Month: April 2024

• April 27, 2024

  Compassionate Reasoning, the Future, and Reconciliation

  Reconciliation between those in deep conflict and hate mostly never happens. It is deeply challenging to move relationships in the direction of reconciliation.  The challenges of reconciliation as a valuable form of social change revolve around the fact that if reconciliation is seen as a faith gesture, it loses its attraction. It is a done deal that you believe in or don’t believe in, and if you believe in it, it becomes an automatic gesture between people. We can safely say that people resent that because it doesn’t begin to get at the deep levels of hurt, rage, and anger.

   

  It certainly doesn’t address any of the justice issues. But to the degree to which reconciliation is more of an investment in facing the past and then moving towards a different future, with unique gestures and ways of talking and thinking that suggest that there will be a new future, …

• April 16, 2024

  Overcoming Tribalism: A New Way of Thinking

   

  The most important thing to understand about tribalism and gang warfare is that it is deeply damaging to human societies and that it always has been for tens of thousands of years. We like to think that tribalism is somewhere else. It’s not where we exist; it is very far away and primitive. But the fact is that tribalism is something that we all naturally fall into for various complicated reasons in human nature. We tend to affiliate with groups that will make us feel protected, initially the family and the family unit. But it constantly expands to include people we trust in more significant circumstances, expanding to community, culture, and nation.

  Studying the impact of tribalism and its consequences is an important part of the sociology and anthropology of all normal human communities. At the same time, we need to think about the destructive aspect of tribalism that results …