Ecology of struggle: Permanent change

We frequently hear and may even use phrases such as "settle once and for all," or "permanent agreement," "fix this for good." These may be meant to be metaphorical or tongue-in-cheek hyperbolic, but that seems unclear to many and the package of assumptions affixed to any such thinking should be unpacked and dealt with or nonviolent civil society may gain a bit of awkward power and quickly lose it, inviting unwanted results. In short, the fabulous gain of obtaining an agreement with another party in a conflict is a bit like buying an apple tree with the goal of espaliering it against your sunny south-facing brick wall. Just as training your apple tree to grow flat against the wall takes up to five years of close time-consuming pruning, monitoring, bending, tying, and blossom-picking, so too will your conflict require high maintenance post-agreement or it may grow inevitably back into destructive conflict.

The only permanent reality is change. Even a well made machine eventually rusts--"stainless" steel is not stain-proof. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and ecosystem management rely on shifting forces to maintain the appearance of homeostasis, or ecological stability predicated upon self-regulation. Diversity and systemic adjustments are the only constant requirement for best security and stability. If civil society finally discovers and uses its latent power, it will be best served to self-analyze and learn to keep that power in reserve. This is the difference internally between a healthy democracy and one that is more like two corn snakes in an otherwise empty terrarium, eying each other not as mates but as meals. Indeed, this is what we see increasingly in the US democracy, looking like a beta version of something that missed its chance to evolve.

An agreement may help prevent a conflict from deteriorating into a protracted destructive conflict. It can help to settle one contested issue among many or to manage how the conflict is waged. The conflict may escalate moderately and be settled and then escalate constructively again and be settled again repeatedly. The struggle remains within bounds the adversaries regarded as legitimate or as acceptable, oscillating in moderate intensity (Kriesberg, 2007, p. 294).

This constructive conflict that accepts and even requires periodic escalation is the difference between the assertion of a healthy relationship and the passive-aggressive dysfunction we see so often when we believe that we've solved something "once and for all." We are correct with the "once" but incorrect with either "for all time" or "for all parties." This is simply how our infinitely complex human systems operate and they require devotion to process or the process becomes explosive and toxic.

There are always conflict management systems in place or there are accumulating grievances. This axiomatic for a relationship of any kind. We all develop small grievances as we engage in any relationship and there are two places we can put them. One is on our stack of grievances that are openly heading for management. These are going on the agenda and will be handled in a civil and transparent fashion. The others are going into the trash can that never gets emptied, where they attract emotional rats and pathogens, festering and spreading out into other areas, affecting other relationships, and giving a false sense of security, much like recruiting an armed force of the poorest young men and women, training them to kill, and equipping them with a deadly arsenal, as though that will manage conflict. What we see instead is this loots our economy, prevents our growth as a mature society that can engage meaningfully with others, poisons our environment and sets up a dynamic of intimidation and resentment, invasion and resistance, between our society and others.

Agreements are great beginnings. A well constructed agreement is one that provides for adaptive management and one that agrees to devote resources to managing the conflicts that are natural sequelae to any agreement between conflicting parties. A good agreement assumes that constructive escalation is a desirable phase of any nonviolent conflict management systemic design, a safety feature that ensures creativity forever, once and for all, permanently (ha). This is an ecology of peace, a system of dialectical structural nonviolence.

References
Kriesberg, L. (2007). Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

How to end war with nonviolence: An ecological approach

War has existed since humans began to write history.

War is natural. But is it inevitable?

There is one way to end war. Build a culture of nonviolence. Create a system of nonviolent conflict management that meets the needs of humankind. Grow an ecology of nonviolence with nested and related ecologies that tend to help the greater ecology of nonviolence produce peace.

How do ecologies work? James Lovelock proposed that Gaia, Mother Earth, is a self-correcting organism, an ecology, that achieves homeostasis by filling in gaps, by evolutionary experiments that can succeed when the time and conditions are right, so that a change in one component can be balanced by another change, even if it takes some time to come into balance following a catastrophe. This Gaian Hypothesis explains how Earth recovered from the Cretaceous Debacle, even though entire species and ecologies were ended. Others rose in their place and the grand planetary ecology eventually righted itself. Natural fluctuations, such as ice ages, did not become runaway disasters. Earth--life--knows how to evolve to preserve an atmosphere, soil, water and other necessary elements for life. Positive feedback loops, or mutually reinforcing dynamics, are blunted by new or evolved lifeforms that can eventually produce ecological effects in the aggregate that preserve a planet's biosphere.

Another public intellectual, Barbara Ehrenreich, in her germinal book Blood Rites, posited that war is a meme that also adapts to humanity to self-perpetuate. Indeed, war is so robust that it may one day consume humankind. The possibility exists and we know it. Life would not end, but we as a species may. War may be our fatal flaw--or we may in fact prove that we deserve our self-annointed name, Homo sapiens, the wise ones. We are the only species capable of drastically affecting the outcomes of our largest systems, war or peace, death or life.

We can end a particular war with violence or nonviolence, abject surrender or refusal to continue. To do that we can look to the literature on strategic nonviolence and plug in the components--mass organizing, media work, lobbying, noncooperation, electoral action, general strike--and we can succeed. As Barbara Deming said during the war in Vietnam upon her return from her visit there, Let's not forget the general strike. We could end this war in a month. Ending a war requires will and willingness to sacrifice. Mass organizing in self-replicating strategic campaigns could produce enough pressure to finish off a particular war, and it's sad that we can find the will to sacrifice for war but not for peace. Civil society will go to the mat for war but what will they do to end a war?

So this is a national conversation that we need to continue to have. The question is never decided when we are shooting other people. Those who want peace ought to continue to press for it and never give up.

Ending war, of course, is a different and larger proposition. Again, humanity has so much free will that few, if any, questions are ever permanently resolved. But we can work to create an ecology of nonviolence that will end war on Earth and will keep it ended if we maintain that ecology.

To achieve this we need to work on each subsystem. This feeds a nonviolent output into the larger and to the connected subsystems--and in any ecology, all subsystems are somehow connected.

Teaching peace journalism would help produce a media system intent on producing a nonviolent outcome.

Massive increases in nonviolent parenting education offered freely to young adults and all parents would help us produce generations who understood nonviolence and who could learn constructive conflict management from a young age.

Building down a violent military and investing instead in massive de-escalation and interposition training of teams deployable in all parts of the world would transform militaries into forceful nonviolent crisis managers.

Redirection of training for police from the use of violence to the practice of verbal judo and non-pain compliance techniques would put our civil society on a stronger path toward nonviolent conflict management.

If the moral leadership of our communities were to stand for nonviolence--the imams, ministers, rabbis and philosophers, publicly committed to constructive conflict management--that would help turn our huge civil society energy to a committed force for an end to war.

Our teachers could be trained, our educational systems could start to teach peace education from preschool to postgraduate. Civics education that taught the history of peace and how to make it would produce generations with new frameworks, new starting points of what is possible, and new outcomes.

When we are finally able to learn and believe that nonviolence is in fact the new pragmatism--and our post-1906 history shows us that abundantly--we can finally begin to elect the new pragmatists who will vote to fund this transition and skill it up.

As George Crocker said, look, we're going to win this battle, and we must, because if we don't, no one is really going to be around to worry about it. War is anti-life and our conscious evolution is no longer an option if we wish to be members of this Gaian community of life.

We have the research, we know the history, we have learned many of the lessons, and nonviolence is the greatest latent force on Earth, just starting to make itself seriously known. Once we overcome the centuries of assumptions about war and nonviolence we can go through that gate together to a new way of life. Nonviolent communication, nonviolent mediation, strategic nonviolent action and nonviolent sanctions with real power are not mysteries any longer. We are massively committed to war. If we continue that, we die. The biggest polluters on Earth are the militaries and the industries that serve them and the wars they wage. The biggest consumers of oil and strategic minerals are the militaries. Adding the structural violence deaths from the opportunity costs of spending so much on war and we see the failure to make faster progress on disease control, malnutrition, bioremediation and other ongoing human problems, and we see some of the greater costs of war.

Nonviolence is our option, our new flinty-eyed idealism, our new pragmatism. It will take a huge effort--almost as much as our ongoing efforts to wage wars and clean up after them.