Manuela Montoya Alzate
Grammar
November 5, 2014
Writing #4 (first draft)
(Research Argument)

Human Nature vs. Non Violence

In history of humanity more conflicts have been resolved with violence. The human nature, as the way people behaves in community, is aggressive by itself, and it had to be the case for survival in past ages. Human evolution is understood as the change people have experienced since the beginning of humanity in the prehistory until modern societies. Also it has had an impact on the behavior; it takes a long time to evolve, that is the reason why aggressive manners remains in humans as a heritage from their ancestors. According to the book Apes And The Origins Of Human Violence, the men who were more aggressive in evolutionary past, could be more biologically successful (Wrangham, 1997). But with the human evolution, humans have challenged their biological aggressive instinct to become less violent and resolve issues peacefully, showing that the nonviolence has become an effective method of change.
On the other hand, evolution does not happen overnight; as it is said in the article “Are Humans Hard-Wired to Behave Aggressively?” waiting for evolution to breed out our bad traits can take a long time. There have been some improvements among natural evolution, as the ones that have been observed in Borbono Monkeys, who have split from their aggressive chimpanzee cousins 2.5 million years ago and only were able to create lovely societies ten-thousand years ago (Wylie, 2003). So, humans would need an efficient method but waiting for evolution to become peaceful.
In that sense, when humans have faced off their nature and have been able to create peaceful movements, they have proved how through peaceful reconciliation it is possible to achieve an objective and resolve a conflict. As it was shown in the video A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolence Conflict, it was not easy to threaten their contenders with peace, without doing tests to themselves first. They had to study how to respond to violence in a different way in order to internalize the reaction (York, 1999). However, they have shown to the world that it might be a better option, one that can reduce the number of deaths and bloodshed and still resolve the struggle.
Once again, to escape out of violent human instinct is needed even after war, which is not an easy task, but it could be done. In the history of humankind the majority of conflicts have been solved in a war, leaving to the countries involved not only death, but to big problems preparing the population for the transition to peace. As it is indicated in the article “Healing Lessons From Another War-Torn Society-Mozambique”, a country that had a war that took sixteen million of citizen’s life, numerous outrages were committed, but managed to return to peace rapidly. That was possible due to strong cultural resources for peacemaking and conflict resolution, which is another example how non-violent methods are more effective in society, how it allows people to get away from endless cycles of violence (Cobban, 2003).
As it has