More Conflict [of a kind] Is Needed!
by: Dave Belden on October 9th, 2009 | 12 Comments »
Peace is not absence of conflict. Peace requires hidden conflicts to be brought out and engaged in nonviolently, so they don’t get repressed and eventually erupt in violence. When conflicts are repressed, injustices do not get redressed. Pain builds. People suffer in obscurity (which is not peaceful for them), unless and until they revolt.
But are we peace types studying the art of fomenting conflict? No. We are much more likely to be thinking how to avoid conflict. I can go to classes in nonviolent communication any night of the week in the Bay Area: and I recommend them, they are amazing and I don’t have enough time in the rest of my life to get good at what I have already learned at them.
But I want the next stage: classes in how to bring inherent conflicts into full vibrant nonviolent clash! I want to know how to pursue conflict strongly! rile up the comfortable! rudely interrupt consensus! make change happen! Nonviolently, yes, but effectively, also. The tundra could melt and civilization drown while we are being empathic to the ecologically blind.
I believe this is what Nichola Torbett was calling for in a post this week on how to respond to police violence in Oakland: not just how to do it nonviolently, but how to do it. One can be quite nicely nonviolent oneself by staying home and not trying to stop police violence at all. Of course that failure to engage in conflict with the city and the police may enable current violence to continue. That’s how most of the violence of poverty, racism and oppression around the world does continue: when people don’t get up to stop it. The message of Gandhi and MLK was not just “Be Nonviolent” it was “Ramp Up The Conflict With The Oppressors–Nonviolently.”
So Obama got the peace prize. I love the man but he’s no role model for what people like me have to learn if we are to have peace. People like me? I mean middle class well-brought-up seekers after peace and empathic connection. I mean the supposedly uber-reasonable white college-educated well-mannered rationalists.
We hate the bull-headed way the Right has gone about conflict since the 1960s and 70s. We realize that to some degree they were reacting against how the Left, or parts of it, have done conflict — abusively, contemptuously and so on. We loved Obama because he was a man in the middle, able to see that there was no red America, no blue America, just America; and he was a man who at the same time spoke in semi-spiritual terms about renewal and change.
But he’s in reaction mode against ugly divisiveness. He’s not modeling good divisiveness.
Is there such a thing?
We know there is in personal relationships. We have absorbed the notion that someone who goes along with their partner’s addiction is co-dependent, and needs to get tougher, to say no. When I repressed any instances of anger in my first marriage, my anger built until it erupted: not helpful. I had to learn to express my needs and anger earlier in the process, and I wasn’t inventing any wheels in doing so: lots of people know that. You have to learn how to have conflicts safely and lovingly in a relationship or family, not how to avoid conflicts.
And that’s what a lot of democracy is: a way to have conflicts safely. But safe for whom? Safe for the people in power? Maybe when parents learn to welcome their children’s expression of any of their own needs that come into apparent conflict with the parents’ needs, and work out together how to enable the fullest life for each member of the family, then the culture will be more ready to hear from the less powerful about their needs.
I am co-dependent with health care profiteers when I don’t foment activism for nonprofit universal health care. I am co-dependent with so many bad things that are happening on the planet! It’s too bad. I’d much rather be in denial. I cling to denial. “There’s nothing I can do.” I’m really an armchair guy.
Obama got the prize less for accomplishment, we are told by the pundits, than for his aspirations — or at least for the world’s aspirations about him. A nudge in the right direction: Be worthy of this, Mr. President! This raises the nice idea of giving prizes at school and elsewhere to those who most need to excel, rather than to those who have already done so.
But what he needs to excel at, to get peace, is a little more nonviolent conflict with the hawks at home and the hawks in Israel and the autocrats in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, so that we can focus less on demonizing our enemies and dominating them, and less on securing our own markets and narrowly conceived interests, and more on hearing the voices crying out for justice and a place at the table, more on getting ourselves and our allies to act with justice and generosity. The Nobel Prize people are trying to strengthen his hand in his conflicts with his own people at home and America’s allies abroad, so that the conflict is not all projected onto our enemies.
In other words: Mr. President, grow a pair.
“Be worthy of this, Mr. President! This raises the nice idea of giving prizes at school and elsewhere to those who most need to excel, rather than to those who have already done so.”
Who is to be awarded with Nobel Prize?Only the Committee knows.Perhaps is it a nice vein to lead Obama to the road of peace?
Dave,
Thank you for sharing thoughts that I have had as well.
I, too, yearn not only to master “how to bring inherent conflicts into full vibrant nonviolent clash!” but also for the commitment to put myself on the line. Perhaps I am too old (69) to start? Yet, my age may work in my favor. Time will tell.
jo
Gee, here’s the full quote of my definition of peace (it has had a few metamorphoses since i shared it with Tikkun some times ago but i am flattered you chose to use it in part)
“Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is its constructive resolution without dishonesty, oppression or violence.” Aminah Carroll
First of all, there are an awful lot of people here on one of my favorite blog spots who actually must think Obama IS the Messiah. My questions to you negative naysayers are these:
Are you among the too many who watched while others received the Nobel Prize for signing bits of paper and making promsies never kept. Are you now among the lots of negative voices on the far right and shamefully, on the Left, decrying this great honor given to our remarkable and honorable president–the first global leader who is a peace builder, though not a pacifist, since the first George Bush.remember, george Bush left us stronger in the Middle East and among arab nations a friend–or have you forgotten so soon–because he is not a “liberal”?
Where have you been while we have been increasing the National debt by billions to murder innocent civilians around the globe because they are a religion that became verboten under GW Bush?
Where have you been while we have been spending trillions to enrich a global oligarchy of world powermongers who have no loyalty to anything but their own pocket and continued instability at home and around the world to pad profits? And who are even now stymying every effort of Obam’s to erein in our Congress which is in the pocket of the lobbyists?
Where were you while your brothers and sisters in America have been dying for scores of years in this rich nation because the basic decencies that allow an individual to have a successful life: food, shelter, education, health care and work were all placed out of reach of the poor, working class, and working poor middle class?
Where were you while double income upprer middle class plutocrats made it necessary for the working class to ahve two fulltime wages , the single wage earners in the middle class to work two jobs, and the poor and those who could no longer put food on their tables turned to black market crime and attendent violence all across America as not the economic engine of choice but of necessity?
President Obama offers us the capacity and the means to reclaim democracy and scuttle plutocracy; to build a better world instead of ever bigger burying grounds for the Common Good.
Let’s recognize his capacity and our need to support him not to bealbor him because he is the only one who really knows what is going on at the top and he is doing his best as an honest ethical compassionate and brave human being to lead and guide people who are corrupt, cynical, detached, and highly judgemental…on all sides of the political specctrum…many of whom could never have achieved a high school diploma if placed in his baby shoes.
Nice comment, bizarre but nice.
As one who is constantly accused of being a “negative naysayer,” mainly by the owning-class positivity cult (See Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America), I’ll answer your questions simply:
I was on the receiving end of all that stuff you said while I struggled to put food in my mouth (and later with my wife and kids into “our” mouths), tried to work ethically in increasingly unethical workplaces, tried to be true to what I know could be and should be, trying to form, then advocate for, a new bottom line (Thanks Rabbi Lerner for articulating what I always knew in my guts was right), and trying not to get sent off to the war-du-jour or become homeless. I succeeded in not getting sent off to war but I failed at avoiding becoming homeless… the subprime did me in. Six months on the street with my family… not so great. meanwhile the owning-ruling class occupying both parties pretty much violated every value I’ve ever held and breeched my trust and the Constitutional contract with all of us, and made boatloads of money doing it.
So, what was your question or concern really all about?
whoops that quote, from 11-24 2008 shared also inthe Jewish Week News should have been amended to a later version :
http://thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c37_a3572/News/National.html
“Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is its CREATIVE and constructive resolution without dishonesty, oppression or violence.” Aminah Carroll
I do not know what Obama is trying to accomplish. Paul Craig Roberts wrote a very good article, “The Nobel War Prize”, dated October 10, 2009. Please read the article!
As Richard Cohen put it in the Washington Post ” and the Pulitzer Prize for literature went to Sarah Palin for her stated intention ‘to read a book someday’”
I like, a lot, what you say about peace. Last June we did a writing evening about peace with Tikkun Toronto, and the big breakthrough in planning was the realization that like everything else there’s a dark side to peace. There’s peace between countries, as the Chinese want peace in Tibet. There’s peace in the family, which w’re all encouraged to keep by not raising certain issues. If peace becomes another idol (why won’t those pesky Palestinians stop protesting and be peaceful?) it’s as false as any idol. All goals, most of all the valid ones, need to be sen in a state of dynamic tension with each other, not as absolute monoliths.
“There’s peace between countries, as the Chinese want peace in Tibet”,you argued.
Dear Peter, it’s stange to hear such a queer idea. It is well-known that Tibet is one part of China.For what do you argue ,peace or conflict?
Thanks, Dave for writing this blog. I’ve been wondering when Tikkun would get around to it. I’ve been reading a lot of the pieces you’ve posted and this one is by far the very best one. Not merely because every sentence resonated with me, but also because the flow of it is just gorgeous. Lots of bloggers write treatises or opinions but this post has flow and it’s beautiful and the ideas and the statement of it is just a wonderful voice to hear right now. Thanks, dude. From your words to the Peace Prize winner’s ears….
It seems to me that peace is truly in the eye of the beholder.
To me peace is much like love. Love is both a noun and a verb.
When I tried to define love I came up with this ” compassionate action “. If a flower is dying, you may feel compassion for it, but it is when you get the water from the well and bring it to the plant and water everyday that you fully embody loving that plant.
Peace is both a noun and a verb.
Peace is a level of consciousness ( individual, group and collective). Peace also is used to define the level of conflict within and between people and groups of people.
It seems pretty easy to recognize someone being at peace but much harder to recognize and agree with people in their attempts to doing peace ( unless they are meditating). Dave holds the belief that Obama would lessen conflict between nations if he would only enter into more non violent conflict with Dave’s choice of the most responsible for conflict : the hawks at home and in Israel and the autocrats in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
Dave writes ” so that we can focus less on demonizing our enemies and dominating them, and less on securing our own markets and narrowly conceived interests, ”
I ask you the readers wether Dave is not also guilty of demonizing his personally selected enemies of peace. His choice : the hawks of the US and Israel and the autocrats aof Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Again, it is in the eye of the beholder. I could argue that Dave is being narrow in his approach which are reflecting promoting his interests and dominating his enemies.
Perhaps someone else in the world has a different set of demons than Dave for Obama to confront ?
I do not know what will bring peace to our world, I admit it. That said, I found nothing in Dave’s presciption for Obama that would bring the world any closer to peace. I do on the other hand respect Dave’s rght to vent.
It’s a frustrating gig trying to do peace.
God bless the peacemakers
In laymen’s terms, crisis often means something catastrophic. But in psychological terms, crisis is usually considered a necessary step to growth. And of course we’ve all heard the cliche about the Chinese character for crisis meaning both danger and opportunity.
In terms of resolution and true peace, those who understand crisis in the psychological sense realize it is a necessary and desired stage. So creating crises in order to foster resolution is what I think you’re getting at here.