Struggling To Do Good in a Complex World

I’ve been struggling lately – as a student, teacher, activist, writer, vegetarian, wife, you name it.  More accurately, I’ve realized how much I have been struggling for a long time.  Like many people who want to do good in the world, I have been forced to compartmentalize my life into the situations where I can make a difference and those were I can’t.  What I have the time and energy to care about and what I need to ignore.  However, this isn’t a sustainable model.  Eventually, I am going to burn out or become so callous that I’m not any use to anyone.   This essay is prompted by a number of factors: the high rates of burnout, bitterness, and alcohol use I see in conflict resolution practitioners and development workers, the dual questions posed by works such as Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution and Ross’s “’Good Enough’ Isn’t So Bad”, which ask if the system can be reformed or if imperfect actions can be considered “good enough” in a given situation; and my own frustration and misgiving with my own work.  

I’ve spent the last four summers working at peacebuilding and cross-cultural communications summer camps for international youth, the bulk of them from conflict and post-conflict regions.  In many ways this is a refreshing break from my academic work – I get to be away from my desk and books, sometimes literally in the wilderness, working with young people full of promise.  However, to do this, I really have to divorce myself from my “real” life.  From the time I get up at 7:30 to the time I go to bed around midnight, I consider myself responsible for roughly 120 teenagers, many of them suffering from PTSD in addition to the other problems of adolescence.  Add to this the needs of a (mostly) very young staff living in very close quarters.  I deal with these pressures by embracing the busy schedule and working myself to exhaustion, without stopping to consider the contradictions I face. When I initially started this piece, I conceived of this as a wholly internal problem: my inability to cope or assimilate my experiences.  However, as I have done research on a related project and spoken to others who do similar work, I have decided that the problem is deeper and more complex than just my individual experience.

Each year I watch kids grow and blossom in a safe situation, with caring, well-trained adults who encourage them to share, explore, and, in the words of a colleague, “fall in love with each other”.  However, at the end of the program, we send them back to a world which not only are they unprepared to deal with, but which is unprepared to deal with them.  The Saudi Arabian girl who, for the previous month had been encouraged to talk about the veil, feminism, and gay rights, went home to a country where, if current trends continue, she may never vote or even venture outside unaccompanied.  The Kurdish girl who learned the word “genocide” and applied it to what happened to her family returned to a country that technically does not exist.  American kids from Southside Chicago and Native American reservations returned to situations wherein they are far more likely than their wealthier, whiter counterparts to drop out, become parents, develop preventable illnesses, and be victims of violence, all before finishing high school.  For the Native American young women, the statistics are even grimmer.

Even if my kids are destined to be among the few that make it, the deck is stacked against them.  Wars and global warming are unlikely to abate any time soon.  Recent years have shown that global economies are far less stable than we had been led to assume, and that Social Security, health insurance, and a college fund are things they should not count on.  The air they breathe, the food they eat, even the bottle they nursed from all have the potential to poison them in ways their parents never dreamed possible.  A few weeks of conflict resolution training and shared soccer games is supposed to prepare them for this?  Right.  The truth is that entire generations of adults have failed them – failed to provide the safe environment that our shared humanity should guarantee them.  The problems facing these kids are far larger than can be dealt with at summer camp.

This is what paralyzes me: the fact that I can do practically nothing to actually fix what is wrong with the world. It is also why I frequently chafe at our discipline (peace, conflict, and development studies) and the questions I feel we fail to address.  My fear is that in teaching people skills and behaviors but not addressing systemic and structural violence we may only be making them aware of their misery and the problems they face, rather than giving them tools for change.  Worse, I feel that we may be tacitly implying that the buck has been passed: resolving the conflicts they live in is now their responsibility; we gave them the training and now they need to go out and fix the world.  It is for this reason that I question mediation and similar interventions, because they seem to be to simply make people feel better about the violence inflicted on them.  In a recent class a fellow student told the story of an interaction between a crime suspect and a police officer that had recently attended a conflict resolution training.  The suspect was refusing to sit down and the officer initially told him that he could make him sit, if needed.  Then the officer reflected on his training and asked the man why he did not want to sit down.  The suspected criminal had recently undergone knee surgery and was concerned that sitting would damage his knee.  The officer offered a compromise where the suspect would sit with his leg propped up.  An ottoman was fetched and everyone went away happy.  Except the Black man went away arrested and the White man went away free.  The suspect may have felt better about the arrest, but nothing happened to alleviate the system of race- and class- related violence in which he is enmeshed.  How would these men, or their proxies, react when they encountered a similar situation?  Would the officer be angry at the suspect for not mending his ways once given the chance to see how understanding the police can be?  Would the suspect be angry that the cop was in his neighborhood again, harassing people, when he thought they came to an understanding the last time?  Aggression can be even more devastating when it comes from someone trusted, and once broken a second time, that trust is unlikely to be repaired.

Paulo Friere writes that to move people out of oppression one first has to show them that they are oppressed.  In this example, the opposite has happened.  The suspect has been shown caring by a man he wouldn’t ordinarily have a reason to expect it from.  But he hasn’t been shown all the ways in which he is oppressed.  The officer feels good about doing a good deed – and it was a very good deed – but nothing has happened to make him aware of his role as an oppressor, much less the ways in which he himself is oppressed.   In the case of my students, they have been shown all the glorious potential they have, but the realities of their situations have been glossed over.  This came into stark relief this summer, when a young man from Pakistan asked a State Department official meeting with the group why, if drone bombings kill civilians and alienate the Pakistani public, they are still used.  The official’s response – that the bombings protect the American homeland – was far from adequate; worse, I felt wholly unprepared to deal with the answer, other than to agree privately that it was total bullshit.

Perhaps I’m demanding far too much.  Small, incremental change may be helpful and may be the only way we can effect change as individuals.  However, I am drawn to reflect on another article I wrote for Unrest[1] on Rosa Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution.  She argues that not only are small, incremental changes ultimately ineffective, but in the long term the complacency they generate works against real change.

Where does this leave people who want to make a change, but who understand what real change is nearly impossibly difficult?  Three routes appear:  delusion, bitterness, and dropping out.  Delusion happens when we try to convince ourselves that our small changes really make a difference, but we’re lying to ourselves.  Africa doesn’t need or want Tom’s shoes.  They flood and depress local markets.  They inhibit entrepreneurship.  Your Starbucks coffee will not save one single human life, but waste from Starbucks packaging will continue to clog landfills.  My reusable grocery bags, while a good idea, do nothing to alleviate the huge amount of industrial pollution created each day to make the products I carry home in them.  We convince ourselves that these small changes work, because these small changes are what we personally can do, but this takes the emphasis off the real work that needs to be done to change the system.

Bitterness is well known to most of us who work in conflict resolution, development, or other humanitarian fields.  At a recent party it occurred to me that the most caring people I know also say the cruelest things.  The people who work in genocide prevention and expose war crimes make Holocaust jokes.  Those who work with rape survivors make cracks about giving it to someone up the ass.  What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?  The Holocaust.  That one will send conflict resolution practitioners into spasms of guilty laughter.  This kind of humor, along with alcohol, drugs, failed marriages, and therapy, bring the frustrations facing us into stark relief.  Conflict resolution workers are well aware of the enormity of the challenges facing the field, and each has their own methods of dealing with this.

If it all gets to be too much, we drop out.  We get a nice corporate job in an office with a window and stop trying to save the world.  We tend our garden, because it’s something we can control as opposed to our inability to change anything that we feel matters.  This is where I’ve been finding myself of late.  I was in Kramer Books a few nights ago, examining the religion and philosophy books.  I was looking for something that would make me feel better.  Chicken Soup for the Skeptic’s Soul.  I examined books on how to be a better Christian, Buddhist, or Muslim, but I didn’t really see anything that would teach me how to be a better human.  What I bought was Zizek’s Violence.  To borrow from Salinger, I wanted “St. Francis and Seymour and Heidi’s grandfather all wrapped up in one”, but this does not hold the answer to any of my questions either.  Real changes need to be made, but real changes are nearly impossible.  This leaves us in a sort of Catch-22, where we can’t do what we need to do, and thus keep doing what we know doesn’t work.  If there are to be real changes in the world, people struggling to do good must embrace the complexity of the situations in which we act.  Stopgap measure might feel good and seem “good enough” in the short-term, but real change needs to be effected on a systemic, rather than individual, level.  Conflict resolution as a field needs to spend more effort on addressing systems and structures of violence and oppression rather than incidents of violence and oppression.  Complex problems need complex solutions, and dialogue and problem solving workshops may not be the best way to approach situations of such enormity as globalization or gender-based violence.

I want to end with a quote from Zizek, because he is one of the few thinkers who understands and embraces complexity.  In an article for the London Review of Books, he writes:

“Faced with a disaster over which we have no real influence, people will often say, stupidly, ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ Perhaps, lately, we have been doing too much. Maybe it is time to step back, think and say the right thing. True, we often talk about doing something instead of actually doing it – but sometimes we do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them.” [2]

Notes:

[1] http://www.unrestmag.com/revolution-revisited-re-reading-rosa-luxemburgs-reform-or-revolution/

[2] http://www.lrb.co.uk/2008/10/10/slavoj-zizek/dont-just-do-something-talk