Banksy, “Flower Chucker 2″(?)

I’m going to do two terribly irresponsible things in this post. First, I’m going to at least tangentially touch on the current situation in Egypt, a subject on which I am both horrified and woefully uninformed. Second, I’m going to be obnoxious based on the title of an article, which I well know is not necessarily endorsed by its writer, and in this case when I finished reading it, bore relatively little (but not no) relationship to the content of the article itself.

Also, I need to remind you that this is my venue for half-baked, incorrect, and underthought ideas. You need to pay if you want the good stuff, or come inside the ivory tower, obvs.

But on the plus side, holy schnikes, it’s a post that’s actually relevant to some of the stuff I’m supposed to, you know, professionally think about.

Anyway, the article that got me thinking about this stuff most recently was William Dobson’s “Lost in Egypt,” whose long subtitle is “President Obama has no influence with Egypt’s generals. It’s time the administration admits it—and speaks a language the generals understand.” It’s that last bit – a language the generals understand that I want to riff on for a sec.

My day job being horror and violence (i.e., security studies-ish), I hear variations on this argument a lot, that when dealing with particularly violent groups, there’s no point in trying to see where they’re coming from, or negotiating with them, or what have you, you need to meet them in kind. Probably the most seminal expression of this viewpoint in my field is Stephen John Stedman’s 1997 article “Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes.” In a nutshell, Stedman argues that we can divide “spoilers” – groups that oppose peace processes – into three types: limited, greedy, and total.

Limited spoilers are what they sound like. They want some specific thing, and if you give it to them, they will become peaceful. Most of the time (Stedman argues, and many follow him), the way to deal with them is to give them what they want.

Greedy spoilers don’t want to fight forever, but they want to salami-slice you. Give a greedy spoiler an inch and it’ll come back and ask for a mile. They will keep fighting and dragging their feet as long as they think they can maybe get more. So you deal with them most effectively through a “departing train” strategy – we’re doing final divvying up of the rewards of a peace process now and if you don’t say, “OK, we are fine with this, and just this, no more fooling,” you get NOTHING.

Total spoilers are… well, read my book for some of the conceptual confusions I think are involved in this category. But they’re the folks you can’t deal with. Either there is nothing that will make them stop fighting (they desire the war for its own sake), or they want something completely non-negotiable – e.g., they’ll stop fighting if you let them straight up genocide some group. You have to kill or neutralize them.

In my experience, there’s a lot of pressure to put the bogeyman of the moment into the “total spoiler” category. Why are we dragging our feet on Syria? Why don’t you want to bomb Libya – do you love Qaddafi? Why did Nelson Mandela play so nice with Mugabe? Etc. Implicit in these questions is that one (and, typically, only one!) of the players is so irredeemably evil that there’s no point trying to deal with them.

But this claim is really worrisome, and not just for someone with my optimistic Lederach-derived moral intuitions about people. First of all, it’s ahistorical (again something I bring up in the book – e.g., in the DR Congo, at one time the CNDP were figured as “total spoilers” and the national army allied with the FDLR against them; later, the FDLR were figured as “total spoilers” and the CNDP was integrated into the national army to fight against them – meanwhile, the FDLR have a complicated – dysfunctional, but complicated – relationship with the actual people in their areas of operations.).

But I want to focus for a sec on how it interacts with the “language they understand” claim. The general intuition seems to be that the bad guys – whoever they may be in this situation – have set the terms of the debate, and we must follow them there or risk irrelevancy.

Why would we want to let the bad guys set the terms of the debate? Let’s grant, e.g., that the Egyptian army has decided that it is going to make the current conflict there about who can wield superior force. They are assholes and we should not listen to them.

We should also not ignore the power of the terms of the debate to constrain our options. We all want an outcome where no one gets hurt and everyone is happy, right (RIGHT)? It’s just that it’s only hippie dippie peaceniks like me who think that’s possible.

But think about the ways in which letting the terms of engagement be set in violence makes the peaceniks wrong rather than simply recognizing our wrongness. The most chilling part of Carol Cohn’s “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, to me, is the way she reports that living in the world of “threat advantage” and “deep earth penetrators” (snicker) colonized her own mind. If your language is that of rational choice theory, it’s very hard to admit that the world also includes psychology, love, hope, fear, trauma, and the like. And then you sneer at the hippies like me for bringing them up. It’s not the peaceniks who made that world, man, you’re the ones trying to make us live in it.

And here’s where it goes from being a peacenik’s lament to a real policy problem. Using a conceptual and linguistic framework where you can only understand each other’s actions in terms of threats and advantage not only impoverishes the world, it carries very real risks of creating and exacerbating the violence you claim you’re there to prevent. Denying and obscuring that we’re dealing with human beings who have a psychology and a political physiology doesn’t make it go away.

There’s pretty good evidence that violence exhibits attributes of a contagion. The mechanisms are still being researched by psychologists smarter than me, but they include imitation and reduction of psychological barriers to aggressive actions in the victims of aggression. It looks like attributing an aggressive motive to your interlocutor is more likely to make you act aggressively towards them, too.

So, where does this leave us? If we use the language of threat and interest, we will see our enemies pursuing their interests, through threats, and responding reliably only to threats – whether those of violence, or of other forms of harm (e.g., economic). How sad is our state of understanding of conflict if the thought process on a place like Egypt is that we consider shooting, then cutting off aid, and then throw up our hands? (“Oh, but we did talk to the generals about peace.” “Really? Did you appeal to them as human beings or did you make a public diplomatic statement in an ambient discourse of threats?”). And so we speak to them in the language of threat and interest. And they respond in kind. And we wonder where the violence came from.

Alternatively, what if we spoke to them in a language that they didn’t “understand?” What if we spoke a language that allowed for all that hippy-dippy stuff about love and peace to be a real part of the discourse, that recognized the fear and anger that goes around in these sorts of situations? It’s hard to assess a policy that’s so rarely been tried, but the evidence is suggestive: violence interrupters in Chicago, family group conferencing as part of restorative justice programs, mass moral shaming.

If you want a philosophical homily, the mistake seems to be tied to one that Arendt accused thinkers of making: conflating power and violence. Both can get someone to do what you want. But violence does it by short-cutting the person, attacking them on a lizard-brain level and getting them to jump to out of fear; power does it by coordinating actions and making people move along with you out of solidarity. You can, if you try very hard, turn a violence advantage into a power advantage, by systematically smashing down all other sources of power until yours is the only one left standing, and people go along out of sheer moral exhaustion. My fear is that we – people like me, playing a part in a very powerful military nation – have spent so much time hammering down every source of power that we’re in danger of losing the meaningful ability to speak in the register of power rather than the register of violence. We’re projecting an inability to understand any other language onto the other by convincing ourselves that speaking violence is one way of speaking power, and that the other is refusing to respond to other ways. When in fact we have only atavistic non-violent language to use, empty rituals from power-building, and so if the other started responding to power we wouldn’t even recognize it. It’d be like Wittgenstein’s lion.

OK, if you’re not a philosopher, retroactively skip that last paragraph so I don’t sound in(s)ane. If you are a philosopher, commence nitpicking my abuse of Arendt.