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.

Violence in Charlottesville: The Dangers of Painting with a Broad Brush

The national conversation is filled with discussion of the violence in Charlottesville over the weekend. The death of one woman is both a tragedy and a crime, as is the injury of nearly two dozen others. Our justice system has much to do to address these terrible acts, and I have faith that it will.

As is often the case, I am more interested in the broader conversation and the conflict that it represents. I have a couple of points I want to make; because of the raw nature of recent events, we'll see how well I can make them.

First, the supporters of White Supremacy often like to wrap their political activities in the flag of Free Speech. The right to peaceably assemble is sacred to all, whether we agree with their views or not. This much is true.

But it is debatable whether "peaceable assembly" includes showing up with shields, helmets, body armor, and sticks. That's not a "peaceful" demonstration, it's intimidation and preparation for combat. So I'm not buying the "peaceful assembly" line. There was never any intention for this to be "peaceful". This is not a movement much interested in peace.

Second, at some point - probably already happened by now - some apologist for the marching racists will argue that it's not fair that they all be blamed for James Alex Fields' actions. He acted alone, they will say. You can't all paint us with the same brush just because of one violent man in our midst.

Bullshit.

The entire White Supremacist movement relies on painting with broad brushes. All blacks, all Jews, all gays, all Muslims, all Latinos - "they" are all the same. This is the entirety of their "argument". They don't care about individuals, only about groups. All of "them" are always the same.

If you marched on Friday night, tiki torch in hand, and you don't think this describes you, get the heck out now. You have taken up with a violent movement. Perhaps the icons of knives and axes might give you a clue. Or the hardware your fellow marchers are carrying.

So fine. Your group - each and every one of you - is violent to the point of being murderous. And we, the rest of civilized society, are justified in rounding you up and prosecuting you under the law.

Finally, this is the really key thing that these White Supremacists, neo-Nazis, and various KKK hangers-on don't yet realize. They've already lost. The vast majority of American society - including whites - rejects them, rejects their ideas, and most especially rejects their murderous attachment to violence. To borrow Ronald Reagan's memorable phrase, they are already consigned to the Ash Heap of History.

They just aren't smart enough to know it yet.

Let us not forget that it was the forebears of these rampaging rage-monsters that slaughtered 168 Americans, including 19 preschool children, twenty-two years ago in Oklahoma City. The mix of rage, incoherent fear for their white identity, and rejection of government authority has killed before.

I hope that the death of Heather Heyer will serve the same purpose as the deaths of those many innocent victims in 1995: a wake-up call to the nation and the start of another effort to drive this kind of violent hatred back underground. Given the current occupant in the White House, I'm not holding my breath, but I hope at least that his fellow Republicans will see the Faustian bargain they have struck and repent.

Many people have been quoting MLK's "arc of history" line. In this case, he is absolutely correct. The men (and yes, they are mostly men) who have bought into this violent insanity have been brought out into the light. But they have already lost. The nation unites in horror against their dystopian rage. They cannot win, not even a little bit, anything that they hope to achieve. They can't even keep the statues they are so keen to protect standing in the public square. All they can do is shriek helplessly as the arc of history leaves them behind.

Or, they can repent and join the rest of us. I, for one, would be happy to have them back if they can find a way to set aside their rage, fear, anger, and hatred. We need people working together to build a more perfect union for all of us.

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:

Gaslighting on Terrorism and Immigration

This weekend has seen a mass of confusion, protest, anger, and dismay at a hastily-constructed executive order that brought an immediate halt to certain kinds of immigration and travel, and an indefinite halt to others (specifically, refugees from Syria). People marched, court orders were issued (and apparently ignored), statements were made, contradicted, and clarified. Things are still far from certain as of the start of the week.

Lost in the shuffle of all of these important issues is an underlying reality: we as a nation have been effectively "gaslighted" on terrorism and immigration. The Trump forces have told the lie that we are unsafe and vulnerable to attack by terrorists traveling from overseas so often that we all now take it for granted - even Democratic Senators otherwise opposed to the executive order.

As a security studies scholar, let me put this in clear terms: there is not a shred of evidence that the United States is any more vulnerable to terrorist attacks from abroad than it ever has been, and plenty to suggest that we are safer than at any point in our history. There is also no way of defending the assertion that Islamic terrorism represents an existential threat to the United States, or that it even ought to be on the list of top US national security priorities. We are afraid of terrorism only because we've been told we should be.

The easiest way to see the truth, of course, is to look at the statistics. Violence of any kind - never mind terrorist violence - doesn't even make the top 15 list of causes of death in the US, and has been in long-term secular decline (as have death rates in general). Any given American's odds of being killed or injured by a terrorist are almost infinitesimally small, and the odds of a terrorist attack of any kind happening on US soil on any given day - or even in any given month - are likewise extremely small. The list of things you are more likely to encounter than a terrorist is vast.

The few high-profile cases we've had in recent years (San Bernadino and, if you really want to stretch, Orlando) were committed by US citizens. The only recent case that might conceivably have been stopped by the rules recently put in place was a knife-wielding Somali at Ohio State, which while regrettable and tragic didn't lead to any loss of life (other than the attacker's) and which represented only the tiniest of dangers even to the people of Columbus, OH. Dylann Roof did more damage in South Carolina that this student did in Columbus.

The fact is that, of things that threaten Americans' lives and way of life, terrorism just doesn't make the list. It is, in reality, just not that important. Are we 100% free of terrorist risk? Of course not - and we never will be. There is no set of rules, no border restrictions, no "extreme vetting" procedures that will ever eliminate that risk. And at this point, the risk is so low that any efforts to improve procedures - however well-considered and well-implemented - will only lower the risk level by an almost immeasurably small amount. When you're that close to zero, it's hard to get closer.

Why, then, are so many Americans concerned about terrorism? Why are even Senate Democrats unwilling to question the underlying logic of Trump's executive order, which amounts to "desperate times call for desperate measures"? Because we have all been gaslit on this. The lie has been repeated so many times that it has become the truth.

This is not a problem that goes away with one administration, however disliked or incompetent. This is now baked into the system, the result of 15 years of steady drumbeats that long predate Trump and his people. No politician, Democrat or Republican, will challenge the conventional wisdom, and a great many of them will find it useful as cover to do what they want to do, whether it be restricting economic activity or discriminating against certain groups or simply getting reelected on the basis of blind fear. The "War on Terror" is, indeed, the never-ending war, because we have enshrined it on a pedestal in our heads.

I wish I could be less bleak about this, but I don't see a way forward. We have largely lost the capacity for hope in our politics, especially as concerns "national security" issues. 25 years ago we dreamed of a world in which we felt secure. Since then we have allowed our "leaders" to make sure that we will never feel secure again, whatever the real world is doing. As usual, Walt Kelly said it best: we have met the enemy, and He is Us.

Oregon Occupation: What Kind of Politics Do We Want?

Now that the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a band of armed anti-government protesters appears to be mostly over, we can step back and see if there's anything to be learned from the whole mess. The answer may be "not much," insofar as the whole thing was a bit of a farce (and widely treated as such) from the beginning, but I think there are some significant points to consider.

The chief question, one raised every time a group of citizens finds itself opposed to a government policy, is: how is opposition to be legitimately expressed? If I don't like a government policy, what should (or shouldn't) I try to do about it, and what are the limits to my opposition?

To talk of limits to opposition seems almost countercultural in these days of open political-tribal warfare in which politicians and political organizations have done almost everything short of direct violence against each other. Certainly the rhetoric of most politics, whether in campaigns for office or in the constant, ongoing "debates" over this or that policy issue, does not admit to any limits. The mantra is, we are right and they are wrong and we must do whatever it takes to prevail.

This is great for getting masses riled up (and, as the proverb has it, separating fools from their money), but what does it really mean? The Bundys and their followers apparently took this rhetoric seriously. They had a particular view on government policy towards federally-owned lands, and they chose to arm themselves, occupy a (remote) set of federal buildings, and issue demands until they were met.

Setting aside their views on the particular issues of federal land management and ownership, their strategy was both ridiculous and doomed to failure from the start. It was ridiculous in that no government and no society can function if the means of opposition is to take up arms and issue demands. If groups did this every time they didn't like a policy decision, we would quickly become a country of armed camps. It's an absurd way to conduct politics.

No government, of any kind, is going to give in to demands under such circumstances. To do otherwise would set a precedent in which groups would know that if they want to win on their pet issue, they need to arm themselves and find some federal building (or set of employees) to take hostage. The idea of any government - democratic, authoritarian, or anything else - meeting such a demand is extremely difficult to entertain.

What the Bundy boys did was not just misunderstand the law, or the Constitution. They misunderstood politics fundamentally. In any society, there is ultimately a choice to be made about how resources will be allocated and distributed and how rules will be established and maintained. Either there is a process for establishing those rules that involves consultation and assent from some (or all) of the population, or the rules are established and enforced by whoever has the most and biggest guns. Law and violence are the basic choices here. Either we agree on something, or we fight it out.

The Bundys seemed to want to have it both ways. They made an argument based on their interpretation of law, yet they denied our entire system of government designed to set up and maintain laws. They tried to use force (of a sort) to get the government to agree with their interpretation of the law. They broke the law in order to try to change it.

Some sympathizers have taken this logic to equate the Bundy movement with MLK and the civil rights marchers. The equation is of course absurd. MLK understood that when you break the law, you face the consequences. He voluntarily went to jail to prove a point, to shock the conscience of the nation. He didn't break the law and then hide behind a gun, daring the government to arrest him. His strategy was clear: he wanted through action and example to convince a majority of Americans that his cause was right and his preferred laws and policies were good ones. In this he succeeded to a substantial degree.

So changing policy through force and demand is out. No matter what political system you operate under, it doesn't work and it doesn't make any sense. Small wonder the occupiers in Oregon have garnered such widespread scorn.

In our current political climate, however, this does leave the rest of us wondering how politics should be conducted. We have seen a decades-long escalation of rhetoric calling for all-or-nothing solutions. Promises to "take back America". Strategies to create a "permanent majority". These things don't involve guns or shooting, but they do call into question what kind of society we want.

If your approach to politics is predicated on achieving some ideal future in which everybody agrees with you, I have bad news for you: there will always be people who disagree. Sometimes there will be more people who disagree with you than agree with you. Sometimes you will be on the winning side, sometimes on the losing side. If you want to participate in society and in politics, you have to accept that. You also might want to consider that you could work with people of differing views to get things done that you both can agree on.

In the end, we forget a key truth: the process is far more important than any particular outcome. There will always be another issue, another policy, another law that we want or hate. But the way we handle and deal with each other in reaching those outcomes, day after day, is in the end what defines us.

Going Out On a Limb on Race

Let me state the obvious up front: I'm a white man in a privileged position. I have tenure, rank, and an administrative position of some authority within a university. I have a social position within my community that is comfortable and oftentimes even respected.

So from some points of view, I may not be the best person to engage the current discussion about race, racism, and higher education. On the other hand, there are a lot of people like me running universities and colleges across the country. So if we don't engage, then solutions will be difficult to find. So I dip my foot in these waters tentatively, with humility and understanding that mine is a particular perspective.

A number of articles have been written of late that are well worth reading. There is Nicholas Kristof's excellent piece in today's NYT. There is a very good article in the Atlantic in defense of civility and against censorship. There is this blog post about racism written compellingly from a young black man's perspective.

In the midst of all of these conversations about clashing free speech and racism concerns, I appreciate these perspectives. In particular I appreciate the voice of the young blogger trying to explain what racism really is to those who never experience it. It is powerfully put and I believe sincere. He isn't attacking anyone in particular, but a broader problem in general. This is the kind of thing that can contribute to a conversation.

In order to actually push that conversation forward, however, it is not enough to hear from the victims of racism about the pain it causes. We need to know more - not about those who suffer from these indignities and injustices, but about those who perpetrate them.

Not all whites (or members of any group, for that matter) are racists. But some are. How do we address those who engage in these behaviors? How do we identify them, engage with them, and ultimately persuade them to change? That, it seems to me, is the real challenge. Beyond the protests and the screaming and the back-and-forth internet trolling, this is what real leadership (from wherever it emerges) needs to do.

Earlier today I likened the ongoing protests (some of which are occurring on my campus today, in solidarity with others) to a conflict. As a conflict scholar, the steps towards resolution are clear:

- Identify the essentials of the conflict. Who are the players? What are their interests, and what are they fighting about? What are the rules of the surrounding environment that shape how the conflict is conducted?

- Decide on the desired end goal. If the conflict were over, what would you want that to look like? What resolution do you seek, and what does that resolution look like for ALL of the actors involved?

- Evaluate and choose a strategy for achieving that goal. Can I get there through unilateral action, or do I need the cooperation of those with different views? Can I engineer a solution that meets my needs regardless of what the other side wants, or do I have to persuade others to join with me in a mutually-agreed settlement?

I don't think we've yet had much clear thinking about any of these things. Conflicts often arise between aggrieved students and university administrators or faculty, which is an example of the lamppost fallacy: tackling what you can see, rather than going where the problem really is. The fundamental conflict is between members of minority groups (blacks, latinos, transgender, etc.) and members of the majority group who want to discriminate against and oppress them. If that is the core of the conflict, there is no unilateral solution - neither group can wipe the other out, both must continue to live in the same society together. The question is, how?

I don't have any good answers. I don't know how you identify who the racists are, much less how you draw them into a political process designed to address their real interests and fashion a mutually acceptable solution. All I know is that until we do so, we are likely to be stuck in the ugly stalemate of today - sometimes quieter, sometimes louder, but with very little progress towards a better future.

"Blood on our Hands": Moral Responsibility and Modern Life

It has become characteristic of a certain kind of political protest to demand that some institution - the US government, a university, your local town, a company - take extraordinary steps to disconnect, divest, or otherwise disassociate itself from a political situation or conflict. Institutions that fail to take such steps are, in the eyes of the protestors, "morally responsible" for whatever atrocities or horrific crimes are being committed elsewhere. And since the crimes in question often involve a lot of bloodshed, this tends to lead to some pretty hyperbolic protest language.

A student at Ohio University treated her university, and the world, to an especially silly version of such a protest this week. You can read a full news account of the incident here. The original video has unfortunately been taken down, but you can watch the debate it set off on the OU campus here.

It is worth noting that the student body president did recant and apologize for her silliness and appears to have recognized the error of her ways. But I would guess that this is an argument that will linger for a while on the OU campus.

While dramatic (turning the Ice Bucket Challenge into a bucket of blood will certainly draw attention), the argument that this student made is a familiar one. It's worth noting her statements, captured in transcript from the video:

In the video, posted on Vimeo, Marzec states, "I'm sending a message of student concern of the genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine by the Israeli state. I'm urging you, and OU, to divest and cut all ties with academic and other Israeli businesses and institutions," she said during in video. "This bucket of blood symbolizes the thousands of displaced and murdered Palestinians atrocities which OU is directly complacent in your cultural and economic support of the Israeli state."

Now, I assume that she meant "complicit" rather than "complacent", but you get the drift. Because OU's investment portfolio and international activities include ties to Israel in some fashion, the university itself has "blood on its hands" for all of those innocent Palestinian deaths.

There is a practical silliness to this, of course: OU could do as this student asked tomorrow, divest itself of every investment connected to Israeli companies, cut all ties of cooperation with Israeli universities, and not a single thing would change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Indeed, if every last university in the US did this, it still wouldn't change a thing. This seems like the opposite of the Peter Parker Principle - if great power brings great responsibility, shouldn't no power absolve one from responsibility?

But the real reason for such protests isn't the practical impact of the actions demanded (though protesters often delude themselves into thinking that they will in some fashion change the world). What these folks are primarily after is the self-righteous rush of feeling that, whatever evil happens in the world, their hands are clean.

This is, of course, an absurdity in the modern world, especially if your standard for "bloody hands" is "any financial connection to the perpetrators". Do you pay taxes to the US government? Do you participate in the international economy? The reality of modern trade and global production is that nearly any economic activity is likely tied, in some fashion, to some questionable behavior that you probably wouldn't like to be associated with.

It is the merging of these impossibly high moral standards with the obvious (if unintended) hypocrisy of those who promote them that makes the whole thing fall apart. What starts as impassioned moral protest degenerates quickly into cheap theater, screaming, and useless diatribe that accomplishes nothing.

If you are truly concerned about the great moral issues of the day, whether they are in Missouri or Israel, the appropriate response is much harder. Rather than trying (fruitlessly) to disassociate ourselves and our institutions from whatever side of a conflict we don't like, what we need to do is engage with the issues and the people involved. Talk to all sides and hear their stories. Listen to their humanity, their dreams, their aspirations. Understand their weaknesses and failings - and how little you may be able to change them.

You cannot end an intractable conflict by dumping blood on your head. But you may be able, in a small way, to heal some of the damage that conflict causes, even if it's far away from the bombing and the killing. And in the process, you will discover something far more valuable than angry self-righteousness. If you're lucky, you may just discover the peace that comes with connecting with another human being.

The Root of Egypt's Problems?

My friend Steve Saideman has recently posted some excellent stuff on what's going on in Egypt, despite his avowed position that he doesn't know much about Egyptian politics. His emphasis on the basic rules of democracy is an extremely important reminder of what underlies democratic politics in any nation. Since I don't know much about Egypt either, I am naturally going to follow him down that road.

One thing I think may be missing from his list is a condition necessary for democracies to work. When we think about democracies and defining them, we think about process - the how of politics. But most people aren't process people, they're outcome people - they care a great deal more about what happens then about how it happens.

People's willingness to tolerate or go along with various sets of process rules tends to hinge on whether the outcomes generated are acceptable. As the aphorism goes, if you don't like the game, change the rules. Egyptians didn't overthrow Mubarak because he was undemocratic; they overthrew him because they were tired of corruption and being randomly thrown in jail and being poor.

This helps explain, by the way, why otherwise fundamentally undemocratic systems that produce acceptable outcomes (Singapore?) are stable. If you're wealthy and have a reasonable amount of freedom in your personal and professional life, it's harder to get you to take up arms against the tyranny of government.

What does this have to do with Egypt? The current inability to form a stable government, and the reason for the military takeover, may relate to an underlying problem: factions within Egypt have definitions of "acceptable political outcomes" so fundamentally divergent that there is no space available for stable politics.

We expect there to be differences of opinion - every society has those. In functioning democracies, those differences are not so severe that different factions refuse to accept outcomes acceptable to the other side(s) and turn instead to revolt and open revolution. Aside from a very small number of fringe elements in the US, even the current state of polarization in American politics hasn't led anyone take up arms, either against the state or against members of the other party. As Steve pointed out, even the contested 2000 election was settled not by the military but by the courts. It's been two generations since we've seen any significant armed resistance to political outcomes.

Contrast this with Egypt today, which is clearly sharply and perhaps irrevocably divided between numerous factions. The Islamists put together a coalition big enough to win an election. But the outcome they wanted was beyond the range of tolerance for other groups in society, who rose up against a "democratically elected" government - a clear case of political outcomes trumping the supposed legitimacy of the process itself. Now that the military has swept the Islamists from power, the latter are starting to resist forcefully as well (if not yet effectively), and it isn't clear that there's enough common ground among the non-Islamist factions to base even a temporary government on.

The logical conclusion to this line of reasoning is a depressing one: Egypt may simply be too divided to have a functioning democracy. If that is the case, all the elections and constitutional conventions in the world won't solve the problem - they simply provide new battlegrounds on which various factions will fight their winner-take-all battles. In that case, military rule may in fact by the only stable solution that prevents the country from sliding into civil war.

The solution to Egypt's crisis lies, as it always does, with Egyptians. The military or various political leaders may be able to help, but in the end democracy there will only work if there's enough overlap in what different people think of as acceptable political outcomes to base "normal" politics on. Given the violence of the last few weeks, it seems that point is a ways off. Until then, I suspect we're in for a period of either protracted instability or prolonged military rule - and despite our own democratic predilections, the latter may be preferable to the former.

Turkish Protests and the Fundamental Question of Governance

Until recently, I haven't been following the events in Turkey very closely. I have several Turkish academic friends who have posted lots of good stuff to Facebook - much of it, unfortunately, in Turkish - which has given me a general sense that things are bad, probably worse than the slimmed-down story carried in standard American news outlets. My guess is that most of my fellow Americans aren't paying much attention either, although the longer things go on the more people may take notice.

I should also point out that I am not at all an expert in Turkish politics, nor am I Turkish myself, nor have I ever been to Turkey. But, as my friend Steve Saideman is fond of saying, why should this stop me?

In truth, I don't have any great insight into the particular conflict going on in Istanbul, nor do I have solutions or advice to offer to either the protestors or Prime Minister Erdogan. But a dimension of the conflict as it has unfolded has struck me as important - indeed, as essentially fundamental to the question of how societies govern themselves and what democracy is or should be.

The core of the conflict, as it initially began, revolved around a plan to alter (or demolish) a park in central Istanbul to make way for different kind of public space. Having never been to Istanbul, I'm in no position to say whether this was a good or a bad plan. But some Turks appear to have thought it a very bad one, and undertook nonviolent resistance tactics (e.g. occupying the park) as a means to stop the government's plan, at least until there could be a broader dialogue about it.

From this initial conflict - protesters vs. the government over the fate of Gezi Park - has grown a much larger fight between the central government and opposition groups more generally. As E. E. Schattschneider pointed out some 50 years ago, the key to winning a fight is controlling what the fight is about, because that determines who else gets involved. The original band of protesters has been very effective at getting a wide range of others involved in their fight, such that the protest expanded beyond the park itself to neighboring Taksim Square.

The government's response - personified in Prime Minister Erdogan - has been, essentially, to order the protesters to stop protesting and to employ force to drive them away. In justifying this response, Erdogan and other Turkish officials have referred to the protesters as "riff-raff", "marginal", and even "terrorists". A representative summary from a recent Reuters news article reads this way:

Erdogan argues that the broader mass of people are at best the unwitting tools of political extremists and terrorists and points to his 50 percent vote in the last of three successive electoral victories for his political authority.

However much the government might like to frame the protesters as "marginal" - and however much they may or may not not represent the majority of opinion in Turkey - the fact remains that they are Turkish citizens. One of the fundamental insights of modern democratic systems - as distinct from simple majoritarian rule - is that everyone gets a voice. In the end, not everyone will win - in this case, maybe 75% of the country really does want the park to be remodeled - but everyone gets to say their piece. And the end result, in any representative republic, is supposed to be the best approximation of the will of the people as a whole as can be achieved.

Many people lament the inefficiency of democratic institutions, but inefficiency is the price for this kind of inclusiveness. It takes time to let voices be heard, to consider all points of view, and to weigh and sift those views into something like a "national view". In some cases, shortcuts are taken where decisions need to be made quickly. And in most cases, over time the will to really do the hard work of listening and weighing and sifting declines (but that's a story for another day).

Rather than take the radically democratic approach of stepping back, framing the question, and inviting everyone in to a dialogue, the Erdogan government has chosen the other major alternative: make a decision and use force to make people accept it. That this is fundamentally undemocratic is obvious. But this is also what many countries do, much of the time. Even within the United States, there is an increasing tendency for various political factions - on the left and the right alike - to advocate for forcing their solutions on everyone else, without listening to the views of the other sides. Turkey is not so different from us, as participants from Kent State and Zucotti Park will tell us.

Perhaps this will all be resolved soon in Turkey. Perhaps the Erdogan government will find a way to back down and participate in an open national dialogue. Absent that, I think that the Turkish government is kissing away its chances of being admitted to the European Union within the next generation or two. A warning sign of this came from the German Foreign Minister:

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Wednesday the Turkish government was sending the wrong signal at home and abroad with its reaction to protests, describing pictures from Taksim square as disturbing.
"We expect Prime Minister Erdogan to de-escalate the situation, in the spirit of European values, and to seek a constructive exchange and peaceful dialogue," Westerwelle said in a statement.

The temptation to use force - to believe in the rightness of our cause and to hammer that belief home on the unwilling and the unconvinced - has been the dark side of human politics for thousands of years. A few hundred years ago, drawing on a few ideas far older but largely untested, some folks decided that maybe this really is a bad idea, and that maybe the best way to govern is by restraint and dialogue, however messy and imperfect that may be.

Despite a widespread sense that "Democracy Won the Cold War" and is the only real governance game in town, it seems that backsliding is all too easy. Today it is Turkey's turn to teach this lesson; tomorrow, perhaps, it will be ours again. But if we really believe in the basic choice of democracy - rule by consent rather than rule by force - we need to keep learning it, over and over.

Threats and Violence: The Demons Are Never Far From the Surface

Focus has turned to the hardest question in the Boston marathon bombing case: why? We have a living suspect (very likely guilty by the existing evidence) as well as a wealth of information from social media, witnesses, friends, and family on both him and his brother. Yet despite all of this information, understanding why two people would do something so obviously heinous and evil is never an easy thing. We may never have a fully satisfactory answer.

But while we find acts of wanton violence incomprehensible, there is more violent thought in our midst than we would care to admit. This is not news; in the 1960s and early 1970s Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo conducted experiments that showed us just how easy it is to move people across the line to otherwise unacceptable behavior.

A recent story from higher education has brought this to mind again. Earlier this week Dartmouth College cancelled classes after a public protest on campus sparked a nasty, even vicious backlash of rape and death threats in online fora. I'm sure additional details will emerge; you can read the initial news story in the Chronicle here.

What interests me isn't the initial protest, which was poorly targeted (a presentation to prospective students?) and probably counter productive. What I find more interesting is the response, apparently from other Dartmouth students who took to anonymous online discussion forums and expressed a desire to either kill or rape the protesters. One quoted example:

"Wish I had a shotgun. Would have blown those [expletive] hippies away,"

Clearly there's a logic in anonymous online environments that is different from the real social world. It's almost certain that, if you gave that particular author a shotgun and put him in that room during the protest, he probably would not have pulled the trigger and shot anybody. I say probably, because in the heat of a passionate moment people are known to do things they later regret. And I suspect that most of the other authors of similar comments are unlikely to actually commit murder or rape in their real lives, either now or in the future.

That said, I don't find it very satisfying to write this off as simply "harmless online chatter blowing off steam". As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences - our actions flow from the ideas in our heads. I blogged just last week about the hard questions surrounding violence and the relationship between our ideas (or our emotions) and our willingness to justify one kind of violence or another. Sooner or later, philosophies of violence become actions of violence - often when and where we least expect it.

In this sense, Dartmouth College's reaction (cancel classes) is probably a good one. The online threats are serious, not just because they make the targets of the comments feel unsafe, but because they ought to make everyone feel unsafe. There are, apparently, people within the Dartmouth student population willing to entertain the notion that private, person-to-person violence should be used against people you disagree with. This is not just wrong, it's barbaric to a degree that stopping classes for a day to discuss it seems a measured response.

I doubt that the interrupted day will change very much by itself. What the exchange at Dartmouth has done is remind us that the demons of violence are never far from the surface of our collective thoughts. Take any population - even one as wealthy, privileged, and safe as Dartmouth's is - and you will find them skulking in corners waiting for a chance to peek above the surface. If we really want to make headway in banishing the barbarism within ourselves, it can't be done only in response to crises - it must be an ongoing, everyday conversation.

In the course of living our lives we form, test, and entertain ideas about conflict and force and violence nearly every day. Most of the time we don't pay attention to the paths our thoughts travel - and that is the demons' opportunity to sneak in and take up residence. Let's hope that folks at Dartmouth - and everywhere - will start paying more attention to their own thoughts and attitudes, before the demons become actions.

Fun With Academic Politics: The Kabuki Theater of Faculty No-Confidence Votes

As I have been reading the headlines of the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, I've been noticing a lot of faculty no-confidence votes directed at university presidents in the last year or so. I started to wonder whether or not this might be a trend, or at least an increase. Sure enough, Inside Higher Ed has published an article on the subject confirming the trendiness of the no-confidence vote.

The article points out that these votes have little impact. That's not surprising; it's hard to find cases where a no-confidence vote, in and of itself, has had significant impact. It is just what the name implies: a statement that a faculty (or, as the article above points out, part of the faculty) don't have confidence in the leadership of a particular president. Given that presidents are hired and fired by governing boards, on its face this doesn't really matter much.

While there are occasions when such a vote contributes to a presidential firing - some credit the 2005 vote by the Harvard faculty for helping to oust Larry Summers - cases of "success" usually come at the end of a string of problems in which support for the president has already eroded among multiple constituents. If the faculty don't like the president but everybody else (students, trustees, alumni, donors) does, the faculty just look petulant in picking on someone whom everyone else thinks is swell.

This is true in large part because a no-confidence vote, while a great way to get headlines, is an extremely blunt instrument. It doesn't signify a willingness to talk, and it often doesn't do a very good job of explaining what the problem is to non-academics. Yet a no-confidence vote is, like any other attempt to influence organizational outcomes, a political act. And faculty, by and large, don't understand politics very well (even, in my experience, political scientists).

Good political analysis starts with understanding the goal (get the president fired? change certain policy decisions? alter the process to have more input?), the players (administration, trustees, students, alumni, donors, others), and who controls or influences what (who's got what power). The truth is that, on many matters, faculty are often largely powerless unless they can develop what Joseph Nye called "soft power" - the ability to influence and persuade without carrots and sticks. If you don't have much power yourself, you need to figure out who does and how to convince them to use their power in the service of your goals.

This is Politics 101, but too often faculty and administrators both ignore it. Faculty do wield tremendous power over some things, especially the curriculum and its delivery - which is the basic "product" of the university. No administration will get much done if the faculty simply refuse to cooperate on building new programs or expanding existing ones. Yet faculty rarely create issue linkages that would exploit that power.

It would be optimistic, but probably wrong, to suspect that faculties will learn to stop doing something that is mostly useless emotional catharsis. But smart faculty leaders would do well to apply the analytical skills we learn in our disciplines to this particular problem, and figure out better ways to influence their universities than holding no-confidence votes.

Trying (Too) Hard to Relive the 1960s

This story may not get much beyond regional coverage, but for those of us in higher education, it's an interesting one:

About 100 students protesting a plan to offer high-priced courses at Santa Monica College this summer tried to storm into a meeting of the college's Board of Trustees on Tuesday evening. 

A handful of protesters suffered minor injuries as campus police tried to prevent dozens of students chanting, "Let us in, let us in" and "No cuts, no fees, education should be free," from disrupting the meeting during a public comment period.

There are a number of notable items here. What's not so surprising is that a group of people, obviously quite exercised about a decision being taken by the college's board of trustees, decided that their disagreement gave them a right to try to disrupt the proceedings.

In the heat of the moment, there is an admittedly fine line between "my voice should be heard" and "I can shout you down and stop you from doing what you're doing". But that line is there, and anybody trying to protest against somebody else's decision needs to understand their core options. Either you persuade those who have the decision-making power to change their minds, or you force them to do something other than what they intended. The latter almost never works in our society, because groups of protesters rarely have the power necessary to force a different outcome - if they did, they would use it. But sometimes, people lose sight of that distinction and try to force the outcome they want anyway.

Persuasion, of course, can sometimes come from gathering a crowd and loudly proclaiming an opinion. But it's not as successful as you might think. It helps if that opinion makes sense. Shouting "education should be free" persuades nobody; you might as well shout "the sky is green". Nothing is free.

The real argument is, who should pay for it? If students want to argue that they should not pay for their own education, they had better be able to articulate a really clear vision of who will, and how that is going to come about. You have to convince other people with money that they should pay for your education. I'm not saying that's impossible - but it's not very easy, and shouting at a board of trustees isn't going to get it done. Contrary to some popular belief, boards don't conjure money out of the air.

Finally, it's worth noting the response of the board to this particular protest [emphasis added]:

No arrests were made. 

The meeting room was cleared and trustees adjourned to another room. Santa Monica police were called in to secure the perimeter of the building. 

President Chui Tsang said the small boardroom wasn't able to accommodate all of the students who wanted to speak and that an adjacent room had been provided for the overflow. 

When the meeting resumed, most of the students were allowed to address trustees from an adjoining room. Many urged the board to find other solutions to maintain access. 

Board Chair Margaret Quinones-Perez announced at the end of the comment period that the college would pay medical bills for any students who suffered injuries during the disturbance.

Here's a lesson in calm crisis management. The board continued its meeting safely. Everyone who wanted to speak was allowed to. And anyone hurt in the fracas - even if their injuries were the result of their own behavior - would be treated at college expense. For a college in financial trouble, this sends a powerful signal: yes, we're listening. Even when those doing the talking cross the line of force, we're still listening.

This won't be the last time that a college faces these kinds of tough choices, or that students want to express their opinions about them. Hopefully both students and boards will learn from this incident. For students: stop pretending that quasi-violent mass action will get you somewhere - it won't. For boards: remain calm, and be the adults in the room even if the students aren't.

The lesson to both is simple: persuasion is built on respect. Treat the other with respect, and you are much more likely to get what you want - or, at least, closer to what you want than you might otherwise.