I would never have known anything about the book or Dr. Ruwart if I hadn't gone to the Minnesota Libertarian Party Convention in...it must have been 1998. It seems like The Older Girl was still young enough that I felt guilty about leaving her and her mother on a weekend. She was there, selling and signing copies of her books. Frankly, I went to her table because she was the most beautiful woman in the room. I'm sure she finds that to be the case quite often. (I haven't found a picture that does justice to her personal impact, but here's one.)
So, I bought Healing Our World: The Other Piece of the Puzzle and Short Answers to the Tough Questions.
I was still reading Rand back then, and I'd read some Hayek and Bastiat, so I had a pretty strong backing in the literature already by then. Ruwart's book didn't come as a great revelation to me, except that I was very impressed by "The Other Piece of the Puzzle": restorative justice.
I've heard people deride restorative justice as namby-pamby, bleeding-heart-liberal chit-chat to make everybody feel better. These are the same people (the deriders, I mean - "Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful." Ps. 1:1*) who bitch all day long about what's going wrong in our courtrooms and how the world's going to hell in a handbasket. (Now who's being scornful?) I know they're the same people, because I listen to them doing it on talk radio all the time.
I agree with them, to a large degree. There are some people who offer solutions to the problem, but the guys I've heard deriding restorative justice haven't offered any. And I haven't heard conservatives advocating any alternatives other than "Loser Pays," which I agree would help cut abuses, nor any kind of privatization of conflict resolution. Alternative conflict resolution has been growing right along over the past couple decades, apparently without any help from conservatives.
Some things are looking up, but apparently, if nobody pulls a gun, it ain't legitimate.
Here's a quote from the intro:
When we acknowledge how our reactions contribute to our inner state, we gain control. Our helplessness dissolves when we stop blaming others for feelings we create. In our outer world, the same rules apply. Today, as a society, as a nation, as a collective consciousness, "we" once again feel helpless, blaming selfish others for the world's woes. Our nation's laws, reflecting a composite of our individual beliefs, attempt to control selfish others at gunpoint, if necessary. Striving for a better world by focusing on others instead of ourselves totally misses the mark. When others resist the choices we have made for them, conflicts escalate and voraciously consume resources. A warring world is a poor one.
Attempting to control others, even for their own good, has other undesirable effects. People who are able to create intimacy in their personal relationships know that you can't hurry love. Trying to control or manipulate those close to us creates resentment and anger. Attempting to control others in our city, state, nation, and world is just as destructive to the universal love we want the world to manifest. Forcing people to be more "unselfish" creates animosity instead of good will. Trying to control selfish others is a cure worse than the disease.
I have the new version, updated post-9-11, called Healing Our World In an Age of Aggression - btw, you can download the original version for free at the link above, the changes don't alter the basic message - ...where was I?
Let me type up the summary of Chapter One: The Good Neighbor Policy:
As Children, we learned that if no one hits first, no fight is possible.
Therefore, refraining from "first-strike" force, theft, or fraud, is the first step in creating peace.
The second step is compensating others for any damage that we do.
These two steps, honoring our neighbor's choice and righting our wrongs, constitute the Good Neighbor Policy or the practice of nonaggression.
Peace and prosperity are only possible when we are Good Neighbors.
We can abandon the Good Neighbor Policy without even realinzing it when directed to do so by an authority figure.
When we take from our neighbors what they won't voluntarily give--at gunpoint, if necessary--we call it taxation.
Perhaps we don't have peace in the world because we've abandoned the Good Neighbor Policy without even realizing it.
Huh. No bullet points in this thing. She uses little olive branches for her bullets.
I enjoy it that throughout the book she prints supporting quotes in the margins from well known wise people, as you can see in the introduction where the quotes are from the Bible, M. Scott Peck, Krishnamurti and Edith Packer and a few others. Randomly opening the book to pp 266-7, she has quotes from Milton Friedman, Lao-tsu, a Czechoslovakian Environmental Minister, Lenin ("Our power does not know liberty or justice. It is established on the destruction of the individual will." - Dr. Ruwart is not advocating that position.), Solzhenitsyn and Thomas Paine.
I particularly like the quote she chose to support the idea of restorative justice, Numbers 5:7: "He must make full restitution for his wrong, add one fifth to it, and give it to the person he has wronged." [Of course the passage goes on to tell you what animal to sacrifice... I suppose I could theorize about how a non-Jew could make proper obeisance to his God (or god) to gain assurance of forgiveness and the ability to continue on post-error, but that would be pure speculation.]
What more do you need me to say to get you to read the book?
--Al, the man with the heart of a librarian.
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