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By the time that the parties to a conflict have accepted that they have conflicting concerns or values about a situation, the conflict has already become legitimated and each party has, at least to some degree, accepted that the other has a legitimate point of view. Pre-conflicts may be dealt with before they become conflicts. This may happen if a person's complaint is taken seriously, and an appropriate response made--which may be just taking the complaint seriously. However, pre-conflicts may be suppressed by more powerful others who refuse to accept their legitimacy. In these circumstances, resolution of the conflict may require its emergence in the open, even if this seems at first to be a deterioration. It is usual for authority--sometimes described as legitimate power--to refuse to allow pre-conflicts between individuals and groups with the state to become conflicts. The police, for example, do not have conflicts with demonstrators but 'contain' them or act to prevent the breakdown of law and order. Individuals or groups who have a pre-conflict with the state have to appeal to a higher authority to have this taken seriously: to God, to the constitution, to an international court or to the United Nations. Fighting and conflict Phylogenetically and ontogenetically, the most ancient way of dealing with conflict is to fight. The aim of fighting is to incapacitate the opponent, usually by hurting them physically although many species have also developed submission behaviours that terminate fights but mean that the victor wins control over whatever was being disputed. In higher primates, submission results in long-standing changes to 5HT levels in the brain which reduce the loser's inclinations to fight in the future. It has been argued that depression is, in fact, the human experience of submission and the consequent loss of status or rank. The possible harm that fights cause are limited in animals by inefficiencies built into the fighting repertoire. Stags do not, for example, have horns that are particularly suited to piercing other stags but are good at getting locked with the horns of other stags. The availability of weapons to human beings means that biological damage limitation is superseded. Psychological and social mechanisms also exist, however, to limit fighting. Empathy is one factor that terminates fighting, although surprisingly little is known about it. It is likely that it has this effect because the distress of the victim is shared by the fighter, and this terminates anger that the aggressor feels and therefore terminates the aggression. However, the relationships may apply particularly to children. For one thing, empathy may be restricted to in-groups and therefore not applicable to someone who is seen as different. Empathy can also be inhibited by training, as a result of attribution bias ("they deserve it", "they don't feel pain like we do", "women like a bit of the rough") or through modelling. Violent fathers are, for example, likely to have violent sons even if they teach their sons (by hitting them sometimes) that violence is wrong. In fact, the increased likelihood that those who are abused may become abusers may be due to the effect of modelling. Although aggression is, in infants, an anger display, it becomes independent of anger as the child gets older. So cold-blooded aggression may at least as common as hot-blooded aggression in later life. Since empathy may inhibit anger rather than aggression, its effect may be negligible on cold-blooded aggression. However, there are other factors that may inhibit aggression in adults: shame is one, and anxiety (anxiety about the price to be paid, about the guilt to be expiated) is another. Fighting may be culturally sanctioned but in a regulated form. At my school, fighting was outlawed, but children who were stopped from fighting were encouraged to box each other in the school ring at lunch-time with a teacher as a referee. Many cultures allow and many encourage ritualised fighting as the final means of resolving conflicts. Fighting a war according to the Geneva convention is a kind of ritualised fight, seen most clearly in the tradition of wars being decided on the basis of single combat between champions, like David and Goliath, Thor and Hrungnir, Hector and Achilles, or Bhima and Duryodhana. Great poetry, music, drama, and art has all been produced glorifying war, and extolling the hero who kills or wounds the most of the enemy. Fighting continues to be a legitimate even an honoured way of dealing with conflict in many cultures today. Freud argued that these were primitive cultures, and that civilization gradually does away with the need to fight, but this is clearly not the case. Pacifism, the belief that all violence is wrong, is a new cultural phenomenon. But pacifists challenge the very basis for fighting, sometimes from a humanist and sometimes from a theistic perspective. The Society of Friends asks "Are we not all human beings, equally precious in the sight of God?"
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This project
is funded by the Leonardo da Vinci programme, project number UK/01/B/F/PP/129_387,
2000-2003 |