Peace as Empowerment
I am especially fascinated by intractable conflicts, those seemingly stuck conflicts that recycle the same arguments endlessly over and over again. Such conflicts cause horrific suffering, loss of life, destruction of property, terrible grief, and yet, the parties cannot get past the conflict, cannot just get over it and it keeps on going from generation to generation. The conflict I am most familiar with that fits this description is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, though the wider War on Terror of the Islamic War against the United States and parts of the Western world is showing signs of becoming such a long-term intractable conflict. It is fascinating to me that incredibly intelligent, well-educated military leaders, polititians, and diplomats, trying their very best to find their way out of these conflicts, inevitably fall back on avoiding looking weak by using force to retaliate against violence, threats, bluster, shows of force, and manipulation of all kinds. Creativity and inspiration in finding novel, new and innovative solutions to these conflicts is so rare as to be almost non-existent. We are caught up in a kind of verbal rhetoric that can see only two options: violence/force or the soft option of pacifism and non-violence. That's it, them's your two options. When you are dealing with human beings who want to be safe, whose lives are on the line and who want to survive, it isn't any wonder that when push comes to shove, most humans choose the option of force thy neighbor. (When you are being threatened with death, non-violence looks like certain death. It doesn't look like a real option to most people.) Why is this so? Why can't we get creative about these things?
To come up with new and effective approaches to peace-making in the arena of intractable conflict, one needs a good understanding of how such conflicts arise and what keeps them in place. Having grappled with these issues for many years, the explanation that makes the most sense to me starts with the fact that human beings are language making creatures and that we create whole worlds out of words, that is, our worlds arise out of the meanings that we make out of what goes on around us and between us. All humans have inherited language systems, that are based on finding something wrong in the world, either in what other people have done to us or by making ourselves wrong. Hence our tendency to blame other people. And if they are wrong, then I (and my group, my people) am right and good. When we have a traumatic event happen to us, something we didn't expect and which was painful, we try to come to terms with it by explaining it to ourselves and other people in language. We make up a story about it, or an explanation or interpretation, if you will, about what it means, and tell it to ourselves and to other people over and over again until that becomes the truth about what actually happened. This is the stuff of conflict. I have my view. You have your view. When a group buys into a story of what happened to its group caused by another group (its enemy) you have the start of an intractable conflict. The heart of an enduring conflict is the human propensity of tit for tat. I don't like what you did to me. It hurt. I will make you feel pain just like you inflicted on me. Maybe when you feel what it feels like you'll stop it. So you seek revenge and you hurt that person or someone in his group. He doesn't like it one bit. So he turns around and inflicts pain on you or your group. You don't like it and so you turn around and inflict it right back. Meanwhile everyone is telling stories about how horrible the other side is and embellishing it with all kinds of details about what kind of people they are, how they won't negotiate, how they hate our people and want to exterminate us, or what have you. Our leaders want to appear strong and powerful so they won't do anything to risk getting thrown out of office; no soft and mushy approaches to peacemaking for us! Wouldn't want that now would we! And the killing goes on . . . . .
Now, one of the things that makes solving these conflicts so difficult is that humans on this planet really are at very different levels of growth and development. Some cultures are more evolved technologically, economically, educationally and in their level of health care than others, making for the disparities between the haves and the have nots that so plague the world today. It's not fair, it doesn't seem right but there you have it. We're just all at different stages. It's not right or wrong; it just is. Some kids are learning to crawl. Some kids are teenagers. Some people are in their thirties. Some people are in their sixties. It's not right or wrong. It's just how life is. People develop at different rates and cultures apparently develop at different rates as well. (For a great explanation about why this is so see Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.)
There appear to be three major developmental stages alive and well among peoples of the world right now. The oldest stage is often called the tribal stage and goes back about 3000 or so years to the times when humans lived in hunter-gatherer or early agricultural groups. Your tribe was all you knew and you depended completely for survival on your tribe. Outsiders were dangerous and suspect. It was truly us against them. This is a fear-based developmental stage and despite the fact that its origins are go so far back in human history, it is alive and well on the planet. Witness what happened during the war in Bosnia or the genocide in Rwanda.
The next stage to come along in human development was the egoic- stage and this began sometime around 500 BC with the appearance of key spiritual figures like Lao Tsu, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, among others on the world stage. These figures pointed toward a relationship with God that was internal and based upon self-reflection, something altogether new in human evolution. People began to think for themselves for the first time and this set the stage for the beginnings of real science and the development of technology, artistic achievements, books, the law and so much of the learning and accomplishment that we have come to think of as the crowning glories of western civilization. So this is a stage about thinking, reason, doing, and most of all about the coming into being of the self, the me, the ego.
There is a new stage of human development that is emerging on the planet, a stage which is called by some the wholistic stage or the world-centric stage. By most accounts it has barely begun. The idea here is that there is a shift in consciousness going on away from the tribe and away from the self (the narcisstic focus on me and my needs) and toward the needs of "us", the whole planet, the entire human race and indeed, in some iterations of this, to the entire cosmos. This is indeed a radically different way to think about and to be in the world. Most of us can't even wrap our minds around it, so used are we to being comfortable and to putting our own needs and that of our families first.
There are many theorists thinking and writing in this realm but my favorities are Ken Wilber and Don Beck. Wilber has divided these stages into many more sub-stages and Don Beck has divided cultural development into what he calls memes, which he codes by color. This is fascinating work for two reasons: it explains why we have such intractable conflicts between different cultures on the planet, especially between so-called advanced cultures and less advanced ones and secondly, because it doesn't criticize any culture for being where they are developmentally. You cannot blame a culture for where it is developmentally because that would be like blaming a teenager for being moody. That's just what teenagers do! Duh! The thing is to provide space and structure and support so that teenagers can grow into magnificent adults.
Now what do you do when you have two nations or ethnic groups caught up in an apparently intractable conflict in which one side is coming from strongly tribal place and the other side is coming from a strongly rational, egoic place? They claim that they can't talk to each other, that there is no one to negotiate with! We can't talk to the other side because there is no one (of good faith) to talk to! They are all killers on the other side! The rhetoric goes on and on. The killing goes on and on. The shouting and the condemnation of the other side goes on and on. Revenge, killing, more revenge, more weeping, more funerals. Meanwhile, of the generations that manage to grow up under such conditions, for example, in Israel-Palestine, some young people grow up in despair and turn to violence, some turn to authoritarianism or fundamentalist religion, and some just grow up numb with no sense of a future. They become joyless robots. What kind of a life is this? It isn't really living at all. That's the point.
The key to all of this however, is language and the meaning that comes from language. Stories about the meaning of the conflict are passed down in each group, and that story becomes the narrative of their group and most people accept it unquestionningly as the truth about how things are. It is possible though, for human beings to complete their stories of the past, to finally and absolutely let go of and be done with the stories and interpretations that they have made up about the past, stories and interpretations that have previously crippled them and robbed them of true aliveness and joy in life. When individual human beings complete the stories they made up about the meanings of their past, they are then free to invent new possibilities to live into, to create a brand new future for themselves and their loved ones. This is known as transformation. When someone gives up a very constraining story from their past, particularly one that had them going through life either as a chronic victim or chronic perpetrator, they are then free to act with true effectiveness and true power in life. Extraordinary freedom is the result. We know this from the experience of hundreds of thousands of people who have been involved in individual transformation work around the world in the past thirty years or so. It certainly has been true in my own life.
Here's the question then. If such transformation, and the miracles that it brings, is possible for individuals, is it possible that whole groups of people, especially social groups that are stuck in recurring conversations (interpretations of their history) that give rise to intractable conflict, could choose to deliberately change those conversations and hence end the conflicts that they have been engaged in? Is it possible that social groups that are at earlier developmental levels might choose to empower themselves so that they and their kith and kin might be able to design and create lives that were full of inspiration and excitement, lives worth living? What if the young people who today strap on vests of explosives and explode themselves and others out of, despair and hopelessness about a future here on earth (trading it for an imagined one in paradise) instead were inspired to create a new future for themselves and their people right here, right now? They could have it, they could do it!
What if a torrent of economic activity that would knock your socks off could be unleashed in the Middle East that would put Hong Kong to shame? What if a new architecture, a new kind of road system and city planning were designed and created that took one's breath away because it so matched the natural environs of the Holy Land? What if Jerusalem, that precious bit of land that two religions now fight over, instead became the world's first truly Open City, open to all three Abrahamic religions and the holy sites were administered by the Buddhists? (I owe this idea to Don Beck.) What if a new way of being and living together, a path of healing and reconciliation among previously warring people arose in Israel/Palestine that had never been seen before in the world? It is possible. Anything is possible--anything! All it takes is people declaring that they are ready, that they are sick to death of the killing, the dying, the maiming, and crippling, the burning of flesh, and picking up bits of bodies. It takes people declaring that they are willing to try what has never been tried before because they want their children and grandchildren to live a life worth living, to laugh and dance on the face of this planet with the sun in their face, while the gentle wind ruffles their hair. That is a future worth living for and it is within our grasp. We have only to decide.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. How can a whole culture or society be engaged such that they make a choice to radically change their future?
2. What kind of world do you want your children, grandchildren and great great grandchildren to inherit?
3. What can we do to change our conversations about peace and violence and enemy-making? Would it be worth changing those conversations to make a better world for our grand kids?
To come up with new and effective approaches to peace-making in the arena of intractable conflict, one needs a good understanding of how such conflicts arise and what keeps them in place. Having grappled with these issues for many years, the explanation that makes the most sense to me starts with the fact that human beings are language making creatures and that we create whole worlds out of words, that is, our worlds arise out of the meanings that we make out of what goes on around us and between us. All humans have inherited language systems, that are based on finding something wrong in the world, either in what other people have done to us or by making ourselves wrong. Hence our tendency to blame other people. And if they are wrong, then I (and my group, my people) am right and good. When we have a traumatic event happen to us, something we didn't expect and which was painful, we try to come to terms with it by explaining it to ourselves and other people in language. We make up a story about it, or an explanation or interpretation, if you will, about what it means, and tell it to ourselves and to other people over and over again until that becomes the truth about what actually happened. This is the stuff of conflict. I have my view. You have your view. When a group buys into a story of what happened to its group caused by another group (its enemy) you have the start of an intractable conflict. The heart of an enduring conflict is the human propensity of tit for tat. I don't like what you did to me. It hurt. I will make you feel pain just like you inflicted on me. Maybe when you feel what it feels like you'll stop it. So you seek revenge and you hurt that person or someone in his group. He doesn't like it one bit. So he turns around and inflicts pain on you or your group. You don't like it and so you turn around and inflict it right back. Meanwhile everyone is telling stories about how horrible the other side is and embellishing it with all kinds of details about what kind of people they are, how they won't negotiate, how they hate our people and want to exterminate us, or what have you. Our leaders want to appear strong and powerful so they won't do anything to risk getting thrown out of office; no soft and mushy approaches to peacemaking for us! Wouldn't want that now would we! And the killing goes on . . . . .
Now, one of the things that makes solving these conflicts so difficult is that humans on this planet really are at very different levels of growth and development. Some cultures are more evolved technologically, economically, educationally and in their level of health care than others, making for the disparities between the haves and the have nots that so plague the world today. It's not fair, it doesn't seem right but there you have it. We're just all at different stages. It's not right or wrong; it just is. Some kids are learning to crawl. Some kids are teenagers. Some people are in their thirties. Some people are in their sixties. It's not right or wrong. It's just how life is. People develop at different rates and cultures apparently develop at different rates as well. (For a great explanation about why this is so see Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel.)
There appear to be three major developmental stages alive and well among peoples of the world right now. The oldest stage is often called the tribal stage and goes back about 3000 or so years to the times when humans lived in hunter-gatherer or early agricultural groups. Your tribe was all you knew and you depended completely for survival on your tribe. Outsiders were dangerous and suspect. It was truly us against them. This is a fear-based developmental stage and despite the fact that its origins are go so far back in human history, it is alive and well on the planet. Witness what happened during the war in Bosnia or the genocide in Rwanda.
The next stage to come along in human development was the egoic- stage and this began sometime around 500 BC with the appearance of key spiritual figures like Lao Tsu, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, among others on the world stage. These figures pointed toward a relationship with God that was internal and based upon self-reflection, something altogether new in human evolution. People began to think for themselves for the first time and this set the stage for the beginnings of real science and the development of technology, artistic achievements, books, the law and so much of the learning and accomplishment that we have come to think of as the crowning glories of western civilization. So this is a stage about thinking, reason, doing, and most of all about the coming into being of the self, the me, the ego.
There is a new stage of human development that is emerging on the planet, a stage which is called by some the wholistic stage or the world-centric stage. By most accounts it has barely begun. The idea here is that there is a shift in consciousness going on away from the tribe and away from the self (the narcisstic focus on me and my needs) and toward the needs of "us", the whole planet, the entire human race and indeed, in some iterations of this, to the entire cosmos. This is indeed a radically different way to think about and to be in the world. Most of us can't even wrap our minds around it, so used are we to being comfortable and to putting our own needs and that of our families first.
There are many theorists thinking and writing in this realm but my favorities are Ken Wilber and Don Beck. Wilber has divided these stages into many more sub-stages and Don Beck has divided cultural development into what he calls memes, which he codes by color. This is fascinating work for two reasons: it explains why we have such intractable conflicts between different cultures on the planet, especially between so-called advanced cultures and less advanced ones and secondly, because it doesn't criticize any culture for being where they are developmentally. You cannot blame a culture for where it is developmentally because that would be like blaming a teenager for being moody. That's just what teenagers do! Duh! The thing is to provide space and structure and support so that teenagers can grow into magnificent adults.
Now what do you do when you have two nations or ethnic groups caught up in an apparently intractable conflict in which one side is coming from strongly tribal place and the other side is coming from a strongly rational, egoic place? They claim that they can't talk to each other, that there is no one to negotiate with! We can't talk to the other side because there is no one (of good faith) to talk to! They are all killers on the other side! The rhetoric goes on and on. The killing goes on and on. The shouting and the condemnation of the other side goes on and on. Revenge, killing, more revenge, more weeping, more funerals. Meanwhile, of the generations that manage to grow up under such conditions, for example, in Israel-Palestine, some young people grow up in despair and turn to violence, some turn to authoritarianism or fundamentalist religion, and some just grow up numb with no sense of a future. They become joyless robots. What kind of a life is this? It isn't really living at all. That's the point.
The key to all of this however, is language and the meaning that comes from language. Stories about the meaning of the conflict are passed down in each group, and that story becomes the narrative of their group and most people accept it unquestionningly as the truth about how things are. It is possible though, for human beings to complete their stories of the past, to finally and absolutely let go of and be done with the stories and interpretations that they have made up about the past, stories and interpretations that have previously crippled them and robbed them of true aliveness and joy in life. When individual human beings complete the stories they made up about the meanings of their past, they are then free to invent new possibilities to live into, to create a brand new future for themselves and their loved ones. This is known as transformation. When someone gives up a very constraining story from their past, particularly one that had them going through life either as a chronic victim or chronic perpetrator, they are then free to act with true effectiveness and true power in life. Extraordinary freedom is the result. We know this from the experience of hundreds of thousands of people who have been involved in individual transformation work around the world in the past thirty years or so. It certainly has been true in my own life.
Here's the question then. If such transformation, and the miracles that it brings, is possible for individuals, is it possible that whole groups of people, especially social groups that are stuck in recurring conversations (interpretations of their history) that give rise to intractable conflict, could choose to deliberately change those conversations and hence end the conflicts that they have been engaged in? Is it possible that social groups that are at earlier developmental levels might choose to empower themselves so that they and their kith and kin might be able to design and create lives that were full of inspiration and excitement, lives worth living? What if the young people who today strap on vests of explosives and explode themselves and others out of, despair and hopelessness about a future here on earth (trading it for an imagined one in paradise) instead were inspired to create a new future for themselves and their people right here, right now? They could have it, they could do it!
What if a torrent of economic activity that would knock your socks off could be unleashed in the Middle East that would put Hong Kong to shame? What if a new architecture, a new kind of road system and city planning were designed and created that took one's breath away because it so matched the natural environs of the Holy Land? What if Jerusalem, that precious bit of land that two religions now fight over, instead became the world's first truly Open City, open to all three Abrahamic religions and the holy sites were administered by the Buddhists? (I owe this idea to Don Beck.) What if a new way of being and living together, a path of healing and reconciliation among previously warring people arose in Israel/Palestine that had never been seen before in the world? It is possible. Anything is possible--anything! All it takes is people declaring that they are ready, that they are sick to death of the killing, the dying, the maiming, and crippling, the burning of flesh, and picking up bits of bodies. It takes people declaring that they are willing to try what has never been tried before because they want their children and grandchildren to live a life worth living, to laugh and dance on the face of this planet with the sun in their face, while the gentle wind ruffles their hair. That is a future worth living for and it is within our grasp. We have only to decide.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. How can a whole culture or society be engaged such that they make a choice to radically change their future?
2. What kind of world do you want your children, grandchildren and great great grandchildren to inherit?
3. What can we do to change our conversations about peace and violence and enemy-making? Would it be worth changing those conversations to make a better world for our grand kids?
posted by Joy at 4:39 PM
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