A Brilliant Animation About German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Hung For His Role In A Plot Against Hitler) Who Concluded That 'Stupidity Is More Difficult To Remedy Than Malice'
Hello Family and Friends worldwide!Some of you had seen this email I sent on November 11 (Remembrance Day) to our Friends for Human Survival network in Calgary. The book synopsis is particularly apropos in these troubled times.Arthur"We have met the enemy and he is us.” – Pogo https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)
Our narratives define us. Zionists have one set of narratives; Palestinians have a different set. Your own narratives of who you are will strongly influence your thoughts, words, and actions.
Yesterday CBC radio carried an interview with RH Thomson
whose work on The World Remembers project https://
theworldremembers.org/ reminds us of the urgent need to remember a broader set of narratives; and the danger of carrying just one set. It was also yesterday that the front page of the New York Times carried an article about how massive protests worldwide are influencing events in the Middle East: “Israeli Forces Have Limited Time in Gaza, US Officials Say: Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks has fueled sympathy around the world for the Palestinian cause even as Israel continues to bury its dead.” Jewish Voice for Peace and countless other voices are calling for an end to the violence. Many of those participating in the protests have a broader set of narratives than those used by the government of Israel and those used by Hamas.
We need to stop fighting among ourselves. We urgently need to act wisely and collaboratively to create a world in which our great grandchildren, and theirs, can flourish. The authors of I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean it Up expressed it very well: “Toxic conversations stall our ability to think collectively and solve the many dangerous problems that are stalking everyone on earth.” Below this email message, I’ve appended once again my synopsis of that book.
It is often difficult and sometimes impossible to change human patterns of behavior. I have a lot of personal experience with trying to change my own patterns of behavior.
If I lived in a very large family in which my brothers and uncles and cousins were prone to violence, and family feuds were repeatedly leading to deaths of members of my family, my responsibility as a member of that family would be to stop the violence.
That is exactly the family I live in. The family of humans. And that is exactly what I am trying to do. It is not the Israelis or the Palestinians that are at the root of the problem, or even Hamas or the government of Israel. The root of the problem is violent patterns of human behavior. Those violent patterns of behavior are driven by narratives of “us versus them.”
We are heading toward a cliff, and the way the speed is picking up, we may not be able to stop in time. I’m talking about another Holocaust, World War III, with a nuclear war. That’s the cliff. In my way of thinking, the important question is how to stop these cycles of violence before we completely lose control of them and plummet to extinction. I think the words of Pogo capture the problem well. The words of H. G. Wells are also worth keeping in mind.
“If we don’t end war, war will end us.” - H. G. Wells
For our next Friends for Human Surviva
l social event, I am trying to book Vendome for 5 PM on Sunday November 26, and I will send you an email confirming this venue as soon as I hear back from them. Toot sweet,
Arthur
Book: (James Hoggan with Grania Litwin) I’m Right and You’re an Idiot: The Toxic State of Public Discourse and How to Clean It Up (Second Edition, 2019)
The author set out with a “beginner’s mind” to write this book, and “interviewed more than 70 political pundits, philosophers, moral psychologists, media gurus and social scientists…” all of whom agreed that “today’s public discourse is an enormous obstacle to change….” Hoggan explains: “Toxic conversations stall our ability to think collectively and solve the many dangerous problems that are stalking everyone on earth.”
The book has two parts. Part I “The Polluted Public Square” (Chapters 1-14) examines “how we all pollute the public square, and how we can make space for healthier dialogue.” Part II “Speak the Truth, But Not to Punish” (Chapters 15-25) examines “how to communicate more effectively and disagree more constructively, using the language of emotions and deep values.”
In Chapter 1, “Like Ships in the Night” (with Daniel Yankelovich and Steve Rosell) we are reminded that when mistrust contaminates communication, everything becomes more difficult. If I want to communicate collaboratively for the common good, then I must take personal responsibility for building trust. “The approach should be: the burden of proof is on us; performance should exceed expectations; promises should be few and faithfully kept; core values must be made explicit and framed in ethical terms; anything but plain talk is suspect; bear in mind that noble goals with flawed execution will be seen as hypocrisy, not idealism.” Dialogue can build trust. “During our interviews, Yankelovich and Rosell explained the clear differences between dialogue and debate: in debate we assume we have the right answer, whereas dialogue assumes we all have pieces of the answer and can craft a solution together.” The process can take decades. Importantly, “by working to create a climate of trust, a community of discourse, we build up capital that we can use to deal with tricky issues in the future.”
In “The Advocacy Trap” (Chapter 2) the interviews are with Roger Conner, who teaches a course on non-litigation strategies for social and political change. Good people sometimes do bad things for good reasons, Conner explains. People try to change others’ opinions either by “pushing” (arguing), by “pulling” (persuading), or – less often but more effectively – by “solving specific problems through deep forms of collaboration in which participants may agree to disagree on other matters.” Conner also emphasizes the importance of your attitude toward another person or group (“stance”). It is essential to respect the other, and not let their behavior undermine your respect for them. A good police officer does this with an angry drunk. “Few of us practice this skill of not letting our perceptions control our attitudes, and as a result we hand over control of a vital part of our cognitive machinery to someone else.” Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi did not allow their stance to be determined by others.
Carol Tavris, interviewed for Chapter 3, “Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me),” uses the concept of cognitive dissonance to help us understand how, for example, someone can continue smoking despite all the evidence that it’s bad for you. They look for contrary evidence, rationalize their behavior so that they can feel okay, and keep smoking. We all do it, especially if we have invested a lot of time and effort in something. Think of someone whose identity depends on their genius in establishing an oil pipeline company. “People need to feel respected and supported, not criticized.” However, political decisions are essential for progress with action on environmental and other issues, including the changes to laws. Political and legal changes will then lead to changes in attitudes in the society over time. “Self-righteousness is a barrier to self-change, and an impediment to persuading others.” Being passionate about specific issues is important but hold your opinions lightly and be ready to change your views.
Chapter 8, “The Self-Regulating Psychopath,” is based on interviews with Joel Bakan and Noam Chomsky. The behavior of corporations (recognized in the US as having the rights of a “person”) has been such that if a person behaved like that they would be diagnosed as a psychopath. Even if the CEO and others working for a cigarette corporation are decent people, they work inside a system the purpose of which is to make money, and that purpose takes precedence over concerns for people’s health and all else. The corporation acts to get people to buy their product so that the shareholders make money. The increasing political power of the corporation is a threat to our future, and only we can stop it. Joel Bakan’s book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power was made into an excellent documentary film.
Basing Chapter 9 on the outstanding research of British investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, Hoggan describes “Steve Bannon’s Full-service Propaganda Machine.” Steve Bannon (who became campaign manager for Donald Trump) intentionally used intrusive information from internet users to create a toxic public discourse. A fist fight can draw spectators, and toxicity in the mass media can draw viewers and shape their opinions and their behavior. We have free access to internet because advertisers pay for it, but computer scientist and philosophy writer Jaron Lanier suggests we need to “disallow the commercial incentive and adopt a new business model, like a public library model or a user-pay model like Netflix” if we want to eliminate this intentional toxicity. In his summary of Part I, Hoggan emphasizes two key strategies he had learned: 1) Don’t get into fights; or as George Bernard Shaw had said, “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Hoggan’s way of expressing it is that “after a while, people can’t tell the difference between you and the pig.” 2) Do not be silent. Tell your own story, otherwise you lose by default.
Part II includes the insights and methods of Adam Kahane, who has helped transcend barriers as severe as apartheid in South Africa, by bringing adversaries into a discussion of possibilities. He does not try to convince people to do anything they don’t want to do. “’They don’t need to agree on the solution or the problem. They don’t need to understand each other, trust each other or even like each other.’ But they do have to recognize that the only way to move forward is together.”
A concluding section of the book “From the Heart” (Chapters 22-25 and an Epilogue, “Hope, Compassion, and Courage”) is based on interviews with Karen Armstrong, Thich Nhat Hanh, and others. In the Epilogue we learn “One defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself” (George Orwell). Progressives have a diversity of opinion on how to make progress. Some think attempts to dialogue with right wing ideologues will backfire; and that it’s public apathy that’s the problem and more outrage is needed. Hoggan acknowledges there is no one way that guarantees success, but that both advocacy and collaboration should be aimed for. Deep listening and respect for the adversary are both essential. We can learn from the success of the civil rights movement: Never give up. All our progress notwithstanding, to this day there has been no “ultimate victory” and there is still a lot of work to do. There will always be those who intentionally pollute public discourse. But the majority are waiting for us to clean it up. We must persist.
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