PEOPLE ARE NOT PROGRAMS
October 15, 2013
This post is a reaction to an
introduction to “peacemaking” as I understand it, that I offered for discussion
last night at the bi-weekly meeting of Central Ohioans for Peace. I was stimulated by the array of views and
perspectives on social control that I heard.
With many thanks to the group for inviting me there (which I intend to
visit for their next meeting), I’m asking COFP chair Melonie Buller to forward
these further thoughts of mine to the COFP membership.
From victim-offender mediation
trainings and practice, I learned that regardless of formal structure and
training, people will apply their underlying habits and perspective as
mediators to doing “restorative justice.”
Many advocates and practitioners of this model of responding to conflict
in practice share my observation that in practice, many mediators concentrate
on following the detailed letter of what to say and do, as they have been
instructed to do, and in so doing, acts more like judges or arbitrators who
interpret and implicitly tell parties what is what, what they need to do, and
have a fixed notion going into mediation as to terms of an appropriate
agreement. One prime example is
requiring “offenders” explicitly to apologize to “victims.” Another example, one that has even formally
been introduced into some theories and practices of “restoration,” is the
belief that “offenders” must be “shamed” into overt remorse for their actions,
and that a good agreement requires that “offenders” somehow “right the wrongs”
they have done, both for their sakes, and for the sake of “repairing the harm”
to meet “victims’” needs. While I am
prepared to ask those identified as offenders to open mediation by “telling
[the ‘victims’ by name] what you did [having settled at intake that by
consenting to mediation they have done something that has triggered the
mediation], why you did it, and please add anything else you would like to say
to [the ‘victims’].” (This happens to
run counter to some training I have had that parties should first be asked to
talk to the mediator, before they are weaned into talking directly to each
other.) I am a minimalist in that I try
to keep my prompts as open and non-directive as I can imagine, to allow parties
to create their own substance and issues among themselves. I hope in effect to make myself disappear
from the conversation as it takes its own course, ensuring only that everyone
in the room, such as family members and co-mediators, have their turns as
entering and re-entering the discussion.
I would begin that process by asking “victims” to describe their own
experience to “victims,” to say whatever else they wanted, and to ask any
questions they had to those who had spoken before them. While parties to mediation are not required
to reach any written agreement, they invariably did in my experience. As often as not, parties started discussing
what they wanted to do and ask of one another without my having to suggest that
they begin doing so. Parties generally
ended up literally dictating their own terms of agreement. On rare occasions, I or a co-mediator might
propose a term. One instance comes to
mind: where a volunteer at an animal
shelter had taken a pit bull puppy to mate and breed with his own puppy, I
proposed that he might have his pets spayed/neutered; the shelter director
ended up offering to pay for the service, and the owner agreed. Above all, I wanted parties to feel and see
that they, not others for them, had invented their own settlement. My favorite settlements were those whose
terms no one, myself included, had foreseen going into mediation.
To me, the differences in
mediators’ style boiled down to what any of us who came in believing was
necessary to maintain our own sense of “control” in the situation. You can see the same differences in how
people act in formally constituted control structures. Thus, many attempts at forming “cooperatives”
turn into contention for doing what “I know” needs to be done—a competition for
setting terms of how things get done. Or
in formal bureaucratic structures, as in policing, many are those who bend the
rules to accommodate the interests and concerns of parties to conflict in the situation
at hand. Thus, while in his 1968 book Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in
Democratic Society (4th edn. 1994), Jerome Skolnick
distinguishes three styles of policing: those concentrating on enforcing the
letter of the law, those who in “watchman” style impose order, and those who
see themselves as in service to the populace, individual officers within forces
run the range of these styles as individuals, regardless of whether the force
is located in an urban “high-crime” area or a supposedly quiet and largely
peaceful upper-middle-class suburb. For
instance, in 1971 when I was gathering data for my dissertation on how police
decided whether to report offenses, I rode with officers who were proud that
they had never had to resort to arrest in moments of public disorder, while
others saw themselves as riding into battle, prepared for combat and often
finding the need for it. You can impose
an organizational structure on people, but you cannot make them change the
cultural frame within which they apply or bend the rules to gain control of their
relations there.
At a national level, in her
acclaimed book The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarderation in the Age of Colorblindedness (2010/2012), Michelle
Alexander joins others in finding that the 13th Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution did not end slavery during post-Civil War
Reconstruction. Instead, former slaves
and their children became the dangerous class that were enslaved by convict
leasing and other forms of imprisonment that today have about one in four young
black men in the country under some form of custody (jail, prison, probation,
parole) on any given day, in a system that employs many prisoners in for-profit
enterprises, and helps fill beds in for-profit private prisons, which an
abolitionist group, Critical Resistance, has termed “the prison-industrial
complex.” And with the refreshing
exception of the recent agreement to destroy chemical weapons in Syria, the
U.S. government has consistently refused to have its power and prerogatives
limited by the United Nations Charter, by international criminal tribunals, or
granting foreign nations jurisdiction to enforce their laws against U.S.
military personnel…this from a government that presumes to be the world’s chief
guarantor of the rule of law.
In a middle ground are those who
believe that the level of respect and dignity they and others deserve depends
on the status and setting. Thus, one who
implicitly accepts that co-workers deserve the respect and dignity they expect
for themselves, may believe that “his or her” children simply need to do and feel
as they are told, considering the child who “talks back” to need to be put in
his or her place, effectively operating in a world of “do as I say, not as I
do.” And so in the world in which they
operate as peers, they also set boundaries on parts of themselves or their
behavior are off limits to disclosure and evaluation. This constraint on what concerns and
sensibilities are “appropriate” in one setting versus others is encoded in
legal rules of who has “standing” to be heard, and on what kinds of evidence
are admissible and not contemptible. (By
contrast, my rules of procedure for mediation boil down to my determining the
order in which participants enter the conversation, to abstaining from name
calling and interruptions, and to my own commitment to stay with the
conversation until everyone in the room has said whatever s/he feels needs to
be said, prepared to schedule additional meetings if the parties are not
finished—an example of why I call myself a “recovering lawyer.”)
In sum, I do not think we can
depend on formal structural change, on rules of right and wrong, to transform
attempts to impose order by having those we recognize as the proper authorities
and experts set miscreants straight—which only deepens human separation,
antagonism, and resistance alongside compliance—by mutual accommodating
feelings and sensibilities of those affected by our actions, first and foremost
of those voices least heard in our conversations, letting go of attachment to
agendas we bring into our conversations in moments of conflict and
difference. Time and again I have seen
a single actor—judges for instance—catalyze such a transformation merely
introducing their own inclination to share the formal power over others they formally
enjoy. And looking at the history of
some nations—notably Norway where I have spent some deeply meaningful time—I have
seen a transition from a culture of conquest and domination (the peak of Viking
empire), to a culture of relative peace (no more combat troops sent abroad
after 1821, transition from an incarceration rate in 1840 equal to that in the
U.S. in 1960 to what remains one of the world’s lowest incarceration rates by
the end of the 19th century), that I have found reflected through social
contexts. So in Norway, Independence Day
is celebrated by children’s parades, schoolchildren call teachers by their
first names and have medical/dental clinics in their schools, and at dinner
parties children sit at the main table with adults and are quite purposely
drawn into conversations there. Business
meetings are conventionally led by “word leaders” modeling themselves on those
who coordinate crews moving ships. In an
academic seminar or department meeting, the word leader nods acknowledgment of
those who signal they want to speak, calls them in order of volunteering to
speak, and periodically summarizes what has been said. People all over the world espouse “democracy,”
but it seems to me that some groups of people have an near reflex of treating
all their conversations as exercises in what I think of as “participatory
democracy.” Built on conquest by English
immigrants who proclaimed themselves as men of property, the prevailing culture
in my homeland is one of acquiring wealth and superiority over “others,” most
of all foreign and domestic “enemies” who stand in the way of “our”
prosperity. Economically and militarily,
the national quest for global superiority, the ethic of competing to succeed,
that power over others, has peaked. The
decline of empire comes hard to those raised to have their personal identities
rest on national superiority. In this
world, social progress is deeply felt and thought to rest on mobilizing to
struggle and fight “wars” on social problems, whatever we define our most
pressing problems to be. It becomes moot
who causes the state of war, and who deserves to win. In that warmaking process, social divisions
and mutual distrust and guardedness widen and deepen.
When people ask me how I propose
to “solve” problems of violence and social discord, I am at a loss to answer. Problems in closed systems where things are
true or false by definition can be solved; problems of human relations
cannot. But as we notice peacemaking
enough examine what is happening in this or that course of human relations, and
as we try and sometimes succeed in catalyzing that process, I believe that
those of us frustrated by efforts to impose or fight to win games of power over
and under others may by degrees internalize habits of balancing talking with
listening, of letting go of attachments to outcomes, in which habits I call
peacemaking become second nature, where performance and getting ahead lose
their grip on human psyches. Over
generations, this change in balance of consciousness of what works, what increases
trust, security and security at any and eventually all our relations, can, I
believe, emerge and metastasize to become recognized and practiced as
prevailing cultures. The modesty of my
faith in building cultures of peace rests on the depth of my conviction that there
is no path but peacemaking to enduring personal and social security in all our
relations. As in our conversation last
night with Central Ohioans for Peace, I recognize that among many people of
good will who share my desire for redressing violence, peacemaking is too
trivial to be practical. May these
conversations continue, our will to make peace as best we can figure out how to
do remain strong. Thanks again for including
me. Love and peace--hal
