Conversation peace: Bob Johnson on the pathology of violence

‘The fifty murderers I worked with confirmed for me the validity of the Peace Testimony.’

I knew little of violence. Certainly I’d never been to prison before I went to Parkhurst. Even then I was only hit once during five years there – and that was entirely due to my own inadvertence. I did know something of peace. I was brought up in a Quaker family. My aunt worked in Friends House during world war two and it was expected that I would register as a conscientious objector – though the decision was exclusively mine.

When I did go to work in prison, it was after lengthy professional training. I had spent twenty years as a GP, studying family structures and wrestling with why so many people worried over nothing, or did other irrational things. Perhaps my experience of bombing had something to do with it – York, my home town, was a prime target. I well remember, as a toddler, sitting on a German bomber pilot’s knee, in a local prisoner of war camp, singing Christmas carols in German. We had visited them as a Quaker family. You might call that ‘cognitive dissonance’ now, being friendly to someone who had just been trying to kill us.

At school fighting was common, so I suppose violence was always around. In fact, people talked as if we were only a few steps away from the jungle. So where did this odd search for peace come from? A Peace Testimony of all things? How would that help? Surely the way to stop violence was to be even more violent – to carry a bigger stick.

Today, I find the Peace Testimony to be the most glorious religious insight of them all. It is a conception of enormous wonder, a miraculous piece of insight that – if we could only propagate it further – would enrich the whole world.

Some will find such voluble exuberance unQuakerly. Although helpful for me on my own spiritual journey it shouldn’t be something waved around publically. I fully respect such a position. This is indeed an entirely personal opinion, a belief that I’ve come up with myself (with indispensible help from others, and especially from Quakerism, but entirely limited to what I can see at this moment). And I’m happy to admit that none of us can ever see more than a very small fraction of what’s really going on.

I can only say that the biggest professional challenge I faced in my working life was to unpack one apparently simple string of words: ‘peace of mind’. I needed to find an answer, not only for me, but for my work. I’d wanted to cure psychotic symptoms – the holy grail of all psychiatry – since working at The Retreat as a holiday job before going to university.

From my training, I knew that childhoods mattered. Freud taught me that. My apprenticeship in family medicine enabled me to identify where childhoods went wrong. When you think about it, it’s only too obvious. Teach a child violence, and that’s what they learn. And it tends to stick with them for the rest of their lives, unless someone comes along with an alternative (and even then, such teachers have to be utterly trustworthy and reliable).

But there’s something else going on, a deeper pathology just below the surface. Here we have to get medical. The human brain can cope with an infinite number of challenges – the changes in technology alone since my father’s day testify to that – but there is one challenge that defeats it, every time. Terror. Irrefutable scientific evidence of how it does this became available twenty-five years ago. Play a trauma tape to someone in a brain-scan machine and their frontal lobes and speech centre simply stop working. Once terror hits, their nervous system shuts down and they can no longer think or talk about the worst thing that ever happened to them. It’s called ‘speechless terror’. And terror continues unabated, as a result, at least in their minds.

It’s like having a stroke. Part of you is paralysed, and tends to remain so unless you can get physiotherapy. This physiotherapy is never easy, and entirely dependent on the enthusiasm, skill and trustworthiness of the physiotherapist. But when it works, that part of you which you couldn’t use before comes back into service.

This is what I took with me into Parkhurst Prison – though verbal exercises rather than muscle ones. The fifty murderers I worked with confirmed for me the validity of the Peace Testimony. More, they taught me where all violence comes from, and how to eliminate it. Human beings, they showed me, are never born violent. They have violence thrust upon them and, given half a chance, much prefer to be sociable.

After years of this work, what do I find? Those early Quakers got there before me. They told the English king that, despite the internecine civil war all around, they utterly denied violence. What a glorious assertion of a basic human truth, in vastly more challenging circumstances than I have ever had to face. Human beings thrive by cooperation, not by coercion. We need to teach everyone, infants onwards, that violence is not only ‘wrong’, in Martin Luther King’s heroic declaration, but myopic, which, for a thinking species, could prove terminal.

Quakerism taught me another fundamental. Words can get in the way, so let your lives speak. You can read in the Bible that killing people is wrong, but do you believe it? I didn’t tell the prisoners to stop because the Bible said so. I had to bring something more direct. But before I could do that I had to find out where their ‘disease’ had come from. They didn’t know. And because of speechless terror, they simply had no way of finding out. They had to learn that their ruinous childhood was now, in actual practice, over – time for them to grow up.

Curbing speechless terror allows peace-of-mind to blossom. This enables the coercive ‘thou shalt not’ to mutate into ‘social delight defeats social harm’. Here’s an incentive not to kill. You can only kill another human being when you don’t really know what you’re doing – if you could get rid of speechless terror you would see your victim as a source of delight, as every single human being ever born is.

What those 1660 Quakers were saying was, grow up and smell the roses – something they’d done, and devoutly recommended. When will we all catch up?

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