| R-KV-R-Y spring/summer 2005 Mediating Evil, War, and Terrorism: The Politics of Conflict by Kenneth Cloke
and nations, the faint fluttering of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some say this hope lies in a nation, others in a man. I believe, rather, that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and words every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. Albert Camus Politics are among the most ancient, enduring, and consequential sources of conflict, as they determine how power will be distributed among people, including over life and death, wealth and poverty, independence and obedience. Conflicts concerning these issues have shaped the ways we have interacted as a species over the course of centuries. At their core, as Hannah Arendt wrote, is the conflict that, "from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics: the cause of freedom versus tyranny." Freedom and tyranny are factors not only in conflicts between minorities and nation states, but in small, everyday conflicts between parents and teenagers, managers and employees, governments and citizens, and wherever power is distributed unequally. If we define political conflicts as those arising out of or challenging an uneven distribution of power, including relational, religious, and cultural power, it is clear that politics happens everywhere. In this sense, “the personal is political,” yet the political is also personal, due to globalization, the reach and speed of communication, reduced travel barriers, and increasing environmental interdependency. We can even identify an ecology of conflict, in which rapidly evolving international conflicts have the ability to overwhelm safety and security everywhere. Conflicts in Afghanistan, Sudan, Brazil, and East Timor can no longer be ignored, as they touch our lives in increasingly significant ways. We therefore require improved understanding, not only of the conflict in politics, but the politics in conflict. As our world shrinks and our problems can no longer be solved except internationally, we need ways of revealing, even in seemingly ordinary, interpersonal conflicts, the larger issues that connect us across boundaries, and methods for resolving political conflicts that are sweeping, strategic, interest-based, and transformational. A clear, unambiguous reason for doing so occurred on September 11, 2001. The Response to September 11 As a nation, we need to re-examine how we responded to the conflicts that occurred, and are still occurring, as a result of that tragedy. In the aftermath, we began searching, as individuals, nations, and human beings, for some ritual of release, completion, and closure; some acknowledgement of the horror, grief, fear, and confusion we experienced. This search led many, unfortunately in my opinion, to seek release for their grief and anger through blind patriotism, constriction of civil liberties, and “preventative” unilateral war, directed not against those responsible for the tragedy, but a nation and people who had nothing to do with it. This response has led to increased suffering, including grief, fear, divisiveness, and confusion -- not only for us, but those whose lives we have similarly shattered by violence. While it is clear to me as a mediator that dozens of alternatives to war in Iraq were readily available, these were largely ignored. This failure to pursue peaceful alternatives contributed to the rise of aggressive, adversarial attitudes toward those who opposed the war, a refusal to listen or cooperate with other nations, a reduction in our personal freedoms, and a division in national and international consensus, sapping our spirits, closing our hearts, and dissipating the unity and desire for peace that spontaneously arose after September 11. By responding to violence with violence, we not only lost a unique opportunity to unite people and governments around the world in opposition to terror, we helped strengthen a culture of war rather than peace, bullying rather than compassion, revenge rather than forgiveness, and isolation rather than collaboration. By our aggressive statements and unilateral actions, we have deprecated the importance and prestige of peace-making, conflict resolution, international partnership, and public dialogue, thereby contributing to future conflicts, making them more serious, and constricting opportunities for settlement and resolution. To have acted differently would have required us to recognize and respond with compassion -- not only to the pain we experienced in the U.S., or in Israel, but no less equally to the pain Iraqis and Palestinians have experienced for decades. This would have required us to see ourselves as partners in a world community of nations and peoples, to cease using our superior military and economic power to coerce compliance, and to seek dialogue, negotiation, and mediation before reacting with violence, even against those we have defined as evil. Sometimes, as poet May Sarton wrote, “[o]ne must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” September 11 challenges us to take the lead in developing dispute resolution skills and applying them pro-actively, preventively, and strategically to the full range of international disputes – not to augment our power, wealth, or status, but to create the conditions under which conflicts can be resolved without war or terror. September 11 challenges us to understand that we cannot separate peace from justice, but must link interest-based conflict resolution skills with an unwavering commitment to political, economic, and social justice, without which it will prove impossible to build a global community that can resolve its differences without terrorism and war. Good and Evil in Conflict Journalist H. L. Mencken wrote, decades before September 11, that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” While his description remains valid, our hobgoblins are no longer imaginary. There are seemingly unending conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis, Indians and Pakistani’s, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Turks and Kurds, Hutu’s and Tutsi’s. In addition to these, there are countless conflicts around the globe between rich and poor, despots and democrats, leftists and rightists, labor and management, natives and settlers, ethnic majorities and minorities, environmentalists and developers, each accusing the other of evil. The deepest and most serious of these conflicts are no longer confined to the boundaries of nation states, but affect everyone everywhere. Even outwardly minor disputes between competing communities can rapidly escalate into world crises, triggering the slaughter of innocents, rape, ethnic cleansing, economic collapse, the ruin of eco-systems, and hatreds that cannot be dissipated, even in generations. Each of these acts directly affects the quality of our lives, no matter how far away we feel from the actual fighting. Following these disasters come those who pick up the pieces and start over again. While it is always helpful to offer aid in food, clothing and shelter, the victims of these catastrophes also need to develop skills in resolution, recovery, reconciliation, and regeneration of community. Recovery requires acknowledgement of grief and amelioration of loss. Resolution requires the dismantling of systemic sources of conflict within groups and cultures that actively promoted violence. Reconciliation requires the ability to engage in public dialogue, and speak from the heart. Regeneration of community requires the creation of a new culture based on collaboration, compassion, and respect for differences. Together, these require an understanding of how assumptions of evil, even in petty, interpersonal disputes, lead to war and terrorism. In political conflicts, it is common for each side to label the other evil. Yet what is evil to one is often good to another, revealing that evil is present in miniature in every conflict. Evil sometimes originates in the attribution of blame to someone other than ourselves for harm that has befallen us, or the assumption that our pain was caused by our opponent’s pernicious intentions. Blaming others for our suffering allows us to externalize our fears, vent our outrage, and punish our enemies, or coerce them into doing what we want against their wishes. It allows us to take what belongs to them, place our interests over, against, and above theirs, and ignore their allegations of our wrong-doing. Evil is not initially a grand thing, but begins innocuously with a constriction of empathy and compassion, leading ultimately to an inability to find the other within the self. It proceeds by replacing empathy with antipathy, love with hate, trust with suspicion, and confidence with fear. Finally, it exalts these negative attitudes as virtues, allows them to emerge from hiding, punishes those who oppose them, and causes others to respond in ways that justify their use. A potential for evil is thus created every time we draw a line that separates self from other within ourselves. This line expands when fear and hatred are directed against others and we remain silent or do nothing to prevent it; when dissenters are described as traitorous or evil and we allow them to be silenced, isolated, discriminated against, or punished; when negative values are exalted and collaboration, dialogue, and conflict resolution are abandoned and we do not object. At a more subtle level, identifying others as evil is simply a justification and catalyst for our own pernicious actions. By defining “them” as bad, we implicitly define ourselves as good and give ourselves permission to act against them in ways that would appear evil to outside observers who were not aware of their prior evil acts. In this way, their evil mirrors our diminished capacity for empathy and compassion, and telegraphs our plans for their eventual punishment. The worse we plan to do to them, the worse we need them to appear, so as to avoid the impression that we are the aggressor. The ultimate purpose of every accusation of evil is thus to create the self- permission, win the approval of outsiders, and establish the moral logic required to justify committing evil oneself. Allegations of evil are therefore directly connected with the unequal distribution and adversarial exercise of power. The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote that perceptions of good and evil originated historically in social relationships of domination and dependency between unequal economic classes:
good has been done. Rather, it was the “good” themselves, that is to say the noble, mighty, highly placed, and high-minded who decreed themselves and their actions to be good, i.e., belonging to the highest rank, in contradistinction to all that was base, low- minded and plebian…. [Thus, the] origin of the opposites good and bad is to be found in the pathos of nobility and distance, representing the dominant temper of a higher, ruling class in relation to a lower, dependent one. In contemporary terms, if we, as individuals or nations, believe ourselves to be good and possess more power than others, we will naturally seek to justify our use of unequal power by indicating our intention to use it for the benefit of those with fewer resources who are less good. But without empathy, compassion, and power-sharing, this will inevitably evolve into a belief that whatever benefits us must benefit them also. This will lead us to regard their criticism of our self- interested benevolence as ill-mannered and ungrateful, and their opposition to our power as support for evil. We will then interpret their desire for self-determination as rebellion and perhaps, as in Vietnam, seek to “kill them for their own good.” In order to exercise our power without experiencing injury or guilt, we are increasingly driven to dismantle our empathy and compassion until we are no longer able to recognize our opponents as similar to ourselves. We can then feel justified in wielding power selfishly and attacking them, or anyone who tries to curb our power or equalize its distribution. It is at this point that simple, natural, innocent, self- interest begins its descent into evil. At every step, it is aided by anger, fear, jealousy, pain, guilt, grief, and shame, and the suppression of empathy and compassion. Yet all these dynamics occur on a small scale in countless petty personal conflicts every day, and are used to justify our mistreatment of others, including children, parents, spouses, siblings, neighbors, employees, even strangers on the street. Every dominant individual, organization, class, culture, and nation manufactures stories and allegations of evil to justify withholding compassion, using power selfishly, and violating their own ethical or moral principles in response to perceived enemies. Worse, these small scale justifications can be organized and manipulated on a national scale to secure permission for war and genocide, just as war and genocide give permission to individuals to act aggressively and resist reconciliation in their personal conflicts. For these reasons, we need to carefully consider how, as individuals and nations, we define our enemies, disarm our empathy and compassion, organize our hatreds, and rationalize our destructive acts through conflict. For example, we frequently combine the following elements to create circular definitions of “the enemy”:
[Based partly on work by Kurt R. and Kati Spillman] We can deconstruct and transform each of these elements, for example, by differentiating intention from effect, rebuilding trust through small agreements, accepting responsibility for problems, identifying shared values, adopting interest-based processes, being self-critical and acknowledging, distinguishing individuals within groups, extending empathy, engaging in dialogue and negotiation, and refusing to behave in evil ways ourselves. To begin, we need to recognize how evil is reflected in the language we use to describe our conflicts, enemies, issues, and ourselves. The Language of Conflict In every country, there are not only national languages and local dialects, but thousands of micro-languages, ranging from professional terminology to ethnic phraseology, popular slang, bureaucratic technicality, family vernacular, and generational jargon. There are, for example, distinct languages for organizational management, political candidacy, ethnic minorities, social classes, economic cycles, and criminal pursuits. Each of these languages serves a unique purpose and produces unique results in the attitudes and behaviors of those who use them. There is also a distinct language of conflict. There is the conscious use of exaggerated statements to disguise requests for reassurance, as in stock phrases such as “you always,” and “you never.” These words are not intended as statements of fact, but mean “You do too much or too little of X for me” and “I would appreciate it if you would do X less or more.” Yet the mere use of these phrases indicates the presence of deeper emotional problems, impelling us to:
camouflage a hidden agenda, it becomes difficult to describe our feelings accurately. When asked how we feel, we use words implying that we are being coerced by others, instead of words accepting responsibility for how we feel about what others have done. Our words contain judgments – not merely about what others did, but of who they are. We say, for example, “He is infuriating,” or “He made me mad,” instead of “I am angry.” Or, "She is a blabbermouth," instead of “I feel betrayed.” Or "He is out to get me," instead of “I am afraid he is going to fire me." By translating or reframing these statements, we convert a language of powerlessness into a language of empowerment, just as do by turning “you” statements into “I” statements, being precise about what we are feeling, transforming conflict stories, and recognizing that beneath accusations lie confessions and requests, either of which serves our interests better. These are all valuable interventions, but they do not address the underlying problem. A more careful examination of the language used in political conflicts reveals a deep set of issues. Psychologist Renana Brooks describes the ways language is used to reinforce abuse and domination in power relationships. She cites, for example, broad statements that are so abstract and meaningless they cannot be opposed; excessive personalization of issues so they can only be addressed individually; negative frameworks that reinforce pessimistic images of the world; and inculcation of a “learned helplessness” that assumes change is impossible. Mexican novelist Octavio Paz describes how this deterioration of language reflects a broader social and political decay:
gangrenous... and alongside oratory, with its plastic flowers, there is the barbarous syntax in many of our newspapers, the foolishness of language on loudspeakers and the radio, the loathsome vulgarities of advertising -- all that asphyxiating rhetoric.
distortions produced by adversarial assumptions in speaking and listening, the strangled expression of intense emotion, the coexistence of fear and rage, the weight and weightlessness of the issues, the craving for revenge and forgiveness, and the simultaneous exhibition of power and powerlessness, arrogance and humility, domination and dependency.
domination and control, reinforcing assumptions of hierarchy, bureaucracy and autocracy. Even seemingly innocuous corporate expressions such as “upper management,” “direct reports,” “bottom line,” “alignment,” “getting people on board,” “raising the bar,” “lean and mean,” “accountability,” “pushing the envelope,” and similar expressions reveal myths and assumptions that distortcommunications. In similar ways, the language of law is replete with terminology conveying arrogance, incomprehension, and hostility directed toward emotionality, vulnerability, artistic thinking, human error, collective responsibility, compassion, frivolity, redemption, play, and forgiveness. |
