Episode 48 - Corrosive Habits that Breed Polarization

In this episode we’ll shed light  a set of corrosive habits that breed polarization and propose some antidotes to them.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. Welcome to today's episode of Reimagining Our World with me your host, Sovaida Maani. I'm delighted to be here with you. Today I wanted to share with you some thoughts and reflections that I gleaned from reading a wonderful book called Say Nothing, by an author called Patrick Radden Keefe. He basically gives an account of The Troubles, the times known as The Troubles in the north of Ireland that raged between the late sixties and the late 1990s. It was conflict, a sectarian conflict that raged between the Protestant Unionists and the Catholic Nationalists and that eventually led to a power sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998. What's interesting about this book is that it highlights a number of really noxious habits that we as human beings tend to have that breed polarization. Last time we talked about polarization and today it occurred to me that it'd be really useful to identify some of these destructive and self-destructive habits, that we have that we're sometimes not even aware of, that are actually really easy to fix once we're aware of them. So I'd like to dive into this and take a look at a number of these habits. The first habit that he talks about is the scourge of what-about-ism or what-aboutery, which is the way he casts it. And he says that during The Troubles, this phenomenon of what-aboutery took hold in Northern Ireland. So the best way to explain it is this. Do you remember when we were kids in school, if somebody came and hit you on the head, you'd say,"Hey, wait a minute. Why did you do that?" And they'd say"Do you remember last week you pushed me?" And you say,"But wait a minute. I pushed you because the week before you stole my pencil?" And then they'd come back and say"What about the prior month when you did this?" The story just goes on and on--a whole series of what-abouts. And Keef in his book actually goes through a whole series of this, set in Northern Ireland. For those of you who are familiar with the history of Northern Ireland, here's something of how it goes. One would say,"What about Bloody Sunday?" And the other would respond"What about Bloody Friday?" And then the other person would respond back."What about Pat Fincuane? And then the other would say,"What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre?" Then"What about Enniskillen, and on and on. So you get the picture. The trouble with this is that you just keep going on and on back to the past and it is never ending. It is really grounded in this game of endless blame and shame. Now this phenomenon was not only present in Northern Ireland. We see it everywhere in the world. We see it in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We see it between the Azeris and the Armenians. We see it between the Armenians and the Turks. We see it in the DRC. We see it in Yemen. And wherever you go, we humans seem to have this really bad habit of engaging in what-aboutery. Now the problem with engaging in this habit is that it's based on a feeling of victimhood and endless grievance, coupled with blaming of somebody else, blaming of the other. This habit ends up only breeding both resentment and a sense of righteous blame, and the ultimate consequences that it robs us of our sense of agency. We're so busy blaming people outside ourselves that we refuse to take responsibility for our own role in this dance, that we're doing this dance of grievance and blame. I like to think of it as a parasite that blights all our attempts to plant the seeds of a more peaceful, constructive, and just world. Okay, so the second habit that I gleaned from this book Say Nothing, is the habit of ruminating over and nursing past grievances. Now, it's very closely tied to the first habit of what-about-ism By engaging in this, by constantly repeating something you did to me, we keep, these grievances fresh and alive, and we keep our feelings of victimhood and righteous anger alive. We see this in the United States between the political parties. We see it between the races. We see it across all sorts of identity lines. The unfortunate result is that it perpetuates a cycle of conflict. Now in the book again, the author talks about a central family, the Price family. They were a family some of whose members belonged to the Provisional IRA group that wanted to unite with the Republic of Ireland and be independent of the United Kingdom. And he says that in this family, people had a tendency to talk about calamities from a bygone past as though they had happened just last week. And this is really the nub of it. As a consequence, it's actually difficult to pinpoint exactly where the story of this age old quarrel between Britain and Ireland first began, right? Because you're just going back and forth, and back and forth, and constantly reliving past grievances. Believe it or not, and this is the good news story that we've covered in other sessions, the Germans and the French for centuries had the same story going between them: You did this to me; you did that to me. And they would, in their literature, talk about drinking their hatred with their mother's milk and how they would never live in peace and they'd always be at war. And then came the aftermath of the Second World War and the building of the foundations of the European Union by Jean Monet, who created this brilliant system of pooling critical resources like coal and gas in the hands of a supernational organization that would make sure that all nations got equitable access to these materials that they needed so badly to rebuild and reconstruct, and that basically formed the foundation of a durable piece in Western Europe. It's really phenomenal, but it's very hope inducing because it shows that even though we may engage in these bad habits for centuries, we can actually overcome them and overcome them in a very short period of time, if we flip our mindsets and come up with a plan that works as Jean Monet did. Now, the problem with this habit of ruminating and nursing past grievances is that it stops us from seeing and accepting present reality, which can be very different from a repeated past. We end up filling the gaps of our understanding about what's going on now by reaching back into history and pulling it forward and saying,"Ah, but they did this." I've been reading a bunch about NATO recently, and it's fascinating to see how during the history of NATO we see this phenomenon emerge over and over again, where the United States and the Europeans are so fearful of a resurgent Germany that they go to great extremes to contain it, even at a time when Germany really doesn't want to have its own independent army and it's not interested in gaining its own nuclear capacity, in the 1960s. The rest of the Europeans and the US are convinced, based on Germany's behavior leading to the first World War, and then the second World War, that,"Oh. They're gonna do this again. If we don't keep a watchful eye on them, they're gonna go rogue again." And this leads some really unfortunate consequences for NATO and its setup, but we're not here to get into that. I just wanted to have pointed to that. Now the antidote to both the first and second habits is forgiving and forgetting. Letting go of the past and not pulling it forward into our present and our future. In other words, the ability to see current reality with an eye of fairness and justice. Seeing it as it is, not worse than it is, not better than it is, but exactly as it is. Ultimately, I firmly believe that if we work each of us in our own backyards to overcome these habits of what-about-ism and the endless rumination and nursing of our grievances, we can create little islands of health and restored social fabric in a sea of turbulence and chaos and instability. And over time, as these various patches of land pop up in the sea, we will find that we can start connecting them. And over time we'll find that we can create a brand new and better world. It's going to require painful and painstaking work at the grassroots level. Hopefully not painful, but joyful, but painstaking work at the grassroots level as we each weave our own little segment of human society. We've covered the antidote to the second habit. The third habit that I gleaned from reading this book is the habit of collective denial. These are really stories that we craft as societies or nations. It doesn't matter how small or larger society is, we craft them and we cling to them for dear life. Because they justify our behavior and they very often even mask the destructive nature of those behaviors from ourselves, even as we engage in them. It's the art essentially of willful denial. The way it plays out is that we convince ourselves that we've been so wronged---so this is that culture of nursing grievances--- we've been so wronged that we're entitled to resort to measures, however extreme and including violence and murder, to avenge the wrong, even if it requires us to act contrary to our nature. One of the figures in this book, Dolores Price, who was very active as I said, in the Provisional IRA for many years, and then withdrew and stepped away from it, says that as a volunteer in the Provisional IRA she was often quote,"required to act contrary to my nature," but while she was in the throes of it, she didn't really see it. Another example of collective denial and what happens is when we just stick our heads in the sand and don't accept the reality of what's happening. This is the kind of denial we're more used to hearing about. We do this until the pain is so severe that we have to act. For me, a perfect example of this is what happened starting in the spring of 2021, as all of us were sitting in front of our television sets watching the buildup of the military in Russia. And it was a gradual buildup, amassing troops and arms and tanks and whatnot, and artillery, and it continued till June, and then because of some pushback, they withdrew temporarily, then started again in October, 2021, and all the way from October, 2021 until the invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, we were sitting, watching these troops getting larger and larger in number. By December'21, they were up to a hundred thousand at least, and they're moving towards the border. And yet the leaders in Europe really didn't believe that this was gonna happen. And in fact, when they were questioned later on, What were you guys thinking? Why didn't you take some measures? Why didn't you do something?" They said,"We honestly didn't think that Russia was going to invade." And so that is truly denial and collective denial on the part of entire nations in an entire region with devastating consequences, which we don't need to get into because we all can read the news and see what's going on. Now, the antidote to collective denial is acceptance of reality. And taking responsibility for our role, however small, in creating the problem and then working to find a forward-looking solution. This is absolutely critical. It's a sign of maturity to start to take responsibility and to get out of the game of merely blaming and shaming someone else. It's always someone else's fault. At some point we have to step up and say,"What can we do? What responsibility can we take, at the very least to fix the problem?" The fourth habit is a culture of gossip. Again, this is from the book, which I find absolutely fascinating. We talked some about gossip in this series of Re-imagining Our World and the devastating impact it has on societies. But again, it comes up in this book, Say Nothing, this culture of gossip, which is often unsubstantiated. And the author of the book says that the civic culture of Northern Island was, as he puts it,"Clotted with unsubstantiated gossip." And this culture when combined with a culture of silence, of never saying anything openly in consultation or in foums where problems can actually be resolved, leads to the fact that we never can get to the truth of what's going on. So the truth remains hidden from us, and until we can see the truth, it's really impossible to craft viable solutions. Now the antidote, I believe, to this culture of unsubstantiated gossip is fostering a culture of consultation. We talked at length about what true consultation looks like. I invite you to go back to episode 32 in which this was discussed in detail and all the elements and ingredients of a consultative environment that yields solutions to problems and yields a maturity of understanding that then leads to us being able to craft joint solutions that benefit the collective. They're all laid out there. Now, the fifth habit that I gleaned from reading this book is the habit of embracing the limiting belief that the ends justify the means. Now again, we spent a whole episode on this concept, but this was before I'd read the book, and it's fascinating again to see that the reflections that we had in episode 43 are actually viable. So in, in this book, the author says that we often think of it, in this context of Northern Ireland, as a way of justifying murder to achieve political ends And we see this, people use it in the name of liberating territory or in the name of expanding territory. So it doesn't matter which end you're coming from. If we believe that the ends justify the means, then we will resort to whatever means, including murder and violence to get there. And the leaders in Northern Ireland for a while defended the morality of violence by arguing, according to the author of the book, that the course they took involved the use of physical force, but only to achieve the situation where their people could genuinely prosper. And it was only under those circumstances that their actions of physical violence could be justified. So it's the idea that violence is okay as long as it's meted out in service of a worthy purpose. We see this today to justify all sorts of violence in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in the DRC, in Yemen, in Tigray, wherever you look, in Myanmar, we see this over and over again. So the impact of embracing this principle is really quite severe. What they found after doing research after The Troubles were over in Northern Ireland, and it's reflected in this book, is that the effects on the perpetrators of what they call moral injury: this business of I wreak violence in the name of freeing my nation and gaining its independence, for the good of my people. The impact on the people who engaged in it was devastating, including very high rates of depression, resort to excessive drinking and prescription drugs. And as you read through the book, it's really sad to see these figures, who at one time were filled with energy and vitality, thinking they were fighting the good fight, now ending up in these dank dark apartments, on their own, isolated, depressed, wondering why they ever did what they did. Was it worthwhile? Didn't get them anywhere, and they sold their souls in the bargain. So it's something worth thinking about before we engage in this kind of behavior, seeing the end in the beginning so that we don't go down this road. Now the true antidote to this habit is embracing a new principle that the means must always be worthy as the ends. And again, I would warmly encourage you to listen to episode 43, because we went into this in great detail in the contours of what it looks like and what it means and how we get there and so on. Okay. The sixth habit that I gleaned from the book is the habit of blindly accepting false beliefs and assumptions. And an example that's given in the book that I thought was really interesting is the example of the false assumption that bloodshed is a cleansing thing. So there was this gentleman by the name of Pierce who was a poet. He was one of the ones who instigated the rebellion in 1916 for an independent and free Republic of Ireland. And he was deeply attracted to this idea of blood sacrifice. He romanticized it, and even as a child, he thought that bloodshed was a cleansing thing, and he used to praise the Christ-like deaths of previous Irish martyrs. And before the Rising, he wrote these words that"the cold heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield." So you see how he's romanticizing this idea of bloodshed. But it was a very dangerous thing, because it led to a lot of indiscriminate killing and unnecessary slaughter of human beings, and maiming and destruction of entire families. So the antidote to this particular poor habit, maladaptive habit, is identifying and applying certain first principles, non-negotiable first principles or set of shared ethics, social ethics, group ethics, without compromise. In this instance, when it comes to bloodshed, I propose that one of the foundational principles is saying that there is no justification ever for committing murder. For political purposes, for getting freedom, for gaining territory, for getting access to mineral resources, for imposing the faith of one group of people on another, whatever the story is, whatever the justification is, there is no justification, ever, for committing murder. That combined with the principle of recognizing the oneness of all human beings, that we've all come from the same source for the same purpose, will help us a long way. The benefit of identifying these principles is that we then won't get tempted to start down this road of debating whether this person or this group are freedom fighters or terrorists. Then we get ourselves all entangled and enmeshed. And that itself breeds further polarization, as we argue with each other about this."Are these group independence fighters and are they justified or are they terrorists?" So we get to not even start down that road when we identify and all sign on to these first non-negotiable principles. The last habit that I wanted to point out actually doesn't come from this book. It comes from a different book that I've also been reading recently, and it's a book by Robert Putnam, who's an emeritus professor at Harvard, and the book is called Upswing. He shows in this book that research reveals that when people become socially isolated, they become more susceptible to populist ideology. Now isn't that interesting, right? And think about the effects of covid on our societies as well. It's really something worth reflecting on. My own analogy and understanding of this is that social isolation weakens our social immune system by depriving us of a vital element that's necessary to keep it strong. That element is being in company with each other, being socially active and working together and enjoying each other's company, but also standing shoulder to shoulder together to do acts of service. So the results according to the research--going back to the research-- is that what happens when we become socially isolated is that we become more focused on ourselves and we forget to think about the plight of others. Putnam points out that this happened in the United States in the Gilded Age, which ran from the late 1870s to the late 1890s, was marked by tremendous economic expansion and really led to materialistic excesses and widespread political corruption, and generally serious social problems, including, but not limited to, poverty. It was then followed by the Progressive Era. But in order to make the transition, Putnam argues, from one age, the Gilded Age of material excess, to the other, what was necessary was a change in culture initially, which then led to a change in behavior, and this is what I find really interesting. He claims that in order to achieve a change in culture, we have to begin by gaining moral clarity and recognizing that we have a moral obligation not just to ourselves, but to others, and that obligation is just as important as the moral obligation to ourselves. I find that absolutely fascinating and it's grounded in historical evidence, so it's something worth considering. This reminds me of a conversation we had in episode 44 about the famous 20th century historian, Arnold Toynbee, who also said that in his view, and based on his studies of world civilizations, one of the key preconditions for a positive shift in civilization is the ability to arrive at a common vision of our values. Again, that's that same moral clarity that Robert Putnam is talking about. Common vision of our values: especially, he says, the difference between right and wrong. The last thing is the antidote. The antidote to this last habit is cultivating a sense of moral obligation to others. How very easy! Something we can each do by engaging in regular acts of service to the other, no matter how small the acts of service are. And we can get together, we can do it alone. We can do it with one other person. We can do it in small groups. We can do it in our neighborhoods. We can do it within our families within our friend group, and we can expand it to our villages, our cities, our nations, and the world. All right. It's been a delight to be here and, I'm just looking at the comments. Thank you all very much for your comments. I appreciate them and I very much look forward to being with you again next month. Have a wonderful month. Take care. Bye-bye for now. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.