Conflict As Human Necessity

May 20, 1984
Lakeland

Anyone who has churned tempestuously, inwardly, when in conflict may very well say, that if conflict is human necessity, it is one we should be able to do without. "He has a conflict," we say, indicating that there is some contradiction between inner wishes or convictions and what one is able to do in society, feels free to do in society, or what one is permitted by society to do. When one speaks of conflict in a social group, a political party, a church, a government, one usually refers to collisions of persons with consequences of ill-feeling. There's a biographical anecdote about John Hunter, a famous 18th century Scottish physician, who remarked, "I am at the mercy of any rascal who causes me to lose my temper," and immediately thereafter died in a fit of rage due to a heart attack. (AM Sch Vol 15, #4, p 418)

Instead of defending conflict as human necessity, should I not do better by exhorting you about the line in the 37th Psalm, "Cease from anger and forsake wrath?" Quite apart from the politically complex arguments which engender conflict between nations, why should I speak of conflict as human necessity? Can conflict do us any personal good? Andre Maurois wrote that personal quarrels (in the reign of Louis XIV) were so fierce and frequent that between 1589 and 1607, seven thousand men met their death in individual duels (Maurois, VOLTAIRE, p. 1). When one feels the irritations in the belly, the poundings of the heart and the headaches which art the consequences of being in conflict with ourselves and others, how can it be asserted that conflict is human necessity? Would not better advice be to quote Norfolk who speaks to the enraged Buckingham (HENRY VIII):

"Be advis'd;
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot,
That it do singe yourself: we may outrun
By violent swiftness, that which we run at
and lose by over-running."

However, I agree with Herbert Thelen that "conflict has become a dirty word, for our emotional reactions to the term blind us to the fact that without conflict neither growth nor education would be possible." To seek to avoid all conflict because stormy experiences may result is as unrealistic and self-defeating as it would have been for the children of Israel to refuse to cross the path of divided waters because their feet might have become wet.

Conflict is a contradiction between one's needs and desires and the needs and desires of others. Sometimes it is a result of the interaction of personalities within the family – jealousy, selfishness, over-protectiveness, excessive domination. There is a battle of the sexes, or so we read. We want to succeed in competitive activity, be #1, yet want to retain the complete goodwill of others. There is conflict between religions and in the workings of any one religion.

Religion is often the symbol of, and thought to be the instrument of the reconciliation of conflict. Such a harmonizing purpose has merit as long as there is no avoidance of necessary encounter and no attempt to hide inevitable disagreement. To turn the other cheek does not require silent submission to ideas we believe harmful; to walk the second mile does not imply that we must plod in craven acquiescence along paths we believe to be wrong.

Someone saw a sign in an obscure, inelegant restaurant, "If you get bad service here and you resent it, you're right in resenting it. You'll still get bad service, but you're right." The feeling of conflict seems quite appropriate at times.

Conflict is a vice when it generates only destructive collision; conflict is a virtue when it is the instrument of encounter, when it is the vehicle of convictions wherein meanings are made more clear. One of the continuing obligations of the human venture is to maintain such a distinction.

Sometimes instances of conflict point beyond the immediate. Consider the bloody conflict in July of 1979 between members of the Communist Workers Party and a segment of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina. Five human beings were killed. The CWP organized a demonstration march with the slogan "Death to the Klan." Not long ago a jury freed the accused killers, who were Klansmen. Will Campbell, a well-known Christian minister and writer who has lived all his life in the area of the tragic killings was called by many out-of-town journalists to get his views. Most felt that the verdict was an outrageous miscarriage of justice. Campbell (CHRISTIANITY AND CRISIS, 5/14/84) asked each caller if they had called the State Department. The callers asked, don't you mean the Department of Justice? “No,” Campbell replied, "The State Department." When the callers pointed out that the State Department does not deal with civil rights violations, domestic matters, Campbell replied, "and which of those departments has been in charge of indoctrinating the American citizenry that Communists, whether they be the most doctrinaire and mainline Bolshevik, or peasants of Southeast Asia and Central America who recognize bread but not ideology, and who know as little about Marxism and capitalism as I know about directing Luciano Pavarotti, are always and forever the enemy and do not deserve to live?"

Then Campbell related how the wife of one of the men who was on trial for the killings told him that she had filled out the form for her husband to join the KKK two weeks prior to the killings. She said, "He don't read too well." Then she asked Campbell a question, "Preacher, tell me how come it's just fine for us to send our boys all the way across the ocean to kill some people who never bothered us, people we never even saw who the government tells us might be Communists but when some people are right here in our country wearing signs saying they're Communists and that they're going to
kill us, and well, if our boys kill them, they get put in jail." Campbell couldn't answer that question, could you? I couldn't.

Conflict may have many obscure roots as well as the visible growth. Some time ago I read of a research scientist whose research into minerals suggested that there may have been a surprising origin of some unique minerals discovered in meteors. These scientists suggested, tentatively that certain rare minerals found only in meteor fragments did not exist in space either. When the meteor struck the Earth, the force of the collision – the heat and pressure of impact – created new minerals. These minerals did not exist prior to collision. But the creation of the new was the product of great destruction – the fragmentation of the meteor and the damage to the earth it struck.

I wouldn't know enough to argue with any mineralogist who dismisses this theory, but the notion is suggestive of human behavior. Some great ideas and inventions are born of conflict. Medical techniques develop sometimes under the terrible necessities of battle casualties. Such advances are paid for at too high a price. Like the minerals created by the impact of meteor, great destruction has been the companion of the new and valuable when war has been the cause of discoveries. How [can we] maintain the conditions for creation born of dialogue and disagreement while at the same time avoiding the loss, pain and grief of destructive collision between persons or nations?

The totalitarian approach is not the answer. Pavlov demonstrated that living organisms could be conditioned in their behavior. After training, the dog would salivate when Pavlov rang the bell. But such is not the human behavior we want. The dog was manipulated for an end, his appetites exploited, his needs made the means for Pavlov's ends. But all worthwhile religions assign a higher priority than that to the human personality and its potential for growth. Conditioned obedience is alien to the values of a religion which holds freedom as more essential for growth. This holds even when conflict, inner or external, is the price of freedom.

Because freedom for self-direction must allow for the differences and imperfections of the human condition, freedom can never walk alone. The chance of error, struggle and the pains of conflict are perennial companions. But the price is worth it. Conflict with oneself and others can be avoided only at the cost of giving up freedom. Such a price is much too high even to achieve good digestion and untroubled sleep.

The human task then is to live in ways that the productive results of conflict are maintained but the destructive impact of violent conflict is reduced. How can we control (in Thelen's words) "the basic themes of conflict – conflict between our wishes and the wishes of others, between our present needs and our future capabilities, between our animal nature and our social ethic, between what we are and what we want to be, between our easy habits and our creative urges"?

Many criticisms can be made of Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution he headed in the 17th century. But one development of that struggle demonstrated that the "priesthood of all believers" connected freedom and growth in the creative conflict – i.e., peaceful disputes. The historian writes:

"For him the purpose of such machinery (decision by discussion pointing to a consensus) is to find something out, to discover something which is there to be discovered – discovered by hearing what each man's conscience has to say, out also by frank and open discussion among men wishing to learn the will of God. What he has learned from his experiences of the small democracy of the Christian congregation is the insight into the purpose of life which the common life and discussion of a democratic society can give as nothing else can. The root of the matter is that if discussion is at all successful, we discover something from it which could have been discovered in no other way." (See THE FREE CHURCH, Franklin Littel, Starr King Press, 1957)

When we are not steaming in a pressure situation, we are aware, many times, that some of our most difficult conflicts are not only with others, but also with ourselves. This is the plain truth contained in those words in the prayer of general confession of the Book of Common Prayer, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us." One does not have to affirm what is to me outdated theology to perceive there is truth in the recognition that inner conflict weakens us. Inner conflict can make us feel that there is no health in us. As the poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote in the first three lines of "Everyman,"

The weariness of life that has no will
To climb the steepening hill:
The sickness of the soul for sleep and to be still.

How [should we] deal with these inner conflicts? One of the famous preachers of the 19th century was the unyielding fundamentalist, Dr. Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Robert Ingersoll called Lyman Beecher one of the wardens of the Puritan penitentiary. Dr. Lyman Beecher frequently worked himself into towering rages over the two movements which infuriated him most: Roman Catholicism and Unitarianism. Lyman Beecher kept two piles of sand in the cellar, and when his inner fury was getting near the uncontrolled point, he would go down to the cellar and shovel the sand back and forth until he regained his composure (TWO FRIENDS OF MAN, Korngold, p. 22). I have told some of you of a woman I knew, a minister's wife, in the days when the minister's spouse was expected to be an unpaid assistant to the minister. She saved her cracked dishes. When inner conflicts started to boil too high, Alice Milburn would go down to the cellar and throw the cracked dishes against the wall – this was her safety valve.

One of the New Testament legends is a superb example of mastery over inner conflict – or so I interpret it. As the old story has it, Jesus went to the wilderness to struggle with temptation. This is a stylized legend which has been told in various ways about the founders of other religions also. Toynbee has taken this type legend and fitted it into his philosophy of history, asserting that great religious leaders acquire their powers of leadership after such a wilderness experience. Toynbee called it "withdrawal and return."

Symbolically, we can interpret that the "devil" who tempted Jesus was his own mixed feelings. Given the belief structure of his times, Jesus was torn by the problem, "Can a man demonstrate his conviction that he was speaking God's will if he had no magic powers? "Command this stone to be made bread." In those days, ability to perform miracles was a sign that God was with a man.

Should not God be tested to discover if divine protection is assured before daring great things for God? "And he brought him to Jerusalem and set him on a pinnacle of the Temple and said unto him, "if thou be the son of God, cast thyself down from hence."

Then the subtlest temptation of them all, the devil taking him up an high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. "All this power I will give thee and the glory of them."

Jesus believed in the coming of the Kingdom of God. Should not people be compelled to be citizens in this kingdom, even though they did not understand it, nor yet want it? "If I seize power, everything will be well, for I mean well." This is the conflict of lust for power and the vulnerable soft spot to which so many persons of great ability have yielded.

The old legend in Matthew says that when Jesus had resisted the temptations and resolved his inner conflicts creatively, "lo, angels came and ministered unto him." This, too, is a symbolic way of stating that the peace and understanding that can come when conflicts have been resolved creatively.

The same story as told in Luke ends with a different note suggesting additional insight, "and when the devil had ended all temptation, he departed from him for a season (until an opportune time)." For a season – not forever. The nature of inner conflict ensures that it is a renewing encounter. Again and again we must wrestle with the conflicts within us. Life cannot be lived for long in quiet retreats or snug harbors; irresistibly our course becomes set for choppy waters. The times of inward testing persist.

Nothing is more difficult than to maintain the creative elements of conflict with ourselves and others. To master conflict creatively is an emancipation struggle, great in its rewards out gigantic in its difficulties. Aristotle said it well, thousands of years ago, "Anybody can became angry – that is easy; but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree, and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody's power and is not easy." However, there is accumulated wisdom which can be brought to bear; there is guidance available from other experience; there is suggestion from many human endeavors which can be helpful in making our conflicts part of the dynamics of our maturity.

First, we need not restrain a sense of healthy indignation at outrageous acts. Not all indignation is righteous, particularly when, it is a response of our injured vanity. But there are elements in situations which outrage human values. There are issues in the social order about which each of us should feel and express righteous indignation. The issues will differ from person to person. But to repress such anger multiplies our inner conflicts.

Conflicts can be constructive, too, when we speak with our best voice. There is no one of us who is helpless in all situations. Some situations, maybe, but not all. Even those who are reticent or reluctant to speak out have strength to contribute to the causes in which they believe. This is not a choice between hostile and peaceful ways of living, but rather a decision to make your convictions count or be lost in silence. So, if in the experiences of living you feel torn by conflict but at the same time hold strong convictions, you should speak with your best voice at all opportunities. How many causes were lost because of silence on the part of those who were supporters?

Last, it might be suggested that conflict can be constructive when affection remains warm. Do you remember the late Paul Goodman's story, from a cartoon ("The May Pamphlet")?

Tom says to Jerry, "Do you want to fight? Cross that line!"
Jerry does.
"Now", said Tom, "You're on my side."

Conflict can be constructive when affection remains warm – toward yourself on inner conflicts, toward others on outer. It is not difficult to get the message when a mood changes and a person begins attacking you and not your point of view in the dispute. The change is always an unhappy one. When the person is the target, not the problem, then the negative aspects of conflict work destructively. But when good-will and human love fulfill the law of right relations, then we may invest all vigor in the conflict of ideas. Out of such conflict can evolve new ways and refined ideas.

The human enterprise always needs the creativity that will come from the conflicts of problem solving. To that end, we can say with Carl Sandburg,

"Empty the last drop
Pour out the final clinging heart beat
Great losers look on and smile
Great winners look on and smile
Plunger take a long breath
And let yourself go."