Politics D14

Page D14

Politics The Town Voice Balanced

Unresolved Internal Conflicts

By Arlon Staywell RICHMOND — For most of the many years of my life I have resolved apparent conflicts in arguments. On the debate team it happens often. Usually the differences are between teams, sometimes conflicts occur or seem to occur within a team, sometimes even within one person's arguments. Such "internal conflicts" must be "resolved" or the team contradicting itself automatically loses by "unresolved internal conflict." It can also be called an "internal unresolved conflict," that order of the words doesn't change the meaning.
An internal unresolved conflict, however denoted, is sometimes given as the definition of insanity.
This certainly derives from the very common sense that opposite things cannot be proven true for the same time and place, the same circumstances. Of course many will recognize that opposite things can sometimes be proven true for different circumstances. Many are familiar with the story of the man who breathes hot and cold with the same breath. How can the breath do opposite things? The opposites are a result of very different circumstances. The same breath that warmed his hands in the freezing outdoor cold cools his indoor boiling hot soup. There is no need for the man to change the temperature of his breath. There is a temperature much warmer than freezing and much cooler than boiling. Describing how the same breath can warm freezing hands and cool boiling soup is called "resolving" the conflict. Nothing about a properly resolved conflict requires forfeiture of a debate or gives the slightest hint of insanity.
Just as holding to two opposing ideas can indicate a failure of reason, stubbornly insisting on a single solution to different problems can also indicate a failure of reason. The best tool for cutting wood might not be the best tool for driving a nail in it.
An apparent conflict thrown at people who believe the Bible has important life lessons is that it appears to encourage killing and makes a rule against killing as well, so which is it?
Most people can resolve the issue, there would be no Bible through the all these years if it could not. But there are various skill levels in drawing resolutions. For many it seems enough to say that "murder" is prohibited but "killing" unless it is murder is not prohibited. While that might indeed be enough for people who have other jobs, people whose job it is to promote the faith really need to draw better resolutions than that. Depending on the government to set definitions is usually fine. But all people, or certainly most of them, should be prepared to explain what is right and wrong and how and why it is right or wrong otherwise the government itself might lose sight.
A resolver of apparent conflicts needs to identify the constant. By finding and describing the constant, the thing that stays the same in all the circumstances, that is the resolution. But there are more and less well made descriptions of the constant. Using the "government" as the constant can be highly descriptive, but it is someone else's description and it might go sour if it is not maintained.
One constant recognized by scholars is that violence always dissembles order. A better way of wording that might be that violence can only be useful in a context of disorder. To illustrate by example, the Jews who fled the Pharoah were not the law of the land, Pharaoh was. Whatever violence God might have used against Pharaoh dissembled that order. The American Revolution dissembled the order of the British Crown. According to the several states in the South, slavery was the law and the American Civil War dissembled that order such as it was. When "goodness" has control violence doesn't make sense. Violence should never be necessary except where the network of goodness becomes weak or is missing.
Because of a phenomenon called cultural inversion large numbers of people came to believe that violence is a proper tool to establish order.
The belief for example that torture can be useful is an example of cultural inversion. If you threaten to break his arm unless your captive divulges information you might indeed get information you need, although it is far more likely you won't. Part of the price is that you can never expect voluntary or highly accurate information, but the really greater price is that when you are ever wrong you have created a lasting testimony that you were wrong. Your voice loses authority every time you are wrong and in proportion to how severely wrong you were.
At one time in this country "martial law" was considered an inferior means of establishing order which should be avoided unless some catastrophe disrupts ordinary law and order. Because of cultural inversion some believe there is no law except martial law. But while many appear to believe in violence we have yet to see what else they might agree upon. Meanwhile they might expect us to take their constancy on violence as a sign of their rationality, absurd as that is when they agree on nothing else.

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