Moving the Embassy Didn't Matter: the Palestinians Were Already Stuck

Now that the Trump Administration has recognized Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel and moved the US embassy there, many are asking what this will mean for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and prospects for future peace. A lot of public discussion, however, tends to be driven not by an analysis of what is and what may happen, but by what people want. This is one of those conflicts where dispassionate analysis is hard to come by - so naturally, I thought I'd give it a shot.

Objective analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult because both sides have very strong narratives rooted in justice and righteousness. That these narratives are largely incompatible is lost on no one, which goes a long way to explaining why there's been no resolution. Even outsiders tend to look at the conflict through the eyes of what they want to have happen, and make predictions that are really attempts to calculate how to get from wherever we are at the moment to that end.

This is particularly true for those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. The case for injustice in Palestine is easy to make. Even former President Jimmy Carter, a man of wisdom who knows how to weigh his words carefully, has likened the separation of Palestinians from mainstream Israeli society and the control over their movements and territory, as akin to South African apartheid. The Palestinian population is stuck in a third- (or even fourth-) world existence, both politically and economically, from which there appears to be no escape. There's an easy justice narrative there.

Israel too has a narrative about justice and victimhood. Beyond the Holocaust, which was perhaps the worst targeted crime against a population in human history, and beyond the centuries of violent anti-semitism that preceded it, modern Israel is an island of less than 9 million inhabitants surrounded by a sea of hundreds of millions of Arabs, many of whom have expressed the desire to wipe Israel from the map. However powerful Israel has become - and it is indeed very powerful - it is difficult to fault modern Israelis for believing that the world is a threatening place, with hatred directed against them from all sides.

But if we want to understand the possible and impossible next steps in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, none of this helps. For a conflict analyst, it is enough to know that the two sides have mutually incompatible, even mutually contradictory, narratives about themselves and the other. This much has been true since 1947, and it hasn't changed.

So what now? Is the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capitol city the end of the peace process? Or will this usher in a new era of opportunity? There answer can't (or shouldn't) depend on whether we like or don't like Donald Trump, or whether we prefer the Israeli or the Palestinian narrative, but on an analysis of the situation.

In any such analysis, it is important to note that neither "side" is a monolith. There are Israelis who are happy about the US embassy move, and those who are upset by it. There are even Israelis who would be perfectly happy to see all the Palestinians expelled from the whole territory, although they tend to be quiet about it. There are Palestinians who desire to "drive the Jews into the sea", and those who would be happy to live beside them in peace. So what we see at any one point in time reflects a rough majority opinion of each side. Feelings and goals can change, and if they do the analysis changes with it. But for now, things are what they are.

As of today, Israel has most of what it wants. It has complete control over its recognized sovereign territory, and (as of today) a slightly greater recognition of its claim to Jerusalem, which it already controls anyway. Since its withdrawal from direct occupation of the West Bank and Gaza back in the 1990s, it no longer has the immediate burden of trying to provide services or a functioning economy for most of the Palestinian population, nor the difficulty of policing it from within. Israel still faces security challenges from terrorism, from the Syrian civil war next door, and from Iran, but these are for the most part as managed as they can be, and the bigger issues (Syria and Iran) are independent of the Palestinian issue.

The status quo, in essence, is one that most Israelis are perfectly happy with. The moving of the US Embassy doesn't really change that, except perhaps in a minor symbolic way. Despite the emotional narratives and (for some) references to the Will of God, the primary interest for the median of Israeli society is peace and security.

There is a subset of Israelis who would like to change the status quo still further, by gradually assuming control over the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, in their parlance). The settler movement is actively engaged in this effort at what Palestinians might call slow-motion ethnic cleansing, encouraged (or at least enabled) by the current Israeli government. Again, the moving of the US embassy doesn't change this calculus much either, except perhaps as a further signal that the US will not actively oppose settler expansion. Then again, no American administration since George H.W. Bush has done much to dissuade this movement, so there again the Trump Administration hasn't changed very much.

On the Palestinian side, of course, no one is happy with the status quo. The economy is a shambles, there is little hope either individually or collectively that their prospects will improve, they are subject to a host of difficulties in being told where they can live, where they can travel to, and what jobs they can or can't have, and their political leaders are largely ineffectual, alternately violent and corrupt. Things have been bad for a very long time, and every year they get a little bit worse.

Here, the moving the US embassy is a small material change in that it signals that the two-state solution - with Jerusalem divided into two capitols side by side - is dead. More importantly, today's events send a signal that the power of the United States is firmly on the side of Israel, the locally dominant power in the conflict. But this is at best a marginal shift, because these things have largely been true for a while. It is arguable that, except for the symbolic location of the embassy, not much would have been different under a Hillary Clinton administration.

It can be argued that outcomes are a function of the intersection between interests and power. Israel holds nearly all the power in the current situation, while the Palestinians have essentially none. Palestinians have not yet discovered any means of leveraging their assets in a way that would exert significant power on the situation. In the 1980s they launched the Intifadah, and although they paid a heavy price for it they did force Israel to reconsider the situation. Since that time, and with a few echoes in the 1990s, Palestinians have been largely powerless.

Palestinians' hopes have always leaned on one of three possible sources of power. Either their Arab brethren in neighboring states would help them, or the United States would help them, or they would somehow find the means to alter the situation themselves. The first hope vanished in 1979 when Anwar Sadat abandoned any significant pretext of sponsoring the Palestinian cause. The second swelled briefly in the Bush 41 and Clinton Administrations, but hasn't been much since; Trump's announcement is the last of a line of nails in that coffin. The third has been slowly leaching away with time, and as Israel has gotten better and better at sealing the borders and preventing any significant weaponry from getting into the Palestinian territories.

The most likely scenario, therefore, is that the conflict is stuck. The party which has the greatest interest in changing the situation has no power to do so, and no prospect of acquiring any. The party that has power to change things has no interest in doing so. Barring a truly massive uprising that disrupts Israel's security calculations - and today's events demonstrate that they're willing to be pretty ruthless about meeting the threat of force with much greater force - this isn't going to change.

So it is not true that Trump's decision to move the embassy has killed the peace process. The peace process was already dead. And, although I don't like it and wish the world were otherwise, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

New Year Thoughts About Israel

I ran across this article today and was reminded of the slow boil that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Israel changes law to make it harder to cede Jerusalem control

Between this and the Trump Administration's decision to recognize a united Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, things have been moving fast - and not in a good way.

These things together represent unilateral moves by Israel to resolve aspects of the conflict in Israel's favor. They represent a turning away from negotiation as a means to find mutually-agreed upon solutions, preferring unilateral solutions over the other side's objections instead.

Amazingly enough, this is exactly what I wrote my dissertation about twenty years ago. Then as now, I was interested in conflict dynamics: if side A does X, what choices does side B have, and what kinds of outcomes become more or less likely? One of the core organizing principles, which I still believe in today: in conflict, all actions are working either towards a Unilateral solution (imposing your will on the other side) or a Multilateral solution (finding an agreement that both sides accept). Sometimes parties try to do both, but that usually doesn't work well.

The thing about Unilateral strategies is that they are both one-sided (by definition) and path-determinative. If side A chooses to pursue the Unilateral route, side B loses the option of pursuing Multilateral options instead. Side B's options are reduced - either surrender entirely, or go Unilateral themselves.

Regarding Jerusalem and the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, Palestinians now face exactly this choice. Do they become despondent and simply give up, allowing Israel to take over all of the 1948 Mandate territory and becoming second-class citizens in someone else's country? Or do they fight back, pushing what has been a fairly quiescent conflict back into violence?

I don't know the answer here - I can't make a prediction, because I don't have data about how Palestinians see the situation and what their calculations are. But these are the only two outcomes possible - either surrender into de facto apartheid, or go back to violence. Neither is good from the Palestinian perspective, but they don't control the choices they're given.

I'm mindful too that there may be factions in Israel (including, possibly, the ruling Likud party) which see both of these as good outcomes. They will gladly take the territory if Palestinians are willing to surrender it, and they will gladly seize the opportunity to crush Palestinian resistance if provoked.

For those wishing for peace on earth in 2018, this doesn't look like a good start. Either way, Palestinians suffer. Israelis may suffer as well - how much depends on choices yet to be made. Not a great start to the year.

Trump is Not the Problem

I know a lot of my friends will disagree, but I believe that President Trump is not the fundamental problem we face today.

Trump is a symptom of the problem, a product rather than a cause.

The problem is us.

I know that we're fond of, and prone to, sweeping judgments about the state of our politics. Everyone has a take on what the "real" problem is, and on the whole I tend not to put much stock in such arguments. But there are, I believe, fundamental issues that drive all of the others. And on one of these issues, I think we are very, very wrong.

I was reminded recently of a book I read back in college, E.E. Schattschneider's The Semisovereign People. At the core of Schattschneider's argument was this observation: that what happens in politics isn't determined by the power of the opposing sides, or by what they choose to do. It's determined by what the conflict is about in the first place.

What we see on a day to day basis is a parade of different issues - health care, tax reform, immigration policy, Russian meddling in American elections, protests during football games, etc., etc. Although these are all very different issues, with different details and differential impacts on different parts of the American people, they all have a sameness. They feel like they are all the same argument.

We subject ourselves to this kind of Groundhog Day politics because the community of "America" is largely gone. Far too many of us no longer care about America - which means, we no longer care about our fellow Americans. We care only about a subset of them - those who look like us, talk like us, support the parties or candidates or symbols that we do.

When you only care about Your People, you will do anything it takes to win and to make sure the other side loses. It's OK to pressure, to strong-arm, to lie, to cheat, to steal, to kill. People inspired by ISIS kill pedestrians in NY. People inspired to Richard Spencer kill pedestrians in Charlottesville.

Years ago in writing my dissertation I stumbled on an insight: in any conflict, if one sides resorts to zero-sum thinking it will quickly drag the other side into the same morass. A Prisoner's Dilemma world moves from TFT-style mutual cooperation to mutual defection and conflict very quickly. It's not enough for some to want to be cooperative - both sides (all sides) have to agree, or the whole is dragged down to the lowest common denominator.

That's where we find ourselves today - the lowest common denominator of American politics. Richard Spencer and Milos Yiannopoulos wage a battle to "win" for their side, whatever the heck winning is, by cheating and abusing and pushing buttons and generally behaving in all sorts of barbarous ways our parents taught us not to.

The Trump Administration does the same, attacking anyone and everyone it disagrees with, disrespecting every institution and every rule it finds inconvenient, and generally acting like a bunch of barbarians.

The reason why the story about the agreement between the Clinton campaign and the DNC in 2015 has legs is that it fits this same narrative: do anything you have to in order to win. Republicans decry it as "crooked Hillary", but show me a Republican today who doesn't have that very same stain on their actions.

We are all becoming barbarians.

My research and writing over the years has helped me understand all of this, to see behind the surface to the next level of dynamics. But as author Noah benShea once put it, Reason explains the darkness - but it is not a light.

I don't know where the light is. There were times in the past when natural disasters and tragedies have brought us together as a people, at least for a little while. I remember the Mississippi floods of the 1990s, where for a time it seemed like Americans just came together as Americans and forgot our divisions. After Oklahoma City we saw how toxic a political cultural could become, and for a little while we turned our back on hatred and came together in honor of murdered children. I remember a time, too short a time, after 9/11 when we did the same. Even after Hurricane Katrina, though the Bush Administration took some abuse for its sluggish response, we all agreed that it was a tragedy and did what we could to help.

In the past two months we (the United States, we Americans) have been hit three times by major hurricanes. Where is the unity, the sense of shared purpose, the empathy? Still we squabble and argue and spit. Houston and Florida have been forgotten in the national conversation, while Puerto Rico is a sordid battlefield of childish insults and corrupt bargains.

I wrote a year ago, just before the Presidential election, that America is Dying. One year later, it has only gotten worse, and the trajectory has not changed. President Trump isn't helping, but neither is he the driver. We are destroying ourselves.

This will end when, and only when, we start to value our fellow Americans - all of them - more than we value our own selfish and tribal desires and wants. When we stop seeing every fight as an existential conflict which we must win or die. When we become willing to listen, and to bend, and to compromise because the relationships we have with one another are more important than the issues of the day. When winning matters less than people - than us.

To put it in theological terms: it will end when we learn to love each other again.

The Lost Art of Listening

You know you are living in strange times when news anchors have to give warnings about offensive language before playing clips of the President of the United States giving a speech, and when the most important issue on the national stage seems to be whether professional athletes should stand during the national anthem.

By all measures and to all indications, the United States appears more polarized and factionalized today than at any point since the 1960s and early 1970s. Our national leadership - including but not limited to the aforementioned President - seems determined to add fuel to the fire rather than finding ways to put it out. The media (social, mainstream, and otherwise) have become amplifiers that increase the volume. Everywhere people are concerned, confused, frightened, angry.

There are, as always, no simple solutions. But there is a simple diagnosis: we have forgotten how to listen to each other.

I don't mean that we've become actually deaf. But there is a vast difference between hearing the words coming from someone else's mouth, and listening. Generally, we hear others' words either as confirmation of our own views or as fodder for snarky memes and late-night talk shows that make us feel better about ourselves and superior to Those Idiots Over There.

Listening assumes basic human empathy. To listen to someone, I must first believe that they are of value, that they deserve "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" just as much as I do, that they matter. This is no small thing, because it requires us to recognize that someone else's humanity is every bit as valuable as my own. It forces us to love others as we love ourselves. We long ago sanitized Jesus' command (love your neighbor as yourself) by referring to it simplistically as "the Golden Rule", and in so doing forgot how genuinely hard this is.

We begin our lives as intensively selfish creatures. It takes time before we become aware of the existence of other humans, still more time before we come to recognize them as humans instead of moving objects in our environment. And though empathy often develops quite young, so does selfishness - the desire to Look Out for Number 1, to put ourself ahead of others.

We resolve this tension in part by forming groups, which helps us to exercise empathy and altruism towards some other people while still discriminating against and rejecting others. Tribes are, in a sense, a more complex form of selfishness. Evolutionary philosophers like Jonathan Haidt have suggested that this is as far as we can go - that selfishness is simply built into who and what we are, so we always have to have an out-group.

And yet we strive to be better. The highest ideals of nearly every society, and certainly every major religion, include some version of what we so glibly call the Golden Rule. We are reminded to show hospitality to the stranger, to care for the weak and helpless, to put the needs of others ahead of our own. The stories that unite us, the ones we all cheer for despite party or race or nationality, are the stories of heroic self-sacrifice: the firefighters rescuing people from the burning building, the fishermen who drove down to Houston with their boats to rescue people from the flooding, the neighborhoods coming together to help each other recover from the hurricane or tornado. As divided and polarized as we are, these are the stories that we all agree represent the best of us. Greater love hath no man indeed.

The lost art of listening is really just empathy put into its simplest action. If I can listen to you, not with the intent to rebut or ridicule or mock or disagree, but simply to try to understand your point of view, then I am practicing empathy. I recognize you as a fellow human being, made in God's image as I am.

Most of our current troubles derive from a lack of listening. Very few in government listen to those outside their party or their support circle. The President spends much of his time actively discouraging the practice, calling people names and denigrating those who disagree with him. We used to argue that the President is a role model for the nation. I think that's true, and our current one is modeling the problem, not the solution. Leaders in Congress and the most common voices we see in the media are little better.

We also don't listen much to each other. I've written before about "bubbles" and the problem of fear. We don't listen to each other because we're afraid of each other - afraid of being demeaned, dismissed, or even attacked (verbally or physically). Like all abilities, the less we listen, the less good we get at it. In an atmosphere where no one is listening, many people will grow up never learning the skill at all.

There are others out there making this same point, though they are often faint voices (because conflict is louder by nature, and because those who run society's megaphones make more money from noise than from quiet conversation). A conservative friend of mine sent me this one from the Weekly Standard. The author makes a lot of excellent points and hits on exactly the same problem, although parts of his article are couched in the same kind of partisan snark that makes listening so difficult. Those habits die hard, but die they must.

I've watched the bizarre conflict over the NFL mostly with sadness. Those yelling at the players, including our President (who seemed to think it important to call them profanities and demand they be fired), aren't interested in listening to what those players have to say. They don't want to hear the concerns of African American men who are trying to speak up for their brothers and sisters who can't speak up for themselves.

Likewise, those who support those protests don't always stop to listen to what the booing fans in the stands are saying. In a polarized time, symbols of identity become critically important. For some, those include the flag and the national anthem, symbols that have a nearly sacred meaning to some (even as they have a different meaning, or no meaning, to others).

To listen to others is not necessarily to agree with any of them. I can understand that for some of my fellow Americans, the flag means more to them perhaps than means to me. That's OK. I don't ask that they adopt my meaning. I can also understand that some of my fellow Americans have an experience of discrimination that I don't have, and that because of that difference they feel differently about some institutions than I do. I don't ask that they adopt my feelings either.

I don't know what the "solution" to these issues is. Race relations, protests, free speech on university campuses, immigration - there's a long list of things about which we are seriously polarized. I don't know what the solution to any of them should be. What I do know is that there is only one way to get to a solution: listening. The longer we put off really listening to each other, the more pain there will be. The sooner we start listening, the better our chances of finding solutions.

Denouncing Nazis is easy. Living together is hard.

Facebook reminded me that a year ago I posted a piece titled There Are No Enemies.

It's not the most popular piece I've ever published, not by a long shot. It did pretty well - a little over 200 hits - but nothing special.

Re-reading it today, I think it may be one of the most important and difficult things I've ever written. And it helped me codify something that's been bugging me ever since the violence in Charleston and the political fallout that ensued.

In the aftermath of the Charleston violence, nearly everybody took to the airwaves and social media to condemn the assortment of white supremacists, Nazis, and KKK types who instigated the violence. This was easy to do: their brandishing of hateful symbols, their chants against Jews, blacks, and others outside their tribe, their obvious anger and aggression - all these put them squarely against core American values.

President Trump, of course, took tremendous political flak for his response. He tried to lay blame for the violence on "many sides" and seemed to go out of his way to serve as an apologist for the white supremacy movement. They themselves clearly saw it that way, judging by their reactions, especially after his Tuesday press conference. For this, Trump was roundly criticized by pretty much everyone across the political spectrum. The few people in his own White House who didn't distance themselves from this view now no longer work there.

That's all a pretty pat and easy story: Nazis and white supremacists are bad, we're the good guys, etc. Trump aside, almost everyone else will jump on this bandwagon.

But then I come back to my piece from last year: there are no enemies. And I also recall a lesson learned from decades of studying conflicts: conflict only ends when the different sides learn to live with each other.

Yes, white supremacy is morally wrong, and yes, Nazism is a horrible set of ideas. But because we say these things, however forcefully we may say them and however many of us "stand up" to do so, we are stuck with two unavoidable realities:

1) Some people will continue to hold to these ideas, despite (or even because of) our efforts to shout them down.

2) Those people are still our fellow Americans. And, if you hold to the Gospel of Christ, they are still Children of God.

We sort of know these things, deep down, though we don't know what to do with them. These are the reason why so many supporters of Hillary Clinton cringed when she made her famous "basket of deplorables" gaffe. She said in public what we wanted emotionally to say but know is morally wrong: that there are groups of people who are bad people.

In the language of revivalist Christianity, we failed to separate the sin from the sinner.

The problem with that logic, of course, is the conclusion to which it leads. If there are people who are irreducibly bad, then they must be either eliminated from society, driven out, or contained. It is, in fact, exactly the same logic that white supremacists operate under. They're just more open about it.

Lots of political movements - from the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge to the Interahamwe to the founders of Republika Srpska - have taken this idea that those people need to be gotten rid of and tried to put it into action. Every single of one of them failed. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, "purifying" the nation - it never works. It creates a lot of pain and a lot of dead bodies, but in the end you still end up living in a diverse society, and you tend to end up poor and miserable to boot.

That's an easy argument to make when confronting Nazis. But we need to think beyond confrontation, because confrontation itself isn't going to resolve anything.

We thought we had gotten rid of Creationism, until we discovered in the 1990s that it never went away. Most of us read Inherit the Wind in high school and saw it as an historical tale about the last gasp of Young Earth Creationism. Creationists read it and saw it as inspiration. We didn't notice until they started to take over school boards again.

White supremacy isn't going to go away simply because we shout at it, and it isn't going to go away because it's wrong. People are quite capable of holding morally abhorrent beliefs for generations, as our own history with black slavery shows. That some of those beliefs are still in circulation should surprise no one.

So while I applaud people who stand up against Nazis, who show up in Boston to demonstrate that there are far more of us who believe in diversity than there are in them who don't, that's just a band-aid. If the rest of us are vociferous enough, or if we elect a President less inclined to say supportive things about white supremacy the next time around, they may go back into the shadows. But they'll still be there, living among us as fellow citizens.

If we really want to move beyond endless demonstrations - if we really want to seek peace - demonstrations and taking down statues won't get us there. At some point, we're going to have to talk to the people we think of as our enemies. That can't happen in large groups, it certainly can't happen while people are carrying torches and clubs and shields, and it probably can't happen in public with TV cameras rolling. But in the end, it's the only way.

Years ago in graduate school, I wanted to start an article with what I thought was a clever observation: "everyone wants peace, they just want it on their own terms." My advisor stopped me and argued that I should get rid of that sentence. Not everyone wants peace, he pointed out. And he was right.

It's easy to look at those who march with Nazi flags and say, they don't want peace. But do we? We are comfortable in our knowledge that we're right and they're wrong and there are more of us anyway - just as they are comfortable in their understanding that they are right and we are wrong, even though there are fewer of them. Moral righteousness is addictive.

None of this means that we have to "meet them halfway" or adjust our beliefs in a racist direction. That's a red herring. But it does mean that we have to take the time to listen to our fellow human beings, and hope that they in turn will listen to us.

I don't know how to go about that, because all sides prefer the conflict we have to an uncertain peace in the future. But I know that, for myself, we are missing a piece of the moral puzzle: the piece that recognizes the common humanity of our "enemies" and seeks the seemingly impossible task of reconciliation. We have to live with "those people", like it or not. We might as well try to live together well.

Political Conflict on Campus Today

I write a fair amount about academia and higher education. I also write a lot about conflict. Sometimes, I get to cross my realms of expertise and write about both.

It was in that conjunction that this article from this week's Chronicle struck me:

From Video of Campus Forum, Virtual Venom Flows

The Reader's Digest version of the story is this: some folks at Northern Arizona University decided to have a public campus form titled "The Specters of Fascism?" It's the kind of thing that universities do - bring their expertise to bear on questions of public interest and hold open discussions about them.

In this case, the forum was mostly about Fascism in Europe, with the added question of whether there were lessons from those historical experiences that might be applicable to the United States today. It's the sort of question that historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others have discussed for decades - interesting, relevant in a high-level sort of way, and amenable to scholarly inquiry. In today's highly polarized political and tribal environment, however, it attracted a different sort of attention than one might expect when academics hold a scholarly forum.

A NAU student affiliated with a group called Campus Reform filmed the event and shared that video with the organization, which posted a segment of it on their website. Campus Reform, which bills itself as "America's leading site for college news", is a conservative project that "exposes bias and abuse on the nation's college campuses". It is an offshoot of the Leadership Institute, an avowedly conservative organization whose mission is "to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process".

Needless to say, university professors speculating about whether European fascism has any parallels in American politics today proved to be red meat to conservatives, who boiled the whole thing down to "liberals equating Trump with Hitler". Abusive and threatening emails started flying almost immediately, aimed at faculty members associated with the event (often for things that they didn't say, as the video was apparently unclearly labelled).

Interestingly, the student who took and posted the video also came in for a fair amount of online abuse and some pushback from people on her campus, some of whom accused her of being a racist and of belonging to the "alt-right". She characterized her treatment (perhaps a bit hyperbolically) as "full-on bullying from the university".

The usual frame by which these kinds of stories are viewed is the "academic freedom/freedom of speech" frame. In this view, everyone has the right to say what they like and to express the views that they like. The forum was an exercise of free speech, as was the taping of the forum and posting it online. The subsequent abuse and death threats are merely an unfortunate byproduct of our exercise of our free speech rights.

While correct in itself, this frame is largely useless for understanding what's going on here. What this episode shows is one manifestation of a much larger conflict taking place across society, on campuses as well as in other ways. Once we place this in a conflict frame, we have the chance to make progress towards both understanding and mitigating if not resolving these issues.

Like all conflicts, this one has at least two sides, each of which is a coalition of actors and entities that agree with each other to varying degrees. What holds the sides together is not agreement about facts or ideas, but a sense of common identity - "us" versus "them". The student who posted the video may not like being lumped in with the alt-right, but she's planted her flag on that side and so, in the eyes of her adversaries, she's one of "them".

Like all tribal conflicts, the dynamics are pretty predictable. Each side defines the other as both monolithic and defined by its own worst actors. Each side is reduced to simplistic, usually dehumanizing, epithets by the other ("libtard", "redneck", etc.) Each side has only a vague notion of its goals and objectives - though individual actors may have specific plans - but in broad terms, the conflict is seen as zero-sum - either "we" win or "they" win.

It is this last point that gives rise to the deplorable kinds of behavior that we see - the online bullying, dehumanization, and threats. Because people the conflict is perceived as zero-sum, each side focuses on "winning". There is no notion of compromise or accommodation - such thoughts are heresy, and those who entertain them usually branded as heretics and forced to recant or tossed out of the tribe. In the terms of my own research, each side is pursuing a Unilateral strategy.

Sometimes in international conflict, Unilateral strategies make sense. One thing my research has turned up is that Unilateralism is contagious - if one side gets it, the other side pretty much has to follow suit. It's very difficult for me to try to reach accommodation with you while you're trying to kill me. This is why Zartman has spent so much time researching the notion of "hurting stalemates", because once you're locked into Unilateralism on both sides, it's very difficult to get out.

Some of the rhetoric within our domestic political conflict has taken on this sort of flavor. Dig around a little bit and you can find conservatives (often of the alt-right variety) talking about a "genocide" of liberals, while on the Left you have liberals talking openly about secession (Calexit?) from the rest of the country. Both of these assume a universe in which members of both tribes cannot coexist, at least not in the same political space, giving rise for the need for one or another kind of "final solution".

All of this, of course, is ridiculous. My partner-in-crime on secession research Steve Saideman recently pointed out that Blue State secessionism is nuts and anti-democratic. And the idea that "conservatives" can somehow identify and remove (via death or forced migration) all "liberals" is both wildly unrealistic and horrifying.

The reality is that within the United States, Unilateral strategies are a waste of time. They will never succeed. The only thing they are good for - and this goes a long way to explaining their popularity - is helping some politicians get into power and stay here. The side effect of this political strategy, of course, is that the body politic as a whole suffers. And so a college professor and a college student are both made to suffer so that demagogues who have no interest in resolving conflicts can go to Washington.

The Atlantic recently ran an article covering research that suggests that one side effect of Americans drifting away from organized religion (in particular, the many branches of the Christian church) is that they are become less tolerant of each other. While Christianity is often associated in the public mind with intolerance (towards gays, Muslims, single mothers, and others, mostly because of particularly vocal denominations), it turns out that the universalism within Christian theology (a universalism reflected in most major theological systems around the world) does tend to make adherents less rigid than we usually think. You can only sing "In Christ there is no East or West" so many times on a Sunday before it starts to occur to you that maybe God really does love everybody, even the people you disagree with.

The flight from religion is particularly pronounced on college campuses, both among academics and faculty (who tend to share a culture of cosmopolitan secularism) and among students (who tend to share the young adults' gravitational pull away from the religion of their parents, who increasingly don't have one anyway). So it's not surprising that when the broader conflict surfaces on campus, its manifestation tends to be particularly intolerant. Each side, of course, uses this to accuse the other of hypocrisy, thus making the whole thing worse.

The thing about viewing this as a conflict is that it helps us think about the important questions. What would a "resolution" look like? What is the conflict about, and what kinds of solutions to those problems are possible? Because we tend to think that the conflict is about "ideas" ("liberal" ideas versus "conservative" ideas), we then erroneously think that the solution is for our ideas to "win". That is not, of course, how the "marketplace of ideas" works. Change tends to come evolutionarily. Nothing "wins" or "loses" in whole, but the interaction changes all sides and produces new (and hopefully better) ideas. Hegel was right - the conflict between Thesis and Antithesis produces, at its best, Synthesis.

As long as people are sending death threats to each other, of course, this kind of progress is going to be very slow. And as long as students (of whichever tribe) think that they need to help their side "win" - whether by posting videos of views they don't like to like-minded websites or by shouting down speakers they don't like at public events - not much is going to change.

When you're in a conflict, you should be thinking about how to end it - about what realistic conclusions are possible and about how to get from where we are to one of those, as fast as possible and with the least cost. Right now, people on all sides aren't thinking this way. They're trying to "win" an unwinnable war. If you don't like the idea of strangers flinging death threats around, heed the advice of Joshua: the only winning move is not to play:

Trump's Zero-Sum Universe

There are plenty of things to respond to in President Trump's inaugural address last Friday. Having read the text of every inaugural since Harry Truman (all easily available online), some simple observations jump out:

• It was remarkably short.

• It was not particularly uplifting nor inspiring. This is obviously something of a judgment call, but I have read inaugural addresses by Presidents whom I liked and agreed with and by Presidents I disliked and disagreed with strongly. Pretty much all of them were good pieces of inspirational rhetoric, whether I liked the President or not. This one wasn't.

• The phrase "American carnage" was bizarre. The America that Trump describes is not one that most Americans experience.

• I had no idea that schools are "flush with cash" but leave "our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge." My local public schools, which my kids attend, do an excellent job of transmitting a lot of knowledge to my kids, and even though we live in a pretty affluent area even our schools aren't "flush with cash". I don't think his description fits a single school district in the country, much less the entire system.

• "America first" has a ring to it that troubles some folks. What I found far more disturbing was this statement:

At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America

Calling for total allegiance to the state is positively totalitarian and certainly un-American. I can't imagine where this came from, or what purpose it serves.


But beyond all of this, what I found fascinating about the address is the extent to which it illuminates Trump's fundamental view of the world. Trump's world is all about competition, all the time. All interactions, for Trump, involve winners and losers. Everything to him is zero-sum.

This is both inaccurate and profoundly amoral. Let me elaborate a bit on both.

There are indeed some human interactions that are zero-sum, at least on some dimensions. Negotiation over the price of a car or a house is inevitably this way, at least so far as that issue is concerned: every dollar I give up (as a buyer) is a dollar gained (by the seller). Of course, this works primarily for single-issue interactions, because as soon as I introduce multiple values I introduce the possibility of tradeoffs in which both sides can get some, or even all, of what they want or need. This is negotiation theory 101, and the fact that Trump (who claims to have written a book about bargaining) doesn't understand this says a lot about his worldview as well as his intellectual breadth.

More broadly speaking, the defining characteristic of human civilization is cooperation that produces greater benefit for all, rather than competition that takes from one to give to another. The creation of wealth, the functioning of markets, the social interactions that produce what we call "civilized society" are all predicated on the notion that we do things that benefit not only ourselves, but others as well. If we were all about competition, we would barely have descended from the trees.

It is true that many these interactions have both relative and absolute gains within them. Trump is clearly a "relative gains" kind of guy - if the other side is gaining more, even if he himself is objectively better off, he feels that he's "getting screwed".

Relative gains thinking always leaves everybody worse off. It was behind the wave of protectionist tariffs and trade barriers in the 1930's (Smoot-Hawley in the US) that drove the world economy further into depression. It was in response to this disaster that after WWII, American policymakers put forward the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan - arrangements designed to enrich Europe and Japan more than the United States, because that was the smart thing to do. The result was massive worldwide economic expansion that improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. No people has ever gotten prosperous on the basis of protection.

In Prisoner's Dilemma, relative gains thinking on both sides leads to very poor outcomes - both lose. Absolute gains thinking leads to mutual cooperation and better outcomes for both. This is, to a substantial degree, a matter of mindset. The winning strategy in PD is Tit for Tat, which assumes that cooperation is possible and starts every interaction cooperatively. Trump apparently hasn't read Axelrod.

In addition to being a lousy understanding of human interaction, Trump's worldview is also deeply disturbing from a moral standpoint. If everything is about winners and losers, then there are no real limits. Ultimately any behavior is justified, if only it helps you or your side win. Restraints on behavior are for suckers, and each side should be expected to do everything in its power to "win" (whatever that means in context). Winning, in turn, is its own moral justification. Might (achieved through winning) really does make right.

There are philosophical systems that have argued this point in the past, but they are profoundly un-American. They are also deeply anti-Christian. President Trump obviously has only the most tenuous connection to the Gospel, despite throwing in a few awkward God references in his inaugural address, but his zero-sum mentality makes it clear that he has no real relationship with Christianity.

The direction of the Christian gospel is pretty clear on this point. "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." "Love one another as I have loved you." "Blessed are the merciful, for they will have mercy." "Do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other also." "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

The list goes on and on, of course. Even "us first" nationalism is difficult to sustain in the face of Scripture. At the beginnings of the Abrahamic story God promises that "in you all nations of the earth will be blessed", and Peter understood that "God shows no partiality".

I keep being confronted with the same question: for those of us who claim to be Christians, do we take this stuff seriously or don't we? Forget the Supreme Court, or LGBT rights, or abortion, or any of the other issues that Christians sometimes hold up as being "the" issue that justifies their choices. All of this is under Screwtape's "Christianity and..." - things we attach to God that become God. They are idols.

To view the world as Us vs. Them, to reduce every human interaction and every issue to a struggle to produce winners and losers, is an utter and complete repudiation of the Gospel of Christ. To follow a man who walks that path is to reject the injunction of Jesus' own prayer to God: Thy will be done. God's will is not for a world of conflict and strife. Why would we follow someone who wants to make it more so?

Karate and Life: No First Strike

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the first of Gichin Funakoshi's 20 Precepts: The Way Begins and Ends With Respect. I believe that Funakoshi's ideas go beyond karate-do, that there is wisdom worth sharing in his list of Precepts. This is the second post in that series; eventually, I hope to write about all 20.

Funakoshi's second Precept is perhaps his most famous:

Karate ni sente nashi.
There is no first strike in karate.

This is often understood in the martial arts world as tactical advice, and has given rise to endless debates about the nature and application of various blocks and strikes. For an excellent review of this debate, see my friend Dan Djurdjevic's blog.

But what about the rest of us? I believe that the meaning here is far more important outside the dojo than inside it. If more of us lived by this precept, the world would be a better place.

The Japanese word "sente" means not simply "strike" or "attack", but "initiative" - in this case, "aggressive initiative". What Funakoshi is referring to here is that moment in any conflict when one party take the first aggressive, escalatory step - the moment when the conflict leaves the path of mutual accommodation and problem-solving and instead becomes a zero-sum struggle in which each side seeks to beat the other into submission.

All conflicts have this "inflection point" somewhere. A disagreement, or a divergence of interests, in and of itself does not generate a conflict. What turns disagreement into war is a decision by one side to try to impose its will on the other - to try to achieve a unilateral solution in which I get what I want and who cares about the other guy.

Sometimes this point comes right at the beginning of a conflict, because one side has already decided to take what they want away from the other. Sometimes, it comes after a period of time in which both sides come to realize that there is a disagreement which neither was aware of before. In all cases, somebody has to make a decision to take that step - to throw the first punch, to launch the first attack, to throw away any hope of negotiating a mutually agreeable solution in favor of grabbing as much as you can get.

Prior to this point, mutual resolution is always possible. There are no conflicts on earth between humans that can't be settled in some fashion. Some of those settlements may require compromise - each side getting less than it fully wants. Some settlements may even require a redefinition of interests, even a redefinition of identity. Such things can and do happen - there are no laws in the cosmos that prevent any of this.

Peace, in the sense of resolving conflicts together, is possible. We just don't do it very well.

Funakoshi's dictum is a plea to all of us - don't be the first one to take a step down that road. Remain open to mutual dialogue as long as possible. Don't throw the first punch. Because once that first punch is thrown, disagreement becomes conflict and peace goes out the window. And everyone will suffer.

Political scientists and economists have known this by a different language. In our fields there is a game called "prisoner's dilemma" (or PD). I'll spare you the details, but in essence the game boils down to a choice between cooperating with the other player or stabbing him in the back. If both cooperate, both sides get something and are better off. If I stab and the other guy doesn't, I get everything and he gets nothing. If we both stab, we're both worse off.

Games like PD are great for modeling certain dynamics, but life isn't like that. We rarely play a game or make a choice once and then walk away. In life, we make these choices all the time, over and over again.

A Princeton scholar, Robert Axelrod, set out to capture this by inventing an artificial computer world in which players ran around and bumped into each other. At each interaction, they would play PD with each other. Each time, players had to choose not knowing what the other side would do (the game is played with simultaneous choices) - but each DID remember what the other player had done before. Players in Axelrod's game built up memories over time of what other players do.

In this virtual world, Axelrod asked a simple question: what strategy wins? That is, from a selfish perspective, what could players do to maximize their own gains in these interactions, assuming that they cared only about themselves and not the welfare of any other players in the game?

The winning strategy, which has spawned a wealth of literature, was what Axelrod called Tit-for-Tat (TFT). The essence of the TFT strategy is simple:

• On the first round of an iterated game, Cooperate.
• On every subsequent round, do whatever the other player did the last round.

Here is Funakoshi's karate ni sente nashi in action. My best strategy is to start by trying to cooperate with the other side. If they cooperate back, then we both keep cooperating with each other, with both of us gaining every round. Only if the other side betrays me first do I resort to similar responses. I never launch the first strike.

Amidst all the debate among academics about TFT, here's the reality: no one has ever come up with a better strategy. In the long run, you and I and everyone else will be better off if we start by assuming that cooperation is possible.

Most of us will never get into a fistfight or a physical altercation. But all of us have interactions every day with people near to us and far away. In every one of those interactions, we have a choice: do I want to seek cooperation, or do I want to lash out? Find common ground or try to "win"? Funakoshi's advice is as simple as it is profound: don't be the first to start a fight. Reach out with an open hand. Sometimes people will return the favor, sometimes not. But we will always be better off if we do.

Hate is Hate: Responses to the Orlando Shooting

Much has already been written about the terrible shooting in Orlando this past afternoon, and much more will be written and said in the coming days and weeks. A lot of what we hear will be predictable, because we've had this "conversation" a lot of times before. I've written a lot about gun control already; if you want to my thoughts on that subject, type "gun control" in the search box on this blog and have at it. The short form: guns are a terrible means of self-defense, and the answer to gun violence isn't arming everyone else in society.

What I want to offer here is a broader perspective, one that looks at the shooting in Orlando not as simply as a terrorist attack or an attack on the LGBTQ community or a mass shooting, but as another event in the long and frequent chain of human violence.

Viewed from this very broad lens, the specific questions about the precise motives of the shooter or the detailed connections between him and various other organizations become much less important. They matter for this case in particular, but if our intention is to have a dialogue about how to have fewer such incidents in the future then we need to move beyond the specifics and talk about violence.

We tend to be guilty of "fighting the last war" in our response to mass shootings. After Sandy Hook and Aurora, the answer was "better mental health"; after Columbine, "better parenting". After Orlando, some want to use the "terrorist" label to claim that we have a particular enemy (ISIS? Radical Islamism?), and that all we have to do to prevent such attacks in the future is to eradicate that enemy.

All of this, of course, misses the point. We had plenty of shootings (including mass shootings) in the United States long before the current flavors of radicalized Islam came along, and we will likely have more long after they are gone. Many recent attacks (including Sandy Hook, Charleston, and Aurora) weren't conducted by Muslims at all, nor did they have any particular political motive. Yet the action, and the result, was much the same: innocent civilians, going about their daily lives, gunned down by an individual bent on their destruction.

Politicians who offer simple solutions are deluding us, and possibly themselves. There are no easy answers, no "if only I was in charge everything would be better" actions. Crimes of mass violence are at the same time unique and the offspring of a particular set of (very broad) factors:

Opportunity: This is the one factor that we never talk about, because there's simply nothing that can be done. If someone is bent on killing civilians and can manage to hide their plans from law enforcement ahead of time, there will always be opportunities. A sporting event. A dance club. A concert. A shopping mall. A movie theater. An airport. A train station. A school. The fact that we live in community makes us vulnerable. We can tinker with these vulnerabilities at the margins, but only for specific targets and for limited periods of time. To live in society means to live in vulnerability to one another. The key here is to live with that vulnerability, but without fear.

Means: This tends to attract a lot of heat, and not much light. There are many ways for people bent on mass destruction to cause it. Some are more effective than others, and some are easier to contain or implement than others. Homemade bombs are possible, but tricky, and efforts can be made to monitor certain kinds of chemicals in certain quantities to try to prevent another Oklahoma City. Knives and other hand implements can be deadly, but usually in small numbers; it is difficult to imagine an assailant killing 49 people in a night club with a knife.
     Guns come in various types, from small pistols with few rounds to large rifles with many rounds and high rates of fire. Guns get most of the attention because, in the United States, they are the perfect means for anyone bent on causing widespread destruction: easy to acquire, easy to use, widely available, and highly destructive. We already have a few restrictions on firearms - fully automatic weapons are widely restricted from civilian ownership, for example. Further restrictions would reduce the means available for mass killings. It would not eliminate these events, but it would make them both less frequent and less deadly when they do occur.

Motive: This is the arena in which people love to engage in rampant speculation, most of it useless. More often than not (Orlando, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino, etc.), the killers die in the incident, leaving us to speculate afterwards about their motives. What particular ideology or mental illness fueled this particular rampage? We think that, if only we can get the right answer (or say the right words), we can solve the problem.
     This is where we are most at sea. For law enforcement purposes, it matters whether the Orlando shooter was working with others or not. But for the purposes of trying to reduce the quantity and severity of violence in our society in the future, it's irrelevant. We shouldn't care whether this individual was a follower of ISIS, or al-Qaeda, or the KKK, or the Westboro Baptist Church. There will always be ideologies and theologies that justify, even demand, violence against innocents. There is only one thing they all have in common: Hate.

On Sunday night as we were still sifting through information about the shootings, I happened to be watching the Tony Awards and was treated to Lin-Manuel Miranda's moving and emotional sonnet, which he read in lieu of an acceptance speech. The poem is anchored in an anthem of the LBGTQ community, "Love is love", and so it is. But the opposite is also true: hate is hate, whether born of Christian or Muslim ideology, whether directed at women or blacks or sexual minorities or other nations or people of different faiths or members of different political parties.

If you're looking for one root cause to these acts of inhumane violence, here it is: hatred. Hatred of particular groups, hatred of others who are different, hatred of random strangers, even hatred of self. Hatred, as Star Wars reminded us, leads to suffering - for both the hated and the hater.

The thing about hatred is that it feeds on itself. Read, if you can, this Storify compilation of live tweets from a recent rally for Donald Trump. The anger and hatred, as the correspondent reported, were "palpable". Insults, curses, angry words, threats, coming both from the candidate and the crowd - all combined to raise the collective level of hatred far beyond simply the sum total of the individuals. The more anger and fear we immerse ourselves in, the more we hate. The more hatred we encounter in others, the more we hate. And make no mistake - there is hatred inside all of us.

Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us of this many years ago:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

If you want a more modern example, I encourage you to read this speech by the Lt. Governor of Utah. It is moving, it is eloquent, and it makes all the right points.

If we want to have less violence in our society, the answer doesn't lie in defeating an ideology or a religion. It doesn't rest on electing a strong man who promises peace but delivers only anger. It doesn't rest, in fact, on who we elect at all. It doesn't even rest, ultimately, on whether we put more money into mental health, or do better work with terrorist watch lists, or restrict guns - although all of those may be good things to do. The answer lies in us, every day. Every day we face opportunities to love more, to be kind, to come together. And we face temptations to give into fear, to express our anger, to hate someone a little bit more. We together decide which it will be.

Which will you choose today?

Fear, Anger, and Hatred: Our Never-Ending Suffering Over Guns

Lots of stuff has been written in the wake of the latest mass shooting in Oregon. My good friend Steve Saideman has been carrying lots of water on this issue, as have many others. Newspapers are filled with both stories and commentary. The President speaks, people opine, tempers flare, dogma is repeated. In the words of the late, great Yogi Berra: it’s déjà vu all over again.

So why write anything at all? I have no illusion that my words, read by relatively few, will change the world. But if there is any purpose at all to writing it is simply to continue the conversation. I don’t know whether things will get better or not. I do know that without the ongoing conversation, however painful, they definitely won’t. So here’s my 2 cents.

Regular readers of this space will know that I’m fond of borrowing a line from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back to explain conflict dynamics. It’s simple, powerful, and easy to remember:

Fear -> Anger -> Hatred -> Suffering. This is the cycle we repeat, over and over again, like some nightmarish version of Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day.

I want to apply this dynamic to one of the most painful dimensions of the current discussion: the tribal shouting match over restrictions on firearms. The pain of every broadly-publicized mass shooting is amplified by the fear, anger, and hatred of this “discussion”, experienced over and over again with each new tragedy.

So what’s really going on here? Let me try to reflect on the dynamics of both sides. In so doing, I will freely admit that being closer to one side of the divide, I probably understand one point of view better than the other. I will nevertheless try to be fair to all, starting with two assumptions: that none of us thinks of ourselves as evil and that we are all flawed human beings deserving of compassion, dignity, and respect.

So what happens in the wake of each new gun-related tragedy? I believe the cycle of fear-anger-hatred is triggered in both “pro-gun” and “anti-gun” tribes, but because neither understands the other or regards the other as legitimate, we remain locked in a painful stalemate from which there is no clear way out.

Fear

Highly-publicized shootings trigger fear in both camps. For pro-gun folks, the fear is simple but also deep: they fear having all of their guns taken away. This is less of a practical fear than it is an emotional one: many in this camp see guns as culturally positive and would regard losing them as a loss not only of freedom but identity. Folks who don’t own guns have long ignored the depth of this feeling, or tried to argue it away on practical grounds, at their peril.

Full disclosure: I’m guilty of this myself. I’ve written any number of pieces (here, here, here) about guns and their realistic application to self-defense. For most folks to whom such arguments might be directed this misses the point, which is that guns make folks feel safer regardless of their practical impact. We can make fun of that feeling if we like, but it’s no less powerful for our attempts to denigrate it.

For anti-gun folks, public mass shootings also trigger fear. For some, it may be a visceral fear for their own lives or the lives of their loved ones – the sense that “if this happened there, it could happen anywhere, even in my community.” Given the low probability of such an event, I suspect that for many the fear is more diffuse: the dread of living in a nation that has lost its soul. The evil of these events is palpable in the innocence of the victims, but it is magnified many times by the angry responses of pro-gun forces who, in the wake of yet another tragedy, call for yet more guns as the solution. Put simply, mass shootings remind many people that they fear an overly-armed society with lots and lots of guns. Pro-NRA folks ignore this fear, or dismiss it as ridiculous, at their peril. You can repeat “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” all you want but the reality is that guns frighten people and the public shooting of innocent victims heightens that fear.

Public shootings make both camps afraid, but of very different things. Neither side understands the others’ fear, and both think that the fears of the other side are absurd. At worst, each thinks that the others’ expressed fears are really window dressing for something more nefarious – idol-worship and radical dog-eat-dog individualism on the part of pro-gun conservatives, totalitarian government-controls-all Orwellian fantasies by anti-gun liberals.

Anger & Hatred

Given that each side mocks the others’ fear, it is any wonder that attempts at “dialogue” quickly lead to anger? Folks in favor of more stringent gun controls want to see the possibility of change, and get angry when they see people on the other side not only blocking that change but mocking it in ways that appear to denigrate the victims of mass shootings (Bush is going to pay for that “stuff happens” comment for a while). Folks in favor of more widespread gun ownership get angry at what they perceive as an ongoing plot to deprive them of their rights, possibly as the first step towards a more totalitarian society. Both of these contain an element of the ridiculous, but the anger is no less real for that.

The problem with anger, of course, is that it clouds judgment. Angry people are even worse than usual at evaluating information, assessing options, and drawing conclusions. Anger focuses on people rather than facts or issues. The conflict becomes the problem rather than the problem being the problem, with both sides blaming the other.

Eventually, anger turns to hatred. Instead of gun violence being a problem to be solved by people working together, it becomes the battleground on which we fight. We call our opponents names, we denigrate their intelligence and their parentage, and we congratulate each other within our tribes on how clever our put-downs and insults are.

Some anonymous fellow left a comment on this blog a while back calling me a “special kind of stupid”. He (or she) and I have never met, and likely never will. It was a small action of hate, made in a moment of passion. I have little doubt that, in the back of his/her mind, this person was driven by fear and compensated for that fear by lashing out in a small way. C.S. Lewis reminds us that hatred is “often the compensation by which the frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear.”

Those moments and actions, these little compensations by which we assuage our own fears, add up. For some, the anger and the hatred become all-consuming. They define the limits of what someone sees. Gun violence is no longer about gun violence, it’s about them: NRA apologists with blood on their hands, fascist liberals ready to take everyone’s guns and throw us all in concentration camps.

Because hatred is a powerful motivator, those who experience it most are most motivated to act. In this regard, my friend Steve is right – politicians generally listen to the folks who are most mobilized, and in this case that has been the folks on the NRA/pro-gun side of the debate. Their hatred, their anger, and (I suspect) their fear are simply deeper and more lasting than their liberal counterparts. As long as the rules of the game are based on these things, they will continue to win the battle – but not the war. They will continue to suffer along with the rest of us.

Suffering

Gun violence begets two tragedies with every new shooting. The first is the tragedy localized to that particular time and place: the victims of that particular shooting, their family members, and the community in which they live and move. The suffering of the people of Umpqua Community College and in the town of Rosewood, Oregon, is theirs. The rest of us can share by sympathy from afar. We may feel some of its echoes, but attenuated severely by distance.

The second tragedy is the one we inflict on ourselves: the endless, frustrating, fear-anger-hatred-fueled shouting match that occupies the landscape where “public discourse” should be. President Obama gave voice to some of that in his response, albeit from one particular side. NRA adherents and spokespeople have also taken to the airwaves and the internet, their fears heightened, their anger on alert. Let the ranting resume.

To be fair, there are players in this drama largely untouched by the suffering. Not everybody is driven by fear, anger, and hatred. Gun manufacturers in particular profit from all of this. Every time the national tragedy is renewed, their gun sales go up, ammunition sales go up, and they make out like bandits. Their support for the NRA and similar organizations is predicated simply on business calculations.

For the rest of us, we are confronted with these two tragedies: the local, periodic, unpredictable shootings of innocent people, and the national festival of bile and rage that ensues every time a random mass shooting occurs. We will not solve the first without addressing the second, and we will not succeed in the latter without breaking the cycle of fear, anger, and hatred. We inflict this suffering on ourselves, but we don’t know how to stop. And so it is indeed déjà vu all over again.

How do we go about this? Here I don’t have a lot of good ideas. My years of studying conflict tell me that moments of heightened anger and hatred are the worst times, not the best, for trying to resolve things. We need to have a dialogue, not right after a shooting but in the in-between times when people aren’t frightened and angry. We need to talk to each other honestly about our fears – without mocking, without snark, without denigration, but in respect and compassion. Over time, that’s the conversation that is likely to produce results.

This is not easy – in fact, it’s far harder and less likely than passing some new gun control legislation in the wake of a shooting. Fear is a powerful short-term motivator, and righteous anger feels good on all sides. There are many who benefit from our anger: not only gun manufacturers, but also politicians, pundits, and “professional interest groups”. What would happen to the NRA if we had a real national dialogue that produced a real national consensus? Donations would plummet, people would stop paying attention, and Wayne LaPierre’s salary and staff would be slashed. For him and many others (on both sides) who use the national shouting match as a means to their own ends, there is little interest in resolution. The battle itself is what they want. It pays their salaries, garners votes and volunteers for the next election, and keeps the whole system going.

If a real conversation is ever to take place, it will be in spite of those who now wield the loudest voices – the politicians, the pundits, the NRA and others – rather than because of them. We cannot expect leadership from any of these “leaders”. We have to do it ourselves.

That’s not a prescription, much less a call to action. I know well the powerful forces blocking such a path. I only know that the path is there, for anyone who wants to try it. I expect that few will, but I hope that some might.