THE NEED FOR CONCILIATION

RARELY in history have mankind's conflicts seemed quite so hard to resolve. Vast social changes are causing almost daily clashes that defy law and logic; from courts to legislatures, the old peace-keeping institutions are too often archaic and unresponsive. Blacks and whites, Arabs and Israelis, students and administrators, Frenchmen and Charles de Gaulle--all seem pitted against one another in postures of unmalleable pride.

Witnessing this worldwide obduracy, writers as disparate as Naturalist Konrad Lorenz and Novelist Arthur Koestler have redefined Homo sapiens as Homo maniacus, arguing that man appears doomed by some inherent quirk to follow the dinosaur into oblivion. Among the apocalyptically minded, the only question is where Armageddon will begin. Harlem or the Hotel Majestic? The Sorbonne or the Sinai Peninsula?

Such pessimists ignore conciliation: an ancient art that has served mankind through centuries of quarrelsome existence. To be sure, attempts at conciliation are often futile until the combatants reach exhaustion. Henry Clay's compromises merely delayed the Civil War that Abraham Lincoln had to win before the Union could be restored. It is not the United Nations that prevents World War III but the balance of nuclear terror.

Not surprisingly, history rarely mentions conciliators: man's sense of the dramatic is more aroused by violence than by the "effort to establish harmony and good will." Among U.S. heroes, George Custer outranks William Penn, who pacified Indians with kindness rather than carbines. How many American boys would rather win the Nobel Peace Prize than the Medal of Honor?

Still, from the Biblical Solomon to the ecumenical Pope John XXIII, conciliators have polished a craft that succeeds in a wide variety of negotiable situations. The U.S. once boasted the world's bloodiest labor movement; now it has such effective conciliation machinery that remarkably few slayings have occurred in labor disputes since the 1950s. For all its failings, the U.N. has helped to keep most of the world's angry opponents at arm's length, producing a host of skilled conciliators in the process--Sweden's Count Folke Bernadotte, Canada's Lester Pearson, America's Ellsworth Bunker. Common to such men is a firm belief that conciliatory techniques (negotiation, mediation, arbitration) apply equally well to all disputes, marital as well as martial, between races and generations. It is a faith based not on Utopian dreams but on hard-won experience.

Constructive Conflict

The key to conciliation is an understanding that conflict is universal, indeed necessary. All living creatures want things that others do not care to relinquish. Without some conflict, there are no solutions, no yin and yang, the classic Chinese harmony of opposites. The humbling fact is that animals achieve such harmony better than humans. Unlike men, animals retain instinctive devices that end their conflicts short of murder. When one wolf defeats another in a fight for territory, the loser commonly exposes its jugular to the stronger opponent--a form of honorable surrender that the winner peaceably accepts without further aggression. Not only is the loser preserved in the process--so is the species.

Unhappily, man requires what psychologists call "attitudinal consistency": the belief that he is right. He is cursed as well as blessed with the sharp fangs of ideology, to say nothing of lethal weapons. If principle is involved in a human conflict, the loser is likely to run home for his gun. With their passion for principle, human antagonists are prone to paint their opponents in ever darker lineaments, while gilding their own ideological positions. While it may be relatively easy to solve human conflicts involving mates or money, quarrels about political or religious faith tend to endure with unabated fury, both sides demanding unconditional surrender.

Many students of conciliation apply a games theory to their definition of human conflict. As they see it, the bitterest conflicts are conducted as "zero-sum" games, in which each side tries to win the entire stake. In his 1960 book, The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard Economist Thomas C. Schelling spelled out the absurdity of zero-sum in the thermonuclear age: "The precarious strategy of cold war and nuclear stalemate has often been ex pressed in game-type analogies: two enemies within reach of each other's poison arrows on opposite sides of a canyon, the poison so slow that either could shoot the other before he died; two neighbors, each controlling dynamite in the other's basement, trying to find mutual security through some arrangement of switches and detonators." Today, at least 15 nations from Egypt to Pakistan are treading the backsteps of that cellar--all in the best of ideological causes.

Transmutations

The main task of the conciliator is to break down rigidly consistent attitudes, to transmute hyperbole and hysteria into a reasonable compromise that allows both sides to come out feeling like winners. Psychologists contend that the essence of compromise lies in the introduction of inconsistency to closed minds. If a white racist can be convinced that at least some Negroes are not shiftless, savage and uneducable, his prejudice is bound to be fractured. Ultimately, the inconsistency will become unbearable, and if he does not wholly reject the new idea, he will change his feeling about Negroes. Of course, the introduction of inconsistency is difficult when coping with intensely ideological minds. Maoists are so sure of their scrupulously scripted versions of "objective reality" that not even the most sincere signals of accommodation can easily erode their consistent views of perfidy.

In such situations, conciliation seems possible only through the miraculous imposition of a "superordinate goal"--a common cause, whether threat or desire, which neither side can hope to win on its own, but which both together can readily accomplish. The classic case of a world-uniting superordinate goal would be an extraterrestrial invasion. In fact, such goals have already worked in favor of U.S.-Soviet cooperation--for example, the common fear of nuclear proliferation, unshared by Red China, that led the two superpowers to ban atomic tests in 1963. That treaty was preceded by a stark case of common danger when Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy notched their zero-sum poisoned arrows over the Cuban missile crisis. At the brink of war, the Russians sent the Americans two letters, the first proposing reasonable terms for negotiation, the second permitting scant compromise. Realizing the grave threat to mankind, Kennedy chose to ignore the tough letter, replied to the sensible one, and the superordinate threat of world cataclysm was dissipated.

Conciliators disclaim any formal rules or principles--if only because of their pressing need for subtlety, privacy and psychological surprise. Even so, conciliators agree on certain standard techniques. The first requisite is a willingness to suspend all judgment, the better to grasp exactly how their contending clients think and feel. Without such empathy, conciliators are likely to hear only false signals. Roger Pfaff, retired judge of the Los Angeles County Conciliation Court, recalls the case of one lawyer friend who was almost divorced by his wife because she was too embarrassed to admit that what really bothered her was not his "mental cruelty" but the way he clipped his toenails in front of the television. After a conciliator brought out the truth, the couple lived happily ever after.

Tolerance--at least on the surface--is the conciliator's biggest asset. Wrote Britain's late Sir Harold Nicolson: "Not only must the negotiator avoid displaying irritation when confronted by the stupidity, dishonesty, brutality or conceit of those with whom it is his unpleasant duty to negotiate; but he must eschew all personal animosities, all personal predilections, all enthusiasms, prejudices, vanities, exaggerations, dramatizations and moral indignations." At the same time, settings are crucial to the right conciliatory mood. When entertaining antagonists, the late U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold always seated his clients at a neo-Arthurian round table. Economist Kenneth Boulding, who founded the University of Michigan's Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, remarks that labor contestants often punctuate their all-night sessions with not only invective and the pop of hairy knuckles, but also enough alcohol to produce a "nice euphoria."

In dealing with student dissidents, perhaps a more effective coolant might be the joint (marijuana cigarette), which has sealed many a youthful alliance. Indeed there is a precedent for such get-togethers in the American Indian ceremony of the peace pipe, which was often filled with "kinnikinnick"--a mind-bending admixture of hemp and the inner bark of dogwood.

Above all, the "cool" setting must definitely be private. According to New York's Theodore Kheel, who has dealt with everything from subway strikes to student sit-ins, the mediators' first commandment is "Thou shalt not disclose the bargaining positions. Thou shalt not make any public proposals for a solution."

Face & Fractionalization

Whatever the manners or modes employed, all conciliators agree that face-saving is the top consideration in their trade. For one thing, leaders of militant groups or nations find it difficult to sell compromises to their constituents without some semblance of victory. During the recent Memphis sanitation workers' strike, the adversaries had become so entrenched behind their harsh words that it appeared face could not be saved on either side. Called in to mediate the dispute, U.S. Labor Under Secretary James J. Reynolds was stymied not only by the black v. white impasse but more importantly by Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb's adamant refusal to grant a payroll checkoff for union dues. How did Reynolds break the ice? By using the Federal Credit Union, which is employee-owned but federally administered. As he reasoned, the City of Memphis had no right to prevent its employees from designating some portion of their wages for the credit union. Result: the wages were duly deducted for the credit union--then transferred for payment as union dues, saving face all around. Such conciliation would be far easier if adversaries would only heed the aphoristic advice of Danish Scientist-Poet Piet Hein:

The noble art of losing face may one day save the human race and turn into eternal merit what weaker minds would call disgrace.

What conciliators often need above all is the ability to break down a conflict into its "fractional," or workable components. Once the combatants agree on small issues, the big ones seem less important. For a century, conciliators have looked to a remarkable model: the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), the last truly successful peace conference. By modern standards of resolute idealism, that parley should have been a failure. In the wake of Napoleon's defeat, the allies--including 215 petty princes--were thirsting for spoils, and a 19th century cold war seemed inevitable. Spies roamed the corridors of the Habsburg hostelries, paying small fortunes to household servants for the gleanings from wastebaskets. Even cynics winced when France's devious Talleyrand installed himself in the Kaunitz Palace, with his beautiful 21-year-old niece as mistress, hostess and general tension-easer. What the cynics overlooked was the participants' talent for piecemeal diplomacy. For all its intrigues, the Congress reached sound--if only temporary--settlements on such combustible issues as Polish partition, the denial of German national unification, the continuance of a papal sovereignty in an increasingly nationalistic Italy. The Congress created a stable balance of power that pacified Europe for nearly half a century--until the Crimea raised a bloody ruckus. A major key to success was fragmentation: allied committees insisted on looking at the old feudal map of Europe rather than the emerging new map of impassioned nation states. Hence they dealt with such minuscule problems as the "Duchy of Bouillon" rather than the fate of Europe at large. The participants' very obsession with spoils rather than principles made settlements easier to reach--far easier than in the present age of ideology.

Of course, fractionalization is still at work in all sorts of contemporary disputes. While serving as U.S. Labor Secretary, for example, Arthur Goldberg once solved a union-contract impasse between automakers and auto workers by reducing it to the level of how many "relievers" could be added to assembly lines while other workers went to the toilet. Once settled, that minor issue produced a major contract. Something similar occurred during a recent seminar at the University of Illinois, where students insisted on tearing down "the system," until an unexcited professor asked what they would put in its place. All at once, the students began discussing specific, limited reforms.

If conciliation is made easier by breaking a big crisis into small problems, the converse is also true. It is the steady pileup of unsolved small problems that is creating today's smoldering anger and the sudden explosions that few ever expect--or worse, too casually accept. Clearly, the arts of conciliation should have been employed far earlier in every conflict. If they had, many of the blowups would never have occurred. Not that conciliation is any panacea; it offers only a marginal hope in an increasingly violent era. Today, the rigidity of hyperconsistent minds may well prove unshatterable by conciliatory techniques. Yet history shows that all those devices do work and are readily available--whenever Homo maniacus chooses to use them and save himself in the process.

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