Communication and Peace: Celebrating Moments of Sheer Human Togetherness [1st ed.] 9781137503534, 9781137503541

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
The Concept (Cees J. Hamelink)....Pages 1-35
A Polarized Planet (Cees J. Hamelink)....Pages 37-66
Deep Dialogue (Cees J. Hamelink)....Pages 67-87
A Tall Order (Cees J. Hamelink)....Pages 89-133
Desperate Optimism (Cees J. Hamelink)....Pages 135-153
Back Matter ....Pages 155-161

Citation preview

GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH A PALGRAVE AND IAMCR SERIES

Communication and Peace Celebrating Moments of Sheer Human Togetherness Cees J. Hamelink

IAMCR AIECS AIERI

Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series

Series Editors Marjan de Bruin HARP, Mona Campus The University of the West Indies Mona, Jamaica Claudia Padovani SPGI University of Padova Padova, Italy

The International Association for Media and Communications Research (IAMCR) has been, for over 50 years, a focal point and unique platform for academic debate and discussion on a variety of topics and issues generated by its many thematic Sections and Working groups (see http:// iamcr.org/) This new series specifically links to the intellectual capital of the IAMCR and offers more systematic and comprehensive opportunities for the publication of key research and debates. It will provide a forum for collective knowledge production and exchange through trans-disciplinary contributions. In the current phase of globalizing processes and increasing interactions, the series will provide a space to rethink those very categories of space and place, time and geography through which communication studies has evolved, thus contributing to identifying and refining concepts, theories and methods with which to explore the diverse realities of communication in a changing world. Its central aim is to provide a platform for knowledge exchange from different geo-cultural contexts. Books in the series will contribute diverse and plural perspectives on communication developments including from outside the Anglo-speaking world which is much needed in today’s globalized world in order to make sense of the complexities and intercultural challenges communication studies are facing.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15018

Cees J. Hamelink

Communication and Peace Celebrating Moments of Sheer Human Togetherness

Cees J. Hamelink University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands

Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series ISBN 978-1-137-50353-4 ISBN 978-1-137-50354-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Flashpop/gettyimages Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

This book is dedicated to the late maestro Peter Guidi who inspired so many kids to enjoy jazz music. One of his favourite lines was “Jazz is fun, serious fun”. It inspired me to say “Peace is fun, serious fun”

Preface

This book is the reflection of a journey undertaken to explore what a word with a special feel could mean in concrete terms. Zygmunt Bauman writes that some words have a feel. Peace has that. It feels good (Baumann 2001, 3). The beginning of this book looked simple. I had written about communication and warmongering and media and escalating conflicts. Now I would write about the contribution of communication to peace and as specialist in global communication the theme would be how can global communication contribute to global peace. Basic to all human societies is the question how we might live together and how we might experience togetherness as an inclusive experience. In exploring an answer to this question the word peace keeps coming back. Humanity has since long desired peace. Peace is an essential theme in human history. The longing for peace with ourselves, with our families, with others—even those we do not know—seems rooted in our hearts and goes beyond conventional interpretations of peace as the absence of war or violent conflict. In spite of the universal embracing of the word its meaning remains fuzzy. All of the conventional conceptualizations of peace in international law, philosophy, theology and in peace studies have serious shortcomings. It could be that most peace efforts have failed because of an unsatisfactory definition of the lead concept. Although peace may have always been a somewhat nebulous concept humans have throughout their history longed for peace and expressed this in poetry and literature, in

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the fine arts, in music, in sculpture and in religious and spiritual texts. It seemed to me that writing on Communication and Peace would only be possible if I presented to the readers my own understanding of peace. In the textbook on Global Communication (Hamelink 2015) I wrote that we always depart from normative perspectives when studying social phenomena. Perspectivism is inevitable. These perspectives do reflect different conceptions of social reality, different ideas of what science is, different notions of what constitute valid interpretations and even different responses to the question as to what it is that we should understand. There is no universal principle that tells us which perspective is preferable. We have therefore to take a position and make a choice for a specific viewpoint. Without a viewpoint there is nothing to see. Perspectivism is thus valueladen. Science is possible only from specific theoretical positions that are essentially contestable. The core of science is the challenge to conduct a permanent open and critical dialogue in which the assumptions from where we study phenomena are articulated and thus exposed to contestability. At its core science is observation and human perception is always guided by subjective preferences, experiences and values. This biased position is only a problem as long it is obscured and denied. For this book the normative perspective was guided by a choice for Hannah Arendt’s politics as “sheer human togetherness”, for William Isaacs plea for “thinking together”, for Barbara Ehrenreich’s argument about “collective joy”, for Kwame Anthony Appiah’s vision on cosmopolitanism and for the painter from Siena, Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Between February 1338 and May 1339 Lorenzetti painted The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in a series of three fresco panels that are in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. The painter of Sienna saw peace as life under good government and under prosperous economic conditions. Images in the painting that struck me were dancers and peasants going about their rituals and responsibilities in a leisurely way. Not guided by the conventional conceptions of time but by the movements of the seasons and the planets. The community depicted in Sienna suggests that peace is made by resilience, togetherness (Hannah Arendt), good governance, sound economic conditions, a creative time frame for leisure and dancing in the streets (Ehrenreich). It suggests that a peaceful world would overcome polarization and find common ground. (William Isaacs).

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Longing for Peace When the cult of Eirene (peace) was introduced to Athens and became a regular feature of the Greek religious calendar (in the fourth century BC) a bronze statute was placed in the Agora representing Eirene, the personification of peace carrying the boy Ploutos, the personification of wealth. From Hesiodus we learn that she is the daughter of Zeus and Themis. Not only was Eirene linked to Athens, but she also has roots in Corinth where she was raised along with her sisters, Dike (Order) and Eunomia (Justice).1 Also in Rome where the idea of peace was used as propaganda for Augustus’ political program of “peace and prosperity” sculptures referred to peace. An illustration is the sculpture on the southeast side of the altar Ara Pacis that was commissioned by emperor Augustus to honour and celebrate his victories in Spain and Gaul and the peace that he brought to Rome. The relief sculpture on the southeast side of the altar, Allegory of Peace, depicts three figures and several animals. Nancy Thomson de Grummond in her article, “Pax Augusta and the Horae on the Ara Pacis Augustae”, argues that the figures on the relief are the three Horae with Eirene or Pax Augusta in the center.2 Throughout the history of art the peace theme keeps coming back. In Dutch and Flemish paintings, in murals by Picasso and Diego Rivera, in the 2011 Yoko Ono exhibition that featured John & Yoko’s Year of Peace or by the street art mural paintings in countries affected by conflict around the world. In September 2016 the UN International Day of Peace was marked by a series of paintings on 30 walls simultaneously which transformed walls of separation into walls of connection. Street artists worked together with local communities to produce large-scale peace-themed murals in Beirut (Lebanon), Berdyansk (Ukraine), Davao City (Philippines), Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo), Kampala (Uganda), London (UK), in Nairobi’s Kibera slums, in the Bangladeshi city of Sylhet and in Mexico City. From the first fiction writing on peace in Aristophanes’ comedy play numerous literary texts have dealt with peace, among them children’s books. Peace poems were written among others by William Butler Yeats and George Herbert. In music and musical education peace has always been an important message. As Indian musician Zubin Mehta says “music only brings peace” or in the words of Daniel Barenboim “When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace”. Throughout the years songs about peace have been created to spread the message of peace, hope and love. Among the examples are Peace Train written by

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Yusuf Islam and performed by Cat Stevens, Let There Be Peace on Earth, written by Jill Jackson Miller & Sy Miller and performed by Vince Gill, Give Peace a Chance, written by John Lennon, performed by The Plastic Ono Band, Blowin’in the Wind by Bob Dylan, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? by Pete Seeger, One Love, by Bob Marley & the Wailers or Give Me Love by George Harrison. This is all very beautiful and inspiring. Yet, I failed to get what I am looking for: a conceptualization of peace that would be productive, realistic and inclusive. With productive I mean useful in concrete policies and projects. With realist I mean an approach that is non-perfectionist and non-utopian in the sense of not aspiring towards permanence and totality. I could not see peace mainly in terms of the end of wars and violent conflicts. Apart from the utopian character of such impossible end goals I also consider this too myopic because when war ends human relations in the sense of human togetherness are not necessarily restored. Therefore, I choose to take as a realistic point of departure the fractures that characterize the present human condition and that may accumulate towards existential risks for the human species. With inclusive I mean a conceptualization that is broadly applicable—beyond the conventional statal framework—to all types of human communities and beyond cultural barriers. This helped me to arrive at a proposal for an affirmative conceptualization of peace. Peace as a moment in which we celebrate sheer human togetherness. I should add immediately I understand human togetherness not as the in-group feeling that does not include the non-group members. All individuals in societies relate to a stronger or lesser degree to groups that are essential in the development of their identity, their existential meaning and their future perspectives. Groups give answers to such questions as “where do I come from”, “who am I and what is the sense of being me” and “where do I go, what is my destiny”. The collective answers to such questions render people vulnerable to the manipulation of their collective identity. The more the group cohesion grows, the individual members of the group will tend to ask ever less critical questions and identify with the suggested collective identity. The more cohesive in-groups become, the greater becomes the external disconnectedness to out-groups. The selfrespect of the group members is “tied to believing that their own group is better than other groups” (Pruitt and Kim 2004, 133). The intensification of feelings of responsibility for other members of the in-group in combination with the anonymity of crowds which diffuses individual responsibility towards members of the out-group is a lethal mixture.

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It makes it easier to blame, dehumanize and ultimately kill members of the out-group. This is particularly so, in case groups with different religious beliefs and cultural preferences are involved. Sheer human togetherness aspires to the inclusion of the stranger, the “other”. However, this should not be driven by the fear of being left out or the pressure to belong which is so characteristic of many fascist movements. Sheer human togetherness is also not meant as the inclusive togetherness of colonialism that invites the others to be together with us but on our conditions. A good descriptor for the human togetherness I have in mind is the word “cosmopolitan”. This stands for the feeling that you are part of humanity and have obligations towards others who may be different from you. As Appiah formulates is “People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences” (Appiah 2006, xv). The cosmopolitan also takes the local concerns about these differences seriously. It is intellectual laziness to simply categorize people’s anxieties about the loss of local preferences as xenophobia or populist fascism. We should not underestimate the importance of our local habitat in the definition of our identity. We live in localities as the places where we find the joyfulness and comfort of sociocultural (including language, customs, humour, religion) proximity. I believe we have to approach the polarized fragmentation that I will discuss in Chapter 2 from the position of a “cosmopolitan localism”. We embrace the stranger but from an embeddedness in our localities. I am inspired to think that we can do this because humans are the most communicative species on the planet. We are socially interactive creatures which makes cooperative communication central to our existence. I will suggest that we explore human togetherness through the modality of human interaction that I will call “deep dialogue”. The argument in this book leads to a conceptualization of that much desired though nebulous aspiration of peace as “celebrating moments of sheer togetherness”. The collective joy of celebrating needs however a qualification. Peace is not the celebrating of the pleasure that Germans describe as Schadenfreude: the guilty pleasure of enjoying the misfortunes of others. “To see others suffer does one good”, wrote the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “This is a hard saying, but a mighty, human, all-too-human principle”. And in Japan there is the proverb that “The misfortune of others tastes like honey”. This malevolent joy of celebrating collective damage—dancing on the dead bodies of the conquered ones—may be a joyful experience for the deranged mind and may create social cohesion but that would be a form of exclusionary togetherness. A togetherness to which some others

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are not invited. It should also be recognized that there is a dark side to collective human ecstasy “as expressed in rites of human sacrifice and war” (Ehrenreich 2007, 20). I use collective joy in the sense of an inclusionary togetherness that intends to accommodate the diversity of the human species. I propose a collective joy that is inclusive, loving, caring and altruistic. This collective joy includes others and accepts their alterity. It is an essential part of our cultural history that we should reclaim today. Acknowledgments for their contributions in many pleasant encounters are due especially to the late Peter Guidi (for many hours of deep dialogue), to Hans Achterhuis (who set me on the track of Hannah Arendt), to Loek Dullaart (for our philosophical dialogues in the garden), my librarian brother Ronald Hamelink (who always finds the material I want to use), Julia Hoffmann (who made me write this book), Huib Kraayenhof (for our whispering sessions on health on the planet), Norman Perryman (for the artists’ point of view), Glenn Sankatsing (for deep thinking on the future of our species) and to my Muse Gabriela Barrios Garrido (for love and friendship). I am particularly grateful to all the students (in Amsterdam, Athens, Merida, Mexico City, Puebla, Aruba, London and Friedrichshafen) who—without always realizing this—were great sounding boards for my effort to find a coherent way to talk about communication and peace. Special thanks are also due to my IAMCR sisters Marjan de Bruijn and Claudia Padovani for their support and willingness to respect my desire to escape the deadlines of “chronos” and enjoy the freedom of “kairos”. Amsterdam, The Netherlands December 2019

Cees J. Hamelink

Notes 1. Scully, S. (2015). Hesiod’s theogony: From near eastern creation myths to paradise lost. Oxford University Press. 2. De Grummond, Nancy T. “Pax Augusta and the Horea on the Ara Pacis Augustae.” American Journal of Archaeology, 94 (1990): 663–677.

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References Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism. New York: W. W. Norton. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1993). Between past and future. New York: Penguin Books. Baumann, Z. (2001). Community: Seeking safety in an insecure world. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ehrenreich, B. (2007). Dancing in the streets: A history of collective joy. London: Granta Books. Hamelink, C. J. (2015). Global communication. London: Sage. Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. New York: Random House. Pruitt, D. G., & Kim, S. H. (2004). Social conflict: Escalation, stalemate, and settlement. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Contents

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The Concept Peace in International Law Peace in Peace Studies Peace in Religions The Jewish Tradition The Christian Tradition Buddhism and Peace Hinduism and Peace The Bahai Tradition Islam and Peace Religions and Peace: Ambivalence Studies on Communication for Peace Peace Journalism Philosophers and Peace Summing Up Conclusion References

1 2 4 5 5 6 8 9 9 10 11 13 15 21 25 30 33

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A Polarized Planet Global Fractures Gender Fractures Urban Fractures Identity Fractures

37 38 40 42 45 xv

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Religious Fractures Polarization Existential Risk Conclusion References

49 57 59 62 65

Deep Dialogue The Origins On Cooperation On Trust On Mutuality On Patience The Basic Principle: Communicative Freedom Song and Dance Sanctuaries Conclusion References

67 68 78 78 79 79

A Tall Order Can We Trust Each Other in Our Conversations? Liars Surge in Dishonesty Can We Trust Those Who Govern Us? The Lie in Politics Political Speech Can We Trust the Mediators Between the Reality of the World and Our Own Reality? Journalistic Liars Voice for the Spin Doctors Selective Perception Selective Word Use and Prejudice Sloppiness Mediacomplicity Media and Reliability On Fake News Daily Communicative Practices Relaxed Playing Fields

80 81 85 85 86 89 90 90 98 101 101 102 108 108 110 112 113 114 114 115 120 125 127

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Conclusion References

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Desperate Optimism Introduction The Art of the Deep Dialogue and All That Jazz Learning the Art of the Deep Dialogue What Would Deep Dialogues Be About? The Deep Dialogue and Its Sanctuaries Memes and Cultural Evolution The Cooperative Species The Promise of Complexity The Small Victories Conclusion References

135 135 137 139 141 141 144 147 148 149 150 152

Author Index

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Subject Index

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CHAPTER 1

The Concept

The United States Strategic Air Command: “Peace is our profession” Erasmus “Peace is the mother and nurse of all that is good for humanity”

What a joy to greet your readers with peace be with you, pax vobiscum, as-salamu alaykum or shalom aleichem. The words sound wonderful. But what do these sweet words mean? And what do we want to achieve when we refer to cultures of peace, to peace mentality or peace spirituality. What do we expect that peacemakers should do? How well have we conceptualized peace? And why is this relevant? The International Day of Peace (“Peace Day”) is observed around the world each year on 21 September. Established in 1981 by a unanimous United Nations resolution, Peace Day provides a globally shared date for all humanity to contribute to building a Culture of Peace. But in order to build bridge engineers need to know what a bridge is. In order to build a culture of peace we need to know what peace is. What is on our minds when we engage in peace education? What are we educating for? And could it be that many of our well-intended peace efforts have failed because we never had a clear idea of what peace really is? It seems sensible therefore to explore whether in studies of international law, in peace studies, in theology, studies on communication and peace or modern political thought we can find a productive, realistic and inclusive conceptualization of peace.

© The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Hamelink, Communication and Peace, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1_1

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Peace in International Law In international law, one finds numerous references to the strengthening of international peace but no definition of what should be strengthened. In most international legal instruments, there is no definition of peace. Most relevant texts suggest that international peace should be promoted however without demanding a commitment to concrete measures. Most of the international instruments speak in the most general way about the ideal of peace, the spirit of peace and how various means (such as mutual respect and understanding) will strengthen peace. Could it be that the beautifully worded legal texts that leave the notion of peace a nebulous target serve the political purpose of convenient ambiguity? From its establishment the League of Nations (predecessor to the United Nations) was concerned about the relation between communication and peace, in particular the contribution of the press to peace. In 1931 the League asked the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (predecessor to UNESCO) to conduct a study on all questions related to the use of radio for good international relations. In 1933 the study “Broadcasting and Peace” was published and it recommended the drafting of a binding multilateral treaty. This treaty was concluded in September 1936 as the International Convention concerning the Use of Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace with the signature from 28 states. The fascist states did not participate. The convention entered into force on 2 April 1938 after accession or ratification by nine countries, Brazil, the UK, Denmark, France, India, Luxembourg, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa and Australia. Basic to the provisions of the convention was the recognition of the need to prevent broadcasting from being used in a manner prejudicial to good international understanding. The contracting parties agreed on the prohibition of transmissions which were likely to harm international understanding by incorrect statements (Hamelink 1994, 19). In the 1980s, several countries denounced the convention. Among them were Australia, France and the UK. In the late 1990s, the convention was still in force and had been ratified by 26 member states of the United Nations. The complex interaction of media and peace remained on the agenda of world politics after the Second World War and did generate some important norm-setting instruments that, however, did not define peace. This lack of a concrete conceptualization of peace is found in most of the international instruments that refer to peace. Examples are the Declaration on the use of scientific and technological progress in the interests

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of peace and the benefit of mankind (1975) or the UN Declaration on the promotion among youth of the ideals of peace, mutual respect and understanding between peoples (1965), and the UN declaration on the participation of women in promoting international peace and cooperation (1977). Even the United Nations Charter that addresses the peace issue in its first article provides no clarification as to what “living in peace” would mean. In the Declaration on the preparation of societies for life in peace (1978), there is reference to an inherent right to life in peace. But the explanation states only that advocacy of hatred and prejudice against other peoples is contrary to the principles of peaceful coexistence. In the Declaration on the right of people to peace (1984), it is provided that “people of our planet have a sacred right to peace”. The exercise of this right demands the elimination of the threat of war and the renunciation of the use of force. Also the International Year of Peace (1986) that focuses on the removal of threats to peace narrows the concept of peace down to the prevention of war and the use of violence. In the 1998 United Nations General Assembly Declaration on a Culture of Peace, art. 3 provides that a culture of peace includes the compliance with international obligations under the UN Charter and international law, such as the promotion of democracy and development. This seems to link the concept peace above all with the capacity to deal with violence. “Education for peace…..broadly includes nurturing knowledge, values, behaviours, and capacities to confront violence” (422). According to UNESCO the culture of peace is defined as a set of values, attitudes, modes of behaviour and ways of life that reject violence and aim to prevent conflicts by tackling their root causes through dialogue and negotiation between individuals, groups and nations (http://www.peace.ca/unesco.htm). Among the Proposals for a Culture of Peace Presented to the International Conference on Education (Geneva, October 1994) are: training and practice of conflict resolution and mediation in school systems, among staff and students, and extension through community involvement to the rest of society, linkage of school activities to ongoing activities in the community which promote participation by all in culture and development, and incorporation into curricula of information about social movements for peace and non-violence, democracy and equitable development. Systematic review and renovation of curricula were recommended to ensure an approach to ethnic, racial and cultural differences which emphasize their equality and unique contributions to the enrichment of the common good. Also the teaching of history should be systematically reviewed and

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renewed and should give as much emphasis to non-violent social change as to military aspects of history, and there should be special attention to the role of women in history. Essential to most international legal instruments is their embeddedness in a statal framework that by promoting peace through international law almost inherently focuses on peace as the absence of war or armed conflict. In an important contribution to combining international law and peace the authors state “Hence, peace may be situated within the micro-level of home and family, centring on interpersonal relations and the requirements of human dignity as an element of peace; as well as at the macro level, exploring the aspiration of equality between states and peoples” (Bailliet and Larsen 2015, 4). This would seem a welcome broadening of the concept but the authors never seriously address the micro-level. This is understandable as they do not manage to rid themselves of the statal framework. States are seen as the key actors in promoting peace because they have the legal obligation to do so. In the foreword to the study of Bailliet and Larsen, Asbjorn Eide refers to the UN resolution (39/11 of 1984) that provides that the peoples of our planet have a sacred right to peace. “The Assembly claimed that the preservation of the right of peoples to peace and the promotion of its implementation constitute a fundamental obligation of each state”. The editors do agree that “peace is an inherently elusive concept” (2) and “it is especially vague within the realm of international law” (2). Within the international statal framework legal instruments either provide no definition of the concept peace or narrow the conceptualization down to an opposition of peace versus war/violent conflict. This follows the thesis of Grotius that “between war and peace there is no middle position” (Grotius 1625 quoted in Dower 2009, 6).

Peace in Peace Studies Most peace studies programmes focus on questions like: What are the sources of violent political conflict and what institutions, strategies and tools are available to secure peace and justice? How can international and domestic factors foster peace, and what are the roles of norms, values and beliefs in peace efforts. Prominent peace researcher Johan Galtung distinguished (1996) negative peace and positive peace. According to him, peace does not mean the total absence of any conflict. It means

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the absence of violence in all forms (including structural and cultural violence) and the creative transformation of conflict in a constructive way. This raises the question as to how realistic the suggestion of a progression towards a state of non-violence is. There may be moments in human relations when there is no violence but in Galtung’s broad formulation of structural violence these moments would seem very scarce. In peace studies there is a tendency to see peace as a process of conflict transformation. The question however is whether all conflicts can be transformed and if they can what are they transformed into? Also Galtung’s positive conceptualization remains linked to notions of war, conflict and violence. It also seems to me to be too broad. It encompasses so much (human rights, development, justice) that it becomes unrealistic and not useful for a productive conceptualization of peace. It is obviously important that we should teach our fellow human beings and ourselves to respect the claims of others to equality, dignity, freedom and security. This would render the planet a more agreeable place to live. And, obviously, if we could learn how to de-escalate deep conflict we would all be better off. But even when achieving this the question remains whether we would really live in peace.

Peace in Religions The Jewish Tradition Peace is central to Judaism. Is it the ultimate purpose of the whole Torah that was written for the sake of peace and peace is what will save the Jewish people: “God announceth to Jerusalem that they (Israel) will be redeemed only through peace” (Deuteronomy Rabah 5:15). And as the prophets (Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3) said, “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore”. In Hebrew, the word for peace is shalom which stands for wholeness, health and harmonious relationships with others. At its core, shalom refers to more than just an absence of war or a resolution of conflict among formerly hostile parties. In Jewish Messianism there is the expectation that in the future a Messiah will emerge to bring all Jews to Israel and this will be the beginning of eternal global peace. An interesting concept in Judaism is Tikkun Olam the imperative to “repair the world”. This concept, originally formulated by Rabbi Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century

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Safed (Northern Israel), reflects the Jewish values of Justice (tzedakah), Compassion (chesed) and Peace (shalom), and it has come to symbolize a quest for social justice, freedom, equality, peace and the restoration of the environment. It is a call to repair the world through social action. It recognizes that each act of kindness, no matter how small, helps to build a new world. As the book Deuteronomy states “You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 16:18–21:9). Peace is so important a concept in Judaism that Jews have a religious obligation to pursue it. “Seek peace, and pursue it - seek it in your own place, and pursue it even to another place as well” (Leviticus Rabah 9:9). The Jewish concept also recognizes that true peace is part of a totality which includes justice and compassion. The traditional greeting, “Shalom Aleichem”, is the name of the song that begins the Shabbat meal every Friday night. Through this song the blessing of Jewish homes with peace is asked and this means that there should be no conflict between friends or family, especially not on Shabbat. The important blessing of Aaron the High Priest and brother of Moses, states “May the Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up His face toward you and give you Peace” (Numbers 6:24–26). The Christian Tradition In a long sermon at Carthage (in the year 413) Church father Augustine preached “Peacekeepers are people who are at peace with themselves and thus remain mindful to strengthen and make known the good of others. But even if you want to restore peace between two of your friends who have disagreement, you must begin by yourself to be peaceful. You must bring peace to yourself from within, where you are likely to struggle with yourself every day (De sermone Domini in monte 1,56). The Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches stated in 1956 “Deeply and persistently man longs for peace…..Christians everywhere are committed to world peace as a goal. However, for them peace means far more than absence of war; it is characterized positively by freedom, justice, truth and love. For such peace the Church must labour and pray”. Within the World Council of Churches and its member churches there has always been a

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strong conviction that peace should be pursued within the framework of justice. As the United Presbyterian Church (UPC) stated in 1980 “The pursuit of peace is the pursuit of Shalom, of what is right and just”. One of the consequences of this position is according to the UPC document “We cannot expect to have a peaceful world if the enormous disproportion of wealth and opportunity that now exist in the world are not brought under judgement and significantly modified”. Also in the theology of Paul Tillich peace is essentially linked with justice and this implies necessarily a discussion about the ambiguities of power because without this “a realistic approach to the peace problem is impossible” (1990, 176). The dilemma in the exercise of power with or without justice has been solved for many centuries with the idea of “just war”. In a nuclear age, Tillich argues, that notion has lost its meaning. “Most differences about the problems of peace are rooted ultimately in different interpretations of human nature and consequently of the meaning of history” (ibidem, 177). Hope for peace was often grounded in the belief in “humanity’s growing reasonableness” (ibidem, 178). A hope that time and again would be disappointed and therefore “….we cannot hope for a final stage of justice and peace within history, but we can hope for partial victories over the forces of evil in a particular moment of time” (ibidem, 181). Tillich points to the possibility that the resistance against those who violate the dignity principle can go from rebellion, to revolution and to warfare. It is a complex and controversial idea and religious wars over contrasting interpretations of justice “are the most cruel, most insistent and most devastating ones” (ibidem, 175). Controversies about justice create deep and dangerous fractures in person to person relations, but also in individual to group or group to group relations. The notion of justice is also found in the 1963 Encyclical letter of Pope XXIII (Pacem in Terris) on world peace. Its motto is Establishing Peace Among All Peoples in Truth, Justice, Love and Liberty. The basic principle of the encyclical is “justice”. The approach to peace is deeply embedded in the observation of the divinely established order of the universe that prevails in nature and to which the human order is linked. It is interesting that the Pope departs from an integration of the liberal tradition of universal and inviolable human rights with the natural law tradition. The human being is as person subject to fundamental rights and corresponding duties. Essential is the recognition of human dignity.1 The Pope grounded his support for human rights (and the UN human rights instruments) in the Christian faith “that humans have been made through the grace of Jesus Christ into

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sons (and daughters) and friends of God and heirs to eternal glory” (Holland 2012, 13). Following the tradition of a unified meaning and order in life the Scottish bishops proclaimed in 1982 “We do not accept a division of human beings into allies and enemies. We are brothers and sisters and the earth is our common inheritance; we have a common responsibility to share this world with everyone else, to pass it on uncontaminated, unpillaged, unspoiled, to future generations”. However, not all Christians expect a lasting world peace on this earth: “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household” (Matthew 10:34–36). Many Christians believe that world peace is expected to be manifest upon the “new earth” that is promised in Christian scriptures such as Revelation 21. In Christianity peace means the right relationship with God. This implies reconciliation, forgiveness and unity. Peace is ultimately a gift from God resulting from people’s loyalty to God. In the Old Testament shalom remains an unfulfilled promise, in the New Testament Jesus makes peace a reality. By dying at the cross he brought peace to all mankind and reconciled all those who were enemies. In July 2016 Pope Francis declared that the world is at war. “All religions want peace; it’s the others who want war”, said the Pope. As religions represent the majority of the world population the remaining 10% would then in the Pope’s vision be the belligerent bastards.

Buddhism and Peace The Buddha is often referred to as the “Prince of Peace”. Crucial to the Buddhist concept of peace is compassion and the notion of equality. In Buddhism, humankind is seen as one species. An active contemplative attitude enables people to be partners. It is common in Buddhism to believe that world peace can only be achieved if we first establish peace within ourselves. Basic to this is the belief that negative states of mind are the cause of wars and violence. Peace is possible only if we get rid of negative feelings and develop positive feelings such as love. In Buddhism, a central concept is the avoidance of violence. Around the world in cities like New Delhi, Tokyo, Vienna and London peace pagodas have been sources of inspiration for world peace. It is a Buddhist ideal to achieve

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a state of mind that can be described as “inward peace”. This is a state of complete freedom in which the mind is master of itself so people can discover the truth themselves. Religious life is thus based upon critical self-examination and not on blind faith, “There is no easy solution to the problem of how we can have peace on earth and goodwill among mankind ……. The great powers are working for peace by forging the weapons of war and talking about it for propagandistic purposes. But the real alternative to peace today is the destruction of mankind……There is hope in the possibility that the very fear of the dire consequences of the next war may prevent it. It would be too much to hope for a great power to have the moral courage and the spiritual strength to disarm unilaterally without fear of the consequences, but for those who love humanity more than themselves or nations there seems to me to be no other alternative but to work unreservedly for pacifism” (Jayatilleke 1962, 23).

Hinduism and Peace In Hinduism, an ancient Sanskrit phrase that translates as “The world is one family” is essential. The meaning of this phrase is that only inferior minds see dichotomies and divisions. The wiser minds think inclusively and free their internal spirit from worldly illusions. World peace is hence only achieved through internal means. We need to liberate ourselves from artificial boundaries that separate us all. Hinduism shares with Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism the essential concept of avoiding violence.

The Bahai Tradition The Bahai Faith distinguishes between two states of world peace: a lesser peace and a most great peace. The lesser peace is essentially a collective security agreement between the nations of the world. In this arrangement, nations agree to protect one another by rising up against an aggressor nation that seeks the usurpation of territory. The lesser peace is limited in scope and is concerned with the establishment of basic order and the universal recognition of national borders and the sovereignty of nations. Bahá’ís believe that the lesser peace operates largely through the Divine Will with only a minor Bahá’í influence on the process. The most great peace is the eventual end goal of the lesser peace and is envisioned as a time of spiritual and social unity—a time when the peoples of the world

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genuinely identify with and care for one another, rather than simply tolerating one other’s existence. This process takes place largely as a result of the spread of Bahá’í teachings, principles and practices throughout the world. The larger world peace process and its foundational elements are addressed in the document The Promise of World Peace, written by the Universal House of Justice and published in 1985.

Islam and Peace Islam has emphasized several principles to justly and fairly organize relationships among members of the society. Foremost among these principles is social justice. The aim behind social justice is to found a society that enjoys peace, fraternity, love and welfare. Indeed, justice in Islam is not restricted to or practised by Muslims only. Rather, it is the genuine right of all members of the society regardless of anything else. Justice stands for placing things in their rightful place and stands also for giving others equal treatment with no discrimination whatsoever. Some schools of thought within Islam suggest that achievement of global peace should be reached through forced Islamization and that it is the duty of Muslims to bring world peace through the sword. This is problematic since forcing belief is contrary to the freedom of religion that the Quran preaches. “There shall be no compulsion in (acceptance of) the religion” (Holy Qur’an 2:256). According to Islamic thinking about the end of time, the whole world will be united under the leadership of Prophet Isa(Jesus) and justice and peace will make the world like paradise. Islamic teachings propose that the journey towards true inner peace and tranquility involves an absolute faith and obedience through worship of only one God, the source of Ultimate Peace. The knowledge of having a common ancestry derived from Adam and Eve is evoked as a reminder for men and women to suppress the poisonous ideology of racial superiority and to enable communities and nations to live together in this shared world, in peace and harmony. Once an individual is at peace with himself and free of any internal agitations, he can then enter into truly peaceful relations with others. This begins with those closest to him in his family and extends to his neighbours and others in the community, eventually extending to all of humankind as a whole. Thus, Islam establishes an entire social structure in which people interact with others, based on relationships, rights and obligations, in ways that bring about a peaceful coexistence. The Islamic view of global

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peace is mentioned in the Quran, where the whole of humanity is recognized as one family. “Mankind was one community, (then they began to differ) whereupon God raised up the Prophets as heralds of glad tidings and as warners…” (Holy Qur’an 2:213). This could mean that peace will prevail in the world once mankind converts to Islam, although which branch of Islam is apparently still in dispute. In an interview with CBN News (2010), British Islamist Anjem Choudary rejected interpretations of Islam as a religion of peace. “You can’t say that Islam is a religion of peace”, he said, “Because Islam does not mean peace. Islam means submission. So the Muslim is one who submits. There is a place for violence in Islam. There is a place for jihad in Islam”. And indeed there are Quran sura’s like “I will cast fear into the hearts of the unbelievers. Therefore behead them and cut off all their fingertips” (8:12) or “Slay the unbelievers wherever you come upon them, take them captives and besiege them, and waylay them by setting ambushes” (9:5). These texts do not sound particularly peaceful. As Choudary said in the interview “What is curious is that no-one, so far as I know, has placed much or any emphasis on the earliest history of Islam. By any measure, this early history sadly demonstrates that Islam has never been a religion of peace and that modern jihadists, especially Salafis, take their inspiration directly from the actions of the first three generations of the faith, the Salaf (forefathers), the companions of the prophet, their children and their grandchildren. What is, or should be, worrisome, is that these figures could serve as role models for Muslims today”.

Religions and Peace: Ambivalence All the religious yearnings for peace are extremely ambivalent. Therefore, they are not very productive in providing us with a robust conceptualization of peace. Exemplary for this ambivalence was the peace councils and peace-keeping forces of the eleventh century (Armstrong 2014, 188). In 1095 the peace council of Clermont admonished Christians to fight God’s enemies and called for a crusade as an act of love. Karen Armstrong in the Afterword of her study on religion and violence wrote “Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action” (ibidem, 359). There is no “single, unchanging and inherently violence essence” in religion (ibidem). Yet, in the European sixteenthand seventeenth-century civil wars Christianity has not acted as a force of reconciliation. In the more recent confrontations in Northern Ireland,

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the Christian churches did not make peace. The secular enlightenment movement in Europe did more for peace through its separation of state and religion than the Roman Catholic Church that ferociously battled against the Enlightenment ideas.2 The major religions have contributed and legitimized massive violence against fellow human beings particularly when the honour of ethnic groups was equated with the honour of God and when what was perceived as immoral behaviour was equated with blasphemous conduct. Religions must distinguish between truth and error and as these distinctions are essential the histories of religions are characterized by hate, intolerance and violence. When Arthur Schopenhauer in his criticism of monotheïsm (quoted from Christopher Hitchens book, The Portable Atheist 2007) contrasts the peaceable historical record of the Hindus and the Buddhists with the wickedness and cruelty of the monotheists he makes the point that in monotheism the only God is a jealous God who is by definition intolerant. However, he overestimates the tolerance and friendliness of the gods in polytheism. In the bloody Hindu/Buddhist conflicts (1947, 1992, 2002) the spiritual traditions of both movements have not been able to control the massive violence. In Erasmus’ complaint peace hopes to find asylum among the clerus: “When I take a view of them at a distance, every outward and visible sign makes me conclude, that among them, at least, I shall certainly find a safe asylum. I like the looks of their white surplices; for white is my own favourite colour. I see figures of the cross about them, all symbolical of peace. I hear them all calling one another by the pleasant name of brother, a mark of extraordinary good-will and charity; I hear them salute each other with the words, ‘Peace be unto you’: apparently happy in an address so ominous of joy. I see a community of all things; I see them incorporated in a regular society, with the same place of worship, the same rules, and the same daily congregation. Who can avoid being confidently certain that here, if nowhere else in the world, a habitation will be found for peace? O, shame to tell! there is scarcely one man in these religious societies that is on good terms with his own bishop; though even this might be passed over as a trifling matter, if they were not torn to pieces by party disputes among each other. Where is the priest to be found, who has not a dispute with some other priest? Paul thinks it an insufferable enormity that a christian should go to law with a christian; and shall a priest contend with a priest, a bishop with a bishop?” (Erasmus 1517).

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Wherever people of different religions live in close proximity to each other, religious sectarianism can often be found in varying forms and degrees. In some areas, religious sectarians (e.g. Protestant and Catholic Christians) now live side-by-side for the most part, although their differences have resulted in the past in violence, death and outright warfare. Within Islam, there has been conflicted in various historical periods between Sunnis and Shias. Shi’ites consider Sunnis to be damned, due to their refusal to accept the first Caliph as Ali and accept all following descendants of him as infallible and divinely guided. Many Sunni religious leaders, including those inspired by Wahhabism and other ideologies, have declared Shias to be heretics and/or apostates. If—as I will argue later—fragmentation is a major obstacle for the celebration of cosmopolitan togetherness, deeply divided religious communities are certainly prime candidates for the obstruction of this essential togetherness. The major religions have very dubious credentials as peacemakers.

Studies on Communication for Peace Communication is an essential tool in the hands of warmongers, propagandists for violence and preachers of hate. This has been analysed in many studies. The more important question however is whether communication could contribute to peace. An answer to this question would need the conceptualization of peace in a robust way. Can we find this in studies on peace and communication? In general, it could be said that, beyond the engagement with and promotion of peace journalism, which is a rather specific limited set of normative claims about the role and impact of news media coverage of (mostly directly violent) conflict, there is very little literature that focuses on the relationship between communication and peace. Worse, the few exceptions that there are, do not clearly or only implicitly delineate their area of interest, leaving the core concept of peace, largely obscure. “The issues of peace, war, armament and disarmament have not been widely analysed in the scientific literature in relation to the mass media, communication or cultural consciousness”. Heinz Fabris and Tapio Vatis wrote this in 1986 (Varis 1986). Their statement still holds true many years later. Media studies have demonstrated an interest in the issue of war and when they did they usually addressed the effects of media propaganda for war, the contribution of media to the prevention and solution of lethal

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conflict and the ways in which news media cover war, conflict and violence. To a limited extent only have media studies taken up the peace issue. This is somewhat surprising since the fields of media studies (with research on mass media, news, entertainment, advertising, journalism and social media) and peace studies would seem to have a logical connection. One might have thought that media studies could have been inspired by the reflections the UNESCO offered in its Mass Media Declaration of 1978 (UNESCO 1978). According to the Declaration, it is the purpose of UNESCO to contribute to peace and security through promoting the free flow of ideas by word and image. The supporting argument is that the distribution of information counters prejudice and ignorance and that greater freedom of communications promotes understanding and confidence and gives expression to the desire of all peoples for peace. Admittedly, this is a rather narrow view on a one-dimensional relation between the free flow of information and the peace issue but even so it might provide an interesting starting point for academic research. At the origin of media studies war rather than peace as the key notion, the main research preoccupation (after the Second World War) focused on the prevention of yet another devastating war and on the social responsibility of the media in this effort. As a result, there was an interest in analyses of war coverage by news media and in studies of the effectiveness of propaganda for war efforts. In his study on war Quincy Wright (1965) addressed the question why peace propaganda is more difficult than war propaganda and concluded that peace is less interesting to human beings than war (ibidem, 31). In any case from a news perspective it is easier to find cases of war propaganda the effects of which can be studied than cases of peace propaganda. And, for media studies media effects are high on the academic agenda. Therefore, early media studies often provided analyses of war propaganda and its effects. Over the years media have covered peace activities only in minimal ways. There are several reasons for this. Journalists and their editors generally assume that the public interest prefers warlike activities over peace and military forces over peace movements unless a peace march ends in street violence. Also the interests behind the justification of warfare have always been more powerful than those backing up peace and the fact that media ownership was and is usually in the hands of combined media + military interests promotes more attention for armament than for disarmament. It should also be noted that war represents a reallife phenomenon that proves content for media. War consists of events (often very dramatic) that can be observed and covered. These events

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offer media contents that media studies can analyse. Covering peace is more problematic. Does peace exist as a real set of events? Is peace not an aspiration in people’s minds rather than a real-life process with newsworthy human interest and political features? Peace is not a clear-cut process or state about which reporters can write stories. To a large extent peace is for journalists a non-event. War matches the media logic better than peace. The acts that constitute war are more limited and relatively easy to comprehend. The peace effort is multi-interpretable, very complex and multi-layered. Where would you go as researcher if you wanted to investigate the representation of peace in the media? This would indeed be much harder to find than media representations of different modalities of violence among individuals and groups. The dominance of war coverage is arguably related to a worldwide preference for bad news among media professionals and their audiences, as will be discussed in Chapter 3. What, however, would happen if media studies aspired to study the peace issue more extensively? The first problem to deal with is that the interpretations and definitions of peace go in many different directions. There is no easy political or academic consensus on what peace is or should be. We always live in a multitude of relations among individuals, groups and institutions. These relations move constantly between killing fields, armistices, negotiations, reconciliation, consolation, threats, stereotypes and peaceful coexistence. This is difficult to quantify and thus to measure and there is increasing pressure on media studies to focus—as real science—on quantification. As a result, what cannot be “objectively” measured does not seem worth studying. My conclusion is that peace is not a media issue. Peace is not mediastuff. As a result, there is little to nothing to study in terms of contents or effects. Media studies could address the question of how media (conventional and new) could promote the conditionalities for a complete (global and inclusive) state of well-being. One should however realize that even if media students were sufficiently inquisitive, courageous and critical to engage with this question, they should realize that media practitioners and media politicians might only be mildly—if at all—interested.

Peace Journalism Various authors have suggested that a format in which communication could contribute to de-escalation would be “peace journalism”. This notion was launched by Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung as

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a counterpoint to the dominant format of conflict reporting. Conventional war journalism focuses on war as a zero-sum game with winners versus losers, is oriented towards us versus them propaganda and uses victory and defeat metaphors. Peace journalism is more empathic, proactive and focused upon the effects of violence. It exposes propagandistic lies and highlights peace initiatives. In short, peace journalism provides a more balanced news coverage, seeks alternative interpretations, focuses on context, is proactive, humanizes all sides in a conflict, exposes lies from all sides, exposes the suffering, pain and trauma of warfare, and de-anonymizes the evil-doers. We are better at war-reporting than at peace-reporting (Galtung) and have more war specialists than peace experts in TV commentaries. In February 2003 in connection with the speech by Colin Powell to the UN the major US nightly networks did 393 interviews to which only 3 anti-war leaders were invited. As Amy Goodman in an interview with WACC journal Media Development, vol. LV, 4/2008; 50–51 commented “those who are opposed to war, those who are opposed to torture are not a fringe minority, they are not a silent minority, but they are the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media”. The key hypothesis of peace journalism studies is that “conventional news routines and news values tend towards conflict escalation” (Hackett and Schroeder 2008, 26). Suleyman Irvan (2006) defines peace journalism as a normative theory that obliges media to be socially responsible and promote peace. Peace journalism proposes what media should do in order to positively contribute to violent conflict. The literature on peace journalism is aware of essential obstacles to the realization of this normative position. Conceptions of journalistic professionalism that focus on objectivity can be impediments since they suggest that peace journalism threatens professional integrity and independent reporting of the news. Institutional impediments to peace journalism are the prevailing mode of organization and management of media that often operate as commercial enterprises driven by an obsessions with market shares, ratings and scoops. There are also obstacles in the form of nationalist sentiments. When the nation goes to war, there is a strong inclination among media to follow the flag and become partisan to the conflict. It is pretty obvious that—within reasonable limits—a more balanced and less propagandistic, partisan and war-triumphalist news reporting is an important factor in the de-escalation of conflict. It may also stimulate the uncritical bystanders in conflict situations to ask more questions. However, there are serious flaws

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in the peace journalism proposals. There tends to be a somewhat romantic expectation about the transformation of violent conflicts. It is however highly unlikely that the reality, pervasiveness and perseverance of intergroup conflicts can be transformed into sustainable peaceful relations. There is too much historical evidence to support Reinhold Niebuhr’s conclusion that “society is in a perpetual state of war” (1932, 19) to expect journalists to be able to promote peace. The second flaw in peace journalism proposals is the lack of awareness of the necessity of societal receptivity to the offerings of the peace promoting journalist. Unless societies (i.e. media audiences) at large care about the specific qualities of a more qualified, more contextualized, less sensationalist, less partisan and more investigative conflict reporting the journalistic effort is an exercise in futility. As suggested before, an essential question is whether the realities of news production as business, of news as commodity, of prevailing news-institutional interests and professional standard operations, can accommodate the routines and value orientations of media formats that accommodate peace journalism in both pre-escalation and post-escalation situations. This would definitely require a substantial change in the ways journalism is organized on the supply side. Even more importantly though is that this requires—on the demand side—a substantial change in the expectations of news audiences. Critical researchers may propose different news styles but global audiences in massive numbers demonstrate no disturbing dissatisfaction with the “news as it is”. The concern for mass media performance is not the sole responsibility of media producers. It also involves client communities. “The listening, viewing, reading public underestimates its power”, wrote Wilbur Schramm in 1969 when he pointed to the shared responsibility of public regulatory bodies, the media themselves and the general public for the quality of mass communication (Schramm and Rivers 1969, 249). In 1993 journalist Mort Rosenblum also included the role of the general public in the inadequacies of international news reporting “If the suppliers haven not done better, it is because consumers have not demanded it” (Rosenblum 1993, 287). When armed conflicts begin often the words of senator Hiram Johnson are heard, “In times of war truth is the first victim”. But a good second victim would seem to be the public interest in knowing the truth. Often media audiences prefer not to know all the details of armed confrontations. Reliable media need good quality audiences. Since the provision of information is of critical importance in democratic societies citizens can be asked to be vigilant media consumers that actively and critically reflect on media

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contents. Unless media consumers worldwide demand to be properly informed about conflicts in peace journalism formats, it is unrealistic to expect the news business to change winning horses. Media are part of the societal context within which they function. Research evidence does indeed suggest that by and large media are followers and not leaders. In most important social debates media may look like the initiators but they are usually the disseminators, the amplifiers, not the pioneers. Examples abound of social movements that are the first definers of social issues such as gender, race, pacifism or climate change. In the literature on peace and media, the emphasis tends to be on the role of communication in conflict resolution with the implicit assumption that resolution of conflicts equates peace. This needs to be questioned. First of all because many conflicts between individuals and groups cannot be resolved at all. Human life is impossible without the relations we develop on global, local and personal levels. These relations are never without conflict. There are always opposite positions, differences, incompatibilities and disagreements. Conflict is a constitutive element of human life. If we accept this, it seems odd that so much time and energy is invested—worldwide—in the prevention and resolution of conflict. One finds in both literature and practice a great deal of attention for the prevention and/or resolution of conflicts. All this activity suggests that conflicts can and should be prevented and that they can and should be resolved. We should rather direct our efforts to the understanding and prevention of the escalation of conflicts into irreparable damage. Accepting the inevitability of conflict may help us to discover that conflict can even be desirable. As Canary et al. observes (1995, 124) “Perhaps more than any other type of interaction, conflict acts as a catalyst for personal development”. The attempt to resolve at all costs the confrontations between parents and children, for example, may seriously obstruct the independent development of children towards maturity. Conflict can often be a positive force for change. It can act as an agent of reform, adaptation and development. “To experience conflicts knowingly, though it may be distressing, can be an invaluable asset” (Horney 1945, 27). Conflict does not necessarily stand in the way of satisfactory human relations. The frequency of conflict says relatively little about the quality of relationships (Canary, o.c., 126). Conflicts can be a source of creativity and growth. If indeed conflicts are a constitutive element of the human condition and inherent to human life, they cannot always be prevented. Moreover, sometimes it is even undesirable to want them resolved. Some conflicts are irresolvable since they are the result

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of fundamental personality, cultural or religious differences, or the result of essential and mutually exclusive needs of parties. Conflicts may be insoluble because there is no reasonable answer to the clash of positions. There are situations in life that demand choices between two or more fundamental moral principles that are equally valid but demand different and conflicting courses of action. Rather than relying on the conflict resolution gurus, parties should find ways to live with such disputes without irreparably damaging their relationship. People may have disputes about non-negotiable issues that cannot be de-escalated and they will have to accept that history just takes its bloody course. Essential to framing peace as the end of war and violent conflict is the expectation that wars and violent conflicts could be transformed into more peaceful relations between parties. This finds some support from studies among others by Steven Pinker who documented a decline of armed and lethal confrontations over time. However, “…the much lauded ‘decline of war’ (Pinker 2011), clearly visible in the statistics for the 1990s and the early 2000s, appears to be not only halted but reversed” (Backer et al. 2018, 15). Whereas “2005-2011 was an exceptionally peaceful period –probably among the least violent in human history” (ibidem, 21), it needs to be observed that in recent times there is return of lethal conflict with many casualties. “The trend towards a more peaceful world was broken in 2011…..Based on data from 2015, we must acknowledge that the number of conflicts and the number of casualties are indeed at a higher level than they were five years ago” (ibidem, 22). The question obviously is whether this represents a long-term trend. Important in this context is the observation that “every new conflict that broke out in 2015 involved, except one, militant Islamist actors”. “Muslim countries have historically accounted for a fair share of the world’s wars, ranging up to 60% between 1946 and 2000. From 2005 onwards, however, a pronounced shift is observed, whereby Muslim countries predominate on the list of conflicts” (ibidem, 21). For the conceptualization of peace as the resolution of violent conflict, it is important to note that cessation of hostilities does not mean that a conflict has been resolved. Parties often mull over conflicts long after the confrontational situation has ended, and thus the silent dispute may continue. Conflicts do not disappear when parties have forgiven each other. Conflicts may also re-appear in different forms. The ending of a conflict may almost immediately lead to another conflict, possibly less violent

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but very disturbing for those involved. An illustration could be the postgenocidal situation in Cambodia. After the unimaginable massacres by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the liberation arrived with the establishment of a ruthless “free” market economy that caused enormous gaps between the privileged elite and disenfranchised majorities: a new conflict with its own losers and victims. The core conflict of a dangerously divided population was not resolved. Very real conflicts may be downsized by compromises, but these are not the same as solutions. Compromises often create artificial harmony. Compromise solutions may be accepted although none of the actors is particularly content with this and the confrontation of positions could—in the end—have yielded a more beneficial outcome (Pruitt and Kims 2004, 97). Conflicting self-interests between social groups can never be fully resolved. A temporary accommodation may be achieved usually based upon the physical power that one group is able to wield over the other group. As soon as the other group feels powerful enough to challenge this power, it will try to change the accommodation towards serving its own collective egoism. Withdrawal from and avoidance of conflict can be constructive on the short-term but is often very dysfunctional in the longer term. Real issues and real positions on these issues will not disappear by avoidance behaviour. If one party (A) really wants to address an issue and the other (B) withdraws, this does not lessen the interest A has in the dispute and does not improve relational quality. Often conflicts remain latent and are kept under control by normative rules of conduct that people have formally accepted or internalized for the governance of their behaviour in the family, at work, or on the road. Most societies have developed mechanisms to deal with conflict and prevent it from turning violent. Every society has rules, etiquettes and rituals to cope with conflict in ways that avoid that too much damage is done to fellow human beings. In the higher developed animals, we find a great deal of rituals to avoid such damage. If non-human animals kill their own species, they usually kill only a small number. Human animals are capable of killing vast numbers of their own species in relatively short periods. Human rituals to tame aggression are poorly developed. All laudable efforts in communication for peace projects have not seriously changed this. Actually, despite many international mediation successes it is likely that many violent conflicts were not fundamentally resolved but hostilities were temporarily suspended and they may come back with a vengeance. If one concludes that important types of conflict cannot be prevented, cannot really be resolved and in some cases should not even

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be resolved as they are essential to human life and its development, the core challenge for peace journalism would not be to resolve conflicts, but to understand the dynamics of conflict. It is essential to understand how disagreements cross an “invisible line” and develop into lethal confrontations. How do disputes escalate from safety zones to danger zones? Conflicts become dangerous when the invisible line is crossed. The crossing has no clear demarcation and there are different invisible lines in different situations. Once they are crossed, conflicts escalate and may have very damaging, even lethal outcomes. My quest so far concludes that in international law, theology, and peace studies, one finds commonly three positions: the idea of peace is not defined at all, it is conceptualized in a negative way or in an affirmative way. All three positions have considerable flaws but they also offer building blocks for a robust conceptualization. To explore this further I now turn to some philosophers that have addressed the question of peace.

Philosophers and Peace Philosophers have a long tradition of giving little attention to peace. This is understandable when peace is seen as the absence of war and war is seen as noble (Aristotle), as the key thought for princes (Machiavelli), as the natural state of mankind (Hobbes), as a perennial necessity (Hegel) or as “the father of all things” (Heidegger). And yet, peace has been an issue for philosophers from Mencius, student of Confucius, to Jurgen Habermas. They have conceptualized it as an idealist, utopian notion, a moral aspiration, a legal concept or a political programme. The history of philosophical thought on peace shows a multidimensionality of conceptual approaches.3 My reading of philosophers on peace was intended as exploration of useful clues for a robust conceptualization of peace. Although many thinkers used a war versus peace conceptual frame (in which the doctrine of the “just war” was often basic) and restricted peaceful relations to relations between states, the following leads emerged. Throughout the history of the deep longing for peace thinkers and actvisists were stimulated thinkers and activists to find solutions for the world’s violent conflicts. There is a long history that prepares for the modern global peace movement. On the turn of the thirteenth-/fourteenthcentury legal scholar, Pierre Dubois proposed that the bishop of Rome convened a conference to deal with conflicts among Christians. Under his presidency, according to Dubois, the participants should endorse the rule that no Catholic monarch should attack another Catholic monarch.

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Quarrels between Christian princes could no longer be settled with the sword, but had to be resolved at the conference. And in the sixteenth century Maximilien de Béthune, duke of Sully, invented a “big design” that proposed a mixture of statal interest and beautiful words about universal values. Sully was minister under the French king Henry IV (1533– 1610) and he tried to find a solution for the situation in which all of Europe was threatened to be ruled by the house of the Habsburgers. Arguably the first pacifist intellectual writing on peace was by Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) who has often been said to be the inventor of peace. In his The Complaint of Peace, the character Peace tells about his life as expelled and persecuted. At the end, Peace speaks to the princes, with the call to become allies in the pursuit of eternal peace. “Let us then turn to peace that Christ may recognize us as His own. Let popes, princes, and cities deliberate on that……As to the people in all these countries the greater part of the people certainly detest war, and most devoutly wish for peace. A very few of them, indeed, whose unnatural happiness depends upon the public misery, may wish for war; but it is yours to decide, whether it is equitable or not, that the unprincipled selfishness of such wretches should have more weight than the anxious wishes of all good men united. You plainly see, that hitherto nothing has been effectually done towards permanent peace by treaties, no good end answered by royal intermarriages, neither by violence, nor by revenge. Now then it is time to pursue different measures; to try the experiment, what a placable disposition, and a mutual desire to do acts of friendship and kindness, can accomplish in promoting national amity. It is the nature of wars, that one should sow the seeds of another; it is the nature of revenge to produce reciprocal revenge. Now then, on the contrary, let kindness generate kindness, one good turn become productive of another; and let him be considered as the most kingly character, the greatest and best potentate, who is ready to concede the most from his own strict right, and to sacrifice all exclusive privilege to the happiness of the people”. For Spinoza (1632–1677) “peace is not being free from war but a virtue that arises from strength”. Individuals must surmount their basic selfish interests and recognize the necessity of participation in civil society that through law and reason serve the advantage of individuals. For the sake of peace individuals must live in a condition where there is a constant will of following what ought to be done according to the common decree of the governing authority. “Living in that condition, says Spinoza, is peace” (Bagley 2015, 41). And “It may be said

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that Spinoza’s answer to the question of peace is to promote liberty and tolerance through obedience to law” (ibidem, 41). In Sikkenga’s reading of John Locke (1632–1704) “there must be a liberal political culture – a set of practices sustained by people at once motivated by self-interest, yet capable of self-regulating behaviour” (Koivukoski and Tabachnick 2015, 5) and it is needed “to cultivate a peaceful public sphere is the shaping of citizens who are inclined to peaceful coexistence” (ibidem, 5). Essential is a liberal education that teaches the value of freedom. Although still locked in the war versus peace frame Locke saw the need for liberal societies that promote “good will, mutual assistance, and preservation” (Sikkenga 2015, 71). “Liberal societies…do not try to dominate the lives, liberties or properties of people in their own or other societies… ” (ibidem, 72). Locke believes that main goal of education is to create “industrious and rational” people that can overcome an innate desire to exercise power. A peaceful society is based on liberty and reason not on the unreasonable love for domination. Peace needs “passion for inquiry and free-thinking is important because many citizens may hold significantly different views on political, philosophical and religious matters” (ibidem, 83). In his view liberal education (which includes dancing and music) will “produce tolerant dispositions combined with the firm belief that others are also entitled to their opinions (and may even be right)” (ibidem). At the end of the eighteenth century (on the eve of the Napoleonic wars, 1803–1815) somewhere in the ravaged Germany a Dutch innkeeper had given his tavern the name Zum Ewigen Frieden. He had a graveyard painted on the sign above the entrance suggesting either that his tavern was forever a peaceful place or that peace among people and nations would not prevail until everyone was dead. The philosopher Immanuel Kant 1724–1804) mentioned this sign in the preface of his essay with the same title (1795). “Whether this satirical inscription on a certain Dutch shopkeeper’s sign, on which a graveyard was painted, holds for men in general, or especially for heads of state who can never get enough of war, or perhaps only for philosophers who dream that sweet dream is not for us to decide” (p. 1). His essay To Perpetual Peace is integral part of Kant’s broad political and philosophical system that forms the basis for his argument that pursuing perpetual peace among nations is an essential moral obligation for humanity (Koivukoski and Tabachnick 2015, 7). Although Kant does not propose a definition of the state of peace that must be established, he recommends provisions for a perpetual place that all seem to point to overcoming the natural state “among men living in close proximity”

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which is the state of war. He argues strongly for such provisions as the republican constitution of every nation, the rights of nations based on a federation of free states and conditions of universal hospitality. They may contribute to minimize risks of warfare between nations but do not provide an image of what concrete state people would live in if wars ended. Kant wants a realistic peace rather than utopian dreams. Peace should be based on the notion of universal human rights. Peace as a political project needs concrete action and Kant “insists that we have a present duty to work towards peace, albeit with the limits of present practicality……” (Bradshaw 2015, 134). Kant recognizes there may be doubts regarding the project for peace but “so long as (these doubts) do not have the force of certainty, I cannot exchange my duty for a rule of expediency which says I ought not to attempt the impracticable” (ibidem, 135). For Kant peace is a practical and political project. This is also the core of Arendt’s thought about peace. Politics is the most likely route to peace as “it represents the finding and protecting of common spaces for agreement, disagreement, or engaging in peaceful relations” (Koivukoski and Tabachnick 2015, 10). Clearest is the connection of war and peace in the thinking of Martin Heidegger (1884–1976) who suggests that in the contemporary world we can no longer distinguish between war and peace (Tabachnik 2015, 193). For Jacques Derrida peace should be understood as a relationship with otherness. Peace is a universality that arises out of our differences and our divided beings (Koivukoski and Tabachnick 2015, 11). For Derrida according to Pamela Huber “peace is neither a reality nor a potential. Rather, it is something that may tangibly only exist when we work to make it a reality. As soon as we stop acting, it disappears. For Derrida, peace is in the doing” (2015, 243). For Jurgen Habermas peace is a legal concept and a process of legal pacification. It is not merely a negative concept. “Rather, it is a positive concept that describes the transformation of political relations according to normatively legitimated rules and/or procedures, which we can respect because they are right” (Borman 2015, 271). Habermas writes “Kant was satisfied with a purely negative conception of peace. This is unsatisfactory not only because all the limits on the conduct of war have now been surpassed, but also because of the new global circumstances that link the emergence of wars to specifically societal causes” (ibidem, 272). Peace is also a process through which socioeconomic conditions are transformed such as to render peaceful common life possible (ibidem, 272). However, in his elaboration of the conditions

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for his positive conceptualization of peace Habermas does not manage to create sufficient distance from a negative conceptualization. It is unclear how his scepticism about reaching a global consensus on distributive justice (ibidem, 279) relates to his plea for a shared understanding of peace, that is for peace in the broad sense of a common life that respects social, economic and cultural rights. He insists on ambitious but realistic prospects for global peace as a non-utopian project. However, it remains unclear how the global community would achieve this. I agree with his harsh criticism of the current global order and its institutions like the UN and share his scepticism about states willing to give up their sovereign power over the common life of their citizens. States are not the best partners in a process of fundamental transformation that would motivate them to respect the socio-economic and cultural rights of their citizens. As Borman writes “Habermas obviously hopes that this motivation will come from the citizens themselves, but how, and why?” (ibidem, 280). A fundamental problem with most modern philosophical thought is that the notion of peace remains embedded in a war versus peace framework which fails to recognize that without war people do not necessarily live in what could be described as peaceful relations. I believe that abusive, exploitative and humiliating relations between individuals or social groups cannot be characterized as peaceful. Even if it is recognized—as in Kant’s thought—that individual states are only able to end wars through supra-state institutional structures—such as a league of states—I find it a myopic vision to relate peaceful relations to inter-state or supra-state relations because it obscures to sight on a multitude on other relations that can in honesty not be described as peaceful.

Summing Up Having accepted the challenging task of writing a book on Communication and Peace, the first problem I encountered was a rather fuzzy notion of what peace is understood to be. Admittedly communication is also a multi-interpretable concept but I could at least define the core of human communication as conversation. Conversation obviously comes in many shapes and shades and it could only be more precisely defined in relationship to what the conversation would be for or would be about. Having a clearer understanding of peace could lead me to fine-tune the kind of conversation that would contribute to a situation that could be defined as peace.

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Overviewing the literature my conclusion is that thinking about peace takes three forms: there is no definition of peace (it seems self-understood or is deliberately left vague for political convenience), there is a negative conceptualization that defines peace as the absence of war and violent conflict and there is an affirmative conceptualization that tends to equate peace with lofty goals such as justice. *There is no clear definition The verbs most often used in connection with peace are building, strengthening, promoting, making, maintaining and keeping. But what does this mean if the object of such activities is unclear? Peace building sounds good but if you were an architect and had to build a bridge you would have to know what a bridge is. Churches have often been referred to as peacemakers. Everyone would understand the churches as pizzamakers. There may be a variety of possibilities but the basic concept of pizza is clear. But without defining what peace is what are those churches making? Ways of conceptualizing peace are the basis for peacemaking. What one does to achieve peace depends on how one imagines or defines peace. If our present peace efforts have failed to assure a world in which we can flourish together, then our conception of peace may need revision. It may be our inability to make the concept clear that has led to failure. Indeed “peace” has proven difficult to define. Perhaps the lack of definition has rhetorical uses for political leaders who benefit from the ambiguity of the term. In politics grey shades are usually preferred above clarity. Grey provides more space for the wheeling and dealing and the muddling through that is so common in the political process. But for an increasingly interdependent world that drifts rapidly towards unparalleled catastrophe this is a supreme form of irresponsibility. We must reach some level of agreement on what peace might be and explore different ways of conceptualizing it. *The negative conceptualization of peace Peace is often conceptualized as the absence of war, violent conflict and injustice. Much writing on peace suggests that peace can only be described as a state of living without war and violent conflict. There is no longer warfare in Bosnia but between Muslims, Croats and Serbians the city of Mostar rests divided as during the ethnic battles of 1992 and 1994. This illustrates how communities that were once violently hostile to each other often continue to be fragmented. Mostar has two separate fire brigades one for Muslims and one for Catholics. A peace accord was concluded in Dayton (USA, 1995) but the agreement in fact strengthened the power of nationalist elites certainly when embedded in the reality of

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increasing polarization in both the USA and Europe. Similarly, when in Syria President Bashar-al-Assad wins the war, there is no automatic reconciliation between minority and majority communities that are so poisoned by mutual hate that harmonious coexistence may take many generations certainly in a corrupt and repressive environment. “Kings! To you I make my first appeal. On your nod, so is the constitution of human affairs, the happiness of mortals is made to depend. You assume to be the images and representatives of Christ, your Sovereign. Then as you wish men to hear your voice show the examples of obedience and hear the voice of your Sovereign Lord, commanding you upon your duty, to seek peace and abolish war”. Desiderius Erasmus wrote this in his The Complaint of Peace (Querela pacis, 1517). He thought of peace primarily as the absence of war. Erasmus saw war as the essential obstacle to peace and even argued that an unjust peace is better than a just war. The doctrine of the just war deserves to be contested because—although defensive action against violent aggression might be justified—an unjust peace is no peace. The absence of war does not mean that people live in dignity. It would seem unlikely that people—even if there was no war— would refer to their “living in peace” if they live in misery, humiliation and discrimination and if they belonged to killable and rapeable communities. It makes little sense to see a life under the threat of poverty and crime as a life in peace. Can a world that is not at war but is under the threat of nuclear destruction or extinction seriously be called a world at peace! It should also be asked how realistic it is to strive towards the absence of war and violent conflict. Evidently, one need not argue how dramatic and traumatic these events are. Yet, they have always been with us. We are better at war making than at peacemaking. War comes naturally and is easy. It requires skills for deception, cunning, violence and ruthlessness, whereas peace requires patience, tolerance, resolve and courage. An attractive feature of war is that it is an intensely cooperative venture. And we are genetically well equipped for warfare. Killing con-specifics is part of our evolutionary history. The human being is a murderous mammal and behind the deceptive image of the harmless hunter-gatherer tribes there are too many reports of revenge killings and group-sponsored executions (Boehm 2012, 260).4 A world without violence would likely be a world without human beings. Negative peace tends to be seen within the narrow-minded nation state framework. States are indeed usually the warring parties but if they do not wage war and families, marriages and workplaces continue to be sites

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of harassment, humiliation and disappointment it is difficult to portray this as peaceful living. Concentrating on warfare we may lose sight of the numerous ways in which people kill, maim or humiliate each other and do what war does: inflicting costs on competitors and destroying the wholeness of life. The statal “war versus peace” framework seems too static as it tends to conceptualize peace as an end-state, even as an eternal state. This may be a dangerous delusion. We have always been at war and it seems very unrealistic that given our evolutionary history this would change. Kant’s eternal peace is likely the peace of the graveyard of the political as implies the elimination of all differences and, thus, the end of the democratic process. The vision of everlasting peace is a fallacious utopian construct. Peace and war are temporal phenomena and can be better understood when seen as dynamic and impermanent processes. If peace is not a state but a process, we can project realistic aspirations that provide hope rather than fear or indifference. It should also be added that the “war versus peace” framework grossly invalidates the broad significance of the concept peace. Peace is too complex to be housed in the limited space of binary thinking. It fits better in inclusive thinking where war does not exclude peace and where peace does not exclude war. There is also the added complication of a negative conceptualization that defining A by the absence of B does not necessarily clearly describes what A might beyond a situation in which B does not occur. If I define love as the absence of hate, I still do not understand what love is. This leads me into the direction of an affirmative positive conceptualization of peace. *The affirmative conceptualization of peace There are in the literature several proposals to extend the concept of peace beyond the absence of war. Johan Galtung introduced in 1964 the concept “positive peace”. More than the absence of war peace includes economic development and social justice. In this line of thought domestic peace would have to include the respect for social, economic and cultural rights. Much earlier Spinoza wrote that peace is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition towards trust and justice. Martin Luther King suggested that peace is not the absence of tension but the presence of justice. However, if we conceptualize peace in an affirmative way, this could mean that we exchange one nebulous concept for another fuzzy idea. How productive is it really to equate peace with justice? There are many different interpretations of justice. Justice has been defined as fairness, moral righteousness, correctness, getting what you deserve or equality. The concept of justice differs in every culture. Theories on justice have been developed

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by Plato in his book The Republic, by natural rights defenders such as seventeenth-century John Locke or nineteenth-century utilitarian thinker John Stuart Mill. Theories were developed in the traditions of the social contract, redistributive justice or egalitarianism. Moreover, achieving justice—for example in the Syrian drama—would mean bringing Assad to justice which would lead to many more deaths. Sometimes the violent conflict can only end when the perpetrators are not prosecuted. Like the ending of the trouble in Northern Ireland required that perpetrators of crimes on both IRA and British side went unpunished. Impunity is the price paid for stopping violent acts but it also means that justice was sacrificed. In popular culture (film and TV) justice is often equated with retribution and revenge. A world in which people revenge injustices done to them or others does not strike me as a peaceful society. “While full injustice may be impossible, complete impunity is now generally recognized to be unacceptable” (Hayner 2018, 10). But everywhere in the world there is still ample space for impunity arrangements if these serve geopolitical and especially economic interests. The equation of peace with justice is complicated because there is tension between the two concepts and often between the professional communities that work towards justice in the sense of recognition of human rights violations and the avoidance of impunity and those who aspire towards the ending of violent conflict. “Human rights proponents worry that peace mediators will too easily sacrifice justice and that an impunity deal will only lead to more abuse” (Hayner 2018, 9). The complexity of achieving peace and at the same time addressing the justice issue (and particularly the impunity issue) is such that proposing that peace as justice is not particularly helpful in the search for a robust conceptualization. Also the peacemaker’s paradox: “how to obtain sufficient justice without scuttling the possibility of peace” is still too much embedded in a peace versus war/violent conflict frame. If effective in their mediation peacemakers may help to end violence. This is terrific. But to call it peace is somewhat too grandiose. What is often achieved is a temporary armistice based on a compromise that always implies the possibility for either party in a conflict to feel disadvantaged or unfairly treated, or feeling forced to sign up to the compromise. However limited, this needs to be recognized as an important first step towards a situation of sustained good relations between formerly polarized communities. But it will only work—beyond the short term—when mediators manage to reclaim the cooperative communicative qualities of these communities. It is now generally recognized that past (war) crimes

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cannot be ignored and need to be addressed. However, it is also recognized that both pushing for prosecution and trials at courts and pushing for total amnesty may lead to intensifying violence. In finding a balance it would seem important to particularly address acts of violence that are—in the words of Hannah Arendt—“illegitimate but justifiable”, in the sense of self-defence as a means of survival. It is also critical to analyse more precisely the personality disorders of the perpetrators. A certain percentage of war crime perpetrators is best described as psychopaths with whom convivial relations; or celebrating inclusive togetherness will not be possible. For the development of communicative relations between former opposing parties the prosecution of psychopaths who committed crimes with pleasure will be helpful. For those who seriously believed that the recourse to violence was the only option to fight the injustice of oppressive regimes it may be that not prosecuting is the better option.

Conclusion I feel most at ease with an affirmative conceptualization. Peace feels good and to conceptualize it in a positive way feels even better. A positive concept could be used productively in research, politics and daily practice. However, such concept would have to meet some specific requirements. It would have to be rescued from the limited statal war versus peace frame and should be expanded to include the broad variety of human relations. It should not be treated as a concept that is relevant only for the relationship between states, but as a concept which is applicable to all kinds of human relations. It should be based on a sense of communal responsibility to fight evil, to confront human vulnerability, to capture our demons (violence, enmity, hatred, contempt, humiliation) and to build resilient communities. It should reflect that humanity knows a universal aspiration towards communal belonging, to being incorporated in a community that experiences sheer togetherness as a “cosmopolitan togetherness”. It should also be liberated from the anthropocentric nature of most, it not all, current conceptualizations of peace. We seem to be concerned mainly or even exclusively about peace (whatever we mean by this) among human beings as if we are the only inhabitants of the planet. In reality, however, we share the planet with a multitude of other living and sentient species. The concern about extinction often seems to be a “humans only” worry but the sixth massive non-human animal extinction that takes place in the

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anthropocene is mainly caused by human animals. We live in an anthropocentric bubble and refuse to see that whatever we define as peaceful living together would have to incorporate togetherness with our fellow species. The planet also belongs to them. The planet where we all temporarily rent time for living is a common responsibility. As humans we should realize that we are the least significant contributors to the wellbeing of the planet. We are mainly important to ourselves but in comparison with non-human animals that contribute to the life cycles and food chains of mother Earth humans are pretty useless animals. In order to reflect on cosmopolitan togetherness we need to liberate ourselves from the idea that the human species has the exceptional position of having dominion over “every living thing upon the Earth”. The justification of anthropocentric dominion begins with the meme of Genesis, Chapter 1, 28, “Fill the Earth and subdue it!” As Sankatsing writes, “No other phrase ever spoken or written determined the course of human history so much” (Sankatsing 2016, 116). Anthropocentrism means that the central question always is what serves human beings best with the implicit neglect of the interests of the non-human fellow inhabitants of the world. The affirmative conceptualization of peace that emerges from these reflections is: peace is the moment in which we celebrate cosmopolitan togetherness. I argue that this a robust conceptualization of peace since it is based upon realism and pertinence. It is realistic because it does not sell utopian dreams. No one is any better off with unachievable utopian visions. The notion of “moment” would seem more inspirational than permanent end-state since it recognizes that human life is characterized by temporality and by moments of transformation. It is also realistically based on the human aspiration towards communal belonging and the history-long longing for the “collective joy” of synchronous group activities. Collective celebrations are a universal experience! Humans have a long history of being capable to participate in manifestations of collective joy. This conceptualization is pertinent because it can be applied in the context of different cultural values and religious convictions and not only in inter-state relations but in all human constellations in marriages, in families, in urban relations plus it accepts that our fellow species on the planet are part of the celebration. Here we find the beginning of an answer to that basic question of how we can live together. In all the reflections on peace the most enlightening for me was Hannah Arendt’s politicization of peace and the articulation of politics as “sheer human togetherness”

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(1993, 180). And even more so when she claims that the content of political life is “the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new” (1993, 263). Politics implies taking multiple perspectives into account and bringing them in dialogue. Totalitarian regimes have always understood the enormous transformative power of people acting and speaking together and have tried through coercive and discursive measures to break down human togetherness. The critical question thus becomes “What can we do to preserve the capacity for politics?” (Enns 2015, 230). In my quest for a robust conceptualization of peace, I was guided by the normative choice for the temporary experience of being at one with oneself and with others, being able to respect both self and alterity, both singularity and plurality. As Arendt formulates it, “Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives or will live” (1958, 8). A pertinent conceptualization of peace should be based in the empirical social reality of the human condition. This means it should be grounded on an analysis of current features of human life on planet Earth. In search for a robust conceptualization of peace, I conclude that peace would mean moments in which acting and thinking in fragments that leads to polarization is replaced by “thinking in togetherness”. Therefore, I choose to take as a point of departure in the next chapter the fractures that characterize the present human condition and that may accumulate towards existential risks. How can we achieve moments of togetherness and find common ground in a dangerously polarized world? We are fractured but we are also the most communicative species. We are socially interactive creatures which makes cooperative communication central to our existence. Following Hannah Arendt we must develop the capacity for (politics as) togetherness and I intend to argue that basic to this capacity is our unique human skill of cooperative communication. The development of communal resilience through celebrating “cosmopolitan togetherness” is especially urgent in the light of the existential risk that humanity confronts today requires a modality of human interaction that I will call “deep dialogue”.

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Notes 1. This is quite remarkable in the light of the long history of human rights violations by the Catholic Church in the Crusades, in the inquisition, the conquest of the Americas and the sanctioning of slavery and anti-Semitism. 2. It should be noted however that secular states have not been less belligerent than their religious counterparts. 3. Ahul Oka of Notre Dame University, Indiana, USA concludes in a study of 420 armed conflicts around the world in that humans have always been belligerent (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017). 4. From an evolutionary point of view, it could be argued that the leading cause of violence is maleness. Chimpanzees and humans are most likely the only species for which it can be documented that they engage in “maleinitiated coordinated coalitions that raid neighbouring territories and result in lethal attacks on members of their own species” (Wrangham and Peterson [1996] quoted in D.M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology [2009], p. 292). “In all cultures men commonly have bonded together to attack other groups or to defend their own” (ibidem, 292). “In no culture have women ever been observed forming coalitions designed to kill other human beings” (ibidem, 312). This may imply the suggestion to strive towards the absence of males on the planet. Maybe not a bad idea but not a very realist target, it seems to me.

References Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, H. (1993). Between past and future. New York: Penguin. Armstrong, K. (2014). Fields of blood: Religion and the history of violence. London: The Bodley Head. Backer, D. A., Bhavnani, R., & Huth, P. K. (Eds.). (2018). Peace and conflict 2017. London: Routledge. Bagley, P. (2015). A secure and healthy life: Spinoza on the prospects for peace. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), Peace in modern political thought (pp. 31–46). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Bailliet, C. M., & Larsen, K. M. (Eds.). (2015). Promoting peace through international law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boehm, C. (2012). Moral origins. New York: Basic Books. Borman, D. A. (2015). Habermas on peace and democratic legitimacy. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), Peace in modern political thought (pp. 269–291). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

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Bradshaw, L. (2015). Kant cosmopolitan rights and the prospects for global peace. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), The question of peace in modern political thought (pp. 129–148). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Buss, D. M. (2009). Evolutionary psychology. Boston: Pearson Education Inc. Canary, D. J., Cupach, W. R., & Messman, S. L. (1995). Relationship conflict: Conflict in parent–child, friendship and romantic relationships. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dower, N. (2009). The ethics of war and peace. Cambridge: Polity Press. Enns, D. (2015). Hannah Arendt on peace as a means to politics. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), Peace in modern political thought (pp. 223–242). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Erasmus, D. (1517). The complaint of peace. Published in 2007 by Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MT, USA. Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means. London: Sage. Hackett, R. A., & Schroeder, B. (2008). Does anybody practice peace journalism? A cross national comparison of press coverage of the Afghanistan and IsraeliHezbollah wars. Peace & Policy, 13, 26–61. Hamelink, C. J. (1994). The politics of world communication. London: Sage. Hayner, P. (2018). The peacemaker’s paradox. New York: Routledge. Hitchens, C. (2007). The portable atheist. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press. Holland, J. (2012). Summary and commentary for the 50th anniversary of the famous encyclical letter of Pope John XXIII on world peace. Washington, DC: Pax Romana. Horney, K. (1945). Our inner conflicts: A constructive theory of neurons. New York: W. W. Norton. Huber, P. (2015). Defining peace: Derrida’s “impossible friendship” and “democracy to come”. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), Peace in modern political thought (pp. 243–268). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Irvan, I. (2006). Peace journalism as a normative theory: Premises and obstacles. Global Media Journal, 1(2), 34–39. Jayatilleke, K. N. (1962). Buddhism and peace. Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society. Koivukoski, T., & Tabachnick, D. E. (Eds.). (2015). Peace in modern political thought. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Niebuhr, R. (1932). Moral man and immoral society. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: The decline of violence in history and its causes. New York: Penguin Group. Pruitt, D. G., & Kims, S. H. (2004). Social conflict: Escalation, stalemate, and settlement. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Rosenblum, M. (1993). Who stole the news? New York: Wiley. Sankatsing, G. (2016). Quest to rescue our future. Amsterdam: Rescue Our Future Foundation. Schramm, W., & Rivers, W. L. (1969). Responsibility in mass communication. New York: Harper & Row. Sikkenga, J. (2015). John Locke’s liberal path to peace. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), Peace in modern political thought (pp. 71–90). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Tabachnik, D. E. (2015). Heidegger’s polemical peace: Outer violence for inner harmony. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), The question of peace in modern political thought (pp. 183–198). Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Tillich, P. (1990). Theology of peace. Louisville: John Knox Press. UNESCO. (1978). Declaration on fundamental principles concerning the contribution of the mass media to strengthening peace and international understanding, to the promotion of human rights and to countering racialism, apartheid and incitement to war. Paris: UNESCO. Varis, T. (1986). Peace and communication. In T. Varis (Ed.), Peace and communication (pp. 15–29). San Juan: Editorial Universidad para la Paz. Wright, Q. (1965). A study of war. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 2

A Polarized Planet

A house divided against itself, cannot stand. (Abraham Lincoln)

In spite of the delusion of neoliberal globalization as an imaginary togetherness and the pseudo-togetherness of the social media, we live on a deeply fractured planet. Advances in communication and information technology facilitated global connectivity but this is different from global togetherness. Facebook and Twitter created communicative bonds mainly between like-minded people and made strong expressions of dislike, hate and prejudice for the non-like-minded daily routine around the world. Basic to the connectivity ideology of people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerman (“connectivity is a human right”) is the naive belief that all users of connectivity technology would act in good faith and would not use new global communicative possibilities to further polarization. Current globalization processes suggest forms of global “unification” but their totalising tendencies integrate real fractures in a unifying imagination that benefits the winners and disadvantage the losers. Fragmentation continues to be a crucial characteristic of contemporary human life around the globe. There are deep fractures between Muslim fundamentalists who are dedicated to violence and terror—as Osama bin Laden was—and Muslim fundamentalists who are dedicated to preaching and praying. There are Protestant Christians around the world who believe that all Muslims, Jews, atheists, Catholics and Protestants of other denominations can only avoid going straight to Hell if they accept their version of Jesus as their © The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Hamelink, Communication and Peace, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1_2

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Saviour. They demonstrate a total lack of basic respect for those who believe otherwise and do not have even minimal compassion with the poor souls who are missing out on Heaven. There are forms of social division around disability and sexual orientation that are a stark reality around the world (Bradley 2016). In the case of fractures between abled and disabled people, there are practices of discrimination (like in unequal treatment regarding employment) and exclusion (a.o. from social activities or public transportation). “Disabled people are disadvantaged because they belong to a group that is the object of pervasive institutionalised discrimination” (Hyde quoted by Bradley 2016, 235). In terms of sexual orientation, we find the common use of binary oppositions putting heterosexual people and non-heterosexuals as opposite to each other. And as Bradley observes “on a global basis at least LGBT people have experienced the most violent forms of oppression” (ibidem, 237). Advances have been made in decriminalization of homosexuality, gay rights and same-sex marriage. However, around the world expressions—often violent—of homophobia (in terms of harassment, bullying and direct assault) abound and the public acceptance of LGBT people is very low or nonexisting. Fractures on the basis of sexual orientation are often vigorously maintained by conservative religious groups. In Indonesia, for example homophobia is on the increase with the rise of Muslim populism (guided by the Front of Defenders of Islam) and although homosexuality is not considered a crime, homosexuals are criminalized under such legal rules as the anti-porno law. There is a proposal for legislation that would censor LGBT behaviour from television. Homosexuality is still illegal in some 68 countries. Around the world particularly transgender people face societal marginalization. We are also divided within our families. Despite the common pictures of the happy family, there are deep divisions within many families. There are gender fractures, political fractures, rich–poor fractures, religious fractures and fractures inherent to urban life. There is also a deepening fracture between the human species and its fellow inhabitants on the planet.

Global Fractures There is a very obvious, persistent and explosive worldwide fracture between the rich who continue to profit from economic growth and the poor who are facing economic stagnation (World Inequality Report 2018). This global fracture has different sets of rules for the winners and

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losers. Governments bail big banks out whereas ordinary citizens lose their houses when they cannot foot their bills. Globally, austerity policies have mainly aggravated social fragmentation. These policies have made “women, ethnic minorities, the young, the old, the disabled…the losers and the international super-rich and national elite classes have been the winners, and the beneficiaries of other people’s suffering” (Bradley 2016, 268). Various calculations by different authors seem to usually end with the conclusion that a small percentage of the world population (3–5%) control over 50% of the world’s wealth. A small group of the very rich claim an ever larger part of global income and capital (Piketty 2017). According to the Swiss bank Credit Suisse in 2018, the richest 1% owned 50% of global capital and the rest the other 50%. Roughly this amounts to 140 billion dollars for each group. Growth for the 1% is estimated at 6% p.a., and thus, in 2030 the 1% would own 305 billion dollars and the rest 195,000. The growing gap is framed by many conservative politicians and corporate media as normal (Wysong and Perrucci 2017). In this frame doing more with less is the “new normal”. People should accept austerity budgets, and widening inequalities “between wealthy and Average Americans, with regard to wealth, income, health care, employment and educational opportunities”. Wysong and Perruci argue that the new normal of deep equality should not be accepted. Against the “new normal narrative” of the corporate media that obscures real differences, inequalities and fractures stands the “structural realities” narrative. “For us, the term structural realities narrative refers to a general story line that views origins, causes, dimensions, and consequences of current economic, political, and social inequalities as growing out of actions and policies shaped and implemented by powerful social structures such as large corporations and federal government” (ibidem, 12). Global inequality can be analysed in terms of income and capital, but also in terms of resources, power and dignity. There is a worldwide inequality in access to fundamental resources. This can be illustrated with the observation that for 1.2 billion people there is no access to safe drinking water. As Thomas Piketty argues in his Capital et idéologie (2019), enormous inequalities were always justified by the beneficiaries (such as aristocrats, slave owners and colonizers) through sets of ideas (ideologies) about the just social order. Inegalitarian regimes were justified by plausible and coherent ideal visions that made unequal access to resources a natural phenomenon. In authoritarian countries but also in democracies the power of decision making is very unequally distributed. This is also around the globe

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the case at work and in the family. Corporate media—worldwide—are integral part of a deeply hierarchical and unequal set of power relations and are embedded in structural relationships that rob many people of their fundamental communication rights since they manage to create a culture of denial and silence about the abuses of power. There are enormous differences in the experience of recognition of one’s human dignity. Worldwide people’s dignity is respected in highly unequal ways as the treatment of women, of gay men and women, of disabled people, older people and people with darker skins illustrate.

Gender Fractures “Gender divisions have a long history” (Bradley, 108). In A New Dawn for the Second Sex, Vintges writes “Power asymmetries between men and women still manifest themselves in many other ways (2017, 11, 12). The number of women living in poverty is disproportionate to the number of men, women earn less than men at all levels. Sexual violence against women and children continues everywhere, and has taken on new, extreme forms such as global trafficking in women from poor to wealthier countries, ‘jihadists’ forcing captured women into slavery and ‘lover boys’ luring and blackmailing girls into prostitution through social media”. In many countries, expectations about sexual behaviour of men versus women collide frontally. Feminists are confronted with a reality that still binds female sexuality to more rules than male sexuality. Sexual freedom—even in terms of dressing—is much bigger for men than for girls and women. The #metoo campaign exposed the intimidating sexual behaviour of men who could get away with this too long. It also demonstrated that in most cases this predator behaviour has more to do with power than with sex and with the abuse of freedom to constrain someone else’s freedom. There is a dominant and powerful discourse on femininity and masculinity that rationalizes unequal treatment that occurs as unequal remuneration, or discrimination, sexual harassment, and patriarchical exploitation in the workplace and at home as a natural phenomenon. “The many studies of the sexual division of labour reveal the extent and strength of gender segregation in contemporary societies” (Bradley 2016, 126). Some advances have certainly been made but the suggestion that the world entered a post-feminist phase in the twenty-first century does not even for the most enlightened societies hold true. “The

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swings between advances towards gender equality and conservative backlashes, combined with outbreaks of misogynism (hatred of women), have continued to manifest itself in America, Britain and elsewhere” (ibidem, 110). Bradley refers to the emergence of a neoliberal neopatriarchy. As the Kilburn manifesto states “In no society in the world does the criminal justice system take the side of women. In no society are women paid the same as men for a day, a week, or a lifetime’s work. In no society do men share equally the work of care with women. Sexism finds new cultures and contexts: violence and sexual aggression attract impunity (2016)”. Gender fractures—based as they are upon binary oppositions—stand obviously in the way of joyful togetherness as they maintain and justify unequal hierarchical relations of power that are hard to imagine as peaceful relations. Asymmetry of status stands in the way of cooperative communication. It creates adversarial relations that contest for the championship contrary to convivial relations that try to find common ground. Tannen (1992, 286) citing Goffman describes asymmetries in status between men and women with the male as protector and the female as the protected, the male as the one who embracer and the female as the embraced. “This can only remind us that male domination is a very special kind, a domination that can be carried right into the gentlest, most loving moments without apparently causing strain- indeed, these moments can hardly be conceived apart from these asymmetries”. “We create masculinity and femininity in our ways of behaving, all the while believing we are simply acting ‘naturally’. But our sense of what is natural is different for women and men. And what we regard as naturally male and female is based on asymmetrical alignments” (ibidem, 287). The classical protector/protected relation portrays the (male) protector as competent and deserving of respect whereas the (female) protected is seen as incompetent and deserving of indulgence. The question is whether these (deep) asymmetries can be dissolved. In the myths of humanity, we find this basic asymmetry between the sexes well reflected. In his study on myths, Levi-Strauss “analyzes how they are always structured along binary oppositions” (Vintges 2017, 138). “In line with Levi-Strauss Beauvoir argues that the mythical tales of mankind comprise a hierarchical relationship between men and women. But for the roots of this asymmetry she refers to the mechanism of Othering: man establishing woman as the negative of himself is, in her view, a phase to be overcome” (ibidem, 138). Paglia (1990)—a great admirer of Beauvoir—also argues that the mythical tales phrase the opposition in terms of man versus woman

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as culture versus nature. “Since woman is nature, our imaginations and dreams will never change. History has no chance. It is the character of women’s bodies, as the immanent principle of fertility that makes the dichotomy of Man as Culture and Woman as Nature inescapable” (in Vintges 2017, 144). For Paglia, this is a given. De Beauvoir thinks this can be overcome. For her women can escape “confining stereotypes and practices” (ibidem, 144). De Beauvoir suggests that new myths will emerge. And new cross-cultural coalitions are indeed emerging. Vintges gives the example of “the coalition that developed over the past years in Morocco between secular and Islamic feminists in a campaign for the reform of family law” (ibidem, 168). There are impressive initiatives by muslim women to liberate themselves from oppressive frameworks. These Muslim Women’s Freedom Practices demonstrate that male domination in patriarchical social relations can be contested not only on secular liberal grounds but on religious grounds. “Islamic and Muslim feminists contest ‘patriarchy’ and fight for women’s empowerment, women’s rights and gender justice within the realm of religion, in a religious vocabulary and within religious forms” (ibidem, 86).

Urban Fractures1 In the twenty-first century, the city will be the space in which people have to find ways to live together as slum dwellers and non-slum dwellers, as illegal urbanites and legal urbanites. The world has never before known so many cities and never such large cities as the massive conurbations of more than 20 million people that are now gaining ground in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Many of these cities have populations larger than entire countries. The population of Greater Mumbai (which will soon achieve mega-city status), for instance, is already larger than the total population of Norway and Sweden combined. The quality and sustainability of life in the world’s cities will largely depend upon the ways in which the urbanites manage to coexist with each other. Urbanity is the future form of life. For the first time in history, humans will become the “urban species”. In the years to come, some 70% of humanity will live in cities and many of these urban spaces will be mega-cities. Cities are the key hubs in global economic activity and key actors in current processes of globalization. They are not only centres of money and high-finance, also centres of culture. Cultural production and consumption have become an important element of the economy of the world’s big cities and this has introduced

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new ways to use urban space for public cultural performances where a variety of cultural roles merge, such as those of spectatorship, tourism, performance and sales. The big cities have also become key places for all kinds of services, such as legal assistance, marketing, advertising and architecture (Sassen 2001). This means that within these spaces people will have to find ways to live together and to deal with the conflicts this implies. The quality and sustainability of life in the city will largely depend upon the ways in which the urbanites manage to deal with their conflicts. There is an inherent tension and over-sensitivity in movements of large numbers of people that are unknown to each other, insecure about the potential threats others pose, and who interact anonymously but often very closely, almost intimately. Urban spaces where strangers interact with strangers easily breed “street rage”. The city is full of explosive places—an insignificant car collision may be like lighting a cigarette in ammunition depot. As long as there have been cities, there has been urban conflict. The inherently conflictual nature of urban space is the result of several forces that reinforce each other. Cities confront their inhabitants with clearly visible disparities between the affluent and the losers. In particular, cities in developing countries show enormously big and very visible gaps between the rich and the poor. But also in the affluent parts of the world, cities such as Paris, London, Stockholm or Amsterdam have as a result of gentrification policies exclusive neighbourhoods that are inaccessible for low income groups. Most cities have a (globally networked) urban elite and an urban mass. It is not uncommon that the elite benefits from the disadvantaged position of the mass. The marginalized mass can be exploited for its cheap labour, for example. Fear of crime among the better-off reinforces segregation as the rich protect themselves by building gated communities which cause socio-economic exclusion and stigmatization for the urban losers. The resulting fragmentation of the city creates even more moments of violent and criminal conduct. Segregated spatial arrangements that are intended to enforce security can themselves become sources of high security risks. Cities have always been places where people emigrated to from impoverished rural areas or from warntorn regions. City administrations have always had to deal with “alien politics”. They had to address questions about which foreigners to welcome (usually the better-off), which ones to deport (usually the poor), which ones to grant local welfare services or even citizenship. The waves

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of migration throughout history from antiquity, middle ages, reformation and counter-reformation, through a eighteenth-century cosmopolitan Enlightenment to twentieth-century mass labour and industrial migration have always primarily affected the cities. Most cities face the problem of rapidly expanding populations while the provision of adequate infrastructures and services lags behind. Most big cities in developing countries have an “illegal city” that is rapidly growing and that is characterized by poor living conditions, overcrowded houses, unemployment, lack of clean water, poor sanitation, and violent crime. Cities are more competitive and more differentiated than rural areas, the heterogeneity of urban populations is much larger than among rural populations. The city is also the place of frustration. Those who migrate to the city dream of limitless opportunities that in reality are not offered by urban life. Life in the city does not provide all city-dwellers with economic improvement. Evidence shows that the probability of being a victim of crime and violence is substantially higher in urban areas than in rural areas. Cities are crowded spaces that offer easy and soft targets for terrorist and insurgents groups. High levels of urban crime and violence affect the social fabric of entire cities. They instil fear and suspicion in the lives of urban residents, often leading to residential fortification among the rich, who build higher walls around their homes and spend more on private security, in effect “locking themselves” in enclaves that are physically separated from the rest of the city (UN Habitat Annual Report 2006, 145). The fear of crime leads in many big cities to the abandonment and stigmatization of certain neighbourhoods and the development of an “architecture of fear” (UN Habitat Annual Report 2006, 145). Urban insecurity creates fragmented cities with securely protected “gated communities” and “no-go areas”. This insecurity threatens the social and economic development of cities because it hampers urban mobility and cohesion thus “undermining the interchange, openness, flow and density that sustain cities in the first place” (Graham, in UN Habitat Annual Report 2006, 151). Security has always been a prime feature of city development. Their economic importance made cities prime targets for warfare and political struggle. Today’s big cities seem obsessed with security and develop ever wider and more intrusive forms of surveillance over citizens. “The universal consequence of the crusade to secure the city is the destruction of any truly democratic urban space” (Davis 1992, 155). The proliferation of security measures, such as street surveillance, control of public

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areas and the curtailment of such civil liberties, as the freedom to associate or to express opinions, threatens the core of urban life. In many cities, one finds safe pedestrian quarters, with lavish fountains and piazzas and comfortable benches whereas at a short distance where poverty reigns and the city administration does not nothing to keep streets livable. The world has close to one billion slum dwellers who live in the city but are excluded from the key urban infrastructures and services. The vast majority of slums—more than 90%—are located in cities of the developing world. The “dual” city reflects the broader a-symmetrical world order that is characterized by division and exclusion. In many cities, one finds the two parallel processes of Disneyfication (the city as “theme park”, Sorkin 1992) and Bronxification (the city as place of violence and crime). In the Disneyfied urban space, conflict is denied. There is no trouble in Disneyland where everything is predictable and controlled (Wasko 2001). The “reality” of Disneyland is one-dimensional. Its inhabitants—however cosmopolitan in their aspirations—prefer to live next to people who are like them. And thus the city has to be regularly cleansed of unwanted persons. The poor sometimes intrude upon the city centre and city administrators design plans to deport the “deviants” to places where they cannot be seen by decent city-dwellers. When the losers try to survive on the streets, many city governments engage in civil war against them. In the Bronxified urban space, conflict easily escalates towards lethal violence. Here, just like in the world arena, poor people are the likely victims of other poor people perpetrating acts of violence.

Identity Fractures One of the world’s most critical problems is the alarming and worldwide increase of identity conflicts. With almost certainty it can be predicted that several violent conflicts are still to break out in the near future. The potential for such clashes is extremely high in different parts of the world. Around the world some 10,000 distinct societies have to find ways to live together in some 200 countries. What is most troublesome in the rise of these conflicts is that they are characterized by the exercise of gross violence against civil populations. Contrary to classical warfare between armies, violence now increasingly targets civilians of the fighting parties. At the dramatic core of ethnic conflicts is the grand scale perpetration of crimes against humanity. Over the past decades, the number of countries in which such conflicts escalated into bloody wars has considerably

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increased. Ethnic and religious extremism and fanaticism have expanded across the world in ways that should have been unimaginable after the horrors of the Holocaust. But as “….the assertion of group identities continues to be a major factor in the politics of almost every world region”, also in established democracies, identity conflicts are likely to remain sources of the escalation of violence (Harff and Gurr 2004, 194). Many modern societies are confronted with growing diaspora communities— that are permanent, increasingly assertive about their cultural identity, and that through transport and communication technology and cash flows of over 100 billion dollar annually (according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund)—retain strong cultural bonds with the homelands. Modern states feel ill at ease with this phenomenon and if they are not pursuing apartheid, segregationist or assimilation policies, they try integration politics. Most modern states feel uncomfortable about the loss of the mono-state (the mono-ethnic, mono-religious, mono-cultural and mono-ideological state). States like the Netherlands may perceive of themselves as multi-culturalist, but in fact the myth of the mono-state is not easily given up and the cloak of multiculturalism obscures what is in fact cultural assimilation. There is space for cultural identity but within the boundaries of the dominant model. The formula is simple. The indigenous tribes have developed a normative societal framework and the newcomers are invited or coerced to integrate within this. The dominant societal model is taken for granted and not up for public deliberation. On national, regional and global levels, integration processes are always imposed from above in situations of socio-economic inequality. This constitutes a source of growing and violent discontent. Identity conflicts are usually referred to as ethnic conflicts. However, the notion “ethnic conflict” is troublesome. It is a late-sixties academic construct that leans heavily upon the singularist definition of groups of people. It defines people in terms of only one of their characteristics, their ethnic background. It suggests a unique specificity that—like with the term “race”—makes little sense biologically: genetically human beings are more similar than different. There is no such thing as a single ethnic or religious identity. People live inevitably with multiple identities and operate in several different multicultural and transcultural fields (Bourdieu 1984). Your ethnic background may be Moroccan, but you are also an immigrant, a Dutch national, a woman, a student, a Muslim, a music lover, and a sports aficionado. In other words, you always have multiple identities and some of

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them may also change over time through transgender operations or religious conversions. “Ethnic” tends to have a somewhat demeaning connotation as it often refers to non-Western groups. Their ethnicity is sometimes also held responsible for the hostilities between groups of different ethnic background. The implied suggestion is that ethnicity is the major factor in the conflict and not an unjust distribution of power that was organized by colonial powers in the first place. Ethnic differences rarely are the main cause of hostilities by themselves. They are often used by leaders to mobilize people for hostile action against others. It would be misleading to think that mainly age-old ethnic rifts caused the massacres in the Hutu-Tutsi hostilities. There were more incendiary components like the role of the colonial powers in the distribution of political and economic power. Today’s identity conflicts have historical roots in processes such as colonial rule. Colonial rulers often favoured specific groups thus disadvantaging others. “Colonial rule also established hierarchies and rivalries among groups where few or none had previously existed” (Harff and Gurr 2004, 21). “Ethnicity” provides especially those hit worst by resource scarcity (often the poor) with a sense of belonging to an ingroup that is different from and superior to an out-group. This makes them vulnerable to agitation against others by unscrupulous leaders. A more appropriate term for “ethnic” conflict is “identity” conflict. In an identity conflict, a perceived identity of an ethnic or a religious nature is a central variable. People rally around symbols of the “common” background in race, ethnicity or religion. The emotion of saying that “we are Catholics, or Muslims, or Serbs” has a strong cohesive significance. It stresses commonality above differentiation and renders the protection of this “imagined collective” (I borrow—inevitably—the term “imagined” from Benedict Anderson 1983) more important than protection of the rights and freedoms of its individual members. Those who question— let alone criticize—the wisdom of this collective sentiment are in danger of—at best—marginalization. At the core, identity is an imagination that binds people together and distinguishes them from other people. The national identity (and the nation state as an imagined community, Anderson 1983) can be inclusive (a space for multi-ethnicity) and exclusive, the prerogative of the self-selected indigenous tribe excluding other communities. Nationalism has a strong homogenizing tendency. It demands a strong emotional attachment to a shared belief and tends to respond to perceived threats to those beliefs. Identity conflicts can also occur among

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members of diaspora and migrant communities between different generations and the experience of their identity, for example in relation to religious practices. Identity conflicts facilitate mass killings more easily than conflicts about politics or economy (Licklider 1995, 84). This massive violence is executed against groups that are characterized by ethnic and religious features or by political preferences and are seen a threat to the power and territorial interests of the in-group. They have to be removed! Identity is a confrontation with the difference of “otherness” and thus a potential source of conflict. We can only say who we are in distinction to others who are different from us. The confrontation with others who are different may be perceived as a threat to who we are. Why are they different? Why are they not the same as us? What is wrong with us? They pose a challenge to our self-concept, to our view of the universe, to our values and deeply held beliefs. Heterogeneity is difficult. In a society where people have more homogeneous lifestyles and normative positions, key values—as free speech—are self-understood. In a society with a heterogeneity of value positions such shared values become a source of conflict. Humankind is inevitably heterogeneous. This heterogeneity is to borrow a term from Connolly (1991) agonistic and a permanent provocation (Foucault 2003). This is denied by those forces that want to lock people up into a singular identity. The ethnic and religious absolutists refuse to live with this provocation and prefer homogeneity. The ultimate denial of heterogeneity necessarily implies collective violence as in genocidal war. Identity is impossible without “alterity”. People find who they are by contrasting themselves against others. This can be a violent process if the other—who is not us—is seen as inferior to us. The others are “different” but that is in itself not a sufficient reason for violent action because many other groups are equally or even more “different” and yet they do not become enemies. Those others become enemies to whom the misery of one’s life can be attributed: they are the source of our problems and this justifies our hatred of them. The mechanism of attribution can be skilfully manipulated by ruthless leaders. The inter-group conflict may be about substantial issues, like access to vital resources, but it will be exacerbated by the affective issue of blaming the other for your own misery. The affective component (they cannot be trusted and deserve to be killed) is in any case a strong element in prolonging conflicts and rendering them violent and cruel.

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Religious Fractures Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. (George Washington 1792) Religious divisions continue to be a major source of instability in the world. (Harriet Bradley 2016)

Religious violence is a key aspect of many identity conflicts. In past decades, religious conflict has become an almost standard ingredient of conflicts around the world. Especially since 2001, the percentage of religious conflicts as proportional to overall conflicts is on the rise. Conflicts that centre on identity issues, like in Tibet, Sri Lanka or Sudan have a strong religious component. The addition of religious sentiments to violent conflicts creates, especially in the case of separatist conflicts, dangerous situations. Religion and separatism form an explosive mixture, just like the combination of religious fears with nationalist sentiments. An illustration was the explosive affiliation of the Serbian Orthodox Church with Serbian nationalism during the leadership of Milosevic. As Harff and Gurr observe, “…. Religious differences create a special intensity in conflicts between peoples when a dominant group attempts to impose rules based on its religious beliefs on others” (2004, 31). Throughout the ages people have struggled—often violently—with incompatible positions on their deepest convictions. Today an explosive worldwide conflict develops around the Islam and its Holy scripture the Qu’ran. Those who attack the Islam and its faithful and those who defend their religion are engaged in a dangerous spiral of hostility. However, there is also violence by Christians. Like the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (ibidem, 168). There are violent Christian movement such as the Reconstructionist Movement and the Christian Identity organization. For many years, Northern Ireland was a classic case. In the Bolivia crisis (end of 2019), an important and highly divisive and violent role was played by evangelical Christians who are very hostile towards the indigenous population. In 2011, Anders Breivik massacred 77 people in cold blood. Breivik allegedly hated Muslims and Islam and subscribed to a fundamentalist, right-wing Christian ideology. Extreme religious movements can engage in mass destruction of others or their own members (collective

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suicide) and such movements pose—also for democracies—grave dangers, certainly when they feel threatened. Examples are in India the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in Israel the Gush Emunim, in the USA the Branch Davidians and in Iraq the Mahdi Army directed by Muqtada al-Sadr. Religious conflicts are often intra-religious conflicts like between Sunnis and Shias in Islam. There is a long history of conflicts within existing religions that did lead to the establishment of new religions, like Janism that emerged from a conflict with the Brahman priesthood in Hinduism. Also, within these new religions strong divisions developed, like Hinayan Buddhism versus Mahayana Buddhism. Sikhism is divided into the Quietistic Group and the Militaristic Group. Confucianism is opposed by Taoism. There are divisions in Judaism and Islam. Christianity is incredibly divided into mainstream institutions such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Reformation. To these divisions, hundreds of small sects can be added. From its early beginnings there were serious conflicts within Christianity. At different times they escalated into destructive measures that ranged from excommunications to burning the heretics at the stake. Conflict in the sense of dispute is inherent to religion. Although such disputes may be couched in theological terms, the real bones of contention were often the exercise and distribution of power, social and territorial control, like in the disputes over Jerusalem during the Crusades. At the core of religious thought is often the notion of “truth”. The conflict over territory may thus gain the status of Holy War. Truth is inherently divisive and creates deep antagonisms between the believers and the non-believers who hold different conceptions of the truth. If one’s religious truth is threatened, the essence of the believer’s identity is attacked and will have to be defended, if necessary, even with violence. In recent years, we have seen the largest displacement of religious communities in history. People are forced to leave their countries because of their beliefs. Widespread religious intolerance directed against people of different faiths is getting worse everywhere in the world. In today’s societies, people cannot escape the confrontation with others who find their deepest convictions totally abject and even dangerous. They will inevitably be profoundly hurt. The rejection of essential beliefs touches upon human dignity since it takes an important part of human existence away. This cannot be conveniently argued away by reference to the democratic necessity to tolerate criticism. At the same time, we cannot deny those who offend others the right to express their existential

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fear of the stranger and his strange convictions. This would not only violate the constitutional right to freedom of speech, but more importantly it would violate the fundamental and absolute human right to freedom of thought. The largest communities of religious people are Christianity and Islam. “As of 2010, Christianity was by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31 percent) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth,” the Pew report says. “Islam was second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent of the global population.” The third largest religion is Hinduism with 900 million adherents (source Pew report). Islam grows faster than the world’s population and will be the largest in the world by 2070, research by the US-based Pew Research Centre has found. The Pew studies found that the world’s population of Muslims will grow by 73% between 2010 and 2050, compared to 35% for Christians which form the next fastest-growing faith. The world’s population will grow by 37% over the same period. If those rates of growth continue past 2050, Muslims will outnumber Christians by 2070, the report found. It also says that Muslims will make up 10% of Europe’s population. A deeply worrisome trend in current conflicts is the incorporation of religious motivations in ethno-politics and the overall rise of religion as political ideology. This is dangerous since the enemy who is disrespectful of what is held to be most valuable is seen as the de-humanized devil that needs to be destroyed. Religious beliefs represent the sacredness of important values and it is the mission of the chosen people to defend these beliefs. The non-believers deserve to be discriminated against and eventually to be eliminated. In combination with apocalyptic interpretations, the deployment of all means of destruction is easily justified. In the context of “communication and peace”, the obvious question is “does religion cause violence?” or “does religion justify violence?” Critics of Islam frequently quote out of context the more aggressive passages of the Koran, arguing that these verses could easily inspire and endorse terrorism. They ignore the fact that the Jewish and Christian scriptures can be just as aggressive, if taken out from their historical context. For example, the Old Testament says: “Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves” (Numbers 31:17– 18). Many violent Jewish and Christian groups have used these biblical texts to justify their actions. Crusaders used them against Muslims and Jews. Nazis used them against Jews. Serbian Christians used them against Bosnian Muslims. Zionists are using them regularly against Palestinians.

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But non-religious people have done the same in the name of one ideology of an other. Although religions may not always have been the engine of violence and armed murderous conflicts, the leading world religions have most certainly failed as peacemakers and have demonstrated poor abilities to heal fractures. My argument here is not focused on the question of the link between religions and violent conflict but on fragmentation. Do religious fractures (and there is abundant empirical evidence of these) lead to the kind of polarization that hampers togetherness? It seems to me that the key threat of rapidly growing religions is not primarily cultural or political but is more than anything else their sectarian beliefs and practices that foster fractures and promote dualistic thinking between us and the others. Islamic terrorism—as manifest in actions of ISIS or Al Qaeda is inspired by religious thinking which is possibly based upon deceptive or ill-understood interpretations of the articles of Islamic Faith. In one way or another, Islamic terrorism is linked to Islam as the Crusades were linked to Christianity. However, the question whether religions are in themselves conflict-oriented and prone to the use of violence is not very meaningful. The discussion about such generalities like the essence of human beings tends to be very unproductive and inconclusive. What does matter is that the (perceived) religious identity can be manipulated for destructive action. It is obviously an important concern that religions can so easily be abused for acts of violence, discrimination, exclusion and hate. It makes little sense to de-link this from essential elements of religious beliefs! If leaders can make their followers believe the core of their identity (their faith) is threatened, bloody revenge against the other faith can easily follow. Religious experience begins as a deeply personal experience. The belief in God is experienced as essential for the person’s identity. This identity may be seen as threatened by events in the social environment such as humiliation, discrimination or denial of agency. When this is coupled with the common Us versus Them binary distinctions that humans make it leads to the conclusion that there is a group (to which we belong) that protects our identity and an out-group that threatens who we are. If this is combined with elements like use of resources, territorial claims, nationalist sentiments, the confusion of the post-colonial state, imperialism, the rifts may lead to violent battles. They could become particularly vicious because of the religious sentiments the different groups hold. The raging madness gets worse since it plays out in a public forum. Evidently, there is a relation between the religious claims upon which violent acts are based and the religion itself. Violence with

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religious inspiration can become a sacred act as it seems permitted by the will of the Divine and the conflict becomes thus a battle between evil nonbelievers and believers. It should be realized though that deep conflicts have always been inspired by mainly political motives. The Crusades were religiously inspired but they were also political, territorial conflicts driven by papal imperial interests. “The sectarian hatreds that develop within a faith tradition are often cited to prove that ‘religion’ is chronically intolerant. These internal feuds have indeed been bitter and virulent, but they have nearly always had a political dimension” (Armstrong 2014, 361). The most vicious civil disturbances and wars often have a religious component (as in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Middle East, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, Philippines and East Timor). In April 2017, the Pew Research Center ranked India as fourth worst country in the world for religious intolerance after sectarian violence in Syria, Nigeria and Iraq. There is a long history of inter-religious conflicts like in the Christian– Muslim conflicts during the Crusades. There are Hindu/Muslim conflicts in Uttar Pradesh (India) or the violent Buddhist attacks against Muslims and Christians in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Thailand. There is violence in Muslim Bangladesh against Hindus and Christians. There are also fractures within religious groups through the formation of sects having their own interpretations (in doctrine and practice) of the larger belief. The major fracture within Christianity is that between Catholicism and Protestantism. In my search for a robust definition of peace, my focus is however not on religious belligerence but on the sectarianism in religions. There is in the major world religions an inherent strong sectarian sentiment that does not lend itself easily for building togetherness, let alone celebrating collective joy. People of other faiths (and even those of other denominations in the same religion) are sometimes actively discriminated against. Religious minorities often face discriminatory treatment like in employment and education. Muslims may hold the perception of belonging to the community of believers (“ummah”) but there are major fractures within this community, like the Sunni versus the Shi’a groups. The togetherness of the Islamic community is frequently broken up by this rivalry like in Iraq and Syria where Sunni militants see Shi’ites as “apostates” and Shi’ites consider Sunnis to be damned. It is not so much violence (armed conflict, terrorist attacks, war) that is quintessentially religious but the feeling of being threatened by the challenge of otherness. Christians and Muslims comprise half of the world’s population. Thus their relation is

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essential to the world community at large. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of Muslim–Christian dialogues at local, regional and international levels. Mainly motivated by the need to understand, respect and cooperate. The most visible Christian leader during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Pope John Paul II, was a strong advocate for the new approach to interfaith relations. During his papacy (1978–2005), John Paul II travelled to 117 countries. He often met with leaders from various religions, on his travels and in Rome. He was the first pope to visit a mosque (in Damascus in 2001). The spirit of his approach to Islam is evident in a 1985 speech delivered to over 80,000 Muslims at a soccer stadium in Casablanca: “We believe in the same God, the one God, the Living God who created the world … In a world which desires unity and peace, but experiences a thousand tensions and conflicts, should not believers come together? Dialogue between Christians and Muslims is today more urgent than ever. It flows from fidelity to God. Too often in the past, we have opposed each other in polemics and wars. I believe that today God invites us to change old practices. We must respect each other and we must stimulate each other in good works on the path to righteousness”. On the Islamic side the Qur¯an states that “there shall be no compulsion in religious matters” (2:256) and affirms peaceful coexistence (106:1–6). At the same time, the People of the Book are urged to “come to a common word” on the understanding of the unity of God (tawh¯ıd) and proper worship (e.g. 3:64, 4:171, 5:82, and 29:46). Christians, in particular, are chided for having distorted the revelation of God. Traditional Christian doctrines of the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity are depicted as compromising the unity and transcendence of God (e.g. 5:72–75, 5:117, and 112:3). There are also verses urging Muslims to fight, under certain circumstances, those who have been given a book but “practice not the religion of truth” (9:29). With few exceptions, Islamic literature that is focused on Christianity has been polemical. The writings of the celebrated fourteenth-century Muslim scholar Ibn Taym¯ıyyah illustrate the point. In his book Al-jaw¯ab al-s.ah.¯ıh. li-man baddala d¯ın al-mas¯ıh. (The Correct Answer to Those Who Changed the Religion of Christ, 1328), Ibn Taym¯ıyyah catalogues the major Islamic theological and philosophical criticisms of Christianity: it alters the divine revelation, propagates errant doctrine and permits grievous mistakes in religious practices. Inter-religious dialogues began in the 1950s when the World Council of Churches and the Vatican organized meetings with representatives of other faiths. In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council opened efforts

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for interreligious dialogue, and in the 1970s, the WCC established a programme for Dialogue. By the 1980s, a programme for Muslim Christian Dialogues was established with the Muslim World League and the World Muslim Congress. The organized dialogue movement represents a new chapter in the long history between Muslims and Christians. Intentional efforts to understand and cooperate are hopeful signs, particularly for religious communities with a history of mutual antipathy. Muslims and Christians who advocate and engage in dialogue still face many obstacles. Many Muslims are wary of the entire enterprise because of the long history of enmity and the more recent experiences of colonialism. Contemporary political machinations involving the USA or other major Western powers also create problems for many would-be Muslim participants. Still other Muslims suspect that the dialogue is a new guise for Christian missionary activity. Although the organized religious dialogue originated largely with Christians church-related bodies, many conceptual and theological obstacles remain among its protagonists. Some Christians argue that dialogue weakens or undermines Christian mission and witness. For many, the perception of Islam as inherently threatening is deeply ingrained. They are unwilling or unable to move beyond stereotypes or to distinguish between sympathetic and hostile counterparts in the other community. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington marked a major turning point in Muslim–Christian relations. These and many subsequent developments in the USA, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Israel/Palestine created both obstacles and opportunities for Muslim–Christian dialogue. In the USA, thousands of churches focused study programmes on Islam and many initiated dialogue programmes and constructive projects such as building houses for low-income neighbours by churches, mosques and synagogues together. Courses on Islam and interfaith relations increased dramatically in colleges and universities throughout North America. The concerted efforts to facilitate constructive dialogue during the previous half century provided an invaluable foundation for many. At the same time, amidst all the efforts to come to a constructive encounter the voices of some highly audible Christian and Muslim leaders became more polemical. Those overtly rejecting the other religion as “false”, “demonic” or “evil” found followings in their respective communities. The long history of mistrust and animosity continues to affect the attitudes of many people in both communities of faith. For an authentic religious dialogue to be

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effective the partners need to fundamentally abandon mistrust and animosity towards “non-believers” or even better they should no longer use the binary opposition of believers versus non-believers. In a serious communicative encounter, all religious beliefs would be up for critical reflection, all participants would question their assumptions and prejudices and “alterity” would be treated with respect for dignity. In this dialogue, there is no space for absolutism since this will always inevitably create hostility. For peace as a celebration of togetherness the fractures between believers and non-believers need to be resolved. However, can religious parties find common ground? A religious dialogue requires giving up absolute and final beliefs and this poses a major challenge for all religions. Are they capable to give up their totalitarian claims to how societies should be managed and individual lives should be lived? Can a dialogue be conducted between those who state their God is dead and those for whom God is a living reality? Between those who tolerate no criticism of their prophet and those who believe that also the prophet should be the object of critique. Can we find togetherness between a religiously inspired societal order where religion is the basis of political choice and where religious beliefs can be expressed in public spaces versus a completely secular order where religious beliefs are relegated to the private sphere? A robust conceptualization of peace would go way beyond friendly—but non-committal exchanges about religious tolerance and pluralist searches for common ground. They require a fundamental re-tooling of mindsets. All the world religions have “departments” of fundamentalism. Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduisms have strong movements among their faithful that hold absolutist beliefs about the key figures and key doctrines of their faith. Evidently, all four religions have produced liberal, progressive, critical schools of thought but these (like the theology of liberation in Latin America) never had the coercive and discursive powers and the coalitions with political and military power that their fundamentalist counterparts had and continue to have. Real politics in Latin America was more determined in past decades by representatives of Opus Dei than by liberation theologians. It is important to see that fundamentalism—features of which are the use of ruthless violence and overt forms of racial discrimination—is no accident to these religions. At their core is a solid belief in the absolute uniqueness of their teachings and the conviction that deviance from their recognition of the absolute truth will be punished. As human beings try to find answers to their ontological anxieties about life and death, the fundamentalist teaching comes as a great relief as

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it provides the clarity and comfort many people search for. Here lies the core problem in the relation between religions and a conceptualization of peace as cosmopolitan togetherness. Religions are in essence stories that lend themselves conveniently as ideologies for secular, political and divisionary interests. Ideologies are sets of ideas that serve the justification of such interests as political and territorial control. Religions function so well as ideologies for the powerful since they have all the ingredients necessary for the management of mindsets. They refer to archetypical experiences of unconditional loyalty, fear of punishment, surrender and salvation and they create a deep bond (religio = reverence) with a divine entity that is all powerful and yet needs our help. Moreover, the beauty is that since the stories have no legally acknowledge source there is no risk of divine intervention if one choose to abuse the story for idiosyncratic purposes. It is a magical formula. Stories that justify control over people’s lives and that match the desire of numerous people to live with these stories. A beautiful match were it not the case that the religious ideologies that are in fact secular/political ideologies create fractures between humans and with other sentient beings that form an existential risk for life on planet Earth.

Polarization The Greek philosopher Herakleitos coined the phrase: “From differences results the most beautiful harmony”. Maybe he should have been somewhat more cautious because we are biologically, psychologically and linguistically wired to think in fragments as in most modern sciences where we are still haunted by Cartesian divisions. We understand the notion of “parts” better than the concept of “wholeness” because we tend to think in fragments and not in coherent patterns. Once we have fractured the world into stand-alone pieces, it is an illusion that simply connecting us through advanced technologies will create coherence. Through social media we connect but do not create togetherness. Common to all the forms of fragmentation—that I described—is a mode of thinking that William Isaacs (1999) called “thinking alone” which means being defensive about our positions, clinging to certainties and imposing judgements upon others. It reflects a binary discourse that categorizes people against each other. Men versus women, black versus white, impaired versus non-impaired, religious versus non-religious. Binary thinking fosters exclusion and discrimination. We have no shared discourse to converse about the fractures of humanity. Against this Isaacs argues that we need to

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“think together” which means listening, respecting, suspending assumptions and letting our inner voices speak up. “Thinking alone” fosters and feeds polarized fragmentation. The opposite poles are immobile and entrenched in their singular identities. Once people lose the capacity to think about themselves in terms of multiple identities, they are ready to believe that the others deserve to be dehumanized and eventually to be eliminated. The belief in singular identities tends to see violence as only way to protect your own identity. When fragmentation gets polarized, conflicting parties tend to forget that all have multiple identities and that identities are not static but dynamic lest we become each others’ enemies. Our identities and those of others are permanently in flow. We are “flaneurs” as Walter Benjamin phrased it. Especially in global cities there is a constant interaction between multiple identities and we need to reclaim the capacity to celebrate this. The city can only survive if we dance in the streets! There are no fixed identities; they are constructed labels for convenient purposes such as domination. Identities are fluid. As Kwame Appiah says in an interview with the Financial Times (31 August 2018) “Still, whatever their religion, sexuality, racial identity, or nationality, people should have a lighter hand with their use of these identity categories in a way that would mean that moments in our cultures where conflicts arise might be somewhat defused”. Essential identities do not exist however much many people care about them and get angry when what see as their identity is not taken sufficiently seriously. Identity can only develop in interaction with others. Appiah, “Beginning in infancy, it is in dialogue with other people’s understandings of who I am that I develop a conception of my own identity” (Appiah 2007, 20). As Appiah argues identity is not an authentic inner essence but it is—in the words of Charles Taylor—dialogically constituted. “Individuality presupposes sociability” (ibidem, 20) since we are social beings as Aristotle already knew. In Appiah’s felicitous phrasing “so much we care about is collectively created” (ibidem, 20). We should understand that our individual identities have strong collective dimensions… “because they are constituted in part by socially transmitted conceptions of how a person of that identity properly behaves” (ibidem, 21). In processes of polarization, the narratives about who we are tend to be narrowed down to the stories of others who think like us and behave like we do. The collective dimension impoverishes and the dialogical construction of our identity allows the input of a limited set of voices only. There is grave danger in the frozen identities to which the so-called nationalist/populist identity politicians greatly contribute.

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We need to answer this polarization of dividedness with creativity and flexibility, with storytelling, theatre, music and dance. Once dividedness polarizes, it paralyzes communities and stands in the way of their resilience. With polarization, the de-escalation of conflicts becomes practically impossible because conversation is no longer possible. Polarization confronts us with the most dangerous of all fractures. Humans have managed to create a formidable enemy—Mother Gaia—and we need protection against her devastating anger. A deeply polarized human species is unable to provide this protection that needs to be based upon togetherness, thinking together and conversing together.

Existential Risk The accumulation of the fractures into polarization causes the human species—in the beginning of the twenty-first century—to face once again deep existential risks. Those are the risks where humankind as a whole is imperilled as they imply major adverse consequences for the course of human civilization for all time to come. Risks in this category are a recent phenomenon. This is part of the reason why it is useful to distinguish them from other risks. We have not evolved mechanisms, either biologically or culturally, for managing the present risks (Bostrom 2002) that are largely “unintended consequences of radicalized modernity” (Beck 1999, 3). The concern about the extinction of the species we belong to is based on carcinogenic ingredients in food supplies, organized (cyber-)crime, pollution by poisonous materials (acid rains, chemical products), series of natural disasters (asteroids, comets, volcanoes), genetic experiments, collapse of financial markets, the scarcity of water and energy sources, infectious pandemic diseases, the consequences of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence or molecular manufacturing, or on increasing global inequalities that endanger economies and politics (Stiglitz 2013). There is the persistent risk of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare with the observation that for the first time in history weapons of mass destruction and the knowledge of how to manufacture them are available for individuals and small groups. There is also climate change, the loss of biological diversity and the largely underrated issue of overpopulation.2 The human species has survived over centuries many risks but contemporary risks have a planetary scale and “In the charged reflexive settings of high modernity, living on ‘automatic pilot’ becomes more and more difficult to do, and it becomes less and less possible

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to protect any lifestyle, no matter how firmly pre-established, from the generalised risk climate” (Giddens 1991, 126). As Ulrich Beck writes in the world risk society we cannot be privately insured against the risks of modernity (Beck 1999, 4) and their global interdependence. Unprecedented technological progress that provided the conditions under which the mass murders organized on an industrial scale and made possible by an efficiently organized and managed modern bureaucratic state by the Nazi’s could take place. Technical skills and organizational talent is crucial to organize massive gemocide and massive addiction to industrially produced goods such as mobile telephones. Under conditions of modernity Auschwitz could happen again. The need for highly efficient coordination makes modern society very vulnerable to disruptions and on a level of global interdependence such disruptions may have global consequences. Technological advances make humans ever more dangerous, and at the same time, humanity is incapacitated to deal with such unprecedented risks as it outsources its moral responsibilities increasingly to medical, psychotherapeutic, scientific, nutrition and technical-engineering experts. Whereas the Enlightenment promised to liberate humans from the selfimposed inability to use their minds independently of others (Kant), modern life is handed over to coaches and counsellors. As “the most likely global catastropic risks all seem to arise from human activities, especially ´ industrial civilization and advanced technologies” (Bostrom and Cirkovi´ c 2008, 27) humanity has the responsibility to reflect on the unintended and unforeseen consequences of its actions. Most urgent in terms of human survival are the fractures between humans and the Earth System. In the planet’s history humanity finds itself now in a new phase: the “anthropocene”. This means that humans are with their immense and unprecedented power the most influential force in the evolutionary process. Interestingly enough the social sciences largely have refused to accept that the Earth sciences can contribute to our understanding of the world as no longer a “humans among themselves affair” (Hamilton 2017). The “humans only” focus that prevails in the social sciences leads to humans watching their own extinction as a televised spectacle that takes place outside the cubicle of their daily lives. Humans may—as the most powerful species—be at the centre of the planet but are increasingly unable to control the planet. “Our understanding of the Earth we inhabit is undergoing a radical change. The modern ideas of the Earth as the environment in which humans make their home, or as a knowable collection of ecosystems more or less disturbed by humans, is being replaced by the

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conception of an inscrutable and unpredictable entity with a violent history and volatile ‘mood swing’” (ibidem, 47). It is debatable whether as Pope Francis states in Laudation Si: On Care for our Common Home (Encyclical published by the Vatican, May 24, 2015) nature “is the sister that cries out to us” and “a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us”. As Clive Hamilton notes “Now when Mother Earth opens her arms it is not to embrace but to crush us” (ibidem, 48). Because “Nature is no longer passive and fragile, suffering in silence” (ibidem, 48). As Hamilton argues, we no longer have to save nature but we should save ourselves from nature and from ourselves. The most existential threat is now in the fracture between the unprecedented human power to disrupt the earth system and “the uncontrollable powers of nature it unleashed in the Anthropocene” (ibidem, 49). The interesting conclusion is that we are not any longer free to treat the Earth as we please. Our enormous power comes with an unsettling moral responsibility: we no longer can choose between dominion and stewardship. We have to accept that the anthropocene is anthropocentric (ibidem, 50ff.) meaning that we have the power to change the course of the earth system. This leads to the ethical conclusion that “we must restrain ourselves and restrict what we do” (ibidem, 54). In the conflict between humanity’s unlimited desires and ambitions and the finitude of the earth system we must control the dark side of technological development. We must understand that the forces that were expected to bring us more freedom, more equality and more civilization also brought disruption of the earth system, lethal arms systems, unprecedented ubiquitous surveillance and a tweeting culture that effectively erodes whatever minimal deliberative social processes we had developed. In this moral conflict, we must explore whether our conventional ethical repertoire is adequate. Can we rely upon the will of God or our love for nature? Can we trust enlightened self-interest? Can the notion of collective public duty stand up against the solid individualism of a modern capitalist society. Will the drive towards self-preservation outlive the rampant media-induced indifference? Our future is a confrontation between humans and an unpredictable earth system. This has a certain outcome if we think we can afford indifference and an uncertain outcome—at best— if we treat an angry mother Gaia with the care she deserves. The question is whether today’s global community is capable of dealing with the existential risk of extinction. Can we constitute a global resilient community that can avoid this?

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Conclusion As Abraham Lincoln, later president of the USA, on 16 June 1858 after he had accepted the Illinois Republican Party’s nomination as that state’s US senator, famously stated “A house divided against itself, cannot stand”.3 In order to deal effectively with a formidable existential risk, we must develop communal resilience. This involves the difficulty of accepting genuine dissimilarities. It implies recognizing the other as responsible agent. It demands the critically probing of the arguments for different positions and accepting that togetherness is only possible when groups no longer monopolize the truth. And learning that fractures do not necessarily exclude “togetherness” as long they do not end in the dead alley of polarization.4 If peace is conceptualized as “celebrating moments of sheer human togetherness” and if we aspire to peaceful living together, we must overcome the great obstacle of polarized fragmentation. It may not be the fragmentation in so many different terrains on our planet that creates the essential obstacle to the cosmopolitan togetherness that is basic to collective joy. But the greater problem is that fragmentation is based upon a mindset that is characterized by the belief in singular identities, in the exclusion of alterity, in rampant individualism and in “thinking alone”. This perspective fits remarkably well in the hierarchical social orders that characterize also modern so-called democratic societies. For the conceptualization of peace as moments of collective joy, it is also important to note that such orders are antagonistic to collective festivities. “Ecstatic rituals still build group cohesion, but when they build it among subordinates – peasants, slaves, women, colonized people- the elite calls out its troops. In one way, the musically driven celebrations of subordinates may be more threatening to elites than overt political threats from below” (Ehrenreich 2007, 252). Recent research on resilience seems to be shifting away from individual resilience towards a focus on community resilience which does not ignore the importance of individual agency and capability but stresses the embeddedness of individuals in collective processes that relate the healing of fractures to political and cultural factors and available resources in the forms of social, cultural and information capital. Communal resilience recognizes that the ability to meet existential risk goes beyond the individual and needs the involvement of the family, the local community, the nation and the global polity. Communal resilience requires at all those

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levels a readiness to cooperate, to accept diversity, to think inclusively, the ability to act autonomously—as empowered agents—and to engage in critical reflection. In order to deal with the complexity of all these factors that stand in the way of living in peace, we need to turn to humanity’s unique resource: humans are the most communicative animals with unique skills for pro-social, cooperative communication. Communication is never a neutral process and to bring about communal resilience it needs to be embedded in the “thinking together” mindset. This means that we need to communicate through the authentic conversational modality of human communication. I call this conversation the “deep dialogue” that combines human linguistic proficiency with human ecstatic emotional capabilities.

Notes 1. Much of the following material was inspired by book on Media and Conflict (2011). 2. Much has been written about this so I’ll only highlight some issues of global concern. The planet has close to seven billion people, and in 2050, this could be 9.8 billion. You need to have an unlimited belief in human technological inventiveness to think that we can provide enough food for this number. Humans are the leading force in killing at a rapid rate other species. This “biological extermination” (biologist Paul Ehrlich) means that when humans require more space on the planet there is less place for other living beings. Biodiversity is thus undermined at such a rate that it may last only two to three decennia before we go from the edge of the abyss into the abyss. It is a taboo to say that we are with too many but being indifferent to this reality only increases the risks for our existence on the planet. First thing is get the topic on the global agenda. People at large seem to be totally insensitive to the drama of their own extinction that they watch on TV sets, tablets and telephones as if a spectacle occurs that does not really touch them. 3. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South”.

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4. Polarizing forces have become over the past years a formidable factor within the European region. Between Northern and Southern Europe an increasing financial division becomes visible and between the East and the West deep splits in political conceptions of democracy and rule of law emerge. There are those who want more EU and those who want less or no Europe. There is an increasing division between “populists” and “cosmopolitans”. In this polarization, the powerful meme of populist politicians is that represent the real people and know best what is true. Their homogeneous and indivisible nation is threatened by the others who should be excluded. The populist mindset is exclusionist. It divides people into those who belong and those who do not belong. Its powerful beliefs are that “we are the real people, we own the truth and are the true believers”. The others belong to a different and inferior moral universe. Their otherness is dangerous. This is why strong directions are required of leaders who claim “there is none better than me” and “I am more capable than all the others”. Against this cosmopolitans stand for protection of minorities, belief in diversity, pluralism and universality. They accept difference and disagreement but in constructive ways. There are also dangerously polarized fractures between political Islamists and secular Muslims. Moreover, neoliberal politics and economics (that are neither new nor liberal) continue to feature an enormous polarization between the wealthy and the poor. Because of the immense wealth of a few, majorities are excluded from the “good life” and also from sharing social power. Added to the rich/poor polarization are the fragmentation processes on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, age, cultural identity and religion. There is obviously polarization between Israeli and Palestinians but there also deep fractures within the Jewish community, and likewise among Christians and Palestinians. About this discord Els van Duggele wrote the book “We Hate Each Other More Than the Jews”. She documented a depressing series of deep conflicts in the Palestinian community. The polarization between Fatah and Hamas incapacitates the Palestinian community to effectively cope with the risks of outside threats (such as Israeli occupation politics, or Salafist aspirations to establish an Islamic State). The internal polarization undermines the resilience of this community. “The division under the Palestinians has become in recent years deeper and more paralyzing. Also more dangerous…..Hamas and Fatah seem engaged in a battle of who can act most cruelly…..the leaders of the PLO, Fatah, Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood are all quarrelling with each other. The internal division in the Palestinian community has made a twostate solution unrealistic. The combination of Israeli occupation politics and Palestinian division is a lethal one for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state” (p. 280). Politics in Palestine largely diverged along the

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rift created by the two most powerful Arab families in Palestine that constantly competed for power: the Husayni family and the Nashabisji family. An antagonistic relationship that begins in the early twentieth century and produced a fragmentation that stood in the way of their common longterm goals such as stopping the influx of European Jews and preserving the Arab Palestinian state. As a result of this internal division that persist until today Palestinians failed in creating a resilient community that could deal with their external enemies.

References Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. New York: Verso. Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism. New York: W. W. Norton. Appiah, K. A. (2007). The ethics of identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Armstrong, K. (2014). Fields of blood: Religion and the history of violence. London: The Bodley Head. Beck, U. (1999). World risk society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bostrom, N. (2002). Existential risks: Analyzing human extinction scenarios and related hazards. Journal of Evolution and Technology, 9(1), 1–30. ´ Bostrom, N., & Cirkovi´ c, M. M. (Eds.). (2008). Global catastrophic risks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste. Cambrige: Harvard University Press. Bradley, H. (2016). Fractured identities: Changing patterns of inequality. Cambridge: Polity Press. Connolly, W. E. (1991). Identity difference: Democratic negotiations of political paradox. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Davis, M. (1992). Fortress Los Angeles: The militarization of urban space. In M. Sorkin (Ed.), Variations on a theme park: Scenes from the new American city and the end of public space (pp. 154–180). New York: Hill and Wang. Ehrenreich, B. (2007). Dancing in the streets: A history of collective joy. London: Granta Books. Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the College de France. New York: Picador. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hamelink, C. J. (2011). Media and conflict. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Hamilton, C. (2017). Defiant earth. Cambridge: Polity Press. Harff, B., & Gurr, T. R. (2004). Ethnic conflict in world politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue. New York: Currency.

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Licklider, R. (1995). The consequences of negotiated settlement in civil war, 1945–1993. American Journal of Political Science, 44, 84–93. Paglia, C. (1990). Sexual personae. New York: Random House. Piketty, T. (2017). Capital in the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Piketty, T. (2019). Capital et idéologie. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city. New York, London, Tokyo: Princeton University Press. Sorkin, M. (Ed.). (1992). Variations on a theme park: Scenes from the new American city and the end of public space. New York: Hill and Wang. Stiglitz, J. E. (2013). The price of inequality. New York: W. W. Norton. Tannen, D. (1992). You just don’t understand. London: Little, Brown Book Group, UN Habitat. UN Habitat Annual Report. (2006). State of the world’s cities. United Nations: Nairobi. Van Duggele, E. (2017). We haten elkaar meer dan de Joden [We hate each other more than the Jews]. Discord within Palestinian society. Amsterdam: Atheneum en Polak & van Gennep. Vintges, K. (2017). A new dawn for the second sex. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wasko, J. (2001). Understanding Disney: The manufacture of fantasy. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. World Inequality Report. (2018). Written and coordinated by: Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman. General coordinator: Lucas Chancel. Creative commons. https://wir2018. wid.world/. Wysong, E., & Perrucci, R. (2017). Deep inequality: Understanding the new normal and how to challenge it. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

CHAPTER 3

Deep Dialogue

The ultimate explanation for how it is that human beings are able to communicate with one another in such complex ways with such simple gestures is that they have unique ways of engaging with one another socially in general . (Michael Tomasello) Humans are particularly socially interactive creatures, which makes communication central to our existence. (P. Th. Schoenemann)

My conclusion at the end of Chapter 2 was that in order to create space for the celebration of sheer human togetherness we need to overcome the polarized fragmentation that today characterizes most global and local politico-economic and sociocultural processes. This requires the building of resilient communities through communicating with each other in the modality of a “deep dialogue” that combines verbal proficiency with human playful capabilities. As I will argue in this chapter, the unique feature of human communication is its cooperative nature. This enables us to engage in authentic conversations through storytelling and through sharing emotions.

© The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Hamelink, Communication and Peace, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1_3

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The Origins The longing for relation is an innate characteristic of the human being and constitutes the basis of human communication. Conversation is the most basic process in human life. “Not only is conversation the most pervasively used mode of interaction in social life and the form within which, with whatever modification…..language is first acquired, but also it consists of the fullest matrix of socially organized communicative practices and procedure” (Heritage and Atkinson 1984, 12). Throughout human history conversation in myriad forms and constellations has been the central element in the organization of life. Humans are uniquely well wired for conversation because their communicative processes (different from all other species on the planet) are fundamentally cooperative as they are based on seeking common conceptual ground and shared intentionality. Human communication—as summarized by Tomasello—is grounded in shared understanding of the context of social interaction and is performed for fundamentally pro-social motives: informing others and sharing emotions. “Other primates do not structure their communication in this same way with joint intentions, joint attention, mutually assumed cooperative motives and communicative conventions…” (Tomasello 2010, 108). In order to understand where conversation comes from, we need to approach the origins of human communication from evolutionary theory. Although “evolutionary communication is a powerful theoretical perspective that applies to all forms of biological and social interaction” (Lull and Neiva 2012, 16) and evolutionary theory “is one of the most powerful scientific explanations ever put forward” (ibidem, 16) there is little impact on communication theory. The social sciences have marginalized biology and particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory from its efforts to understand the world. Therefore, Lull and Neiva argue that there should be “a major infusion of Darwinian thinking into communication theory…” (ibidem, 16). This point is elaborated solidly in Lull’s recent on evolutionary communication (2020). Communication is a crucial instrument in cultural evolution and yet the social sciences and the humanities have been unable to provide a solid understanding of how culture evolves. The thinking has been too much focused on the individual and not on the group. Cultural evolution and with it the evolution of human communication would be best studied at the level of the group since human life is characterized by living in large groups (nations, corporations, tribes).

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The focus of much research has been the individual whereas human communicative behaviour can be best understood if studied as behaviour in social groups (see Richerson and Boyd 2005 on “population thinking”). An evolutionary approach helps to understand why we prefer communication with person or group A over communication with person or group B? From our biological evolution, we learn that successful adaptation needs reciprocity. In chimpanzee colonies, the practice of grooming which is crucial to survival (the removal of parasites from places where the animals themselves cannot reach) functions most effectively when there is reciprocal altruism. I groom you and you groom me. Free-riders are dangerous to social cohesion and will be dealt with: they become social outcasts. From this observation, the argument can be developed that people will prefer to communicate with those who (seem to) provide reciprocity. Through the application of evolutionary principles, we can also gain insights in the question why we prefer some information inputs over others. Across the world news media tend to bring primarily bad news: floods, earthquakes, wars, crimes or terrorist attacks. Many studies have been dedicated to this. In a study by Davis and McLeod (2003), 736 newspaper front-page stories that appeared between 1700 and 2001 were analysed. The results demonstrate a uniformity of sensationalist topics that refer to fear, survival and reproduction. Among the prominent ones are death, robbery, assault, injury and rape. Much analytical work on news focuses on what journalists do and a rapidly expanding volume of studies tells us that they use framing and priming mechanisms in their reporting of the world. Less research has been dedicated to the question why journalists do what they do. Most explanations of “bad news“ focus on the analysis of so-called news values. Such analysis does enlighten us about how news gets to be constructed once these values that determine selection are in place. However, they do not help us to understand where the values come from. In search for grounds, we find references to professional socialization, internal and external political and economic pressures, ideological biases, mechanisms of human perception and automatic categorization. Explanations that tell us that the owners of news media prefer bad news because it sells best may have a point but fail to say why media audiences in such large numbers accept bad news about their world and do not massively demand other dimensions of reality. Attempts to answer the question why audiences are drawn to sensational forms of reporting point to socialization, lack of empathy, compassion fatigue, stereotyping or malicious delight in other people’s suffering. But what draws

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people in large numbers to the reporting about misery and abuse? As an eighteenth-century editorial worries, “let a Gazette inform us in detail of a plague, civil war or dreadful famine and this paper would deeply engage the attention, be read over and over again and pronounced a valuable paper” (Independent Ledger 1784 in Davis and McLeod 2003, 208). There are explanations from sociological and social-psychological perspectives, but it would seem that an evolutionary perspective holds the most solid cards. A Darwinian explanation would offer a reasoning that argues that the most preferred news topics are related to the human capacity to adapt to their environment. Among the successful and effective adaptive mechanisms are the detection of cheaters and free-riders, the fear of violence and assault, and the readiness to fight or flee. For millions years, our predecessors lived on African savannahs. They were not as we might prefer to think the eminent sovereigns of their habitat. With a length of only 1.20 m, other animals like hyenas or saber-toothed cats (twice as big as lions) must have looked intimidatingly big to them. They must have lived in constant fear and must have acted with utmost prudence in order to survive. They could only hunt for their food when the real hunters, like the lions, were resting. Under these circumstances, it seems realistic to assume that their communication consisted primarily of warnings for imminent danger. We know from evolutionary studies on culture that when certain mental patterns have been imprinted on minds they will stay there for a very long time indeed and will change only very slowly. Today’s “bad news” is a relic of a stone age adaptive function that was once essential for survival on the savannah. Bad news appeals to audiences because it helps humans to give attention to information that is essential to their survival and their reproductive fitness. This does not mean that today warnings would no longer have a function. But in a modern contemporary environment an adequate adaptation to reality requires that also “good news” stories are taken seriously. Survival of the human animal in the twenty-first century is probably best secured if an alertness to risks is combined with openness to challenges. The problem with permanent warning for impending danger is that the alerts become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People may begin to meet others with such preconceived ideas about their hostility that the others begin to behave in accordance with the expectation. This is a very common occurrence as we know from social-psychological studies about stereotyping. Obviously, also in modern societies there can be solid grounds for fear. We do live in what Ulrich Beck has baptized a global “risk society” (1992). We can

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now blow up the planet several times over. But fear can be exaggerated and can be manipulated and exploited for political reasons (the terrorism fear which serves the erosion of basic civil rights and freedoms) or for commercial reasons (the virus-fear which helps to sell vaccines). Often, as the case of terrorism phobia demonstrates, the actual occurrence of terror acts and the probability of being a terrorism victim bears little relation to the alarm bells that governments and media ring. A culture of fear creates serious obstacles to social cohesion and to living together. We need a more differentiated environments that are much more variegated than those of our ancestors. In the twenty-first century, we need for our survival as species hope more than we need fear. More “good news” in daily newscasts and news reporting serves a more adequate adaptation to modern environments than that relic of the stone age: “bad news”. Dominique Moïsi has proposed a division in the world of cultures of fear, hope and humiliation. He concludes his study on the geopolitics of emotion by stating “To respond to the challenges we face, the world needs hope” (Moïsi 2009, 159). On the basis of these considerations, the thesis could be formulated that permanent warnings for danger and risk hamper an adequate twenty-first-century adaptation to modern realities. For an evolutionary understanding of human communication, we need to start from the basic Darwinian algorithm for successful adaptation. This is based upon variation, selection and replication. In the domain of human communication, this can be applied as follows. Communicative behaviour evolves through variation. A great variety of modalities of communication evolve because of the need to adapt to different and changing environments. This evolution is both non-intentional and intentional and limited by both genotypical and historical factors. Much of it proceeds (as in the evolution of knowledge in science) by trial and error. In the evolutionary process, the best adaptive solutions are kept. Communication forms that optimally serve human survival and reproduction will be retained. Those forms of attention and memory that are designed to notice, store and retrieve information and that are useful to solving adaptive problems will further evolve. Inadequate communicative solutions will disappear. The most adequate adaptations will be transmitted to future generations. This leads to an understanding of human communication as a complex adaptive system that is largely driven by the instinct to cooperate. The species homo understood early on that their communities would benefit from cooperative communication. Communication made the kind of

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coordination that hunting required possible and facilitated the organization of complex societies. There is a good deal of evidence to safely suggest that the origin of cooperative human communication emerged from the instinct to cooperate. Through cooperative communication, humans designed adequate adaptive systems that secured their survival and reproductive capacity, and thus, human communication became a key-player in the biological and cultural evolution of humanity. Understanding communication as a complex adaptive system helps to see how human interactions have to be diverse, innovative and dynamic so they can cater for the constant changes in the environment and adapt to them in non-linear and probabilistic ways. Communication is basic to all living species. Yet, in spite of this shared reality all species have developed their own characteristic communicative repertoire. Human communication displays distinctive design features. These are altruistic cooperation, shared intentionality and a complex vocal language. Human beings are able to communicate with each other in complex ways with the simple gestures of pointing and pantomiming because “they have unique ways of engaging with one another socially generally. More specifically, human beings cooperate with one another in species-unique ways involving ways involving processes of shared intentionality” (Tomasello 2010, 72). In the natural gestures of the great apes (pointing and pantomiming), we find the basic structure of what will evolve as human communication. The transition from natural gestures to language relied on shared intentionality, on the meaningfulness of natural gestures. Apes use their gestures to demand action from others. They want others to see something and do something. Apes understand individual intentionality but do not participate in shared intentionality (ibidem, 331), they can synchronize actions but do not form joint goals or joint plans. Humans—contrary to the great apes—engage in the collaborative activity of cooperative communication. Shared intentionality means that humans have joint goals and joint plans and share beliefs, motives and assumptions. “The skills and motivations of shared intentionality thus constitute what we may call the cooperative infrastructure of human communication” (ibidem, 7). We are able to communicate in cooperative ways because humans have the cognitive skills to create common ground “even pre-linguistic infants communicate gesturally in much more complex ways than apes” (ibidem, 74). The crucial factor seems to be “context”. The communicative context is what is relevant for social interaction. A shared inter-subjective context requires common ground.

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“Common ground includes everything we both know (and know that we both know, etc.) from facts about the world, to the way that rational people act in certain situations, to what people typically find salient and interesting” (ibidem, 75). We seek common ground by making efforts “to communicate in ways that are comprehensible to the recipient, who in turn makes efforts at comprehension by making obvious inferences, asking for clarification when needed (Tomasello 2010, 83). This cooperative spirit is characteristic of human communication. “There is no evidence that other animals ever ask one another for clarification” (ibidem, 83). We can conclude from this that the evolution of human communication has been guided by the need and the capacity of “thinking together”. Human communication is motivated by mutualism and reciprocity. We request from others information that is helpful to us and offer others information that is useful to them. We also share information and emotions with others because we want to be linked to them. It is important here to take note of the narrative structure of human communication. We do things (like hunting, cultivating the land, building settlements, fighting wars) and from beginning to end we tell each other stories about what we are going to do and about what we did. Storytelling is an essential condition to make human actions possible. Storytelling obviously only makes sense if we can understand each other through the sharing of a non-verbal signalling system or through a common verbal language. Crucial for the ability to communicate in humans was the co-evolution of brain and language. Human communication began to make sense when this co-evolution made it possible to speak to and with each other. Changes in the human brain made thinking and awareness possible and facilitated the basic skill of reading the intentions of others which created the common conceptual ground for human communication. At the same time, language adapted to the possibilities and limitations of the human brain (Schoenemann 2009, 180). Increasingly complicated social interactions drove the evolution of language and the human brain adapted to better serve language since language presupposes a brain that facilitates the use of language (ibidem, 163). As language is crucial for human adaptation, it is likely to influence brain evolution. Language evolution is more complex than physical evolution where the environment determines what is beneficial like a thicker fur in cold climates. This is an adaptation independent of the group. In linguistic development to be better than others serves no one if the others cannot hear what you say. The advantage is dependent upon the abilities of other members of the species. “Larger

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social groups have increasingly complicated social interactions, and successful social living depend upon how best to navigate them…Given that language is an inherently social activity, the usefulness of language would be greatest in the human species” (ibidem, 168). The cooperative motives of human communication are requesting, informing and sharing: “The facts that communicators operate with these cooperative motives and that recipients are inclined to respond appropriately …are part of the common ground between human communicators” (Tomasello 2010, 88). The new species homo was exposed to an impressive range of predators (Sterelny 2012, 74). This required a collective defence based upon solid and efficient coordination. Thus, communication was used to send warning signals in cases of imminent danger. The collective hunting also demanded cooperation and a fair distribution of the loot which implied the suppression of bullies. Cooperative foraging needed expertise which developed and expanded through information sharing. From earliest times on hominins and later humans were information junkies: constantly seeking and receiving information. “Human life depends on this informational commons and has done so at least since the regular harvesting of large game and the regular use of fire, and this may be as deep in time as two million years” (ibidem, 76). These informational commons evolved in human history from the sharing of signals through gestures in pre-verbal times to storytelling when language developed and to modern soaps in high-technology media. The conclusion from evolutionary arguments is that human beings are well prepared for what Buber calls “the speech of genuine conversation in which men understand one another and come to a mutual understanding” (Buber 1999, 236). Yet, in his book On Dialogue Bohm (1996) asks “Why then is it so difficult actually to bring about such communication”? Human conversation has often taken the form of the polemical debate. Polemizing however is not without risk. It is a battle of words, a form of waging war. Using words like weapons is of course also a form of violence. Verbal violence can cause exceptional emotional damage and can also lead to physical violence. Verbal and physical violence are positions on a sliding scale. Polemizing is playing with fire. It is not innocent when opponents are described as fascists or terrorists. Such types can only be silenced with the help of physical violence. When words are used as weapons, a spiral of violence is used that can end in the use of weapons as words. The media have often greatly magnified polemics. This provides entertaining and exciting spectacles. Politics suddenly becomes fun again.

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But in the end, nobody becomes any the wiser. There is little or no listening in the polemic debate, false arguments and fallacies are used and there is constant reference to uncontrollable sources. The truth is certainly not served by the polemic debate. Such a debate consists of a series of fundamentalist monologues in which the opponents want to surpass each other, do not let the other speak out, talk through each other and use one-liners to reduce reality to simple constructions. In most media around the world debate is a popular format whereas the opportunities for genuine conversation tend to be minimal. Oddly enough, the gossiping that is essential in human evolution and that we seem to enjoy endlessly is better suited for conversing in togetherness. Most of people’s conversations are dominated by social topics. “These include discussions of personal relationships, personal likes and dislikes, personal experiences, the behaviour of other people, and similar topics” (Dunbar 1996, 123). As Dunbar concludes “language evolved to facilitate the bonding of social groups” and this is mainly achieved “by permitting the exchange of socially relevant information” (ibidem, 123). As social beings, we are fascinated by the minutiae of everyday social life “Who is doing what with whom and whether it’s a good or a bad thing; who is in and who is out, and why; how to deal with a difficult social situation involving a lover, child or colleague” …..“we seem to be obsessed with gossiping about one another” (ibidem, 5, 7). In Dunbar’s vision, gossiping is the human version of grooming among primates. Gossip is an evolutionary universal from way back and “it manifests itself today in our national media in the form of gossip columns, TV ‘entertainment shows’ and soap operas, while in our workplaces and neighbourhoods we continue to discuss privately (and deliciously) the doings of others- just as been done in small communities of human foragers for dozens and dozens of millenia” (Boehm 2012, 34). Gossip has an important social function as it “functions as a court of public opinion. It’s a special court, however, the defendants don’t get to face the charges against them- and often there’s simply no way to defend themselves” (ibidem, 239). In many hunting bands “the critical court of public opinion isn’t interested in holding balanced and fair hearings but rather in knowing about what people will try to hide” (ibidem, 240). Gossiping is characterized by the contrast between enjoying talking about others and fearing that they might talk about you. It clearly has a social and moral function. “The fact that a solid public opinion can be quietly formed without personal risk or conflict and through highly specific symbols provides a formidable social tool, against dangerous bullies,

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and when it’s time for action, the findings can be used surgically” (ibidem, 245). Our endless chatter (on radio and TV, via the Internet or via cell phone) has an important social function. It is the same ritual as that of the flocking monkeys: we reassure our peers, because we show interest and we show that we are not aggressive. The grooming modality of human communication is important in strengthening communal interests for resilience. However, to overcome the polarization that obstructs the celebration of human togetherness it seems that the conversational modality of human communication has the best cards if we manage to combine our verbal proficiency with emotional narration. I call the conversation that employs language, song and dance and is based upon the features of cooperation, trust, mutuality, patience and the basic normative principle of communicative freedom “deep dialogue”. The “deep dialogue” is an exercise in slow thinking through which a polarized community (family, city and country) investigates a theme of urgent and current significance. Despite fundamentally different views on the theme, participants in the dialogue are exploring whether they can find common starting points. The usual forms of discussion—discussion and debate—are insufficient to arrive at lasting common insights that can form the basis of cooperation towards collective resilience. Essential in the deep dialogue is listening attentively (have I actually heard what the other person is saying?) and talking attentively (do I know what I really want to say and do I know if this contributes to the subject under investigation?). In the deep dialogue there is time and space for all participants to tell their story and to be listened to with respect. All participants share personal experiences that relate to the subject under investigation. The deep dialogue is not so much about discussing a theme as it is about researching points of view regarding the theme and exploring common principles. It is an exploration of the validity of our knowledge, prejudices and assumptions. The Socratic qualities that are essential for the deep dialogue include the capacity of people to reason about what they believe or what they believe they know and to critically investigate their own assumptions (Nussbaum 1997, 19). For Socrates, this is the essence of all reflection. He suggested that our positions are often more determined by beliefs than by knowledge and we often fail to explain these beliefs. A Socratic investigation may reveal that we often talk about many matters we have little understanding of and that frequently we do not even understand our own thinking. I added the notion of “deep” to dialogue for the following

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reasons. Firstly, the word dialogue has undergone some devaluation as a result of its cavalier use by political and religious leaders. They are fond of embellishing their—often—unproductive encounters with the label of dialogue. Secondly, the mode of conversation I propose here is at the service of the cosmopolitan togetherness that I call peace. Therefore, this conversational modality cannot be based upon shallow agreements to cooperate, upon compromise deals, upon the sharing of ideas that provide attractive window dressings, or on the construction of similarity without alterity. Its features need to be building blocks of the greater aim it seeks to achieve. You cannot achieve this togetherness by babbling or gossiping or have a good talk or negotiating. In the way you interact, there needs to be recognition of the different assumptions that should be freely expressed but also freely questioned as a means to understand why we believe differently. The deep dialogue does not resolve disagreement it will seek to understand why we disagree and how might we live together in fundamental disagreement. This requires an extraordinarily strong moral commitment to the dignity of human agency as this conversation is liberated from all missionary and colonial intentions. Thirdly, the deep dialogue is a reiterative and dynamic process. An exercise in moral reasoning. A method of moral argumentation that makes participants’ choices visible and justifiable. There are multiple interpretations of what people hold to be right versus wrong. There are no last words in law or morality since moral positions are forever contestable propositions. There is no single morality. The deep dialogue assists in finding minimal agreements on procedures that optimally accommodate the interests and principles of various parties. The deep dialogue opens the possibility to discover that the moral practices of “Us” are not always morally defensible and that those of “Them” are not always morally despicable. Fourthly, the deep dialogue is distinct from other conversations since it includes the non-human species we share the planet with. We may not be able to deeply dialogue with them but the concern about their well-being and the procedures for addressing this—as part of our common survival—is on the agenda of the “deep dialogue”.

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On Cooperation The deep dialogue is a cooperative relation that requires that we find a balance between cooperation and competition. As Gambetta argues “a certain dose of competition is notoriously beneficial in improving performance, fostering technological innovation, bettering services, allocating resources, spreading the fittest genes to later generations, pursuing excellence, preventing abuses of power - in short, in enriching the human lot” (Gambetta, 215). Yet it needs to be realized that in essence the deep dialogue is a collaborative activity.1 “In a dialogue nobody is trying to win” (Bohm 1996, 7). “The fundamentally cooperative nature of human communication is, of course, the basic insight of Grice” (Tomasello 2010, 6). Herbert Paul Grice (1913–1988) was a philosopher of language who proposed the general principles that he called the Cooperative Principle and the Maxims of Conversation. According to Grice, the cooperative principle is a norm governing all cooperative interactions among humans. He formulated maxims on quantity and on quality. The maxim of quantity suggests to make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange. That means do not provide more information than is required. The maxim of quality advises not to say what you believe to be false and not to say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Grice also proposed the maxim of clarity implying to be perspicuous, to avoid obscurity of expression and ambiguity, and to be brief and orderly.2

On Trust Trust is “a device for coping with the freedom of others” (Gambetta 1988, 220). Relations with others imply the possibility of deceit and defection. As Giddens argues if someone’s activities were continually visible and thought processes were transparent there would be no need for trust (Giddens 1990, 33). Since we never have full information about the thoughts and actions of others, we need to take the risk of trusting them if we want to cooperate with them. “All trust is in a certain sense blind trust!” (Giddens, ibidem, 33). Trust means that I need to know that what the other says is genuine and the other should be assured that what I say is authentic “…for I can only speak to someone in the true sense of the term if I expect him to accept my word as genuine” (Buber 1999, 238). Trust is essential to living together. It is the basis of social

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cooperative behaviour. We cooperate because we rely on others to be reliable. If they turn out to be unreliable, there can be no cooperation. Trust is a dependency relation based upon the expectation that this dependence will not be abused and this expectation can be based upon knowledge about earlier behaviour of the other, or knowledge about his character, or strong affective feelings. If an encounter starts from distrust, i.e. the belief that the other cannot be relied upon to speak truthfully, to deliver what he/she promises or to meet a commitment, a conversation may be possible but not a “deep dialogue”. For the deep dialogue, you need to trust the conversational partners. Equally important however is that you can be trusted as partner. Thus, the deep dialogue is also an exercise in critical self-reflection. Can I be sure that I am to be trusted? Do I trust myself? Do I believe my own truth? “It is necessary not only to trust others before acting cooperatively but also believe that one is trusted by the other” (Gambetta 1988, 217).

On Mutuality As cooperative relation the deep dialogue is a convivial and reciprocal activity. Most people—with only few exceptions—live in communities. For these communities to be sustainable, people need to seek mutual understanding. This becomes even more critical as communities— through changes in global demographics—evolve into multi-cultural and multi-religious communities. Lest these new communities get entangled in violent and possibly lethal conflict, they should engage in interactions in which others are seen as unique individuals with faces, stories and experiences. In such interactions, it is vitally important that we want to understand who this other is. “Cooperation frequently makes some demand on the level of trust, particularly of mutual trust. If distrust is complete, cooperation will fail among free agents. Furthermore, if trust exists only unilaterally cooperation may also fail, and if it is blind it may constitute rather an incentive to deception” (Gambetta 1988, 220).

On Patience Patience means taking time for reflection. The authentic conversation is slow and needs time for ideas to sink in and to understand perspectives different from our own. Deep dialogue requires waiting and silence. For the deep dialogue, we need to learn the art of wasting time. We may tend

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to see the patient conversation as a waste of time but that is precisely what the dialogue requires: the willingness to waste time (Lightman 2018) and the praise of idleness (Russell 1935).The deep dialogue requires “kairos” versus “chronos”. In Greek mythology, there were two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos refers to mechanical and quantitative time: a measured and linear time in which the metrum mercilessly continues. Chronos is the time of agenda’s and deadlines. Chronos is living in moment after moment. Much of our daily lives—certainly in modern western societies—is controlled if not terrorized by the linearity of the clock. However, there is another time. Kairos is the time of significant events; it is the time of the seasons. Kairos represents the opportune time for action: qualitative, social and creative time. Kairos stands for “time out of time”. “Kairos time is forever. It is the time of memory. It is the time of being” (Lightman 2018, 73). Releasing the innate human ability to dialogue requires the creativity that comes with non-measured time.

The Basic Principle: Communicative Freedom In many conversations, participants take positions that for them are no longer negotiable because they hold their assumptions to be truths and defend them even against overwhelming evidence of their absurdity. Caught up in our own prejudices, fears and feelings we often listen to ourselves and not to the others. We often accuse the other of not listening and being prejudiced and prefer to not see those flaws in our own thinking. We seldom ask real questions and more often than not produce opinionated statements to which we add a question mark. In many encounters that are termed dialogue the participants do not question their own assumptions and take positions that they see as non-negotiable. We all bring assumptions about ourselves, others, the world, our societies, relationships and ways of life to the encounter. In today’s world, people will encounter others that come from different cultures with different cultural assumptions. And here the problems is as Bohm writes (1996, 11) “And they may not realize it, but they have some tendency to defend their assumptions and opinions reactively against evidence that they are not right, or simply a similar tendency to defend them against somebody who has another opinion”. Many conversations are in fact negotiating processes in which ideas are traded off against each other seeking accommodations that will satisfy all participants. Negotiating blocks the deep dialogue. Freedom as “communicative freedom” means that people

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should be free to accept or reject each other’s claims on the basis of reasons they can evaluate. The respect for the communicative freedom of others is a basic recognition of their human agency (Benhabib 2011, 68). It requires that we accept the other as fundamentally different from us and see their alterity as a unique feature that cannot be assimilated and reduced to similarity. Communicative freedom is the capacity “to agree or disagree with me on the basis of reasons the validity of which you accept or reject” (ibidem, 67). Freedom of communication means that people should be free to accept or reject each other’s claims on the basis of reasons they can evaluate and explore the arguments that seek to justify positions and beliefs. Positions can be justified from various perspectives. Justification is inherently perspectivist. Different beliefs can be justified. The dialogue opens the possibility of recognizing that a different position is justified and that there can be real differences and genuine Otherness. In the deep dialogue, participants do not hold on to only one position as the absolute truth. They accept the willingness to cope with real and deep differences. The respect for the communicative freedom of the other— who shares in our common humanity, including those who communicate in different ways like children, or the mentally ill—is a recognition of the dignity of human agency. If we deny people agency we do not accept them as autonomous beings, as beings defined by themselves and in charge of their own lives. Communicative freedom is characterized by the equality of communication partners to initiate communication, the symmetrical entitlement to speech acts, and the reciprocity of communication roles. The essential features or requirements of the deep dialogue are interrelated. The deep dialogue is a cooperative relation which requires trusting the other in the sense of accepting the communicative freedom of the other and this works only if participants in the relation take their time to find confidence in the reliability of the other.

Song and Dance However, meaningful our verbal discourse in our interaction with others may be, the expression of our feelings about ourselves and others requires the additional instruments of singing and dancing. Language is “a most wondrous invention for conveying bald information, but fails most of us totally when we want to express the deepest reaches of our innermost souls” (ibidem, 148). Dunbar argues that as we were acquiring the ability

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to argue and rationalize, we needed a more primitive emotional mechanism to bond our large groups. “Something deeper and more emotional was needed to empower the old logic of verbal arguments” (ibidem, 148). And he suggests that “language allowed us to find out about each other, to ask and answer questions about who was doing what with whom. But of itself, it does not bond groups together….it seems that we needed music and physical touch to do that” (ibidem, 148). “One of the more intriguing features of human behaviour is the extent to which song and dance feature in our social life. No known society lacks these two phenomena” (ibidem, 142). The important thing about song and dance is that we love it! It is hard work but the remuneration is that it produces opiates that cause collective joy that overcomes the emotional inadequacy of human language. In the deep dialogue, human conversation needs to employ in addition to the tool of human language such age-old evolutionary tools as ecstatic song and dance. These “represent an important part of human cultural heritage” (Ehrenreich 2007, 19). Our ancestors seemed to invest a lot of time and energy in collective joy. The evolutionary function of dance was “to enable- or encourage- humans to live in groups larger than small bands of closely related individuals” (ibidem, 23). Collective dancing was experienced as a pleasurable way to build communities. Where words fail, music speaks. (Hans Christian Andersen)

Recent research by Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello (2010) finds support for the hypothesis that joint music making among 4-yearold children increases subsequent spontaneous cooperative and helpful behaviour. They argue that group music making effectively satisfies intrinsic human needs to share emotions, experiences and activities. In Paris one finds in the rue Saint-Jacques the Ecole Supérieure de Musique, Danse, et d’Art Dramatique. Satie, Debussy, Albéniz and Messiaen taught there. Cole Porter studied there. This imaginative school that began as Schola Cantorum genuinely cares for music. Its statement on the spirit of musical education declares “elle n’accepte pas l’esprit de competition qu’introduit trop souvent dans beaucoup d’etablissements la notion de ‘concours’”. In this school, one does not make music against one another but one makes music with one another (Carhart 2002, 174). The Portuguese piano virtuoso Maria Pires practises this counsel in her music education. For her, learning to play music is an adventurous exploration rather than an effort

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to impress parents and teachers. Because of the competitive drive in many conservatories around the world, most musical education is fine for highly motivated and talented children, but does little to develop motivation and talent for all the others. Pires wants her students to discover the fun in music and the love for music and discourages them to participate in contests. The competitive drive stands in the way of really listening to the music and cooperating with others. One of the grand old men of jazz music, the late Hank Jones, once said after a concert, “I never compete with fellow musicians, I only try to play better than I did yesterday and I do this by listening to the others, particularly the young ones”. Music making has special qualities that can help us to learn the art of genuine conversation. From music we can learn that one does not communicate against each other but with each other. Music has a direct impact on our emotional state of mind. Music influences behaviour and the readiness to help others is greater after listening to pleasant music. Collective music making leads to surges of endorphin within the brain which makes people more friendly disposed towards each other. Music making is also likely to release the neurotransmitter oxytocin in the brain which particularly in musical flash mobs stimulates social bonding. Music is a great teacher of “conviviality”. The concept convivial denotes the combination of cheerfulness with helpfulness. A common association with music is the emotion of happiness (Higgins 2012, 142). The link is important as we know from a range of experiments in social psychology that happy people tend to be helpful and cooperative (Mithen 2006, 99). Collective live music making creates participation, inclusiveness and community. In relation to my plea for collective and communal resilience it also needs to be observed that “what seems one of music’s universal roles in human experience- its promotion of feelings of security-can, ironically, serve highly divisive ends” (Higgins 2012, 149). “Music’s impact on our sense of security and its power to create power cohesion makes it serviceable to sectarian purposes” (ibidem, 182). An interesting point that needs to be raised in connection with the universality of collective joy is that “The diversity of ways in which cultures shape their musical styles can be impediments to crosscultural musical understanding” (Higgins 2012, 68). These impediments can be unfamiliar cultural symbols and contents, but also unfamiliar timbres, tuning, musical schemes or rhythmic patterns. There are however ways to overcome this and to become more at ease with different types of music. We can develop new schemata to familiarize ourselves with nonfamiliar musical idioms. “Becoming acquainted” with a culture’s music is

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akin to learning a foreign language (ibidem, 74). And as she adds this is “inevitably a gradual process”. In becoming familiar with what is culturally unfamiliar there are helpful universals. “Both transcultural universals –such as the preference for symmetry, balance and clarity- and pancultural universals –such as the preference for displays of vitality- can direct what we attempt to hear in foreign music as well as offer bases for taking pleasure in it” (ibidem, 75). For celebrations of collective joy it is essential to recognize the universal significance of music in rituals “because it ‘signifies’ other non-musical concepts involving human affect and communication” (Harwood, cited in Higgings, 61). Musical content is universally expressed by means of words that refer to universal human experiences such as joy, love, anger, protest, solitude and sadness. There are important universals in the experience of music. It is more often than not made in groups—it creates feelings of community, and is exercised in ceremonial-ritual contexts, it is strongly associated with basic human emotions that are expressed in words and movements, and has strong communicative significance that makes it worldwide vulnerable to censorship by the powers that be. Music can stimulate the recognition of a common humanity across cultural differences but it may at the same time stimulate divisiveness. The strong feeling of belonging to one’s own community may get stronger the more others are excluded. “Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak”. This statement by William Congreve in the seventeenth century is a beautiful wording of the general feeling that music has a positive function for individuals and communities. We must however be warned against over-romantic ideas about music. Music also has had in his history a very questionable relationship to inhuman forms of human behaviour. There is a substantial amount of historical evidence to show “the dark side of the tune” (Johnson and Cloonan 2009). Music has accompanied extreme violence—in Nazi death camps—and has incited to violence through war cries, national anthems and hate songs in various conflicts, such as in Northern Ireland, former Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ibidem, 96 and 97). Indian popstar Laxmi Dubey sings that we will chase the terrorists from our blessed country. Her songs in the Hindutva genre are enormously popular. They represent the Hindu nationalism that Muslims in India experience as a real threat. Laxmi Dubey incites her Hindu audiences to fight against godless religions and cut tongues of people who speak ill of the Hindu god Ram. A dubious—but probably less lethal— practice of mind manipulation has also developed in shopping malls and

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restaurants where music is used to stimulate more consumptive behaviour. Music is also used to clean up public spaces. Youth gangs have been dispersed with the music of Bing Crosby and Cliff Richard. However innocent this control of human behaviour seems it raises serious issues of power relations, citizenship and access to public space (ibidem, 185). The dark side of music actually strengthens the argument for musical education and musical literacy. As Johnson and Cloonan argue “to be literate in the modern world- and thus to be an active citizen- a level of musical literacy is required as part of a broader notion of literacies. Genuine musical literacy would involve not only appreciation of music, but also a considered approach to one’s own use of music” (ibidem, 185).

Sanctuaries The deep dialogue requires “sanctuaries”: open spaces without authority or hierarchy for creative and free encounters in which we can let anything be talked about. The deep dialogue requires safe and convivial environments. We need sanctuaries for creative critical thinking together. It requires what Gordon Burghardt calls “a relaxed field” (Burghardt 2005).

Conclusion The deep dialogue as essential form of human cooperative communication is basic to creating resilient communities that can celebrate moments of sheer human togetherness which makes them: “communities of peace”. In this chapter, I have outlined the principles of such dialogue. We now need to see that “In opposition to them stand the elements that profit from divisions between the peoples, the contra-human in men, the subhuman, the enemy of man’s will to become a true humanity” (Buber 1999, 239). As Buber wrote “The name Satan means in Hebrew the hinderer. ….the designation for the anti-human in individuals and in the human race. Let us not allow this Satanic element in men to hinder us from realizing man! Let us release speech from its ban! Let us dare, despite all, to trust”. In the following chapter, I want to explore and identify the “hinderers”: the conditions that stand in the way of the deep dialogue and thus obstruct peace as moments in which we celebrate the collective joy of human togetherness. It will be a tall order to overcome these conditions.

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Notes 1. Gambetta argues “cooperation and competition are not necessarily alternatives; they can and do coexist in both the animal and the human world. Very few people, however, would venture so far as to claim that in the world as it is we have managed to get that balance right” (1988, 216). More important still, the possibility of competition may depend upon cooperation to a much larger extent than is generally acknowledged, especially in capitalist countries (Hirsch 1977): the most basic form of human cooperation, abstention from mutual injury, is undoubtedly a precondition of potentially beneficial competition. As Robert Hinde (1986) has pointed out, there is a difference between outdoing rivals and doing them in, and within species, competing animals are considerably more inclined to the former than the latter. Even to compete, in a mutually non-destructive way, one needs at some level to trust one’s competitors to comply with certain rules. This applies equally to political and economic undertakings, and the awareness of such a need is not, of course, particularly novel. In spite of the fact that Hobbes has come down to us as the theorist of the inevitability of coercion in the handling of human affairs, he himself was conscious of the decisive role of the growth of trust among political parties for building viable societies. So was Adam Smith with respect to economic life. His notion of self-interest is not only contrasted from “above” with the absence of benevolence, as is predominantly stressed, but also from “below” with the absence of predatory behaviour (Smith 1759). 2. It is an entertaining and instructive exercise to watch or read—on a rainy Sunday afternoon—speeches by your members of parliament or by your president and test them against the Grice criteria.

References Beck, U. (1992). Risk society. London: Sage. Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in adversity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boehm, C. (2012). Moral origins. New York: Basic Books. Bohm, D. (1996). On dialogue (L. Nichol, Ed,). New York: Routledge. Buber, M. (1999). Pointing the way: Collected essays. New York: Humanity Books. Burghardt, G. M. (2005). The genesis of animal play. Cambridge: MIT Press. Carhart, T. (2002). The piano shop on the left bank. New York: Random House. Davis, H., & McLeod, L. (2003). Why humans value sensational news: An evolutionary perspective. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24(3), 208–216. Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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Ehrenreich, B. (2007). Dancing in the streets: A history of collective joy. London: Granta Books. Gambetta, D. (Ed.). (1988). Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Heritage, J., & Atkinson, J. M. (Eds.). (1984). Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Higgins, K. M. (2012). The music between us. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hinde, R. (1986). Why good is good. Abingdon on Thames: Francis & Taylor. Hirsch, F. (1977). Social limits to growth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Johnson, B., & Cloonan, M. (2009). Dark side of the tune: Popular music and violence. Farnham: Ashgate. Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31, 354–364. Lightman, A. (2018). In praise of wasting time. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lull, J. (2020). Evolutionary communication: An introduction. London: Routledge. Lull, J., & Neiva, E. (2012). The language of life, how communication drives human evolution. New York: Prometheus Books. Mithen, D. (2006). The singing Neanderthals. London: Orion Publishing Co. Moïsi, D. (2009). The geopolitics of emotion. New York: Anchor Books. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating humanity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by Genes Alone. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Russell, B. (1935). In praise of idleness. London: George Allen &Unwin Ltd. Schoenemann, P. Th. (2009). Evolution of brain and language. Language Learning, 59, 162–186. Smith, A. (1759). The theory of moral sentiments. Charleston: BiblioLife. Sterelny, K. (2012). The evolved apprentice. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Tomasello, M. (2010). Origins of human communication. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

CHAPTER 4

A Tall Order

Let me summarize the argument so far. I proposed to conceptualize peace as moments in which we celebrate the collective joy of sheer human togetherness. Following this I have suggested that collective celebrations are seriously challenged by our polarized societies. The deep fractures that divide us pose a serious existential risk to humanity and stand in the way of collectively celebrating cosmopolitan togetherness. The form of human cooperative communication we need to build resilient communities that can confront polarization is the genuine conversation that I called “deep dialogue”. This conversational mode of human communication is hindered by formidable adversaries. These are found in the features of common human communicative behaviour and in the flaws of its facilitating environment. The ways in which many of us communicate daily with others are inimical to the requirements of the deep dialogue. I will focus especially on the challenges to trust since the issue of deceptive versus authentic communication has become so fundamental in our “post-truth era”. The three leading questions are: Can we trust each other in our conversations; can we trust those who govern us and can we trust the mediators between the reality of the world and our own reality?

© The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Hamelink, Communication and Peace, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1_4

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Can We Trust Each Other in Our Conversations? A little sincerity is a dangerous thing and a great deal is absolutely fatal. (Oscar Wilde)

“We human beings are torn by a fundamental conflict- our deeply ingrained propensity to lie to ourselves and to others, and the desire to think of ourselves as good and honest people. So we justify our dishonesty by telling ourselves stories about why our actions are acceptable and sometimes even admirable” (Ariely 2012, 166). Ariely gives two main motivations for lying. An economic and a psychological. “we want to benefit from cheating……we want to be able to view ourselves as wonderful human beings” (ibidem, 237). We manage to do both by “our capacity for flexible reasoning and rationalization” (ibidem, 237). This works as long as we cheat only a little bit. And “all of us are perfectly capable of cheating a little bit” (ibidem, 238). Although we have to recognize that we also often let opportunities at cheating pass by, Ariely concludes that the experiments he conducted “are indicative of dishonesty in society at large” (ibidem, 239). Good individuals, companies, credit card companies, and banks all cheat but just a little.

Liars teeth.1

We lie through our We are certainly lying when we say we never lie. Many of our interactions are characterized by untruthful communication: between sales people and customers, between politicians and voters, between employers and employees, parents and children, doctors and patients, between acquaintances, colleagues, neighbours and loved ones. The lie is an important instrument in our communication. Lying has been around since the beginning of time, in any culture, social class, any age and has probably been done by all types of animals. People cook up about two stories a day on average, according to social psychologist Bella M. DePaulo, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who conducted a 2003 study in which participants filled out “lie diaries”. It takes time, however, to become skilled liars. A 2015 study with more than 1000 participants looked at lying by people in the Netherlands aged six to 77. Children, the analysis found, initially have difficulty formulating believable lies, but proficiency improves with age. Young adults between 18

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and 29 do it best. After about the age of 45, we begin to lose this ability. Current thinking about the psychological processes involved in deception holds that people typically tell the truth more easily than they tell a lie and that lying requires far more cognitive resources. Telling a lie implies that we have to invent a plausible scenario that does not contradict observable facts. We must also assess the reactions of the listener to our lie so we can adapt our original story line. Moreover, we must consciously decide to transgress a social norm. According to psychologist Backbier, people tend to lie when this is functional. This is the case when the liar considers the lie the best way (or at least more effective than speaking the truth) of determining the progress of personal or social interactions (2001, 115). Her research also shows that a lot of lies are told about diseases people do or don’t have (ibidem, 146). A motive for lying about your health can be that people want to hide a condition if it is regarded as negative (scary, contagious or threatening) and fear that they will be rejected as a person. People also lie about their ailments if they want to achieve something that could be hindered by an ailment. On the other hand, people also say they have a medical condition if they are trying to wriggle their way out of something, if they expect to receive something or if they want to keep something, they really like. People lie about all sorts of topics: facts, events, other people, feelings, dreams, wishes, desires, fears, personal qualities and political views. Lying forms an inescapable part of the way in which people interact. Lying could be described as a deliberate and purposeful act to deceive. The liar makes a statement (active lying) or withholds something (passive lying) with the intention to deceive the other person, meaning that he intentionally tries to convince the other of something of which the liar knows or suspects that it is not true. This definition focuses on the intention of the liar and not on whether what said or withheld is true. Lying is therefore not just making untrue statements. The person making an untrue statement is not per definition a liar. If someone considers that an untrue statement is true and he does not intend to mislead the other, this concerns an inability, rather than lying. However, such statements can have the same effect as lies and deceive people. Also statements that are, in itself true, can be told in such a tone of voice or body language that the person spoken to is deceived and thinks: “Surely that cannot be true”. It is therefore also possible to mislead others with statements that are in fact true. This does involve (passive) lies, such as that in the story of Saint Athanasius who was accused of treason. He tried to escape. When the people who followed him caught up, they

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did not recognize him. They asked him if he knew where the traitor was. Athanasius looked back and said truthfully: “He was there just a minute ago. I am sure. He is very close by”. Athanasius spoke the truth and was deceptive at the same time. Who could blame him? We often consider passive lying as being not as bad as active lying, but it can still do a lot of damage. Passive lying is often a lot easier as you don’t need to remember as much and if you get caught, you can always say that you didn’t know or you were planning to say it. There are many different levels of lying. We usually distinguish between the white lie (which is usually not intended to harm others) and the intentional deception. There is also a distinction between pro-social lies and antisocial, damaging lies. And in between these forms there is a large grey area of statements that consist of a combination of true and untrue elements, or the withholding thereof. White lies are often “routine lies”. These act as a lubricant of our social contacts. Still, this good-natured form of lying can easily evolve into a permanent lie whereby the liar can hardly tell the difference between a lie and the truth. But even well intended lies can have devastating consequences once the betrayal is discovered. The compliments one makes a host on the especially delicious food are part of civilized interaction. If the guests afterwards say that they will grab something nice to eat, unintentionally within the host’s earshot, then the good-natured lie can turn into a hostility for life. However good the white lie was intended, this is a form of deception and can seriously jeopardize the trust between people. Small and big lies form part of all human interactions. William Shakespeare’s sonnet says it all: “When my love swears she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies”. Many lies have been told by loved ones, and that may be a good thing, because the truth and nothing but the truth would increase the already extensive number of divorces. Parents lie to their children and children lie to their parents. But should parent share their vices, depressions and betrayal with their children? The evolutionary interest requires that parents present themselves as being better than they are. And children shouldn’t tell their parents everything in order for them to develop as independent people. A famous saying goes: “Children and drunk people tell the truth”. Although it is unclear to what extent drunk people tell the truth, it is certainly not true for children. They are good liars. Children lie to save themselves from sticky situations, to avoid punishment or because they are ashamed of something. They can tell the most fantastic stories,

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for example, that the cat ate all the candy or that an elephant broke the teacups. Particularly children of four or five years old love telling unbelievable tales and enjoy creating them. A conclusion of the research conducted by Wendy Gamble from the School of Family and Consumer Sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson is that although the number of lies does increase as they get older, it is for a large part linked to social aspects. Children often try to help or protect others by lying. They get better as con artists when they realize that if you confess, you may be punished but if you lie, you may get away with your mischief. Our brain operates with feedback loops that make performance of similar actions in the future easier to perform. For lying this means that it gets easier the more you do it. But this also holds for honesty. A recent study out of the University of Chicago in which participants were asked to be more honest for a few days reported that participants discovered that honesty is actually way more pleasant than they thought it would be. “People generally assume that others will react negatively towards increased honesty. As a result, people assume that honest conversations will be personally distressing and harm their relationships. In reality, honesty is much more enjoyable and less harmful for relationships than people anticipate”, writes Emma Levine (2015, 2013). In their study on deception and trust, Levine and Schweitzer challenge the assertion that deception harms trust. They demonstrated that some types of deception increase trust. “Across five studies, we demonstrate that pro-social lying increases both behavioural and attitudinal measures of trust. We find that perceived benevolence is more important than perceived integrity in predicting trust behaviour. We also find that deception, regardless of outcomes or intentions, harms integrity-based trust, a previously unexplored dimension of trust. This work expands our understanding of deception and deepens our insight into the mechanics of trust” (Levine and Schweitzer 2013). In 2003 DePaulo and her colleagues summarized 120 behaviour studies, concluding that liars tend to seem more tense and that their stories lack vividness, leaving out the unusual details that would generally be included in honest descriptions. Liars also correct themselves less. Their stories are often too smooth. Yet such characteristics do not suffice to identify a liar conclusively and at most, they serve as clues. In another analysis of multiple studies, DePaulo and a co-author found that people can distinguish a lie from the truth about 54% of the time, just slightly better than if they had guessed. But even those who encounter liars frequently—such as the police, judges and psychologists—can have trouble recognizing a

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con artist. In the Journal Nature Neuroscience (2016) psychologist Dan Ariely and colleagues showed how dishonesty alters people’s brains, making it easier to tell lies in the future. When people uttered a falsehood, the scientists noticed a burst of activity in their amygdala. The amygdala is a crucial part of the brain that produces fear, anxiety and emotional responses—including that sinking, guilty feeling you get when you lie. But when scientists had their subjects play a game in which they won money by deceiving their partner, they noticed the negative signals from the amygdala began to decrease. Not only that, but when people faced no consequences for dishonesty, their falsehoods tended to get even more sensational. Lying, in effect, desensitizes your brain to the fear of getting caught or hurting others, making lying for your own benefit down the road much easier. Why do people lie? The series of motives is endless. (Gaspar et al. 2015) People lie to advantage or protect themselves or their loved ones, to disadvantage others, to hide something, to keep something, to brag about something, to provoke, to exercise power, to be liked and to influence the behaviour or thinking of others. People also lie out of fear, anger, shame, jealousy, courtesy, love, hate, rancour, bullying, laziness or just thoughtlessness. A doctor can lie for therapeutic reasons when he considers the truth of the diagnosis too burdensome for the patient. There can be strategic motives, for example, lying to the enemy in times of war as one needs to prevent their own people from suffering damage, while causing as much damage as possible to the enemy. It can also be that personality disorders initiate lies. Lying can be a form of chronic sick behaviour. The pathological liar devises fantastic lies about all types of subjects, such as his wonderful performance, his special qualities, possessions, the higher or lower background, famous friends or terrible disasters he has experienced and whereby the liar acted as a hero. Conmen often use such fantastic stories and these chronic liars manage to gain the trust of others in a charming and intelligent way. A very nasty type of compulsive lying is found in people suffering from a borderline syndrome. Borderliners are often impulsive, moody and self-destructive people who can lie in a very dramatic way. Their devious lies on the alleged incorrect or unreliable behaviour of people around them cause divides and arguments. When asked what they contributed to the argument, they play innocent or feign loss of memory. The category sick liars include the theatrical, affected personalities who can rationalize their own lies so well that they believe them or in any case do not have any feelings of guilt. This type

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of liar manipulates everything and everyone to achieve his goal and is a master at using deceptive flattery. The classic type is the Don Juan. Then there is the narcissistic personality who lives with grand illusions about himself. He needs lies and deceit to maintain the illusion. The authentic pathological liar is someone who cannot lie. The extreme compulsive form of this psychological disorder is very rare. People lie to gain a benefit, but they also lie because it makes it easier to live together. After all, the truth can be devilish and destructive. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to this devilish truth. He wrote: “There is a truth which is of Satan” (1955, 328). He refers to the unmerciful truth of the cynic, who will, without reason, tell anyone what he considers to be the truth, and be equally rude to anyone anywhere: “He wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he lives, and laughs arrogantly at the devastation he has wrought and at the human weakness which cannot bear the truth” (ibidem). “The truth and nothing but the truth” unhinges social and personal lives and ruins the trust between people. An example of such an unmerciful truth is the confessing during one’s death bed to having cheated during the marriage. It releases the dying person of the burden of the lie, but can have a devastating effect for the surviving partner. Recent psychological research has shown that lies are often not discovered. All the usual signs expected with regard to the revealing behaviour liars might display, appear not to be true. Indicators such as nervous behaviour, blushing, tone of voice, stuttering, speaking rapidly, blinking your eyes or looking away are not proof that someone is lying. When comparing test people who lie and those who speak the truth, the difference in body language appears to be minimal. The saying “the truth will come out” is not always true. Liars very often get away it. However, much we reject lying in “theory”, a good liar is very much appreciated. Liars are generally considered nicer than people who always tell the truth. Until the lie is uncovered of course. The lie is even deeply anchored in our brains. If we consider our brains as a source of information we are always permanently lied to by our brains. Our brains show us things that are not there, leave certain information out or emphasize one detail over the other. We can show this by a simple experiment. Just look at two circles that are of equal dimensions. If they are in a different environment, our brains tell us that they are not equal in size. Our brains also tell us that the same colours are not the same when the colours in the background differ. Our brains have a strong tendency to ignore the similarities and to emphasize the differences.

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The animal kingdom is also familiar with the phenomenon of deception. Animals can deceive their enemies. Some butterflies have drawings on their wings that deceive birds of prey. Many birds will boast their feathers in order to pretend that they are bigger than they are and impress their peers. In doing this, they scare off competition and increase their chances of reproduction. Some animals, like cats and dogs, may also discover that their deceit has good results in the form of attention and sympathy. Primatologists have collected a lot of data the past ten years that seem to show that various types of primates do indeed show intentional deceptive behaviour. They seem to realize that they are deceiving other animals. In particular with regard to hiding food chimpanzees seem to deceive each other intentionally and strategically on where food can be found. The lie is therefore a very natural occurrence. If lying is often so successful, why would anyone want to tell the truth? Speaking the truth is an ancient form of civilization. In the world of religions, truth is a basic understanding. The Old and New Testament are clear in their rejection of the lie. The ninth commandment in the Act of the Lords (Exodus 20:16) warns against making false statements. Psalm 5:7 says “You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man”. In the bible book Leviticus (19:11) God told Moses: “Thou shalt not steal, lie or deceive”. According to John 8:44, Satan is the father of the lie and in his first letter to Timothy Paul places liars in the same category as father killers, mother killers, harlots and abductors. Along with this strict moral truth requirement, the stories of the Old and New Testament confront the reader with a long series of liars. Deception and ruses are discussed immediately in the first chapter of the bible. The snake in paradise lied to Eve that she would be equal to the God if she were to eat the forbidden fruit. When Eve was seduced by this lie, this resulted in a nasty situation. When Adam and Eve were driven out paradise, they had two sons: Cain and Abel. Because Cain was jealous of his brother, he beat him to death and when God asked where Abel was, he lied: “I don’t know”. The wife of patriarch Abraham, Sarah, lied, just as Jacob who, in turn, was also deceived. And then there were liars, such as King David, the whore Rahab, the traitor Judas and the disciple Peter. The high standard was seemingly not achieved by many of the main characters of the holy writ. The Islam forbids the lie in respect of Allah and the prophet Mohammed. However, in the tradition of Islam teachers we do see that lies and deception are permitted under certain circumstances. The famous and respected Muslim-theologian Imam Abu Hammid Ghazali says the

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following about truth and lies: “Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible” (from: Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, The Reliance of the Traveller, Amana Publications, 1997, 745). Although speaking the truth is preferred, lying is permitted in certain situations. Classic Indian literature considers honesty and trust to be important standards. At the same time, we see that in the Ramayana epos even the noblest characters lie and cheat. This involves the “white lie” for which excuses can be made because someone needed to be protected. On the one hand, there is clarity on the moral principle. On the other hand, there is the necessity to deviate from this norm. People lie and deceive and are obsessed with the truth at the same time. The truth as the norm and the lie as practice often results in the peculiar moral paradox of liars who want to hear the truth and who don’t want others to lie. Parents who may regularly lie to their children still do not want their children to lie! In a study by Harding and Phillips in 1986 (in ten West-European countries) into the qualities parents preferably wish to transfer to their children, it appears that “honesty” scores highest. This conflict is understandable because although lying can be seen as inevitable it is also considered morally despicable. Moreover, there are good arguments for speaking the truth. The most powerful argument that is usually mentioned is the necessity of social and relational trust. In social and personal relations mutual trust is essential. The lie undermines this trust and reduces the basis of human society. We realize that if everyone continuously lies to everyone else social life would be unbearable. In her ground breaking study on moral choice in public and private life Sissela Bok analysed the lie and how it affects the basis of human society (Bok 1978). An argument against lying is that the liar uses the other person to do things that he would not have done without the lie. In doing so, lying damages the freedom of people. Lying limits the freedom of others to determine their own ideas and opinions. No matter how much we seek to find the truth, as an individual we often are required to join in the lies. If you were the only one to speak the truth in an environment where everyone lies and deceives, you will probably lose. It is simply too risky to be honest always and everywhere and to be open while others tried to merchandise their doubtful products or doubtful qualities with faked

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enthusiasm or poker faces. It is just like at a reception where everyone starts talking louder and louder in order to be heard. When you continue talking at a normal level, you will simply not be heard. You are better off going home. It is easy to see how lying reduces the level of trust between individuals and so threatens the stability of societies. Yet, societies survive all this lying. Probably because people manage to find balances between the white lies that benefit people being lied to, and the antisocial black lies that benefit the liar. Gerardo Iñiguez and collaborators at Aalto University (2014) worked out a model in which the act of lying is considered to be antisocial when it tends to increase the difference in opinion between two individuals and so weakens their ties. The act of lying is considered to be pro-social when it tends to reduce the difference in opinion between two individuals and so strengthens their ties. The model captures the effect of both white lies and antisocial lies on the broader society. The results provide the insight that when everybody is an antisocial liar, society simply fragments because links between individuals are constantly broken. Nobody can trust anybody else. But the other extreme is equally strange. When everybody is honest, society becomes a uniform mass with no major difference of opinion. The greatest diversity occurs when there is a certain amount of deception. In that case, prosocial lies strengthen ties while antisocial lies weaken them. This tension allows diversity to flourish. “The results of our study suggest that not all lies are bad or necessarily socially destructive; in fact, it seems that some lies may even enhance the cohesion of the society as a whole and help to create links with other people” (ibidem). This suggests that far from destroying society, lies actually help it to function properly and the balance between pro- and antisocial lies looks to be crucial. “In effect, some kinds of lies might actually be essential to the smooth running of society” (ibidem).

Surge in Dishonesty It seems to me that lying has reached epidemic proportions in recent years and that we have all become immunised. (Benjamin Bradlee)

The standard of being truthful is almost permanently undermined by the increased dishonesty in society. There is number of reasons for this epidemic lying (Bradlee 1991). In any area (such as education, sports, politics and business) the necessity of competitive behaviour has strongly

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increased. In order to compete successfully, deceit is practically unavoidable. Being open and honest simply cannot win all those battles. Modern society is mainly a market economy. Social life is governed by all types of commercialization. All this buying and selling only work if people believe, it is in their interest and that they get value for their money. Due to the excessive amount of goods and services on offer, the purchase must be promoted as being unique, exclusive and available for a competitive price. As the daily stream of advertising de-sensitizes the public, more and more strong impulses are required to do things and buy things they really don’t need. In a commercial society, you will see what is referred to as the “calculating” person. This moral calculating person will find it increasingly easy to weigh the benefits and disadvantages of the deceit against each other and will often conclude that deceit is rewarding. In this day and age, we strongly emphasize the necessity of a successful, personal image. You need to count, be relevant. Your personal presentation becomes a sort of “brand” in the market of personalities. That is why we need to hide personal weaknesses and deficient skills in order to emphasize our strong unique selling points. Technological developments make it increasingly easy to operate anonymously. The Internet is a means of communication that is extremely well suited for lies and deceit. This is due to the anonymous nature of the net. It is difficult to ascertain what the real source of information is. Actually you can never really be sure with whom you are communicating on the net. Users of the Internet can easily provide a false identity or hide behind their digital assistant. However, people still send most messages under their own name. Manuel Castells, the author of the famous trilogy about the information society, refers in his analysis about virtual reality on the Internet to Nancy Baym who has established on the basis of an ethnographic study that most Internet users maintain the same identity on-line as they do off-line. However, the Internet is still the perfect place to conduct all sorts of fraudulent activities. In the Internet Librarian of 5 November 2001, Marylaine Block provides ample examples of the misleading use of the Internet. The deception mainly occurs in the area of healthcare information. People pretend to be health experts. Loads of quacks prescribe all sorts of fake medicines and hazardous diets on the Net. This can have all sorts of nasty consequences as many Internet users see the Internet as a library where you can find reliable information. The sound and image of the new information technology can also be manipulated to a great extent. When Katharine the Great rode through the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century, Potemkin—her lover—had

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great façades erected along the whole route which were meant to give Katharine the impression that the villages in the land over which she governed were wealthy. But the deceit of Potemkin is child’s play in comparison with the means we have at our disposal today. Thanks to the greatly improved techniques in the area of image and sound reproduction (cinema, television, video, photo montage and the fake reality of computer images) we can manipulate images and sound digitally to such an extent that it cannot be determined whether it is real or fake. Digital manipulation is the perfect version of the Potemkin-metaphor. The computer generates a virtual reality in which real and unreal can literally not be distinguished from each other. Digital technique can create an image of someone that is totally untrue. People merge images of body parts and/or characteristics of one or multiple people and in doing so, create a new pseudo person. This allows people to make a photo or film of someone in which that person performs activities he never performed or say things he never said. You can place someone in an environment where he has never been before. Jose van Dijck gave an example in her inaugural speech at the University of Amsterdam (11 April 2002) of the reconstruction of “the best goal ever made” by the Brazilian soccer idol Pele. Sadly that goal was never filmed, but was reconstructed in a studio. The summary is that the lie can be very useful. Continuously lying can be very damaging. The truth can be very useful. Continuously speaking the truth can be very damaging. For many people, the truth remains the norm. Most people feel better when they speak the truth than when they lie. The reason that the lie is so effective might lie in the fact that we generally prefer the truth to the lie. We like to believe that what we hear is the truth and moreover people do often speak the truth. “Liars usually succeed because dupes mistakenly assume that liars mean what they say” (Barnes 1996, 10). In the daily reality, we often expect the truth, but are not surprised when it appears that we have been lied to. To uncover the truth behind the masks humans wear we need to transform what really happens into words (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). That is so difficult since—following Bonhoeffer—in modern societies we no longer know the quality of words. “Genuine words are replaced by idle chatter. Words no longer possess any weight. There is too much talk. And when the limits of the various words are obliterated, when words become rootless and homeless, then the word loses truth, and then indeed there must almost inevitably be lying” (1955, 330). To express the real in words is seriously hampered by today’s dominant forms of speech, spectacle and secrecy in

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political communication. Between deceptive and authentic communication we have to find our own way. This means finding sanity in an insane world and morality in an immoral society. Finding a balance between the pro-social functionality of deception and the antisocial damage it wreaks. The problem with more honesty is that people may be more vulnerable targets for those who continue cheating as we want to believe them and their honesty. A society of total honesty would not be paradise but a little less of our daily little cheating could contribute to more convivial relations among members of the human species. Actually also those convivial relations will diminish our cheating because of the direct confrontation with those whom we cheat upon. Too much honesty like too much dishonesty stands in the way of human togetherness and renders a deep dialogue just a mere conversation. On the issue of conversational trust, we can conclude that we often lie and are being lied to. The wish to be totally honest with each other is largely unrealistic and possibly also undesirable. If we want to trust each other and be trustworthy ourselves, we must find a balance between true and untrue. And as we develop our conversational ability we might discover that—contrary to Oscar Wilde—a great deal of sincerity is quite joyful. As Adrienne Rich (1979) formulated it “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy….It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us”.

Can We Trust Those Who Govern Us? The Lie in Politics A lot of lies are told in politics. According to the Washington Post Fact Checker US President Donald Trump managed during the first 1000 days in office to publish 13,500 false or misleading statements. Lying in politics is usually functional as the politicians must distinguish themselves from competitors by formulating their own point of view. Their own point of view is usually presented as perfectly as possible, while that of the opponent is depicted as totally wrong or not feasible. Most politicians behave day in day out like the prescription of Machiavelli for “the King”:

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“A sensible king therefore cannot keep his word should it be disadvantageous…”. (1532). The political lie often arises as governments are unable to differentiate between secrecy and deception (Williams 2002, 212). The civilian’s right to be informed does not mean that governments are not entitled to have secrets, but that they should not lie to their civilians! At the core of the political process are the communicative practices of political speech, political silence and political spectacle. Political Speech The motion in the Athenian Assembly to invade Syracuse to restore order in Sicily was deceitful, corrupt, stupid, chauvinistic, irrational, and suicidal; It carried by a huge majority. (Joseph Heller)

As George Orwell (1946) wrote, “Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” (Orwell 1946). The late Francois Mitterrand once explained in a television interview why he lied: “The secret is the most important weapon in politics. However, nothing is as difficult as keeping secrets. If you trust people and emphasise that you don’t want them to disclose what you have discussed, they are already on their way to Paris. That is why I have never been too picky with the truth”. President Bill Clinton tried to tell a lie to get out of a sticky situation (the Lewinsky affair). His greater deception—like not delivering on his election promises—was given less attention by the press and the public as people have already become used to election promises being deceptive by definition. All the sensation surrounding the sex-scandal meant that the media paid little attention to the Clinton administration’s claim (which, by the way, was also made by the Bush administration) that the USA had tried in vain to arrest Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the Sudanese Minister of Defence offered to extradite Osama bin Laden to the USA. However, the American government refused this and allowed him to leave for Afghanistan. This is strange, as Osama bin Laden had already been officially accused in 1995 of the bomb-attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993. Another lie of the Clinton administration concerned the statement that the Kosovo Freedom Army (KLA) had completed the demilitarization on 20 September 1999. At that time, the KLA had approximately

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10,000 weapons, although various sources claim that the KLA soldiers certainly had over 100,000 weapons. That explains why the KLA was able to continue its usual activities: crime and terror, also after September 1999. This was done under the new “flag”, of the “Kosovo Protection Corps” (KPC). The Clinton administration lied about this group that was supposed to be a civilian organization with a humanitarian assignment. But the KPC mainly consisted of the same men who took part in the KLA. Their new leader became Agem Ceku, a former Croatian officer who was accused of war crimes against Serbian civilians. The violence that the KPC showed in Kosovo in 2000 with the knowledge of the US administration, NATO and the UN was covered in a blanket of lies by those involved in 2001. In international politics, lies and deceit are often regarded as unavoidable when it comes to national safety. A classic example being the lies Winston Churchill told during the Second World War, whereby he even had official documentation falsified in order to convince President Roosevelt of the bad intentions of the Germans. Roosevelt, in turn, cheated on the American people in order to involve his country in the war. Since 1945, various American governments have tried to make the population ripe for an attack war. In 1964 there was the Tonkin incident. To justify the American bombing of Vietnam, information was produced about a Vietnam attack on American warships. In the 1980s, evidence was constructed to show what a threat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua meant to the USA. Lying is a daily occurrence, certainly in times of war. In armed conflicts, it is customary for the warring parties to be assisted by experts in public relations and propaganda. Examples include: the PR campaign for the independent of Biafra: Rider Finn Public Affairs (USA). In 1984 Back & Manfort assisted UNITA rebel forces in Angola to improve their image. The government of Angola then employed the PR services of Gray & Co. (USA). In 1991 Kloberg & Associates (USA) were hired to improve the image of Zaire President Mobutu. The government of Croatia did in 1991 and 1992 PR campaigns with Ruder Finn Global Associates. The US administration used a PR strategy to support the NATO intervention in Macedonia and used the Louis Berger Company (USA) and in 1998 Kloberg & Associates worked for the image of the Iraqi government after the poisonous gas attack against the Kurds. In 2001 the Pentago organized a worldwide campaign to support moderate Muslim groups during the Afghanistan war the contract was with the Rendon Group (USA). In 2003 the Rendon Group, Benador Associates, Jack Leslie (with Weber &

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Shandwick Worldwide), Charlotte Beers (formerly with ad agency Walter Thompson) and Victoria Clarke (formerly Hill & Knowlton) were among the PR consultants to sell the war against Iraq. The Office of Global Communication of the US administration could use 200 million dollar for the propaganda. The intentional distribution of incorrect information in order to mislead the enemy is considered a smart tactic. The public will generally consider the lies used in this respect as desirable and correct in the interest of the country. Both parties assume that the other party will try to deceive them. But when governments lie to their own people, they can really get into trouble. This, for example, happened on a large scale in the USA during the Vietnam War. President Johnson was very “selective” in what he told the press and the American people on how the war was progressing. He had already lied during his election campaign in 1964 when he said it would be absurd for American soldiers to be sent to Asia. In 1968 his lies on the military successes in Vietnam were mercilessly revealed by the TET-offensive of the North-Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Johnson, by that time, probably believed his own lies, but the numerous protests of the American people made it clear that the civilians do not wish to be lied to and cheated by their own government. There can, however, be very good reasons in your foreign policy to lie, for example, because you want to make sure that the enemy does not learn about your plans. President Carter, for example, lied in 1980 about a possible rescue mission of the Americans who were being held hostage in Teheran. The problem is that the country’s own population is being lied to in these situations and that is in a democratic society a serious problem as democracy only functions if citizens can trust their politicians. The governmental deception in the case of Afghanistan that was revealed in 2019 showed that American citizens were seriously misled about the purpose and the developments of the 18 years of war in Afghanistan. A federal agency interviewed more than 400 people who had a direct role in the conflict and—after three years of legal conflict—the Washington Post released more than 2000 pages of the interviews. The interviews reveal how many mistakes were made in the war, that there was no consensus on the objectives of the war and that three US administrations had no idea how to end the war. The interviews show that many public declarations made by presidents and generals were false and that they were knowingly deceiving the public about the reality of a war that could not be won and in which 2400 American lives were lost.

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In political speech an absolutist mindset prevails. The absolutist mindset operates with such notions as the absolute truth and absolute certainty. It aspires towards solid foundations, fixed grounds and believes that there should be indubitable knowledge lest the world would be hopelessly lost. The absolutist way of thinking falls back on the Cartesian craving for certain knowledge and ignores that Immanuel Kant liberated the human mind for speculative exploration. In morality, the absolutist mind operates with a sharp dichotomy between good and evil and it perceives evil as “absolute” evil. This absolutism is abundantly present in politics. Very telling illustrations come from political speech in connection with the military invasion of Iraq. Speeches by US President Bush Jr. and VicePresident Cheney are full of statements like, “we know with absolute certainty” or, “there is no doubt”. Moreover, their political discourse identifies uncertainty and hesitation as a dangerous mindset. A characteristic of absolutist political talk is that reasoned argumentation is absent. Political proposals—even the call to war—lack well-balanced justification and do not invite questioning. The absolutist “either/or” claim is not open to examination and its sharp dichotomy of good guys versus bad guys hinders the insight that both parties might be wrong and thus hampers the understanding of a complex and uncertain world. The absolutist mind leaves no space for reflection on the certainty of its own convictions. The absolutist mindset has a particularly strong appeal in times of uncertainty and fear. The “culture of fear” that the Anglo-British perception managers created after 9/11 provides fertile ground for the quest for absolute truths. It would be foolish to underestimate the desire that many people around the globe have to live in a world of manageable binary opposites. Such an anxious world cannot afford the luxury of intellectual reflection and open questioning. In political speech the imposition of the truth through persuasive means is thus more important than the finding the truth. Characteristic of political discourse is the evasion of justification. If governments did not mislead their citizens so often, there would be less need for secrecy, and if leaders knew they could not rely on keeping the public in the dark about what they are doing, they would have a powerful incentive to behave better. Human beings—like other species—are often engaged in competitive encounters where the chances of victory may be strengthened if a strategy of deception is used. Like suggesting you are more dangerous than you really are or by withholding information. “Thus withholding information represents a second form of

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deception – one that is likely to be more prevalent than active falsification because it is relatively more difficult to detect cheaters” (Hauser 1997, 571). It is essential for democratic governments to render power visible. Yet, most government—even if democratically elected—prefer to operate in secrecy and withhold important information from their citizens. In spite of the existence of access laws in many countries the real secrets of the country’s administration (arcana imperii) remain secret. It is often suggested that we live in an information society but most of the time we have no access to the information that is essential to democratic citizenship. There are illustrative cases from the domains of defence, public investment for large-scale infrastructural development, and disasters. Governments always find grounds for restricting access through Official Secret Acts and Freedom of Information Acts. Sissela Bok concludes in her book on Secrets “With no capacity for keeping secrets and for choosing when to reveal them, human beings would lose their sense of identity and every shred of autonomy. Their plans would be endangered and their creativity stifled; they could not count on retaining even the most fundamental belongings. And yet this capacity too often serves to thwart the very same human needs, since it risks damaging the judgment and character of those who exercise it, and conceals wrongdoing of every kind” (Bok 1989, 179). Bok proposes a distinction between private secrecy (the personal experience of keeping a secret) and public secrecy (governmental or professional secrecy) and argues that the justification of private secrecy cannot be used for the defence of public secrecy. The private secret is part of the personal identity. If everything about a person is revealed, there is no person left. Therefore, it is important that children in their development are allowed the private space of their secrets. Parents should not know everything because this hinders the development of an individual life. Keeping a secret and deciding when to reveal it is a crucial dimension of realizing and respecting the individuals’ sovereignty. The secret creates a private space that should only be entered with the consent of the secret holder. Personal secrecy is a valuable instrument of individual empowerment. The private secret is endangered by its exposure against the will of the individual through the Big Brother tactics of those in power. By exposing personal secrets power is exercised over those who hold these secrets. Privacy increases power. Invading privacy leads to loss of power. As argument for the exposure of people’s secrets we often hear that this is necessary in order to uncover criminal or terrorist intentions and that— the exposure serves law enforcement or homeland security. In the exercise

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of public power the capacity to keep knowledge from public diffusion is a powerful tool indeed. This is often justified with the argument of national security. This has been so widely abused that it lost its meaning. The argument of national security in military affairs can easily provide a cover up for corruptive practices in the procurement of weapons system and the granting of R&D budgets. An often used argument is also that it is better for those who do not know not to know. The official public secrecy—it is argued—protects the well-being of the private person. This secrecy however hinders well-informed public choice and renders the political arena an unequal and unfair playing field. As Stiglitz has argued, “Secrecy undermines democracy” (2013, 229). As citizens need access to information to hold governments accountable for their actions and their omissions to act, with the expansion of secrecy accountability withers away and corruption grows. Secrecy is a sign of distrust. Governments do not trust their citizens and citizens do not trust their governments. One of the consequences of governmental secrecy is that it provides food for conspiracy theories and the more secretive a government is the more conspiracy theories become plausible. The political arena is inhabited by governmental secret services, secret negotiations, secret committees, secret courts, secret arbitration processes and official secrets acts as a result of the strong tendency of governments to overclassify information about their actions. However, an overdosis of secrecy may not serve the legitimacy of governments. Over-classifying has the risk of not taking the government seriously and thus provoking leaks, possibly also of really sensitive information. In democracies it is unacceptable that governments collect information about citizens without them knowing this. There has to be a better balance between the requirements of law enforcement and rights to individual freedom. Arguably there should be as much openness as possible and as little secrecy as possible. Citizens should have a right to know what the government keeps secret with what justification and what monitoring mechanisms are in place to secure the legitimacy of secrecy. This means that it should be convincingly argued that the secrecy serves the public interest. We need to be aware however that there is in general a public disinterest in keeping or revealing state secrets. The cases of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have certainly not led to broad civil mass movements of protest or support. Perhaps that is why the Obama administration and many in Congress have called for Edward Snowden’s head on a spike, but the public did not appear all that concerned. The same seems to be the case with the possible extradition by the UK of Julian

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Assange to stand accused of violations of the Espionage Act. Opinion polls so far have shown that while a majority of Americans may believe that Snowden and Assange should be prosecuted, a majority also believes their leaks did more good than harm. That suggests an American public that understands the need for laws to protect national secrets, but that also believes the government is abusing its power to keep secrets. The cases of Manning, Snowden and Assange have not demonstrated that grave harm was done to society by the secret collecting of information nor has the US government convincingly demonstrated that their actions caused grave damage to society. This is possibly the reason for the public at large to be disinterested. It can be argued that democracy needs both transparency and secrecy and the crucial challenge is to find a balance between them. The secret ballot is essential to democracy. People can vote in freedom but the secrecy of the vote can also be abused by corrupt governments to manipulate the results of an election. We would also be glad to find that information about our taxes and medical bills remains secret. On the issue of trusting those who govern the conclusion is that our political governors are not to be trusted and they themselves—more often than not—fail to trust those they govern. This renders it critically essential that citizens develop an alertness to the immoralities of their political leaders. For citizens in a democratic society the lead question is “but is it true”? The combination of deceptive public secrecy and democracy makes for unhappy bed-fellows and it is up to the citizens to permanently expose this. For this they need the assistance of reliable mediators: mass media and social media.

Can We Trust the Mediators Between the Reality of the World and Our Own Reality? Journalistic Liars Although journalists do not frequently purposely lie, some still get caught on a lie. For example, the Washington Post published a heart-wrenching story about an 8-year-old boy who was addicted to heroin, which, as it turned out, was totally fabricated by journalist Janet Cooke. It won her the Pulitzer Prize in 13 April 1981, which she returned when her deceit came out. In May 2003 it came to light that an employee of the New York Times, Jayson Blair, had repeatedly lied in his journalistic reports. Blair had misled his colleagues and readers with untrue stories that were

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based on sources that either did not exist or had not been consulted. For example, he made up the response of the parents of the American soldier Jessica Lynch on the reports of her disappearance in his report of 26 March 2003. He simply fabricated and wrote the story in his flat in New York without even consulting her family in Virginia. “The newspaper has never sunk this low in its 152-year history”, said the editor-in and chief in her comment to this violation of the credibility of one of the most respected newspapers in the world. As a result of Jayson Blair’s lie, the editor-in-chief and the managing editor of the New York Times handed in their resignation in June 2003.2 Another example of deceit is the case of Stephen Glass, former editor of the weekly magazine The New Republic. He confessed in May 1998 that he had made up various stories and used half truths in his articles. In 1998 columnist Mike Barnicle was fired by the Boston Globe due to plagiarism and falsification of stories. In that same year journalist Patricia Smits was fired, also by the Boston Globe, for having fabricated stories, persons and quotes. In 2001 it came out that Jay Forman of Slate magazine had fabricated a story about fishing monkeys in Florida. The German news magazine Der Spiegel revealed in 2018 that one of its top reporters had falsified stories over several years. Award-winning journalist Claas Relotius (CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014) had, according to the weekly, “made up stories and invented protagonists” in at least 14 out of 60 articles that appeared in its print and online editions, warning that other outlets could also be affected. Relotius won in 2018 Germany’s Reporterpreis (Reporter of the Year) for his story about a young Syrian boy. It has since emerged that all the sources for his reportage were at best hazy, and much of what he wrote was made up. Another example of intentional deception in the media is purposely not reporting on important events or developments to the public. For 25 years the American Project Censured has been drawing up a list of the top 25 items that were not reported in the media. In the past years, this involved stories on the collaboration between multinational companies and repressive regimes, on the fraudulent activities of the American Cancer Society and the support of the Clinton administration to the violent actions of the Turkish army against Kurdish villages. In 2002, the mainstream media in America failed to report on facts about the support of the Bush administration to the mass murders in Columbia, the intentional destruction of water facilities in Iraq, the conduct of the CIA in Macedonia, the CIA’s kidnapping of suspects for the purposes of having them tortured and executed outside the USA, the

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abuse of horses by the pharmaceutical industry and the support of the government to privatized prisons. Benjamin Bradlee, editor and chief of the Washington Post, says that this practice of not reporting on certain subjects in the media is the result of regular meetings held with the government about sensitive subjects and moreover: “we withhold stories for reasons of national security much more often than people might think” (van Ginneken 1997, 101). Deceptive journalism also involves any distorted reporting that is based on idiosyncratic political preferences. An illustrative case is the reporting about a peace demonstration which was held in Washington 29 September 2001, where the New York Times reported just a couple of hundred demonstrators while the police said there were at least 7000 and the organizers said there were approximately 25,000. The Washington Post even referred to the demonstration as “pro-terrorist”. The Los Angeles Times reported on 24 November 2001 about the war in Afghanistan and said there were a couple of dozens of civilian victims, while at time, it had already been reported that over 3500 civilians had been killed. The regular use of the term “anti-globalists” is another example of the intentional ideological deception. In 1999, there were major demonstrations during the World Trade Conference in Seattle (USA). The New York Times referred to the Seattle demonstrations as “anti-globalist”. The use of the word “anti” is tendentious as it rapidly invokes the association with negative action, including violence. It is also incorrect since the demonstrators opposed the neoliberal version of the political-economic globalization process and focused on the realization of a human version of globalization. In the humanitarian globalization process, the worldwide respect of the human rights is one of the priorities. The demonstrations in Seattle did have a “global” nature. People from all over the world were rallied with the aid of a global network (Internet) to come and to demonstrate global solidarity. Contrary to the anti-globalist label Le Monde Diplomatique called the demonstrators “les mondialistes alternatives”, the “alternative globalists”.

Voice for the Spin Doctors3 Deceptive reporting often occurs when the media become the voices for professional perception managers. As in the 1991 case of the dramatic story of Nayirah, a 15-year-old girl from Kuwait, who claimed that when she was a nurse in Kuwait City, she had seen soldiers of Saddam Hussein take babies from the incubators and laid them on the cold hospital

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floor to die. She emotionally recalled that this was how fifteen babies were killed. This barbaric story had an enormous effect on public opinion in America and played a huge role in the decision of the American Senate to wage war against Iraq. Upon hearing such a story, the media should have been suspicious. Killing babies is one of the “archetypes” in the collective subconscious of society and immediately invokes massive resistance. That is why this subject has often been skilfully used by spin doctors for war propaganda. Nayirah, who turned out to be a daughter of the Kuwait ambassador to the United Nations, was well prepared for her appearance by Lauri Fitz-Pegado, the vice-president of PR firm Hill & Knowlton. Civilians, who had fled Kuwait for the USA, had incorporated the organization “Citizens for a Free Kuwait” and gave Hill & Knowlton the assignment to win the American people over for a war against Iraq by starting a media campaign. They used Nayirah’s testimony to achieve this. According to her, Iraq soldiers had killed hundreds of babies. The press reports repeatedly mentioned 312 babies, and this number was confirmed by Amnesty International and others in January 1991. In March 1991 John Martin of ABC investigated the matter and interviewed the hospital staff in Kuwait. According to the healthcare director in Kuwait, Dr. Mohammed Matar, the story was a lie: Kuwait did not even have such a large number of incubators. Reuters ran John Martin’s story, but Associated Press did not. Amnesty International, who had initially accepted the story of Nayirah, became suspicious after ABC’s report, investigated the matter and did not find any proof for the witness account. Other organizations (including Middle East Watch) concluded that the story was propaganda and that the media had all accepted it as being the truth. In 1992 a lot of media confessed that they had believed the story. The story of the incubator murders is a clear example of the relationship between propagandists and the news media. There is a story that is not a total lie, but which is blown out of proportion to make it extra dramatic. Most media will cover the story as it is a story that will appeal to most people. The PR experts used an archetype expertly. There may be discussions and critical revelations afterwards but the lie has done its work and any later counter claims will have less effect. Moreover, many media organizations have a short-term memory and will often cover the story years later and present it as the truth and nothing but the truth. Another case comes from the Kosovo crisis when NATO press agent Jamie Shea reported that a NATO plane had accidentally shot a train with civilians on 12 April 1999. This caused a lot of civilian victims and involved a sad mistake.

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General Wesley Clark showed a film during the press conference whereby the train rode so fast that it was clear that the pilot was unable to change the route of his rockets on time. The attack was an unavoidable mistake and no critical questions were asked. Many important international media covered this distorted version of events. In January 2000 it was confirmed that the video tape had been played at a much greater speed than normal. “A technical problem” the spin doctors said, and when this did not seem convincing, it was said that it had been done for “safety reasons”. The same happened with the bombardment of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. This also involved a so-called mistake, but it later turned out to have been a precision attack on those areas in the embassy that were used by the Serbian broadcasting company after the studios of the national broadcasting agency had been bombarded to rubble by the NATO. Deceptive reporting may not always be caused by intentional lies but by such mechanisms as selective perception, prejudice, sloppiness, clumsiness and laziness.

Selective Perception There is a great difference between lying and distorting. The journalistic distortion of reality is a result of the unavoidable selective view of events, situations and people. Most media users probably realize that there is always a level of distortion in the media. If you have, for example, visited an event and you read a report on it the next day in the paper, you may wonder whether you have actually visited the same event. If you read three newspapers, often the reports seem to be about three different events. These may be distorted reflections of the truth, but not necessarily lies! As journalists paraphrase the truth in their reports, it might happen that some intentional or unintentional prejudices are incorporated in their story. The public is given the personal interpretation of the reporter, which unavoidably results in some distortion. The human perception is always prejudiced, and the same goes for the journalistic perception. All sorts of factors play a role in selective perception, such as the environment, character, political preference, cultural background and life experience. We see certain patterns in the truth and emphasize some facts and certain relations between those facts. Our knowledge of social reality is therefore mainly based on a distorted and largely misleading perception of the truth. The subjective character of that selective perception often disappears behind an institutional anonymity that suggests objectivity in

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phrases such as “The newspaper reported” or “The TV journal reported”. Our view of the world is strongly distorted when loads of journalists from all over the world, as they did in 1991, reported on the Gulf War while there was hardly anything to report due to the governmental censorship and the journalistic self-censorship that applied at the time. At the same time, there were disasters in Mozambique and Sudan, which hardly anyone or no one covered in a news report. The world news, particularly via the television, shows inevitably a distorted view of the world since it only presents a small selection of the many events that take place in the world. That selection is determined by a number of factors. There is always a limited space, a limited number of international news suppliers, there is always too little money, there are professional ideas about what news is and what has no news value, and journalists naturally have political views and cultural prejudices. Hunger, for example, is a situation that is not “current” in our Western society. Hunger elsewhere in the world is only news when it takes on dramatic proportions. The permanent hunger in many parts of the world is not news. That at least 30,000 children die in poor countries every day is not news. Their death being absolutely unnecessary is not news. That their deaths can be prevented is also not news. That the political-economic elites in the West refuse to prevent their dying is also no subject for the daily news. This means that an image of the world is presented in which daily hunger is invisible. Hunger is only shown now and again, like a type of unavoidable natural disaster. That presentation of the world is a deceptive distortion.

Selective Word Use and Prejudice The choice of words in reporting is important. Choosing the right words to describe situations or events is a difficult thing and sometimes this does go wrong due to haste and pressure. This can result in unintended deception. We describe reality with words and our choice of words add colour to the description. Selective word use can easily lead to tendentious reporting. When in a conflict party A performs the same activities as party B and that of A are referred to as terrorist acts, while those of party B are described as understandable retaliations, the chance of deception is great. In the editorial policy of British press agency Reuters, the word “terrorist” is avoided. Reuters naturally does not do this in direct quotes, but the press agency does not use these words to refer to certain groups. The reason for this is that whereas someone may be seen by some as

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terrorist, others may see that person as freedom fighter. According to Reuters, people should decide for themselves which acts they would refer to as terrorist. It is interesting to note that when US minister Colin Powell described terrorists as people who wanted to achieve a political goal by ruining buildings and killing people he may have been referring to his own government and his fellow-countrymen and women as terrorists. In the past ten years or so, the USA has ruined a lot more buildings and civilians for political purposes than the members of the Al Qaeda network have done.

Sloppiness Journalistic sloppiness results in the misleading use of general nonsense terms. Newspapers, radio and television gladly refer to “the people in the country”, “the” society, “the” Russians, “the” French, “the” Muslims, “the” Moroccans, “the farmers”, the members of “the right wing party”. After an event in China, the presenter of a TV newscast may ask the correspondent in China: “How do the Chinese feel about this?” Although there are approximately two billion Chinese, the correspondent has no trouble answering the question. Generalizations use stereotyped images and tend to enlarge the problems between conflicting parties rather than improving their understanding of each other. In an explosive situation, this can cause serious escalation of conflicts. Laziness is an obvious cause of misleading generalizations. After all, it is much easier to use generalizations rather than applying nuances. Generalizations also capture the imagination. They do not really provide any information, but do draw the attention and that is all that counts in media competition. Naturally the lazy word use fits perfectly in modern society, where many words have lost their meaning and “have become homeless” (Bonhoeffer 1955).

Mediacomplicity The media are often accessory to the spreading of the lies of perception managers. This has been the case in such operations as the Mockingbird project in which the CIA—as was uncovered in US Senate hearings in the mid-1970s—recruited American journalists and foreign news services to write stories that served the interests of the agency.4 A mechanism that makes journalists particularly vulnerable to the trap of mediacomplicity is the obsession with completeness. It is based on the conventional notion

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that a journalistic story should answer the five W’s of what happened, when did it happen, where did it happen, who did it and why. Usually answers to the first three are easy but the latter two questions can often not be answered in the early stages of an newsworthy event. However, the spin doctors often have those answers—well prepared and with convincing evidence—and the journalistic desire or their editorial managers’ obsession with the full story makes it attractive to follow the leads of the professional propagandists.

Media and Reliability The civilian needs reliable partners to uncover political, social or historical lies. Journalists can be such partners. But what does this reliability mean? Is reliability the same as speaking the truth? Can someone speak the truth and still be unreliable? Is the liar always unreliable? In their professional code journalists say the respect for the truth must be key. The honorary code of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) which was adopted in 1954 in Bordeaux states in its first article: “Respect for truth and for the right of the public to truth is the first duty of the journalist”. One might wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to just drop that aspiration and to lower the bar slightly. Would a more realistic attitude towards the truth and lies not be a better reflection of everyday life? In the journalistic professional code, one could state that the journalist honestly promises to show the social reality as carefully and as fully as possible. Journalism is not about the legal model of finding the truth. It is about mediation of the truth and about how people can be helped in discovering “their” own truth. The journalist does not need to work with the pretence of finding the ultimate truth, but he or she does need to be capable of enabling media users to find their own version of the truth. They can do so by—at a minimum—letting the public read, hear or see different sides of a story. A recent case is the media coverage around the Magnitsky Act. This Act was enacted in 2012 by the Obama administration. The Act authorizes some the US sanctions against individuals and companies. It is named after Sergei Magnitsky who according to William Browder—the head of the Hermitage Capital company—was a whistleblower over a massive financial fraud that involved the Kremlin. In August 2019 the European Court ruled that the Russian government violated several articles in the European Convention on Human Rights over the course of its 11-month pre-trial detention and posthumous criminal

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conviction of Magnitsky. There are two versions of the Magnitsky story. The version promoted by Browder and a different version presented in a TV documentary made by filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov who was known as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin but who in this instance found the West’s widely accepted Magnitsky storyline to be a fraud. The documentary is blacklisted by Western media thus keeping information away from American and European publics who might want to make up their own minds. As investigative reporter Robert Parry of Consortium News—who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s—writes in August 2017: “Why is the U.S. mainstream media so frightened of a documentary that debunks the beloved story of how ‘lawyer’ Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive Russian government corruption and died as a result? If the documentary is as flawed as its critics claim, why won’t they let it be shown to the American public, then lay out its supposed errors, and use it as a case study of how such fakery works?” Whatever the merits or flaws of the merits of the film “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes”—may be the media that refuse to show a different view of an important event are complicit in shielding audiences from the information they should have a chance to watch for the formation of their own opinions. The discussion on accountability and responsibility is a regular feature in debates about the social role of journalism. It emerges in particular when there are these moments of intellectual, political and moral panic about the alleged uncontrolled power of the media. Actually the use of the word “power” in respect of the media is a regrettable choice of words. It might be better to reserve the word “power” for situations in which individuals, people or institutions are able to have people do things against their will. Power should be used in connection with physical and mental coercive measures (such as violence, sanctions, punishment, brain washing) or the threat thereof. For the media the word “influence” would be more suitable, just like it applies for church organizations such as the Vatican. Influence refers to situations in which people or institutes can have people believe things (and even act accordingly), while those people would not have done that without that influence. Influencing can take place without coercion and is often done by persuasive messages, (dis)information, propaganda and many half and complete lies. Probably no one wants to deny that the media, and certain mainstream media, exert influence on the public. That influence arises by presenting matters in a certain light, correctly or incorrectly, with direct and indirect

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lies, accentuation, distortion and suggestive remarks. The biggest problem in this respect is that most media are not too happy about correcting their mistakes or lies. Television media, in particular, seem to have great difficulty explaining to the people that information provided earlier was simply incorrect. If the media want to be our reliable ally in the search for unveiling lies and deceit, they would do well in being more generous and more open about any rectifications. This does not cost much, increases professional reliability and does not violate the freedom of speech. Rectification is essential, as otherwise incorrect information can linger on for years and years. This is illustrated by those cases where a newspaper makes a portrait of someone, uses generally accessible sources and fails to submit the publication to the person in question. If that portrait includes incorrect information, then this information is likely to show up time and again in future, unless it is immediately rectified. A rectification or an apology that appears weeks later is no use. If, in future, someone would take the same story from a news clippings archive in order to use a quote, then the incorrect information does sort of become truth and if they are again referred to somewhere else, then they become the hard truth. Naturally this can cause a lot of damage for the people involved. Rectification is not without issues. Often if a rectification is too late, then it is not necessarily noticed by the reader who read the earlier story. Sometimes a rectification provides an opportunity to do the story again, including the statement that it was not totally correct. Rectification can therefore damage the person involved even further, but certainly does not violate the freedom of the media. It would also not violate the freedom of press if journalists were to resign after having made a very bad mistake. This happened when the editor of the Flemish newspaper De Morgen resigned in 1999 after the newspaper had used documents which had been falsified by its sources, or the editor-in-chief of the New York Times who resigned after the Jayson Blair affair in 2003. As the media love to criticize those in society who fail, it would only be natural for them to criticize themselves once in a while and take appropriate action. After all, the media should be more transparent when it comes to the question why certain editorial choices have been made. This does not necessarily limit editorial freedom. It is very likely that more transparency on editorial choices would be in the interest of journalism. The search for ways in which the media could be a reliable ally of their audiences should not in any way compromise editorial independence. The reliability of the media means that the users can count on “their” media, particularly when important or

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substantial national and international events take place. Finally, a last consideration concerns the media public. The public plays an important role in the deception of the media. That the truth is the first victim in times of war is a quote that is often used. But the second victim is probably the desire to learn the truth. If people would rather not see or hear the truth, a lie more or less does not matter so much anymore. The media consumer who prefers to receive easy bits of information and entertainment and has no interest in knowing what the world is really about, can expect nothing but lies. Media are usually not so happy with the interference of “alert” consumers. This could lead to certain types of populist (self) censorship and an inappropriate pressure on the media. Others think that the people have so much on their minds already, that they cannot be expected to voice criticism with regard to the media. This may be true, but in a democratic society a reliable provision of information is essential in order for people to form their own opinions as basis for political participation. To act as responsible citizens in a democracy is not particularly simple. It is a demanding and time-consuming activity. Anyone who is not interested in going through all that trouble should not be surprised if society is becoming increasingly authoritarian. As the greatest possible diversity of information suppliers offers the best protection against lies and deception, we need to exert a lot of public pressure on politics and the media in order to achieve this goal. But, why would a civilian want to be reliably informed and why would he take action in order to receive high-quality information? A first motive is probably ordinary human curiosity. Humans just like other animals are very curious and that is a good thing, as curiosity benefits art and science. But our curiosity sometimes also has a sharp edge of malicious delight. We mainly want to know “how bad” it is, when an ambulance stops further along the street. We feign interest when we ask: “Who is it?”, “Is he injured?”, “Will he make it?”, “Did they need to break the door down?” and “Who is taking care of the little dog?” Pure enjoyment! However, citizens may also to be informed in order to form an opinion and adopt a position. They may want to hear the news, preferably from both sides, as it will enable them to know what to think about something. This motive is supported by the assumption that people are rational beings who want to base their points of view on new information as much as possible and will review their earlier points of view and reach new insights on the basis of new information. Reality, however, is usually different. We often “know” on emotional, irrational grounds what we should think and feel. That is why we almost automatically filter any

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information that does not suit our point of view. A lot of people have a strong tendency not to allow information that undermines a “cherished opinion”. They are therefore not sensitive to the question of whether their preconceptions are actually solid. They just believe that these are correct. The idea that people want to have information in order to reach better decisions is also based on the assumption that the decision-making process proceeds in an orderly fashion. But the process of a social and personal decision-making usually does not take place in recognizable steps, but is often chaotic, confusing and often driven by irrational ad hoc motives. If we were to use rational and logical information processing models in our decision-making process, we would change our minds more often. Does this mean that the whole media circus is pointless? Yes, if we are not open to new information and only subscribe to our established opinion. However, if we would be open to a diversity of new sources of information and would read Le Monde, Le Figaro, The New York Times, The Guardian and the Frankfurter Allgemeine, in addition to our local newspaper, watch the BBC, Al Yazeera and CNN in addition to our local TV news items, listen to radio newscasts and permanently check the Internet, we would drown in the news coverage and would never reach a sensible opinion. All the media on offer means that some events and developments are placed on the social calendar, which we might think about, discuss with others, be worried about or tell others that they were wrong, while waving the newspaper that agrees to our views. Although I would always prefer the madness of the media circus with all its shortcomings above the radio silence on social events, I do not have that the illusion that media users in general learn something from the reports. Media research (in England, the USA and other countries) conducted just after the Gulf War in 1991, showed that television reports had managed to confuse many more viewers than they had managed to inform. It also became clear that the more people watched television, the less they knew about the war. But, despite all these considerations, we will all be glued to our television-sets, laptops, i-pads and smart phones should the next major conflict arise, and despite all the good intentions of journalists, producers and audiences we will be largely mis-informed. Because with all the insecurity about who we actually are, we are sure about one thing: humanity does not learn from its mistakes. Barbara Tuchman has explained this in detail in her wonderful book The March of Folly (1984). People march through history like fools and cannot be prevented by anyone from making the same mistakes time and again.

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On the issue of the trustworthiness of the mediators it can be concluded that media corporations tend to offer their audiences a deceptively distorted image of the real-life world. That is sometimes caused by commercial and ideological idiosyncrasies but most often the cause is the easy complicity with those who have a vested interest in lying. For media to be trustworthy and reliable messengers they need the confrontation with critical media consumers who keep them accountable for the quality of public information provision. One problem here is that humans are the smartest but also the most gullible species on the planet. We believe incredible stories and pledge loyalty to leaders (religious and secular) who tell us absurd stories. We find it difficult to live with the truth and nothing but the truth about ourselves, our loved ones, our leaders and our countries. We like to believe stories that unite us even if they are blatantly untrue. Journalists are the great storytellers of our time. The stories are true, untrue, factual and fictional or a combination thereof. It is socially important for citizens to be able to trust the providers of information to be of good faith. We cannot always trust this to be the case. Politicians will accuse the media of providing “fake news” as part of their battle with unruly social media. The political arena is however the largest distributor of untrue stories.

On Fake News The current discussion about fake news tends to focus on the damage that this news would inflict on democratic society. It is not about the democratic deficit of that society. Before we get excited about potential threats to democracy, we must ask ourselves how democratic our societies really are. The mainstream media will rarely engage with this question. Usually they report dutifully about the ins and outs of the system and leave fundamental questions about the system itself off the agenda. The real problem however may not be fake news but fake democracy! The struggle against fake news seems to assume that when citizens would be less misleadingly informed, that they would not only participate better in political choices but also be listened to more. The powerful resistance of national governments (at the beginning of this century) against attempts to codify the “right to communication” in a UN declaration was the result of the unwillingness of these governments to take the voice of their citizens seriously. It therefore seems logical that governments would like to intervene in the news service via social media because these media give citizens an open forum to express themselves. That will not always be

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completely honest, open and polite, but that’s how society is and we have to live with it. In history, we walk along in a long procession of scammers, thieves and impostors preceded by unreliable and conspiratorial governments. The quality of the news coverage has little influence on this. To plead against fake news in a society characterized by deceptive communication, which is hasty, competitive, inegalitarian and in which the members entrench themselves in the niches of their identity politics, comes down to a plea for sexual abstinence in a brothel. The pursuit of truthfinding is obviously desirable, but it makes little sense in a society where we lie so much of the time. Precisely because reality is too contingent, too slippery and too full of contradictions, the premise that there could be a system to determine what is fake news, is very misleading. Yet in the public debate, projects are on the agenda (e.g. in education and government commissions) based on the distinction between fake news and real news. However, there is no manual with criteria for distinguishing between fake and real. We do not have a reliable fake alarm that warns us of the danger, such as the smoke detector. A misleading premise is also that the truth is an established fact that can be brought to light in a linear process of truth-finding. But we all love our own truth, like to subscribe to that truth in the media and assume that the truth of the other person is fake. There was never a homogeneous audience but always a variety of audiences with their own insights and opinions about reality. Some of those audiences are not at all interested in critical journalism and simply want to see their views confirmed. Politicians want to play moral knight again and decide for the citizen which news is good and which news is bad for him or her. But, of course, no one has the moral authority to determine for others how they should be informed. In the public discussion the subject of all commotion about “fake news” is often the role of social media. Social media are considered to be the main cause of the spread of fake news. But in many countries the Twitter noise is caused by small numbers—especially so-called angry citizens, often confused people chattering at the village pump. A social problem arises only when conventional media take this chatter seriously. Then it can have political effects. Media tend to view communications from politicians on Facebook and Twitter as news (while in fact they are press communiques that are hardly worth mentioning). The tweets of US President Donald Trump receive a lot of attention in the conventional media! It may be a comfort to realize that news has always been largely fake news. Its main sources such as governments or trade companies never

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had a great interest in opening things up. Moreover, the representation of events is always inevitably distorted, biased and incomplete. That is a reassuring thought that immediately puts the whole heated discussion about fake news into perspective. The daily news is a story about aspects of reality. Some recipients recognize (or want to recognize) in them a reliable representation of events and other recipients see the same story as pure fabrication. In the daily processing of the “news” (through which mediators), we often end up in the movie Groundhog Day. In this film, published in 1993, Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who covers the annual Groundhog Day festival and ends up in a time-loop, so that he keeps experiencing again and again the same day. This brings us to the question of whether those who are so concerned about the fake news are trustworthy parties. The public debate is about how social media can be curbed (or better: censored) and not about the role of governments and mass media in spreading incomplete and misleading information. Politicians who themselves are unconcerned about their own lying are probably not the best parties to denounce fake news. Yet it is precisely those parties heads who insist on fighting misleading and untrue information. These parties include the German government, French President Macron and the European Commission. The German Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz makes intercompany companies (such as Twitter and Facebook) responsible for combating untrue information. Apart from the threat to the freedom of information, the law makes companies responsible for the distinction between sense and nonsense, between truth and false hood and therefore for the content that their customers provide. However, the provision of Internet services and the content activities of users must remain separate. In his New Year’s speech (January 2018), the French president announced that he would amend French legislation in such a way that fake news in social media (a danger to liberal democracy according to the president) could be contested. The new legislation should make it possible for judges to remove fake news from websites and to block access to websites that spread untruths. Thousands of propagandistic sites operate in all languages around the world and they spread lies that besmirch the reputations of politicians. But that is what the spin doctors of various governments have done since time immemorial. The European Commission recently installed a fake news task force (with 40 European experts!). The chairman Professor M. de Cock Buning said (in NRC Handelsblad) that “If misinformation is disseminated and people do not let themselves be informed more broadly, then that becomes reality”. But that is not

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a new problem that would have been caused by the social media. Fake news is a phenomenon that societies already live with from the moment that there are forms of news provision. The European Union has also launched a campaign to respond to pro-Kremlin disinformation. The EU versus disinformation campaign is led by the European External Action Service East European Task Force. However, the European fact checkers have already caused the necessary fake news due to the carelessness of their analyses. Public authorities who care about the spread of fake news have traditionally been the biggest suppliers of deceptive news. The greatest propagandists in history were governments, from Alexander the Great, via Napoleon to Dr. Goebbels. Governments have always generously invested in disinformation departments, secret services and spin doctors. Fake news is of all times. I think we should not have any illusions about the willingness of the producers and their sales channels to deal with the news service with greater responsibility. In all probability, all kinds of creative forms of regulation are so much part of the problem that they cannot solve it. The only party that can enforce change is the public. Attempts (in the 1990s) to mobilize a critical media consumer movement (including the People’s Communication Charter or the Cultural Environment Movement) have, however, not been very successful so far. We have no choice though but to try again and again with “desperate optimism”. If we are unable to discuss the really big questions about information and communication in a deep dialogue with each other, then the discussion about fake news remains chatter about a fake subject. Yet, the debates on fake news offer a unique opportunity for critical self-reflection. After all, in all the care for the truthfulness of fake news, John Locke seems to provide a good guide: “we ought to fight fiercely for the truth, but first have to be sure that it is the truth”. Not a simple task. After all, “the tendency to deceive ourselves constantly applies and we are taken with it” (Locke). The real burning issues in my opinion concern the democratic quality of society, the deceptive nature of the interactions between people and government, the attempts of governments to place the social media under censorship and the lack of attention for the actual suppliers of fake news: the governments and their henchmen in the mass media. By engaging in a fake discussion about fake news, society ignores the actual relevant questions: How do we—as citizens—really get informed and how should we communicate about this question? With the arrival of the social media, we have acquired a large network of electronic village pumps and that is important because at the pump we engage in the core moments of

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human evolution. I have already argued that our babbling and gossiping has great moral significance. We have a strong preference for chatter about ordinary daily affairs; who does it with whom? In the bookstore, we find more fiction than non-fiction. In the conventional and social media, you mainly find gossip. We are addicted to it. We spend a lot of time in each other’s company and show great interest in what others do. Because of life in ever larger groups the intense interaction was made more difficult. We have recovered that interaction through social media but the problem now is that we increasingly only inform each other about our own opinions and then preferably especially in the circle of those who subscribe to the same opinions. In fact, the whole discussion about fake news is about information transfer while the big social issue is that of social communication. There is a strong emphasis in the current public debate, policy and practice on the importance of information and information technology. It is worrying that in much of this debate “communication” has practically disappeared. But for solving the world’s most urgent problems, we do not need more information processing, but the ability to communicate. Ironically, our ability to process and distribute information increases and our ability to communicate with each other deteriorates. More and more people are connected worldwide via superfast, broadband digital networks. However, connecting is not the same as communicating. We are “nomophobes” (no mobile phobia) who have found a zealous new god who does not allow his believers to be “out of the loop”, not even for a moment. The big challenge for the coming years is how we can transform information and data societies into “communication societies”. We will have to learn the ability to communicate authentically again in order to survive. We must prove that we are trustworthy journalists, politicians and public. The discussion about fake news is mainly about the message while it should actually be about the messenger. After all the issue is not whether the message true or untrue but whether citizens can trust that the narrators are in good faith, that they are thoughtful, and that they (the characteristic of professionalism) know what they are doing. We need mediators in an obscure set of true and untrue events. People are senseseeking animals. It is unlikely that other animals (even the primates) are so perplexed by living and dying as people are. The human species is always concerned with finding (in religious or secular ways) meaning for the ultimate questions about sickness, suffering, evil, death and after death. That is why we create mental constructions such as linearity, circularity, temporality and eternity. We need mental flexibility to live with such paradoxes:

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linearity is only useful in combination with circularity, just as temporality and eternity belong together. In the essay collection Sens et Non-Sens (1948) Merleau-Ponty writes “the world is a mystery and always things happen that we had not anticipated”. Sense and nonsense cannot be separated. In a dense fog we are on our way to a goal that we do not know and that may not be there at all. Our heads are filled with fake ideas and delusional images to which, according to John Locke (in Guidance for the Truth, 1690), we willingly submit all over the world. In order to free us from this mental slavery, we do not need an increase of information, but especially communication with the others with whom we are on our way. This means that we have to go back to where we come from and have to learn how to use the art of cooperative communication. People have a unique cooperative way of living together and thinking together and have therefore created a cooperative infrastructure for their communication. In this communication, we explore our starting points and perspectives in an impartial way to discover where and how we are being misled not only by others but especially also by ourselves. The core of this deep dialogue with each other is not to find the truth but to test ideas, principles and (preliminary) judgements on their (temporary) plausibility.

Daily Communicative Practices In addition to the issue of trust, there are other hinderers that we need to consider. They are part of our daily communicative practices that often conflict with such requirements of the deep dialogue as mutuality, patience and freedom. • Mutuality means reciprocity and cooperation. Against this our communicative behaviour is often egotistic as it focuses on “selfies” and self-glorifying Facebook pages. The competitive spirit that prevails in most societies defeats the purpose of the authentic conversation since it renders conversational arenas places to win and to score. The deep dialogue requires that we liberate ourselves from the competitive spirit. As Bohm writes, “In a dialogue….nobody is trying to win” (1996, 7). • Patience means taking time for reflection. The authentic conversation is slow and needs time for ideas to sink in and to understand perspectives different from our own. In our communicative practice, however, we tend to seek instant gratification as we are obsessed by

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short texts and frequent updates. We are anxious to miss something and to be “out of the loop”. We seem to be permanently in a hurry and do not know how to waste enough time (Lightman 2018). • The principle of “communicative freedom” (Benhabib 2011) is clearly a moral claim that raises the question whether humans can be expected to live up to it. We all bring assumptions about ourselves, others, the world, our societies, relationships and ways of life to the encounter with people from different cultures that may hold different cultural assumptions. We tend to hold our assumptions to be truths and defend them even against overwhelming evidence of their flaws. And here the problem is as Bohm writes (1996, 11) “And they may not realize it, but they have some tendency to defend their assumptions and opinions reactively against evidence that they are not right, or simply a similar tendency to defend them against somebody who has another opinion”. Bohm explains how the dialogue is impossible if parties hang on to what they believe is absolutely necessary (1996, 22). Here the intriguing question comes up whether we are sufficiently creative to ask whether what we think is necessary and is indeed absolutely necessary. Many conversations are in fact negotiating processes in which ideas are traded off against each other seeking accommodations that will satisfy all participants. However, negotiating blocks the deep dialogue. Communicative freedom also means the challenge to say “I do not know”. Most of us live in professional or personals worlds where this poses a big problem as we are expected as academics or parents to have answers to problems (Isaacs 1999, 148). Communicative freedom implies that we feel free to speak up. This means that we have to overcome an almost natural inclination to self-censorship that makes us not say things we wanted to say because we are afraid of the consequences. By leaving out the issues of conflict we may reach superficial public agreement but in fact we cause deep fractures. We create a common comfortable discourse and leave out what we really should say, what we really desire, hope for, expect or fear. A fundamental challenge is whether the claims to inclusion, empathy, active listening, nonviolent speech and readiness to change can overcome such natural inclinations as tribal instinct, the desire to silence, competitive drives and hostility driven by fear? Like with other moral claims to equality, autonomy, security and dignity we most probably will have to strike a balance. A sort of temporary moral equilibrium between claims

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and capacities since a lasting, permanent solution of the moral divide seems one of those utopian dreams that lead humanity towards its extinction. “Human history is a succession of waves of morality and immorality. Humanity and inhumanity are part of the human condition” (Hamelink 2011, 138). There is no linear progress from evil to ethics. History is circular and is locked into recurrent manifestations of gross immoral conduct and sophisticated moral reflection. The balance is needed because the adjustment of moral claims to a lower status would get us probably the lowest standard of common human achievement and would also ignore the possibility that humans may transcend their innate moral inadequacies.

Relaxed Playing Fields The real-life environment in which the deep dialogue would have to take place is inimical to “cosmopolitan togetherness”, to genuine conversation and to the joy of dancing in the streets. As I argued in Chapter 3 the deep dialogue is a form of human play and the playing animal needs a relaxed playing field. This is hard to find in the realities of modern competitive and individualist societies where the majority of the world population is involved in a daily desperate struggle for life which is hardly the space for relaxed playing fields. In play time gets a special dimension or rather it seems to disappear. This extinction of time only happens in a relaxed field. Around the globe most people live in mechanical, quantitative antisocial time which limits the creativity of the pro-social— “time out of time” which is essential to make life in togetherness possible. We must ask with Diane Enns “what can we find in our power to do at this very moment to protect places of exchange and agreement? How do we keep open these spaces, guard their fragility from those who would destroy them, especially in the face of tyranny, of brutal repression fueled by fear of the just rage of the masses?” (2015, 238). With the emergence of aristocratic societies in ancient Greece, China, Japan, India, Africa and Polynesia, the element of competition appeared (Bellah 2011, 572). The main purpose of competitive play in aristocratic societies (like in the Greek Olympic games) is winning and “when winning becomes obsessively competitive, play can become negative, something like an addiction, and as Rousseau supposed, it may bring inequality to the fore in a basically egalitarian arena” (ibidem, 573). Ecstatic rituals may

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build social cohesion “but when they build it among subordinates – peasants, slaves, women, colonized people- the elite calls out its troops. In one way, the musically driven celebrations of subordinates may be more threatening to elites than overt political threats from below” (Ehrenreich 2007, 252). As Ehrenreich argues the hierarchical social orders that characterize also modern so-called democratic societies are antagonistic to collective festivities. “So civilization, as humans have known it for thousands of years, has this fundamental flaw: it tends to be hierarchical, with some class or group wielding power over the majority, and hierarchy is antagonistic to the festive and ecstatic tradition” (ibidem, 252). Societies may be (formally) democratic but do not escape hierarchical divisions of classes, castes, gender and race. “This is fundamentally inimical to forms of affective togetherness as the hierarchical order can only bring people together with “mass spectacles and force” (ibidem, 252). The “joy” of mass entertainment and mass consumption is only as spectacle a collective event but in fact a highly individual affair. We are with many in the disco but most of us are dancing alone! This is encouraged and motivated through the conservative social policies that guide social developments around the world. From the perspective of such policies people tend to see others as a threat to their own well-being. Social conservative politics have eroded the sense of collective responsibility and thus humanity lost its capacity to collectively deal with present and imminent danger. Vis-a-vis massive poverty and environmental destruction we are like rabbits staring paralysed in the lights of an upcoming car. “We have evolved to be highly social animals and, more so than any other primate capable of pleasurable bonding with people unrelated to ourselves. But on a planet populated by more than 6 billion of our fellow humans, all ultimately competing for the same dwindling supplies of land and oil and water, this innate sociality seems out of place, naive, and anachronistic” (ibidem, 248). Not only in traditional religious communities from evangelical Protestantism to radical Islam but also in circles of enlightened modern social scientists we find the enemies of collective festivities. It seems as Ehrenreich suggests that if you want either pure religion or modern civilization “you must abstain from taking hold of the hands of strangers and dancing in the streets” (ibidem, 249). As a footnote I might add that as social scientists we under-rate the importance of joy. There are more studies on depression than on fun.

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“Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy” (ibidem, 13). If one conceptualizes peace in a more meaningful than as absence of war one is up against formidable enemies that neither embrace cosmopolitan togetherness nor accept the collective joy with which to celebrate this. Religious groups can be mobilized to march on a “no more war” platform but they are—organized as collectives—usually inimical to inclusion of the others. Organized religion across different denominations of Judaism, Christianity, Islam or Hinduism is a very potent force against peace. It is more dangerous to the rescue of humanity’s future than the emergent force of globally mushrooming nationalist, populist, alt-right, neo-nazi, anti-immigration and racist political movements that— by the way-seem to increasingly enjoy sleeping with conservative religious groups. The political extreme right sounds ominous and intimidating but consists most often of disparate units of disgruntled people that basically hate others because they are unhappy with themselves, their lives, their loves and their boredom. Their politics are manipulated by smart mindengineers and steered by gut feelings more than by sustainable ideological considerations. Obviously, within all religions there were and are always enlightened individuals and groups but in the larger picture they may be intellectually challenging but in terms of political power they are insignificant. Here an important distinction must be made between the individual experience of religious beliefs as sense-making of human history and the organization of religious impulses in doctrines, sacred texts, standardized rituals, rules and hierarchical orders. Religion as individual experience may leave space for questions, doubts and reflections. Religion as collective practice tends towards intolerance of defiance and autonomy. Here the deep disparity between the social behaviour of individuals and that of social groups is a critical factor. As Niebuhr (1932) has convincingly argued the morals of individuals do not guide the morals of the group. Individuals may achieve levels of consideration, empathy and altruism that groups cannot. Approaches to conflicts that are based upon educational insights and that see ignorance as a basic source of conflicts will not work with groups that are steered primarily by collective self-interest. Collective egoism drives groups in their conflicts with other groups to unimaginable levels of cruelty. Groups are not capable of empathizing with the interests

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of other groups. Niebuhr suggested that there is a rift between individual and social morality. “An individual may sacrifice his own interests, either without hope of reward or in the hope of an ultimate compensation. But how is an individual, who is responsible for the interests of his group, to justify the sacrifice of interests other than his own?” (Niebuhr 1932, 267). People can be altruistic with their own interests, but it is unacceptable to be altruistic with the interests of others. The actions of groups are bound to be driven by collective egoism. If groups hope to achieve their selfish aims, they will fail if they apply the rules of individual moralism. If oppressed minorities approach their oppressors with understanding, empathy, and consideration, they will be even more exploited. Their liberation demands forceful action against their opponents. “The selfishness of human communities must be regarded as an inevitability” (ibidem, 272). And, “The moral obtuseness of human collectives makes a morality of disinterestedness impossible” (ibidem, 272). There may be sentiments of commonness, recognition of similarities that mitigate the social conflict; they cannot take the conflict away. Politics as a collective effort is always on a collision course with principles of individual morality. It may be possible to settle conflicts among individuals through reasoning, persuasion and compromise. “In inter-group relations this is practically an impossibility” (Gilkey 2001, xxxi). It is evident that groups also have positive potential and can achieve collectively impressive goals. Groups may not be inherently inclined to evil but there is evidence in social psychology to conclude that “the average of group members’ opinions and behaviors becomes more extreme as a result of group interaction” (Waller 2007, 39). This makes groups more dangerous than their individual members. Waller (ibidem, 40) proposes that “it is the nature of the individuals that make up the collective”. The collective is composed of individuals that are more inclined to good and those that are more inclined to evil and all these individuals have themselves a genius for both good and evil (Fromm 1964, 123). This is a delicate balance that is easily disturbed. Particularly in the Abrahamic religious groups—Christianity, Islam and Judaism—that have the world’s largest number of followers important beliefs (memes) are fostered that are hostile to cosmopolitan togetherness. They are all ethical monotheistic religions meaning they have a certain set of rules that they have to follow. It is a very tall order indeed to make collective religious practices part of global community resilience. This means that the key memes of the largest religious groups will have to tweak such as to allow for the celebrating of human togetherness. Those memes are the

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belief that there is only one God, that human life derives from a higher authority that needs permanent worship and prayer, and that the moral rules given by the higher authority must be obeyed and are not to be contested. This stands in the way of togetherness because it excludes all those who do not integrate these memes in their daily lives. Organized religions have the historical roots, the doctrinal focus on cosmological views, the strong appeal to the human need to belong, the institutional power and a long tradition of skilful propaganda that can effectively oppose the celebration of sheer togetherness. And yet, without making organized religion part of global communal resilience we will not be able to heal the polarized fragmentation that threatens the survival of the human species.

Conclusion The deep dialogue as the form of human conversation that uses both linguistic proficiency and capabilities for play confronts formidable hindrances as were described in this chapter. It is a tall order to overcome them. However, there are good reasons to believe that we can tame the hinderers, talk with each other and dance in the streets as I will argue in the final chapter.

Notes 1. Lying may be the downside of the cooperative nature of human communication. It requires a form of cooperation in which the person being lied to has to trust the liar. Our cooperative nature facilitates deception. The cooperative infrastructure of human communication does not guarantee a non-harmful human interaction. Human interaction/communication can be extremely pernicious; like in incitement to genocide; or discrimination/racism/sexism. 2. A good source for government propaganda and media distortion is Tell Me Lies edited by David Miller. 3. It is ironic to note that the New York Times has been remarkably less selfcritical with regard to its coverage of the Iraq invasion. 4. A source for the CIA propaganda campaign is “The CIA and the Media” by Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977.

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References Ariely, D. (2012). The (honest) truth about dishonesty. London: HarperCollins. Backbier, E. (2001). Disentangling deceptive communication. PhD dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Barnes, J. A. (1996). A pack of lies: Towards a sociology of lying. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellah, R. N. (2011). Religion in human evolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Benhabib, S. (2011). Dignity in adversity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bohm, D. (1996). On Dialogue. London, Routledge. Bok, S. (1978). Lying: Moral choice in public and private life. New York: Random House. Bok, S. (1989). Secrets: On the ethics of concealment and revelation. New York: Random House. Bonhoeffer, D. (1955). Ethics. London: SCM Press Ltd. Bradlee, B. C. (1991). Lies, damned lies and presidential statements. Guardian Weekly, 145(22), 21. Ehrenreich, B. (2007). Dancing in the streets: A history of collective joy. London: Granta Books. Enns, D. (2015). Hannah Arendt on peace as a means to politics. In T. Koivukoski & D. E. Tabachnick (Eds.), Peace in modern political thought (pp. 223–242). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Fromm, E. (1964). The heart of man, its genius for good and evil (Edition 1980). New York: HarperCollins. Gaspar, J. P., Levine, E. E., & Schweitzer, M. E. (2015). Why we should lie. Organizational Dynamics, 44(4), 306–309. Gilkey, L. B. (2001). On Niebuhr: A theological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hamelink, C. J. (2011). Media and conflict. Boulder: Paradigm. Harding, S., & Phillips, D. (1986). Contrasting values in Western Europe: Unity, diversity and change. London: MacMillan. Hauser, M. D. (1997). The evolution of communication. Cambridge: MIT Press. Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. New York: Random House. Levine, E.E. & Maurice E. Schweitzer, M.E. (2013). Prosocial Lies: When Deception Breeds Trust. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 126, 88−106. Levine, E.E. & Maurice E. Schweitzer, M.E. (2015). Prosocial Lies: When Deception Breeds Trust. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 126, 88−106. Lightman, A. (2018). In praise of wasting time. New York, Simon & Schuster.

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Locke, J. (1690). An essay on human understanding. http://www.mc.maricopa. edu/~barsp59601/text/philtext/locke/index.html. Machiavelli, N. (1532). Il Principe. De vorst, 1940, Dutch translation by J. F. Otten, ISBN 90-6054-716-0. Miller, D. (Ed.). (2004). Tell me lies: Propaganda and media distortion in the attack on Iraq. London: Pluto Press. Niebuhr, R. (1932). Moral man and immoral society. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English language: An essay. https://www. orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit. Rich, A. (1979). Women and honor: Some notes on lying: In on lies, secrets and silence. New York: W. W. Norton. Stiglitz, J. E. (2013). The price of inequality. New York: W. W. Norton. Tuchman, B. W. (1984). The march of folly. London: Sphere Books. van Ginneken, J. (1997). Understanding global news. London: Sage. Waller, J. (2007). Becoming evil: How ordinary people commit genocide and mass kiling. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, B. (2002). Truth and truthfulness. Princeton University Press: Princeton.

CHAPTER 5

Desperate Optimism

The new culture of peace is, therefore, a culture of communication. (Mike Traber)

Introduction My quest has so far led me to a conceptualization of peace as moments of celebrating sheer human togetherness. I have argued that this is a robust way to think about peace. It makes peace a realistic goal not as a permanent state but as moments. It is applicable on different societal levels and across cultural borders. To get to moments of peace as sheer human togetherness in the cosmopolitan sense, the most powerful instrument humans have is their proficiency in pro-social communication. However, the form in which this can be practiced—that I call “deep dialogue”— is a tall order because it is hindered by strong adversaries. In this final chapter, I want to propose what needs to be done to deal with the essential obstacles. I will also argue—as desperate optimist—why this can be done! I have divided the hinderers in microissues (related to individual attitude and behaviour) and macroissues (related to societal structures), although obviously they are closely interrelated and sometimes the microissues may not be so small after all. They include our lost capacity to converse in an authentic pro-social way for which we need to re-learn the art of the deep dialogue. This means mastering the basic ingredients of © The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Hamelink, Communication and Peace, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1_5

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trust, cooperation, patience and freedom. This also means re-discovering the collective joy of authentic conversations. At this point, it is important to state that my plea for deep dialogue is not about the need to find substantial agreement on beliefs and ideas (that would be a very unrealistic enterprise) but to find agreement on moments of shared concern and practice. “We in our settings are able to find many moments when we share with people from different settings a sense that something has gone right or gone wrong. It isn’t principle that brings the missionary doctor and the distressed mother together at the bed of a child with cholera: it is a shared concern for this particular child” (Appiah 2007, 256). We can practice human togetherness without substantial agreement on such principles as equality, autonomy or dignity. If we want the deep dialogue across different ideas and beliefs, the search for principled agreement is a dead alley. As Appiah formulates it (ibidem, 256–259), we will not find agreement about what we ought to believe but we should seek agreement about what is to be done. The deep dialogue is not a conversation about the principles of truth and justice but an encounter (verbal and ecstatic) about a shared practice of togetherness. Humans have always been storytellers and there is enormous power in the narrative that invites to imagine moments of togetherness. We could reclaim that narrative quality and share stories. The only principled issue is that an authentic conversation—across the globe—can only take place if all parties accept the basic commitment to communicative freedom. Communicative freedom (with its implicit demand of listening) is a basic principled position and individuals and social groups that want to build the communal resilience critical to the survival of the human species would have to commit to this principle. Essential to communicative freedom is the principle of dignity in the sense of autonomous agency. Dignity is taking yourself seriously as autonomous agent and expecting that others respect this agency. I would agree with Appiah that we are already fellow citizens of a world and “we do not have to wait for institutional change to exercise our common citizenship: to engage in dialogue with others around the world about questions great and small that we must solve together” (ibidem, 271). We can begin tomorrow—and many have already begun—to engage in conversations that can lead to common action “for our shared environment, for human rights, for the simple enjoyment of comity” (ibidem, 271). I propose in this chapter that we should see libraries around the world as sanctuaries for the collective joy of togetherness.

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The Art of the Deep Dialogue and All That Jazz Participation in a jazz band is like being part of a trusted conversation that may have a strong ecstatic dimension. The basic tools of deep dialogue can be acquired through jazz music education. The mental attitude basic to the deep dialogue can best be trained through jazz music that helps to escape from the pressures of standardized time by mastering “time out of time”. From the beginning, jazz was linked to dance and “the popularity of jazz was intimately connected with social dancing for which much of the music was created, and with the places in which dancing happened” (Brown et al. 2018, 10). Dancing in the streets of New Orleans begins with the slave dancing in the early nineteenth century and jazz had an important social function because by being a band member young blacks became part of the community (ibidem, 20). When the connection was severed, jazz became respectable and—I would add—lost some of its social significance. Its accessibility changed when the music became non-danceable and the venues became almost exclusively small clubs. When jazz became “high art” somatic movement changed to low bodily engagement. Jazz musicians often complained about how Rock and Roll took over the podia but this may have been the result of jazz no longer being danceable and young people wanting to shake their bodies. In the 1950s social dancing to jazz all but disappeared. Bebop was distinctly non-danceable and the combination of reduced accessibility with limited bodily movements made jazz from dance/entertainment into an art form for attentive and still listeners. Also the US government increased in 1944 the cabaret tax and as a result there were no more big bands but only small combos, and no more dancing but listening (ibidem, 28). Jazz “was initially and for many years an art that invited active, participatory interpretation, primarily in the form of social dancing” (ibidem, 25). In its development social participatory dancing became professional performance dancing. An essential feature of jazz is that a jazz band is like a selforganizing flock of birds in which the leaders alternate with a collective intelligence that forms new patterns, quickly adapts to new situations and accommodates errors and learns from them. The jazz band is a complex adaptive system in which order and disorder constantly alternate. Its rotation of leadership in taking turns at soloing and accompanying moves the members of the band out of their comfort zones. A jazz band is a cooperative venture that only functions well when the members that engage in a process of communication trust each other. Improvising means taking

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risks and making mistakes. Jazz musicians do not dwell on mistakes. They see them as sources of learning. As trumpet player Miles Davis remarked “If you’re not making a mistake, it’s a mistake”. For the jazz musician, the only mistake is to make that same mistake twice. Whereas most modern organizations are characterized by a maximum set of rules and a minimal degree of individual freedom, in the jazz band one finds that the structure is minimal and the individual autonomy is maximal. Evidently there are restrictions but they are permanently explored in experimenting with balances between freedom and constraints. Important for the convivial nature of the jazz band what is called “hanging out”: after hours practice of social interaction in which the real learning takes place. When a jazz band makes a difference its members are having fun, serious fun and engage the audience in this conviviality. In human cognitive development interaction is a crucial component. The most creative ideas come up when people “hang out” as jazz musicians tend to do after their gigs. The late Steve Jobs understood that when he wanted a new building that would facilitate staff to engage in informal, face-to-face, serendipitous meetings just like the members of a jazz band. “Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas” (Isaacson 2011, 430). The Apple company building was designed to create the space for improvised collaborations. Physical environments in many modern organizations destroy the creativity and serendipity that emerges in intense social networks This is contrary to the conventional thinking about learning that was labelled by Paolo Freire the “banking concept” (Freire 1970). Herewith Freire referred to the common conception of education as transfer of knowledge from the expert to the student. Knowledge is seen as a deposit transferred from one account to another account. In the real world though we learn by doing and by sharing experiences. Convivial organizations are communities of practice and pleasure. They are non-hierarchical places where humans learn, develop and produce through creative storytelling. People are not seen as resources or as raw processable materials. The convivial organization will dismantle its office of human resources. People are seen as creative artists. The convivial organization will establish an office of creative production. In the convivial organization, transformation is fun. It is realized that when we want people to change types of behaviour or mindsets we should be able to demonstrate to them that the alternative conduct or mentality is fun.

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People are willing to do all kinds of (new) things if they are pleasurable. Pleasure is an underrated motivating force in processes of change!

Learning the Art of the Deep Dialogue Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. (Albert Einstein)

In our educational policies and practices, we need to make the moral standard of human dignity our primary guide. My point of departure is that education is never a neutral process. Education can be an instrument to facilitate the conformity of students to the prevailing political-economic and sociocultural system or it is a means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. For the future of education, it is essential to see that there are broadly speaking two opposing modes of thought: the conformity approach (that seems to be more and more dominant around the world) versus the freedom approach (inspired by the work of Brazilian philosopher Paolo Freire). Around the world, when talking to teachers, students and politicians responsible for educational policies I see a predominance of the conformity mindset. This approach manifests itself in the following ways: • Education is rapidly becoming an arena of winners and losers: a competition model prevails with focus on economic output so that quantity wins out against quality. This implies that financially less successful programmes will be censored away. It is crucial to get the highest possible Hirsch index score: a measuring standard with little validity that combines citations with productivity but tells nothing about the quality of the research. Academic institutions are becoming egoistic entities fighting for the biggest part of the cake. The biggest share (or any share at all) of diminishing funds for research means that educational staff needs to spend disproportionate amounts of time to prepare in most cases unsuccessful research project proposals. • There is a strong trend towards the privatization of educational institutions without sufficient guarantees for good quality content and with discriminatory effects on access.

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• Educational institutions are run like large-scale bureaucracies in which managers try to do things right but never ask what the right things are. In such institutions, there is a lot of filling out assessment forms and ticking off responses to questions. This represents a climate in which the individual capacity to judge intelligently is distrusted. Protocols have become key tools of management. The question is no longer whether teachers have a long-time experience and are inspiring people but whether they have followed the protocol. These protocol-driven bureaucracies prefer homogeneity over diversity. The hundred languages kids speak when they are not yet subjected to formal education are replaced by the one language that adults speak (Edwards, Gandini & Forman 1998). There is a drive towards accepting only one indubitable single conception of knowledge type that is based on solid foundations, fixed grounds and empirical evidence. There is an under-valorization of critical thinking and teaching is often more satisfying the entertainment expectations of students than engaging them in critical confrontational dialogues. There is very little collective joy in educational institution. The many universities around the globe that I had the honour of visiting are pretty gloomy places. Maybe the only place where learners still play and enjoy themselves is the schoolyards of primary schools that all over the world are places of playful laughter. For education to bring about communal resilience educational policies and practices need to be embedded in the freedom mindset. This would mean that education is a cooperative venture in which experiences are shared and multiple knowledges are developed, that educational institutions are convivial places where people realize that education is fun, serious fun. As Aristotle taught us education is not just the transfer of knowledge its mission is to make people happy. Convivial places are swinging institutions that make people happy. Schools and universities should announce this mission at their entrances with the famous Duke Ellington phrase: “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”. Convivial education follows the pedagogical method—developed in Reggio Emilia, Italy—that allows children to express themselves in a great variety of languages among others through the arts. Educational policies require a choice between the conformity approach and the freedom approach. To put it more simply: between President Jair Bolsonaro and philosopher

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Paolo Freire. Or as the granddaughter of Freire writes between the eradication of her grandfather’s heritage or the celebration of his liberating approach to education.1 In the conformity approach there is no space for deep dialogue. This is particularly so because it is based on distrusting the others.

What Would Deep Dialogues Be About? I think the deep dialogue is a feasible proposition because it is based upon a “cosmopolitan localism”. It has the cosmopolitan flavour of the international human rights regime and its basic principle that “all people matter”. It is however also embedded in an appreciation of the values that are significantly present in people’s local environments. Tariq Modood (Multiculturalism, 2013) proposed in a debate in Amsterdam (October 2019) the term “multicultural nationalism”. I agree with him that the notion of multiculturalism has regrettably been deleted from much current discourse. However, I would rather exchange his “multural nationalism” for “cosmopolitan localism”. Cosmopolitan expresses better than multicultural the moral obligation to care for all people—also the strangers—and localism reflects better than nationalism that people’s concerns about perceived threats to local identities should be taken seriously. Nationalism is often an aggressive sentiment that is inspired by the mistaken idea that there would be national cultures. The core question is therefore how local loyalty can be liberated from the myopia that threatens human togetherness and how local concerns can be broadened with a cosmopolitan dimension. The topic of the deep dialogue should be of local concern yet with a cosmopolitan flavour. Moreover, participants need to have the feeling they take something away from the encounter. Even if it is only the delight of playing together. The over-arching theme would be how to live together in polarized societies?2

The Deep Dialogue and Its Sanctuaries The deep dialogue is a cosmopolitan conversation. Its essence is the key human rights principle: all people matter! Cosmopolitanism celebrates pluralism. We are different and that is reason for joy. Just imagine how unbearably boring a non-pluralist world would be! The basic mental construct or “meme” of cosmopolitan togetherness is the belief that “each human being has responsibilities to every other” (Appiah, xvi).

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There is a forceful counter-meme that stands in the way of peace as cosmopolitan togetherness. This mindset is fed by the meme of limited local loyalty. The anti-cosmopolitan mindset claims that there is only one way that is the right way and this belief is absolute and has little tolerance for those who prefer not to join the ranks of the holders of the truth. This mindset claims that there is only one way that is the right way and this belief is absolute and has little tolerance for those who prefer not to join the ranks of the holders of the truth. The others may matter to some extent but not sufficiently to feel a moral obligation towards them. We do not owe loyalty beyond those who belong to our local moral universe. This is the universe of our nation, our tribe or our family. The others belong to different moral universes. For them, different rules apply. They can be treated differently from us because we are better! The sectarian memes that are basic to forms of nationalism (“our country First”), populism (“We are the people”) and monotheism (“our God is the only God”) make the cosmopolitan conversation in which we learn from the different others impossible. Against this the cosmopolitan mindset says that we should recognize the human dignity of the others and take them seriously as human beings. We are able to show loyalty to the stranger and yet feel more at ease with those who speak our language, share our sense of humour and a whole set of cultural preferences in fashion, food and music. The loyalty to those with whom are most closely associated is natural but does not exclude a broader concern with those with whom our association is more distant. It is also fairly unrealistic and unpractical to believe that we could love all of humanity indiscriminately. For a species that has always travelled and explored new worlds it should however not to be too difficult to be concerned about strangers! Yes, the stranger is “strange” and different from us but the difference should not be exaggerated. Cosmopolitanism implies the moral obligation to contribute to a world in which we can live together. This means we have to struggle with the question how to behave morally (in my notebook that means acting in line with the moral demands of the international human rights regime) in an immoral world. This could be an essential main topic for the cosmopolitan conversation. How to contribute as individual and as community to living morally in an immoral society and particularly how to educate future generations for this challenge. Since there are no easy clear-cut answers to these questions we need to talk with each other. Without the rational/verbal and the emotional/song and dance modes of conversation our species may not survive. The bad

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news is that anti-cosmopolitan beliefs are obstinate, firmly held and justified by persons and institutions of significant authority. The good news is that they can change and do change! In spite of the enormous obstacles we have to overcome I do believe that we will manage to have this cosmopolitan conversation and I base this expectation on features of human cultural evolution, the human disposition to cooperation, the complexity of our real-world environment, and the small victories that are achieved around the globe on every single day. For the deep dialogue we need to identify the places that function as “sanctuaries” where in moments of “kairos” we can engage in the authentic conversation that is both verbal and emotional. Sanctuaries are places of critical reflection and production of multiple knowledges for communal resilience. They are places where people can exercise communicative freedom, explore the joy of cooperative communication and waste time in “kairotic” experiences. These places should have no surveillance mechanisms in place, should be egalitarian and inclusive and should not have distractive devices (like loud music or the increasingly ubiquitous TV screens). We need to re-learn the pleasure of idleness and re-discover that we are playful animals and that the ritual of deep dialogue emerges from play. Among animals play is initiated when they are adequately fed, healthy and free from stress of predator threat. Bekoff and Pierce (quoted in Bellah 2011, 80). “Play only occurs if- for the time they are playing, individuals have no other agenda but play…large and small animals can play together, and highranking and low-ranking individuals can play together, but not if one takes advantage of its superior strength or status”. In play “Animals really work at reducing inequalities in size, strength, social status and how each is wired to play….play is perhaps uniquely egalitarian” (ibidem, 80). In exploring possible sanctuaries, I found religious places to be too partisan and sectarian, educational institutions to be increasingly competitive and egoistic and under censorship, and most public spaces as private institutions with their own rules restricting the freedom of speech. I think that libraries around the world should and could be the places where people can engage in thinking together, in timeless and playful freedom and enjoy the deep satisfaction or even thrill of collective synchronous activities. This requires that we reclaim that special human heritage of singing, dancing and conversing together. In human history, we have been very good at that and our libraries could be leaders in the revival of collective joy! Sanctuaries require time and patience and thus the acceptance of moments of idleness. We should accept the need to waste time. Human

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creativity needs idleness and the courage to waste time. In praise of idleness, Bertrand Russell (1935) proposed less working hours which can certainly realized today with the help of artificial intelligence and robotics. A great obstacle to collective joy is the “cult of efficiency” (ibidem, 11) “…everything ought to be done for the sake of something else and never for its own sake”. A society in which most people derive more fun from leisure than from work and most people spend more time on work than on leisure is not a relaxed playing field! When working hours would diminish there could be more freedom for celebrating collective joy. The notion of wasting time is in most religions—and most certainly in Christianity and Islam—considered a profanity! A very concrete step towards exploring libraries as places for the encounter in deep dialogue is a project by the Foundation to Rescue Our Future. In this project, libraries (initially in five countries, the Netherlands, Aruba, Surinam, the USA and Mexico) invite from their local communities people with very different social, ethnic and religious backgrounds and different positions with regard to a—locally important—theme to engage in a deep dialogue. The essence of the encounter is the investigation of the various positions from principles that are shared. The ultimate goal of the deep dialogue is to strengthen collective resilience to cope with existential risks. Participants do not have to agree with each other, but it is already a great contribution to collective resilience if they understand each other on topics of communal togetherness and resilience (www.rescueourfuture.org).

Memes and Cultural Evolution Memes are part of human cultural evolution and—although the academic debate continues—they may be based upon the same basic Darwinian principles as the biological evolution: diversity/variation, competition/selection and inheritance. Most of human behaviour is shaped by cultural constructs. “Culturally transmitted technology, from stone tools to automobiles to the internet, and culturally transmitted political, economic and social institutions have drastically changed our environments and our lives in a relatively short period of time. No other species on the planet exhibits such rapid and effective cultural change” (Mesoudi 2012, 1). As genetic evolution proceeds over many generations, cultural changes in tastes for fashion or music may change in weeks (Mesoudi 2012, 15). Most authors seem to agree on the observation that cultural change proceeds at a faster rate than genetic change. A good illustration is the flows

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of innovation in the field of technology. Humans and especially children have an enormous capacity for learning new things, like languages, and for adapting to changing environments. Charles Perreault (2012) shows that (1) cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution; (2) this effect holds true even when the generation time of species is controlled for; and (3) culture allows us to evolve over short-time scales, which are normally accessible only to short-lived species, while at the same time allowing for us to enjoy the benefits of having a long life history. In contrast to biological evolution, which is blind, cultural evolution can be a directed and consequently a faster process. The pace of biological evolution is also constrained by the generation time of the species, since genetic information is transmitted vertically through sexual reproduction. While cultural information can be transmitted from parents to offspring, it is also transmitted between non-parents from a previous generation, and, horizontally, between contemporaries. This transmission mode gives cultural evolution the potential to spread rapidly in a population, much like an epidemic disease (ibidem). Perreault also recognizes that it is not entirely obvious that cultural evolution is always faster than biological evolution. Some cultural traditions have remained very stable over centuries and sometimes biological evolutionary changes have occurred over relatively short periods. Even so, as Perreault writes, it is important to establish that biological evolution is unconscious, opportunistic and not goal-directed, while cultural evolution is conscious, at best planned, and can have a goal. Therefore, even crucial memes—however persistent they may appear—can change within life-times. It needs to be noted however that changing mental constructs that are convenient rational justifications of collective behaviour may be for the individual deviating from the group norm risky business. Yet, collective beliefs can be changed by individual initiatives. In 2012, Nice Nailantei Leng’ete shared her story about changing the traditional belief about female genital mutilation with the audience at TEDxAmsterdam. As a Maasai child in Kenya, Nice Nailantei Leng’ete accomplished something remarkable: she changed her culture’s ritualized female genital mutilation. But saving herself was not enough. As an adult, she has gone on to negotiate with village elders, who traditionally have not worked with women, and convinced them that alternative coming-of-age ceremonies will be healthier for girls and better for communities. Her work as a project officer with Amref Health Africa has saved an estimated 15,000 girls around Kenya from the cut, as well as from child marriage. Nice is an extraordinary example for

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young African girls standing up for themselves. After the loss of her parents, she could have given up and followed the norm, knowing that challenging attitudes in male-dominated communities can get you cast out. But instead, she fought to get an education so she could help change the sociocultural structures that continue to impede women’s lives and well-being. That approach has earned her admiration and respect. Nice was the first woman in her community to be given a black talking stick by elders. And now she speaks on a global stage, using her voice to raise awareness about her work. Female genital mutilation and child marriage will end in Africa because of the likes of Nice. We can learn from her example that outlawing a powerful meme has to come from within the group, it should be clear that core values of the group are respected, the alternative offered should be less damaging for the group, and it is essential to build a coalition with forces within the group. The story demonstrates that throughout history memes come and go as they are functional or dysfunctional to human well-being. Steven Pinker in his “The Better Angels of Our Nature” documents the revolutions that have taken place over past decades with regard to the decline of lynching, racial pogroms, rape and battering, infanticide, spanking, child abuse, bullying, gay-bashing and cruelty to animals. He notes that all these movements towards non-violence “had to swim against powerful currents of human nature” (2011, 475). And “as if biology didn’t make things bad enough, the Abrahamic religions ratified some of our worst instincts with laws and beliefs that have encouraged violence for millennia” (ibidem). Pinker suggests that this (civil, women’s, children’s, gay and animal) rights revolution is largely caused by the spread of ideas that debunked the ignorance and superstition of such beliefs as “that members of other races and ethnicities are innately avaricious or perfidious, that women don’t mind being raped, that children must be beaten to be socialized, that people choose to be homosexual as part of a morally degenerate lifestyle, that animals are incapable of feeling pain” (ibidem, 477). Also Thomas Piketty argues that the doctrine of “natural” societal inequality can be transformed in the vision of a participatory socialism through forms of education that question the foundations of society’s dominant institutions and discover the conditions of their transformation (Piketty 2019).

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The Cooperative Species We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of selfish replicators. (Richard Dawkins)

It may be, as Richard Dawkins (1989) has argued, that we are genetically disposed to selfish behaviour. However, early in our evolutionary history we discovered that hunting for game and especially big game had its own specific requirements. Coordination and cooperation were absolutely essential for the fitness of the group of hunters. Even more important than cooperative hunting was sharing the meat which had to be equitable and was a source of good feelings and positive socializing. “All over the world, mobile hunter-gatherers use social control guided by moral rules to see to it that when a successful hunter kills a large animal, his ego is held in check” (Boehm 2012, 37). In all societies however there are those who will play unfair and who will abuse their strength or status: the bullies. This is countered by what Boehm calls “the inequality aversion” (ibidem, 69)…. “human groups have been vigilantly egalitarian for tens of thousands of years because we have inherited from our ape ancestors to resent being dominated and being placed in a disadvantageous unequal position” (ibidem, 69). This is the origin of egalitarian societies. To guarantee the fitness of the group the meat had to be distributed in an egalitarian way and the “bullies” had to learn self-control, be ostracized or be killed. Our ancestors never liked to be dominated by bullies. With the advent of large game hunting “humans had become decisively egalitarian..alpha types were put down, or executed if they failed to control themselves and restrain their on power moves” (ibidem, 154). Efficient cooperation is good for all members of a group and therefore it pays off to encourage extra-familial generosity. “In human minds everywhere, prosocial generosity is good, inappropriate selfishness is bad, and conflict is to avoided” (ibidem, 53). Boehm makes it plausible that archaic homo sapiens understood the critical importance of cooperative hunting and eating together. Sharing the meat in an egalitarian way demanded in addition to understanding the benefits of sharing, the presence of cultural mechanisms that would support the control of those who try to bully, dominate, cheat or steal. It is fortunate “that these selfishly aggressive propensities have been susceptible to a remarkable degree of control” (ibidem, 311) both by self-constraint and collective sanctioning of bullies and cheaters.

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Using the threat of force, group disapproval and social sanctioning freeriders were effectively suppressed. It is ironic that whereas our ancestors would eventually kill the bullies it seems that our contemporaries honour those who take most of the meat home with presidential offices and royal bonuses. Although there seems to be more cultural support for egocentred competition and greed than for sharing and altruism, the global youth rebellion with iconic figures such as Greta Thunberg, may be an important sign of changing times. The good news is we can learn altruistic behaviour: we have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth as Richard Dawkins wrote. The good news is that (as Charles Darwin proposed) we can rise above our origins and can extend positive feelings to all human beings. The good news is that entirely selfish behaviour does not serve the survival of species. Bullies do not survive long in nature. The good news is that evolution is neither pre-determined nor random, there is space between these two and humans as the greatest social communicators of all species can use this to shape future survival. Bullying and free-riding are serious threats to the fitness of groups and need to be controlled through public vigilance in reporting and gossiping about reputations, through democratic procedures, rule of law and education.

The Promise of Complexity Complexity is a ground for optimism. Human beings are complex organisms both physically and mentally. And whereas humanity has made impressive progress in the knowledge and understanding of the body and the mind there is still more to bodies and minds that we do not understand in spite of detailed and often scientifically evidenced knowledge about the parts. There are sudden and unexpected changes in our body, like a heart attack, that despite all the cardiological knowledge about the working of the heart cannot be predicted. Within complex systems—much like in a tropical rain forest—there is multitude of interactions between connected networks that all carry massive amounts of information and feedback to that information. Complex systems move between order and disorder without an external command post. The earth system is equally complex and in the interaction between humans and the earth system it is extremeful difficult if not impossible to foresee when and where processes of order and disorder will appear and disappear. Without a central controller the emerging disorder (like a traffic jam) may resolve

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as if nothing had happened and without external interference. The traffic jam appears for no reason and then disappears again (Johnson 2007, 19). Complexity means everything is related to everything else (interdependence), small events may have big and unpredictable effects (nonlinearity), and one cannot make reliable forecasts as flows of ideas and opinion may unexpectedly and rapidly change (uncertainty). To understand this complexity, the prevailing scientific preference for determinism and reductionism is not helpful to understand non-linear processes in which unpredictable and surprising phenomena emerge without a central controller. Determinism proposes that it is possible to establish linear causal relations between phenomena in our physical and non-physical environments. Causality assumes a simple world of one-to-one linear relations. More often than not scientists can only demonstrate (with grave reservations) a correlation, an association and then speculate, hypothesize and guess. The “causality obsession” is fatal for a realistic understanding of the world in which we live. We live in a reality of multiple causalities and it is probably impossible ever to single out one specific causal factor. Reductionism proposes that by analysing and understanding parts of a system (as parts of a clock) we understand the whole system. This does however not work with complex systems where we have to accept that a great part of our reality is fundamentally unpredictable. Reductionism and determinism offer an attractive simplicity that suggest we control the phenomena we investigate. This may be psychologically comforting but it does not provide us with reliable knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge requires time. Science which at the core is conversation needs like the deep dialogue patience.

The Small Victories The scale of social justice movements has enormously expanded around the World. That did not change our living together on the planet completely and permanently but we see everywhere that small victories are achieved. Small victories can be seen in the 100 resilient cities project that helps cities from Melbourne (with its urban forestry and biodiversity strategy) to Mexico City (with its innovative water fund) to address of racial inequity and the integration of vulnerable communities into the life of the city and thus become more resilient in dealing with adverse risks (source Cities in Action, 2017, The Rockefeller Foundation). There are

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movements like Black LivesMatter, Occupy Wall Street and Extinction Rebellion. There is also a growing interest in primary schools, children’s daycare centres and pedagogical academies around the world show to engage with the pedagogical approach that was developed in Reggio Emilia (Italy) for children until 6. This pedagogy focuses on what children can do, not what they cannot do. Children are challenged to discover, explore and experiment. Another example is that the Indian supreme court decriminalized homosexuality, that the coral riff of Belize is no longer threatened world heritage, or that Lisbon will prohibit as from 2020 the use of plastic cups. In Kenya, in the province of Makueni people have mastered the art of non-corrupt politics and in the Technologico de Monterey (Mexico) professors and graduates of that institution requested successfully to cancel former president’s Calderon visit because it would be a serious offense to the memory of two students killed at the Monterrey campus on 19 March 2010 during his presidency. Former Brazilian President Lula was released from prison in November 2019: a small but significant victory for the rule of law. In the fall of 2019, large numbers of people in Chile, Lebanon, Catalonia, Algeria, Hong Kong, Iraq, Bolivia and other places took over the streets (often with song and dance!) and demonstrated (often at great risks) their aversion against inequality, injustice and corruption. The youth marches, the kids skipping schools for a better planet, women calling attention (singing and dancing) in the major cities of the world to violence against women: all these expressions of resilience can create a massive critical mass as the tipping point for genuine transformation to “sheer human togetherness”.

Conclusion This is Earth. It will never be heaven. (Rebecca Solnit)

My quest for a robust conceptualization of peace guided me to the proposal of peace as moments of celebrating sheer human togetherness through deep dialogue. I believe this is a realistic but enormously tall order in the light of the many obstacles that have to be overcome. In Optimism and Despair, Noam Chomsky says “We have two choices. We can be pessimistic, give up and help ensure that the worst will happen. Or we can be optimistic; grab the opportunities that surely exist, and maybe help make the world a better place” (2017). I prefer to combine despair

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and optimism. Optimism not in the sense of a romantic utopianism that thinks everything is ok and we can lounge until the end of times: that would be gross naivety. It is desperate because there is enough ground for anger and grief. Desperate optimism is an active mindset that is futureoriented. It realizes that choices about the future have to be made under the condition of uncertainty. Effects in the future of choices made today are unknown. The future is open, because we have no information about it. If we had such information, here would be no real choice. Desperate optimism makes the polarized fractures that confront humanity with existential risks visible, makes us see that we should and can reclaim egalitarianism, that a divided planet cannot stand and that we can create sanctuaries for cosmopolitan conversations and that against all current isolationism we have moral obligations to strangers. We have a tough job ahead of us. Our task can only be performed if we are optimistic. We have no other choice. There is no day without its moments of paradise. (Jose Luis Borges)

In the preceding chapters, I have developed a mode of thought about peace that moves away from the limited view of peace as absence of war and violence, from a framework within peace is mainly the business of statal institutions, from a “humans only” view on peace and from a conceptualization of peace as an end-state. In my quest, I departed from the question of how we might live together on a deeply polarized planet. I proposed that living together in a cosmopolitan way is the essential way to develop the resilience that human communities need for their survival. I added to this the notion that this sheer human togetherness (Hannah Arendt) would always be a temporal phenomenon. Life has to be lived in moments and the moments of sheer togetherness need to be celebrated. I concluded that we could achieve these moments only through the art of the deep dialogue. This is the conversation that is guided by the human rights principle that all people matter. The deep dialogue is based upon cosmopolitan localism that cares for strangers and for localities. I pointed out that this conversation which would use both words and song and dance is obstructed by the common ways of our daily communication and by the difficulty of finding sanctuaries that allow for a cooperative dialogue in confidence, patience and freedom. I argued that the most forceful impediment to peace as sheer togetherness is the “meme”

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(Richard Dawkins) of a myopic local loyalty that justifies the exclusion of the stranger from our moral universe. In spite of the powerful resistance that the deep dialogue as peacemaker faces I entered a plea for a desperate optimism. This optimism is an inevitable moral position which accepts that “This is Earth, it never will be heaven” (Rebecca Solnit, 2016) and that confronts the crucial issue of how moral beings can live together in immoral societies. This optimism inspires to overcome the obstacles to peace by jazz music education, by the freedom approach to all forms of education, and by the inventive use of libraries as sanctuaries. It is based upon our capacity for cooperative communication, the flexibility of our cultural evolution and the daily achievement of small victories. It is driven by the real-life experience that each day has its moments of paradise.

Notes 1. http://www.cta.org.ar/bolsonaro-quiere-erradicar-el.html. 2. A good—urgent, pertinent and difficult—question would seem to me: How should “cosmopolitan localism” deal with the encounter between secular and religious identities?

References Appiah, K. A. (2007). The ethics of identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bellah, R. N. (2011). Religion in human evolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boehm, C. (2012). Moral origins. New York: Basic Books. Brown, L. B., Goldblatt, D., & Gracyk, T. (2018). Jazz and the philosophy of art. London: Routledge. Chomsky, N. (2017). Optimism over depair. New York: Penguin Group. Dawkins, R. (1989). The selfish gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edwards, C., Gandini, L. & Forman, G. (1998). The hundred languages of children. London: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Bloomsbury. Isaacson, W. (2011). Steve jobs: A biography. New York: Simon & Schuster. Johnson, N. (2007). Simply complexity. Oxford: OneWorld. Mesoudi, A. (Ed.). (2012). The pace of cultural evolution by Charles Perreault. Published as https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0045150.

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Modood, T. (2019). Secularism and multiculturalism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: The decline of violence in history and its causes. New York: Penguin Group. Piketty, T. (2019). Capital et idéologie. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Russell, B. (1935). In praise of idleness. London: George Allen & Unwin. Solnit, R. (2016). Hope in the dark. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Author Index

A Anderson, B., 47 Appiah, K.A., viii, xi, 58, 136, 141 Arendt, H., viii, xii, 24, 30–32, 151 Ariely, D., 90, 94 Armstrong, K., 11, 53 Assange, J., 108

B Baumann, Z., vii Beauvoir, S. de, 42 Benhabib, S., 81, 126 Blair, J., 108, 109, 117 Boehm, C., 27, 75, 147 Bohm, D., 74, 78, 80, 125, 126 Bok, S., 97, 106 Bonhoeffer, D., 95, 100, 114 Bostrom, N., 59, 60 Bradlee, B., 98, 110 Bradley, H., 38–41, 107 Buber, M., 74, 78, 85 Burghardt, G., 85

C Canary, D.J., 18 Castells, M., 99 Chomsky, N., 150 Cooke, J., 108

D Darwin, C., 148 Davis, M., 44, 138 Dawkins, R., 147, 148, 152 Derrida, J., 24 Dunbar, R., 75, 81

E Ehrenreich, B., viii, xii, 62, 82, 128 Erasmus, D., 12, 22, 27

F Foucault, M., 48 Freire, P., 138, 139, 141 Fromm, E., 130

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Hamelink, Communication and Peace, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1

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G Galtung, J., 4, 5, 15, 16, 28 Gambetta, D., 78, 79, 86 Giddens, A., 78 Goodman, A., 16 Graham, Grotius, H., 44 Grice, H.P., 78, 86 H Habermas, J., 21, 24, 25 Hamelink, C.J., viii, 2, 127 Hamilton, C., 60, 61 Heidegger, M., 21, 24 Herakleitos, 57 Higgins, K.M., 83 Horney, K., 18 J Johnson, N., 149 K Kant, I., 23–25, 28, 60, 105 King, M.L., 28 L Lévi-Strauss, C., 41 Lightman, A., 80, 126 Lincoln, A., 62 Locke, J., 23, 29, 123, 125 Lorenzetti, A., viii Lull, J., 68 M Mesoudi, A., 144 Modood, T., 141 Moïse, D., 71 N Niebuhr, R., 17, 129, 130

O Orwell, G., 102

P Perreault, C., 145 Piketty, T., 39, 146 Pinker, S., 19, 146 Pope Francis, 8, 61 President Bush Jr., 105 President Carter, 104 President Johnson, 104 Pruitt, D.G., x, 20

R Relotius, C., 109 Rich, A., 101 Russell, B., 80, 144

S Sankatsing, G., xii, 31 Sassen, S., 43 Schopenhauer, A., 12 Schramm, W., 17 Socrates, 76 Solnit, R., 152 Spinoza, B., 22, 28 Stiglitz, J.E., 59, 107

T Tannen, D., 41 Tillich, P., 7 Tomasello, M., 68, 72–74, 78, 82

V van Ginneken, J., 110 Vintges, K., 41, 42

AUTHOR INDEX

W Wasko, J., 45 Wilde, O., 101

Z Zuckerman, M., 37

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Subject Index

A Adaptation, 18, 69–71, 73 Anthropocene, 60, 61

B Bad news, 15, 69–71, 143 Bahai, 9 Biodiversity, 59, 63, 149 Biological evolution, 69, 144, 145 Brain evolution, 73 Buddhism, 8, 9, 50 Bullies, 74, 75, 147, 148

C Causality, 149 Christianity, 8, 11, 50–54, 56, 129, 130, 144 Chronos, xii, 80 CIA, 109, 114, 131 Clinton administration, 102, 103, 109 Collective identity, x

Collective joy, viii, xi, xii, 31, 53, 62, 82–85, 89, 129, 136, 140, 143, 144 Communicative freedom, 76, 80, 81, 126, 136, 143 Competitive spirit, 125 Complex adaptive system, 71, 72, 137 Complexity, 29, 63, 143, 148, 149 Conversation, 25, 59, 63, 67, 68, 74–77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 89, 93, 101, 125–127, 131, 136, 141, 142, 149, 151 Cooperative communication, xi, 32, 41, 63, 71, 72, 85, 89, 125, 143, 152 Cooperative principle, 78 Cosmopolitan, xi, 13, 31, 44, 45, 57, 62, 64, 77, 89, 135, 141–143, 151 Cosmopolitan localism, xi, 141, 151, 152 Cultural evolution, 68, 72, 143–145, 152 Culture of fear, 71, 105

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 C. J. Hamelink, Communication and Peace, Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50354-1

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SUBJECT INDEX

Culture of Peace, 1, 3 D Dance, 58, 59, 76, 81, 82, 131, 137, 142, 150, 151 Deep dialogue, xi, xii, 32, 63, 67, 76–82, 85, 89, 101, 123, 125, 127, 131, 135–137, 139, 141, 143, 144, 149–152 Desperate optimism, 123, 151, 152 Determinism, 149 Dignity, 4, 5, 7, 27, 39, 40, 50, 56, 77, 81, 126, 136, 139, 142 Disneyland, 45 E Ecstatic rituals, 62, 127 Education, ix, 1, 23, 53, 82, 83, 85, 98, 121, 137–141, 146, 148, 152 Egalitarian, 127, 143, 147 Ethnicity, 47 Existential risk, x, 32, 57, 59, 61, 62, 89, 144, 151 F Fake news, 120–124 Fragmentation, xi, 13, 37, 39, 43, 52, 57, 58, 62, 64, 65, 67, 131

Illegal city, 44 In-group, x, 47, 48 International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), 115 International law, vii, 1–4, 21 Islam, 10, 11, 13, 49–52, 54–56, 96, 129, 130, 144 J Jazz, 83, 137, 138, 152 Journalistic liars, 108 Judaism, 5, 50, 56, 129, 130 K Kairos, xii, 80, 143 Kosovo Freedom Army (KLA), 102, 103 L League of Nations, 2 Liars, 90, 92–97, 100 Lying, 90, 91, 93–95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 103, 112, 120, 122, 131

H Hill & Knowlton, 104, 111 Hinduism, 9, 50, 51, 129

M Maasai, 145 Mass Media Declaration, 14 Mediacomplicity, 114 Media studies, 13–15 Memes, 130, 131, 142, 144–146 Multiculturalism, 141 Muslims, 10, 11, 19, 37, 38, 42, 46, 47, 49, 51, 53–55, 84, 96, 103, 114 Mutuality, 76, 79, 125

I Identity, x, xi, 32, 45–50, 52, 58, 99, 106, 121

N Nationalism, 47, 49, 141, 142 NATO, 103, 111, 112

G Gossiping, 75, 77, 124, 148

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Neoliberal globalization, 37

Reuters, 111, 113, 114

O Obama administration, 107 Otherness, 24, 48, 53, 64, 81 Out-group, x, xi, 47, 52

S Sanctuaries, 85, 136, 141, 143, 151, 152 Satan, 85, 95, 96 Schola Cantorum, 82 Secrets, 102, 106–108 Selective perception, 112 Shared intentionality, 68, 72 Spin doctors, 110–112, 115, 123

P Pacem in Terris, 7 Palestinians, 51, 64, 65 Patience, 27, 76, 79, 125, 136, 143, 149, 151 Peace Day, 1 Peace journalism, 13, 15–18, 21 Peace Studies, vii, 1, 4, 5, 14, 21 Perspectivism, viii Pleasure, xi, 30, 84, 138, 139, 143 Polarization, viii, 27, 32, 37, 52, 57–59, 62, 64, 76, 89 Potemkin-metaphor, 100 Propaganda, ix, 13, 14, 16, 103, 104, 111, 116, 131 Q Quran, 10, 11 R Reductionism, 149 Reggio Emilia, 140, 150 Religion, xi, 5, 8, 10–13, 42, 47, 49–57, 64, 84, 96, 128, 129, 146 Religious fractures, 38, 49, 52 Religious violence, 49 Resilience, viii, 32, 59, 62–64, 76, 83, 130, 131, 136, 140, 143, 144, 150, 151

T TET-offensive, 104 Theology, vii, 1, 7, 21, 56 Togetherness, vii, viii, x, xi, 13, 30–32, 37, 41, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 62, 75–77, 85, 89, 101, 127–130, 135, 136, 141, 142, 144, 150, 151 Trust, 28, 61, 76, 78, 79, 86, 89, 92–95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 108, 120, 124, 125, 131, 136, 137

U UNESCO, 2, 3, 14 UN Habitat, 44 United Nations Charter, 3 Urban fractures, 42

W War propaganda, 14, 111 World Council of Churches (WCC), 6, 54 World Inequality Report, 38