MEDIATING EVIL
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| Language and Fascism Perhaps the best example of the deterioration of language and its use to reinforce power, arrogance, and domination in political conflicts is the rise of fascism in Germany. As Victor Klemperer brilliantly revealed in The Language of the Third Reich, the Nazis deliberately manipulated language in order to change the way people thought about politics and daily life. By using repetitive stereotyping, emotional superlatives, and romantic adjectives; hijacking or poisoning formerly positive terms such as “collective,” “followers,” and “faith;” transforming formerly negative words into positives, such as “domination,” “fanatical,” and “obedient;” militarizing and brutalizing common speech; discounting reason and elevating feelings; using “big lies” and doublespeak; and generally debasing and “dumbing down” ordinary language, the Nazis fundamentally altered the way people thought and behaved. This led Italian novelist and semiologist Umberto Eco to brilliantly define fascism as “the simplification of language to the point that complex thought becomes impossible.” This simplification is revealed not only in the crude sloganeering and stereotyping of fascist rhetoric, but in the minor ways ordinary speech is transformed into sermons, prepared scripts, and propaganda, as can be seen, for example, in media coverage following the deaths of political leaders. In Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, Franz Neumann analyzed the Nazi’s transformation of ordinary speech into fascist propaganda. He began by profoundly defining propaganda as “violence committed against the soul,” writing:
have identical purposes of making men amenable to control from above. Terror and its display in propaganda go hand in hand…. The superiority of National Socialist [Nazi] propaganda lies in the complete transformation of culture into a saleable commodity. propaganda, not only because the latter was simpler and appealed to more primitive instincts, but because the Nazi’s were willing to use any contrivance, including deliberate lies, in order to succeed. As Adolph Hitler made clear in Mein Kampf: Propaganda must not serve the truth.... All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it. Therefore, the intellectual level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number of people who are to be influenced by it…. The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. propaganda, and fact into lie and doublespeak; this use of language as a mere means that does not count, and can therefore be distorted with impunity; this huckstering salesman’s approach to truth, that allows it to hide and justify all manner of political and personal crimes. As George Orwell wrote, in “Politics and the English Language,” In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombed from the air, the inhabitants are driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. is not restricted to fascist or Stalinist states, but is responsive to a far deeper problem, which is the forced, impossible effort to suppress half of a paradox or polarity, deny part of a contradiction, and obstruct inevitable changes. Alex Cary, for example, attributes the widespread use of propaganda to increasing conflict between democracy and corporate power: The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. made by US political leaders prior to the war in Iraq, falsely collapsing Iraq into Saddam Hussein, accusing him of hiding weapons of mass destruction that could threaten US cities, linking September 11 to the Iraqi government, stereotyping Arabs as terrorists, demonizing international opposition to the war, and making “preventive war” seem necessary and inevitable. routinely demonize and stereotype our opponents, link them with events beyond their control, make them seem more powerful than they actually are, ignore the systemic sources of our suffering, personalize our problems, and trigger the fear and anger that make our stories successful. For this reason, it is important to recognize that evil is not something “out there,” inside someone else, beyond our reach, or in poorer nations, but also something “in here,” inside ourselves, within our reach, and happening every day in wealthier nations, including the US. Israeli-Palestinian Conflicts of evil have been used to justify the commission of atrocities. A painful example today is the Middle East, where there is so much raw, unresolved grief and insensible hatred that antagonisms feel more like civil wars than wars between opposing states. Entire nations vie, not only in their capacity for revenge, but in their stubborn refusal to accept the necessity of learning how to live together and accept joint responsibility for their slaughter of innocents. As former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir painfully noted: “We can forgive the Palestinians for murdering our children, but we can never forgive them for forcing us to murder theirs.” the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Koreas, Southern Africa, and examples of internecine warfare and national vendetta, from which no region is immune. By doing so, we can identify seven features that routinely block resolution and invite assumptions of evil. These include: 1. Continuous, intimate, non-consensual relationships between closely related yet diverse parties 2. Gross inequalities in the allocation and distribution of scarce resources, power, wealth, and status 3. Disrespectful, unfair, oppressive, and exploitative attitudes and behaviors by those with more power against those with less 4. Contemptuous, hostile, jealous, and resentful attitudes and behaviors by those with less power against those with more 5. Use of “legitimate” forms of power to coerce or manipulate outcomes favoring the powerful and disfavoring the powerless 6. Use of “illegitimate” forms of power by the powerless to block or provide wider access to legitimate forms of power controlled by the powerful 7. Sufficient accumulation of unresolved grief, loss, fear, and pain on both sides to fuel allegations of evil, suppress compassion, amplify rage, encourage revenge, and obstruct closure. These features can also be found in a wide range of personal, familial, organizational, social, economic, and political conflicts. On every level and scale, we become stuck in conflicts and justify our negative behaviors based on genuine experiences of pain and anger that bolster our assumptions of evil. At a simple level, it feels logical: “If I am good and have been hurt by you, it can only be because you are the kind of person who hurts people for no reason.” In the process, we successfully disregard the injuries and insensitivities we caused, stereotype our opponent, and justify our refusal to listen to their explanations or pain because ours have not been heard or ameliorated. At a deeper level, everyone always and everywhere seeks power or control over their environment, and few seek to share it or are willing to be on the unequal side of its distribution. Yet power is fluid by nature and cannot be fixed. This causes those who possess it to hoard it and distrust anyone who does not, and those who lack it to act in ways that justify its use and intensify their desire to seize it. Since neither side knows how to collaborate without appearing to betray their family, nation, culture, or cause, their conflict slips into a descending cycle of accusation and denunciation, rebellion and repression, terror and war. The coexistence of intimacy with inequality and exploitation inevitably leads the powerful to hold the powerless in a subordinate, dependent position, triggering a polarization of attitudes and cascade of aggressive behaviors that lead to accusations of evil on both sides. A subconscious awareness of the unfairness of inequality and exploitation in the minds of the powerful lead them to fear the loss of their unequal status and the retributive violence of the powerless. This causes them to become further entrenched, protect their gains, and resist liberalization, democratization, collaboration, and conflict resolution, which require power sharing. The powerful increasingly come to believe they have only two alternatives: either agree to the demands of the powerless and lose power for themselves, their families, friends, and what they see as their civilizing mission; or use “legitimate” forms of power to crush the powerless, thereby reinforcing the opposition of those they have oppressed, strengthening their resistance, and encouraging them to use violence or terror to achieve what they see as justice. These dynamics lead to stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and marginalization of the powerless, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, on the assumption that the powerless as a group are innately evil. In response, the powerless increasingly come to believe they also have only two alternatives: either accept a temporary, tactical surrender, thereby permitting inequality and exploitation to continue unabated; or use what the powerful define as “illegitimate” forms of power to break their monopoly and end their exclusive control over power and resources, thereby reinforcing the fears of the powerful, strengthening their resistance, and encouraging continued destruction on both sides. Each side behaves toward the other in ways that justify their worst fears, causing the engine of violence to turn in a self-destructive circle. Using interest-based conflict resolution methods, it is possible to identify a third choice for both sides, which is to share their problems, acknowledge that they are brothers, recognize that the true evil is not who they are, but their readiness to regard each other as evil, and that they cannot brutalize each other without brutalizing themselves. It is to understand that nothing can be gained through other methods that is worth the cost; that their mutual slaughter has been a gigantic, tragic, comic, pointless waste; and that they can reach out at any time to their opponents without glossing over their differences. It is to recognize that there are no differences they cannot solve through dialogue, negotiation, and conflict resolution, or that are worth the damage created by their assumptions of evil. It is to engage in open, honest, collaborative, on-going negotiations over issues of justice and equality; strengthen political, economic, and social democracy; develop interest- based conflict resolution skills; and elicit heartfelt communications that invite truth and reconciliation. How Should We Respond to Evil? None of this is intended to imply that there is no such thing as evil, or that it is justifiable, but rather that there is a genesis and logic to its development which, when ignored, call forth adjunct evils in response. Evil is like a cancer that replicates itself by demanding its own destruction, but only through evil means. As the Greek playwright Sophocles wrote, "With evil all around me/There is nothing I can do that is not evil." Evil has been attributed to everything from the external intervention of Satan to the natural, internal operations of the Id. The French Philosopher Blaise Pascal thought it came from “being unable to sit still in a room,” while Novelist Jeanette Winterson wrote that “to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.” Evil is simply the opposite of good, or rather, the good of one that undermines or counteracts the good of another, as what benefits a parasite destroys its host. Yet if good and evil are opposites, it is impossible to end one without also ending the other. From a conflict resolution perspective, evil is sometimes just a story describing what our opponents did to harm us, while leaving out what we did to harm them. Sometimes it is a failure to separate the act that caused harm from the people who engaged in it, or an inability due to previous conflicts to experience empathy or compassion for others. Sometimes it is negligence, accident, or false assumptions. Sometimes it is deep disappointment, the outpourings of a culture of defeat, or a desire to blame others for our own false expectations. Sometimes it is a way of depriving others of the happiness we lost, or subconsciously trying to recreate in others the conditions that caused us pain. As Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote: "No man consciously chooses evil because it is evil, he only mistakes it for the happiness that he seeks." Yet there are people who take pleasure in the suffering of others, and it is little consolation to know they had an unhappy childhood or are merely mistaken in seeking their happiness when we suffer as a result of their actions. While there is good in the worst of us and evil in the best of us, there are hierarchies of evil, and some, like those who engineered the holocaust, belong to a different order. What, then, do we do in the face of such evil? While there may be people, times, and places when it is impossible not to answer violence with violence and evil with evil, it is difficult to distinguish these moments from those that occur everyday in ordinary interpersonal conflicts, except by subjective measurements of their proximity and impact on us. The greater and closer the harm feels to us, the easier it is to justify committing evil in response. Do minor evils then justify minor evils in response? If so, where does it end? And who decides which evil is worse, or whose suffering is greater and more deserving of retribution? Many people view truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation as laudable, yet impractical in the face of evil and terror, and believe the only effective response is to crush them wherever they exist with whatever power is available. Yet evil has always been a response to prior evil acts that are used to justify the commission of equal or greater evils in return. In this way, “eye for an eye” responses add to the total sum of blindness, while assumptions of evil turn suffering in a circle. While there may be times, as Bertold Brecht wrote, when it is necessary to “embrace the butcher” to end an evil that will not desist until forced to do so, these cases cannot be contained or defined. How do we know we are not simply transferring our pain to someone else? When and how do we stop? What do we do in response to subtler forms of terror, and commonplace evils? Who do we become as a result? At what price? As Dwight Eisenhower told the London Guardian, “Every gun that is made, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” Ultimately, there are three consistent responses to evil that do not end up replicating it. The first is to use whatever means may be required to isolate, disarm, and contain it, while at the same time addressing the underlying injustices that brought it into existence. The second is to shift the way we react from power- to rights- to interest- based approaches that do not invite evil responses. The third is to systematically strengthen our skills and abilities in heart-based communications, including forgiveness and reconciliation, which disable evil at its source in the tormented hearts and minds of those who feel powerless to end or grieve their suffering. These responses require us to encourage dialogue, joint problem solving, and conflict resolution, while simultaneously acting to discourage vengeance, retaliation, and unilateralism. They require us to negotiate, especially with our enemies, while simultaneously minimizing their ability to create harm. They require us to accept responsibility, for example, for the rise of fascism, as a result of our imposition of a vindictive Treaty at Versailles, unwillingness to confront anti-Semitism, support for brutal Tsarist regimes that inspired the Russian Revolution, lack of financial aid for the struggling Weimar Republic, failure to assist the Spanish Republic, and similar acts. Finally, they require us to recognize that can be no peace without justice there. No Justice, No Peace In order to discourage assumptions, allegations, and acts of evil and sustain warring parties in dialogue and negotiation, we need to recognize that the true evil is injustice, and as long as it continues, peace will be fleeting, fragile, and a disappointing reminder of all we have suffered and lost. Under such conditions it is easy to agree with Socrates’ adversary Thrasymachus that “justice is the interest of the stronger,” or Franz Kafka that it is “a fugitive from the winning camp.” Genuine, lasting peace is impossible in the absence of justice. Where injustice prevails, peace becomes merely a way of masking and compounding prior crimes, impeding necessary changes, and rationalizing injustices. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton presciently observed:
fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and leisure.... [T]heir idea of peace was only another form of war. When millions lack the essentials of life, peace becomes a sanction for continued suffering, and compromise a front for capitulation, passivity, and acceptance of injustice. This led anthropologist Laura Nader to criticize mediation for its willingness to “trade justice for harmony.” True peace requires justice and a dedication to satisfying basic human needs, otherwise it is merely the self-interest of the satisfied, the ruling clique, the oppressors, the victors in search of further spoils. For peace to be achieved in the Middle East or elsewhere, it is essential that we neither trivialize conflict nor become stuck in the language of good and evil, but work collaboratively and compassionately to redress the underlying injustices and pain each side caused the other. Ultimately, this means sharing power and resources, advantages and disadvantages, successes and failures, and satisfying everyone’s legitimate interests. It means collaborating and making decisions together. It means giving up being right and assuming others are wrong. It means taking the time to work through our differences, and making our opponents interests our own. In helping to make these shifts and move from Apartheid to integration, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that for people to reach forgiveness, they needed to exchange personal stories of anger, fear, pain, jealousy, guilt, grief, and shame; to empathize, recognize, and acknowledge each other’s interests; to engage in open, honest dialogue; to reorient themselves to the future; to participate in rituals of collective grief that released their pain and loss; and to mourn those who died because neither side had the wisdom or courage to apologize for their assumptions of evil, or the evil they caused their opponents and themselves. At the same time, they also needed to improve the daily lives of those who suffered and were treated unjustly under apartheid. Where shanty towns coexist with country clubs, peace cannot be lasting or secure. Where some go hungry while others are well-fed, terror and violence are nourished. In the end, it comes down to a question of sharing wealth and power, realizing that we are all one family, and that an injury to one is genuinely an injury to all. Making justice an integral part of conflict resolution and the search for peaceful solutions means not merely settling conflicts, but resolving, transforming, and transcending them by turning them into levers of social dialogue and learning, catalysts of community and collaboration, and commitments to political, economic, and social change. By failing to take these additional remedial steps, we make justice secondary to peace, undermine both, guarantee the continuation of our conflicts, and prepare the way for more to come. From Power and Rights to Interests Political conflicts can only support justice and serve as engines of constructive political, economic, and social development if the means and methods by which they are resolved promote just, collaborative ends. The principal means we have used to resolve political conflicts for thousands of years have been oriented toward power, including war, genocide, terror, domination, and suppression of those seeking change. Over the last several centuries, we have developed less destructive methods of resolving conflicts based on rights, including adjudication, adversarial negotiations, bureaucratic procedures, coercion, and isolation of those seeking change. What we now require are interest-based methods for resolving political, economic, and social conflicts that integrate peace with justice and undermine resort to evil, including informal problem solving, collaborative negotiation, team and community building, consensus decision making, public dialogue, mediation, and actively rewarding those seeking change. The problem with most efforts to suppress evil or redress injustices is that they adopt power- or rights-based approaches which result in deeper polarization, resistance, and win/lose outcomes that simply trade one form of evil or injustice for another. One side then becomes frightened of going too far, tired of fighting, willing to tolerate continuing injustices, and settles or compromises their conflicts rather than resolving, transforming, or transcending them. Approaching evil and injustice from an interest-based perspective means listening to the deeper truths that gave rise to them, extending compassion even to those who were responsible for evils or injustices, and seeking not merely to replace one evil or injustice with another, but to reduce their attractiveness by designing outcomes, processes, and relationships that encourage adversaries to work collaboratively to satisfy their interests. Evil and injustice can therefore be considered byproducts of reliance on power or rights, and failures or refusals to learn and evolve. All political systems generate chronic conflicts that reveal their internal weaknesses, external pressures, and demands for evolutionary change. Power- and rights-based systems are adversarial and unstable, and therefore avoid, deny, resist, and defend themselves against change. As a result, they suppress conflicts or treat them as purely interpersonal, leaving insiders less informed and able to adapt, and outsiders feeling they were treated unjustly and contemplating evil in response. As pressures to change increase, these systems must either adapt, or turn reactionary and take a punitive, retaliatory attitude toward those seeking to promote change, delaying their own evolution. Only interest-based systems are fully able to seek out their weaknesses, proactively evolve, transform conflicts into sources of learning, and celebrate those who brought them to their attention. Conflict and Political Change Conflict is the principal means by which significant social and political changes have taken place throughout history. Wars and revolutions can be understood as efforts to resolve deep-seated political, economic, and social conflicts for which no other means of resolution was understood or acceptable to either or both sides, blocking evolutionary change. When conflicts and pressure to change accumulate, even trivial interpersonal disputes can stimulate far-reaching systemic transformations. In any fragile system, be it familial, organizational, social, or political, resolving conflict can therefore become a dangerous, even revolutionary activity, because it encourages people to redress their injustices, collaborate on solutions, and evolve in ways that could fundamentally transform the system. Indeed, it is possible to regard every collaborative, interest-based effort to resolve systemic conflict as a small but significant resolution, transformation, and transcendence of the system that gave rise to it. Collaborative, interest-based processes can “socialize,” or broaden our conflicts, allowing us to address their systemic sources through group dialogue and discussion, analysis of systemic issues, and recommendations for preventative, system-wide, strategic improvement without political intrigue and infighting. Responsibility for resolving conflicts can then be extended beyond a small circle of primary antagonists to include allies, secret partners, neutral bystanders, and others whose relationship to the participants or issues could make complete solutions possible. Interest-based conflict resolution techniques offer political systems democratic, socially engaging methods for learning and evolving through conflict. They free us to address political disputes based on equality, respect for diversity, recognition of interests, principled dialogue, collaborative negotiation, and consensus, rather than a desire to retain power or rights. In these ways, peace merges with justice, encouraging learning and evolution. Yet we can go further and develop preventative, strategic, scale-free approaches to conflict resolution that use storytelling techniques, for example, to promote understanding between hostile social groups; public dialogue techniques to stimulate understanding between representatives of opposing points of view; public policy and environmental mediation techniques to locate complex solutions to intractable political problems; prejudice reduction and bias awareness techniques to increase cross-cultural understanding; and heart-based techniques such as truth and reconciliation commissions to promote reconciliation. Whether our conflicts are intensely personal and between private individuals, or intensely political and between nations and cultures, three critical areas require on- going improvement and transformation. These are: our personal capacity for introspection, integrity, and spiritual growth; our interpersonal capacity for egalitarian, collaborative, heartfelt communication and relationships; and our social, economic, and political capacity for designing preventative, systemic, strategic approaches to conflict resolution, community, and change. By creatively combining conflict resolution systems design principles with strategic planning, team building, meditation and spiritual practices, community organizing, and heart-based conflict resolution techniques, we can significantly improve our ability to resolve international political and cross-cultural disputes before they become needlessly destructive. Yet conflict resolution carries a price in the form of our willingness to listen to ideas we dislike and share power and control over outcomes with people different from ourselves. Ultimately, transcending conflict means giving up unjust, unequal power- and rights- based systems, and seeking instead to satisfy interests, which is why we seek power and rights in the first place. This means surrendering our power to take from others what does not belong to us, and right to coerce them into giving what they are otherwise unwilling to give. Accepting this price allows us to achieve a higher value and right, merge peace with justice, and immensely improve our personal and political lives. Kenneth Cloke is Director of the Center for Dispute Resolution. He is a mediator, arbitrator, consultant and trainer, specializing in resolving complex multi-party conflicts. He is a nationally recognized leader in the field of conflict resolution. His consulting and training practice includes organizational change, leadership, communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, team building and strategic planning. He is a published author of Mediation: Revenge and the Magic of Forgiveness and Mediating Dangerously: The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution. He is co-author with Joan Goldsmith of Thank God It’s Monday! 14 Values We Need to Humanize The Way We Work; Resolving Conflicts at Work: A Complete Guide for Everyone on the Job; Resolving Personal and Organizational Disputes: Stories of Transformation and Forgiveness; The End of Management and The Rise of Organizational Democracy; and,The Art of Waking People Up: Cultivating Awareness and Authenticity at Work . He received a B.A. from the University of California; a J.D. from U.C.’s Boalt Law School; a Ph.D. from UCLA; an LLM from UCLA Law School; and has done post-doctoral work at Yale Law School. He is a graduate of the National Judicial College in Reno, Nevada. His university teaching includes law, mediation, history and other social sciences at a number of colleges anduniversities including Southwestern University School of Law, Pepperdine University School of Law, Antioch University, Occidental College, USC and UCLA. |
