3 January 2003, 12:00am IST
Recently, this sentence stopped me short: "Before we can live in peace, we have to be able to imagine, to image peace." On similar lines, sculptor and activist Dana Toomey writes of how once, reading the newspaper, she counted 50 different kinds of war around the globe. Why is it when most of us want peace, war is so prevalent, she wondered. Trying to envision a new culture without war, she asked herself — since humanity has never experienced life without violence, what would peace be like? How would we get the things we want? Who would be our heroes? Is anyone or anything pointing the way? These questions became the driving force of Dana Toomey's life. She formulated an education project in which she asked students: "What does peace look like?" and found how difficult it is to describe what's not there. We usually describe peace as the absence of war since we do not have ready images or language for peace. As a six-year-old girl said to Toomey: "Everybody has a different picture; a different idea. Maybe that's what peace is — seeing everybody's idea." Toomey writes: "These rich conversations, combined with my lifetime studying the way images affect our lives, convinced me that we can only approach the idea of peace through images of the people who practice peace." She went on to create inspiring sculptures of women peace-workers from around the world. Psychologist James Hillman says: "Man is primarily an image-maker and our psychic substance consists of images; our being is imag-inal being." The person who best understood and explained the power of the image was Kenneth Boulding. In The Image, he puts forward the idea that behaviour depends on image, and that the meaning of a message received is the modification it produces on the image. When a message strikes an existing image, several things can happen. The image may remain unaffected, or may change in a somewhat regular way, or become slightly modified, or the message could clarify something that was earlier vague. Sometimes, a message "may hit some sort of nucleus or supporting structure of the image", resulting in radical change. These effects translate into behaviour. In addition to 'images of fact', we operate out of 'images of value' that are our ratings based on an internal scale of betterness or worseness of our image of the world around us. Boulding invites us to see that for any person, or organisation, there are "messages filtered through a changeable value system" that matter more than facts. Repeated or strong messages can eventually hit home to a greater number of people, influencing behaviour. We have only to think of the facts, semi-facts, non-facts put out by any one individual, group, community to convince their supporters against 'the other'. The resulting images can foster violence and war. Only those images we live out can bring about transformation. There are those who realise the power of the image in fostering a movement towards peace and well-being. I use a beautiful quote by Martin Luther King Jr, which talks about the "melody of peace" in an 'Art Corner' for students to generate conversations and create further images about what peace can look like. In November last year, a citizens' group, Insaniyat, organised a lamp-lighting vigil in Mumbai to honour those who, in the recent communal violence in Gujarat, came forward to support, comfort and save those from the 'other' side. This is important because keeping in our minds and hearts the example, the image, of those who wage peace serves as a reminder of what peace can look like. Our task then is to provide ourselves with the capacity to constructively image peace, collaboration, compassion and love. This in no way means being blind to the existence of the former. It does mean creating the energy, space and behaviour to support the latter.
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