Conflict has both intrigued and worried me from my earliest days, a fact that’s undoubtedly propelled me into my playwright’s vocation. As the Greeks discovered, drama has got something to do with conflict. I grew up in a household where marital warfare was unceasing and endemic. There was never any physical violence between my parents but the bickering was intense. The legacy I have is a tendency to avoid conflict in real life. On the safety of the page, however, the causes of conflict and its consequences have continued to obsess me.
Several years back I got a letter from David Moore, an ex-academic who’d teamed up with John McDonald, a teacher turned policy adviser, to form Transformative Justice Australia. TJA is an organisation dedicated to introducing a radical new approach to conflict and justice—conferencing, or community conferencing. It’s a technique that’s designed to cope with the debilitating effects of conflict, paradoxically not by trying to wish that conflict away, but by letting it be forcefully expressed, then attempting to transform it. David and John were inspired by justice reforms in New Zealand, and, informed by a range of disciplines ranging from biology to organisational theory, they developed a circle-based process that could be applied to a wide range of conflicts. Less than ten years after its introduction it’s a method that’s gaining widespread acceptance in criminal, community and workplace situations, both in Australia and around the world.
The more I learnt of the dynamics of conferencing the more convinced I became that I wanted to use it as a basis for drama. I realised immediately that it would pose technical challenges. It is relatively easy to write a two-handed scene, but to write a whole play in which eight to ten characters are on stage and interact continuously is another matter. It wouldn’t offer sets of visual splendour. Just a row of chairs in a semi-circle. And it wouldn’t offer the kind of wall-banging stage hyperkinetics favoured by some directors. Physical movement would have to be replaced to some extent by emotional movement, although as conferencing allows people to get up and move around, a surprising amount of stage movement is still possible. Yet one of the problems for a dramatist in an Anglocentric society is that conflicts tend to be minimised in the social arena in order that we can all maintain a veneer of harmony. It was exciting for me to find authentic situations where real drama explodes with primal force through the barriers of social convention. As John, in his typical laconic way, said to me: ‘Mate, I never have to go the theatre, I get full-on drama in my life every day’.
The other, no less exciting factor that drew me to this process was that it seemed to me then, and still does, a humane, effective and often moving method to reduce debilitating social conflict. As currently practised, conferencing is a micro-method of dealing with conflict, addressing itself to specific workplace, community and criminal situations in which conflict has caused physical and emotional harm. It offers no program for the overall restructuring of society, but it does offer a promise of change, both from the successive and cumulative impact of micro-environments made more harmonious, and even, perhaps in the future, in lessening society-wide conflicts which have become cyclically entrenched.
Finally what attracted me to the process is its optimistic take on humanity. At a time when talk of vengeance and retribution saturates our media, it’s instructive to watch a community conference in action. Negative emotions can be transformed into positive ones. And not just fleetingly. The long-term outcomes are usually very good. A play or plays which depicted a typical conference and its outcome, I felt, might not only be effective drama, but could bring attention to a process that I believed in. And it might also help refute the ever growing ranks of cynics who ascribe to the Hobbesian view that human nature is irretrievably dark, egocentric and vengeful. Not that we aren’t egocentric. Our cut finger means more to us than someone else’s severed arm in a distant part of the globe. But conferencing relies on the fact that we are social creatures who crave the approval of others, and who have the capacity to be compassionate. Unless we are sociopathic, and only a small proportion of the population are, other people’s distress causes us to feel distress. The core reason why this process works is that emotions are contagious. Anger elicits anger, happiness elicits happiness.
The Western intellectual tradition has for a long time been uncomfortable with the emotions. In glorifying the human intellect (‘the thing that distinguishes us from animals’), it has shunned the emotions as an embarrassing relic of our biological past that served only to lead us into negative and destructive behaviour. If we could control these troublesome forces with logic and rationality, our lives would be much more fruitful.
Silvan S. Tomkins, an American philosopher and psychologist whose ideas date from the mid-1950s, reasoned quite differently. His thesis was that emotions are absolutely central to our existence. He re-read the insightful pioneering work on the emotions by Charles Darwin and realised that our basic affects—anger, fear, surprise, enjoyment/joy, distress/anguish, shame/guilt, disgust, contempt and interest/ excitement—were an autonomous physiological response system common to all humankind.
When we become consciously aware that a physiological affect has been triggered we call it a feeling, and when an affect triggers conscious or unconscious memories of similar arousal in the past, we call it an emotion. Different cultures will teach their members to be angry, excited or disgusted at different things, but the affects themselves are universal. We tend to react to similar things. If someone steals our parking space, anger flares both in America and Japan. The Americans will simply express it more openly.
Tomkins’ key insight, which excited me when I studied psychology in the 1970s just as it does today, was his answer to the ultimate question ‘What is the purpose of life?’, or, expressed a little less dramatically, ‘How do we know what we want?’. To him, our lives were an attempt to maximise our experience of positive affect and minimise our experience of negative affect. We all try and get as much joy, contentment, and excitement; and as little anger, fear, distress, disgust and shame as we can. Our ultimate reward system is not money, or even love, but the emotions they engender. As Tomkins points out, however, our attempts to maximise our emotional rewards are usually very flawed because our knowledge of ourselves and our social context is always less than perfect. Conferencing attempts to give us a more accurate picture of ourselves and our social context in order to diminish our emotional pain and increase our emotional rewards. It takes participants through a transition from emotions like hate, fear, disgust and distress, into emotions at the more positive end of the spectrum. If not joy and excitement, then certainly interest, satisfaction and enjoyment.
Tomkins’ theories have been given strong empirical validation by the recent work of neurophysiologists like Antonio Damasio and V.S. Ramachandran, whose detailed study of damage to key areas of the brain have established a much clearer picture of how the brain works. It is now known that conscious thought is much less important in motivation than the Western intellectual tradition would have us believe. In the words of David and John, ‘Conscious thought is less a strategist that decides what we want; it is more a tactician that finds ways to get it’. Their book Transforming Conflict, summarises the advances in brain science, and illustrates the power of the limbic system, which controls the emotions. The limbic system decides which representations of reality are of emotional importance and will be acted on. If the cortex is damaged and loses its ability to refer to the limbic system for priorities, then alternative courses of action can no longer be sorted for their emotional significance. When this happens you get people who, while their intellect is functioning perfectly, are incapable of making decisions. Thus emotions, far from being disruptive outsiders to the intellect, are the crucial component of human decision making. When there is a lack of congruence in the brain between emotional information and cognitive or sensory information, emotional information always takes precedence. And the primacy of emotional information is the dynamic that drives conferencing.
In order to understand how conferencing is different from the mediation process often used as an alternative to the courtroom, it’s necessary to understand the crucial distinction between a dispute and a conflict. A dispute is a situation in which the facts are in dispute. A conflict is a situation in which people feel negative emotions about each other. A dispute doesn’t necessarily involve conflict, and a conflict can occur when there’s no dispute.
The mediation process works best where there’s a dispute. The procedures of mediation are expressly designed to minimise emotional arousal in order to prevent the dispute flaring into a conflict. The participants are encouraged to look at the facts rationally without letting their emotions become amplified or engaged. In a sense this method is the civilised heir of the western intellectual tradition of keeping the troublesome emotions in check, and often proves very effective, especially in cases in which the participants don’t come harbouring strongly negative feelings about each other. However, if you’ve got a situation where people hate each other, then the facts of the dispute are not their prime concern. Disputes will arise from the smallest of pretexts as a result of the underlying conflict and if one dispute is solved another will be found to replace it. Where there is conflict, particularly severe conflict, disputes are only the symptom, not the cause, and mediation won’t be effective.
At the other extreme, an unfortunate side effect of the courtroom process is that it tends to amplify conflict. Even if the participants arrive at court not feeling negatively about each other, the adversarial nature of the courtroom almost ensures negative feelings when they leave. The law is a zero sum game in which there is one winner and one loser. The awful legacy of rage that accompanies a court loss sometimes expresses itself in physical violence and even murder.
Conferencing works best in situations in which conflict is entrenched, and a circuit breaker is desperately needed to break the continuing spiral of retribution.
So how exactly does it work? What is the precise format, what stages does it go through, and how is conflict transformed?
Because we’re egocentric creatures we tend to see the world from our viewpoint. When analysing conflict we make ourselves the heroes and usually ascribe the worst motives to others. In truth, we’re all a little paranoid and in a society that’s becoming increasingly competitive and conflict prone, often more than a little. A conference situation allows all sides to see that the motives they imputed to others are often not their real motives, and, conversely, that their own actions have caused more emotional harm to others than they realised.
The first stage in the process is when a trained facilitator interviews all the potential conference participants to try and establish the key incidents in the ongoing conflict. Anything said by the participants is treated as confidential and may not be brought up at the conference by the facilitator.
The facilitator thus ascertains which incident or incidents are crucial and on the day of the conference will ask someone central to an incident to give his or her account of what happened. Others may then give their versions. The facilitator will steer the discussion, which at this stage is often full of anger, rage, fear and distress, towards the emotional and physical effects on everyone involved and the perpetrators will hear the extent of the damage they have wreaked. Most perpetrators will have minimised this damage in their own minds, so it is usually with surprise and eventually remorse that they discover how deeply other people have been affected. Their allies in the situation might also be surprised and put pressure on them to feel remorse. The perpetrators will then often explain their motives more fully than anyone in the group has ever heard. A supervisor for instance, might reveal the pressure from senior management to deliver greater productivity, and senior management, also present, might describe the threat of deteriorating market conditions on the business. Typically the genuine remorse expressed by the perpetrators leads to a crucial moment which David and John call ‘collective vulnerability’ when all the participants realise that they have misperceived the situation, and that, as a result, their community has suffered considerable emotional damage.
This is the crucial part of the conference, when the emotional negativity starts to be transformed. Genuine remorse elicits the beginning of genuine forgiveness and positive emotions come forth as people realise that negative outcomes can be changed. The vision of a community that can be healed and deliver positive emotional rewards excites them about the future.
The next stage of the conference is that the participants work out a contract between them so that the gains made during the conference can be continued into the future. The contract assigns responsibilities to various people and dates by which the actions will be met. The facilitator subsequently revisits the participants to check that the provisions of the contract have been honoured.
Sometimes after a conference some participants will begin to regret what they have revealed, thinking it will be of harm to their long-term prospects. David and John have found that such fears are misplaced. The honesty participants display is respected and after one or two months the full effects of the conference usually become apparent. The community or workplace delivers a much greater degree of emotionally rewarding experience for all.
David and John believe that the potential for conferencing will ultimately extend beyond the local community level to tackle intractable conflict between groups, or even nations, whose enduring hatreds are deep and atavistic. The present problem that occurs when leaders of two such nations negotiate a settlement is that their followers have no emotional investment in the settlement and rapidly break its terms. The optimism of the Oslo negotiations between Israel and Palestine was short-lived as extremists on both sides found new disputes to fuel their existing hatreds. If a conferencing process between leaders was televised so that the followers were drawn into the emotional power of the process, then they may feel more part of the contract their leaders have negotiated.
But that’s for the future. In the present, the methods pioneered by these two extraordinary Australians continue to be exported to the world.
David Williamson
2001