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COMPASSIONATE NEGOTIATION:
A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE OF OUR TIME
Dr. John Young
UU Church of Jacksonville
October 3, 1999
The basic truth of religion is that each human being is potentially divine.
Our human task is to work together to unleash this divine power, to help one
another, and through this hard work of mutual understanding and compassion to be
saved, evolved, created, and nurtured together. As the Buddha suggested,
individuals can, through correct understanding and individual discipline reach
enlightenment. However, for enlightenment to be real, in order to live one�s
personal salvation in this world, we need to become compassionate. We need to
return to the world to help other humans. Each great religious tradition has
argued some variation on this cosmic theme. Mohammed made help for the poor a
basic element of every Islamic believer�s faith. The Jews argue that our sins
with particular people must be worked out with those people. Forgiveness needs
to be sought from them, amends made to them, and different and better ways need
to be found to live with them. Jesus asked people to love their enemies, to see
God in the least and worst of their fellow humans, to treat even their worst
opponents as they themselves wished to be treated. This golden rule of practical
reciprocity runs through all the world�s religious traditions from ancient
China to modern Wiccans. Selfish truth or selfish ritual are not yet true
religion. Religion must be filled with practical compassion in our daily lives
before the flowers of the spirit will bloom into saving power.
I consider M.K. Gandhi to be the most important religious figure of this
century. I think so because he discovered, taught, often lived and demonstrated
new steps in this path of practical compassion. He reminded us of realistic
political techniques for mutual understanding and gave us ways of making our
compassion work in the real world of human differences and mistrust, anger and
hatred. Gandhi called his method satyagraha, truth-force, and in it the enemy
became ill-will. He called satyagraha the child of the marriage of truth and
love within a context of non-violence. As Gandhi said: "the object is not
to attain perfection, but by compromise to arrive at understanding and make it a
success." he urged us to stop considering any person to be "a dirty
speck in our moral vision." Gandhian practitioners around the world strive
to be self-reliant. They work to communicate fully their objectives and their
tactics to all concerned, to reduce their demands to the very minimum consistent
with truth, to persistently seek for ways of cooperating with their adversaries,
and even ways to be helpful to their adversaries whenever possible, as a clear
sign of good will. Gandhians do refuse to surrender the essentials in any
negotiation and do insist upon full agreement upon fundamentals before accepting
a settlement. However, they also try to keep those essentials and fundamentals
to a minimum based upon mutual and objective criteria for they believe that most
conflicts can be resolved satisfactorily for all concerned through negotiation
and arbitration�if all the persons and groups really communicate and
accommodate as much as they can within the boundaries of justice. Only in those
few instances when negotiation and arbitration do not resolve the conflict
satisfactorily do Gandhians proceed to more direct action. This direct action,
so often associated as the basic stance of the Gandhians, is in fact not the
basis of Gandhian methodology but its last resorts. These direct actions are
ways of proceeding which remain non-violent and continue to focus upon
minimizing the necessary demands upon constructive solutions, and upon any
possible face-saving for their opponents.
Some Gandhians are quaintly out-of-date in India, and some of Gandhi�s own
ideas may have been foolish to begin with. Every religion and ideology has its
share of out-dated ideas and foolish practitioners. To condemn a person or
theory because elements of them are out-dated or foolish would be to condemn all
human ideas and every person.
Let�s concentrate upon the non-violent and compassionate methods of
practical negotiation with our perceived opponents which Gandhi personified for
this century.
A very useful contemporary re-statement of truth-force negotiation is made in
a book called GETTING TO YES�NEGOTIATING AGREEMENT WITHOUT GIVING IN by two
Harvard University professors, Roger Fisher and William Ury. They compare two
usual kinds of negotiation, which they call "hard" and
"soft" negotiation with the truth-force method, which they called
"principled negotiation." They argue that we should separate people
from the problem, that we should focus on interests, particularly mutual
interests, that we should not get caught in fixed positions, that we should
generate a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do, and that we
ought to insist that the result be based on some objective standard and then be
willing to live with the standards mutually agreed upon. The chart in your Order
of Service compares these three different styles of negotiation.
Gandhi�s truth-force or the principles Fisher and Ury call principled
negotiation can be applied on every human level from the most intimate, as in
arguments between husband and wife, among family members and close friends,
through the disagreements among volunteer groups and parties of action, to the
global arguments among nations. Most importantly, it can be used between people
or groups that feel hostility, anger, distrust, fear, even hate for each other.
It can be used with any opponent. Many of our traditional ways of solving
disagreements, like war, violence, hate, running away, acting as though we are
unconnected with a problem, and so forth, are increasingly inappropriate and
inapplicable in our world today.
We need to accept our pluralism. People will continue to choose a variety of
paths for themselves. We need to recognize that we are connected and have no
choice but to live together in increasingly harmony, or fairly soon, not to live
at all. We must learn how to be involved with each other in ways that preserve
our individual integrity and human diversity while substantially increasing our
mutual understanding, cooperation, and regard.
Our liberal religious groups have vital roles to play in these essential
tasks of humanity. We need to persuade an increasing proportion of humanity to
live by religious disciplines which go beyond seeking personal selfish salvation
to embracing daily lives of practical compassion. This practical compassion
needs to be very political, struggling realistically with the divisions of power
and wealth in the world. This practical compassion needs to be very social. It
needs to include all the groups in a community, all the peoples in a culture,
all the nations of the world. The present and the future demand an age
characterized by patient, persistent, caring negotiation.
Central to this task is the Gandhian religious discipline of refusing to
believe that people, groups or nations are our enemies, to see them as devils.
As Fisher and Ury say: "separate the people form the problem."
Understand that the real enemy is ill-will. Concentrate upon the interests we
share with our opponents, not upon selfish positions usually based upon our own
greed, or upon our habitual ways of thinking. We need to creatively invent
options for the mutual gain of all the parties and people concerned. This will
not happen unless we all become willing to make major changes, to make great
personal sacrifices, to become passionate enough to give up many of our own
worn-out dreams and outworn slogans. No one has all the right answers. No party
or religion, group or individual has the whole truth. We must learn how to live
lives of negotiation.
Martin Luther King, Jr., an important American hero and a principal American
Gandhian said that "we do not need to like our enemies, but we need to
learn to love them." This reflection on the ideals of Jesus and the
practices of Gandhi underline the religious discipline of truth-force. Anyone
can love their friends. It is not difficult to practice the golden rule of
mutual reciprocity, of doing to others as you have them do to you, with the
people we already get along with well. It is rather our opponents, those we do
not like and therefore most often misunderstand, whom we must learn to live
with, cooperate with, understand, respect, and yes, even love, if our religions
are going to mean anything�if our enlightenment is going to bear the flowers
and fruits of the spiritual, of practical compassion. William Sloan Coffin, an
American Baptist minister, said it well: "personalize your sympathies,
depersonalize your antipathies, stop thinking that your enemies are more
powerful than your enmities."
Our liberal religious tradition is a grand tradition. however, it demands of
us not simply the selfish faith of wise understanding and individual improvement
but even more importantly the practical compassion of both daily practice with
our neighbors, families, and colleagues, but also patient negotiation with
strangers and opponents. This compassionate negotiation deserves to become the
central spiritual discipline of our time.
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