A Potpourri Newsletter
Newsletter 265 - August 19 , 2024
As you might guess from the title, this newsletter combines several short items.
The first thing that we want to share is friend and colleague John Paul Lederach's recent Washington Post Op Ed and accompanying free book The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War: Surprising ideas from everyday people who shifted the cycles of violence. In both the op-ed and the Pocket Guide, John Paul focuses on the extreme danger of hyper-polarization, how that has led to civil war in many of the places he has worked, and what he has learned from 40+ years experience in peacebuilding about what can be done to avert that danger before it is too late. We think this book is extremely important, based, not only, on what it says, but also given who wrote it, as we consider John Paul to probably be the most astute thinker in our field today.
The second item is a note about Heidi's review of Lou Kriesberg's book Fighting Better and a note about the Negotiation Journal, in which this review was recently published. Lou's book came out in December of 2022, and we published a review of it on BI that month. But a few months ago, the Negotiation Journal asked Heidi to write a review of it, and they agreed to publish an updated and expanded review, which was just published on August 16. To our delight and also of great importance to the field, the Negotiation Journal is now being published by MIT Press, in collaboration with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and it is open access, so the articles are free on the web for anyone to read. That is very big news in our view, as we have always believed that good information about topics as important as peacebuilding and conflict resolution should be freely available, not behind a pay wall. So we are extremely pleased that the Negotiation Journal is now free!
The third item is an exchange Guy and Heidi had with Deborah Laufer, reflecting on Newsletter 261, Massively Parallel Partisanship Revisited.
And Guy wants to add to the mix two Kenneth Boulding observations that seem worth considering at the moment. For those who don't know, Kenneth was a prominent economist and a founder of the peace and conflict resolution field back in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. (Guy had the good fortune to work as his research associate for many years). As part of his voluminous writing, Kenneth liked to formulate "laws" and "theorems." Below, Guy will share his "dismal theorem of political science" and his "law of political irony," both of which seem to apply to the current U.S. election.
John Paul Lederach's Advice for Facing Down a Civil War — and the Lederach Archive
John Paul has worked as a peacebuilder in countries suffering from protracted civil wars for 40 years: Northern Ireland, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Nicaragua, Colombia, Nepal, and many more. He has written several highly respected books in the peacebuilding field, the first called Building Peace, which we still quote frequently, as it contains explanations of the dynamics in deeply divided societies -- and ways out -- that still resonate 25+ years after it was written. We particularly loved his book Moral Imagination, which not only provides wonderful stories and theory, but it is beautifully written, making a peacebuilder's heart soar as they read it. Both those books and many more of his teachings are apparent in his newest offering, The Pocket Guide for Facing Down a Civil War: Surprising ideas from everyday people who shifted the cycles of violence, which he wrote in answer to the many people who have been asking him (and we've wondered too) "is the United States headed toward civil war?" And if so, is there anything we can do to prevent that?
I have not yet read the whole book, as I just learned about it on Thursday, so I will likely be writing more about it in a coming post. I was struck by his beginning where he closely links toxic polarization with civil war, and seems to agree with our assessment that toxic polarization is extremely dangerous, and that the antecedents of civil war are, indeed, brewing here, just has they brewed elsewhere where war has broken out. And John Paul points out right away: America is not exceptional in this regard. It can happen here.
But, he quickly goes on to say it doesn't have to. He starts right away in Chapter One presenting several of his stories from Moral Imagination about ordinary people making the seemingly impossible happen. He retells his story about how the Women of Wajir (Kenya) worked against all odds to bring peace to the marketplace and from there to their country. He talks about the peasants of Colombia who created "peace zones" to prevent Colombia's ubiquitous violence from spreading among them. And his message: they did it; you can too. His Pocket Guide is available for free on his web Archive: a wonderful site that I had heard he was building, but first visited today. Like everything else John Paul does, it is beautiful. And it is stock full of wisdom, of how to transform the most intractable, the most violent situations into ones of hope and healing. Check out
https://www.johnpaullederach.com/
Lou Kriesberg's Fighting Better -- And Heidi's Negotiation Journal Review of It
Lou Kriesberg's book Fighting Better is a scholarly masterpiece, but it is also a practical textbook for people seeking to pursue change in American society. I am writing about it now because we haven't written about it yet in Substack, and my (Heidi's) review of it was just published in the Negotiation Journal, so we wanted to alert people to that. The Negotiation Journal review is a slight expansion on the one we posted on BI in December of 2022, and it is available for free, as NJ is now open source. We also posted a blog post on January 1, 2023 (yes, we are workaholics!) that focused particularly on the last chapter that brings together much of the wisdom presented throughout the other nine chapters to provide advice about how to constructively pursue social, economic, and political change without falling into the many traps that advocates have fallen into before (and which he described in detail in the first nine chapters). Among the suggestions he makes are:
Use legitimate institutionalized procedures when possible — they often do work, and cause less pushback than occurs when you use illegitimate procedures.
Blend persuasion with positive sanctions. (This is very similar to Boulding/Wehr's notion of the power strategy mix, which we wrote about long ago in Newsletter 102.
Recognize that the opposition is not homogeneous. Some are more "reasonable," flexible, and amenable to reconciliation than you might expect.
Seeing a conflict as one aspect of a broader relationship, and as related to other conflicts, can help transform or resolve it.
Noticing and considering the opponent's concerns is necessary for constructive responses.
Conflicts change over time -- the people involved change, the context changes, the dynamics change. Sometimes these changes create openings for transformation or resolution that were not there before: watch for these and take advantage of them!
I explained all this and more in the January 2022 Newsletter and the August, 2024 Negotiation Journal review. But if you really want the details, along with an amazing history of people doing great things and horrible things (and many in between) regarding what Lou calls "the three primary dimensions of all human societies: class, status, and power," get the book! (By the way he also deals with race a lot, but observes, correctly in my view, that race is a problematic concept that is socially constructed, not biological. So he treats it as a subset of status conflicts.)
Deborah Laufer's Thoughts on Massively Parallel Partisanship
In response to our Newsletter 261: Massively Parallel Partisanship Revisited, Deborah wrote us:
A wonderfully crisply written and nicely executed newsletter. My main suggestion is to perhaps remind readers of an example from the past when the US might have been faced with a hyper-charged massively parallel partisan moment/crisis or situation, and yet moved beyond it. Further, while your concluding paragraph is positive and uplifting, you might want to also insist to readers that parallel democracy and peace building efforts are almost always nonpartisan, or at least seek out all contributing voices. It is unfortunate that in the current climate when you even say “peace building” or democracy building”, you are labeled as something unprintable, unpleasant, or “othered”, or simply considered useless. At the very least you could have hyperlinked to other newsletters of yours with your categories of the incredible work being done. Lastly, my continued admiration for all the work that you do to synthesize and manage to present in honest, cogent and balanced ways. You are both brilliant!
We are delighted that Deborah thinks we are brilliant, because some people, we know, think quite the opposite! But that's the nature of the work that we do, and yes, as Deborah said, we are sometimes labeled things that are quite unpleasant. My response to Deborah was:
I don't know U.S. history well enough, I'm embarrassed to say, to know of a time when we've successfully gotten out of deep polarization. But I'm thinking one must be the late 70s, when we were no longer suffering the struggles of the late 60s and early 70s. Guy was just arguing (persuasively, I must say) to me yesterday that the 60s was way worse then we have now. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy (the leading Democratic Presidential candidate at the time) were both killed, cities were burning down, we were having massive marches against the Vietnam War. We were having frequent bombings in Boulder (where we live) -- not Oklahoma city class bombings (where an entire Federal Building was levelled, killing 168 people), but little things that damaged a corner of the courthouse, and a pipe bomb in a garbage can that exploded in the law school auditorium where I was attending a lecture (at the time). And somehow we came out of that. I'm going to have to look into that more. There must have been other times too. Interesting question!
On your second point, sadly, it's not that simple. An awful lot of the "peacebuilders" we used to work with are not nonpartisan. That was the whole point of the exchange we had with Bernie Mayer and Jackie Font Guzman right at the beginning of the newsletter. We're also working on an update to that which will come out in a week or so--reflecting on the many letters we have received that have called us hypocritical because we advocated for neutrality there, but came out strongly pro-Israel. The new post will explain why we did that, and why we don't think we are being hypocritical. But many conservatives don't want to engage in many "bridging" or "dialogue" processes because they fear that they will be lectured to by the Left about how evil they are -- and unfortunately, in too many cases, this is true.
And yes, Guy and I have talked quite a bit about the words "peacebuilding" and "democracy building." Guy argues that "peace" and "democracy" are too important ideas to give up, but we're also using the term "massively parallel problem solving" whenever we can.
I'll add now, that we're told that "democracy building" is a "lefty-term," (and that may be true), but we have read lots of articles that illustrate that Republicans also think our democracy is under attack. But their reasons are different. They think their first amendment rights are being taken away from them by the Left's so-called "cancel culture." They think they are being discriminated against and humiliated in DEI programs, which they see as being illegally imposed not only in government, but in the private sector as well. Many really do think the 2020 election was "stolen," and they fear future "steals" if they don't protect themselves (which, of course, the Democrats see as setting up a "steal" on the Republican side).
So there is plenty of fear and name-calling to go around, and lots of work to be done by people whom one might call "peacebuilders," "democracy builders," "bridgers" or "problem-solvers." In his Pocket Guide, John Paul calls them people with "imagination." Lou Kriesberg calls them "constructive advocates."
And yes, Deborach, are right — there are lots of them out there. Many more than any of us know! As we discussed in our conversation with Walt Roberts and Caleb Christian, we need to make the movement to counter hyper-polarization, no matter what you call it, much more visible and we need to join with Walt, Caleb, John Paul and many others to get many more people involved, instead of piling on one partisan side or the other, and driving the toxic polarization even higher. At the beginning of his book, John Paul cites people who said "enough is enough." Yes!
Kenneth Boulding's Laws
I was delighted to see John Paul quote Kenneth Boulding's First Law -- "if it exists, it must be possible," in Chapter One of his book. We quote that law frequently too. Kenneth formulated this law when people were saying that you couldn't have inflation and a recession at the same time, Yet, at the time, America did have both. He (and we) and now John Paul went on to apply it to people doing things that were said to be impossible — for example, building peace out of an intractable war. Boulding's First Law is a statement of hope, of possibility.
But he had two other saying, both of which seem relevant today, that are not as hopeful. One was his "Dismal Theorem of Political Science." Okay, maybe it is hopeful that it was only a theorem, not a law. But what it said was that the moral temperament and skills that make people successful candidates for public office are quite different from the skills and temperament that they need effectively carry out the responsibilities in that office once elected.
Both Trump and Harris are proving themselves to be effective candidates (otherwise the race would not be this close). Still, it is far from clear who is going to be the more successful candidate. They have both demonstrated the ability to rouse up the crowds, strike fear in the electorate about the threat posed by the other side and persuade a great many people to support them. Unfortunately, the ability to do these things is not translated into an ability to wisely, equitably, and effectively govern should they be elected. In fact, the skills they need to get elected may well undermine their ability to function effectively once selected.
This is something that we, in the United States, can see in the behavior of our Presidents going back a very long time. They were great campaigners. They got out the votes for their sides. But when they won, and promised to govern for all of America, and heal the wounds of the divisive election, they didn't do that very well (as is evidenced by our deepening hyper-polarization and worsening "polycrises").
Our point in calling attention to Boulding's (not Malthus') dismal theorem is not to give us all a clever, new way to express our cynicism about politics (though it certainly does that). Rather, is to highlight a serious shortcoming in our democratic institutions and offer a challenge to those looking for ways to reform our democracy so that it can truly live up to its ideals. We desperately need are a set of reforms that will bring electoral and governing skills into better alignment.
This might, for example, be accomplished by increasing the effectiveness of efforts to build a civic culture that downplays "political hobbyism" while strengthening the kind of citizenship that encourages more widespread public participation in collaborative democracy. This would also need to be accompanied by media reforms that concentrate much more political coverage on the ways in which candidates are likely to respond to the tough issues that they're going to face, rather than simply who is ahead in the race, covering it like a sporting event. Other possible reforms might address the many ways in which moderate voters are disenfranchised and national unity campaigns (like No Labels) are effectively excluded from the political process.
A second Kenneth "Bouldingism" worth remembering in this turbulent time is his Law of Political Irony: "everything you do to help people hurts them, and everything you do to hurt people helps them." This law recognizes the astonishing complexity of modern society and the fact that even the best political leaders have a limited grasp of this complexity and even more limited ability to actually influence this complex system in positive ways. (Breaking things is, unfortunately, vastly easier.)
Look at how many policies have accomplished what they intended. Why is our track record so bad? We would argue it is because most policy makers don't consider the whole system, so they enact policies that end up having lots of unintended consequences. Sometimes those aren't foreseeable or avoidable. But if one tries as much as possible to understand the system one is trying to change, the chances of success go up at least to some extent. So, for example, before Kamala proposed price controls on groceries, she might have looked at how such policies have played out in the past. Before Trump proposed firing all civil servants, he might want to look at the services they provide that would then go unfilled. The other part of the problem is, of course, that candidates (especially those who want to get re-elected) realize their primary goal needs to be being seen as doing things that please their supporters, not necessarily doing those things (reality is not as important as perceptions).
Bottom line, the pro-democracy movement needs to add addressing these two challenging problems to its "to do list."
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Lead Graphic Photo Credit: Potpourri. Picture from https://www.flickr.com/photos/zimpenfish/3895342691/ CC by 2.0 by rjp.
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