affection, to seek the mother's breast. It is only later that we learn -- through our cultures
-- to be violent and aggressive.
"If you had an army large enough to drive the Chinese out of Tibet would you use
it?" I asked him. He laughed loudly and put his hand on my arm. "I hope not, but I don't
know" he responded with remarkable candor, laughing again. "Perhaps they would take
back my Nobel Prize if I did." Then he went on to explain that violent solutions to
conflict and resorts to brute force are ephemeral and do not serve long-term goals:
In the human being, because of human intelligence, force ...essentially is not
suitable unless you change the other's mind. Simply physical change, through
bullying, will not work. ... Through force, physical force, you achieve something,
but very often you create a bigger problem, because... the other party is ... very
unhappy.... Therefore, as soon as another opportunity happens, he takes retaliation.
Although the Dalai Lama’s worldview is counter-intuitive for many, it is a result
of a fusion of the political with the spiritual, the Buddhist with the Gandhian. Moreover,
contemporary studies of combat seem to provide some evidence for his position. It turns
out that soldiers in sustained combat almost invariably have some psychological trauma –
not simply because they are in harm’s way, for the cooks, medics, and chaplains at the
front are not similarly affected – but because they are ordered to kill. So argues killologist
Dave Grossman (1999) who contends that humans share with most other animal species a
natural resistance to killing their own kind, an insight reflected in modern military
training which tries to help them overcome it.
Convention