A Definition of a Peaceful Culture -- from a 'Timeline' book review
In a book entitled Peace: The Hidden Side of History, sociologist Elise Boulding, who spent 50 years studying civil society, especially those societies and cultures which are peaceable, offers a carefully written description of what she envisions a peaceful society to be like. She writes:
[A peace culture] includes lifeways, patterns of belief, values, behavior, and accompanying institutional arrangements that promote mutual caring and well-being as well as an equality that includes appreciation of differences, stewardship, and equitable sharing of the earths resources among its members and with all living beings. It offers a mutual security for humankind in all its diversity through a profound sense of species identity as well as kinship with the living earth. There is no need for violence. In other words, peaceableness is an action concept, involving a constant shaping and reshaping of understandings, situations, and behaviors in a constantly changing lifeworld, to sustain well-being for all.e
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