Beyond War is a must read for anyone who wants to break down skepticism about abolishing war. Fry reviews and rebuts the work of writers who have argued that man is warlike and always has been and, because it's "in our genes," always will be (Lawrence Keeley, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, and others).

He then looks across many cultures to explore cases where war is absent and cases where the society is best characterized as without violence or having extremely low levels of it. He explores the reasons why these cultures-some familiar but many of them little-known-are so different from the violence-prone dominator cultures with which we're familiar.

AFWW provides a detailed review of Fry's important contribution, written for the bulletin of the International Society for Human Ethology (ISHE).

As the website stresses, these are NOT UTOPIAS. The people living in them are not perfect. They are human beings with all of our innate assets and liabilities. What knowing about them does make clear, in the stunning variety of their ways of living, is that plenty of humans have lived without violence and war.

Many, in fact nearly all, of these cultures live in isolated places protected, at least until recent times, from the dominator, warring cultures that have spread across the globe. Readers of this newsletter might recognize a few names: e.g., Hopi of North America, Amish, Nubians, Laplanders (Semaii), and the Norwegians. Take a look at the picture of the distribution. You might want to download it as a visual reminder to share with others.

The Romans, in giving us the example of living by and resolving conflicts by the rule of law rather than by brute force or violence within their communities, also had a great idea, much of which we still use. By limiting power, they also wanted to rein in the ability of a king or dictator to take them to war. The founders of their republic had a vision of a less violent, more egalitarian life, and cultures around them greatly admired the Roman way. But with time the Romans slipped back into the old dominator model of tyranny, and their laws never enabled them to avoid wars with the people around them.

In our time we've had our peace leaders, such as Mohandas Gandhi and the current Dali Lama, with thus far mixed results and certainly not any success in abolishing war. And then there were attempts by governments to rein in wars via the League of Nations and the United Nations. Their level of success speaks for itself. (The book Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace by Judith Hand explores the bottom line, biological reason for failure of these many previous attempts.).

So it's not that we haven't tried. But all have failed, and any moderately educated person knows it and is thus fully justified in profound skepticism about any notion of abolishing war.

To overcome skepticism, we must explain why our time is different. AFWW provides an essay entitled "How Far We Have Already Come". Six key factors, going back roughly 700 years in Western cultures, have brought us to a place where, for the first time in millennia, we have a solid chance to achieve what others before us could not. These six factors are:

1. the Renaissance and Reformation,
2. the introduction of the modern Scientific Method.
3. the reintroduction of Democracy via the English, French, and American Revolutions,
4. giving women the Vote,
5. giving women reliable access to Birth Control, and
6. the development of the World Wide Web (IN)