Because it works.

This is why, and it is important. This is what Obama does that is different. He embodies the conflict resolution approach, and that influences the people around him. Obama’s techniques are straightforward, instantly recognizable to anyone trained in mediation. Demonize nobody. Listen hard to everybody. Restate people’s positions. Identify underlying interests, so you don’t get stuck wrangling over positions. Do not shut anyone out, even the crazies. Address the problems causing conflicts. Have faith in people.

I know you think that I favor the conflict resolution approach because I am a hopelessly naïve hippie, that I only see people’s inner goodness through the stars in my eyes. I dunno, maybe that is true. But that’s not why I favor the conflict resolution approach. I favor it because it is the only thing that works. It actually solves the problem. Using power to force outcomes on people simply never works for long. Forcing people to accept outcomes doesn’t actually work; people have nearly infinite capacities for resentment and resistance. Short of genocide, it is impossible to apply enough force to make a human conflict go away.

I see it everywhere. I was talking to a friend about the controversy in Sacramento over developing our railyards. Standing in line at a buffet, I said “Sometimes I think that everything that happens in this town goes back to the Alhambra Theater.” The stranger in line next to me turned and said “That is exactly right. In this city, it is always about demolishing the Alhambra.” That was thirty-five years ago, people, and the groups that formed then are still fighting that fight. Over on Unfogged, people were discussing what to do about an obsessed stalker, sentenced to prison but due for release in a few years. Confining the stalker is as much force as our civil society can exert, but it didn’t solve anything. The stalker hasn’t changed and the victim’s life is still derailed. When the stalker gets out in a few years it could start again, because they reached no resolution. In Los Osos, people have spent entire careers trying to make the town accept a sewer. There have been no stakes so high (the financial ruin of the town, a generation of discord, threat that people will lose their houses) that make the activists back down. They only renew their vows to resist. You can use power to bring about a short-term outcome, and that outcome may be well worth fighting for. But power cannot bring a solution that gets people what they want and makes them stop fighting you. Only mediation or conflict resolution does that. Conflict resolution is the only technique that actually works.

Conflict resolution seems all soft and squishy, but practicing it is damn hard. The piece that is so hard and so unnatural and so counter-intuitive is believing that your enemy can change. You know that you are a reasonable person who can walk away from your well-justified anger, once the real problem is solved. But your enemy, man. She’s different. She’s an emotionally damaged, constantly conniving fuck, motivated by deep springs of pathological fury. Bitch crazy. Reason doesn’t reach her. Nothing could get her to shift.

Practitioners of conflict resolution do not think that. I haven’t seen a consistent way they overcome the human impulse to demonize people. Some use deep personal religious faith. They believe everyone is made in God’s image and refuse to believe anything else. I’ve seen people get there through Buddhist meditation. I don’t have access to either of those, so my certainty is based on the fact that I have seen people change through mediation techniques. I’ve seen it in real life and I’ve seen it in the comments here. I don’t know what motivates Obama, but my guess is that he saw it work while he was doing community organizing in rough Chicago. I imagine he found himself dealing with entrenched conflict in a bad neighborhood and watched conflict resolution change people who had previously been written off as bad news. I don’t know how he came by it, but he believes now. You can see it. ‘Iran is not an enemy.’ ‘I’ll talk to anybody.’ ‘Republicans aren’t enemies; they’re the other half we need to get somewhere.’

Obama is right about the power of this approach and its potential to change people. Mediation techniques work when you apply them directly to the people in conflict, but they are so powerful that they work simply by inspiration. Obama’s example even swayed Andrew Sullivan, if only for a while. For as long as Sullivan remembers, he wants to be like Obama, reasonable and high-minded. I like Obama’s platform fine, but that isn’t why he has my support. I like Obama because he uses conflict resolution approaches reflexively and constantly and those approaches are transformative.



via Ezra. (Slightly edited, several hours after posting.)

I'll show you "tediously long".

In a post I otherwise agree with, I think Digby got a tangential point wrong in an important way. I keep telling you that Senator Obama has steeped in mediation, that the precepts and practices of mediation come naturally to him now. If I am right about that, Digby read this line of his speech wrong:

Obama: …It's all around culture wars and it's all ... even when you discuss war the frame of reference is all Vietnam. Well that's not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is "what works."…

Digby: …I certainly understood why Senator Obama would take the technocratic approach and say he was about "what works" rather than about ideology or civil rights. …

I don’t think Obama is talking about a technocratic “what works”. I think he’s talking about a far more difficult “what works”. I think he is talking about the state you get into when the conflict is so intractable and so urgent that the stories that people have been telling themselves about right and wrong stop being interesting. You stop trying to judge fairness or weigh grievances, because that is some long, knotty, unresolvable work. Not only is it maddening work, but you only have to do that work if you intend to punish. If you don’t have the authority for or the interest in punishment, or if your goal instead is to make things better, the real substance starts with “what will work?”.¹

The more you listen to every side, the less patience you have for people’s rock hard notions of fairness. People tell a good story to themselves and to you, about the way that thing was totally unfair. They’re often right. That was really unfair. But you go talk to the next person, who offers another perspective on how it happened, and who thinks that the important part was when an unfair thing happened to them. Wow. That was unfair too. You know, there’s a whole lot of unfairness here, unfairness enough for all the players to wallow in forever. Which they do. When people start telling you about the unfair things, they almost always get a tone². Their voice gets rehearsed because they are walking the rut that injustice has carved in their mind. They have thought it and thought it and made complicated reasons for every piece of it and they understand every single tendril of all the ways it hurt them. They tell you this in this closed, justifying, inauthentic voice that is recognizable as soon as it starts. As soon as it clicks in, you know you’re dealing with someone’s self-protective righteousness. Everyone loves their own precious jewels of mistreatment, but when you see a few of them from the outside, they start to look remarkably alike. When you’ve seen a lot of them, they get repetitive, predictable and eventually uninteresting.


As long as people are in that mode, that thinking and justifying and accusing mode, you cannot get anywhere new. You can’t argue them out of it, because they have been thinking of every possible angle on it for years. They will tell you the most convoluted explanation for why they were right and those people were villains. They will simply disregard contradictions in their story or facts that don’t support them or reasoning that challenges them. You do not reach people in defensive mode by argument. Instead, you lift them out of that mode by listening and showing them they were heard. Only after their story, the one they’ve polished in long nights of thinking, has been heard can you move past it to the real problems.

That, in fact, is what happened after Obama gave his speech on race. He showed white people^2.5 that he had heard their story; he quoted their emotions and content back to them³:

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

And some people were so shocked they’d been heard that for the first time in a long time, they openly went on to the next part⁴.

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

Here's the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE n*****s.

Perhaps you are revolted. Maybe you are offended by the open racism. But my reaction was “Oh thank god. Now we’re getting somewhere. If this is the real problem, we can work with this.” Look, in his howl, this dude finally told us his real problem. But they wear their pants funny! They listen to the wrong music! Too loud!! Dude, this is the heart of it?⁵ Oh mister, you’re on. This deal is done. If I had two sides sitting down, both wanting a new reality, this one is ready to go. So, in exchange for an end to discriminatory sentencing guidelines and the over-incarceration of black men and an end to predatory lending and free college for any black takers, our young black men will pull up their pants and listen to Mozart once a week? I think I can sell that deal to both sides. Toss in a program to reverse the effects of redlining and I bet I could get them to tuck in their shirts. This is so do-able. The break-through came from the new emotional information. The rest is details and negotiation.

You do three things to get to a new stable arrangement that gives all sides what they want most. You listen, to move people past their reinforced defensive stories. You offer them a vision of a new reality that is even more tempting than self-pity, one that addresses their core wrongs. You change your frame of reference from judging right and wrong to “what works”. Sen. Obama is absolutely consistent on those three fronts. He’s going at our problems in a way that American politics has never tried before. He is doing it in a way that works. I think you’re going to like it.











¹ You parents know this. When your daughters are squabbling and you ask what happened and the stories of hair-pulling and line-crossing and doll-touching and book-stealing and ball-slamming and seat-taking go back to the cradle (when they were so sweet and quiet!), you come to the realization that justice simply isn’t an issue here. The issue is the current resolution and please god, make it last a few hours.
²Sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, when they sound as shocked and hurt and raw as when it first happened, pay even closer attention. This could well be a rare thing in extended conflicts: an innocent. The other roles, of redress and punishment could apply here.
^2.5He told the black stories as well, but I ignore them because of white privilege don’t trust my understanding of black worldviews enough to try to articulatewrite them up in public.
³Look how elegantly he did that. For those of you who thought I was talking crazy talk, go back to that quote and look at all the words about emotions: anger, “don’t feel … privileged”, anxious, “feel their dreams slipping away”, resentment. He nailed that and because he got both parts, the emotion and the content right, everyone knew he’d understood them.
⁴I haven’t read or clicked on the original. I’d be more worried about libeling that guy if I thought such a thing were possible. Instead, I’m linking to a woman who quoted him. I’d like to point out that her gut response, a sincere one that I agree with, does two things that won’t help the problem at all. First, she tells him his feelings don’t matter, because they are despicable. I agree that his feelings are despicable, but unless we intend to wait until he’s dead, to solve racism by generational replacement, his feelings are the ones we have to work with. They matter a lot. Second, she argues with him. You can’t argue. Remember? There is no persuading people in the defensive mindset. Every instant spent in the realm of arguing defensive thinkiness is wasted time. Feels satisfying for a while, but it is waste.
⁵This is probably not the real heart of it. The real heart of it is probably fear of black men, immediate physical fear and fear of them being with white women. That is some fucked up shit. I owe you another painfully long post on fear and trust. Sadly, I’m pondering yet another equally abstract post on grace.

You're going down, strawmen.

These keep distracting me, so I want to put them here.

Sen. Obama is glossing over problems and pretending they don't exist.

No he isn't. Listen to him. He'll describe any policy problem you choose thoroughly and precisely. He understands the causes and effects. But that's not where his attention is, re-hashing problems and figuring out what was unfair when. Past unfairness gets treated by a full airing, by listening and acknowledgement, and it informs our choice of solutions. But it doesn’t stop us from doing something that would work and offers gains to all parties. When Sen. Obama talks about moving forward, he isn’t glossing over the past or pretending that problems don’t exist. He just wants to fix them the only place they can be fixed, from here on out.

Sen. Obama's pretty words and speech-making aren't a plan.

Y'all. You can read Sen. Obama's policy plans in his policy statements. By most accounts, they're solid and much the same as Sen. Clinton's or Edward's. But that's not what you mean. You're all, "hope" and "change" don't happen because of pretty speeches. People keep saying that he is being airy-fairy, head in the clouds, buy the world a Coke and sing in harmony. He’s not. He is methodically following the mediation playbook to address the real problems. It only sounds abstract to you because you aren't familiar with the elements of mediation and you haven’t seen it work. But I have. It isn't that I have secret insight into this guy. Anyone who is trained in mediation sees each techique he uses. Active listening is where you say the emotion and content of both sides back to them. Y'all were all "ooooooooh, what juju did he use in his race speech?!" and I was like, active listening. Refusing to demonize people. Believing that we will live up to the better sides of ourselves. Offering a vision that is better than what people can get without mediation is the heart of his campaign. His emphasis on "what works". He himself is not magic. He is a skilled practioner of an approach that has a ton of power to resolve problems. If you knew that approach, everything he does would look familiar to you.

It is cruel of him to offer a hope that doesn't exist.

Dude. It better exist. Some big scary stuff is coming our way. The rest of the recession. Bringing our troops home from war. Climate change. Rising costs of living. The persistent effects of racism. Three trillion dollars in household debt. The war debt. We get to deal with these simultaneously. That's gonna be awesome. Those are coming and they will be resolved by meeting them and solving them, or they'll be resolved by our people living in poverty. There had better be hope.

That brings me to thoughts on pragmatism. It seems to me that there are a couple different places to be pragmatic. Some people say that pragmatism is admitting that something won't work. Or they accuse me of hopeless idealism, refusing to be pragmatic. This surprises me, because I think I have plenty realistic assessment of what things are really like. Then I figured out that I am pragmatic at a later stage in the game. For me, the first step is a decision that the problem is solvable. This IS solvable, so what will the solution require? That's where the pragmatism comes in. OK, for us to solve climate change will simply require that our population rapidly understand science, decide to change their individual choices of convenience, re-design the American dream, spend a trillion dollars adapting and mitigating our infrastructure and stop treating the natural world as something to dominate. Cool. Is that all? Oh wait! Develop clean cheap energy, too.

It isn't that I have unrealistic ideas about what solving the problem will take. I know perfectly well. It is just that I've skipped the step where people say it can't work. It has to work, because not-working will suck worse. Bad as the solution is, the problem really is worse. So I don't want to hear that kind of "pragmatism". I want to hear how we're going make the next steps happen.






I'm sure I had more. But I'm also sure you've had enough.

And I have high hopes for an Obama presidency.

I keep looking at this post on what the Sac Bee thinks is the most important stories of the day. Prof. Rauchway notices that the Bee doesn't mention the presidential campaign; in the comments, PorJ suggests that this is how all newspapers will respond to keep customers: limit the politics, run personal experience stories, be hyper-local. I think the Bee was right on, though. Maybe they're omitting national political stories because they can't compete with online sources for those*, but for whatever reason, I think they've hit on the important stories of the day.

The three stories the Sac Bee chose are a big jump in the cost of gas, the collapse of the west coast salmon fishery and former Governor Spitzer's wife's appearance at his press conference. I could have done without the last, on account of how I don't care, but how political wives act in scandals seems to interest lots of other people. The two other stories, on gas prices and the salmon collapse, will matter vastly more to Californians than anything that happened in the presidential race yesterday.

In fact, either of those stories will have more impact on Californian quality of life than the outcome of the Democratic primary**. Big jumps in gas prices are going to test whether gas price elasticity is as generous as it always has been. Since our housing patterns depend on that, lots of stuff in your daily life cascades from it. Size of house, length of commute, type of commute, city densities... or just the effects of the price of gas, like cost of food, cost of any trucked good, type of car you drive. In twenty years, you'll feel every piece of that much more concretely than any difference between a Clinton or Obama presidency. The story on salmon? Well, it matters a whole lot to the salmon industry, which will likely end this year. It matters a little to people who like to eat salmon. More than that, though, is the fact that the last time a fish species collapsed like this, Californians south of the Delta lost one-third of their water. Yesterday, the water wholesaler for municipal southern California raised their rates by 14%, and wanted to raise them by 20%. These news stories aren't abstract in the least. They point to the drivers that will shape us far more than political contests.

That got me thinking. Prof. Rauchway is a historian, and for most of American history, resource contraints on our behavior didn't really exist. There was more land, more timber, more water, more coal, more everything. Sometimes you needed a technological jump to access a resource, but we solved those. In a place with no effective constraints, you might as well watch what people are doing. Their behaviors will determine what happens. That's not where we are anymore. We are at limits; resource constraints are closing in around us. People will get herded in from urban sprawl when they cannot afford their house and a tank of gas twice a week. People will come in from the desert when it is too expensive to buy trucked food and air conditioning. In this new system, it is entertaining to watch political contests, but they aren't going to matter much compared to the forces operating on us. The best we can do with our political contests is choose how well we transition and who bears the costs. Important stuff, but small compared to the forces our lifestyle has set in motion.

I am pleased with the Sac Bee's choice of stories. They've hit on what is going to matter. We're on a rollercoaster now, so I'm glad they're describing the route.










*Although I've felt some silly regional pride at the journalism coming out of national McClatchy Group. Their name is all over town.

**I'd say either is more important to how Californians experience life than the overall presidential election, except that McCain would continue to spend staggering sums of money to perpetuate endless war. That expenditure will one day come home in ways we feel.

My early endorsement.

This, incidentally, is why I'm for Obama. I think he's the only electable candidate who has done peacework and I think peacework is most radical, and only workable, option to undo what Bush has done. The stuff he says that sounds conventionally crazy ('Of course I'll talk to any world leader who wants to talk to me' and 'I'm not interested in punishment') is straight from conflict resolution practices. Well settled, not even controversial, in conflict resolution circles. That and climate change are my two top concerns, and he nails them both.

Way I see it,

Clinton is saying "if you elect me, I will do a skilled job within the system towards these ends." OK. Good. I respect skill and mostly agree with those ends.

Edwards is saying "if you elect me, I will do a passionate job within the system towards these ends." Cool. I like those ends even better.

But Obama is saying "if you elect me, I will play an entirely different game that also includes these ends." I know his game and I like his ends, so that's what I want.




(Posted later, but moved in time to satisfy my sense of how the posts should be ordered.)