Newsletter #59 — October 24, 2022
In This Issue
- From BI's Co-Directors
- From the Discussion
- Colleague Activities
- Beyond Intractability In Context
- About the MBI Newsletters
- Newsletter Archive
From Beyond Intractability's Co-Directors
Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess
If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, it Is Going to Be Hard to Get There
As we often tell our students before we ask them to do a future-visioning exercise, "if you don't know where you are going, it is going to be hard to get there." In the absence of an attractive and broadly accepted image of what a just and peaceful society would look like, it is going to be very hard to build one. In Heidi's graduate reconciliation course, she uses a future-visioning exercise modeled after one developed years ago by Elise Boulding who asked people to "imagine a world without militaries." Heidi asked her students to imagine a country (the U.S. or other) without deep divisions, without hyper-polarization or actual or threatened political violence.
Since most peacebuilding graduate students tend to be politically left, they usually came up with an image of a country that exhibited all the progressive ideals: equality of wealth and income, excellent (often free) higher education and health care for all, good jobs and housing for all, controlled climate change, a comprehensive anti-racism program and full protections for the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
When asked how they'd "get there," the assumption was either that conservatives would come to understand that the progressive view was right, and would join the progressive side, or alternatively, the assumption sometimes was that the conservatives would just be outvoted and overpowered. "Do you think they will just slink away and be quiet?" Heidi would ask. "Will they leave the country?" "Well, no," her students admitted, then coming to the understanding that their imagined future, if it were to come to pass, would not be one of peace, but rather one of continued struggle. She would then send them back to the drawing boards, to come up with an image of the future in which everyone would want to live. The resulting essays looked very different!
John Paul Lederach, who has, over the last several decades has been one of the world's most insightful and creative peacebuilders, developed an elicitive strategy for helping deeply divided (and usually war-torn) communities surmount deep differences and develop a common vision for a better future. His approach focused on helping communities rediscover the long-standing wisdom that was already deeply embedded in their socio-cultural traditions – wisdom that, in the heat of ongoing conflict, had receded far into the background. He believed that building on existing insights is far more likely to be successful than trying to import alien ideas from other cultures or embracing brand-new ideas that, while often superficially attractive, have never really been tested against the harsh complexities of the real world. That said, he also recognized that communities may need to adapt their long-standing ideas in ways that enable them to better address the demands posed by rapidly changing social conditions or the now recognized failings and inequities associated with past approaches.
This seems, to us, like good advice as we try to build broad support for efforts to reverse the hyper-polarization spiral. In the United States (and the many other countries whose cultural origins trace back to Western European civilization), we are heirs to a centuries-long effort to figure out how to structure societies composed of people with very different socio-cultural traditions in ways that allow everyone to live together in freedom, peace, and prosperity, while also limiting power concentrations that can lead to exploitation, oppression, and authoritarian rule. For our society, these efforts have coalesced around a complex and continually evolving array of governing principles that we call liberal democracy.
In saying this, we want to be clear: liberal democracy is not the only way to organize a society. There are lots of other societies with other long-standing traditions that they could draw on to get them through contemporary crises. In the United States, however, liberal democracy is deeply ingrained in our society. Rediscovering its virtues and fixing its many shortcomings is likely to be much easier than finding and persuading the society as a whole to embrace something new and different.
In fact, it is efforts to promote something new and different that are a big part of what is driving our current hyper-polarization. On the left, progressive disillusionment over many injustices that it sees as having been allowed to persist in the context of liberal democracy has led to the emergence of powerful new "successor ideology" and a "woke" challenge to liberal democracy. (These are names given to this movement by its critics. Oddly, a broadly-accepted and positively-framed name for this philosophy has yet to emerge from its proponents.) On the right, with its very different set of moral beliefs, we have seen the emergence of what its opponents call an "illiberal democracy" movement that advocates increasingly extreme measures to combat the progressive left — measures that often violate liberal democratic norms.
Unfortunately, there are "bad-faith actors" on both the right and the left who are actively working to inflame tensions in ways that enable them to accumulate power and exploit others. These efforts, when combined with the natural power of escalation dynamics, have taken us to the point where the left and the right really do constitute a major threat to each other's interests — a fact that only further intensifies the confrontation.
Still, the fact that both the left and the right are mobilizing around what they see as threats to "our democracy" gives us hope that rediscovering and recommitting to democratic ideals might offer a way out of our current predicament. After all, liberal democracy is a system designed specifically to allow diverse communities with competing and incompatible beliefs to live together in peace while equitably sharing the burdens and benefits that come from living in such close proximity. Instead of discarding it, we need to figure out how to adapt it to the challenges of the 21st century. Those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise have much to contribute to such an effort.
Hopefully, we will demonstrate that Fukuyama is actually right history is converging on some new and better form of liberal democracy as the only viable alternative to chaos and authoritarianism.
From the BI/CRQ Hyper-Polarization Discussion
Jack Williams: Reaching out Within and Beyond the Classroom
In his response to the CRQ hyper-polarization framing essay, Jack, who is President of the Zurich-based Institute for Global Negotiation, focused on the central role of education in tackling polarization.
The institutionalisation of conflict resolution skills within all academic programs should be a central goal of any MPP [massively parallel peacebuilding/problem solving]initiative and one where conflict resolution scholar and practitioners are uniquely placed to act. Launching a campaign to encourage this – with accompanying syllabi, resources and facilitation guides – would allow the conflict resolution community to pro-actively promote the skills rather than waiting for interested stakeholders to come to them.
Jack goes on to say that " universities must serve more than the students who attend them." He suggests that universities can serve as "peacebuilding hubs." much as Barney Jordaan called for in his CRQ Commentary. "This reimagining of universities as local peacebuilding actors offers opportunities not only for the community but also for the university’s students," enabling them to act to prevent, limit, and resolve conflicts.
After reporting on his own efforts to spur reasoned discussions over Brexit during the referendum campaign in the UK, Jack concluded that he "firmly believe[s] that there is an appetite to reimagine our discourse away from simply polarised positioning and that we have the tools to achieve this. We just have to get to work."
Barney Jordaan and Peter Adler's Responses to Newsletter's 57 Crane Brinton Essay.
Barney wrote to note that the Crane Brinton essay reminded him of a quote from Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes: "in a real revolution... the best characters do not come to the front. ...A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and tyrannical hypocrites at first. Then come the pretentious intellectual failures, the rogues, and then
The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement – but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment – often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured – that is the definition of revolutionary success.
Peter Adler wrote about Camus' The Rebel. Camus, Peter observed, "wrote about the roots of rebellion and some of the consequences and excesses that usually ensue." Camus's writing Peter said, "figured prominently in [his forthcoming] civil war novel."
Kevin responded to our request for comments with a link to the Toda Peace Institute's Public Conversations with people working on Global Challenges to Democracy in the 21st Century. One of these was a conversation that Kevin and Paula Green had with Stephan Haggard and Bob Kaufman about their new book Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Modern World. Drawing on detailed case studies, including the United States and countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, the book focuses on three, inter-related causal mechanisms of democratic decay: the pernicious effects of polarization; realignments of party systems that enable elected autocrats to gain legislative power; and "the incremental nature of derogations, which divides oppositions and keeps them off balance."
In addition to those drivers, they discussed international organizations and bad faith entrepreneurs who are working to dismantle the democratic liberal order (rather than helping build it as used to be expected), the role of fear in driving hyper-polarization and resulting attacks on democracy, the growing "visceral opposition to the cosmopolitan idea," and finally, prospects for democracy over the short and medium term. Notably, in the context of Crane Brinton, and also our discussion of visioning above, Paula noted that "if you are not building the new while you are taking down the old, there is nothing to move towards. So these things have to happen simultaneously." Bob ended by saying that he wasn't optimistic or pessimistic, he was "worried." "Democracy has very important things to offer, and those will become more salient when they are taken away from people." But all of the countries they looked at, he said "are in a deep hole, and it's going to be very challenging to dig out." Stephan added that this is a time when democracies need to support one another—help each other recognize, block, and respond to threats, and work together to enhance each other's prosperity—for very pragmatic reasons.
Colleague Activities
Highlighting things that our conflict and peacebuilding colleagues are doing that contribute to efforts to address the hyper-polarization problem.
- Big Picture Thinking Projects
The Horizons Project: Sharing a United Front — Social change agents need to build a united front by fostering a shared understanding of the threat, collaborating across difference, and forming dense networks. - Constructive Communication
Strengthening Social Connection and Opportunities in Rural Communities — This report illustrates the benefits of including a broader array of voices in determining needs among residents of rural communities. - Power-Sharing Strategies
The Two-Party System is Failing Us — A discussion between Duncan Audrey and Benjamin Life discussing why the U.S.'s two-party system doesn't work, and what might be done about that. - System Thinking Strategies
How to Save Democracy — From The Atlantic, a report on a massive, crowd-sourced effort to find and then test mass audience-based strategies for diffusing our hyper-polarized politics - System Thinking Strategies
The U.S. is Heading Toward a Second Civil War. Here Is How We Avoid It — From Peter Coleman, a colleague with a long history of research into the problems posed by complexity and intractability, thoughts about how to escape our current predicament.
Beyond Intractability in Context
From around the web, more insight into the nature of our conflict problems, limits of business-as-usual thinking, and things people are doing to try to make things better.
- Analytical Failures
The Sources of Russian Misconduct — From a defecting Russian diplomat, an explanation of how an anenvironment in which dissent was not tolerated led to the tragedy in Ukraine (with important lessons for those suppressing dissent in the US). - Political Dysfunction
America's Democratic Backsliding Is Not Universal — For those clinging to the belief that the United States is still the most successful democracy, evidence that others are doing better (and that maybe we can learn from them). - Communication Obstacles
How Stewart Made Tucker — A surprising and quite perceptive explanation of the role that Jon Stewart played in bringing about today's more divisive media environment. - Gender / LBGTQ+
The Boys Feminism Left Behind — Reflections on the way in which the women's movement disrupted relationship patterns that existed between men and women for 1000s of years and thoughts about how to build new and better relationships. - Gender / LBGTQ+
Let’s Say Gay — With respect to LBGTQ issues, a look at the complex way in which the language we use to describe social problems evolves and the way in which that language drives conflict and determines policies. - The Scale and Complexity Problem
Future Population Growth — Eye-opening, often surprising, and extremely important charts showing where populations are exploding, stable, and contracting and by how much. - Authoritarianism
The Omnipotence of China's Xi Jinping — An in-depth profile of Xi Jinping with important insights into the threat posed by 21st-century authoritarianism. - Social Complexity
The Way Los Angeles Is Trying to Solve Homelessness Is ‘Absolutely Insane’ — A detailed account of how one well-funded and well-intentioned policy initiative is failing with valuable insights into the complex challenges that real-world problem-solving must meet. - Developing a Unifying Vision
Can Democracy Exist Without Liberalism? — For a time when illiberal democracy is on the rise, Shadi Hamid reflects the all-important relationship between liberalism and democracy. - Climate Change
The Environmentalists Undermining Environmentalism — A reminder that efforts to limit climate change will require us all to make tough choices and sacrifices -- including environmentalists.
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