Sharing Humanity within Conflict
My deepest apologies to the readers for my absence the last several weeks. I’ve gone through several future-focused life direction changes and gotten a little too caught up in the on-going melodrama that is the United States political situation. However, am now back and ready to tackle issues.
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Raised voices. Increased heart rate. Narrowed vision. All the physical hallmarks of a discussion that devolved into argumentation and conflict. These same physical experiences can also be seen when participating in a game with a team or during intensely intimate moments with one's partner, which should make us pause. We quite quickly write a particular story to provide us with direction for our behavior, but the ease with which this occurs can blind us to other potential stories. If there's even a shred of dissonance in your mind right now, that's actually a good thing. Growth, personal and group-related, occurs at the edges of comfort, not at the center of contentment.
Seeking Shared Values
At the heart of interpersonal conflict is seeing the other person or party as devoid of anything shared with oneself. The groundwork for doing so is established through the dismissal of similarity, of what we share as human beings. It isn't enough to rest there, though, since to 'be human' is too vague. We can start with recognizing our capacity to care about parts of life and identifying those things through the naming of Values.
Declaring someone or a group 'doesn't share my/our values' has become the go-to place for easy dismissal. The reality is that one of two things is happening: one, the means through which the value is being supported is not agreed with, or two, the value for which the behavior is supporting is not the same across both parties. Consider working late at your job; someone judges you for it, declaring you don't value 'family.' One, this may be how you support your family, and two, when deciding on your behavior, the initial guiding value was financial security or personal integrity. In both perspectives, 'family' is not dismissed. The only person seeking to remove that value or place it solitarily within a singular expression they agree with is the person passing judgment.
Notice that in the dismissal, the lack of engagement is the point. Value has been removed from what the other person is doing and their capacity to act upon it. This process of someone being made 'other’ leaves no reason for dialogue, as there's nothing in common to start the conversation. The person passing judgment wins by defaulting to declaring a wall around what is and isn't a proper way of viewing your behavior. The human experience is then limited to its singular place within reality. All else is subordinate. The ‘other’ ceases to exist as an autonomous agent within the broad spectrum of human potential. There's no exploration and, therefore, no possibility of growth for either party.
Connecting Stories
Life is not the book of mazes you picked up for entertainment as a child. There is no single path to the end because the end is more like a mountain range of many peaks instead of a dot on a map. This is good news as it means the potential for human flourishing is multifaceted and multi-directional. You don't have to do the same thing as someone else to find meaning and purpose and live an ethical life.
The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
Connecting our behaviors to what we care about, our Values, requires stories or narratives. We move within the world through the roadways and paths laid down by our stories. Unfortunately, any time we focus too exclusively on a path we're on, we tend not to see what's around us, including other potential or actual paths. In this day of Google Maps, it's easy to narrowly consider one and only one way to get to a destination. However, try bringing out an old-school physical map or not have the AI tell you where to go, instead opting to view a broader map and decide for yourself. The odds are that you'll see more and find routes you would never have thought possible otherwise.
Viewed through the mechanism of conflict or agreement, the end goal is one of getting the other person to see your path as the only true one. The adversarial nature of it precludes seeing the other person as a co-creator in the story of experience you’re creating. Seeing other pathways is vital to understanding other people or groups. Broadening one’s vision focuses on exploring the variations in human expression. If you're able to step back from behavior and see the story of how a Value was attached to it, suddenly there's the potential for a dialogue that otherwise was impossible.
Transcending Conflict, Accepting Differences
Dialogue has recently been receiving a bad reputation. Having a conversation with someone has suddenly been conflated with agreeing with them as if giving someone a 'platform,' whatever the size, is a declaration of support. The principle doesn't hold; else we'd have to say support every thought that finds itself on the platform of our conscious lives. I'm not sure about you, but disagreeing with things that enter my mind is part of good ethical practice.
“Anyone who wants to understand the world should be open to new facts and new arguments, even on subjects where his or her views are very well established. Similarly, anyone truly interested in morality—in the principles of behavior that allow people to flourish—should be open to new evidence and new arguments that bear upon questions of happiness and suffering. Clearly, the chief enemy of open conversation is dogmatism in all its forms. Dogmatism”
The thing about dialogue to keep in mind is that it’s a constant example of how facts do not come with pre-arranged structures to be placed in. This was the core of Thomas Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” the acknowledgment that paradigms, narratives, or stories, depending on social context, guide scientific exploration. New facts are initially placed within the established paradigm or dismissed if they don’t. Eventually, the sheer surplus of facts is too much to be gainsaid, and the paradigm is shifted for another. The accumulation of new facts and new arguments can be scary business as it isn’t just points to be considered but an entire paradigm that is felt to be under threat.
Acceptance is the space within which disagreement has room to be healthy rather than dismissive, flexible rather than dogmatic. Acceptance isn't agreement, nor is it lazy. Acceptance is an acknowledgment that the space you find yourself in, whatever it may be, in all of its parts and whole, is part of the shared reality you're in. I accept thoughts of depression, not to give them a voice, but to acknowledge they're already a voice. I accept my feelings, not because they're always helpful, but to have them take up the space they already have instead of giving them more than they deserve. I accept the creative enterprise that is a worldview from other people, even those, or especially those, I disagree with, because every perspective is a window to the human condition.
The opposite of Othering is not “saming”, it is belonging. And belonging does not insist that we are all the same. It means we recognise and celebrate our differences, in a society where “we the people” includes all the people.
Accepting different behaviors is appreciating the cognitive dissonance at the heart of life. We can disagree while acknowledging that if circumstances were different, and they most certainly have been in the past, we'd be doing things we find objectionable upon later judgment. Seeing that possibility allows us to live through the wisdom of "there but for the grace of god, go I." Our shared humanity includes the good, the bad, the gray, and the uncertain. Being willing to wade into that dissonance, into the uncertainty at the heart of competing perspectives, with a desire to understand, starts with noting none of us have humanity exclusively to ourselves.