Dr. John Young                                                                                              3/22/09

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Peace-Making

The world is beautiful, but often harsh. Life is good, but inevitably tragic. Each of us can find meaning and value in life, but we all, at least occasionally, make a mess of things. The vast majority of humanity wishes to live in peace, but every life contains significant and enduring conflicts.

Individuality and democracy are two of the central achievements of the modern era in world history. There have always been rugged individuals, but it was exceptional for thousands of years, an elite phenomenon and an extraordinary achievement against multiple cultural and tribal barriers. Democracy is inconceivable except in a political territory full of empowered individuals since democracy is the empowerment of the majority of its population.

Activism is the practice of empowerment. Non-violent activism is being effectively powerful with minimal violence or violation. People can be powerful without violating other people and usually without violence. One of my favorite quotations is this list of central virtues from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu: “creative endeavor without possession, action without aggression, and development without domination.” Too many people still think that power needs to be based upon possession, aggression, and domination. In fact, those focused on possession, like property or treating people as their possessions, on aggression, thinking that power requires violence or threats of violence, or domination, the idea that respect requires control, manipulation, or even violation of others, in fact betray both individuality and democracy. The possessive, aggressive and dominating are sacrificing others out of selfishness and thus betraying individuality, and abandoning democracy because possessiveness, aggression, and domination betray both majority rule and the rights of minorities, the foundations for any workable democracy.

People often disagree. We may have different needs, priorities and desires. So, there will always be conflicts. The point is that most conflicts can be satisfactorily resolved without violence and certainly while minimizing violence or violation. Individuality and democracy are all about becoming powerful and effective. To become and remain an individual and to become and remain a citizen in a democracy you need to be and to remain an activist. Non-violent activism is being effectively powerful with minimal violence or violation.

In my experience, most of human virtue is like an ice berg or even like a shadow. Virtue is iceberg-like in that most of the good that people do is submerged in the ordinary and may become invisible to the average outsider, so that many people perceive only the most extravagant acts as virtuous and miss the basic methods and routine practices of virtue. Virtue is like a shadow in that people tend to identify virtue as avoiding any evil; so, virtue becomes defined by what it is not rather than by what it is. This becomes terribly misleading in that people come to identify virtue with purity and with heroic self-sacrifice, while the most virtuous people are characterized usually neither primarily by their purity nor heroism. They may be purer than most people in certain ways, and they may do acts of heroism in the course of their lives, but their essential virtue is in their careful daily choices and in their consistent courageous activism, and the most virtuous are often also comfortably imperfect and gentle. So, people tend to think of the powerful as the saint or the warrior, and even with the non-violent activist, they tend to remember the moments of extraordinary self-sacrifice, like time spent in jail, or extravagant elements of purity, like weeks of fasting, while more than 90% of effective non-violent activism is neither asceticism nor heroism.

Martin King had a four stage explanation for effective non-violence activism: 1. collection of the facts to determine whether an injustice exists, 2. negotiation, 3. self-purification, and 4. direct action. I want to break down the first three of King’s stages differently to reflect how I think nonviolent activism works in ordinary life. First, we need to analyze the problems; second, we need to communicate with and understand all of the participants, and 3^rd, then we are ready to actually negotiate. If we are going to make headway in transforming seemingly endless conflicts into satisfying resolutions, we need to learn to think of these three separately. For me, analysis, communicated understanding, and negotiation are the real virtues rather than the shadow virtues, the mass of virtue that is ordinary and everyday, and, therefore, too often invisible.

Think of a conflict in a marriage, friendship, or other intimate relationship. You want their respect; you care about them, and wish to be trusting, but you feel injured and that an injustice has been done. So, the first action needs to be analysis, as King said: collection of the facts to see if an injustice does exist. I suspect that in at least a third of the conflicts in the world, a careful analysis reveals that either there is no injustice or you are the person at fault. Preventive analysis before you put fire under a potential conflict can save you and others a great deal of heart-ache.

A second step is communication with and understanding of the participants. A primary element here is self-understanding, but at least equally important is actually listening to everyone else affected. Conflict-resolution is impossible without empathy, and empathy is not going to happen unless you ask the appropriate questions and actually listen to the answers. Just as self-understanding usually takes patient spiritual practice and personal growth, understanding other people takes patience, discipline, and fortitude. At least another third of conflicts are satisfactorily resolved simply by the participants actually listening to and understanding one another and themselves. For me, this is the heart of what Gandhi and King called self-purification.

Once you have rationally analyzed the situation, and listened and understood the other participants and yourself, then you are ready to negotiate, and healthy and effective negotiation will resolve most other problems. To become a successful negotiator, you need to learn four lessons from Harvard negotiators, Fisher and Ury: 1. separate the problems from the people, focus on shared interests while avoiding fixed positions, together generate a variety of possible satisfactory outcomes, and then mutually come to consensus on objective standards for success. In most cases, you will discover that your need for the relationship outweighs the particularities of the issue at hand. You will discover that you share common interests and that you have different priorities so that each of you can relatively easily give something to the other without sacrificing your central interests. Conflict-resolutions are compromises or accommodations, but effective resolutions leave everyone’s integrity and necessary interests in tact.

Now, in each of our lives, we face some conflicts that are not satisfactorily resolved. They blow up in our faces; they scar our lives. Here, truth and reconciliation processes, like the process run by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa, are effective models of a better way to deal with traumatic conflicts. In a truth and reconciliation process, you first get to the truth; you come to understand the facts of the situation. Secondly, you hopefully come to understand the participants’ feelings and explanations for their behavior, and you hope that aggressors will become mature and big-hearted enough to admit mistakes, feel sorry and express regret to the wronged or their surviving intimates. When this happens, some of the wronged then find themselves mature and big-hearted enough to be forgiving. It is a beautiful and even transcendent event when this happens, and it has happened in most of our lives. We have been able to own our shame, express regret, and be forgiven. As social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr said: “forgiveness is the final form of love.” I would add that truth-telling, expression of shame and regret, the gift of forgiveness, together lead to reconciliation. I heard Pastor Mark Griffin of Wayman Ministries on television preach that the greatest benefit in forgiveness is to the forgiver, and that is also my experience. Mark will be on our ‘faith answers to violence’ panel next Tuesday evening at the Southside Methodist Church.

Right now, too much of our so-called justice system understands justice as punishment and getting even, getting revenge for wrongs done by others. I want to argue instead for a justice system based upon restitution. Restitution means to repay. To participate in restitution is to face up to wrongs done, to deal with one’s own character issues, and to repay, to do your best to make up for the wrongs done through money, action, and attitude.

Right now, our response to evil-doers is to lock them up, punish them, and occasionally still even kill them. Obviously, there are people who are likely to be a danger to others, and they do need to be isolated, but the evidence is strong that such people are a small percentage of the presently jailed population. Right now, we are locking more people up than any other nation, and in our present system this makes it extremely unlikely that they will ever be in a position to repay money lost because we are taking away their ability to make a living. Too often we are also putting them in environments surrounded by other criminals where their primary experience in prison is further training in crime. So, we are failing to provide them with the ability to make amends for their mistakes and making it likely that they will not reform themselves.

What if, instead, we put the mentally ill in mental institutions, the non-violent addicts in rehab programs, and kept all but the most violent offenders in work programs? If the crime was money or property, seize the perpetrators’ money or property and make them work hard to pay back the rest, to literally pay off their debt to society. Make people face their victims, or people like their victims and see the consequences of their behavior, not only in a courtroom for a few moments during their trials but in continuing relationships that change minds and hearts. Almost any conceivable system of effective restitution would in fact cost far less than our present prison system, and it would be much more satisfying for victims, much more transformative for criminals, and pay multiple dividends to society. We need to grow up from childish notions of right and wrong to shared interests, common concerns, and different priorities.

There will always be conflicts, but most conflicts could be resolved peacefully, through non-violent activism. This will require preventive analysis, patient communication and understanding, and lives of principled negotiation. It demands the transformation of our retributive justice system into a system of truth, remorse, reconciliation, and forgiveness, and careful systems of restitution are the best societal tools to leverage these needed changes. Sometimes, each of us make a mess of things; mature people face up to their mistakes, clean up the mess, make amends and transform their lives. This process is the spiritual transformation of forgiveness that is the final form of love.