In this chapter we are going to look at three cases, at a very high level, but seeking to apply some of the lessons of this book to potential avenues for exploration. I am aware that in none of the three is there detailed discussion, and they are not included to give answers but to suggest humbly some examples of the very beginnings of application of some of the ideas of this book. I am equally aware of the huge complexity of the issues, and that vast numbers of people do nothing but work on them. I am not for a moment feeling that I know better!
There are two conflicts that are both universal and local. The first is climate change and the second is racism and ethnicity. Within the western democracies there is a third: the issue of populism (used here in the sense of manipulating genuine fears and grievances for the end of political power, not in order to find their solution. Of course, the issues are very often, even usually, genuine and need dealing with in genuine partnership and giving power to those who endure them.).
This last challenge of disagreeing well also exists in all other countries, including Russia, India, Pakistan, much of the Middle East and in many countries in Africa. However, the social situations underlying these countries are so radically different that they are not possible to consider here except in widely generalized form.
Climate Change: Human Conflict with the Planet
In the case of climate change the research is very well developed. The vast majority of scientists agree, and the objective evidence supports, the idea that the climate is changing and biodiversity is threatened, to a degree that will threaten the future habitability of large parts of the earth, especially in low-lying areas and in the Tropics.
It is also very widely agreed that these enormous changes are to a large extent human driven. There have been very many extreme changes before, but never at this speed and never with such a clear and unprecedented externality, human economic development, and its consequences in the emission of pollutants and carbon or other gases linked to global warming.
Since 2016, it is also widely agreed that the target for the twenty-first century should be to limit global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. The present outputs from human activity seem more likely to result in more than 2 °C – perhaps 2–3 °C, or even higher.
The mapping of the conflict is less clear, but some key features are easily seen.
• As discussed earlier, it is possible to see two major sides: the creation and the human race. However, that is a terrible over-simplification.
○ Human beings range from massive contributors per head both to a loss of biodiversity and to global warming, to those whose contribution is insignificant. In general the former are from relatively rich countries and the latter from the poorest, including people groups who are essentially non-contributors and thus are victims of the changes.
○ At the same time there is uncertainty about the impact on the climate in specific areas. Some places may become easier to inhabit and do relatively well. For example, the UK and especially its northern parts may become more open to new forms of agriculture where it is currently not warm enough. Whether this is true or not, the overall effect is likely to cause people movements of extraordinary size, the political impact of which will only be manageable with huge sacrifice or immense inhumanity.
○ ‘Spoilers’ are also identifiable by many. They are not a single block. Some disagree with the majority of scientists. Some agree but feel that morally it is not right to limit economic growth now for the sake of those yet unborn and that the discounted cost of future climate warming is less than the current cost of its prevention. Some have a vested interest in the economic rents and returns from economic activity that drives climate change. This includes companies, political parties, nations and individuals. They are in different moral as well as political categories. The first group may widely be seen to be mistaken but it helps no one to categorize them as wicked. Spoiler is thus a bad term. The other groups have a more dubious role. Finally, there are significant shadow influences, especially in international politics and in politics in the democracies.
• Risk capacities range vastly, and a RAM (Risk Allocation Matrix; see Chapter 7) would be a book in itself. Essentially, though, the strongest players in the short term are human beings in geographical areas that are less likely to be heavily and adversely affected, and that also happen to be, in some but by no means all cases, the richest. In the short term the poorest in any country are the most at risk, and the poorest countries have the highest risks. In the long term, human beings are likely to be the weaker party, and the creation the dominant force, in the absence of something extraordinary turning up in scientific and technological aspects of climate control.
However, the adequacy of work breaks down when it comes to relating.
• There is no universally trusted group to act as a convenor and facilitator among the 197 states and far more people groups, lobbies and interests.
• The human side is bitterly divided, at odds with each other to the point of war on other interests, and divergent in capacity. The creation side is impersonal, a thing that is not open to negotiation or discussion. It simply responds to inputs in a way that we do not understand adequately. It could be argued that the conflict is within the human side, but that ignores the consequences of failing to act.
• The sense of responsibility for creation has been diluted by millennia of activity that did no permanent harm, by religious teaching of various traditions, and the huge extent of groups having an impact so that everyone feels the problem is someone else’s.
• The mere fact of a common need does not seem to break down the individual wills of nations and groups.
The common good is thus not recognized and needs establishing. At the same time the danger threatening the planet should give a great incentive to every human being, provided they have hope of some progress in their lives and of adequacy of food, shelter and security.
The relating is therefore going to have to work hand in glove with the relieving, and reconciliation to reduce conflict and increase security must be a priority in order to enable longer-term thinking and minimize the possibilities of wars that prevent any further action on climate.
For all human beings, the imminent threat of death or the destruction of society will outweigh all longer-term issues.
The urgent need is therefore to relieve need.
• The restarting of trade that is fair and open will give huge incentives to innovation and will reduce extreme poverty very rapidly indeed, as has been seen in the last fifty years. The World Trade Organization is therefore a central structure for the necessary developments that will open the doors to better work on climate and biodiversity.
• In some places, this can only be done with aid offered at the UN’s recommended 0.7 per cent level of Gross National Income. The giving of such aid to parts of the economy where the economic return is too long term for thinly capitalized and poor countries, such as infrastructure, health and above all, education, will ease the pressure towards a world climate change agreement sufficient to limit the temperature rise. Aid needs reimagining and political leadership must enable the richer parts of the world to be curious and present to see the impacts.
• Peacebuilding needs to be of the highest priority and enabled by every nation with good armed forces and the skills to enable local populations to be reconciled. Key areas to tackle must be, first, the arms trade, which must halt the flow of weapons and ammunition to conflicts. Second, anti-corruption and tax evasion is indispensable, and tax havens and lack of transparency must be ended. The largest financial centres, in particular London, the EU, Europe other than the EU, Singapore and the USA, together with those areas of dependency, can tackle this question. Legislation on an international basis needs to make tax evasion and money laundering even harder than now.
• The UN must have the capacity to stop conflicts, intervening early. This would need more cooperation from the permanent five members of the Security Council, the strengthening of regional and multilateral partners such as the African Union, and the embedding of mediation and reconciliation hubs in national and international security structures.
• But relieving must also be done at the most local level. Basic improvements are indispensable in green spaces within communities, in recycling even at household level, with incentives to alter behaviour. Added to that must be a huge effort in education. Excellent local practice will deepen the commitment to excellent national practice (middle out) and thus in its turn to global progress.
The risks involved are huge.
• The very large political risks of the sacrifices necessary by the currently rich to enable the poor to grow sufficiently to take their own steps against climate change are risks of a monumental nature. The major problem is pain now in exchange for survival and flourishing in fifty years. Those risks can only be decided by people voting, but must be encouraged by politicians and others leading. One essential is for the weight of sacrifice in each economy to be borne by the wealthy in the same way as globally it must be borne by the wealthiest economies.
• The role of faith groups, which account for over 80 per cent of humanity, is essential. Their leaders must take risks: of being responsible for teaching on the sacred relationship with creation, of meeting and leading, of taking responsibility for the errors of those who claim to follow their faith. Christians have to be the global foot-washers, by their service and example enabling others to be liberated to serve well. For church leaders, this will often mean the risk of laying aside prestige, partition and inter-church quarrels for the sake of God’s call to be stewards of creation and lovers of the poor and suffering.
• One way of mitigating the pain of the sacrifice is through green technology, fiscally encouraged. Expertise cannot be allowed to be monopolized by one country. What benefits only a small group will never motivate the vast majority. If the vast majority is not motivated, the future is lost.
• The struggle to combat climate change is going to be one full of setbacks, with the outcome visible only after more than a century. Maintaining the impetus will be a great risk. Finding milestones that can be celebrated is a huge challenge.
• The risk of meetings failing, and of major economies taking a short-term advantage, and the risks of terrible diversions such as wars, make the need to cooperate in this area on which all should be able to share a vision a potential huge mitigator of risk in other areas of competition.
Reconciling, with all these challenges, offers great hopes and great difficulties.
• It will bring hope to see nations agree on objectives. The relationships built may enable other dangerous areas, such as nuclear weapons proliferation and use, to be addressed with greater mutual confidence.
• The endless meetings and necessary campaigns are a long road without much beautiful scenery or interesting diversions. What progress can be made to encourage resolution and resilience?
• Reconciliation must be at the three levels: top down, middle out and bottom up. On such a scale of issue as this, the top is the global, the middle the national/regional and the bottom the local. To reimagine at each level, to make the struggle present at all levels, to encourage presence and participation without elitism, all these habits will be necessary.
Resourcing is where it hurts.
• The sharing of costs is the largest problem of the day. Sacrifice, suffering and altruism are required.
• Resourcing must include the development of adequate scientific, mathematical, technological and cultural skills to enable civilizations to develop and grow in a way that is committed to the common good. This can only be done at a national level; any form of international paternalistic or imperialist top-down approach is utterly wrong. Yet it must be resourced to give every person in any economy opportunity to aspire, to compete, to be ambitious and yet to serve.
In all these areas we have the skills. There is a need for a trusted, diverse, transparent and effective global secretariat to coordinate and advocate. The UN is made for such things. There is also a need for brave leadership. That we must see in the years up to 2030.
Racial and Ethnic Differences and Divisions
Racism and ethnic divisions are invariably born out of a common fiction, which is summed up for the British in a satirical poem by Daniel Defoe, who wrote The True-born Englishman in 1701, when Britain had a Dutch king, sandwiched between previous French, Welsh and Scottish dynasties and our present German line:1
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes and furious lust begot
Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot …
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane …
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
Whate’er they were they’re true-born English now …
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction …
Since scarce one family is left alive
Which does not from some foreigner derive.
Or to put it more bluntly, Professor Mary Mwiandi, former chair of the University of Nairobi’s History department, said at a 2009 historians conference, ‘We’re all immigrants and we’re all here.’2 The loss of that reality is fertile ground for racism across the world.
In the case of climate change the biggest weakness is in the R of relating. In the case of race and ethnicity, including the challenges and suffering behind BLM, the areas of failure are much wider.
Researching is prolific but not agreed.
• In terms of the habits of reconciliation in the Difference Course, the effective segregation in many parts of many countries reveals the absence of curiosity, betrays the failure of presence and prevents reimagining.
• By failing to see the distinctions, there is radical over-simplification of failures that are different in different societies. The problems in race relations in the USA are very different from those in the UK or in France, to take three examples. For example, the UK has not since the end of serfdom had legal slavery in the way that many states in the USA did until the mid-nineteenth century. However, the prosperity of many English cities, especially Bristol, Gloucester and Liverpool, but indeed of the whole of what is now the UK, was built on the slave trade. In addition, the entire UK economy gained hugely from not only trading in slaves but also the related trades in the Golden Triangle of shipping goods to West Africa, slaves across the Atlantic, and sugar and other goods to British ports. It is also worth remembering that the legacy of slavery in the UK is so profound that the compensation for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire only stopped being paid to the descendants of former slave owners in 2015.
• The British position is enormously complicated by the legacy of Empire, which has led to great diversity of religious and ethnic backgrounds since 1945. The simplification of all these factors into one category of BAME, when there is immense diversity within that grouping, also provides for lack of clear thinking and a recognition of proper responsibility by some among the White majority. As was discussed much earlier, many White people in the richest parts of the world are themselves deeply excluded from the benefits of economic growth and do not experience privilege in any meaningful sense.
• Another example is France, where the history of empire is very different and thus the minority ethnic groups tend to have a much higher proportion from North Africa. In the case of Black people in the UK, a high proportion of those who came from the Caribbean, and were and are so ill-treated, are of Christian and not Muslim tradition. Those of a Muslim background often come with the legacy of the British Empire more than that of slavery.
• There has also been a tendency for debate to become focused on highly controversial areas such as Critical Race Theory, as though disproving it would somehow show there is no problem with racism. Such self-unaware approaches to the genuine issues of racism reveal a lack of willingness to be present, to be curious and to reimagine.
Thus, researching has done much, more than in almost any other area of dispute and conflict, but has not resulted in an acceptance of a basis of truth that reflects perception and real experiences.
Relating has been alluded to in discussion of the issues of the ‘two hours of segregation’ on a Sunday in the USA, and in equivalent separated living in many other places, including parts of UK cities, schools, housing and so on. In France the suburbs of places like Paris reflect this problem very significantly.
• Relating starts at the local. It must be the responsibility and vision of local groups, of intermediate institutions, to work hard with programmes like Difference and then seek in every possible way to encourage local gathering. Where this happens the results are superb, as can be seen by schemes in England like Near Neighbours.3
• Once again education must play a large role. Key issues to be addressed at local and regional levels must be differentials of health and education outcomes, standards of housing, language proficiency, and opportunities for high-quality higher and further education.
• There are increasingly good role models where relating is demonstrated. In many countries these are seen specially in sport. That is true in the UK.
• Challenges around public health and housing give a very good opportunity for building relationships within local government areas. So do local politics.
• One of the biggest challenges is the quality of relationships and not just the quantity. Do they permit the raising of genuine areas of concern and differences of perception? This is where the habits matter of being curious, being present and reimagining.
• A genuine area of controversy is free speech. The danger of facing the issues of racist behaviour is that fear of experiencing racism again, or of being called racist, lead to self-censorship. In that sense people are not present to each other and dare not be curious. The reality of the problem is handled in the USA by the First Amendment rights, and in other countries by tight restrictions. They represent two ends of a range. Truth is something that needs to see the lie in order to challenge it. Better to hear racist language and answer than to be unaware of lurking thoughts is an approach that has much to commend it. All that being said, encouragement to violence is always wrong.
• At the heart of relating, to quote a friend from an African British background, is that the issue of ‘Whiteness’ is a cultural disorder in everything we do. In other words, the whole way of living assumes being White (or, for that matter, male). I have heard this comment from many people who never speak of Critical Race Theory. The point being made, from a strongly Christian and biblical view, is that change requires a shift in power, and a clearer sense of truth. In the conversation there was a very interesting metaphor, which I am still thinking about, involving Old Power in our society and New Power. Old Power is institutional; you have to fit. New Power is participative; you have to join in. Old Power is Tetris, New Power is Minecraft. Both forms of power are needed, but both need each other in order to balance the other’s weakness.
Relieving need is a huge issue and very weakly addressed.
• The largest challenge is that of reparations. The historic legacy of slavery, Empire and racist attitudes linked to both has in many ways led to systemic discrimination. The question about reparations will have to be faced, and an answer found that is a sufficient sign and symbol of genuine relief of the needs caused by past actions. It cannot be right to say that the policies of past generations are not our fault, and thus should not be the subject of reparations, while on the other hand enjoying the results and fruits of those policies in terms of global power, of privilege, and of position internally and externally to our country, whichever it may be.
• The danger is that reparations will be so difficult to agree that at a national or international level the search for the right answer will take so long that it will lead to no answer for several generations. Once again, the local matters. For example, Virginia Theological Seminary has a programme of tracing and seeking to support those who are the descendants either of those enslaved at the Seminary or of those who were employed there in the time of the Jim Crow laws. That can be done in many places.
• A clear area of reparations will be in working with countries that were affected by the slave trade to improve education and opportunity.
The issues of risking and reconciling will vary from country to country. There will never be a universal settlement, even in one society, because it is rightly impossible to work out who represents whom. Reconciliation in all these areas will be sociological, long term, local, and above all will require sacrifice by those who are in power. Each discrete area of discrimination will need looking at to ensure justice and truth. In some cases, this will be by a panel. The scandals of Windrush and associated racist actions come to mind. In other areas the key question will be representation in leadership. It is very noticeable that in the UK the Home Secretary in August 2021, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Business Secretary, the Health Secretary and the Cabinet minister who was president of COP 26 in Glasgow were all from a minority ethnic heritage. That would have been impossible even thirty years ago. Progress can be made, but it requires a continued determined effort, a vision and a fixed aim to see greater justice for all human beings, for all are made in the image of God.
Hatred as the Great Good
The third and last of these reflections is on the divisions we find among ourselves, sometimes called populist, or nationalist, but realistically each label misleads to some degree. These divisions are as old as human beings for they are founded on desires for power and desires to retain power. Those who stir up these hatreds seek to enable people to find their identity by finding their enemies.
In 2 Samuel 15, King David’s son Absalom, returned from exile, carries out a textbook coup d’état. The first step is to stir up latent discontent within the kingdom. This he does by supporting those who felt excluded and ‘thus Absalom stole the hearts of the people of Israel’. It is a classic approach, which culminated in a swift military strike that capitalized on the popular support he had. The pattern is equally familiar in modern times. Conversely, the pattern of Jesus Christ and of his Church when it acts rightly is not to seek power but to serve. The revolutionary nature of all that Jesus did and all that God does today is found in this rejection of the classic means of taking power.
The extreme opposite characterizes many populist rulers and leaders today, whose ability to gain traction in their campaigns arises from using existing divisions, not only some magic in the way they campaign or speak, or in their policies.
The impact of divisions unreconciled – that is to say, without the capacity to disagree well – is to open a society and large groups of people to manipulation. By contrast, the justice and goodness of God, in the words of Mary the mother of Jesus in Luke 2, is seen in equality, the humbling of the proud, the satisfaction of the needs of the poor. To put it infinitely less poetically than the Magnificat, God is present and shows us a reimagined world of justice, of forgiveness and of love. A church that does not identify with that vision but rather seeks its own power loses its soul.
In the UK, the USA and many countries in Europe and around the world, great changes have taken place, often through democratic votes that did demonstrate the voice of the people, such as the Brexit referendum vote in the UK, but leaving behind a deeply fractured and angry society. On 6 January 2021 a crowd stormed the Capitol Building in Washington DC, claiming that victory for their candidate in the US elections of November 2020 had been stolen. The claim of a rigged election is very often the cry of those who lose, but to see sights such as occurred on that day and to experience the bitter divisions that continue was deeply shocking to many with no personal interest in who was elected.
What can be done about this anger? Is such a thing as a reconciled society possible to imagine?
The strength of populist leaders is considerable as a result of political skills of a high order. In a way that mimics the Difference Course, but with motives of power rather than peacebuilding, they begin with listening, a habit of paying attention, being present to those whose voices are not normally heard. The contrast was often seen, and still is heard, among so-called elites, who openly, or behind closed doors, appear to be contemptuous of the voices of large groups of people.
Virtues such as patriotism are too often derided or ignored as old-fashioned and out of date. There is contempt for many who are genuinely concerned about the changing nature of the country, whether through social change, immigration, economic impact, the financial engineering of international capital in the City of London, Wall Street and a thousand other centres, and above all the sense that they exist to be the objects of other people’s manipulation. In the words of the UK Brexit campaign, people want to take back control.
What is seen above all is an absence of research and relationship. To put it simply, many of those with money and power don’t know what the struggle is for those without it and don’t care. Whether genuinely or not – it is too easy to judge over hastily on that question – many populist leaders, for want of a better description, do ‘get it’. Or, at the very least, they sound as if they do. They channel the anger that is felt in communities that for generations lived in one way and that, through no fault of their own, have seen their ways of life changed. In the north-east of England in the 1960s there were more than eighty thousand people employed in the mines. Today there are none. In Liverpool, at the same time, up to forty thousand people worked in the docks and related industries; today it is less than one-tenth of that figure.
Anger and discontent are reasonable and proper reactions from people who find their world changing and whose leaders do not appear to be paying attention. To combine rapid economic change with rapid social change only adds to that sense of insecurity as communities feel disrupted.
The relieving of need, in the absence of a genuine understanding of those needs, does not make a difference, even if done with the best of intentions. To use the language of the habits encouraged in the Difference Course, being curious leads to understanding, being present to relationship, and those two enable a reimagining.
The risks in such divisions are on one side from those who seek to use disrupted economic and social conditions to gain power, and who point to perceived and often real injustices. On the other side, the risks are accentuated by distanced and mechanical systems of care and mutual support. The impersonality of government actions is a direct result of the fact that they are not mediated through the local. Archbishop William Temple pointed to the essential nature of intermediate institutions, those that exist between the state and the household, that are sometimes voluntary and in other cases small businesses, social clubs, churches, schools, hospitals and an infinite number of others. Those in them know their areas, recognize needs and are capable of meeting them.
The infrastructure for meeting needs exists, through everything from parliamentary, political constituency associations in the UK to local mayors in France and to very strong faith communities and other local charitable groups in the USA. Local governments, when properly funded, are accustomed to meeting needs.
One of the earliest and most crucial developments in epidemiology took place in the Soho area of London in 1854. A severe outbreak of cholera was in full swing. The local curate, the Revd Henry Whitehead, working under the leadership of Dr John Snow, and with support from Florence Nightingale, mapped and identified the source of the infection as one water pump. Although removing that pump helped, the more significant change was in the understanding of the causes of cholera as being waterborne, not airborne.
The point of what happened was that it was local, as public health is to this day. Local actions based in local knowledge and relationships are critical for the national or global changes required.
Reconciling divided societies is the ultimate test of whether we can find the will and determination to overcome issues of privilege and power and work simultaneously from the bottom up, middle out and top down.
Reconciling happens when there is a level of trust created by the previous Rs, when people see genuine curiosity based in love and care, when they experience relationships, when needs are met and when people take risks. To map the conflicts of our societies is too large a task, and the different local levels are too varied. Yet some things we can see, based around inequalities and injustices. Resourcing reconciliation requires a shift in the way government works in divided societies, from doing to changing to doing with.
As mentioned earlier in this book, one area of work going on is the /together campaign. That includes a vast range of groups of all sorts and opinions in the UK and is designed to demonstrate that there is much in common. It contains the potential for work at all levels. It is only one of numerous possibilities.
There is nothing inevitable about societies divided by hate. It is possible to disagree well. Yet, as in other areas, it requires the empowering of the local, not the distanced actions of an impersonal state. It is an economic process, but it is very far from being only that. It also requires moral imagination, deep relationships, profound risk taking, thoughtful research, adequate resourcing and long-term work. What it offers is not a society that has conquered all its problems, but one that has the structures and trust to face anything with resilience.