Are We Done Fighting?

Building Understanding in a World of Hate and Division

Matthew Legge

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781771422970
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Paix et développement mondial

Powerful tools for spreading peace in your community

Unfounded beliefs and hateful political and social divisions that can cascade into violence are threatening to pull the world apart. Responding to fear and aggression strategically and with compassion is vital if we are to push back against the politics of hate and live in greater safety and harmony.

But how to do it?

Are We Done Fighting? is brimming with the latest research, practical activities, and inspirational stories of success for cultivating inner change and spreading peace at the community level and beyond. Coverage includes:

• An explanation of the different styles of conflict
• Cognitive biases that help explain polarized and lose-lose positions
• Practical methods and activities for changing our own and others' minds
• When punishment works and doesn't, and how to encourage discipline in children without using violence
• The skill of self-compassion and ways to reduce prejudice in ourselves and others
• Incredible programs that are rebuilding trust between people after genocide.

Packed with inspiration and cutting-edge findings from fields including neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioural economics, Are We Done Fighting? is an essential toolkit for activists, community and peace groups, and students and instructors working to build dialogue, understanding, and peace as the antidote to the politics of hate and division.

AWARDS

• SILVER | 2019 Nautilus Book Awards: Social Change & Social Justice

1

Peace and Power

We’ll start by exploring our sense of what peace is not. Toward the end of the book we’ll return to the definition and try to decide what peace is.

In this first section we’ll also look at divisiveness and forms of power. We’ll clarify many mysterious and bizarre quirks about human attitudes and actions.

As we do this, we’ll find the gaps where the peace virus can spread. Skills developed in this section will primarily relate to understanding problems and proven tips for transformation.

1

What Peace is Not

Fundamental to all else is the need that [humans] should grow to understand and practise patience and tolerance, and to substitute for the clumsy, uncertain, cruel tool of violence, the methods of reason and co-operation.¹

— EMILY GREENE BALCH

EMILY GREEN BALCH was a Nobel Peace Prize winner with great insights, yet the sentiment expressed here has its flaws. Thankfully, peace doesn’t depend on our becoming reasonable! If we rest our hope on reason, we’re in impossibly deep waters. Reasonableness and rationality are, it turns out, not at all what we may think. This has huge implications for peace work, so let’s see some examples of what I’m talking about.

Nowhere is cold logic more dependable than in the courtroom. We’re all supposed to be equal before the law, and a judge’s ability to think clearly and make carefully reasoned decisions is honed over years. Yet research suggests that what should be irrelevant factors — like how much sleep a judge got the night before — make a big difference to rulings. Researchers suspect that when judges don’t get as much sleep, they may be more irritable and have less mental energy to make decisions, resulting in harsher rulings.² A different study carefully controlled for many factors and concluded that parole decisions depend on how many cases a judge has seen since taking a snack break. The authors suggest what may be going on is that “decision making is mentally taxing…if forced to keep deciding things, people get tired and start looking for easy answers. In this case, the easy answer is to maintain the status quo by denying the prisoner’s request.”³ Particularly when we’re mentally tired, we make more reckless decisions or are more likely to not make a decision at all — doing nothing or accepting the default option presented to us even when we could have benefitted by picking differently!⁴

Let’s consider a case where a reasonable choice matters most — a life-and-death decision. You’re told you have lung cancer. The doctor says in the exact same concerned tone, “You have a 70 percent chance of living if you have this surgery,” or she says, “You have a 30 percent chance of dying if you have this surgery.” What choice would you make? This was tested with patients in a hospital (they had a variety of conditions, not lung cancer) and with students and doctors. Every group — even the doctors, with all their years of medical training — were much more likely to choose surgery if it was explained to them in terms of how likely they were to live!⁵ The answers we arrive at depend on the framings we start off with.

Another example: Applicants arrive for a job interview. The interviewers are participating in a study. Before the interviews, researchers casually ask the interviewers to help them for a moment by holding their drink. Some of the interviewers get an ice-cold drink to hold, others a warm cup of coffee. The job applicants come in and answer the interview questions. People conduct interviews by rationally analyzing all the facts about each candidate, don’t they? Actually, the applicants were secretly actors trained to say exactly the same things in each interview. Interviewers who’d heard the exact same answers liked the applicants a lot more if they’d held a cup of hot coffee instead of a cold drink! Interviewers who held coffee said applicants had warmer personalities, better skills, and were more hirable.⁶ Sensations we’re feeling get readily confused with decisions we’ve carefully reasoned out.

If a stranger asked you to volunteer to put a big ugly sign on your lawn, what would you say? A famous study found a way to increase people’s likelihood of agreeing by 400%. First, people were asked to put a very small sign on the inside of their window for the same cause — safe driving. Having agreed to this, self-perception seemed to change. Now people understood themselves to be the type of person who cares a lot about safe driving. When asked to put up the big ugly sign, three-quarters of folks who’d agreed to the small sign now complied.⁷

Credit: Photo by Nigel Downes, first published in This Light That Pushes Me: Stories of African Peacebuilders, Quaker Books, 2014

Zawadi Nikuze

What we’re seeing is just a tiny bit of the wealth of evidence that we’re actually surprisingly bad at determining why we do what we do. Yet we’re very good at being convinced that we do know our motivations. Some of us might think that this is all very interesting but that we’re too clever to be caught by such tricks, that our intellect will help us behave reasonably while other people don’t. Research suggests this itself is just another bias. In fact, the smarter we are, the more likely we are to be affected by biases like the ones we’ve just seen.⁸ But what does all this have to do with spreading peace?

Congolese peace worker Zawadi Nikuze, who’s been in traumatizing conditions for decades but, incredibly, maintains a sense of optimism, advises, “Give what you have. [If you have] a good smile, give it to someone who is stressed who needs it…”⁹ This might sound like a nice gesture but ultimately not much of one. How is a smile more than trivial? To be sure, being smiled at will make most of us feel better for a few moments and may not change our lives. But perhaps those moments are worth more than we’d imagine. It’s even possible that what we do in those moments will change our lives for years to come.

As we saw with judges, decision making is hard work. To minimize the amount of work we have to do, we look for help from others and follow their lead. That may help explain why, for example, if the first online review for a product is positive, that increases the chances that other reviews will be positive by almost a third, and increases the overall rating by a quarter.¹⁰ We even do this with ourselves. We regularly look to our past decisions as if they were made by someone whose lead we should follow. In order to be consistent and to save effort, we tend to do what we’ve already done, forgetting completely why we did it the first time.¹¹ Once we can look to our past and see that we made a decision to put up a sign about safe driving, we feel that we must care about safe driving and now we need to act consistently with that. We don’t recall that right before being asked to put up the sign we were feeling good because someone smiled at us, or warm because we’d just held a cup of coffee. In other words — we don’t understand the conditions that lead to our actions, but once we’re going in one direction, we can easily get carried forward by following what we did before.

What was your mood last Wednesday at 1 pm? Did you have a warm cup of coffee or a cold drink in your hand? Had someone smiled at you recently? If you’re like most people, you won’t remember. But what you will remember is that on Wednesday you decided to put a sign in your window about safe driving. Since you made that choice, you’ll be quite likely to follow your own lead further in that direction.

This means that a well-timed expression of care from Nikuze could actually help start a chain of events that changes our lives. If in the next moment we had to make a choice about a conflict, we might find ourselves pausing instead of escalating. Then the next time we’re in a similar conflict, we’d recall that we’re not the type of person who escalates conflicts, looking to what we did last time with zero memory of having felt good because of Nikuze’s fleeting influence on us. This is just one of the ways that small acts can sometimes unlock significant changes — either for good or ill.

What I hope we’re starting to see is that many of us are surprisingly uninformed about ourselves. This makes it tough to make decisions and to act based on our own interests. Here’s a simple illustration of the challenge. Rank this list in terms of what will make you happiest:

1. Commuting to work

2. Watching TV

3. Surfing the internet

4. Doing hair, makeup, or other personal grooming

5. Shopping

6. Exercising

7. Preparing food

What did you think? Many of us will rank the list something like this: 2, 3, 5, 4, 7, 1, 6. Watching TV is obviously a fun activity, and preparing food tends to be a chore. Exercising is painful, and we do it for the results. We love spending long hours online chatting and playing games.

The actual findings are very different. Researchers used a phone app to check in with people at random during the day and have them answer a few questions to rate their happiness and say what they were doing. This information was collected from a diverse range of people. So what makes us happiest? Exercising, then preparing food, shopping, watching TV, grooming, commuting to work, and then surfing the internet.¹² What’s striking is that most of us do these things, yet we still can’t remember how happy each one actually makes us while doing it. When asked while not doing it, we get the order wrong.

So if we’re not nearly as reasonable or informed as we think, and if we want to spread peace, what can we do? Many of us assume we need to spread information. We believe that if people had all the facts, they’d make more peaceful decisions. Some good-quality information is certainly valuable, but the proof that it’s not usually enough is easily offered by author Dan Heath: “Are you doing something in life right now where you have all the information that you need to know it’s not a good idea for you, and yet you keep doing it anyway?” From not eating balanced meals to staying up too late or other more dangerous choices, the honest answer for almost everyone is, “Yes!”¹³ Having enough information and good intentions regularly fails us, and this insight is far from new. In the Bible we find Paul exclaiming with anguish, “I don’t understand my own behavior — I don’t do what I want to do; instead, I do the very thing I hate!”¹⁴

I think these points are crucial to understand, because if we’re going to make peace infectious, it won’t do to start with impossible premises about how peace spreads. We’ll just squander our efforts. Our problem-solving tools need to respond to reality. Informing us that we’re not being reasonable or cooperative enough is unlikely to change us. As folks ready to see positive changes, what we can do is go first, offering smiles if that’s all we have, happily questioning our assumptions, and diving deeper into the constantly evolving understanding we gain. This is a challenge of self-discovery, skill building, and peacebuilding, all at once.

We’ve just dipped a toe into the river of questions we’ll be looking at — how to feel inner peace, build more peaceful relationships (interpersonal peace), and support changes in the world around us (structural peace).¹⁵ You may have noticed that in all this I’m not saying what peace is. That’s deliberate. Together we’re starting off where we are and testing our ideas as we move forward. Soon we’ll do an activity to further outline what peace isn’t. Here’s one important distinction first — negative versus po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by George Lakey
• About Quakers and the Author
• Introduction
• Using This Book
• Section 1: Peace and Power
• Section 2: Communication Skills
• Section 3: Violence and Interpersonal Peace
• Section 4: Inner Peace
• Section 5: Structural Peace
• Appendix 1: What We Mean by a Culture of Peacebuilding
• Appendix 2: The Basics of Facilitation
• Notes
• Index
• About New Society Publishers