Episode 1: The Power of Peace

Transcript:

David DesRoches: What does war sound like? [sounds of war]

What about peace? What does it sound like?

Tawakkol Karmen: And we listen to the people outside the demonstrating,

Translator: Simply asking the other person, how are you? And listen to her story. This is a good step for people to feel listened to.

Panel host: I invite you to listen, observe. And please empathize.

Jackie: If you shout, it’s because you don't feel listened [to], so you need to shout to the other person. So when somebody is starting to get angry, the best tool that you can do is like to start whispering. The moment you start whispering, hearts connect.

David D: This is Dismantling the Divide, a podcast exploring the global peace movement through the voices of Nobel Peace laureates, researchers, academics, and young people.

I'm David DeRoche. This episode's called The Power of Peace.

For this episode, I wanna lay the groundwork for this series. So we'll basically be discussing some pretty big questions like what is peace and how do we build a peaceful world? The core of this podcast is built around my trip to Monterey, Mexico in September of 2024 for the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates.

It was a week long event that included a youth summit for college students from around the world. There were close to a thousand students from like 60 countries there, and I talked to a bunch of them. The big question on my mind was this. What is peace?

Translator: Often when we speak of peace, we think of an of a far away concept, something that only government and leaders can achieve.

But the truth of the matter is that peace begins with each and every one of us. Particularly with you, the youngsters, you the youths are the generation.

Student panelist: To me, that's peace building. There's many ways to make a change in the world. There's activism, there's protest, there's boycott, there's divestment, there's sanctions. Man, there's violence, right? That's a strategy to make a change in the world. But here we're peace builders. And peace building to me means meeting each other in the middle, building mutual understanding, so that we can work together as partners to build a future that works for both sides. Thank you.

David D: So we just heard a few thoughts on peace, and clearly peace is personal, but in a world where peace seems almost like a naive concept is, is it even something that can exist on a global scale or is it a completely individualized state of mind, like zen, or maybe it's both or something else entirely.

Sean Duffy: In many respects, when I think of peace, I think of sticking myself on a mountain side, listening to the birds chirp and feeling the breeze on my face and the sun on my, on my back, and just enjoying being in that moment.

David D: That's Sean Duffy. He runs the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Quinnipiac University, and he was the reason that I, and about 20 faculty and students, got to go to the Peace Summit in the first place.

And so Sean's talking about one version of peace, but there's at least one other one too.

Sean Duffy: Peace could easily also be described as human flourishing and as fully functional communities. And, and by fully functional communities, I mean communities in which there are fewer rather than more consequences of inequity. That people have what they need to thrive.

David D: I kind of like that idea, you know, it has this connection to wellbeing and I, I think it's important that Sean said, “Fewer consequences of inequity,” because it may be that there will always be some inequity, right? But if we actively work toward decreasing those instances, well, we're actually building a more peaceful society.

Because, I mean, let's face it, if there's less inequity, then there's less room for people to be angry about it and then lash out. Now, that's not to say that all violence comes from inequity between people or groups of people. I mean, people get angry and violent for all sorts of reasons — and fear, that primal lizard brain emotion, it's a big thing that motivates us and it's being used against us constantly.

Barack Obama: The other day I heard someone compare Trump. To the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day.

Hilary Clinton: Donald Trump fell asleep at his own trial and when he woke up…

JB Pritzker: But take it from an actual billionaire. Trump is rich in only one thing. Stupidity.

David D: And here in the old US of A, the Democrats want us to fear Donald Trump.

So they constantly bombard us with videos of him saying some ridiculous thing. And, and their goal is to motivate us to be anti-Trump. They want us to be against something or someone, or a group of people. And Donald Trump and the Republicans, they do the exact same thing. Trump stokes fear by talking about immigrants and everything else he hates

Sen. John Kennedy: Today's Democratic party, um, looks like the game room in a mental hospital. It's exquisitely shambolic. Uh, the only, the only thing the Democrats contribute to the discussion is just a bunch of rabid barking.

Donald Trump: All of the things that we've given, and they wouldn't vote only because they hate Trump, but I hate them too. You know that. I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them because I really believe they hate our country.

David D: Everything he's mad at is the fault of the Democrats. So his goal is to have people against Democrats and progressive causes in general. Both parties abuse and manipulate our fears by forcing us to take sides in a fight against the other.

This is really obvious during election season. Erica Franklin Fowler is the co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks campaign advertising.

Erika Franklin Fowler: There's no doubt that negativity is more memorable. It is more, um, uh, emotion provoking,

David D: negative campaigning takes up about three-quarters of ad spending on both sides, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. In the 2024 election cycle, Donald Trump's campaign ran hardly any positive ads. It was almost all attack and contrast ads. The co-director of the media project said this was “unprecedented.”

And it is exhausting! I don't know about you, but I am exhausted. I'm stressed out. The news doesn't help either, does it? It's almost always negative reports and fear mongering and war and hate and genocide and starvation and all these things. How did all this happen and what can we do about it, if anything?

Flight announcer: This is the final boarding call for American Airlines Flight ten seventy seven to Monterey, Mexico.

David D: So this brings us to the 2024 World Summit of Nobel Laureates in Mexico. And let me tell you, I've never been to a conference with so many incredible minds in a single place. It included Nobel laureates, like this incredible person.

Tawakkol: I always dreamed that people around the world gathered for a very important thing, which is to achieve peace, justice, freedom, democracy, and prosperity.

David D: Tawakkol Karmen is a journalist from Yemen. She was the first Arab woman to win the Peace Prize back in 2011. She led protests against the dictatorial Yemeni regime in the two thousands calling for democracy and freedom of speech, and she founded an organization called Women Journalists Without Chains, and she was imprisoned and persecuted for her work.

During the Arab Spring, the Nobel Committee praised Tawakkol for her “nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace building work.” She shared the prize that year with two other women, and one of them was at the summit with her.

 Leyma Gbowee: How do you know what you're supposed to work on? There are so many things. And it's overwhelming.

David D: Leyma Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist and feminist who led a peace movement that ended the second Liberian civil war in 2003.

Leyma: It's housing justice is reproductive rights is, and um, L-G-B-T-Q is, is women's rights, is faith issues, democracies, freedom, all of the different things. But as these things are being thrown at you. The one that keeps you awake, like, and you say, every time I hear about housing rights, I'm angry.

David D: From anger, ideas will emerge, she says. And ideas help us build relationships. And these relationships can develop into actions.

Leyma: And you wake up every morning and you have a placard, you and your crazy friend, that's action. And you say: For one hour every day we will stand here and say, rise up to the genocide going on in our world.

David D: And it's from these tiny actions, Leyma says, that's how movements begin.

Leyma: The mistake that we make in our world today is to assume that transformation starts with a multitude of people. Gandhi says, First, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you, then they join you.

David D: In total 12 Nobel Peace laureates from around the world, were at the summit, along with dozens of other notable thinkers in fields like economics, law, business, and the arts. Even Mexico's richest man, Carlos Slim, made an appearance. We're gonna hear from a lot of them throughout this podcast series. We're also gonna hear about how a Palestinian man was accidentally introduced to a massive auditorium full of people as being Israeli.

And we'll also hear about how the laureates came together after that to apologize in a really touching act of restorative justice.

So I wanna kick it off with the conversation I had with Sean Duffy from the Albert Schweitzer Institute. So we talked about the summit, we reflected on our impressions about students' experiences, and we also talked about who Albert Schweitzer was, his theories about respect for all life, and and how that ties into this idea of peace building.

Albert Schweitzer won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in, in ethics, in “Reverence for Life.” And, and I just have a quote from his civilization in ethics where he wrote: "ethics is nothing other than reverence for life. Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality. Namely that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and to destroy, to harm or hinder life is evil.”

Pretty basic kind of conception. But when we are talking about life, all things having, you know, life and all life has value. That was probably kind of revolutionary at the time, at least in Western culture. You know, if you're talking about indigenous peoples always kind of had that, that sense, right?

But for Western society to hear that, they're probably like, what's this guy talking about? But now it's a more accepted idea.

Sean Duffy: Yeah. It leads directly to what we're referring to these days, at least in western culture of, of a more ecocentric view, seeing humankind as part of a larger living world as opposed to separate from or above the rest of the living world, which is sort of the traditional

David: Biblical kind of sense.

Sean: Yeah. Biblical, Judeo-Christian sort of inheritance. But certainly that more ecocentric view is one that's very common in many indigenous cultures around the world. I often say that to my students when I'm introducing Schweitzer about how radical this really was, at the turn of the, you know, 19th into the 20th century, to actually disrupt this assumption that humans were created separate and above the rest of the world and that other living things were there for humans to use or to exploit or to, um, benefit from, as opposed to having ethical standing of their own.

David D: Right. Right. But there's still people today who think the world is there as their oyster that they could just shuck whenever they want to.

So, you know, to the extent that a lot of people have been enlightened, there are still those that wish we were back in the 19th century, unfortunately, pre Albert Schweitzer. But even the indigenous peoples in the Americas, especially specifically the Algonquin people, you know, they thought even inanimate objects that had life, like a rock was, um, a part of the same stuff that we were made of, essentially.

And if you think about it on a quantum level, like there is no you or me, right? We are kind of all the same stuff. So as we progress scientifically, it'd be interestingly to see how that stuff kind of reinforces these other ideas about, um, about how all things are kind of the same and united and, you know, the temporary you and me is just a, you know, construct of our temporal reality. We don't have to get that deep today.

Sean Duffy: Well, I'm thinking about how it relates to such a universal realizable kind of concept, that reverence for life. Um, yeah. How it relates to some things like, um, you know, like the basis of compassion and humility. Really humility. It's like seeing yourself as moving through a world that is inhabited.

I mean, even the, even the rocks and the streams are inhabited with spirit or existence or being of their own that has some value on its own. And, um, you know, it, it, it actually helps me to see that continued relevance of this idea and of Schweitzer himself. When we relate this to, you know, human rights and how we treat each other as human beings, the, the ability to recognize in one another that very same self, or that very same life force, that very same, um, striving to be and that, and some of the same, um, sort of values of living beings, um, means that you can't really other, the other, right. You can't really, um

David D: Because you're othering yourself at that point.

Sean Duffy: Exactly. Uh, you, you can't recognize that some are, are less than and others are more than, or better than.

Um, if we cut down to this very fundamental idea of life and, and then the extension obviously then is to every other living thing and, and quite possibly the rest of the natural world, really. Um, to think of that, it's a very humbling k ind of orientation, which would've been very new and radical at that time.

David D: If you are able to view, you know, first other people, let's start, make it easy, right? If there's a spectrum of difficulty, I imagine being compassionate toward a human being is easier than being compassionate toward a bug, right? I imagine. So let's start there. Let's start with people. Um, so compassion for your fellow human being, right?

Um, if we could get to that point, right, and then maybe start moving down the line. And so that can think, that's kind of what you are doing right, is, is this idea of, of how we build compassion, how we deal with compassion fatigue, especially in light of the COVID pandemic.

Sean Duffy: So one of the things that I think is a takeaway for me, and this is again, coming from a novice in sort of Buddhist philosophy, this idea of equanimity.

Um, and I think this is the one where, you know, to get back to your question about how do we, you know, how do we treat one another as human beings, and then how do we extend that to other living things? I think this idea of equanimity is what kind of Schweitzer was really getting at the. The story goes with Schweitzer that he'd been searching and like mulling over in his head, “how do I pull what I'm thinking and what I'm trying to pull together into a simple sort of ethical principle?”

And he was, um, on the Ogay River in, um, what was then French Equatoria Guineal, um, Africa now Gabon, on the way to or from his hospital there. And he saw a bunch of, um, hippopotamuses, I believe, um, just sort of wallowing in the shallows at the edge of the river. And it, the way he tells that it came upon him, like a, you know, like a bolt of lightning or something.

It's just reverence for life. He just took such delight really in just seeing the living principle in these hippopotamuses and how they were, how they were living there. And the way he talked about this later was that it was the recognition that every living being has this life force and this will to live, this will to fully express themselves in the living world.

And that that made us all the same.

And this is the Buddhist principle of equanimity. It's like when you're looking at someone who seems very different from you or has ideas different from you, I'm thinking about how relevant this becomes in this particular time, we have such a divided country, but to be able to recognize that even those who hold fundamentally different political views to you are also the same that everybody wants to thrive. Everybody wants to be well, to be happy, that this is something that is connected to that life force that we have. And it makes us all the same at the end of the day.

And from that position, now we can have empathy for one another and compassion for one another and move together as a society. And why not extend that to other living beings, as well, to look out and recognize that, I don't know the, the raccoons who have been causing you so much trouble in your backyard, right?

David: They're just hungry.

Sean: They're just hungry, right? They're just other living things. They're just expressing their own life, right? You know, sort of patterns, and you can take delight in that as well.

David D: The other day I was in the dean's office and, somebody who will go unnamed, we were standing around and a spider came down and I, you know, I'm big on spiders, like, I mean, I, I try to only kill mosquitoes as much as I possibly can. The mosquitoes I'm still struggling to have respect for, but spiders are great, right?

They control pests, and so I was gonna take it and put it outside and, you know, my colleague just smushed it. Just right on the spot. And I was like, you know, “let's put it outside,” you know? And she was like, “no, no time for that.” But I think so many people just have that knee jerk reaction to creepy crawlies, you know?

And it's unfortunate. And I think just going back a little bit, you know, to that, that story of, um, of Schweitzer on the river in Africa, seeing the hippopotamuses or hippopotami, or whatever the plural is for that, you know, I feel like, and I wouldn't want to put thoughts into his head, but I imagine, you know, when you're in a location that's very different from where you grew up — I believe he grew up in Germany, is that right?

Sean: Yeah.

David: That it puts your mindset into a place in which you, in order to not be overwhelmed by the differences that are around you, you naturally, at least for me, like we talked about this before, like when I travel, it puts me into a naturally open mind, which you have to sort of occupy or otherwise you'll go crazy, right? Because there's so many different things around you. So you have to be open because it's new, everything's new, and you need to like, you know, keep your wits about you, which, you know, so if it were me, that's what I imagine I would be feeling, you know, if I were him in that moment, already kind of primed for an experience. And so just because he had been doing things for, you know, up to that point that were, you know, leading him up to that point. And then he just happened to have this very open mind because he was in this place that was very different and it kind of popped and I imagine that probably had something to do with it. Like I, I'm not sure if he was wandering the streets of Germany and saw a pigeon like he — maybe, right? But, but you know, that would've been a thing that he was seeing all the time, it wouldn't have, have had this kind of effect on him.

I think there is something to that, right? There’s something to being in an uncomfortable place, which requires you to be open, open-minded, and being okay with that. And I think so many of us, to your, to your point about, you know, where we are as a country, you know, avoid the discomfort like the plague. We don't want to be around somebody who thinks differently than us.

That feels icky. It gets our blood going, you know, our, our fight or flight thing starts flashing, our amygdala's going crazy, but we could really benefit from that. You know, we could really benefit from being okay being uncomfortable sometimes.

I mean, it's so easy to be comfortable these days, right? It's so easy. Everything we want is on the internet, right? You order food, it’s brought right to your face right now, right? Any movie you wanna watch, you can watch it. It's so easy to be comfortable. So we, I think we've gotten less apt to seek out those moments where discomfort can happen and be okay with it.

I don't know. Maybe ultimately what I think I'm trying to get at is, um, let's have some compassion. And the way you can have compassion, I think is by, you know, putting yourself out there being not being afraid of being uncomfortable for a little bit

Sean Duffy: Immediately my mind goes to the value of travel. You know, which I think is embedded in what you were just saying as well, because I can equally think of cases of students I brought abroad who shut down, right? They locked down. Um, when they're confronted with something so entirely different than what they're used to, that their reaction is to shut it off and then to freeze a little bit and look for something familiar or complain when you can't have it if it's not familiar. This often really happens around food in a restaurant. You know, when, when all of a sudden it's like, well, don't they just have a hamburger? I just want hamburger. And, and you can see what's happening.

And some of this is built in, it's, it is our personality types, right? But I'm, I'm persuaded, I'm convinced that it's trainable, within the bands of possibility in our personalities. And this is such a fundamental value as we try to live in increasingly large and complicated and diverse societies, is to be able to have that open appreciation of each other and not just for our own immediate community, although it starts there, but an open appreciation for people on the other side of the world, um, because we all need to cooperate at the end of the day.

So again, I guess if we come back around to, you know, sort of the value of this idea of taking this initial orientation of wonder and appreciation towards that, which is different, um, because it still has that life force, it still has that, you know, recognizable, um, familiarity or commonality with, with what you can connect to.

If you can keep forwad, I think that can be a, a major building block for the challenges that we have ahead of us.

David D: So I went to Ethiopia 10, 12 years ago now, no longer 2007, so geez, almost 20 years ago. Anyway, and my first night I got there really late. So I slept through the day and I woke up in, it was nighttime and I went outside and it was so different. Yeah, it was so different. Um, I was in the city and, you know, there it was very dirty and there were, um, aggressive, you know, um, unhoused people around and, you know, children running up to me.

And I got very defensive. I did exactly what you're saying. I kind of froze. I closed off. I went, and I at least had the mindset to go and eat something, like at a place that was random and it was incredible. But I went back and forth in my first few days between this freezing and this openness.

And I think what ended up happening was as I realized that every time I'd freeze that this anxiety would overwhelm me, and every time I was open that I just felt free and liberated and open. It was just a, it was just like a natural decision. I'm just gonna be free from now on. And so, you know, it was the culture shock that, you know, that I ebbed and flowed between, but then ultimately after a few days I was in, you know? I was open and I was forced to be open and it was like this incredibly liberating feeling. And I imagine like for people who haven't traveled, this might be something that you experience, you experience that, the freeze you mentioned. And um, but I encourage anybody to find the way to just open because it is liberating.

I’ll never forget that feeling. And to this day, um, it's like a memory that I can try to apply to any time I'm in an uncomfortable situation. I think of that. And I think of where I was and the openness that I occupied and how liberating it was, and how everything else was sweeter. You know, everything, all the other experiences that were otherwise annoying were a little bit sweeter because now I was open.

I wasn't all like, you know, oh, what is this? And so everything, even the negative things, had a little bit of a sweetness to them.

When we're talking about traveling, we're talking about Mexico, right? Obviously the trip to the Nobel Laureate Peace Summit. So we we're traveling to Mexico for this event and you know, I've only been to, you know, the, uh, the resort towns in Playa Del Carmen and Cancun and that area, so I'd never been in internal Mexico and I didn't know the history of this area.

It, it is an incredible history and I also was only slightly aware of what was happening in Mexico at the time, um, which was, you know, there was a transition in president and there was a change in the selection of judges in Mexico, which was now gonna allow for judges to be elected. And so a large portion of the population was concerned that that will introduce more additional corruption, because elections, as we all know, involve money and all these kinds of things.

So there were protestors there during the Nobel Laureate Summit. There was one night when I was in my room, I was about to go to bed, and I heard drumming outside and I ran to the door, ran to the window, and looked out, and I was like, what's going on here? And this was before I had seen any of the protestors, this was my introduction to them, just seeing them on the street. I was like, “oh, it's like a protest, I have to go record it.” So I ran downstairs and my initial thought was as I was out there was, this is what peace sounds like because we, you know, we will talk about this in a minute — peace is an activity, right?

It's not necessarily a thing that, you know, we may ever achieve in, in terms of a global scale. But if you work toward it through events like this where you're, you're exercising your right, your democratic right to express your discontent with things that are happening and you're doing it peacefully and you're doing it respectfully and you're disrupting something, right, you're disrupting the traffic, right?

The thing you're doing has an effect that forces people to listen. And that concept, I think. It's so vital for peaceful society, because we're never gonna agree on everything. That's not the point. Right. That's, that's scary. I don't wanna live in that world. Right, right. I wanna live in a world in which we can do things like this and not worry about being murdered or, you know, being defamed, um, or anything like that.

So it was just, it was. It was nice to hear and see and experience that in action, especially today when things are so vitriolic.

Sean Duffy: First off, you know, talking about that, learning that alternating between sort of that. Anxiety, panic, freezing, and the sort of open exploration when you're confronted with a very, very different environment, I think is something that I really, really pay attention to when I'm traveling with students. I'm trying to pay attention to how the students are experiencing it. And so it really doesn't even matter what it is that they're experiencing. I mean, I know I should probably be having conversations with them about, you know, and, and I try to do that, you know, to try to draw them out a little bit. But I'm really interested in that sort of trigger point.

And maybe this is the educator in me, I want them to actually come away from this experience like you did coming back from Ethiopia all those years ago, realizing that it's liberating to let go of some of your preconceptions. I think so many of our defenses end up being negative and they shut us down.

They create more anxiety. I'm thinking of, you know, our reactions to slights or something like that often turn into resentments or things like that. I'm thinking this is very similar to what we're taught about the value of forgiveness. For example, you know, like when, when, when you do me a wrong. I, I can carry that resentment around for the rest of my life and that's just gonna hold me back. When I forgive you, I'm not doing you a favor, I'm doing me a favor. Right? It is liberating me from this, from this, um, negative closing of my ability to appreciate and enjoy my life.

David D: So what is peace then? A feeling? Is it a goal, an ongoing activity? Is it all of those things? Is it something else? What's your vision of peace? Let us know. We're on social media @QUPodcasts.

Thanks for listening to Dismantling the Divide, which is reported, produced, edited, and hosted by me, David DesRoches.

The podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio in partnership with the Albert Schweitzer Institute. In the next episode, we're talking about the power of narratives and how stories can sow division or bring us together.

Bob S: What do we do with that? We're both humans. We both have stories. We both have narratives. It's not about the sol a quote unquote solution. It's about humanizing, uh, the conflict and then working together to, to go from there.

David D: This was the Power of Peace. Stay with us.