AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

subconscious, and the well-embedded conflict, into action.
The basic point about time is the inertia of structure and
culture. Unless something deliberate is done to counteract them,
they will continue, unabated. A kairos of war may have to be
confronted with a kairos of peace. Better still is a long,
patient khronos of work for peace till the vicious cycle is broken
by a transition from quantity to quality. But how?
Culture: Through each war humanity dies a little. But we are
a sturdy species, otherwise we would have extinguished long time
ago. There is more to us than the sad story told by focusing on
war and violence only. If conflict, in the sense of
incompatibility of goals, is ubiquitous, at all levels of human
organization, from the intra-personal to the inter-regional,
intra-global, inter-stellar for that matter, then we evidently
also have some great conflict-transforming capacity./28/
More precisely, humanity must have great reservoirs of the
three major components of a peace culture, or cultural peace as
opposed to cultural violence: nonviolence, creativity, empathy.
Wars and violence are travesties on these virtues.
That wars are not nonviolent is more than a tautology. There
may be self-imposed restraints in wars, operating on one or more
sides, both ad bellum and in bello./29/ But the point about
nonviolence is to respond to violence and destruction with
something constructive. Wars rule out that response as treason,
and substitutes a culture of secrets/deceits, lies/propaganda./30/
There is no denial that wars may be highly creative in their
destructiveness. But the bottom line remains destruction, of life
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