Cultivating New Skills

"It was the earth that received the blood of Abel, and it was the earth that was cursed for Cain. Our violence toward one another also breaks our unity with nature. Just as in Genesis the sin against God, the abuse of the tree of life, resulted in expulsion from the garden, so today the fruitfulness of the land is jeopardized by hostility between us. We notice occasionally how our society is dependent on nature, and how the shape of the soils or the snows or the floods influences our well-being, but we seldom analyze deeply enough to know how much our land is being abused in the name of our civilization. As the word indicates, cultivation, what Cain was the first to do, is the first form of culture. To develop a fruitful field demands years of cooperation between the farmer and his land, his learning how to nurture it, how to adjust the crops to the soils and the calendar. Cain cannot be a farmer if he cannot be trusted with his brother's life. If we must constantly be taking refuge in the walls of cities, we cannot be out working the fields.

"This offense escalates, just as we saw the offense of vengeance escalating. What the United States did to nature in Southeast Asia with defoliants and herbicides, bombs and bulldozers, was unprecedented in degree. Yet the fact that nature was the victim was not a new thing. The Thirty Years' War made some of western Europe desert for generations. The Crusades did the same thing in the Middle East. Our battleship artillery again did it to the hills behind Beirut. War always means pillage and scorched earth. The effects of a massive nuclear exchange upon our ecology will be new in degree, but we have always drawn our patient vulnerable mother earth into the suffering we inflict on our neighbors.

"This is the normal extension of the curse of Cain, and specifically of the mark of Cain (the fact that he is protected by a circle of vengeance). What is destroying nature and destroying the possibility of social peace is not anarchy, but government gone beyond bounds. What is killing us is not savagery, but civilization. The saga of Genesis simply describes that fact. That is the way it is: the reciprocal interlocking of genocide and ecocide. The voice of our brothers' blood cries out to God, and we cannot live with our brother on the land. What can we do with a lost creation? What would you do? What would you try to do if you were God? . . .

"Peace is something to be waged

". . . to plan for
. . . to train for
. . . to sacrifice for
. . . to die for

"Peace has institutional prerequisites that don't just happen; they need to be built.

"Peace has attitudinal prerequisites that run against the grain of our nationalistic and racist cultures. They can be brought about only by experiences of unlearning, relearning.

"We are given glimpses of the alternative culture that the nations will create when they have come to Jerusalem.

"The first is what we today call economic conversion. It is expressed in the phrase we know best from the prophecy: swords shall be transformed into plowshares.

"The skills of smelting and smithing will be devoted no more to arming but to farming. The sharp edges will still be needed. In fact the edge of an agricultural implement needs to last longer and to cut more often than a weapon. So to make coulters instead of swords, and pruning knives instead of spears, will mean a technological advance, not a slowing down (just as today the armament industry is the least efficient and least competitive segment of the industrial economy). Thus the prophets' vision is not primitivism or 'back to nature.' It calls for the more expert and more productive use of the skills of smelter and smith.

"The second change to be described is the renunciation of war as the institutional means of conflict resolution. It is not said that there will be no more nations — on the contrary. It is not said that they will have no differences, or no selfish interests. But because the Lord is their arbiter, they will make no plans for war.

"Now we need to remember that war is an institution. It is not something that can happen without planning. A deed of violent personal self-defense may be spontaneous. A nonviolent action may sometimes be spontaneous (although the best ones are usually planned). A deed of reconciliation may be a decision of the moment (although even when such creative gestures seem to be quite spontaneous, they are most often also the product of indirect premeditation and the expression of a gradually learned lifestyle).

"But a war cannot be spontaneous. It must be studied for. It is complex and costly. It demands enormous organization to do things that are not done every day. It needs skills different from those of wholesome daily life. If you don't prepare for war, you won't have war. The prophet says that they won't prepare, thereby aligning himself with the many other places in the psalms and the prophets where the end of war is announced as part of the prophets' hope."