Conflicted Read online

  Humphrys had stumbled across a truth about human arguments: they tend towards statelessness. Arguments that start off as being ‘about’ something quickly become about nothing but themselves, locking the participants into a pattern of negative reciprocation. The conversation becomes as simple and simplistic as a straight line.

  Stateless arguments can run on indefinitely and fruitlessly since there is nothing to solve or conclude. As they do so they usually become more unpleasant. Like water, argument becomes diffuse as it heats, but in this case, the resulting gas is toxic. You might forget what your argument with your partner was about, but you will probably remember how it made you feel.

  The science writer Brian Christian observes that, ‘Verbal abuse is simply less complex than other forms of communication.’ MGonz’s anonymous correspondent replied to the bot’s insults with insults of his own. However witty or stinging his retorts may have been, he was making things easy for the bot by retorting at all. If he’d just asked a few questions, he would have quickly discovered the limited range of his interlocutor. Chatbots find it near impossible to respond convincingly to enquiries such as, ‘What do you mean by that?’ and, ‘How so?’ because requests for elaboration rely on context; they prompt the participants to widen the conversation rather than just taking a cue from the last remark.

  Similarly, to make a conversation between people more human and less robotic, we need to ask questions that can’t be answered with a pre-prepared script. Hence the crucial roles for empathy, curiosity and surprise in conflict-ridden conversations. In Memphis, Don Gulla played the Memphis cops a video of an attempted arrest (there are many such clips online, taken on smartphones or bodycams). A man who has just committed an armed robbery stands in the forecourt of a store, facing off against an officer with a gun pointed at him. The criminal’s gun is in his back pocket. He isn’t reaching for it or attempting to flee, but he is refusing to obey the officer’s request to get down on his knees.

  The officer moves from requests to commands at a steadily increasing pitch of intensity: ‘Get down on your knees,’ he shouts. ‘I am not going to tell you again!’ The man refuses, the officer tells him again. The deadlock is only resolved when further officers arrive. After playing the video, Gulla said, ‘The officer makes a dozen verbal commands. He should realise that what he’s doing is not working. Don’t continue a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.’

  Gulla elucidated the psychology of a deadlock. ‘The guy asks you to back off. Your ego says, “No, I’m the police.” But who cares? Give the guy some space. Maybe ask his name. You could even lower your gun and offer him a cigarette. Ask yourself, why is he refusing to kneel? Maybe it would be humiliating for him. Say, “Will you at least sit down?”’

  ‘Sometimes’, he observed, ‘you just need to switch gears.’ Gulla told a story about an officer chasing a man on foot down a highway as cars screamed past. Then the officer, who was getting out of breath, had an idea: he stopped, and shouted, ‘Hey, I’m too out of shape for this. Please stop!’ The man stopped, turned around, and gave himself up. ‘It was beautiful,’ said Gulla, eyes twinkling.

  * * *

  On a snowy night in January 1993, two slightly dazed Israeli academics arrived at a Norwegian country house after a long drive from the airport. Ron Pundak and Yair Hirschfeld were acting as clandestine representatives of politicians back home. Their Palestinian counterparts Abu Ala, Maher El Kurd and Hassan Asfour arrived late, having been held up by immigration, much to their annoyance. A Norwegian businessman had given Rød-Larsen the use of the house, known as Borregaard, and its staff, without having to be told anything more than that it was for some international political activity.

  The next day, the Palestinians and Israelis gathered in the sitting room. The atmosphere was, unsurprisingly, awkward: nobody was sure how this was going to go or whether they should even be there. Rød-Larsen gave a brief talk, explaining that the Norwegians, unlike the Americans, would be playing no role other than facilitation. ‘If you two are going to manage to live together, you’ve got to solve this problem between you.’ He advised them to spend their first hours together getting to know each other, to share stories about their homes and their children. After lunch, a fire was lit and the Israelis and Palestinians sank into red velvet sofas on either side of a low coffee table and began to talk.

  At the heart of Rød-Larsen’s vision was the stuff that conventional diplomacy overlooked or ignored: setting, mood, personality. He didn’t see why Palestinians and Israeli negotiators should not be able to get along, even to like each other – just as he did not see why those boys in the streets of Gaza could not play together instead of fighting. Rød-Larsen believed that once the negotiators got to know their counterparts, the conversation would become less predictable and more creative. As he put it to me, ‘Our goal was to get them off-script.’ His job was to design the conditions which made that possible.

  In Washington, the two sides sent delegations of more than a hundred people each. They stayed in different hotels, and met across vast tables, after holding separate press conferences, while American mediators brokered proposals and counter-proposals. At Borregaard, the Israelis and Palestinians lived together, ate together, and shared downtime. Rød-Larsen paid meticulous attention to details like the seating plan at dinner. Participants were served Norwegian specialities, like smoked fish, and potatoes baked in cream, while enjoying access to a ready flow of wine and whisky.

  The negotiators, five in all, held sessions in different parts of the mansion, and sometimes ventured outside, arguing and discussing during long walks in the snowy woods under the stars. As Jane Corbin puts it, the atmosphere was one of ‘a country house weekend: good food and good company and stimulating discussion late into the night’. For the negotiators, it felt a very long way from the corridors of power in capital cities. The novelty of the environment allowed a new, more emotionally expansive conversation to emerge. Relationships of trust were quickly forged.

  Rød-Larsen’s own role was a self-effacing one. He didn’t participate in the discussions, but whenever a negotiator exited the meeting for a break, they would go to him and unburden themselves of whatever was on their mind, including their frustrations with the other side. Rød-Larsen would listen, reflect back what they were saying, and reassure them the conversations would bear fruit. One of the negotiators noticed that Rød-Larsen never asked him about the negotiation, only about what he felt. ‘How did you feel about meeting your arch enemy?’ Rød-Larsen would enquire casually. ‘Did you ever think you would?’

  * * *

  There is a fundamental tension in the human psyche, says Peter Coleman, between coherence and complexity; he calls it the ‘crude law’ of our existence. We want resolution and closure at the same time as we want interest and novelty. We seek order, and we seek freedom. Problems arise when we feel pushed too far in one direction or the other. Societies that are too ordered become stifling and oppressive; those that have no coherence are unsettling and alienating. Mental health problems tend to result from an excessive drive for either order (obsessive compulsive syndrome), or chaos (schizophrenia).

  When we’re anxious or threatened or just tired, we have a strong drive to simplify – to take short-cuts to coherence. What happens when you’re in an argument with someone? You feel stressed, attacked and weary. So you reach for ever simpler answers (she is an idiot, he is evil), while your opponent does the same. When a conflict of any kind escalates, says Coleman, there is a press for coherence, on both sides. Each party become increasingly rigid and inflexible. Nuance, irony and compromise collapse into binary oppositions: good versus evil, stupid versus smart. Curiosity about our opponents’ point of view is rendered suspect, because it opens up questions we prefer to be closed down. So is empathy, which might smudge the clarity of our moral vision. The only allowable question becomes, whose side are you on?

  Disrupting this dynamic requires a lateral approach. Rather than going
directly after a conflict, Coleman’s advice is to ‘stop making sense’. The main task is to find a way, any way, of fostering positive feelings between the parties: ‘This may seem simplistic, but it’s everything. In fact, the more distant these attempts are from rational persuasion, and from obvious attempts at swaying emotions, the better.’ Negotiators are trained to analyse and rationalise; they think in straight lines. But when straight lines are the problem, what’s required is imagination.

  It sometimes takes a third party to introduce creative dissonance to an us-and-them dynamic. In the Oslo process, that role was played by the Norwegians. In Liberia in the early 2000s, a group of ordinary, albeit exceptionally brave women – mums, aunts, grandmothers – formed an organisation known as the Women’s International Peace Network (WIPN), which helped end a decades-long civil war. When UN peacekeepers were stuck in an armed stand-off with a group of rebel forces in the jungle, they called the WIPN. The women arrived on the scene in their white T-shirts and headdresses. They entered the jungle with hands raised, dancing and singing. The WIPN intervention introduced surprise, tonal variation, and good feeling to the stalemate. After two days, the women brought the rebels out of the jungle.

  * * *

  The first Oslo meeting ended after three days. In February, the participants reconvened at Borregaard, with the tacit blessing of their respective leaders. The Oslo channel, which remained a secret from the outside world, was now considered by both sides to be a serious counterpart to the official talks. Over the next few months, over a series of meetings in different Norwegian country houses, the participants argued their way towards a revolutionary agreement.

  Being a social scientist, Rød-Larsen paid close attention to group dynamics. A micro-culture had formed at Borregaard, and he looked for ways to preserve its fluidity and prevent it hardening into protocol, even as new, more senior negotiators were introduced. When a very senior Israeli official joined a meeting for the first time, Rød-Larsen seized Ala, the Palestinian negotiator, by the hand and, pulling the men together, said, ‘Meet your public enemy number one!’ The remark sounded spontaneous, but Rød-Larsen had planned his words carefully. In conventional diplomatic terms, it made no sense. But the joke provoked a smile from both Israeli and Palestinian. Later, the same men would go on walks in the woods together, interspersing intense discussions with dirty jokes.

  For eight months, day and night, Rød-Larsen acted as a go-between for the negotiating teams and their respective leaders in Tunis and Tel Aviv. He worked hard at maintaining the group’s camaraderie – its sense of ‘us against the world’. He knew that only within the context of this strange solidarity between antagonists would new ways of seeing the world emerge. It was an emotionally and physically punishing endeavour, but Rød-Larsen succeeded in creating the conditions in which arch enemies were able to recognise each other as human beings – as individuals who understood the pain of exile and bereavement; as parents with hopes for their children; as men who shared a taste for bad jokes.

  The Oslo process culminated in a meeting that took place one morning in September 1993. Under a blue sky, two men faced each other on the White House lawn before an invited audience of world leaders; millions more watched on TV. One of the men was Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, a former general in the Israeli Army, and veteran of bloody battles with Israel’s neighbours, including the Palestinians. The other was Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, which had fought an insurgent war against the Israeli state for forty years.

  Less than nine months after Rød-Larsen hosted that first clandestine meeting at Borregaard, the two leaders had come together to sign a joint declaration of principles, known as the Oslo Accords. This was the first time the PLO and Israel had even recognised each other as legitimate antagonists – something that most people thought was impossible, until it happened. Standing between the two men was the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, who invited the two enemies to shake hands. Arafat reached out first. Rabin hesitated, as if to convey how hard this was for him. Then they shook.

  Shortly after this handshake, negotiations on the fine details of the agreement ran into the ground. Rabin, perhaps the only Israeli leader held in sufficient esteem at home to make the deal work, was assassinated in 1995. Five years later, the process set in train by the Oslo Accords ended definitively with the outbreak of the Second Intifada, a period of intensified violence between Palestinians and Israelis.

  Oslo was a failure, but a valuable one. The spirit of the agreement endures in the very notion of a peaceful, two-state solution. So does the story of the Oslo channel, whose embers glow faintly in the darkness. If the impossible suddenly seemed possible once, it might seem so again.

  * * *

  Peter Coleman cites a study which estimates that about one in twenty conflicts are classified as ‘intractable’ – that is, extremely hard to solve. The figure is said to apply not just to diplomatic and political clashes, but to the conflicts of everyday life between family members, friends or colleagues. Intractable disputes may be rare, but they exert a powerful influence over the lives of the participants and those around them, draining energy and generating hostility. We are used to referring to them as ‘complex’, but in a sense, as we’ve seen, the problem is the opposite, which implies something about how to approach them. As Coleman put it to me, ‘In conflict you are pulled to simplify, and so you need to offset it with more complexity of feeling, thought and action.’

  Arguments with our friends and relatives often follow regular patterns. Once the argument begins, you can predict how things will unfold, like an expert chess player can predict the next eight moves in a game from a glance at the board. As the familiar script plays out, we find ourselves almost irresistibly swept along with it, playing our parts in a stale drama. To stop this happening, mix things up – say what the other person isn’t expecting you to say, agree on something unexpectedly, or switch topic for a while. You can vary how you say things as well as what you say: the language you use and the tone you deploy. It might be a note of humour or a touch of warmth, or even just something that doesn’t quite make sense. If you always have the argument in the kitchen or in an office, find somewhere else to have it out.

  What you’re trying to do is create space, literal and figurative, for a new way of communicating with each other. In fact, you might want to think about it as opening a secret back channel to your antagonist.

  12. Share Constraints

  Disagreement benefits from a set of agreed norms and boundaries that support self-expression. Rules create freedom.

  In 2013, when Kal Turnbull was seventeen and in his final year of secondary school in Nairn, Scotland, he became aware that he and his group of friends all tended towards similar views, whether on politics or music or TV. Turnbull started to wonder, where do you go if you want to hear from people who see things differently?

  It is not as simple a question as it seems. Anyone who has lived in the same place for long tends to spend their time with people who see the world in roughly the same way they do. It’s not always easy to find conversation partners who have strongly different views to your own. Even when you do, there’s a social pressure to agree on things, since, as we’ve seen, disagreement can feel awkward and unpleasant. You can go online, of course. But when Turnbull looked at debates on social media he saw a lot of posturing and pile-ons and little real engagement. There didn’t seem to be a place you could go to have your views probed and challenged without feeling as though you were under fire. So Turnbull decided to create one. He started a forum on reddit.com called Change My View. Within five years it had over half a million subscribers.

  Change My View (CMV) is a place you can go to explore the limits of your own opinions. Perhaps you have formed a point of view on something – on how to run the country, on whether God exists, on the most overrated movie of the year – but you have a feeling you’re not seeing all sides of the question, that you might be missing something important?
Then take your opinion to CMV, and its community of users will help you think it through by politely disagreeing with you. Whether or not you end up changing your view, you will see things differently.

  * * *

  When people celebrate the value of disagreement, they often emphasise free expression. But, as social media platforms have revealed, when people are allowed to express themselves however they want, disagreements tend to degenerate into acrimony and abuse. CMV is not a place where anything goes. Turnbull worked with a team of more than twenty moderators, enlisted from the group’s regular contributors, to maintain a tightly drawn code of conduct. Rule-breakers are warned, then thrown off the platform if they ignore those warnings. ‘We have restrictive rules, but what they provide is freedom for certain conversations,’ he told me. The rules were not designed by Turnbull at the outset: they evolved organically over time, as he and the user community gradually figured out what makes for a good disagreement and what does not.

  CMV works like this. First, you submit a view that you would like challenging: ‘Zoos are immoral’; ‘Heroin should be legalised’; ‘Radiohead is the best band of all time’. The site does not set any rules about the content of the belief – it can be anything. But it does have to be your belief: you can’t say, ‘I’ve got this friend who says . . .’ You should also be genuinely willing to accept your belief is wrong. This last condition is hard to enforce, since it’s impossible to know for sure what’s in someone’s mind, but Turnbull and his team have identified some reliable proxies for bad faith. Submitters who offer the same justification for their view over and over, or who engage in repetitive rants without seeming to absorb or reflect on any of the questions from commenters, violate what is informally known as the ‘no soapboxing’ rule.

  CMV asks users to ‘enter with a mindset for conversation, not debate’ since the latter implies a competition between people who will never change their mind, where the object is winning, not learning. The very act of submitting a view to CMV signals that the submitter, like someone volunteering for therapy, is ambivalent; some part of their mind is open to change. Indeed, Turnbull told me that he wants CMV to feel like a clinic people can visit to learn why they’re wrong.