The importance of emotional literacy for building a peace culture: understanding individual and social meanings and individual and social realities

Abstract

A central thread throughout this paper is that emotional intelligence is a prerequisite for building a peace culture in which the management of conflict through non‐violent means is the norm and violent conflict becomes the exception. This involves giving equal importance to meaning making through intuitive understanding and cultural narratives on the one hand and to the rational systemic analysis of biological evolution and the structural organization of societies on the other. Cultural narratives draw on mythos and imagination and rational analyses draw on logos and argumentation. Political movements are in danger of misusing mythos to justify realpolitik solutions on the one hand and of misusing rational argumentation to justify emotionally laden value judgements on the other.Emotional intelligence therefore requires that we first distinguish between and then endeavour to integrate four ways of knowing: subjective knowing through personal experience; collective knowledge generation through shared inquiry and interpretation; objective study of biological determinants of individual development and functioning; and objective research and theory building regarding the ecological context and the wider determinants of our social, economic and political organization.