model citizen, while someone who is homeless is a criminal. Why would anyone study a model citizen?

There is some general agreement about some areas. Most people believe that most perpetrators were themselves victimized in their childhood. Most agree that patterns of male socialization make it easier for men to become perpetrators, whether their victims are women or other men. People with privilege may have a hard time seeing how the consequences of actions which perpetrate injustice can affect their own lives, and may feel they have little incentive to change.

There are spiritual teachers, like Ghandi, and those who work with prison populations, who believe that deep within even the most hardened perpetrator is a human being with some retained fragment of empathic capacity, who suffers greatly because they have harmed greatly.  

I have to say this is an area of great difficulty for me. I wish I could stand here and say, as does Aurora Morales in her book, Medicine Stories ,

"Torturers" (one of the essays in her book) grows from my own experience as a torture survivor and from my deepest beliefs about the human capacity to heal. It is a call for a politics of inclusion that abandons no-one, and begins with those it is hardest for us to think about with compassion, the professional perpetrators of atrocities. I call on us all for bolder, more visionary approaches to the constituency of the most spiritually damaged. If we are not to perpetuate the cycles of violence, if we are not to become the people we oppose, we need to understand how such people are created and intervene on their behalf.

Morales, p. 8

As a survivor of torture myself, my stomach hurts when I write about perpetrators. My inner little kids are yelling at Morales, "No! No! Nobody should be nice to them!" My physician self sees them as cancer cells, irredeemably mutated, possessing the surface markers of human beings, and so escaping notice, while they proliferate and destroy us all.

When I get to this point someone usually says something like, well, what are you going to do about them? They mean that in order to deal with perpetrators, I would have to adopt their methods and subdue them violently. I think there may be other options.

I want to return to a comment that I made in reference to the Dunbar number, referring to language as the glue that holds human society together. Language as we understand it: symbolic, grammatical, and able to create an infinite number of new sentences, evolved fairly recently, probably within the last 200 thousand years. As it established a relationship with empathic communication, profound spiritual understanding became verbalized, transformed from the visceral, earth-rooted experience of body based sensations and emotions into the vibrating breath. Perhaps the most fundamental, in my opinion, is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".  

The Universality of the Golden Rule in the World Religions

Christianity

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye so to them; for this is the law and the prophets. Matthew 7:1  

Confucianism

Do not do to others what you would not like yourself. Then there will be no resentment against you, either in the family or in the state. Analects 12:2

 Buddhism

Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. Udana-Varga 5,1     

Hinduism

This is the sum of duty; do naught onto others what you would not have them do unto you. Mahabharata 5,1517      

Islam

No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself. Sunnah

     Judaism

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellowman. This is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary. Talmud, Shabbat 3id       

Taoism

Regard your neighbor's gain as your gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss.Tai Shang Kan Yin P'ien   

Zoroastrianism

That nature alone is good which refrains from doing another whatsoever is not good for itself. Dadisten-I-dinik, 94,5

       Adapted from "The Christopher Newsletter"

The Golden Rule is the verbal distillation of the experience of radical empathy. It reverberates throughout spiritual traditions world-wide. Every human being understands it, and it is the reason that perpetrators have to dehumanize their victims, treat them as aliens who are not included in the great commandment. The Golden Rule doesn't just apply to others who might be able to hurt you back. To anyone who lives close to the earth, it means the earth herself and all life, all our relations. To the mothers of Dar es Salaam, it means their babies, too.

I would not do to a perpetrator anything that I would not want done to me. That is the short answer to what to do about perpetrators. On the other hand, if, out of my own empathic impairment, I was about to violate a trust, I do hope that someone would reach out to me. Those who believe in the fundamental humanity of perpetrators are doing this work of reaching out. Some perpetrators appear to respond, returning to human wholeness, many making restitution in the form of working with other perpetrators. Perhaps there is in reality only a small residue of truly empathically impervious human beings, who cannot become non-violent. Is there a non-violent, empathic way of preventing harm from these individuals, as well as others who may not have yet accessed their empathic core?

Perpetrators usually need the help of others to create the harm that they do, and what they want others to do usually feels bad to the empathically intact individual. I suggest that simply paying empathic attention to one's feelings and not doing anything that feels bad would be a safe way to deal with perpetrators. Just don't collaborate with them. Surrounded by empathically intact people, who refuse to amplify the perpetrator's intent, and who support and protect even the wordless victim, there will be little the perpetrator can do.

But you have to be very attentive to notice what feels bad. Perpetrators often hurt a person for refusing to collaborate, and sometimes it may seem like there is no choice, but there is always a choice. An example would be the young people who sat in at lunch counters in the south, allowing themselves to be beaten because, as bad as being beaten was, continuing to comply with a non-empathic system felt worse. Similarly, writing about perpetrators makes my stomach hurt, and I feel afraid and cold and shivery. But I know that if I don't write, if I don't tell the story, I will feel a lot worse.

So I pay as close attention to the pain in my stomach as I can. I let my body tell its story as if we were a village and the Truth Commission was in session. I listen, and make no promises of amnesty. This is all I know how to do. All over the world, this is what survivors do.

Is it enough?

When I listen to my body, I can feel the grip of the perpetrator loosening. I eat more fruits and vegetables and exercise more. I take the risk of trusting another person enough to tell them what I am feeling. And what I am feeling is this: I am terrified that the perpetrators will come back, that all that has been won will be lost. Isn't that what always happens? The neighborhood health clinic, the innovative youth program, the senior center where they serve elders free lunch? What do the perpetrators care about our truth commissions, our village organizations? The disparities are increasing, the Nazis coming back. A decade after Rwanda, Darfur. The child molesters use cell phone videos and the internet instead of home movies. Strip mining has evolved into mountain top removal.

What does it take to stop them?

Devourer                                                          Detail

And what about the empathically impaired who rise to the top of our society? Politicians who order or condone the bombing or massacre of millions of people, or who cut programs which support the weakest citizens, while enriching themselves and their friends with the fruits of corruption. Corporate CEO's whose pay is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, obtained at the expense of the lives of workers they lay off, or whose jobs they outsource. Who produce slick advertising copy while they pollute our land, air and water. What can we do about them?

The behaviors of these privileged, empathically impaired individuals structure a world in which violence and theft appear to be the strategies most likely to be successful for survival, converting others who might not otherwise be so inclined. But at this point even being at the top of our system is like traveling first class on the Titanic. The culture of violence is disintegrating our world, and what is our role? Are we co-perpetrators, stunned victims, or something else? Who are "we?" Are the "we" who crave social justice and harmony the same as "we" who are committed to punishment as a tool of social policy?   Are "we" "the people" in whose name wars are waged, people are tortured, young people are denied sex education and condoms? And if we do crave justice, what can we do? What can we do that will not be wiped out tomorrow when the grant money runs out or the next administration steals the next election?

Some teachers of inclusivity, deep ecology, and non-violent conflict resolution and communication are reportedly working with individuals at the dominator level of society, attempting to reawaken their empathic capacity, getting them to see the consequences of their actions, and helping them to find strategies to meet their needs which are also congruent with the needs of all beings on the planet. Others are working to change the statutory requirements of corporations to include social justice criteria, such as fair employment practices and environmental stewardship, whereas now, the only legal obligation of a corporation is to increase shareholder value, defined by the non-material, non-breathing standard of money. But is this enough?

In response to the events at Columbine, the recognition of the extent of bullying and despair among youth, and the epidemic of gang violence in the inner cities, non-violent conflict resolution and communication are becoming a part of the standard school curriculum. If we live long enough, we have a chance of seeing future leaders who will have the tools to act more responsibly in the world community than the leaders we have today. If we required education in nonviolent conflict resolution and communication for all candidates for public office, would that be enough?

If we work to restore and support the empathic capacity of soldiers, whose training so brutally overcomes their instinctive inhibition to killing, could we end armed conflict and the devastation it inflicts?

What if the employees of arms manufacturers stopped work on the assembly lines, because they had become empathically aware of the agony of the all the living beings struck by the bullets shot by the guns they were making?

What will it actually take?

America plays an overwhelmingly dominant role in global economics, culture, politics and armed conflict. I think that those of us who are Americans have an urgent responsibility to change our own country, akin to the responsibility that white people have for other white people in the struggle against racism, and that men have in working with other men around misogyny. If we who believe in global justice can reanimate empathic capacity within America, establishing it as the root of domestic and foreign policy, would its worldwide spread be as irresistible as McDonalds, or as firearms?

Would that be enough?

Years ago. I read a book called Flatland , by Edwin Abbott. It is an allegory about a land which exists only in two dimensions, like a vast sheet of paper. Everyone who lives in this land is a polygon, and they only know the directions of east, west, north, south, front, back, but no up or down. One day one of these polygons, a square, was sitting at home with his family when he saw appear before him a dot, which became a rapidly enlarging then diminishing circle, a dot again, and disappeared. He was, of course, quite startled, and especially when the circle reappeared, and, lifting him "up", revealed itself to be a sphere, which, when intersecting his two dimensional plane, appeared to be a circle.

The sphere explained to him that he was from the third dimension, and that once every thousand years, one of his kind was permitted to visit the two dimensional world and reveal the wonders of volume.

The square was astonished at being able to see inside his neighbors' houses, and even inside his neighbors. The sphere showed him the no-dimensional land, and the one dimensional land, but when the square eagerly asked him to go on to the fourth and fifth dimension, the sphere scoffed and said that so such thing existed.

Sometimes I am very much aware of the wholeness of the duality of here where we live. You pick up a dime, and you are aware that "dimeness" is a unity of the head and the tail. Everything in our world is like that, even our judgements of good and bad, even death: a unity of dualities that we can feel in meditation and in acts of creativity.

Everything except for these acts of perpetration .

When we say, " how can someone do something like that to another human being ?" we are acknowledging that these acts are outside of our human dimension, as alien to us, in our north-south world, as "up" was to the Flatlanders. Is there some way to imagine how that could be?

Edwin Abbot wrote Flatland in 1884. Today, ideas about the multidimensionality of the universe are cutting edge physics. Some physicists believe that these larger dimensions may have energies that we are simply not able to comprehend, though in those dimensions they may be as fundamental as electromagnetism is to us, as pervasive as the radio waves and cosmic rays that even now are penetrating our bodies.

Perhaps there is a larger dimensional energy permeating all of us, like the way the sphere came into Flatland. We don't really have a name for it, any more than the Flatlanders had a word for sphere. We know that the feelings and images generated by this energy feel pleasurable to our bodies and make our hearts open up, and we are able to recognize the "other" of the Golden Rule as ourselves. We might align this energy with the things we label "good," but it is only good in the same way that the sphere passing through the dimension of Flatland was a circle. Perhaps it is the energy that holds us together as living beings on a living planet, in the same way that gravity binds us together as a solar system. It moves the universe anti-entropically, in the direction of greater and greater complexity and beauty. I think this is what Ghandi referred to as Satyagraha, "soul force." I often think of it as grace.

In the time before agriculture, perhaps it was as easy for people to feel as sunshine. Now we have to work at it. The same forces that reduce our empathic capacity may also make it hard to receive this energy, and so people feel separate, out of contact, their hearts closed.

When I think of cancer as cells that have lost the ability to communicate with other cells, then I think that maybe the universe feels perpetration is a cancer too, and we who are committed to social justice and the Golden Rule are the activated immune system. There must be other alternatives to killing those cancer cells or being killed by them. They did start out with human DNA, perhaps they have the potential for remission, perhaps we can learn what, if anything, it will take to open their hearts, so they can feel that grace and redifferentiate back to the normal cells they once were. At the very least, we can prevent metastasis. At best, we can prevent malignant conversion altogether. But we have to begin to recognize them first.

As urgently as we need to reclaim empathy and reform agriculture, we need to study perpetrators. We need to know as much about them as possible. We need to recognize the aversion we feel to getting close to them, the many ways they have of making us want to turn away and put our attention elsewhere, and remember that, however scary or painful it may be to look at them, the consequences of not looking are a lot worse.

We probably won't know for several generations if there truly is a perpetrator gene, or if all empathic impairment is related to inadequacies of nurturing. For now, at least we can practice harm reduction, refuse to be transformed by perpetrators, chose not collaborate. We can help one another regain empathic capacity, study empathy, normalize it, celebrate it, teach it, make empathy the subject of a national campaign. We can support one another's survival, hear one another's stories, create art, make music, dance, share our organically raised food, with or without pre-chewing it.

I feel the presence of my Homo erectus genes, telling me how to be truly human.   I know my perpetrators didn't turn me into a perpetrator. There are times when I experience grace, and I know that it is not of this world. If the universe and evolution are on our side, then that just might be enough.

Bibliography

Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions , Penguin Classics, New York, orig. 1884

Abdullah, Sharif, Creating a World that Works for All, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, CA 1999

Diamond, Jared, Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies , Norton Paperback, New York, 1997,1999

Grossman, Dave, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society , Back Bay Books, New York, 1995

Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths: facing the challenge of truth commissions , Routledge, New York and London, 2002

Morales, Aurora Levins Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity , South End Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1998

Rosenberg, Marshall B. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life , Puddledancer Press, Encinitas, CA, 2005