Anatomy of Peace

Some thoughts on reading Anatomy of Peace by the Arbinger Institute.

As I understand it, The Arbinger/Anatomy of Peace approach consists of some observations, a hope and a method;

1. observations about self-deception, rationalization, and collusion in our own victim stories
2. a faith that we have a moral compass that we can access pretty easily once we attend to it
3. treating others as ends (not means), having genuine and interested (I-Thou, not I-it) dialog is a way out of the collusion and rationalization we participate in.

#1 I find terrifically provocative. These suggestions have me examining and reexamining my actions and motivations. I have been reading Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. This book examines our habitual willingness to justify. The Anatomy of Peace’s focus on collusion, when both parties rationalize and how this leads to a vicious spiral of self-justifying ever worse behavior, invites a lot of reflection.

These typical and tempting behaviors, especially after irrevocable decisions, make it difficult for any of us to look plainly at what we have done, and listing reasons after the fact will forever be fraught and carry forward into how we weigh what we experience next;

Trouble starts when I fail to notice that I see only whatever confirms my categories and expectations but nothing else. The trouble deepens even further if I kid myself that seeing is believing. That’s wrong. It’s the other way around. Believing is seeing. You see what you expect to see. You see what you have the labels to see. You see what you have the skills to manage. Everything else is a blur. And in that ‘everything else’ lies the developing unexpected event that can bite you or undermine your best intentions. – Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

#2 seems naive, maybe even dangerous. On the plus side, it allows the authors* to short circuit the (overwhelming and constant) desire to blame others for their short comings rather than to look clearly at our own. On the down side, we run the risk of trading peace for justice. We ought to be careful here. We have too many recent and distant examples of leaders who facilitated a lot of destruction while (apparently) sleeping untroubled through the night. If my moral compass rests unexamined it may point north, whether I am heading that way or not. Does faith in this ability to readily know and critique your own motivations from a universal and shared vantage reflect Arbinger’s roots? I don’t know enough, but others may.

#3 is a deep well. Martin Buber, himself, provides a nuanced, careful and caring analysis. Buber doesn’t make a fetish of I-thou, and even notices that all dialogue and the tragedy of our lives lies in that it ends in I-it. Our deep connections exist among and must be rescued from a field of I-it connections. He talks about needing both will and grace to find I/thou dialogues. This makes the project much bigger and the opportunities more fleeting, but in a way I like and respect. In German ich-Du isn’t quite I-you or I-Thou. I like watching the translators struggle because in English we certainly behave in ways that objectify people and treat them merely as means or instruments. And so we ought to have a sharp language to help us notice the difference, but we don’t.

Buber intends to be fully dialogical and argues that we can only know in relation, in deep conversation. What I love most is that a kind of ethics grows out of this dialogical commitment, an ethics about entering full “ich und Du” conversations with each other. This matches my own intuitions about knowledge coming from moving through and bumping into the world together. That this way of knowing has a side-effect about how we aspire to engage one another and to avoid treating people as means is a wonderful bonus. Kenneth Kramers’ Practicing Living Dialogue offers a good way into Buber for English speakers.

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In looking around the Arbinger community site a few weeks ago I came across a C.S. Lewis quote. This made me wonder if some people really enjoy and want to interact with new perceptions, they like their assumptions challenged and enjoy being surprised and other people just don’t.

I too, long for the tang of otherness and the loss of a person into just memories that don’t/can’t be challenged, resonates with me. But I do not think that this is a universal preference. People have different levels of tolerance/interest in an “other”;

Today I had to meet a man I haven’t seen for ten years. And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well “how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said”. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely. Not that he had changed. On the contrary. I kept on thinking, “Yes, of course, of course. I’d forgotten that he thought that “ or disliked this, or knew so-and-so “or jerked his head back that way.” I had known all these things once and I recognized them the moment I met them again. But they had all faded out of my mental picture of him, and when they were all replaced by his actual presence the total effect was quite astonishingly different from the image I had carried about with me for those ten years. How can I hope that this will not happen to my memory of H.? That it is not happening already? Slowly, quietly, like snowflakes “like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night” little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end. Ten minutes “ten seconds” of the real H. would correct all this. And yet, even it those ten seconds were allowed me, one second later the little flakes would begin to fall again. The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone. -- A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis, pages 19 and 20

I hope that that ideas in Anatomy of Peace (and their other book Leadership and Self-Deception) find additional presentations, I would enjoy reading a more straightforward narrative presentation (I think) that allows the claims to be examined, challenged and sharpened (the business story book clearly doesn’t work for everyone, and it probably shouldn’t -- see the review at http://www.stoyko.net/fugitiveknowledge/?p=19).

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*I do wish that the author(s) (J. Ferrell, D. Boyce, ...?) of these books were identified. Given the approach’s enthusiasm for entering into sincere dialog anonymizing participants in the dialog seems like a loss, even if the generally unnamed Arbinger staff (other than C. Terry Warner) benefit from remaining unnamed, as someone wrote on the Arbinger web site “First, we want to keep the focus on Arbinger’s ideas and not on personalities. Second, writing is but one of many important tasks that are performed at Arbinger and we feel that those who write are no more important than those who contribute in other ways. And finally, writing anonymously helps us - individually and as an organization - to avoid the traps and pitfalls of ego. “