Spirit in Action
Loren Cobb: Part 2 - Quaker Economist, The Decline of War
Loren Cobb has an exciting and unusual job. As Aetheling International Consultants he facilitates NationLab, a simulation game helping countries of this hemisphere experience and plan for social, economic and political developments. Loren, a Quaker pacifist and mathematical sociologist, works alongside with the military to strengthen our neighbors, and keep the peace. But that is only one of the roles that Loren lives out.
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Jan 2009
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. [music] Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along On Spirit in Action today, we will continue a visit With Lauren Cobb of Ethling International Consultants Lauren Cobb is a mathematical sociologist and his work for a number of years has been to facilitate games with countries throughout the Americas, using simulation models of a number of societal influences and factors. It's complex stuff, but it's exciting grist for Lauren's mill. Lauren also serves as the editor of an online newsletter called The Quaker Economist, and we'll talk to him today about a couple of intriguing essays he's included, one on the relationship between trauma and militarism, and another on the startling evidence that the damage done by war has been decreasing over the centuries, in spite of horrible blood baths like World Wars 1 and 2. Whether talking about realistic measures of economic growth or the history of U.S. meddling in Central America, Lauren Cobb brings a keen, analytical mind and rich personal experience to the topic. Lauren, we've talked a fair amount about your work with Ethling International Consultants and governmental training experience you call Nation Lab, so I'd like to focus on another aspect of your work. Actually, given the devotion that you obviously have for your work in Central and South America, it's somewhat surprising that you have any spare time to take on another major project. In spite of your workload, a couple of years ago you took on the role of editor for the Quaker Economist newsletter. Would you explain for our listeners what the Quaker Economist is and what your role is with it? Sure, well, you know, with the advent of email, Quakers are really sending an awful lot of emails out what they think about this and what they might think about that. Jack Powell's an economist and a Quaker with enormous international experience started formalizing his emails. Initially, it was just a broadcast email to all of his friends. Lots of other people started signing up saying, "Oh, can we subscribe somehow?" Over the years, it turned into an organized letter. Jack is now 89, I think. When he was 85, he was feeling like it was a burden he had to put down. I had met Jack in a Monday morning discussion group on economic problems that has been going on in Boulder for many years, started by Jack. And he asked me to take it up. And so I sort of polished it up with internet skills, you know, trying to make it look into a nice web page and took over primary authorship with the letter. And it goes out maybe once a month if we're lucky. No fixed schedule on any topic that concerns us. There's editorial board now set up by Jack. So every article that appears in the Quaker economist is vetted by an editorial board with very good results often. And it keeps me on my toes. I really like to write, and some of my best writing has appeared in the Quaker economist. But it's not just me. There are five or six other people who like to write occasionally. Most of them, but not all of them are Quaker. And our mailing list now goes all over the world into many government offices. It's read, of course, mostly by Quakers, but we have a huge non-Quaker readership too. It's really been a rewarding thing for me. I want to ask you to speak about the most recent edition of the Quaker economist because it raised up a very titillating possibility from my point of view. Basically, I think what you wrote is that by looking at the data, we can see that violence has gone down. And it may not just be violence. It may be military violence or casualties of war. That this has gone down over the centuries. This is a surprising idea because we're used to thinking, I believe, that the carnage of war has only increased over the centuries. So those are my words. How would you say it? In your own words, what was the topic and thesis of this piece I'm referring to? It just seemed so surprising to me. Yes. Well, it was surprising for me too. And I came across this in several recent publications. I called the article "The Decline of War." And it really does focus specifically on war. Even though many of the sources blur the issue and talk about domestic violence and gang violence, other forms of organized and disorganized violence, I think the interesting story is what is happening to war itself. I've been long interested in the evolution of war, and I have asked myself many times over the years where on earth is this thing going. What will war be like 50 years from now? Because, you know, military historians are always focusing on the evolution of tactics, first the defense gets the upper hand and the offense, both different weapons systems. And military histories feel the history of weapons systems, and those just get more and more lethal as time goes on. Not stopping with the atomic bomb, but continuing from there. So from a lethality point of view, the picture looks very, very grim on the evolution of war. But these recent studies, one anthropological and the other one from an NGO in Canada, have focused not on the mechanisms of war, but on deaths and injuries due to warfare. There's kinds of warfare. There's, of course, the classical war between two states where a couple of nations will go at it. There's broad interstate conflicts like World War II. And then there are intra-state conflicts like civil wars, guerrilla movements, and almost anything in between. There's been a lot of evolution, and the different studies have different timescales. And I want my listeners to really focus on this. We can talk about the evolution of war just in the last five years, and there's a lot to say. There's also a lot to say about the last 30 years of war, last 50 years since World War II. And then there's the really long perspective. What has happened to war over thousands of years? One of the most fascinating books I've ever read is War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley, his subtitle is The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Keeley is an anthropologist and archaeologist who has dug out an enormous mass of evidence that shows that over the time span of thousands of years war has been steadily declining. When measured by the number of people killed and injured. And we're talking about civilians as well as participants, whether they are military, guerrilla, or whatever. The archaeological evidence is pretty dramatic. And Keeley and several other people have been pulling all of this evidence together. It comes from archaeological evidence, historical evidence, anthropological evidence, sociological evidence, economic evidence. It's broadly interdisciplinary. And of course, that means it's dear to my heart. That's what I love. And it gives a radically different perspective on warfare. And it's a profoundly optimistic, beneficial, wonderful development. There are a number of theories on what's going on, and it may be that there are several things going on, too. Not just one reason or one cause. But the growth of the institutions of modern states is obviously a key in this whole thing. The evolution of institutions of modern states is obviously one of the key developments. Unorganized bands and organized tribes throughout the world, and in all of anthropological history, have had a very high rate of conflict. They suffer an attack where they attack somebody else every year, every other year, sometimes every five years, and a couple of people are killed. Well, the thing is these are small bands. We're talking about maybe 50 to 500 people, perhaps a thousand at most. And when you lose one or two or three people every year, that's a high rate of loss due to warfare. Even though these attacks are often ritualized, there's a lot of yelling, a lot of waving of weapons, but it seems like very few people get hurt, except somebody may suffer a spear thrust and go down and die a few days later. Well, it looks like it's not too bad. We're not talking about any mass genocide here. We're not talking about human waves of soldiers and the trenches of World War I with gas rolling overhead and machine guns blowing down people by the thousands every day. But if you divide by the population size and look at the rate of these deaths, it has been going down primarily as the states have become stronger and extended their influence, because within each state of whatever ideological variety you're talking about, whether it's a democracy or a kingdom or dictatorship, within each state, the state takes care of conflict resolution through its justice system. Now, it may take care of it very badly, but nevertheless, feuds are prevented. People don't typically, as citizens of the state, go into a bitter feud and start killing people who they feel have infringed on their property or persons. We have famous feuds in the past, the McCoy's In the Hatfield in the U.S., but we can just about count them. In fact, you can get books on the few feuds that we have ever had. That's one of the roles of the state. It's the due conflict resolution within its borders, and the effect is to drastically reduce the number of feuds that occur. Overall, it seems that this process is resulting in fewer deaths every century due to warfare, as almost as far back as you can see. I say almost because there is a different archaeological opinion from Brian Ferguson, who still hasn't published his big book on the subject, but when it comes out, I expect him to show that paleolithic man, the Ice Age man, had very few conflicts, very few wars, and that there was a surge, pretty dramatic and serious surge in violence and warfare after the Ice Ages began melting. The very first indication of warfare in the archaeological record is back at 14,000 years ago, leaving almost 100,000 years of almost no evidence whatsoever of warfare. Maybe that shouldn't surprise us, after all, because I think it's well documented that in cold spells, crime goes down, doesn't it? Well, of course, yes, but you know that a lot of the world during the Ice Age of the tropical world, it was cooler, but not a whole lot cooler. It's just that the north, where the ice sheets were, was basically impassable. I'm not sure that temperature really had an effect or not, but one thing does, of course, and that is the tiny populations of the world back then. During the Ice Ages, I don't think the population of the entire Earth ever crossed a million, might have, nobody really knows, but I suspect it was in the hundreds of thousands, and it only crossed the million mark in theolithic age. So, if I understand correctly what you're saying, Lauren, you go back in history, instead of hundreds of countries like now, there were thousands, hundred thousands of groups, bans, tribes, and that they would have a handful of mortalities each year or two. So, not big numbers individually, but as a percentage of the tribe, it was much more significant than, say, the USA with a population of 250 million, having just under 60,000 deaths in Vietnam. In other words, one out of 200 every year for a tribe is a bigger impact than 60,000 out of 250 million over eight years for the US and Vietnam. Am I getting this right? Is the conclusion that, well, that they were even worse than we are? Yes, that's the thing. And then my own particular twist on the theory is to ask, okay, what about post-traumatic stress disorder? I think we can argue from these statistics that far more families were affected by violence in the Neolithic era and pre-civilization to such an extent that they were always suffering. There was always an endemic level of PTSD in these societies. Not to mention the addictions that go along with that and the attachment disorders, the psychological attachment disorders from people growing up in addicted families. But in Europe and elsewhere in the world, up until very recently, the only way you could have safe order was by drinking beer or wine. People in Europe 500 years ago drank gallons of beer every day, and it was not that much less strong than it is now, a little less strong. But it's pretty potent brew in order to kill the bacteria and make it safe. So for your health, you drank a lot. People in some countries drank wine, in other countries, it was beer. Beer was for the poor people, wine for rich. But I think the figures demonstrate pretty conclusively, and I'll be writing about this in a Quaker economist, that there was a very high-level alcoholism, which was unrecognized. They didn't even have a word for it in the middle ages. And that combined with the warfare levels of that age and the effects of famines and other epidemic illnesses that swept over the rate of PTSD was just enormous. That, I believe, one can argue, feeds warfare, because people who are suffering from PTSD are extremely hypersensitive. There's an entire book called Achilles in Vietnam on the political effects of epidemic PTSD. Jonathan Shea wrote the book, fabulous book. He concludes that there is nothing more deadly for democracy than two high rates of PTSD in the population. Well, and of course, those rates are going up right now with what's happening in Iraq. They certainly are. And look at the people who volunteered to go to Iraq. Look at who provides our warriors in this country. They're from Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. This is the heart of traumatized USA, where domestic violence is much higher than elsewhere in the country. So I see a very tight connection between trauma, whether it's combat trauma or whether it's domestic violence or other sorts, gang-related trauma. An honor-based society where everybody needs to preserve their self-image to the point of fighting duels to prove that they are good people and militarism. I think there's a very, very close connection. And I spelled it out in an earlier Quaker economist essay called Speaking Truth to Trauma, which has become one of the most well-known pieces I've ever written and has used in quite a few conferences so far. So have a look at that if you're interested in pursuing this. But at the time I wrote that essay, I didn't know about this evidence on the decline of war. So now I think I can make the argument even stronger, much stronger, and show a straight-line relationship. And all of this is very good news for the future because worldwide, generally, trauma rates are plunging. And it's in part because of where we are now aware of trauma. And even though the United States is engaged in the war and that is creating combat trauma, look at all the news about it. People are aware. Veterans are now talking about it. Hospitals are talking about it. Social workers are talking about it. Politicians are even talking about it. This is what we need to start a process of change. Without the public will and understanding and knowledge, nothing will change. And I believe that we're on the brink of some major changes which will continue this trend towards less and less warfare in the world. So I'm extremely optimistic. If you've just tuned in, I'm Mark Helpsmeet, host of Spirit in Action, a program of NorthernSpiritRadio.org where you can listen to all of our programs, find links to our guests, and other information. My guest today is Lauren Cobb, a mathematical sociologist. And he's sharing some of the insights he's had that he's shared with the world through his role as editor of the Quaker Economist, issues like trauma and militarism. You know, Lauren, it is interesting the degree to which we didn't understand back in World War II what they used to call shell shock, a condition that basically went untreated and dealt with. The studies you were talking about, measuring the decrease in levels of violence, at least some of them were about basically Neolithic times versus now. Is that also true if you compare, say, the 1700s, the 1800s, 1900s? Is it still a downward trend of overall violence through the recent centuries? Oh, absolutely. No question about it. It's very striking in the data. The 19th century was a very violent century. The 20th century was violent, too. The violence was a little different and concentrated in a couple of World Wars and a couple of genocides. But the trend is really crystal clear. There are some problems. There are some red flags in all of these statistics. Let me mention a nice short and well-written article for your listeners. Human Security Brief 2006. If you search for that on the web, you will find this great report from the University of British Columbia on recent changes in armed conflict. I'm talking about since World War II. It includes, over the last five years, they find many positive changes going on. One of the positive changes is that growing numbers of wars are ending in negotiated settlement instead of being fought to the bitter end. That particular development is interesting to me because it contains within it a problem. When a problem is resolved by conflict resolution, using techniques we have today between countries that would be at war, the piece that results, objectively speaking, as measured, is not as good as if the war goes to a conclusion. And those of us who have been out there trying to resolve civil wars have noticed this over and over again in an informal way, but now the statistics back that up. The piece that we are now able to achieve using conflict resolution isn't quite as good. Breaks down more easily, takes longer to consolidate. Whereas if you really want to just get rid of the problem, you can take a cynical point of view, step back, fight it out to the very death, and then there will be some durable piece that results. That's not a good situation. And it tells me that we in the peacekeeping community around the world have a lot to do, a lot more research, a lot more hard work on developing techniques of durable conflict resolution. You haven't mentioned the website for the Quaker Economist, and I will have a link to it on my northernspiritradio.org website. But why don't you tell our listeners where to go to find this information, the essays that are posted on the Quaker Economist site. Okay, the Quaker Economist is a publication of Quaker.org, which is a big website out there. The Quaker Economist in particular is found at tqe.quaker.org. The publisher is Russ Nelson, who is from New York State, economist and computer scientist. I'm the editor, and all of the back issues are there, nicely reformatted by yours, Julie, with pictures, and I think it's a very readable text. And we try to deal with the tough problems. Speaking truth to trauma was one population implosion, was another recent one, energy apocalypse, and some theoretical things, like Jack wrote a piece called The World Without Authority. Another friend wrote, "Goodbye to economic man. I've written on the history and future of world energy and corruption in America. We just will tackle anything." And we try to take both a Quaker Lee and an economic point of view, broadly determined. From your point of view, Lauren, what is it that makes it Quaker Lee? From my point of view, it's the motivation that underlies the articles. The concern with what's happening in the world, emphasis on Quaker concerns with slavery, with violence, with rights of children, and human rights generally. Once in a while, we actually will tackle a problem facing Quakers. I try not to do that very much, but Jack has no fear and he will simply wait in with his opinion on some controversy that is roiling the Quaker consciousness. Whether or not as due of economics doesn't matter. But I take a little more hands-off point of view. And I like to say that the Quaker influence in this newsletter is on our concerns and motivations and in our spiritual orientation. And it is not usually the subject of what we're writing about. Let's assume that there was the Methodist economist or maybe the Baptist economist. I know there's danger in applying stereotypes, but what do you think would be the difference between those theoretical publications and that of the Quaker economist? I think you've mistaken our goal here. Jack invented the newsletter in part because of his profound concern that so many Quakers who had powerful political opinions and strong moral judgments were ill-informed about economics, really terribly informed, making egregious mistakes. So many of the original Quaker economist articles are intended to try to educate Quakers about how economics really works, how the real world out there functions, not how they imagine it functions. So he has a number of articles on what it is to be a classic liberal, on regulation, on the nature of corporations, on the nature of money. So some of our most successful articles are on the nature of money, how it really works and what it is not. So we have probably 20 or 30 articles which are really intended to be educational and yet which are founded on stories or personal experiences in the third world. Both Jack and I like to start out with a little personal story, something that we saw somewhere in Africa or Paraguay, and then go from there into a kind of a lesson. Here's what an economist would say, and here's what a quick would say, and here's how to bring it all together into a coherent whole. That's our ideal educational article. So this is really a question of Methodists versus Quakers, as it is simply a feature of Quakers that they almost never read economics, and many are just lost in the ozone when it comes to how a modern economy works. Well, I do have a request for an article, an essay, and I don't know if you've ever done this, but it seems to me fundamental in terms of motivations and guidance that our government often uses to make policy decisions. There are alternate measures rather than the GDP, the GNP that we could use, and the GDP and GNP have some flaws in addition to the benefits that they have as measuring tools. Could you talk about those alternate measures, and could you then promise that you'll solicit or write up yourself, if you get the time, in a future edition of Quaker Economist, an article on those alternate economic measures? Well, I'm pleased to say it's already half written. I have this little file of ideas for the Quaker Economist, and that's one of them. Alternate measures of gross product, whether it's domestic, gross national product, green product, whatever, it's a fascinating area, and along with it, there is the curious history of the GDP, which is a lot less obvious than anyone might think. It's taught to economists in college, in part. Some of the facts are a little obscure. But outside of majors in economics, hardly anybody knows anything about it, it's just one of those things like inflation, which kind of appears there, and you see the published number, and you think, "Okay, that's interesting." But, wow, there's a lot going on under the hood, which might really surprise some people. And as you say, it misses huge aspects of modern life, just beginning with the environment. And so, it will make a wonderful TQE when I finally finish it. I kind of think of using GDP and GNP versus other alternate economic measures as the same difference as between getting recognition for a high grade point and getting nominated for honor society in high school. My understanding is that for honor society, you are more clearly attempting to measure the whole person, and not just at grade points. Yeah, and you know the GDP, the gross domestic product measure, was never intended for such a thing. It comes out of accounting, a system of national accounts, which was revolutionary in its day. But it's only to track the money, full stop, nothing else. And it has been given a whole host of meanings, which really don't have much to do with what we're really trying to measure. It has become reified. It's been made into this thing that it never was, and that measures somehow the national quality of life, even. So, yeah, I agree with what you say. You're listening today to a Spirit in Action interview with Lauren Cobb, a mathematical sociologist and editor of the Quaker Economist. I'm Mark Helps meat of Northern Spirit Radio. That's northernspiritradio.org on the web. Sharing with you stories of people working to heal the world. Lauren Cobb is certainly one of them. He has a number of deep and inspirational thoughts to share with us today for Spirit in Action. Can I ask you, Lauren, a couple of other miscellaneous economics related questions? Because you're not technically, I guess, formally an economist, are you? No. I mean, as far as that goes, I'm nothing except a mathematician. I don't see a clear distinction between sociology and economics. When I was studying sociology, we studied economics, too. As a mathematical sociologist, the core is economics. I don't know. I just have a hard time. I mean, they say that the core of sociology is institutions, and the core of economics is money. And yet, money is the social institution, a very interesting one. Markets are another social institution. Governments are a third. Religion is a fourth. Families are a fifth. If you insist on saying sociology is just institutions, and economics is just a flow of money and goods, you miss the entire fabric of the subject matter. I think it's extraordinarily destructive to make these disciplinary divisions. And in fact, in modern economics of the last ten years, institutional ideas have come to the fore. And people have said, "You know, the problem with development around the world is weak institutions. Weak institutions of government, of justice, of money itself, and what we need to strengthen the institutions." Well, these are economists who are doing sociology, if you believe in the definitions. And sociologists are intensely interested in incentives. You know, in sociology, we often follow the dictum of Marx. Follow the money! Find out what a person's true motivations really are for him saying what he said. Kind of the essence of postmodern sociology. And deconstructing, separating the stated motivations from what might be the true motivations underneath. This is sociology in action. And is that not economic? At heart, I don't see a sensible distinction that can be made between anthropology, sociology, psychology, and economics. It isn't there, except the figment and the minds of academics. Well, the reason I was asking if you were trained as an economist is because there might be some aspect of formal economics education that you might not have been exposed to as a mathematical sociologist instead. So, with that in mind, the Federal Reserve, that's not actually a Federal agency, is it? Right, it functions as one, but you won't find it listed in congressional authority. When you say that it functions as one, what do you mean? Like, what do you do to get on the Federal Reserve Board, and what's their job, their purpose, their powers? The Federal Reserve is composed of regional banks and I can't tell you exactly how people are appointed to those boards, but I believe that they are self-perpetuating critters. In other words, current board members vote on whom to appoint to the board to replace people who are retiring. And, you know, in a well-functioning institution, there isn't that much wrong with that until the system comes under stress. And that's when formal governmental structures do better. We haven't had, in history, stress at that level on the Federal Reserve Bank, and so we haven't had an opportunity to see whether that particular institution can hold up under extreme stress. My guess is that its private status, which you hinted at, makes it actually more vulnerable and less robust to stress. Now, if it becomes a governmental agency, there are other risks attended with that. And we see them in South America all the time when a central bank falls under the influence of corrupt officials. Hugo Chavez right now is trying to take the central bank of Venezuela under his direct control. I can imagine nothing worse for the central bank of Venezuela. But it's a situation in which we need to have some autonomy of the central bank in any government. It has to be fundamentally autonomous, and yet subject to legal constraints, subject to the normal kinds of professional appointments that the civil service has, for example. I don't believe for a moment that we have the ideal system. It works like many third world countries work primarily because of the goodwill of the people manning the positions, not because of the system that they're in. A country like Paraguay, which fascinates me no end, has many institutions of government that kind of function. They really almost work like the Health Department, the Education Department, Police Department. It's sort of kind of work, not because of the way the Constitution reads, which is bad, not because of the political system, but because the people who put themselves forward for these positions actually want to do a good job. These are men and women of goodwill, and they try hard to do right for their country. And it's daggers long, it's not a good way to structure government for the long haul. There really is a number of things about our country and about our government that most of us are pretty ignorant about. For instance, I believe that the agency that's now called the Defense Department, that used to be called the War Department, right? Oh yes, right up deep into World War II. I don't think it changed until after World War II. Which takes me back to a question that I had about your work. You've dealt with, and you deal with, the Southern Command. There is the infamous institution that was formerly known as the School of the Americas. Are those two related, the Southern Command and the School of the Americas? I believe they are. I think the School of the Americas is an educational institution operated by U.S. Southern Command. I could be wrong, but I believe that's correct. And the School of the Americas is rather infamous for the training, the education that is done. It's trained military or the police for a number of Latin American countries, including some of those who use those trainees to brutalize and suppress their own countrymen, right? A lot of this, I believe the proper blame doesn't fall so much on the School of the Americas as a Southern Command itself, the broader institution. I think that the School of the Americas has become a lightning rod for what really was a broad pattern of abuse and misguided foreign policy. During the, well, those way back, you know, we've been meddling in Central America for almost a century, repeated invasions of countries like Nicaragua and Panama, of course. All of them have suffered from marine landing and trying to shake things up politically. So there's a very long tradition of U.S. meddling, especially in Central America, but throughout the hemisphere. And in parts, this has been an extremely sorted story. I mean, the history is really appalling. And it reached a maximum during the Reagan-Bush era, when Iran-Contra was happening. And Ali North was having his day in the White House as a Lieutenant Colonel, not reporting to the Pentagon, reporting only to political people, and trying to work with the CIA, who eventually got so upset with him, they cut him loose. And he had to form his own irregular intelligence service. So the abuses and the malfeasances, the conduct of not just military, but U.S. foreign policy in the region, really stank the high heaven. It was beginning to recede in the early '90s. I came in around 1994 with plenty of worries on my mind, but I came in with the major effort to make a change. And that was the refocusing of Southern Command on trying to interest Latin American armies, in particular, militaries, in UN peacekeeping, and disaster relief, and public service out of the country. That was the way it was thought that we could help these military organizations become far more professional, expose them to UN leadership in faraway places of the world, Angola, Cambodia, places like that, give them a different perspective on the world so that they weren't so focused on just the next coup d'etat, the next meddling in national affairs. And I believe that that change in focus had a profound effect on Southern Command, and it happened simultaneously with Jimmy Carter's human rights efforts. The climate for human rights is now better than it has ever been in Latin American militaries, and also in ours. It's not just Latin America, our own military has come a long way since those black days in the 1980s, and the 1980s were just the culmination of the century of malfeasance before that. So I see lots of positive change, especially in Southern Command, and in the militaries that Southern Command deals with, each is helping the other to improve. There's an awful lot of two-way flow. It doesn't all happen at the School of America, that's just a tiny piece of the picture, which people have latched onto because there were some really bad apples, psychopaths from Central and South American countries who were coming to this School of America to learn from the people they considered the best in the business. When they met with people who had the old Cold War mentality in which anything went and the fight between communism and capitalism, then the result is exactly what you described. When you comment on how you came in with an agenda of how you wanted to refocus their efforts, and how you're seeing it take place, are you saying that our leadership and that of the Latin American countries, that during the years that you've been working there, you've seen a very positive change in those policies? Oh, absolutely. No question about it. Part of that policy is not due to any deliberate or intended change. I see an awful lot of change happening simply because of the circulation of generations. The Cold War generation of military folks are now retired. Their influence lingers on, but it is less every year. And so people in the US military are gradually becoming less doctrinaire, less rigid, less willing to do anything in service to their country, and more concerned with human rights. The human rights disasters that have occurred in Iraq have, I believe, been primarily maybe even 100% due to decisions made at the civilian levels in the Defense Department. And do not reflect the enormous progress that happened with the people who are actually wearing uniform. Most of the atrocities in Iraq are traceable to poorly trained reservists and National Guard soldiers who are weekend warriors who may have, in the case of Abu Ghraib, who came with an experience as prison guards in New York State. Well, you know, prison guards, they have a tough job, but that is a position that attracts some of the worst practitioners of human rights that you could imagine. They were thrown down into Iraq and told to do a job and nobody oversaw it. I think that the military has earned a black eye by not properly supervising what was going on, not thinking it through. Rick Sanchez, the three-star general in Iraq at whose feet most of the blame has been placed, should take a lot of that blame. And it has been a leadership failure, which I think personally started with the civilian leadership in the Pentagon at the time. I guess you get a kind of ringside seat to all of this. You're actually dealing with the military pretty frequently, aren't you? And do you, for example, count among your friends a number of people who are in the military, something that's kind of rare in Quaker circles? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And a lot of civilians who work in the military, but most of the military people I know are foreign. I don't actually get to Washington very often. I live here quite comfortably in Colorado. But once in a while, I venture into the Pentagon, you know, once or twice a year, sit down with this group or that group, and we talk, and it has been a major education for me as a Quaker pacifist. Let me tell you. One of the things that I've become aware of and I've written about in the Quaker economist is the struggle between people in the Pentagon in leadership roles who identified themselves as peacekeepers versus the people who identify themselves as warriors, warfighters. The warfighters are dominant. There's no question about that. But the number of people who identify themselves as peacekeepers is inching up every year, palpably. These developments are being kept in check in part by the political leadership of a country, which is trying to keep the lid on. Rumsfeld spent awful out of his time firing generals who he fought were peacekeepers, and he wanted only warfighters in the Pentagon. Well, he tried and he failed. I believe that people who take a much more comprehensive global view of war and conflict like General Petraeus are actually coming to the fore despite the best efforts of people like Rumsfeld and Cheney. We would be seeing even better developments if it weren't for this retarding effect of the political leadership, but it's continuing nevertheless. I do. I feel like I have a ringside seat to history being made in the Pentagon, a military history that nobody is writing about. I want to bring the spotlight back to you as an individual, as Lauren Cobb, and how you got where you are and why you are like you are and how you were influenced to have the spiritual values that you have. So let me start with a kind of basic question. How did you end up identifying yourself as a conscience subjector? I assume back in the Vietnam War. Right. It was the Vietnam War, and I was a high school student in 1966 entering college. For those who remember the war was only just heating up. It had only recently graduated from just a bunch of advisors to real combat troops on the ground. And when I arrived at Cornell University, the only people who were doing any kind of demonstrations, and boy they were tiny and they were polite, were Quakers. Having come from a Quaker school, I immediately got in touch with them and heard all of their concerns about the war, which I shared deeply. And I was one of the people in some of the earliest fasts for peace at Cornell, and then the whole anti-war thing broke like an enormous wave. I mean it was just like living through a tsunami where we went from almost nothing, from five people on the entire campus of Cornell protesting the war to 6,000 in mass demonstrations, which is about half of the whole university getting together and having a demonstration. And all of that happened within a couple of years. It was absolutely amazing. Of course the original people running the Quaker demonstrations lost control almost immediately, and the thing went wild, and it wasn't just anti-war. There was the wave of drugs, marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, amphetamines that swept over the campus on the huge change caused by women's liberation, gay liberation. It was just such a profound change. Nobody knew what was going to happen next, literally, and it would be the next big thing. And then the next, and so part of it was anti-war, but only part. It was a social revolution in the making. And I lived through that whole bit, the Marches on Washington, the Women's Liberation. It was an exciting time, and very formative for me, of course. It also hurt my education, so I had to go back later on after I got my PhD, and try to re-learn the things I should have learned the first time around. But spiritual values were absolutely essential. If you didn't have them, you felt lost, and many, many people felt lost. They just were at sea, morally, spiritually, politically, and many people were simply following the mass, following whatever anybody I have. Everybody went to a demonstration. They would go to a demonstration. It wasn't that they were so deeply committed, or it's just that they were followers. And I think that that distorted a lot of things. It all happened way too fast. We never had time to consolidate the next psychological idea, like civil rights, gay rights, anti-war, pacifism, before the next thing was upon us. And it took me years, decades, to try to sort it all out, and to come to terms with what I had lived through, and what my values really were. And ultimately, I came back to fundamental Quaker values, the idea that the answer is within you, you have to still all the noise and look deep and long and hard. That's what I did for several decades after that period. And it was decades when I was also recovering from a personal case of severe PTSD as a result of an arson that I lived through. So I became aware of the whole issue of trauma at that time, just as it was beginning to enter the scientific press, the medical press, and the domain of addictions. And I have found personally that the tripod on which my wife rests, the three primary spiritual foundations, there is Quakerism, there is psychotherapy for trauma, which for me was life saving, and there is the 12-step method for dealing with addictions. All three are vital, and I have taken lessons from each and applied them to the other and constructed a kind of personal way of seeing the world, which has nothing to do with traditional religions, nothing but nothing to do with the Bible. It all has to do with finding my own spirituality amidst chaos of life. And turning into gold, I think. Well, I hope so, but it's very gratifying what I do. It is some wonderful work you're doing. I want to hold up for all our listeners to hear my appreciation for you and for your work in Latin America. So many of us have lamented the often deplorable situation there, and perhaps have tried one way or another to influence it for the better. And I recognize that you are applying a lover at a crucial point to help make a difference in that system. Thank you for doing that, and thank you for the gift of Deep Thought, which shines through the Quaker Economist. Well, thank you very much, Mark. I appreciate those words. My life goes on in endless hope, above our implementation. I hear the real thought fall of the moon, the heart yells a new creation. Through all the true, mold down this strife, I hear its music ringing. It sounds a neck away my soul. How can I keep hope singing? What though the dead, this loudly rose? I hear the truth it lived, and though the darkness round me close, songs in the night it came in. No storm can shake my inmost cup. Why do that rock I'm claiming? Since love is loved of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. When tyrants tread all in their fear, and hear their dead narrowing, When friends reach a place both far and near, how can I keep from singing? In prison cell and dungeon vile, our thoughts to them awaken. When friends by sham or all defiled, how can I keep from singing? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. That song was "How Can I Keep From Singing." It's performed there by Enya. You've been listening to a Spirit and Action interview with Lauren Cobb of Ethling International Consultants. Lauren Cobb, a mathematical sociologist, obviously full of deep and compassionate thought, so much of which he shares in the Quaker Economist newsletter, available online at tqe.quaker.org. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World," performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit and Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit and Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing.