“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
Hannah Arendt
“The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.”
Jacob Burkhardt
“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the working of institutions which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight them.”
Michel Foucault
A Personal Odyssey
When I was in high school, I imagined neutrality as a kind of virtue or wisdom, as the enviable ability to rise above petty squabbles and encompass with equanimity the unique attributes and positive contributions of each warring faction. This idea emerged partly from watching my mother; partly from early efforts to survey the world’s major religions and decide for myself what I believed; and partly from my increasing apprehension and shock as I learned of the horrors of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, racial hatred, and history generally, and how people around the planet had treated one another for millennia.
Later, when I went to college at UC Berkeley, I became more conscious of the injustice and cruelty of segregation, and it became clear to me personally that being neutral about hatred was either a failure of empathy and morality regarding the suffering of others, or a kind of cowardice that simply avoided, conveniently denied, and perpetuated the problem by justifying doing nothing to either negate or resolve it. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. accurately described it:
“On some positions cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.”
Still later, when I went South as part of the civil rights movement, to do what I could to try to end segregation, I quickly learned that neutrality was an illusion, a pretense, a mask, and an impossibility, that there was indeed an iron fist inside the velvet glove, and that a malign prejudice might hide behind a smile, an appearance of civility, and a sworn impartiality. I began to wonder: What could neutrality conceivably mean within a system that excused lynching and countless daily humiliations backed by terror?
When I returned to Berkeley and to law school, I became active in the Free Speech Movement, where it again became clear to me that being neutral about the right to exercise free speech meant imposing a deathly silence over issues that mattered, and precluding any possibility of social improvement. As the war in Vietnam escalated, along with determined opposition, neutrality and silence now spelled the deaths of thousands.
I began working closely with G.I.s who opposed the war, the antiwar “G.I. Coffeehouse” movement, and the Winter Soldier Investigation, where I met many Vietnam veterans, who described in detail the war crimes they personally had committed, and how neutrality, for them, represented a kind of complicity, a condonation, and a consent.
I returned to graduate school to study, research, and better understand these dynamics, and became a professor, and then a judge, and practiced neutrality. I began to realize that that, while neutrality helped reduce the overt biases that are common to dictatorships, tyrannies, and abuses of power, the legal system made it impossible to consider the systemically biased contexts and subjective experiences on which legal claims often arose.
At the same time, I knew implicitly that eliminating neutrality entirely would merely leave the world with competing biases; and that even positive biases like my own that favored social equality, free speech, and peace, could easily be turned negative — for example, by justifying hatred against those who hated, or acted unjustly, or disagreed with my values, making certain that hatred would win, allowing fresh hatreds and animosities to feed, mutate, evolve, and assert themselves.
I began to recognize that hatred and injustice were part of a far larger, more complex system of psychological, cultural, social, economic, and political regulation that rested on a largely uncritiqued subtext of superiority and domination, and innately biased legal processes that mandated superficial, hypocritical, pompous pronouncements of neutrality, primarily as a cover for actual, systemic, contextual bias, and a facade to bolster its’ claims of legitimacy and fairness for all.
As a new generation of women, gay, and working class liberation activists began expressing similar desires for social, economic, and political equality, I began to appreciate that any system, culture, or law that ignored inequality, rationalized hatred, disregarded mistreatment, or defended injustice, could not be neutral, however tempered its’ public appearance, simply because a neutral position on the failure to respect people who are systematically marginalized, mistreated, hated, or treated unjustly, allows their continued mistreatment to continue, and be locked in place.
These expanded critiques of neutrality deepened my understanding of the subtle, highly effective ways used by hierarchical power – not only to discriminate against “lesser” genders, races, religions, nationalities, classes, and cultures – but to discredit empathy and kindness, devalue emotional sensitivity and equality in relationships, stoke fears of gender ambiguity, and fuel anxiety over the loss of unjustly accumulated status, wealth, and power, all of which solidified social discrimination, and turned it into caste. As Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson defined it,
“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy… Caste is … powerful because it is not hatred, it is not personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that has been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”
Years later, I became a mediator and discovered an important nuance that deepened my understanding of the limits of neutrality. I discovered the role it played — not in being partisan or advocating political positions, or deciding legal controversies — but in making it more difficult to help people who were stuck in conflict find common ground, and to build human, empathetic connections with each other; to plumb the depths of their emotional experiences; and to discover fresh solutions and synergies that could lead to transformational and transcendent outcomes.
For example, if we consider the meaning of neutrality in marriages, couples, and families; or between friends, neighbors, team members, co-workers, and colleagues, it clearly signifies someone who is remote, unloving, apathetic, emotionally distant, disconnected, indifferent, bored, isolated, numb, wishy-washy, and halfway out the door. Yet what we desperately and deeply desire is the exact opposite of these things, and it is their ebb and absence that often leads us into conflict.
Mediators who try to appear neutral may inadvertently appear, to one or both parties, to replicate, rationalize, and reinforce the loss of caring and connection that brought them into mediation in the first place. Yet paradoxically, in divorce mediations, cultivating indifference, emotional distance, legal language, and neutrality can be a positive, first step toward softening the parties’ emotional intensity, and ending their attachment to a relationship that is already dead, or dying, and nearly over.
In marital, family, school, neighborhood, team, co-worker, and colleague mediations, on the other hand, positive, transformational outcomes commonly require closer, deeper, and more caring conversations, which are diminished and undermined by neutrality and emotional distance, just as they are by the biases, judgements, and unresolved emotional baggage of the mediator, and by our attachment to outcomes that do not belong to us.
What I think of as “the Zen of mediation” consists of caring as deeply as I can about the people on both sides of the conflict, while simultaneously being “unattached” to whatever positions they may advance, outcomes they may favor, or goals they may pursue, so that, in the end, I do not care one bit what they choose, which belongs solely and exclusively to them.
I also learned in mediation that neutrality can also flow from inexperience, confusion, naiveté, and innocence; that it may seem sensible as a response to complexity, chaos, emotional intensity, and paradox — in other words, to conflict. It can represent humility, patience, caring about the feelings of others, and a lack of attachment or investment in what does not belong to us. And it can emerge from challenges that we are afraid will exceed our skill. Yet even here, neutrality is ultimately a retreat, a surrender to that fear, which does not help us strengthen our skills or find the courage to engage directly, even incrementally, with whatever it is that challenges us.
So, which of these evolving understandings of neutrality do I now believe is true? I think they all are, and that each represents a life choice, a particular context or setting, a personal path, an evolving way of being in the world that seeks, always impermanently, to find balance on the razor’s edge that seeks to integrate intimacy and wisdom, conscience and contemplation, courage and caution, presence and perspective, immediacy and reflection.
Neutrality and Higher Order Skills in Mediating Political Conflicts
On a larger scale, in social, economic, and political conflicts, especially those that arise in a context of burgeoning brutality, violence, tyranny, and resistance, neutrality adopts a new, expanded set of meanings. Many of the same dilemmas can be found, yet here, neutrality can easily be seen as washing one’s hands of democracy, of our responsibility as citizens for the harms we cause, or tolerate, or permit to be inflicted on others.
As autocracy, tyranny, authoritarianism, despotism, dictatorship, and/or fascism surge in the U.S. and around the world, it is increasingly clear that the practice of democracy requires a higher order set of skills that are not merely neutral, but collaboratively partisan; that is, that are open to discussion, dialogue, problem solving, negotiation, and synergistic, consensus-based, mediated solutions, in which opposing parties find out how to feel passionately about their political beliefs, while simultaneously offering room to others to feel just as passionately.
In political conflicts, as in any conflict, it is possible to reach settlements using lower order skills to stop the fighting, negotiate cease-fires, reach compromises, or mediate trade-offs, and in these, neutrality does not ordinarily get in the way. But to reach deeper resolutions that not only end the conflict, but transform it into learning; that allow participants to transcend the chronic, underlying reasons which gave rise to it and evolve to higher orders of conflict, we require higher order resolution skills, which become far less effective when the parties feel distant, distrustful, or disconnected from the mediator.
The first skill set consists of active, empathetic, responsive, empowering, and committed listening, which may include the art of asking deep, difficult, and dangerous questions; eliciting unspoken or repressed interests; practicing non-violent communication and appreciative inquiry; facilitating open and honest dialogues; encouraging emotionally intelligent exchanges, collaborative research, and curiosity; or using subtle techniques like grounding, reframing, flipping metaphors, mirroring, silence, and priming.
The second group of higher order skills consist of creative, synergistic, paradoxical, participatory problem solving, which may include eliciting and clarifying conflict cultures, agreeing on criteria and rubrics, conducting joint research and root cause analyses, or using envisioning, strategic planning, collaborative negotiation, process mapping, brainstorming, consensus building, and conflict resolution systems design.
The third set of skills consist of relationship building, which may include eliciting constructive feedback and evaluation of what isn’t working, conflict coaching, negotiating expectations and desires, facilitating prejudice reduction and bias awareness, renewing trust, transforming conflict cultures, conducting mutual apology and forgiveness exercises, and using circles, team building, community organizing, constructive collective feedback, and restorative justice techniques.
The fourth, and deepest set of skills consist of shifting attitudes and heart opening exercises, which may include guided and solitary meditations, a variety of spiritual practices, deconstructing conflict stories and narratives, facilitating truth and reconciliation sessions, mediating heart-to-heart conversations, grief counseling, “heart math” methods, trauma- and attachment-informed processes, mutual requests and promises, and redesigning marital, family, and relational systems to encourage more honest, open, intimate, and caring relationships.
What we need is to find diverse ways of translating these higher order skill sets into a rich array of practical political problem solving, collaborative negotiation, and conflict resolution systems, methods, and techniques. To do so, we need to learn how to avoid being perceived — not only as biased and unwilling to learn — but as emotionally distant and uncaring. To do this, we need to think more clearly about the deeper meaning of political neutrality, invent more effective responses to toxic polarization, transform the language and culture of political conflict, and design more democratic, direct, substantive, and participatory processes for social problem solving and political decision-making.
The Problem with Political Neutrality
To begin, we need to explore the idea of neutrality not merely as an idea many people apply to themselves when acting in their professional capacity as conflict resolvers, but more profoundly, as what neutrality means when it is applied to political identities and beliefs, social values, economic goals, and environmental policies. In doing so, four new ideas can be seen to emerge:
Clearly, neutrality is of little use to power-based autocrats, tyrants, dictators, fascists, or anyone who insists on unthinking loyalty and obedience. Nor is it particularly helpful to interest-based “direct,” “substantive,” or “participatory” (as opposed to purely “procedural”) democrats, and those who support collaboration, dialogue, mediation, and restorative practices. Instead, neutrality is nearly always advanced by people who favor rights-based solutions, such as the law, where its’ goal is to discourage personal justice, and the private use of violence by repressing volatile emotions, reducing overt biases and open corruption, and prioritizing predictable, “business-like” outcomes.
Complete neutrality is, of course, impossible, even for judges, as everyone has had life experiences that profoundly shape their attitudes, ideas, and orientations. Yet neutrality is critical to the law, because judges make decisions, and must at least appear to be emotionally distant and have no personal stake in the outcome, if their decisions are to be accepted and perceived as fair.
Mediators, on the other hand, decide nothing, and benefit from being perceived as emotionally present, equally empathetic or “omni-partial” to both sides, and dedicated to searching collaboratively for ways of solving common problems. Omni-partiality consists of being respectful and acknowledging toward people, while not necessarily agreeing with their positions, proposals, behaviors, or ideas. As South African mediator Andre Volk explained:
“Practice shows how often persisting with this admittedly difficult strategy [of omni-partiality] often eventually opens creative conflict solutions that may not have been apparent in the beginning. What the neutral party, in this sense of the word, is saying to the other parties in the conflict is not ‘I do not care’, but “I care that you each do well here, I care that you each reach the best resolution available to you in this conflict. So yes, l am indeed biased, but biased towards your best interest, I am biased in that l want you to have a good result and that the conflict should end.’ This … allows the mediator … to get visibly and openly involved in co-creating solutions, exploring alternatives and helping the parties through their difficult areas and problems.”
In their classic text on collaborative negotiation and mediation, Getting to Yes, Roger Fisher and William Ury described the importance of separating “the person from the problem,” then being “soft on the person and hard on the problem.” Neutrality does not do either, as being “soft on the person” requires closeness and connection, empathy and kindness, caring and compassion, which might be perceived as bias, while being “hard on the problem” requires commitment and dedication, openness and honesty, and encouraging the parties to jointly “own the problem,” which could also be perceive as bias, and differs from traditional notions of neutrality. Without both, as Laura Nader has suggested, mediation simply becomes “trading justice for harmony.”
Moreover, as Archbishop Desmond Tutu appreciated: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Indeed, if we consider the incalculable damage that has been done by capitulating to autocracy, tyranny, authoritarianism, despotism, dictatorship, and fascism, in which neutrality has been complicit, efforts to strengthen interest-based practices based on shared values, empathy, and caring seems compelling.
What, for instance, ought the attitude of mediators have been toward conflicts between abolitionists and slave owners before the U. S. Civil War? Was not neutrality an unethical acceptance of slavery and predatory violence? And does not the history of slavery demonstrate, as Brazilian educator Paulo Friere wrote, that in the end, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
We can easily see today that slavery was the source of countless chronic and systemic conflicts, and that no real, lasting solution to these issues was possible within slave societies, simply because slaves could not be permitted to participate as equals in resolving disputes over their own slavery without partially abolishing it, because slavery as a system required the coerced silence, inhumane treatment, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement of slaves. Indeed, had mediators even attempted to find a lasting, systemic solution, they would have been accused of being biased, automatically revealing the deeper reasons for the chronic nature of those conflicts.
It is important, then, to acknowledge that freedom and slavery, love and hate, kindness and cruelty, democracy and dictatorship, are not equal polarized interests, in which mediators can adopt a principled or ethical neutrality, and seek some settlement that lies halfway between them. Instead, the innate values and essence of mediation as a process, is freedom, not slavery; love, not hate; kindness, not cruelty; democracy, not dictatorship. And it is part of the cunning of slavery, hatred, cruelty, and dictatorship that they are able to castigate those who would be free, loving, kind, and democratic as biased, hateful, hostile, and traitorous; or weak, uncaring, useless, and naïve.
Toxic Polarization, Dispute Resolution, and Democracy
As mediators and as citizens, we are presently and increasingly confronted with toxic polarization, highly adversarial political conflicts, and a growing need to strengthen dispute resolution skills, deepen understanding of the sources of political conflict, and find ways of resisting the destruction of democracy and transcending tyranny – and to do so not just in theory, but in response to immediate, difficult, practical, real-life conflicts – and quickly, with little to guide us, on a global scale.
In recent months, the United States and a number of countries have moved rapidly toward autocracy, tyranny, authoritarianism, despotism, dictatorship, and/or fascism, and the seemingly trustworthy guardrails designed over centuries to protect us from these outcomes – including international law, the United Nations, recognition of national sovereignty, the rule of law, legislatures, courts, lawyers, independent universities; universal suffrage, one person one vote, fair elections, Constitutional protections for free speech and rights of assembly, petition, and peaceful protest, guarantees of academic freedom, due process, and independent journalism, prohibitions against graft, invasion of privacy, and establishment of religion — all of these have been vigorously attacked in the last year, and barely withstood assaults that, at times, have seemed unstoppable.
These assaults are aimed not merely at mediative practices and institutions, but at our ability as citizens to think, act, and communicate freely and independently, to critique and disagree, to identify failures and shortcomings in governing institutions, and to participate in political decision-making as citizens of a democracy. These efforts have been aimed not only at protestors, but at the media, at judges and legislators, and at independent critical thinking, all of which have been labeled treasonous.
Neutrality as Treason
Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of linguistics was married to an “Aryan” civil servant in Germany during World War II, and instead of being sent to a concentration camp, was placed under house arrest by the Nazis, where he wrote insightfully about the “Language of the Third Reich.” He observed that:
“[Fascist language] only serves the cause of invocation …. [It’s] sole purpose … is to strip everyone of their individuality, to paralyze them as personalities, to make them into unthinking and docile cattle in a herd driven and hounded in a particular direction, to turn them into atoms in a huge rolling block of stone.”
As novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco eloquently put it, fascism is “the simplification of language to the point that complex thought becomes impossible.” Klemperer described in detail how the Nazi’s “brutalized language,” and the ways that bullying and intimidation were incorporated into ordinary political speech:
“… Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms, and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. . . language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all. … [Nazism] changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence, it makes common property out of what was previously the preserve of an individual or a tiny group, it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures with its poison.”
In doing so, the Nazis at first dismissed and grudgingly tolerated “neutrals,” who were not openly rebellious, yet always suspect, and were eventually forced into obedience and complicity. Authoritarians, autocrats, tyrants, despots, dictators, and fascists everywhere initially seek to isolate and frighten those who openly stand against them, then use bullying, public shaming, cruelty, hounding, repression, imprisonment, and execution to coerce everyone who refuses to bow and obey into complete and total submission.
These tactics can then be selectively applied to anyone who tries to step aside, or take refuge in neutrality, or mediate between opposing forces, forcing them to join one of only two camps that are permitted to exist: those who are blindly loyal to the Leader and ready to obey every order without question; and those who are traitors, and forced into silence and surrender, complicity and capitulation, or poverty and incarceration, or exile and execution. How fast and far this process moves varies, based partly on the level of moral non-compliance, ethical opposition, and courageous political resistance.
In aggressively adversarial regimes, neutrality is always seen as a weakness, as muddle-headedness, as cowardice, as pretense, or as a poorly disguised form of heresy, hostility, disloyalty, and treason. This makes it easier to marginalize, silence, publicly attack, and selectively punish anyone who stands out, or steps aside, as a warning to others. The “Heil Hitler” salute, for example, was perfectly designed to instantly, easily, and reliably identify those who were insufficiently obedient, or less than fanatically loyal, allowing them to be labeled as legitimate targets, and either frightened into conformity, silence, and exile; or else arrested, sent to concentration camps, and executed.
Nobel Prize winning novelist Jose Saramago succinctly described how the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal decided initially to promote and then punish neutrality, in order to produce the fear, resignation, and silence that kept it in power for decades: “What is emerging,” he wrote, “is a way of understanding the world defined by three very clear vectors: neutrality, fear, and resignation.” These can also be seen as stages of surrender.
Mediation, Resistance, and the Bifurcation of Neutrality
In the context of autocracy, tyranny, authoritarianism, despotism, dictatorship, and fascism, neutrality is repeatedly and forcibly bifurcated, increasingly demanding that those who profess it choose between:
This bifurcation of neutrality is not without consequence. The hostility that is directed at diversity, equity, and inclusion; the labeling of all dissent and disagreement as treason; the weaponization of anti-Semitism to attack free speech and academic freedom in universities; the disregard for legal principles and the sovereignty of nation states; the disrespect publicly directed at Canada, Greenland, Denmark, the European Union, South Africa, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Somalia, Ukraine, and countless other countries; and the violence and hatred repeatedly hurled at immigrants, minorities, women, Muslims, LGBTQ supporters, independent judges, the entire Democratic Party, and even moderate members of Congress, suggest dangerous levels of intolerance against all who are not committed supporters.
Yet somehow, despite these actions, the courage to dissent, resist, and refuse to comply have been gaining ground every day. While mediators as a profession have largely been politically silent and are paltry in numbers, agency, and power, there is a growing desire by many to return to less toxic and polarized forms of political discourse, and for more participatory methods of social problem solving, which require facilitated political dialogues, collaborative negotiations, consensus building, joint problem solving, and mediation, all of which form part of the skill set of conflict resolution professionals.
As mediators, we need to strengthen our ability to tell the truth and speak the unspeakable without slipping either into adversarial power-based enemy-creating, zero-sum political accusations and anti-democratic, dismissive assumptions; or into neutral, legalistic rights-based bureaucratic, uncaring, condoning, and complicitous language and attitudes; or into seeking refuge in a desire for safety and fear of retaliation that lie behind much neutrality in a context of prejudice, bullying, hatred, oppression, and injustice.
Instead, we need to create a collaborative, democratic interest-based political language and culture that are intrinsically mediative, that draw people into dialogue, that seek to reveal and validate the deeper desires and reasons for political beliefs, and that invite people to invent synergistic solutions and seek consensus in solving complex, multi-faceted, chronic, and systemic problems.
In The New State, written in 1918, Mary Parker Follett, one of the founders of modern mediation, offered this brilliant insight:
“[I]t is not merely that we must be allowed to govern ourselves, we must learn how to govern ourselves; it is not only that we must be given ‘free speech,’ we must learn a speech that is free; … [I]t is not only that we must invent machinery to get a social will expressed, we must invent machinery that will get a social will created.” [Emphasis added.]
The idea that we need to learn how to govern ourselves, and to learn “a speech that is free,” beautifully describes what mediators might contribute to transforming our political language and culture; to turning social problem-solving and decision-making processes away from digital, binary, toxically polarized, adversarial, enemy-creating, alienating, hierarchical, power- and rights-based assumptions and relationships; and to adopting more analog, diverse, complex, collaborative, consensus building, empathic, heterarchical, interest-based ones that are central to all mediation, dialogue, collaborative negotiation, and restorative justice practices.
What Mediators Might Contribute to Reducing Resort to Tyranny
Mediation is a collaborative, interest-based, consensus building process, and its’ unparalleled success rests on the principle that seemingly hostile and opposing ideas can be creatively combined to generate more successful, higher order, transformational and transcendent outcomes. Yet it is difficult to keep these methods alive when diversity, disagreement, and dissent are ignored, diminished, repressed, or bullied into submission, and as long as those with unequal power seek only total, unilateral victory, and have little interest in collaboration, satisfying the interests of their opponents, or reaching consensus-based solutions.
It is, of course, impossible for a tiny group of mediators to end slavery, or autocracy, tyranny, authoritarianism, despotism, dictatorship, or fascism. But we can help keep alive the human, ethical, democratic core of what makes political problem solving, dialogue, and conflict resolution successful. We can, for example, advocate and acknowledge the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in dispute resolution. We can demonstrate the practical value and strategic importance of dialogue. We can affirm the right to self-determination and collaborative problem solving in international relations. We can critique every resort to violence and coercion, strengthen collaborative methods of resolving complex political conflicts, and elicit sensible, affirming conversations between opponents.
We can propose non-zero-sum solutions to non-zero-sum problems, and encourage values-based, ethical, and morally compelling choices. We can ask open-ended questions, reinforce empathy, appreciation, and attitudes of curiosity and forgiveness. We can invite searches for consensus, and diverse, collaborative, substantively democratic explorations that draw us closer. We can facilitate dialogues over difficult, dangerous, and divisive issues. We can recommend systemic improvements in electoral, legislative, and judicial processes. We can assist social justice movements in resolving their internal conflicts, allowing them to achieve greater unity and mass appeal. And we can help design preventative, mediative approaches to political advocacy and problem solving.
Breakdown Precedes Break Through
A still deeper, far more difficult, transformational possibility also exists, which has not been widely recognized or explored. Instead of trying to return to a world that no longer exists, and whose failures and inadequacies intensified the current crisis, we can focus our efforts and energies on transitioning to a world that is better than the one that is now rapidly being dismantled. As I wrote in 2021 in Mediation in a Time of Crisis:
“Polarization, in every conflict, is a sign that we are approaching a crossroads, a definitive choice, a point of departure. It is a signal that something deep, fundamental, and systemic has already been born; that the past is over, yet the future is uncertain and insecure; and that confusion, nostalgia, resistance, and fear of loss are intensifying in an effort to reverse course and return to a world that no longer exists, and can no longer exist.”
Power- and rights-based approaches to social, economic, and political life consist almost entirely of hostile assertions, punishing monologues, zero-sum positions, moral judgments, bullying proclamations, prejudicial attitudes, toxic polarizations, lose/lose outcomes, and unilateral problem solving, which naturally lead to adversarial, formally autocratic, simplistic, digital, binary conversations that may feel virtuous, yet inevitably end in chronic, costly conflicts, disunity, and periodic efforts to crush all opposition, eliminate all diverse perspectives, and punish all dissent.
Instead, we can try to advance interest-based social, economic, and political reforms that reward and strengthen collaboration, dialogue, joint problem solving, non-adversarial negotiation styles, and transformational approaches to mediation, which are grounded in direct, participatory, non-zero sum, shared, diverse, equitable, and inclusive forms of democracy, and in the aims of restorative justice. [For more details, see discussion in my books Conflict Revolution (2nd Ed.); Politics, Dialogue, and the Evolution of Democracy; Mediation in a Time of Crisis; and The Magic in Mediation.]
Transitioning to an ethical, pluralistic, omni-partial, participatory, interest-based form of social, economic, and political problem solving will not be easy, and will require considerable courage, as these methods demand exponentially higher order skills; rest on more nuanced, complex, and paradoxical approaches to differences, diversity, and dissent; and lie outside the imagined safety and legal protections suggested by traditional rights-based assertions of neutrality.
More difficult still, these reforms require a willingness and ability to tolerate complexity, paradox, and ambiguity; to act with emotional intelligence; to develop a strong sense of empathy and caring for our opponents; and to act with integrity and ethically in all our relations with those who are different, disagree, or dissent. As journalist Michael Ventura has pointed out,
“Empathy that connects, that builds, that heals requires a code of ethics. It requires restraint. It requires trust. It asks the empathizer not just to understand others but also to honor what that understanding unlocks. When empathy becomes unmoored from ethics, it becomes coercion with a smile.… Empathy without accountability is hollow and deceptive. It lulls people into false security. And it fractures the very trust it pretends to build.”
What Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez, Gene Sharp, and many others have advocated is not simple non-violence, but a complex, living, subtle, honest, omni-partial, humane, non-violent ethic that, when faced with autocracy, tyranny, authoritarianism, despotism, dictatorship, or fascistic power, takes the form of moral resistance. This non-violent approach to resistance consists, in my experience, of three essential ethical parts:
The ethics of non-violent resistance start with the realization that what is worse than being beaten up by a bully, tyrant, despot, or dictator is giving in to one, and then either inwardly beating oneself up for the rest of ones’ life; or becoming a bully oneself and demeaning or terrorizing others. Non-violent resistance requires courage and a willingness to accept the fact that bullies, tyrants, despots, and dictators are rapidly drawn to protect their power by inflicting painful consequences on any who disobey.
Yet before their violence, bullying, and intimidation are able to close off all forms of non-violent resistance, the courage and willingness of ordinary people to resist and refuse to go along offers hope to everyone. It isn’t then the flashy public displays of bravado, but the quiet, humble willingness to stand with those who are suffering, the refusal to bow before self-appointed tyrants, that matters, and saves us all.
The strength of tyranny, despotism, dictatorship, and fascism lie in the zero-sum nature of unilateral, power-based problem solving which, along with the perception of looming scarcity and fear of reprisals, leads people to believe that they have no choice other than to climb over the backs of others, if they want to secure a place at the table. This creates a race for the bottom that shifts the ethical rubric from the altruistic ideal that “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and “we’re in the same boat,” to the selfish ideal of “me first,” and “look out for number one.” Yet as Nelson Mandela inspiringly observed, “[T]o be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
History and psychology suggest that bullying, despotic, and tyrannical behaviors alienate nearly everyone, and are ultimately self-defeating. Yet in the short run, they systematically undermine independence, free speech, diversity, dialogue, collaboration, trust, and hope, all of which are essential for solving complex problems. Their goal is to dismantle all limitations on dictatorial, one-person rule by using bullying, fear, corruption, conspiratorial thinking, hatred, shame, and suspicion to intimidate everyone into obedience. All that stands in their way is our capacity for ethical and humane behavior, and willingness to suffer to hold on to them. As the former slave Frederick Douglass eloquently and famously wrote:
“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Recently, we have witnessed extraordinary acts of courage and opposition by people across the U.S. and around the world, which have emboldened others, and made it possible to hope that the worst excesses of hatred can be halted. As Rebecca Solnit insightfully noticed:
“[Tyrants] do not understand the powers of civil society and the power of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation. [T]hey seem to assume that most of us are selfish and timid and will not resist once we see their capacity to dominate and do violence, that we do not care about anything much beyond our individual selves, or that we will see them as winners and admire winning so much we’ll come on over. [T]hey suffer from failure of imagination. The thing they cannot imagine is us.”
And years earlier, an elder, wiser Robert F. Kennedy (Senior) inspiringly wrote:
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
As mediators, it’s time for us to join in and send forth some ripples of our own.
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