Justice First, then Compassion . . . Maybe
In long-term intractable conflicts I often hear a complaint from people who experience themselves as victimized or wounded in the apparently never-ending violence and hatred that they or they group is caught up in. It is a conversation that is directed toward well meaning people like me, who suggest that listening and dialogue might be helpful. "I am so tired of listening. I don't want to talk. Talk doesn't change anything. What we need is action! We need justice, justice now!!" I have heard variations of this conversation from Palestinians, from Israelis, and from African Americans, and it reflects a frustration and exhaustion with reasoned talk which is the norm around the globe when dealing with long-term unhealed, sometimes violent conflicts.
What is the thirst for justice about and how does one respond to it when someone is in your face demanding "action now!"? Justice is something I've studied and examined in great depth in my life and it deserves a closer look. There is no doubt that human beings do terrible things to each other, whether in private criminal acts or within the larger scale actions that constitute genocide, terrorism or war. Whenever anyone violates the body, the safety, indeed the spirit of another human being or takes a human life, there is something in our core or that of those who survive us, that demands an accounting for that violation. Call it reciprocity. There are certain fundamental agreements that humans have that make survival of the whole possible: we need each other, we have to treat each other with respect in order to live in community or the whole cannot survive. If we tear each other apart, the chains of food production, and other things we need for our joint survival cannot be sustained. So we have to call one another to account when one or more of us violate the agreements that make for the survival of the whole. Beyond that, each of us knows that in some way, every life seems to have some value, at least to those to whom he or she is related, and the sudden and precipitous end of that life, is a terrible loss and violation. These things call for an accounting. There is some sense that a profound wrong has been done to us and has to be made right. It is from these deep, inborn feelings that humans have evolved their systems of justice.
In the days of tribes and clans, when a life was taken by a competing tribe or clan, the family simply went out and took revenge on the tribe that committed the original murder. So of course the murders went back and forth in an unbroken cycle of revenge and retaliation until the original injury was forgotten or until someone called for a truce. This was a very rough form of justice and things easily got out of hand, especially as society grew and as people moved into towns, villages and states. Eventually, as kings took over as rulers of nation states, they found this inter-tribal warfare far too costly to the peace of their kingdoms and they instituted the rule of law, wherein the king alone was able to meet out justice for wrongs done. This had the benefit of stabilizing the nation, getting people to delay the thirst for revenge, and it probably also brought in income to the king's treasury. This is how our own system of law and justice evolved.
Now this has certainly not eliminated revenge killing as you can see in the streets of any city neighborhood ruled by the Crips and Bloods. And it hasn't eliminated revenge and retaliation in international warfare as is quite evident in the insurgency in Iraq and in the terrorism conducted by Al Quaeda. So in some ways we are far ahead of where they were a millenium ago with our system of laws and our penal system. But even that system, at least in the US, can still be a system of rough justice at times. The family of a murder victim may wait for years for the person who murdered their child to be caught, then tried, and then convicted. Once the person is convicted, they may sit in the courtroom hungrily waiting to hear from that murderer, some words that he or she is sorry, to see some expression of remorse for taking the life of their loved one. But they will rarely ever see that in a courtroom in the US. Most likely the murderer will have a stony expression on their face and will say nothing as they walk away to their death sentence or to serve life without parole. If the murderer gets the death penalty, the family may wait another ten or twenty years for the murderer to be executed. When that moment comes and the murderer is executed, how satisfying is it for the family that the person who took the life of their loved one is finally taking their last breath? So much time has gone by. No words have been exchanged. Is this really justice? Or is it too, another form of rough justice?
So what is justice after all? Part of it is the judgement of a tribunal, some higher authority that a wrong has been done and that it should not have happened. For people who feel disempowered in their lives, the moral weight of a judge or a tribunal is often very important and helpful in adding an imprimatur, a stamp of value to their loved one's life. In addition, if someone has done some grave wrong and if they continue to pose a danger to the community, then it is important that they be confined until they no longer threaten the safety of all. It seems to me that the current way we administer justice can accomplish at least those two objectives. Yet I think we need to go further and think more deeply about exactly what we want to accomplish when great harm has been done and then we need to ask if our present ways of administering justice are the best way or the only way of giving justice to people.
It seems to me that true justice is something that satisfies the mind, the heart or dare I say, the body. When there has been some great loss, some cruelty, some deep and persistent wrong, either to oneself, one's family or to one's community, such wrongs rankle. They hurt. They persist in the heart, the memory and yes, the body. The vast majority of human beings cannot just get over great harms. They cannot just snap their fingers and move on. So the question is, when a great wrong has been done, what makes it right? I will never forget a dialogue session that I took part in a few years ago in Seattle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During this dialogue a Palestinian woman, whom I believe was a professor at a local university, spoke with great feeling about the loss of her family's home in what is now the state of Israel. The family home had been lost in the Nakba of 1948, the catastrophe in which so many Palestinians lost their homes and became stateless refugees. I asked her this question, "If today some Israeli citizens or a representative of the Israeli government were to listen to this great loss of you and your family and they were to say to you, "We deeply apologize to you for the loss of your home and your village during the Nakba," what impact do you think that would have on you?" She stared at me for a moment, almost as if she were in shock. I thought she might cry. She paused for a moment and said, "That would be wonderful. No one has ever said such a thing to me. . . And I still want the right to choose where I live." What I understood from this little example is that human beings have a deep hunger to have the injustices that have been done to them heard. We all long to tell our stories, to have them heard and honored.
A few years ago when I was deeply involved in the Restorative Justice movement (a movement to shift the paradigm of our present punishment oriented justice system to one of healing and repair), I was trained to conduct meetings between murderers and the survivors of the person they had killed. Although I never actually got to conduct such a dialogue myself (the process hadn't been approved in Washington state at the time), I watched many videotapes of the process and talked with many people who conducted such encounters. Such meetings have been and continue to be extraordinary and miraculous both for the surviving victims and for the perpetrator of the violent act. There is something that happens in the privacy of these meetings that can never happen in a courtroom. Stories are told on both sides of loss, grief, and sorrow. Remorse is expressed by perpetrators of a degree that victims have only dreamed of. Victims walk out of these dialogues feeling deep peace, able at last to get on with their lives. And for many of the murderers, the dialogue opens up something new in their lives; it is a gateway to personal transformation as they see and experience the real, the true human cost of their actions. Isn't this what we truly want---miracles of healing? community building? redemption? reconciliation?
I have watched several different documentaries about the Truth and Reconcilation Commission in South Africa and while I love the intentions and bold aims of the Commission, I was saddened that so much of that work, especially the confrontations between victims and perpetrators, took place in public and on television. Humans are fragile, shame-based creatures and when we have done something wrong, or defined as wrong by others in the community, even if we don't believe it was wrong, it can be terribly hard to take responsibility for it in public. When we are held up in a public tribunal, even if it is only the trial of public opinion, where the proceedings are televised, the phenonmenon of shame automatically comes into play and people shut down. The become closed, defensive and guarded. They are very unlikely to open their hearts to the losses, grief and trauma suffered by their victims. Therefore I have come to believe, that such encounters, should take place in closed sessions, led by highly trained facilitators. If we want true justice, if we want transformation for both victims and offenders, this is entirely possible. It may not happen every time such an encounter is conducted. But it is far more likely to happen in a closed session than in an open one.
I want to return now to the issue of conversations between people caught up in long-standing intractable conflicts like white/African American racism and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I understand that people on all sides in these conflicts are exhausted by the intractability of it all and by the endless cycles of violence. It all goes on and on and nothing seems to change in either of these conflicts. There is an unceasing sense of injustice in both conflicts and perhaps that is my fascination with both: what would or could make a difference in conflicts where there is such suffering? In both the example of racism and in the example of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there is a demand on the weaker side that the talk stop and that action happen now. There is the implication, spoken or unspoken, that the other side, white America, the Israeli Jews, are stronger and hence they are the perpetrators. There is a rhetoric of helpless victim versus all-powerful perpetrator that pervades these conflicts and the more this rhetoric goes unexamined, the more these conflicts stay rooted and unhealed. One interesting aspect of one side demanding action now or justice now before they will sit down to listen or talk is that it implies that someone else has to come along to fix or correct the situation. That side has surrendered their own power and potential in the situation and effectively declared themselves powerless. Someone will come along to save us! We are too weak! By looking at the issue of power and powerlessness in this way, we can begin to find places where we can empower ourselves, where power has been lost, and can be re-asserted in a life affirming way. There is something very exciting, even thrilling, about solving problems oneself (whether as an individual or a social or national state) versus having some other larger force coming along to solve them for you.
Another issue that comes into play in both these conflicts is the difficulty of the party being labelled as perpetrator in taking responsibility for any acts of violence or hurtfulness because to do so would threaten the present perceived role of good, innocent victim. In the US, the white majority likes to portray itself as good and noble and therefore innocent. We white people can't be guilty of racism because that's bad! We're the good guys on the planet! The Israelis view themselves as the victims of the Holocaust and many, many of them were so victimized. They have an identity that is passed down in the Jewish culture as the unwanted victims of the world. So if they are the victim of the world they are innocent and good. They can't do anything wrong. Because of these fixed identities, the majority power or the side with more actual power (in weapons or money) cannot take responsibility for perceived wrongs to the less powerful side because it threatens the identity or self-image of goodness. A similar identity is present for many Palestinians.
Where do we go from here? Well . . . . you can either live with the present conflict and continue to complain about it and make the other side wrong and live with the losses and death you have come to accept as normal. OR, you can do something altogether new. You can engage in a radically new kind of conversation. You can participate in conversations that are carefully structured to create complete safety so that people on each side can be vulnerable and open with each other. You can create conditions that make it much more likely for people in each community to see the places where they individually, or their community, has bought into an identity of victim or perpetrator.
An almost unheard of new conversation would be to give up the identities and labels of victim and perpetrator altogether. In a safe space where these labels have been surrendered, it would be far easier for people to take responsibility for wrongs that they have done, either individually or that their "side" has committed in the course of the conflict. In an environment of acceptance or accountability with love, the human cost of wrongs done by both sides can be heard and honored. It is high time that we let go these fixed labels of victim and perpetrator for I am convinced that at this stage in our evolution, they hurt more than they help. There is no one in this world who hasn't hurt someone at some point in their life, so no one can on this planet can claim to be completely good, innocent or better than other people. And no one, however bad the things they have done in their lives, has not done at least one kindness to another human being at some time in their life. These labels are so arbitrary and constrict us so terribly. It is really time to give them up.
Under conditions of safety and vulnerability, new things begin to happen. People express themselves in different ways. They take new, undreamed of actions. They embrace people on the other side in friendship and community. Walls come down. Alliances are built. An either/or way of seeing the world is surrendered and a both/and way of looking at and being in the world is embraced. Something, roughly like justice, begins to emerge. Or perhaps we should call it compassion.
Questions of Inquiry;
1. Have you experienced rough justice?
2. Have you experienced true justice that satisfied your heart and soul? What was the difference?
3. How could we go about creating justice first in intractable conflicts?
What is the thirst for justice about and how does one respond to it when someone is in your face demanding "action now!"? Justice is something I've studied and examined in great depth in my life and it deserves a closer look. There is no doubt that human beings do terrible things to each other, whether in private criminal acts or within the larger scale actions that constitute genocide, terrorism or war. Whenever anyone violates the body, the safety, indeed the spirit of another human being or takes a human life, there is something in our core or that of those who survive us, that demands an accounting for that violation. Call it reciprocity. There are certain fundamental agreements that humans have that make survival of the whole possible: we need each other, we have to treat each other with respect in order to live in community or the whole cannot survive. If we tear each other apart, the chains of food production, and other things we need for our joint survival cannot be sustained. So we have to call one another to account when one or more of us violate the agreements that make for the survival of the whole. Beyond that, each of us knows that in some way, every life seems to have some value, at least to those to whom he or she is related, and the sudden and precipitous end of that life, is a terrible loss and violation. These things call for an accounting. There is some sense that a profound wrong has been done to us and has to be made right. It is from these deep, inborn feelings that humans have evolved their systems of justice.
In the days of tribes and clans, when a life was taken by a competing tribe or clan, the family simply went out and took revenge on the tribe that committed the original murder. So of course the murders went back and forth in an unbroken cycle of revenge and retaliation until the original injury was forgotten or until someone called for a truce. This was a very rough form of justice and things easily got out of hand, especially as society grew and as people moved into towns, villages and states. Eventually, as kings took over as rulers of nation states, they found this inter-tribal warfare far too costly to the peace of their kingdoms and they instituted the rule of law, wherein the king alone was able to meet out justice for wrongs done. This had the benefit of stabilizing the nation, getting people to delay the thirst for revenge, and it probably also brought in income to the king's treasury. This is how our own system of law and justice evolved.
Now this has certainly not eliminated revenge killing as you can see in the streets of any city neighborhood ruled by the Crips and Bloods. And it hasn't eliminated revenge and retaliation in international warfare as is quite evident in the insurgency in Iraq and in the terrorism conducted by Al Quaeda. So in some ways we are far ahead of where they were a millenium ago with our system of laws and our penal system. But even that system, at least in the US, can still be a system of rough justice at times. The family of a murder victim may wait for years for the person who murdered their child to be caught, then tried, and then convicted. Once the person is convicted, they may sit in the courtroom hungrily waiting to hear from that murderer, some words that he or she is sorry, to see some expression of remorse for taking the life of their loved one. But they will rarely ever see that in a courtroom in the US. Most likely the murderer will have a stony expression on their face and will say nothing as they walk away to their death sentence or to serve life without parole. If the murderer gets the death penalty, the family may wait another ten or twenty years for the murderer to be executed. When that moment comes and the murderer is executed, how satisfying is it for the family that the person who took the life of their loved one is finally taking their last breath? So much time has gone by. No words have been exchanged. Is this really justice? Or is it too, another form of rough justice?
So what is justice after all? Part of it is the judgement of a tribunal, some higher authority that a wrong has been done and that it should not have happened. For people who feel disempowered in their lives, the moral weight of a judge or a tribunal is often very important and helpful in adding an imprimatur, a stamp of value to their loved one's life. In addition, if someone has done some grave wrong and if they continue to pose a danger to the community, then it is important that they be confined until they no longer threaten the safety of all. It seems to me that the current way we administer justice can accomplish at least those two objectives. Yet I think we need to go further and think more deeply about exactly what we want to accomplish when great harm has been done and then we need to ask if our present ways of administering justice are the best way or the only way of giving justice to people.
It seems to me that true justice is something that satisfies the mind, the heart or dare I say, the body. When there has been some great loss, some cruelty, some deep and persistent wrong, either to oneself, one's family or to one's community, such wrongs rankle. They hurt. They persist in the heart, the memory and yes, the body. The vast majority of human beings cannot just get over great harms. They cannot just snap their fingers and move on. So the question is, when a great wrong has been done, what makes it right? I will never forget a dialogue session that I took part in a few years ago in Seattle on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During this dialogue a Palestinian woman, whom I believe was a professor at a local university, spoke with great feeling about the loss of her family's home in what is now the state of Israel. The family home had been lost in the Nakba of 1948, the catastrophe in which so many Palestinians lost their homes and became stateless refugees. I asked her this question, "If today some Israeli citizens or a representative of the Israeli government were to listen to this great loss of you and your family and they were to say to you, "We deeply apologize to you for the loss of your home and your village during the Nakba," what impact do you think that would have on you?" She stared at me for a moment, almost as if she were in shock. I thought she might cry. She paused for a moment and said, "That would be wonderful. No one has ever said such a thing to me. . . And I still want the right to choose where I live." What I understood from this little example is that human beings have a deep hunger to have the injustices that have been done to them heard. We all long to tell our stories, to have them heard and honored.
A few years ago when I was deeply involved in the Restorative Justice movement (a movement to shift the paradigm of our present punishment oriented justice system to one of healing and repair), I was trained to conduct meetings between murderers and the survivors of the person they had killed. Although I never actually got to conduct such a dialogue myself (the process hadn't been approved in Washington state at the time), I watched many videotapes of the process and talked with many people who conducted such encounters. Such meetings have been and continue to be extraordinary and miraculous both for the surviving victims and for the perpetrator of the violent act. There is something that happens in the privacy of these meetings that can never happen in a courtroom. Stories are told on both sides of loss, grief, and sorrow. Remorse is expressed by perpetrators of a degree that victims have only dreamed of. Victims walk out of these dialogues feeling deep peace, able at last to get on with their lives. And for many of the murderers, the dialogue opens up something new in their lives; it is a gateway to personal transformation as they see and experience the real, the true human cost of their actions. Isn't this what we truly want---miracles of healing? community building? redemption? reconciliation?
I have watched several different documentaries about the Truth and Reconcilation Commission in South Africa and while I love the intentions and bold aims of the Commission, I was saddened that so much of that work, especially the confrontations between victims and perpetrators, took place in public and on television. Humans are fragile, shame-based creatures and when we have done something wrong, or defined as wrong by others in the community, even if we don't believe it was wrong, it can be terribly hard to take responsibility for it in public. When we are held up in a public tribunal, even if it is only the trial of public opinion, where the proceedings are televised, the phenonmenon of shame automatically comes into play and people shut down. The become closed, defensive and guarded. They are very unlikely to open their hearts to the losses, grief and trauma suffered by their victims. Therefore I have come to believe, that such encounters, should take place in closed sessions, led by highly trained facilitators. If we want true justice, if we want transformation for both victims and offenders, this is entirely possible. It may not happen every time such an encounter is conducted. But it is far more likely to happen in a closed session than in an open one.
I want to return now to the issue of conversations between people caught up in long-standing intractable conflicts like white/African American racism and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I understand that people on all sides in these conflicts are exhausted by the intractability of it all and by the endless cycles of violence. It all goes on and on and nothing seems to change in either of these conflicts. There is an unceasing sense of injustice in both conflicts and perhaps that is my fascination with both: what would or could make a difference in conflicts where there is such suffering? In both the example of racism and in the example of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, there is a demand on the weaker side that the talk stop and that action happen now. There is the implication, spoken or unspoken, that the other side, white America, the Israeli Jews, are stronger and hence they are the perpetrators. There is a rhetoric of helpless victim versus all-powerful perpetrator that pervades these conflicts and the more this rhetoric goes unexamined, the more these conflicts stay rooted and unhealed. One interesting aspect of one side demanding action now or justice now before they will sit down to listen or talk is that it implies that someone else has to come along to fix or correct the situation. That side has surrendered their own power and potential in the situation and effectively declared themselves powerless. Someone will come along to save us! We are too weak! By looking at the issue of power and powerlessness in this way, we can begin to find places where we can empower ourselves, where power has been lost, and can be re-asserted in a life affirming way. There is something very exciting, even thrilling, about solving problems oneself (whether as an individual or a social or national state) versus having some other larger force coming along to solve them for you.
Another issue that comes into play in both these conflicts is the difficulty of the party being labelled as perpetrator in taking responsibility for any acts of violence or hurtfulness because to do so would threaten the present perceived role of good, innocent victim. In the US, the white majority likes to portray itself as good and noble and therefore innocent. We white people can't be guilty of racism because that's bad! We're the good guys on the planet! The Israelis view themselves as the victims of the Holocaust and many, many of them were so victimized. They have an identity that is passed down in the Jewish culture as the unwanted victims of the world. So if they are the victim of the world they are innocent and good. They can't do anything wrong. Because of these fixed identities, the majority power or the side with more actual power (in weapons or money) cannot take responsibility for perceived wrongs to the less powerful side because it threatens the identity or self-image of goodness. A similar identity is present for many Palestinians.
Where do we go from here? Well . . . . you can either live with the present conflict and continue to complain about it and make the other side wrong and live with the losses and death you have come to accept as normal. OR, you can do something altogether new. You can engage in a radically new kind of conversation. You can participate in conversations that are carefully structured to create complete safety so that people on each side can be vulnerable and open with each other. You can create conditions that make it much more likely for people in each community to see the places where they individually, or their community, has bought into an identity of victim or perpetrator.
An almost unheard of new conversation would be to give up the identities and labels of victim and perpetrator altogether. In a safe space where these labels have been surrendered, it would be far easier for people to take responsibility for wrongs that they have done, either individually or that their "side" has committed in the course of the conflict. In an environment of acceptance or accountability with love, the human cost of wrongs done by both sides can be heard and honored. It is high time that we let go these fixed labels of victim and perpetrator for I am convinced that at this stage in our evolution, they hurt more than they help. There is no one in this world who hasn't hurt someone at some point in their life, so no one can on this planet can claim to be completely good, innocent or better than other people. And no one, however bad the things they have done in their lives, has not done at least one kindness to another human being at some time in their life. These labels are so arbitrary and constrict us so terribly. It is really time to give them up.
Under conditions of safety and vulnerability, new things begin to happen. People express themselves in different ways. They take new, undreamed of actions. They embrace people on the other side in friendship and community. Walls come down. Alliances are built. An either/or way of seeing the world is surrendered and a both/and way of looking at and being in the world is embraced. Something, roughly like justice, begins to emerge. Or perhaps we should call it compassion.
Questions of Inquiry;
1. Have you experienced rough justice?
2. Have you experienced true justice that satisfied your heart and soul? What was the difference?
3. How could we go about creating justice first in intractable conflicts?
posted by Joy at 1:22 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home