More Naivete, Please

Those who call for peace when the fires of war burn hot are always accused of being naive. It is said they underestimate the ruthlessness of an enemy, who will accept nothing less than our total destruction. To negotiate with an implacable foe is the height of folly. Thus, the peace advocate is not only naive, but a traitor—sapping the zeal that comes from the life-or-death necessity of all-out battle, rendering comfort to the enemy.

To do as Gandhi urged, “Speak to their reason and conscience,” is foolish when the opponent is devoid of those qualities.

OK, but in this case, the opponent really is implacable and irredeemable. Which case am I speaking of? Whichever the war du jour is. For those purveying war, today’s war is always the exception. A litany of atrocity stories is always available to demonstrate that this enemy, this person, this group, this nation is beyond redemption. Force is the only language they understand.

I most recently encountered this mindset in my efforts to persuade RFK Jr. and other fervent Zionists to advocate a negotiated settlement, cease fire, and peaceful resolution to the conflict in Palestine. They thought me naive indeed. “Don’t you know that radical Islam forbids its adherents to ever negotiate with a Jew, except as a ruse?” “Don’t you know that they won’t be satisfied until they have exterminated every Jew from the face of the earth?” Here are some statements that prove it. Here, look at the Hamas charter. A cease-fire will just give them time to rearm. They are hell-bent on destruction.

It is hard to persuade anyone with those views to change their mind, especially if they are highly intelligent. Present any evidence, and they will always be able to find counter-evidence. They will select points that fit their narrative, and dismiss—on seemingly reasonable grounds—whatever contradicts it. If that narrative concerns controversial issues and people, they will have a lot of support in maintaining their narrative. In the case of (what I see as) the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, they can look to an entire propaganda ecosystem, as well as a community of opinion comprising lots of other smart people to assure them that they are right. The same is true for any other establishment belief.

Those of us who advocate for peace are not blind to the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7. But without the ideological filter that holds them as irredeemably evil, we are able to see a larger set of circumstances. We are able to ask, “What are the conditions that bred such an outlash? What breeds that kind of desperation?” We are not satisfied with simplistic explanations such as “They learn hate in their schools,” or “Their religion teaches hate.”

The same dynamics prevail in US domestic politics: The information ecosystem of each side offers its adherents sense, meaning, and identity, and makes the other side appear evil, stupid, immoral, ignorant, juvenile, and/or sick. Indeed, part of the identity that political allegiance offers requires a reprehensible opposition as a foil.

Surely there are some people in power who are implacably bloodthirsty, who are either psychopathic or so deeply submerged in hateful ideologies that their hearts are unreachable. I have met a few people like that. I’m thinking of one right now. A person of influence. My blood ran cold when I met his gaze. It seemed to me that his soul was locked away in a vault. But most of the people we demonize aren’t like that.

What is dangerous for our society is the habit of assuming that kind of evil in any person or group presented as the enemy. What is dangerous is our susceptibility to the plot line of saving the world from evil, as personified by (fill-in-the-blank). This has been the narrative behind practically every war and regime change operation my country has perpetrated in my lifetime. This particular episode of violence is necessary, you see, because we have to stop the next Hitler. Saddam Hussein. Manuel Noriega. Bashar al-Assad. Muammar Gaddafi. Hugo Chavez. Vladimir Putin. Or, in the absence of a charismatic leader or strongman, it is an ideology or religion or ethnicity that must be stopped, now, before it is too late.

Now some of these men were fairly brutal tyrants, and some ideologies are hateful. And as I said, genuinely frightening human predators walk our world, and tend to rise within systems of power. These individuals provide the color codes for the paint-by-numbers palette that war narratives use to paint a picture of good struggling against evil (democracy struggling against fascism; traditional values struggling against wokism; liberation struggling against white supremacy, etc. Left and Right are equally addicted to it.)

"Yes, but this war is different."

"This war" is always different. This one is always justified. Every war is justified. In the same way, every hate is justified. This time, so-and-so really is a monster, a predator, a psychopath. In this historical moment, our opponents really are the epitome of evil, and any means are justified to stop them. Once in a while it is true. There are psychopaths among us, ruthless predators. But such people are fewer than it seems from the good/evil orientation. You know how it is with a couple going through an acrimonious divorce? Each thoroughly believes that the other has finally shown their true, monstrous colors. If the other party makes an overture of peace, the first party sees it as a cynical ruse. If you are dealing with a "cluster B personality" like a psychopath or malignant narcissist, that is probably true. In such cases one has no alternative but to fight.

You should not negotiate with such a person—except as a ruse. But you can see the problem. If both sides believe that the other side negotiates only as a ruse, it becomes a mutually self-fulfilling prophecy. Each becomes what they perceive in the other. Ironically, this year it was Israel who negotiated with Hamas as a ruse, assassinating its negotiating counterparts midway through the negotiations. It was also the United States that negotiated as a ruse with Russia, signing the Minsk Accords in order to buy time to arm Ukraine.

Those who crusade against evil (or whatever its equivalent may be in their lexicon—communism, terrorism, Trumpism, etc.) end up impersonating evil themselves. What else is it when PA governor Josh Shapiro autographs howitzer shells destined to blow up Russian conscripts in Ukraine? Or when Nikki Haley and Mike Pence do the same for bombs destined for Gaza? Or when in Vietnam the US military thought it had to “destroy the village in order to save it?” Or when a political party subverts democracy in order to save that? Anything is justified when the threat trumps all else.

Again, there are times in the human drama where one must wage an all-out fight. The problem is not fighting per se; it is an orientation toward fighting. It is a posture, a stance, a way of seeing that interprets, by default, all opposition to oneself or one's nation, all violence, as an expression of evil. More fundamentally, it is a view of the human being that the legal scholars Hanson and Yosifon call dispositionism—the idea that people do bad things because they are bad people, and good things because they are good people. The alternative, which they name situationism, says that people act from the totality of their circumstances. Put someone in a different environment, among different people, and they become a different person themselves. Clearly, the situationism invites more compassion than dispositionism, because one becomes curious about the conditions of the person he has judged. If someone acts out of a fundamental, elemental badness (or goodness), then there is nothing more to understand.

The predisposition toward dispositionism, toward judgment, toward the ready assignment of evil character to those who offend us, is what makes the public so vulnerable to war narratives. The manufacture of consent would not otherwise work. Today in the United States, war narratives have seized the public conversation. I don't mean war against foreign powers, although those narratives have gained purchase too. I mean war against ourselves—civil war.

That is why I am issuing these warnings about the demonization of Donald Trump and his followers. It is not out of any particular love for the man. I’ve never met him, and I disagree with almost everything that comes out of his mouth, both in terms of content and in terms of tone. Rather than engage him on issues of substance, his opponents rely on hyperbolic exaggeration, distortion, and outright fabrication to cast him as a human monster—something he is not—and his supporters as a basket of deplorables—something they are not. It is alarming to see, after two assassination attempts, elected representatives calling for him to be "eliminated" and comment threads profuse with statements like "Third time's the charm!" Such sentiments express the predisposition I've described.

Equally troubling is the expression of that same disposition by those aligned with Trump. When we project evil onto the administrators of today’s institutions of power—the billionaires, the World Economic Forum, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, the hedge funds, the FDA, the CIA, the WHO, the corporations, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and so on—we fall into the same trap of dispositionism. You could replace every single one of those people with someone from the local anarchist co-op, and little would change. Again and again, governments appease popular uprisings by firing a few of the least popular officials. The might even include their most fiery critics in the government. No matter. With few exceptions, the position makes the person.

People in positions of power have some leeway to make changes, but if they deviate too far from the interests of the matrix of elite institutions, the system that gave them power will quickly turn against them.

I can sympathize with those who think I have lost my mind to believe that Trump is anything but a singular threat to democracy, a fascist strongman riding a wave of white supremacy and bigotry. To anyone immersed in the mainstream information ecosystem, it seems so obvious that that is what he is. Therefore I must have succumbed to a moral failing. Maybe I'm in it for the money. Maybe I am enamored of proximity to power. Maybe, as one critic suggested, I prefer to align myself with other white males because I’m uncomfortable with a brown woman like Kamala Harris as President. Maybe I've been hypnotized by the right-wing information ecosystem. These are some of the theories that critics have put forward, with great certainty, on the internet. Something is necessary to explain the otherwise inexplicable. How else could someone who so consistently advocated post-colonialism, deep ecology, radical economics, indigenous rights, and peace consciousness fail to roundly denounce the epitome of evil in our time? It must be bewildering.

Now I can't say for sure that none of the shadow motivations ascribed to me are operating in the background. I sure hope not. But I'm not made of special stuff that is immune to the blandishments of money and power. What I can say, though, is that my core beliefs remain the same, and neither Trump nor Harris comes anywhere close to representing them.

While not a partisan of the MAGA movement, I see in it the potential, yet to be fulfilled, of becoming a genuinely transformative populist movement. In my last essay I described six basic compassion principles that such a movement and its leaders must embody. They are what is necessary to overcome the biggest obstacle to the full emergence of a populist movement, which is, as always, the artificial division of the population.

Kennedy's alliance with MAGA upped the visibility of some important unifying issues such as chronic disease, the degradation of the food system, opposition to war, and civil liberties. His entrance changes the character of the movement, but there is still a long way to go before it reaches its populist potential. For one thing, a genuine American populist movement must be racially unifying. It must unify the dispossessed of the nation. Presently, most of the white working class aligns with Trump. Democrats on average have higher income, education, and wealth than Republicans, reversing the status quo of the 1980s, yet they still hold a majority of the support of Black and Latino voters (though this advantage is quickly fading, especially among the less educated). If Black, White, and Latino people, who are all falling into deepening cycles of misery, sickness, poverty, addiction, and violence, do not unite, and remain instead on opposite sides of the political divide, there is no hope whatever of gathering the transformational force necessary to improve their condition.

Establishment politicians in America have always exploited racial tensions in order to prevent the lower economic classes from uniting. Kennedy had an opportunity to unite them, given his history of championing Black and indigenous communities in his career as an environmental attorney, not to mention his father's commitment to civil rights. Trump has no such background, yet the fact that so many Black people are backing his candidacy bespeaks the possibility of a united populist movement that is ready to be born. They believe that neither Trump nor most of his followers are virulent racists. They applaud him for signing the First Step Act and restoring funding to historically Black universities. But Trump and MAGA will have to do a lot more if they hope to reach across the racial divide.

The first step is the question that compassion asks: “What is it like to be you?” Ask that and listen respectfully to the answer, and all dehumanizing narratives crumble. What is it like to be a teenager in a gang? What is it like to be incarcerated? What is it like to be a single mother on food stamps? What is it like to be an illegal immigrant? When people enter into each other’s stories, they find common ground.

A friend of mine, a gender-queer woman of African descent, confronted an anti-abortion protester outside of an abortion clinic on the West Coast. My friend approached the protester with genuine curiosity and goodwill. I don’t think either of them changed their views, but the heat of their differences cooled to the point where they forged a friendship. The protester still opposes abortion, but she no longer harasses people outside abortion clinics. She understands better the complicated, human stories that are behind the choice to terminate a pregnancy. The edge cases of gruesome late-term elective abortions that arouse so much fury no longer define her narrative. This is a tiny glimpse of the miracles of peace and reconciliation that are possible when people shed war mentality. It is always a little bit naive, from the mindset of war that sees a world full of implacable foes who will only negotiate as a ruse, to make any sincere gesture of peace. The peacemaker can and must be practical. Yet without a little bit of naivete too, neither side will ever leave its fortress.

In this essay series I’ve hesitated to say anything like my statement above that I disagree with almost everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth. That is because I didn’t want to cater to the impulse to distance and denounce. Something more important is at stake right now. The dehumanization of Trump and MAGA is a worse danger than Trump or MAGA themselves. There is good and bad in both of them. There is good and bad in the Establishment as well, which, after all, isn’t a monolithic entity but a matrix of people, organizations, narratives, and relationships with no clear boundary. It encompasses by degrees any member of modern society.

If we do not desist from the habit of looking for the Bad Thing to fight, then we will forever skip from one Bad Thing to another. And we will always be fighting.

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