Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Duluth 
The Psychology and Ethics of Conflict Resolution
In November the UW-Superior
Chancellor's Mediation Task Force asked me to do one of the faculty/staff
mini-training workshops on conflict resolution this March.
In December Karen called to
say that the Worship Committee had been trying to find a time for me to do a
sermon this spring. There was a
cancellation and would I do the sermon on January 23rd. Once I agreed, I learned that the
deadline for the Newsletter was that day.
What title should the newsletter list for my sermon?
Thinking about Mediation Task
Force assignment, the courses I teach on Social Psychology and Peace Psychology,
and my recent reading of work by Sharon Welch on the Feminist Ethic of
Risk and Mary Brabeck’s Practicing Feminist Ethics in Psychology
I told Karen the title would be “The Psychology and Ethics of Conflict Resolution.
At the January meeting of
our First Unitarian Church Peace and Justice Committee, Sue Dailey reminded
me of articles in the January/February issue of UU World. Some of you may have read Our Power Problem
and Against Innocence.
My daughter's January 10th sermon at the Greater Lansing Unitarian Church began with an opening statement
that "It's not that I'm bad at titling sermons. It's just that the title should come afterwards, when you've written it all down. Then you can sum it up in a single word
or phrase. You can identify it,
name it, and understand its limits. There is this tradition of putting sermon titles in the newsletter,
way before I've written a word, as if somehow the title of the sermon is going
to give you a clue about the content of worship. I imagine, so you can decide whether or not you want to bother
to come to church that week.
It's backwards, though. Because church is more than coming to
hear the sermon. And you've all
had the experience, I imagine, of coming to church expecting one topic (probably
because of that darn title in the newsletter) and being disappointed because
it wasn't about what you thought it would be about afterall.
There is much more to coming
to church than the subject matter of the sermon. – it is sharing in a common experience with others that somehow
brings order to our lives by connecting us with something larger than ourselves.
For some, that is named God, for others, it is simply the Larger Life
which we share.
Actually, in the olden days,
rather than a preview of the coming sermon, there would appear a summary of
the sermon in the newspaper. Someone
would take notes on what Ralph Waldo Emerson said, and then report on it after
the fact. After the fact.
I felt the same way. I submitted the title to our First Unitarian
Church of Duluth Newsletter in December, but I didn't know I was going to
say until this morning. Well. I have been thinking about it and doing some reading.
But I didn't write anything down until yesterday.
I use a book by Jeffrey Rubin,
Dean Pruitt, and Sung Hee Kim titled Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate,
and Settlement to teach about conflict resolution. In that book they conceptualize three
classes of strategies: Contending, problem solving, and yielding. Contending refers to any effort
to resolve a conflict on our terms without regard to the other person (or
groups) concerns. Problem
solving entails efforts to identify the issues dividing the parties and
to develop and move toward a solution that appeals to both sides. Yielding involves lowering one's
aspirations, not necessarily capitulating (p. 28).
According to these authors,
contending can include ingratiation, gamemanship, guilt trips, persuasive
argumentation, and threats (p. 47-67). Using contending has always felt uncomfortable to me. Perhaps some of you also find
contending to be uncomfortable.
Let's examine further one
of these strategies, the use of threats. What are some of the advantages of threats?
First, a threat that works
costs the Party nothing. Consider,
for example, the tragedy that swept through the Branch Davidian compound in
Waco, Texas in the winter of 1993. Perhaps if the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
and Firearms (ATF) had first threatened cult leader David Koresh with the
use of tear gas instead of launching a surprise attach, the ATF might have
achieved their objective with less tragic results.
Second threats are often
highly effective; their value has been demonstrated repeatedly and
consistently. Threateners seem
powerful because their messages provide information about what is likely to
happen.
The most serious problem with
the use of threats is that they tend to elicit similar behavior from the other
side. Threats can lead to counterthreats and an escalation of the controversy.
Despite this disadvantage, threats are used because they are cheap,
they often seem justified, and they may appear to be the only tactic that
will work” (61-62).
One type of threats is the"
if-then" message, assertions by a party in the following form: if you
do (don't do) X, then I will punish you.
But there is another type
of threat. This is the irrevocable
commitment. I have started doing
something that requires adjustment from you and [I] will continue doing it
despite your best efforts to stop me. The party guarantees to continue behaving in a certain way, and the
coercive commitment that has been made appears to be an irrevocable one.
An illustration of an irrevocable
commitment is the basic tactics of nonviolent resistance. For example the Mohandas Gandhi fasts
in order to secure concessions from the British forces that occupied India,
the boycotts and sit-down strikes by courageous African Americans in the south
of the 1950s and early 1960s, and the refusal to register for the draft as
a means to protest a national war effort.
Although many of us admire the courage, determination, and moral conviction
that characterize such examples of nonviolent resistance, we must not lose
sight of the essentially contentious tactics at work, which are designed to
prevail in an intensely conflictual exchange (63).
The Unitarian Universalist
Association has two seminaries. Meadville Lombard is the seminary at the University of Chicago and the
one my daughter attended. It holds
a Winter Institute each February in Madison through the University of Wisconsin
extension. This year the topic is
Stardust and Sustainability: The Great Story of Science and Religion. It will be held in Madison on February
17-19. It is the 14 billion year
narrative of cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity. It draws upon the discoveries of the full range of sciences
and becomes our collective sacred story. Consider attending. It will
be well worth your time.
Last year the speaker was
Sharon Welch, Professor of Religious Studies, Women's Studies, and Muticultural
Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia. I was fortunate enough to attend with my daughter. Sharon was speaking at this Institute
on new paradigms for global ethics and global citizenship and drew heavily
on the work of Gandhi.
In Sharon Welch's (2000) book
A Feminist Ethic of Risk she asks How do we know what to do, and what
counts as doing something in response to injustice? She argues that It is difficult for us
to imagine effective alternative responses to humanitarian crises because,
as a culture, we are shaped by an ethic of control-the assumption that effective
action is unambiguous, unilateral, and decisive (25). This need to find unambiguous and decisive
action is greatly complicated, she argues, because . . . all of the participants
in a conflict are flawed. There
is no simple division between good and evil. While there may be at the moment considerably
more violence by one party than another, all parties involved will face the
threat of succumbing to revenge. Moreover,
all are threatened with the delusion of confusing self-interests with moral
purity or the good of the whole. Peacekeeping forces themselves, for example,
need to be monitored and stopped from committing atrocities (27). The Sudan is only one of the most recent examples.
My daughter, Kathryn, gave
me Sharon Welch's (1999) book Sweet Dreams in America: Making Ethics and
Spirituality Work for my 65th birthday four-and-one-half years
ago. In it Welch argues that
the ambiguity and uncertainty about the merits of our actions must not lead
to paralysis. She argues that
. . . ethical power consists not in ridding ourselves of this proclivity for
harm, illusion, and error, but rather in the creative working within the matrix
of human lives that are always conditioned historically and subject to fault
and short-sightedness (xx).
In this context she argues
for an integration of spirituality and political work-a nontheistic yet ecstatic
and mystical humanism. Ecstatic
religious experience, the phenomenon of group cohesion, of being buoyed and
supported by others, by forces larger than oneself, is both an essential component
of sustained work for justice and fundamentally amoral. The sharing in a common experience with others that connects us with
something larger than ourselves that I referred to in the introduction to
this sermon, while important for many reasons, is amoral.
Amoral because the experience
of transcendence is not foundational. Welch elaborates this point when she says It is an experience of creativity,
connection, and energy that is as likely to be evoked by the Religious Right
and by the Klan, as by politically progressive religious groups. The sense of religious ecstasy in each
is the same: the sense of being energized, of being connected with forces
outside oneself. The fact that
a group feels a tremendous surge of vitality says nothing about either the
truth or its claims about reality or the legitimacy of its projects for cultural
and community formation (xxii).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer gives us
a good case study of resistance, ethics, courage, and weakness. He was an upper-class German pastor who
opposed Hitler and encouraged other Christians and gentiles to do the same.
. .He helped Jews escape from Germany, and was part of the group of high-ranking
military officers who tried to assassinate Hitler, stage a coup, and defeat
and replace fascism. While in
prison on charges of helping Jews escape, two of the planned assassination
attempts failed, his role in the plot was discovered, and he was executed
in April 1945.
Bonhoeffer was an activist,
a pastor, and a scholar. His
letters from prison have been published, and he wrote on ethics and religion
and society before his arrest. In
his writings he tried to understand why so many good, decent, German Christians
supported Hitler and/or refused to become involved in the resistance. Christianity had a tradition that should
have led to massive resistance—a tradition shaped by absolutes, by universal
claims based not just on human reasoning, but also purportedly on divine revelation.
In Christianity, the idea of divine authority should have led many
Christians, and not just the few members of the Confessing church, to affirm
the Lordship of Christ over and against the authority of Hitler and the Third
Reich. . . .
“What vitiated these absolutes? One factor was the effectiveness of Nazi propaganda, exacerbating the
demonizing of Jews that was already part of Christian anti-Semitism . . .
Bonhoeffer argued, however, that most Christians were not persuaded by Nazi
propaganda. They knew what was happening to the Jews and they knew it was
wrong. Given adequate knowledge
and adeaquate moral evaluation of the knowledge, why did 99 percent either
stand by or participate in dehumanization and murder? Bonhoeffer's answer: Folly, and fear of
moral ambiguity.
Bonhoefer defined folly as
capitulation in the face of overweening power. Knowing the brutalization and murder of Jews was wrong, knowing
these horrors should be stopped, many were paralyzed by the power of Nazism,
unable to imagine and carry out any forms of resistance. This paralysis was aggravated by what
Bonhoeffer identified as an excessive sense of scruples-trying to remain morally
pure while resisting evil. . .,
“Why, then, the failure to
act? According to Bonhoeffer, the failure to act came from a fear of moral
ambiguity. The moral ambiguity
that characterized resistance was manifold. Any resistance was partial, its likely effects paltry, incommensurate
with the outrages of genocide. Any attempt would save so few lives and there were so many
lives being lost. There was also
the ambiguity of not being able to predict the consequences of one's actions: would they be successful, would they bring
harm to oneself and to one's family?
“Bonhoeffer highlighted a
third aspect of moral ambiguity of resistance: resisting fascism required
acting in ways that were themselves immoral. To be moral, to save Jews, required lying and deception, it
required breaking the law; it might even lead, as it did in the case of
Bonhoeffer, to the plan to murder Hitler. . .
Here lies Sharon Welsh's crucial
point. “We can take ambiguity
seriously, making a best choice, and then being willing to accept the consequences
of that choice. Basically, we
become ready to clean up after ourselves, to reevaluate actions, all with
the style of humor and openness to failure. The key here is not being paralyzed by either moral failure
or by political actions that are ineffective. We can accept that we can only do our best, with a style of
not expecting perfection or saintliness from ourselves and others.
We can accept failure without
a sense of humility, shame, or self-abnegation. We act, rather, in light of a basic recognition
that we all make errors in judgment, we all find ourselves driven by pettiness,
jealousy, and power (121-124)
. .
And now to put a point on
the theme. The article Our Power
Problem” in the January/February UU World begins by asserting that
“Unitarian Universalists tend to be anxious about power, anxious not only
about being subject to it but also about wielding it. We're better known for questioning authority than for having
authority . . .
The Christian Right's highly
organized political efforts made a difference in the election out of proportion
to its numbers. Bill Sinkford
was quoted in this article as saying There is a reason the voice of the fundamentalist
religious right seems so often to be the only religious voice in the public
square. We religious liberals
have allowed it. Until very recently,
our silence has been deafening. We have allowed them to make exclusive use of religious language,
we have watched while they organized and fundraised, we have witnessed their
increasing influence.
“President Sinkford believes
UUs have a distinctive mission. Our power is, and will be, to frame voter
registration and other issues as religious issues, and to prevent the fundamentalist
religious right from claiming sole occupancy of the moral high ground. He urges congregations to link their advocacy work to their congregational
life (22-24).
Let us act on the 6th principle: "The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice
for all" (Frost, 1998). During the coffee hour I challenge you to discuss
with each other how we UUs use our power for the greater good.
Amen
References
Brabeck, M. M. (Ed., 2000). Practicing feminist
ethics in psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Frost, E. A. (1998). With purpose and principle: Essays about the seven
principles of Unitarian Universalism. Boston: Skinner House Books.
Rubin, J. Z., Pruitt, D. G., & Kim, S. H. (1994). Social
conflict: Escalation, stalemate, and settlement. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Welch, S. D. (1999). Sweet dreams in America: Making
ethics and spirituality work.
New York: Routledge.
Welch, S. D. (2000). A feminist ethic of risk. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.