Evelin G. Lindner
How do emotion and conflict interact? This chapter begins with two introductory examples—one international and one personal.
Adolf Hitler was obsessed with bemoaning the weakness of Germany already during World War I. But he was a loner without any influence. It was only later that his obsessions began to resonate with the feelings of other people, particularly with die kleinen Leute , as they were called in Germany, or “the little people,” “the powerless.” He invited everybody to join in a grand narrative of national humiliation and invest their personal grievances, including those they suffered due to general political and economic misery. “The little people” had occupied a distinctly subordinated position in Germany’s social hierarchy prior to Hitler’s rise. Nobody had ever deemed them worthy of particular attention. They greeted Hitler as a savior; his invitation provided them with an unprecedented sense of importance.
Hitler was an expert on feelings. He wrote: “The people in their overwhelming majority are so feminine by nature and attitude that sober reasoning determines their thoughts and actions far less than emotion and feeling. And this sentiment is not complicated, but very simple and all of a piece. It does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way, never partially” (Hitler, 1925–1926, p. 167).
Many Germans put such faith in Hitler that they followed him even when it became obvious that the situation was doomed. It required total defeat for many of his “lovers” to painfully realize that their loyalty had been fatally misplaced. Their loyalty not only led to million-fold homicide, it was even suicidal. Their own country, Germany, was bombed to ashes. Only Hitler himself was satisfied, as he believed in “das Recht des Stärkeren ” (“might is right”). Hitler said on November 27, 1941, to the Danish foreign minister, Erik Scavenius, and the Croat foreign minister, Mladen Lorkowitsch: “I am also here ice cold. If the German people are no longer strong enough and ready to sacrifice their own blood for their existence, then they must disappear and be destroyed by another, stronger power. . . . I will not shed a tear for the German people” (Haffner, 1978, p. 139).
Now to a personal example. Imagine you are a social worker with a client named Eve. She comes to you because she is depressed. She is severely and regularly beaten by her husband, Adam. Neighbors describe scenes of shouting and crying, and the bruise marks on Eve’s body are only too obvious. You implore Eve to leave her unsafe home and seek refuge in sheltered housing, at least at times of crisis. In your mind, she is a victim and her husband is a perpetrator. You explain to Eve that “domestic chastisement” has long been outlawed. You suggest that Adam utterly humiliates her and that she ought to develop a “healthy” anger as a first step toward collecting sufficient strength to change her life. To you this situation represents a destructive conflict loaded with hot and violent emotions and you wish to contribute to its constructive resolution.
Eve stubbornly undermines your efforts: “Beating me is my husband’s way of loving me! I am not a victim. I bring his anger on myself when I fail to respect his authority! He saved me from a cruel father! My father never spoke of love and care—Adam does!” Adam also adamantly refuses to be labeled a “perpetrator.” He accuses you of viciously disturbing the peace of his home, claiming that you violate his male honor.
From Eve’s and Adam’s perspective, there is no destructive conflict, no suffering victim, and no violent perpetrator. It is you, the social worker, the human rights defender, the therapist, an uninvited third party, who creates conflict.
As we see, the definition of love and benevolence is crucial here. You define love as the meeting of equal hearts and minds in mutual caring, a definition embedded in the human rights ideal of equal dignity for all. Eve and her husband, however, connect love with female subservience. They are right in that you introduce conflict by drawing their attention to a new definition of love.
In both cases, that of Eve and that of the “little people” of Germany, their loyalty was intensified by their dominators’ giving them the feeling of being loved as human beings endowed with feelings, rather than simply dominated like chattel. Martin Buber speaks about I-Thou relationships, in contrast to I-It relationships. People hunger to be approached as human beings and not as things. The promise of dignity, even if undelivered, is strong enough to elicit considerable loyalty—and it can be tragically instrumentalized and abused.
We can easily find more examples. Typically neither the supposed “perpetrators” nor their co-opted “victims” initially accept human rights framings of equal dignity. The South African elites, for example, were defensive about apartheid—they felt it was nature’s order itself that entitled them to superiority. Many “victims” also internalized this worldview. The more a ranking order was one of benevolent patronage rather than malevolent oppression—or at least convincingly portrayed as such—the more outcomes were condoned that were other- and even self-destructive.
Practices such as “honor killings” and female genital cutting have recently moved from the category of “cultural practices” to “harmful traditional practices.” Emotion researchers will want to resist the introduction of new “nonlethal weapons” that target emotions and thoughts. The Center for Cognitive Liberties affirms “the right of each individual to think independently and autonomously, to use the full spectrum of his or her mind, and to engage in multiple modes of thought” (www.cognitiveliberty.org ).
In this conundrum, in which emotion and conflict are entangled in intricate ways, questions arise. When and in what ways are emotions (feelings of suffering, pain and rage, or love and caring) part of a “conflict” that calls for our attention? And when are they not? Who decides? If perpetrator and victim agree that there is peace, who, as a third party, has the right to call it conflict? And what about “waging good conflict”?
What we learn is that emotion and conflict are not unfolding in a vacuum. They are embedded into larger historical and cultural contexts. We live in transitional times where growing global interdependence is connected with the human rights ideal of equal dignity for all. Emotions and conflicts and their consequences—how we live them, how we define them—are part of this transition. They too change as the world transforms.
What are emotions? Are emotions cultural or biological, or both? Are they nothing more than constructs of folk knowledge? Or are they merely bodily responses, dictated by hormones, skin conductance levels, and cerebral blood flows? Are there basic emotions? Affects? Feelings? Thoughts? Why do we have them? What functions do they serve? What about the so-called social emotions? What about the meta-emotions of how people feel about feelings? Are there universal emotions across cultures? Are emotions rational? Controllable? To which actions do emotions lead? Is there an automatic link between emotion and action?
Interestingly, William James (1842–1910), one of the fathers of the field of psychology as we know it today in the academic context, gave significant attention to research on human emotion, while his immediate successors did so much less. Only a few visionary scholars, such as Silvan Tomkins, Magda Arnold, Paul Ekman, Carroll Izard, Klaus Scherer, and Nico Frijda, continued studying emotion. For a while, behaviorism and cognitivism were “sexier” than looking at emotions—until behaviorism turned out to be too narrow, as did cognitivism.
Today we know that thought, behavior, and feeling are closely connected. And this insight is as important for the field of conflict studies as for psychology. Political scientist Robert Jervis (2006) underscores how “over the past decade or so, psychologists and political psychologists have come to see . . . that a sharp separation between cognition and affect is impossible and that a person who embodied pure rationality, undisturbed by emotion, would be a monster if she were not an impossibility” (p. 643).
Interest in learning about emotions is now exploding and already rapidly changing, fueled (some would say, overfueled) and “legitimized,” not least, by new technologies. Research on mirror neurons, for instance, underpins the recent emphasis on emotion, making headlines in mainstream publications such as the New York Times : “Social emotions like guilt, shame, pride, embarrassment, disgust and lust are based on a uniquely human mirror neuron system found in a part of the brain called the insula” (“Cells That Read Minds,” 2006).
Imaging techniques are being employed to examine the function and structure of the neural circuits that support human emotion processing and emotion regulation. The Program for Imaging and Cognitive Sciences at Columbia University in New York City is but one example of similar projects emerging in many places. What is being researched is crucially important also for conflict studies: the neurocircuitry of emotional systems (amygdala and basal ganglia) and control and regulatory systems (cingulate and prefrontal cortex).
Until only a few years ago, researchers were intent on constructing classifications of fundamental basic emotions. Andrew Ortony and Terence Turner (1990) give a tabular overview of some of the classification systems.
Today the new cohort of researchers no longer endorses a single perspective on emotion. They prefer multilayered approaches that conceptualize elaborated emotions as comprehensive packages of meanings, behaviors, social practices, and norms that crystallize around primordial emotions. Jan Smedslund (1997) describes the psychologic inherent in our dealings with emotions. James Averill (1997) discusses how emotional experiences are “scripted.” The application of such scripts varies according to cultural and historic influences. A rich overview of the new approaches to emotion research is to be found, among many others, in David Yun Dai and Robert Sternberg (2004), Joseph Forgas (2001), and Tracy Mayne and George Bonanno (2001). Among the journals that serve as platforms for emotion research are Emotion, Emotion Review, Emotion, Space and Society, International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, Consciousness and Emotion, Motivation and Emotion, Cognition and Emotion, Research on Emotion in Organizations , and Frontiers in Emotion Science .
Another major shift in the field of psychology is toward a more relational view, away from regarding the individual as the main unit of analysis (Jordan and Hartling, 2002). “Social connectedness is one of the most powerful determinants of our wellbeing” (Putnam, 2000, p. 326) and “happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of one’s social connections” (p. 332). Mutually empathic and empowering relationships are key to resilience in the face of hardships and stress (Hartling, 2003). Individualistic “separate-self” models of psychological development have endured in Western psychology perhaps not least because these models serve a consumer economy that thrives on a myth of self-sufficiency (Cushman, 1996).
Another new trend is the “humbling of Western psychology.” Western psychology is merely one psychology among others, and indigenous psychologies of emotion are gaining visibility now. (See, for instance, Averill and Sundararajan, 2006; Sibia and Misra, 2011; Dalal and Misra, 2012.)
All new approaches invalidate the old nature-versus-nurture debate. Emotions are both hardwired and malleable, and adaptive to social and cultural influences. Basic affects are the bedrock on which elaborated emotions build. Our primordial emotions are universal biologically based response systems that have enabled humans to meet the problems of physical survival, reproduction, and group governance. Culture, however, has loosened the link between those primordial emotions and their functions. New solutions to old problems have emerged, as have new uses for old emotions.
The historical evolution of the brain and emotions is mirrored in each human being’s individual development. Ontogeny (development of an individual organism) often recapitulates phylogeny (evolution of a particular species). Newborns process basic affects in lower brain structures. Emotions, which are more recent in human evolution, become possible only when certain cognitive milestones have been reached in the life of a child. In the second half of the second year of life, the cognitive capacity of objective self-awareness emerges, with accompanying emotions such as embarrassment, empathy, and envy. Between two and three years of age, the complex ability to evaluate one’s behavior according to an external or internal standard emerges. Self-conscious evaluative emotions such as pride, shame, and guilt are now possible. Schemas for emotions evolve to organize what we believe and how we react to emotions. Finally, cognition and affect are forcefully intertwined in cultural symbol and knowledge systems such as religions.
The most immediate function of the emotional apparatus is to warn us. Fear alerts us to potential danger or to potential benefit (LeDoux, 2002). We hear a noise. Is it a thief—or just our favorite cat? The first brain structure to react is the amygdala , an almond-shaped neurological structure in the lower cortical brain. This structure identifies shapes, sounds, and other perceptual characteristics, sorting for threats and, very quickly and automatically, responding with avoidance if necessary. It acts as a preattentive analyzer of our environment and works without our conscious control, triggering fast and automatic changes in tone and heart rate. Fear is a primary reaction that is processed via adrenergic neurons (as opposed to dopaminergic neurons). Is it a thief? We jump up from our chair, breathe heavily, and feel frightened. This system developed early in human evolution and dominates our first years as children. In adults, stress brings it to the fore again, often in unfortunate ways.
Let’s assume the noise proves to emanate from our favorite cat. The amygdala can relax, passing the data on to the basal ganglia to encode and store, awash in positive-valence dopaminergic neurons. We open our arms to our purring pet. This simple daily stimulus response is aided by information from two internal “library” structures (the left prefrontal cortex and a posterior area) from which our brain draws stored abstract semantic and associative knowledge. All of this is automatic. We are not in control. Indeed, research shows that our brain begins to unconsciously prepare our decisions several seconds before they reach our awareness. (The potential implications of this research for free will, highly relevant for conflict studies, have been discussed at great length in the literature; see, for instance, Roskies, 2010.)
Our brain “wakes up” to controlled emotion processing when a higher brain structure, the anterior cingulate (ACC), signals discrepancy, uncertainty, errors, conflicts, pain, or violations of expectations. The ACC tells us when something is wrong, when our automatic responses do not work and we need to do something different. At that point, two high cortical structures, the ventromedial frontal cortex (VMFC) and orbital frontal cortex , weigh our current goals and the affective value of the situation we face. We need these higher cortical structures particularly in conflict situations, because they empower us to regulate and control our emotional responses. Here we learn and adapt, and generate self-consciousness, abstraction, and imagination. The VMFC is crucial for appropriate judgments of right and wrong; damage to it increases narrow, utilitarian moral judgments. Research on these processes clearly is highly relevant for conflict studies. (“Neuroscience and Ethics: Intersections” is the title of a relevant article by Damásio, 2007.)
To come back to Eve facing Adam—or to global neighbors negotiating climate change or nuclear disarmament—all participants’ brains loop through at least six brain structures that deal with emotion, from lower to higher brain structures, from evolutionarily older to more recent components, from stored memories of how we reacted as children to new modes of responses that are open to us as adults. There are several distinctions and dualities. Feelings can be hot or cold, they can have positive or negative valence, and they can be automatic or controlled. Furthermore, there is the doer-watcher duality. The duality of attention and processing is based on the fact that we can perform a task and at the same time watch ourselves performing this task. Emotions can interfere in this duality and disturb task focus and performance.
Our behavior is regulated by feedback loops that are organized hierarchically. Superordinate loops attend to longer-term, abstract goals. Embedded within them are subordinate loops for short-term tasks. Long-term goals, such as the future of our children and our planet, require that we use long-term mental tools. We create or maintain unnecessary destructive conflict when we allow lower-order phylogenically more immediate and automated emotional processes to override higher-order, more abstracted regulatory processes. In turn, conflict situations themselves, with their increased levels of stress, may cause us to override those loops and let older parts of the brain leap into action.
Emotions serve at least three functions: they monitor our inner world, our relationships with the outer world, and help us act. The second function can cause us to make grave mistakes, because the outer world entails both our ecological and social environments. Our desire for belonging and recognition may entice us to over-hastily turn untested observations and opinions into firm beliefs and create unnecessary conflicts while leaving necessary conflicts unaddressed. The problem lies in that beliefs serve not only our reality testing and understanding of the world but also our psychological and social needs to live with ourselves and others (Jervis, 2006). Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979), a Greco-French political sociologist in Paris, was one of Pol Pot’s teachers. Seeing what he had instigated, he later committed suicide (personal communication with Kevin Clements, August 21, 2007). Pol Pot had turned Poulantzas’s academic reflections into rigid ideology, ruthlessly implemented it in his homeland, Cambodia, and in that way created immense unnecessary suffering.
In today’s world, challenges such as global climate change and unsustainable economic models are necessary conflicts that wait to be addressed. One underlying obstacle is the culture of ranked honor. Human history has shown that narratives of honor have never been very functional with regard to reality testing. Hitler’s allegiance to honor made him lose his connection with reality. In general, the common good of all is undercut and sound reality testing undermined when people forge strong emotional allegiances to cultural scripts that suggest that “worthier beings” merit privileged access to resources and domination over “lesser beings.” In human history, this arrangement has manifested by way of direct force, but also indirectly, as via “success” in accumulating monetary resources. As a result, in 2012, 21 million people live in slave-like situations, and several planets would be needed to continue the present overuse of resources.
Emotions are hardwired and malleable. There is the hardwired physiological response and negative state of “feeling bad” and, at the psychological level, “this is bad for me,” or “feeling good” and “this is good for me.” Elaborated emotions such as rejection and enmity, as well as affection, attachment, loyalty, cooperation, and other positive emotions, are no longer automatic but context dependent. Spiders or worms are greeted as welcome delicacies in some cultures and in others with disgust. For a vegetarian, eating meat is sickening, while it is a joy for a nonvegetarian. In social contexts influenced by human rights values, the term domestic chastisement has transmuted into the negative concept of “domestic violence.” In five hundred years or so, this century will perhaps be decried as a dark century of unsustainable social and ecological arrangements. In all cases, the same sequence of behavior that once was regarded as “good for everybody” is later deemed to be “bad for everybody.”
Neuroimaging may show Adam’s left anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices being activated by his social dominance orientation (the preference for social hierarchy over egalitarianism) and his lack of empathy (Chiao et al., 2009). However, such orientations are not to be taken as fixed states. They are embedded into meta-emotions that guide us in how we feel about feelings (Gottman, Katz, and Hooven, 1997). These meta-emotions emerge within social contexts. Since it is human nature to be social and cultural, efforts to create a new culture of dignity are not in vain.
It would be easy to overwhelm readers with an overabundance of concepts and terms at this point. Goals, attitudes, affects, feelings, emotions, emotional states, moods, consciousness, self, psyche —the list of terms is endless, and often scholars do not agree on their definitions. For our purposes, it is sufficient to understand that we have to give up any quest for rigid context-free classifications of complex elaborated emotions. Elaborated emotions are multifaceted clusters embedded in culture and history.
This section begins with the subject of fear as a basic emotion processed in our “old” brain. From there, we move on to more complex emotions.
The voice of intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all, it is silenced by ignorance.
—Karl Menninger
In 1998, I interviewed Adam Bixi in Somaliland as part of my doctoral research. He described growing up in the Somali semidesert, learning as a very small boy to be constantly alert, even at night, for dangerous animals and “enemies” from other clans. He learned to be ready for fight or flight in a matter of seconds at any time, day or night. Continuous emergency preparedness meant that all other aspects of life had to wait. Emergency trumped everything else. As a consequence, Bixi admitted, he felt he had not lived life.
Modern managers often feel the same way. Continuous emergency alertness diminishes the zest for life. It may even lead to cardiac failure. This is also valid for societies. The reason is the neglect of essential maintenance that is vital in the long term.
Fear and humiliation carry the potential to link up in particularly disastrous ways. In Rwanda, fear of future humiliation, based on the experience of past humiliation, was used as justification for genocide. In his speeches, Hitler peddled the fear of future humiliation by the world Jewry. The Holocaust was his horrific “solution.”
During a conflict, to reap the potential advantage of fear, enhanced alertness, we need to cool down and help our opponents to calm their fears. In negotiations, operating with threats—making others afraid—may undermine constructive solutions rather than provide advantages. Today’s politically polarizing talk media are doing society a disservice when they evoke fear for the sake of profit from drama.
At some point Eve and Adam seek counseling. Adam is afraid to lose power and Eve is afraid to be empowered. The therapist succeeds in nurturing respect, love, understanding, empathy, and patience in an atmosphere of warmth, firmness, and safety in their larger social support network. Slowly their fears translate into deep personal growth for both.
Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain.
Happily the peaceful live, giving up victory and defeat.
—Gautama Buddha
We easily get angry when we feel hurt. Sometimes we even kick a chair that stands in our way and get a bruise. Still, anger is a more composite set of mental processes than fear. Our brain does three things. First, it maps a comprehensive representation of the thing, animal, or person who has hurt us; second, it maps the state of our body, for example, our readiness to fight; and third, it maps the kind of relationship we have to the perpetrator and how we might respond. For example, we presumably would refrain from hitting a sumo wrestler.
We react with anger—rather than sympathy—when we believe that the other person, through either neglect or intentionally, treats us with disrespect. The more we feel hurt, the more we get angry. We get angry when we deem that the person who hurts us has sufficient control over the situation to avoid harming us (the so-called controllability dimension). We get even angrier when we infer that the other intended to hurt us. Indeed, research shows that we want to harm others, either overtly or covertly, when we believe they could have avoided hurting us. It is one thing to be pushed accidentally by a drunken man, another to be harmed deliberately by an apparently clearheaded man.
Our beliefs as to why others behave as they do are being addressed by attribution theory , one of the basic paradigms in social psychology. Fritz Heider is regarded as the first attribution theorist. (For further discussion of attribution theory, see Gilbert, 1998; Jones and Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967; Ross, 1977.) During a contentious conflict, the fundamental attribution error , for example, may lead each side to overestimate the other’s hostility as well as one’s own benign attitude. We tend to attribute others’ hostile remarks to their personality dispositions (“they simply hate us” or “they are unworthy, lazy, and primitive people”) rather than to transient circumstances (“we belittled them first”), while making opposite attributions for ourselves. Reactive devaluation is another insidious bias: we tend to reject even the best solutions when “the enemy” suggested them.
Adam is angry that Eve is not submissive enough, while Eve does not dare to be angry at his wrath; frightened by him, and the possibility and the strength of her own anger, she seeks relief in renewed subservience. Psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller (1986) emphasized that anger, if duly acknowledged and transformed, can lead to constructive conflict and growth. The therapist invites Adam to relinquish using anger as an easy-to-use escape route and helps him to instead face deeper feelings of hurt and pain. She encourages Eve and Adam to explore the new normative universe of mutual respect for equal dignity that defines concepts such as love, loyalty, cooperation, connection, and relationship in profoundly new ways. It is important for Eve to dare to feel anger, at least sometimes—not frantic rage and hatred but the confident firmness of being authentic.
If we consider intergroup or international relations, the world will benefit from everybody firmly standing up in the face of abuse instead of passively standing by (Staub, 1989). If we wish to produce constructive results, however, this anger must be channeled into the conscientization of consciousness and conscience that Paulo Freire suggested, and then into Gandhi- or Mandela-like strategies for action.
It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.
—Mahatma Gandhi
Fear is basic, anger more complex, and humiliation even more so. Humiliation refers to feelings, acts, and systemic structures. The act of humiliation involves putting down, holding down, and rendering the other helpless to resist the debasement. The feeling of being humiliated emerges when one is unable to repel the degradation and deems it to be not just unwanted but illegitimate. Apartheid was humiliation qua system. The humiliating effects of feudalism were brilliantly unmasked by Lu Xun (1881–1936), considered the founder of modern Chinese literature.
What counts as humiliation and what it leads to—the consequences of humiliation—is determined by emotional scripts that vary from one historical period to another, from one cultural realm to another, from one person to another, and even within a single person as he or she reacts at different times to the same humiliation.
Morton Deutsch (2006) observes, “By his persistent public refusal to be humiliated or to feel humiliated, Mandela rejected the distorted, self-debilitating relationship that the oppressor sought to impose upon him. Doing so enhanced his leadership among his fellow political prisoners and the respect he was accorded by the less sadistic guards and wardens of the prison” (p. 39).
My research suggests that feelings of humiliation may acquire the quality and strength of obsession and addiction and can be seen as the “nuclear bomb of the emotions” (Lindner, 2006). Also Avishai Margalit (2002) warns of addiction to the emotion of humiliation, as this secures the “benefits” of the victim status and an entitlement to retaliation. Vamik D. Volkan (2004) in his theory of collective violence set out in his book Blind Trust , puts forth that when a chosen trauma is experienced as humiliation and is not mourned, this may lead to feelings of entitlement to revenge and, under the pressure of fear or anxiety, to collective regression.
Due to their potency, feelings of humiliation lend themselves above all other emotions to being used to unleash mass violence. When people are determined—either genuinely or through manipulation—to perpetrate atrocities, costly military weaponry may no longer be needed. In Rwanda in 1994, everybody had machetes at home for agricultural use, with which neighbors could be hacked to death. The only resource required was Radio Mille Collines to disseminate the necessary propaganda. As a result, within a time span of a few weeks, almost 1 million people were being viciously humiliated, literally, by being “cut short” from allegedly arrogating superiority, and then brought to death. As it seems, the only true “weapons of mass destruction” are hearts and minds that translate feelings of humiliation into acts of humiliation.
Until very recently, few researchers have studied humiliation explicitly, and even when doing so, it is often used interchangeably with shame or conceptualized as a variant of shame. However, particularly the rise of human rights ideals changes the position of humiliation in relation to concepts such as shame and humility and makes humiliation more salient. In the English language, “the earliest recorded use of to humiliate meaning to mortify or to lower or to depress the dignity or self-respect of someone does not occur until 1757” (Miller, 1993, p. 175). As in the case of Nelson Mandela, people who face humiliating treatment may sternly reject feeling humiliated or ashamed. And even if they feel humiliated, victims of torture and maltreatment recount that part of their success in being resilient was not to feel ashamed while indeed feeling humiliated.
The view that humiliation may be more than just another negative emotion, but may indeed represent a particularly forceful phenomenon, is supported by the research of a number of authors, including James Gilligan (1996), Jennifer Goldman and Peter Coleman (2005), Linda Hartling and Tracy Luchetta (1999), Donald Klein (1991), Helen Lewis (1971), Evelin Lindner (2000, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2012a), Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen (1996), and Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger (1991).
Considering feelings of humiliation may shed more light on violence or terrorism than other explanations. Conditions such as inequality, or conflict of interest, or poverty are not automatically perceived as negative. As long as all players accept justifications (poverty as “divine order,” for example, or as karma ), there might be pain, but no shared awareness of a problem that needs fixing, no conflict, and no violent reactions. And conflict, even if it becomes open, is not automatically destructive either; it can be solved mutually and creatively. It is when feelings of humiliation emerge that rifts are created and trust destroyed. If feelings of humiliation are not overcome constructively, cooperation fails. In the worst-case scenario, violence ensues.
Research on mirror neurons indicates that witnessing others’ feelings makes us experience these feelings ourselves. We feel humiliated when we see media coverage of other people we identify with experiencing humiliation, even if they live far away and our life circumstances are radically different. “Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from the west. Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe,” said Faisal Shahzad, who planted the Times Square bomb (Elliott, Tavernise, and Barnard, 2010). Mirror neurons are perhaps the most potent “globalizing agent” of our emotions, for better and worse. They can make us help earthquake victims in Haiti, or become “warriors of terror,” wherever we are on this planet.
At the current historic juncture, two new forces—globalization in concert with the rise of the human rights ideals—increase the significance of feelings of humiliation (Lindner, 2006). “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” means that all human beings are part of one family and equal in dignity. When the underprivileged of this world, and those who identify with them, see how the gap between the poor and the rich grows wider, when they suspect the rich and powerful of peddling empty human rights rhetoric only to maintain and even increase their dominant position, then life at the bottom turns from karma into humiliation and the powerful become humiliators. There is nothing as humiliating as empty promises of equal dignity.
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist, states (2003), “If I’ve learned one thing covering world affairs, it’s this: The single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.”
Based on many years of research on humiliation, I suggest that the desire for recognition unites the human family and thereby provides us with a platform for cooperation. Ethnic, religious, or cultural differences or conflicts of interests can lead to creative cooperation and problem solving, and diversity can be a source of mutual enrichment, but only within relationships characterized by respect. When respect and recognition fail, those who feel victimized are prone to highlight differences to ‘justify’ rifts caused by humiliation. ‘Clashes of civilizations are not the problem, but clashes of humiliation are’” (Lindner, 2006, p. 172).
What happens when feelings of humiliation emerge? Blema Steinberg (1996) posits that feelings of humiliation may trigger narcissistic rage and acts of aggression meant to lessen pain and increase self-worth. Steinberg analyzes political crises and cautions that international leaders who have been publicly humiliated may instigate mass destruction and war. Roy Baumeister (1996) suggests that perpetrators of violent crime combine high self-esteem, albeit brittle, with poor self-regulation, particularly when it is challenged. Walter Mischel, Aaron DeSmet, and Ethan Kross (2006) explain that rejection-sensitive men may even get hooked on situations of debasement in which they can feel humiliated.
Adam may be such a rejection-sensitive man. As long as Eve merely fades into subservience at his onslaught, no open destructive conflict and no cycles of humiliation occur. An unwise therapist could very well create such cycles if she were to nurture feelings of humiliation in Eve that would lead to nothing but the creation of cycles of humiliation. The therapist needs to lay out a vision for Mandela-like dealings with feelings of humiliation for both Eve and Adam.
Cycles of humiliation occur when feelings of humiliation are translated into acts of humiliation that are responded to in kind. In cases of collectively perpetrated mayhem, Hitler-like humiliation entrepreneurs “invite” followers to pour their frustrations into grand narratives of humiliation that call for retaliatory acts of humiliation as “remedy.” Massacres typically are not just efficient slaughter; rape, torture, and mutilation, with the aim to humiliate “the enemy,” often precede killing. Only “Mandelas” can avoid this.
Even the history of the field of psychology itself could be narrated as a story of humiliation. The field began its existence as an underdog (and still is, in many ways). Foregrounding hard science—through quantitative methodologies or the application of the latest technologies—is a path to gaining respect, honor, and dignity in a Western world that is still characterized by a male culture of domination (Lindner, 2010). Emotions, relationships, and qualitative approaches are “soft” and have a taste of the female sphere. Also, listening to indigenous peoples provides little prestige. Currently, it is the arrival of new hard imaging technology that provides prestige to soft emotions. Here we see how psychologists themselves can become victims of traps that are part of their very own field of inquiry—in their wish to avoid being humiliated as “touchy-feely” (to formulate it provocatively), they overlook feelings and relationships, as well as neglecting the wisdom of indigenous peoples.
To conclude, feelings of humiliation affect conflict in malignant ways when they are translated into violence like Hitler’s or terrorism and set off cycles of humiliation. Yet feelings of humiliation do not automatically trigger violence. There is no rigid link. Feelings of humiliation can also be invested in constructive social change. Paulo Freire’s conscientization depends on feelings of humiliation to unfold. What if Mandela had not been sensitive to the systemic humiliation meted out by apartheid? What if he had meekly bowed to humiliation, or cultivated the “resilience” of denial and apathy? Yets while Mandela used the force entailed in feelings of humiliating to rise up, he did not translate these feelings into violent retaliation. He did not follow the example of Rwanda, where the former underlings killed their former elite in a genocide. Indignez-vous! Cry out! This is the voice of Stéphane Frédéric Hessel in 2010, a French wartime resistance hero, born in 1917. In the 1940s, he cried out against Nazism. Today he calls on people to “cry out against the complicity between politicians and economic and financial powers” and to “defend our democratic rights.” The Occupy movement followed his call.
Conflict affects feelings of humiliation through the way it is managed. If managed in condescending, patronizing, and arrogant ways, even if this is done unwittingly, feelings of humiliation will undermine constructive cooperation. The essence of “waging good conflict” is that necessary conflict is addressed rather than neglected, and that this is done in dignified ways, without humiliating the humiliators. This insight can be institutionalized at the societal level. In his book The Decent Society , Margalit (1996) calls for institutions that do not humiliate. What is needed today is a decent global society.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives, a disastrous by-product of the scientific and technical mentality. Nostra culpa!
—Albert Einstein
Guilt is an elaborated emotion and a topic for psychology, psychiatry, ethics, criminal law, and other related fields. To feel guilty, we need self-awareness and the ability to measure our behavior in relation to standards. Self-conscious evaluative emotions such as pride, shame, or guilt are not possible earlier than the second or third year of life. However, since elaborated emotions are culturally dependent, the concept of guilt might never evolve, at least not in any Western sense; in some cultural spheres, a word for guilt simply does not exist.
In its simplest description, guilt may be understood as an affective state of regret at having done something one believes one should not have done. Humiliation, humility, shame, and guilt are related concepts. When I feel ashamed, I accept that I fell short. I blush when I break wind inadvertently. I can be ashamed even if nobody notices. Norbert Elias (1897–1990) places the emerging “skill” of feeling shame at such transgressions at the center of his theory of civilization.
We deem humility to be a virtue, and shame and guilt as hugely important. Shame needs to be acknowledged if bypassed, it can maintain destructive conflict (Scheff and Retzinger, 1991). Particular men in honor contexts may reckon that feeling shame is an unacceptable dishonorable humiliation. Facing guilt and shame can render healing for perpetrators, victims, and larger society through remorse, apology, forgiveness, and restorative justice.
However, guilt can also be abused. When people are taught to feel guilty for their very existence or for certain characteristics of their appearance, this represents a destructive application of guilt. Deliberately creating pathological guilt to weaken opponents in conflict risks undermining long-term constructive solutions.
Shame and guilt societies have been differentiated—Ruth Benedict’s name has become connected to this distinction. Chinese scholars, however, explain that shame and guilt shade into each other, both directing people into self-examination in social situations and motivating people to evaluate their behavior and adapt it.
Eve is kept in timid subservience not least by feeling guilty. She partly believes Adam’s complaint that she ought to be more docile. Indeed, in traditional normative contexts of ranked honor, a woman is expected to efface herself. However, times have changed. Eve is entitled to develop a more comprehensive and expansive personal space—not arrogantly attacking Adam in retaliation but maintaining a spirit of firm and respectful humility. Adam no longer needs to bypass his shame and cover up with violence. He is entitled to feel proud to be a male who supports a strong woman at his side. He may even come to feel guilty and apologize to his wife for not having grasped this insight earlier.
What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death.
—Octavio Paz
The amygdala maintains close connections with the insular cortex, which is more adapted for social behavior and empathy. Frans de Waal (2009) carried out seminal research on empathy, highlighting its anchoring in maternal care. De Waal’s research confirms that Homo sapiens is not just a narrowly self-interested Homo economicus .
Throughout the past millennia of human history, neighboring groups in a fragmented world were always potential enemies, and war was frequent. What political scientists call the security dilemma was often very strong. The motto “if you want peace, prepare for war,” was inescapable. “Loving your enemy” was unforgivably unpatriotic. Gandhi’s recommendation that “there is no path to peace; peace is the path” had little space to manifest. Men were trained to foreground the human capacity to be aggressive toward hostile out-groups, while women nurtured and maintained the relationships within the in-group. The dominator model of society was ubiquitous, a male-dominant “strong-man” rule, in both the family and polity, with hierarchies of domination maintained by institutionalized and socially accepted violence ranging from wife and child beating to aggressive warfare on the larger tribal or national level (Eisler, 1987).
At this point in history, former out-groups merge into one single global in-group or “global village” (or, as anthropologists would phrase it, the human tribes are ingathering ). This gives the partnership model of society (Eisler, 1987) a window of opportunity to manifest (Lindner, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2012a, 2012b). The traditional female role script for maintaining relationships within an in-group can and must now be projected onto the global level. Both men and women together can collaborate as a global family rather than compete for global enmity. The exploitative and divisive aspects of globalization can be harnessed by a new global culture of care that is intentionally shaped. That human nature is on our side—it is social and cultural—is the hope-inducing message from new research.
The problem, however, is that coming together in a common in-group (such as a global village) does not automatically create positive feelings. Humans also share a strong tendency to split into in- and out-groups. New closeness may bring not joy but negative feelings, creating whole new fault lines. The contact hypothesis , or the hope that mere contact can foster friendship, is not necessarily true, particularly not when globalization makes the world frightfully “liquid” (Bauman, 2010) or, even worse, when it exposes the humiliation of empty human rights rhetoric.
Anthropologist Alan Page Fiske (1991) found that people, most of the time and in all cultures, use just four elementary and universal forms or models for organizing most aspects of sociality: (1) communal sharing, (2) authority ranking, (3) equality matching, and (4) market pricing. Family life is often informed by communal sharing. Relationships of trust, love, care, and intimacy can prosper in this context. In my work, I suggest that we need to reinstate communal sharing as the leading frame, globally and locally, since the current primacy given to market pricing eats into our humanity and diminishes it at all levels and in all contexts (Lindner, 2010).
Allow me to share my personal experience. I was born into a displaced family, into an identity of “here where we are, we are not at home, and there is no home for us to go to.” I have healed the pain of displacement by living as a global citizen for almost forty years (Lindner, 2012b). I am embedded in many cultures on all continents, far beyond the “Western bubble.” I understand that many people feel the world becoming liquid, confusing, and fear inducing. Yet to me, true global living provides the stark opposite: a sense of security, trust, and confidence. After all, our forefathers were continuously surprised by new discoveries, while I have a lived experience of how small a planet Earth is.
According to my observation, it is not the ingathering process that poses a problem; on the contrary, it represents a historically unparalleled opportunity. The most significant problems flow from our currently reigning economic frames, which are equally unhelpful locally and globally. They offer illusionary solutions, needlessly intensify old conflicts, and hinder the transition to equality in dignity (Lindner, 2012a). Moreover, people confound the negative and positive sides of globalization. As a result, the promise that the in-gathering trend entails is being overlooked by those who have the capabilities and resources to harness and develop it intentionally and leave it open to being misused by others (social media, for instance, covertly instrumentalizing it for profit).
Sunflower identity is the name I coined for my global unity-in-diversity identity (Lindner, 2012b). Through my global life, its core is more securely anchored in our shared humanity than any human identity ever before had the opportunity to be. My experience indicates that it is psychologically feasible to relate to all human beings as if they are family members and that most people are able to respond in kind. I agree with indigenous psychologist Louise Sundararajan who calls for preserving the relational contexts that our emotions are evolved for, of which a rich source of information is found in many traditional societies.
At the periphery of my identity (the petals of the sunflower, so to speak), it is profoundly enriching to find safety in learning to swim in the flux of life rather than to cling to illusionary certainties. I join Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa in his call for a shift from a machine principle to a life principle, not just in architectural designs. Rigidity needs to give way to process and complexity (Lindner, 2009). Social identity complexity can and must be nurtured, even if power elites fear fluidity and complexity (because it makes for disloyal underlings).
We have to become confident voyagers and not rigid vindicators, according to David Matsumoto, Seung Hee Yoo, and Jeffery LeRoux (2007). When we do not understand our counterpart, jumping to conclusions out of a need to “be sure” will produce failure. Guessing what our spouse (or terrorists) “want” and basing our actions on such speculations simply does not work. We have to learn to stay calm while we use our frustration creatively, with imagination and inspiration.
Intercultural communication scholar Muneo Yoshikawa (1987) has developed a double-swing model that conceptualizes how individuals, cultures, and intercultural concepts can meet in constructive ways. Double-swing pendulation—from you to me, back to you, back to me, and so on—has to be conducted with warmth and respect for all conflict parties. Respect and warmth are the glue that keeps people together while they move back and forth.
From Michel Serres to Kwame Anthony Appiah to Emmanuel Lévinas, all advocate métissage , or intermingling, meaning that both I and the Other are changed when we meet. I suggest harvesting those elements from all world cultures that foster relationships of loving mutuality and respect for equality in dignity—be it from the African philosophy of Ubuntu or indigenous knowledge about consensus building. There are many alternative cultural practices and concepts that merit further exploration if we want to improve democratic practices—ho’oponopono, musyawarah, silahturahmi, asal ngumpul, palaver, shir, jirga, minga, dugnad, sociocracy is an arbitrary collection of terms I personally came across at different corners of the world, which all point at less confrontational and more cooperative ways of arriving at consensus and social cohesion than Western concepts of democracy stand for.
Not only Eve and Adam’s conflict but also community conflicts and global conflicts can be conceptualized along similar lines. Liberation from humiliating domination must be conducted without perpetuating cycles of humiliation; otherwise dignity is lost. Emancipatory psychology must hold hands with relational psychology; otherwise social cohesion is lost. And dignity and social cohesion are needed if we want to cooperate as a global family and face our global challenges with our diversity as a source for our creativity.
More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars. Yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.
—Winston Churchill
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
—Eleanor Roosevelt
Let us assume we have just quarreled and are “out of our mind” (the preattentive brain has taken over). Modern brain imaging yields evidence of the effectiveness of meditation techniques. Buddhist concepts such as mindfulness and the concept of sukha point at “a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment.” We find similar approaches in many fields. Victor Frankl’s concept of self-observation in the framework of logotherapy, for instance, is comparable.
The next step is to constructively regulate our negative emotions of anger, fear, and distress because they are the gatekeepers of any communicative effectiveness. Matsumoto et al. (2007) explain that four main ingredients are key: emotion regulation, critical thinking, openness, and flexibility. These psychological processes are the psychological engine of adaptation and adjustment.
Barbara Fredrickson and Christine Branigan (2001) offer the broaden-and-build model . Rather than physical action, positive emotions facilitate changes in cognitive activity. What negative emotions are to threat, positive emotions are to opportunity. Positive affects and emotions promote intuitive-holistic (right hemisphere) mental strategies, while negative affects and emotions further analytic-serial (left hemisphere) mental strategies.
Too much positive emotion—“blissful ignorance”—however, may maintain or create conflict. Learning to “be happy” within abusive systemic frames makes for “useful idiots.” Successful conflict transformation often requires a certain amount of conceptual change for which negative emotions can be crucially instrumental. Paulo Freire’s conscientization has its place here. In the face of abuse, we need to muster the courage to foster systemic change so that abuse no longer occurs. Apartheid needed to be dismantled, not placated. And this had to be done in dignified ways. “Never again!” calls on all of us to help create a dignified world.
Conflict benefits from being approached with a task-oriented learning-mastery orientation. With this orientation, even if we might get confused or look stupid, we learn together from our mistakes. People who believe intelligence is fixed develop an ego-oriented performance orientation. They are “facade polishers” who wish to satisfy expectations of others, avoid mistakes, and look smart. When they cover up for hazardous mistakes, they risk endangering others.
Cooperation is superior to competition. Deutsch’s Crude Law of Social Relations stipulates that “cooperation induces and is induced by a perceived similarity in beliefs and attitudes, a readiness to be helpful, openness in communication, trusting and friendly attitudes, sensitivity to common interests and de-emphasis of opposed interests, an orientation toward enhancing mutual power rather than power differences” (Deutsch, 1999, pp. 19–20). In contrast, unhelpful competition induces and is induced by coercion, threats, deception, suspicion, self-serving biases, poor communication, and attempts to enhance the power differences between oneself and the other.
Matsumoto’s voyager needs what Barnett Pearce (2005) calls cosmopolitan communicative virtuosity . For a cosmopolitan communicator, disagreement is an opportunity for learning and constructing new realities. Disagreement is a dilemma—rather than a catastrophe—that calls for further exploration to find creative solutions. Virtuosity means a “grand passion” for what we are doing, an ability to make insightful distinctions and engage in skilled performance.
The term for Gandhi’s concept of firm respect and warmth, satyagraha (nonviolent action), is assembled from agraha (firmness-force) and satya (truth-love). This is the social glue of “Big Love” that Western individualism has delegitimized and that we have to regain (Lindner, 2010). The sense of serenity that is expressed by the word sukha has kinship to many concepts that point at appreciation, care, communal sharing, appreciation of compassion, faith in shared humanity, and the experience of divinity through awe and wonderment in the face of the wonder that our world represents. Concepts such as personhood, dignity, rights, character, autonomy, integrity, shame, humility, and entrustment are all intertwined here. We also have a duty for self-respect. We cannot be moral citizens if we violate our own dignity. Finally, apology has the power to heal.
Social psychologists have researched the role of framing. When students were asked to play a game where they had the choice of cooperating or cheating on one another (the prisoner’s dilemma game) and were told that this was a community game, they cooperated. They cheated on each other when told that the same game was a Wall Street game.
When we combine cooperation and framing, we can conclude that the notion of global consciousness, if grounded in human rights ideals of equality in dignity, is the only frame that has the power to lift cooperation and its benefits from a haphazard to a systemic level. Only when our consciousness, our scope of justice, and our actions become globally inclusive can cooperation become the cultural norm also at local levels and put competition at its service. Only then can we end the competitive race to the bottom that drives long-term social and ecological destruction.
Eve and Adam gradually learn that there are other definitions of love and happiness around, not just love defined as mutual dependence in submission-domination. It is like mastering a totally new language. All their hypotheses about what works and what does not work have to be redefined. Time and again they fall back. However, they do not give up. They even attempt to achieve a global unity consciousness, a grand passion to join in and co-create a new future for our human family.
We have the right to be equal whenever difference diminishes us; we have the right to be different whenever equality decharacterizes us.
—Boaventura de Souza Santos
The person who says “it cannot be done” should not interrupt the person doing it.
—Chinese proverb
Ever increasing global ecological and social challenges require global cooperation for their resolution. Conflict and emotion are at the core of both the problems and the solutions. Social emotions at the global level are no longer defined and channeled by a few diplomats. They are felt and responded to by millions of people and become salient for conflicts in the global village in unprecedented ways. Global terrorism is one outfall, a terrifying one. Avoiding important conflicts for the benefit of unnecessary conflicts or denial is equally malignant. Psychology will gain ever more significance at the global level, since political scientists deal with relations between states, a frame that moves into the background in tact with increasing global interdependence.
Is humankind prepared? Two processes stand out: globalization and the rise of human rights ideals. Currently, this mixture is a recipe for heating up feelings of betrayal, humiliation, and conflict.
Globalization entails both opportunities and risks. Ingathering helps us recognize and act on the fact that we are one human family that has to collaborate to survive on our only tiny home planet. However, globalization also opens new arenas for power abuse as it increases levels of anxiety and risks for misunderstandings. Traditional in-group/out-group demarcations, for instance, must be overcome. In-group pride, if built on out-group enmity, is destructive when a globally united in-group is what is needed. We must create a global family of creative diversity and attend to our family problems in ways that good families do.
The rise of human rights ideals is fueled by feelings of humiliation, and it fuels feelings of humiliation. And this happens in the global public arena as much as at home. At this point in history, at all corners of the world, formerly legitimate humbling turns into illegitimate humiliation.
This happens in myriad ways. When inequality—rather than karma —is understood as a violation of human rights, the result can be violent conflict. Conditions such as poverty, inequality, and conflicts of interest can all be addressed constructively by cooperative “waging of good conflict”; enabling environments can be built jointly; scarce resources can be shared. It is when feelings of humiliation emerge that trust is destroyed and seemingly unbridgeable rifts are created. Double standards and empty human rights rhetoric compound this situation: “To recognize humanity hypocritically and betray the promise, humiliates in the most devastating way by denying the humanity professed” (Stephan Feuchtwang, personal note to the author, November 14, 2002). If feelings of humiliation are not overcome constructively, cooperation at best fails; at worst, violence ensues. Feelings of humiliation thus cross-cut other explanations of violence.
All this is occurring at a time when humankind remains blind to the fact that it is emotionally unprepared. We have to learn to move back and forth, get into the others’ perspectives and feelings, and then step back into our own perspective. We have to learn to stay calm and use frustration creatively with imagination and inspiration. For that we need to nurture qualities of curiosity, courage, and patience in ourselves and in others.
We must attend to our negative emotions first, knowing that they are the gatekeepers to our deeper, more positive capacities. However, “positive thinking” can be overdone—we do not want to descend into “blissful ignorance.” We need to learn how to foster positive feelings that are firm and take from negative feelings what is constructive.
We must learn to wage good conflict through mutual entrustment and cooperative problem solving. It is not a question of some experts possessing a collection of smart techniques. We, all members of the global community—the global street, so to speak—have to forge new practices and institutions locally and globally. This chapter offers guidelines.
We can no longer continue to hope that strategies of domination and submission will bring peace, justice, and love—at home or abroad. An adversarial culture with combative communication styles of sending messages of strength to each other triggers the fight-or-flight avoidance system and deepens rifts. In a globalizing world, the traditional pathways of defense and security can be suicidal.
Human security means keeping a formerly fragmented world united in a new global in-group, a global community. To reach that end, the available cultural diversity within the human family must be harnessed in unity. Elements that violate equal dignity or are divisive no longer have a place. Cultural diversity needs to be increased. It is as crucial to protect and nurture cultural diversity as it is to protect biodiversity. However, diversity enriches only when embedded into the unity of respect for individual dignity and choice, the unity of acknowledging that culture is neither fixed nor unequivocally good (since cultural difference can also humiliate or be the result of humiliation). Subsidiarity is the way to achieve this. Subsidiarity is a word that points at layered approaches, be it the loops in our brain at the microlevel or, at the macrolevel, the way to organize societal institutions.
We live in historical times when realistic optimism is warranted. Did our ancestors see pictures of our blue planet from the perspective of an astronaut? Did our grandparents have access to as comprehensive a knowledge base as we have about the universe and our place in it? Mature global citizenship can overcome the security dilemma as well as the commons dilemma (the problem that commons are vulnerable to free-riders and raiders). The present ingathering of humankind opens a window of opportunity to manifest Gandhi’s tenet that peace is the path.
During my global life in all corners of our planet, I have experienced wonderful Buberian I-Thou orientation, connected knowing (rather than separate knowing, Mary Belenky), let-it-flow thinking (rather than verdict thinking, S. M. Miller), listening into voice (Linda Hartling), flourishing (Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen), and dialogue (Paulo Freire).
I have coined the term egalization to connote the true manifestation of equality in dignity and match the word globalization to form the term globegalization (Lindner, 2006, 2010). And my term dignism means nurturing unity in diversity, preventing unity from being perverted into oppressive uniformity, and keeping diversity from sliding into hostile division (Lindner, 2012a).
The Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network (www.humiliationstudies.org ), and the World Dignity University initiative (www.worlddignityuniversity.org ) are examples of initiatives that work for a world where every newborn finds space and is nurtured to unfold his or her highest and best, embedded in a social context of loving appreciation and connection—a world where the carrying capacity of the planet guides the way in which everybody’s basic needs are met and where we unite in our respect for equal human dignity while celebrating our diversity.
This is also the message of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, which was founded by Morton Deutsch and is headed by Peter Coleman. Its message is that cooperation is superior to competition—not the cooperation that serves global exploitation of resources for special interests, but global cooperation for the common good of all, for a new ethics of mutuality and care, for a new definition of success, wealth, well-being, and fulfillment. This can succeed only through understanding Deutsch’s reminder that in an interdependent world, fates are linked in a way that all sink or swim together. And this requires that we all, every member in the global family, develop a sense of truly responsible global citizenship (Lindner, 2010).
In the final analysis, as Marshall McLuhan said, “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” We cannot expect that our diplomats will foster sufficient global cooperation on the conflicts that we need to solve if we wish to survive as a species. We all have to step in. Traditional sources of love, such as parental or romantic love, friendship, or charity, will not be enough. We must learn to nurture, intentionally and proactively, a new level of love to achieve global cohesion: the glue of worldwide interhuman love. Let us learn to be the family we are on our tiny home planet.
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