Episode 14: Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris – Rebranding Conflict Resolution Through Civility

In this episode, Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris discusses:

  • Social media’s positive and negative impacts on conflict
  • Self-restraint and how it differs from repression
  • Civility and self-interest
  • The democratic, liberating potential of art
  • Denialism and post-denialism

More about Keith

Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist, writer, and teacher based in London, England. He also runs the European Jewish Research Archive at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Keith has published five books and has a long-standing interest in conflict and dialogue. For several years, he organized private dinners in the UK Jewish community to try improving conversations over the divisive issue of Israel.

Episode 14 Dr. Keith Kahn-Harris - On Conflict Podcast Episode 14 cover art

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RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST

 

KEITH KAHN-HARRIS – Quotes From The Episode

(Anything uncertain is either replaced by ellipses or put in square brackets, and some quotes are shortened using ellipses  )
  • [1:59] “Speaking very crudely, I think that technological changes, particularly the internet and especially social media, have had an enormous impact on both the prevalence and nature of conflict in the modern world…I don’t like to come to that conclusion, because I don’t like abstracting technology from its wider context, but I think this is one occasion when it’s genuinely true.”
  • [3:03] “The internet, and as I say, social media in particular, has consistently revealed to us the other, and the other’s hopes, fears, dreams, opinions, in a much more insistent way, in a much more pervasive way than has ever been the case before.”
  • [7:30] “The biggest issue in the world today is unquestionably climate change, and climate change also is going to cause conflict on an almost unimaginable scale….climate change, pre- and post-internet, have very different kinds of impact on the conflicts they produce in significantly different ways.”
  • [7:40] “I think, when we talk about conflict in the modern world, what we’ve got to identify is the kind of infrastructure that makes conflict possible.”
  • [11:30] Keith discusses conflict online within the feminist movement over the long-standing issue of non-binary gender identification
  • [17:23] “I’ve had productive dialogues about difficult issues online, and I’ve also had wonderfully silly dialogues that have lifted me up and made me happy.” Keith discusses an example involving a spontaneous online conversation he had with a writer about Jean-Michel Jarre, the French electronic artist who did massive outdoor shows
  • [19:48] “I think we’ve reached the point whereby self-restraint has become, is becoming something quite radical in the context of now. And I don’t mean necessarily self-restraint in the negative sense, necessarily. I make the distinction between self-restraint and repression, and I think we often confuse the two…I’m suggesting that self-restraint is something that we need to start investigating as a value, and how we can cultivate it, how we can cultivate a sense of what should we not be saying.”
  • [21:38] “There are times when you do need to speak publicly about your pain, your love, your hate, your anger. Talk about the Me Too movement, which I think has been overwhelmingly positive. People need to be able to talk and say things. But it has to be thought through. It has to be a choice, and it has to be done for a purpose, rather than simply unrestrained self-expression.”
  • [23:47] “The concept of civility that I’d like to promote would be one that is ultimately self-interested. It’s not about the other; it’s about you. It’s about how can you get heard. How can you accomplish your goals. And 99 times out of 100, being careful in how you communicate makes it much more likely that you’re going to achieve those goals.”
  • [24:10] “There are times when unrestrained communication is warranted and necessary. I’m not a pacifist, and I think there are times when resistance by any means necessary is vital.”
  • [24:55] Julia: “What I’m wondering as I hear you explain your exploration and understandings of civility is, it seems – but I’m not sure because you’ve thought about this so much more than I have – that self-restraint is almost the container upon which one can operate in all aspects, and then civility or civil communication is one aspect.” Keith: “Yes, I think that would be a great way of summarizing it. I should also add that people who think they’ve read my work on civility but haven’t actually read it, which makes me a bit mad, say ‘Oh, Keith is advocating niceness and politeness.’ And I’m not advocating niceness and politeness. Not that there isn’t a role for that – in fact, sometimes it’s very important. But I’m advocating civility as something that is calculating and cynical, even, and certainly a long way from niceness some of the time.”
  • [27:09] “When all else fails, self-interest is a powerful motivator.”
  • [27:21] “Civil communication doesn’t mean not hating people. It does mean hating better.”
  • [27:39] “Most of the time, I avoid a lot of the hatred that happens online because I’m very very careful about it. But when it happens and when I attract it, I’m sometimes excessively nice to people, partly for the reason that it drives them absolutely mad and completely pulls the floor out from underneath them. Now, I don’t think that’s necessarily a model for all your listeners, but on the other hand, it’s my back stop, it’s, when all else fails, I can [tell] myself that at the very least, I can express my anger in a different way, and that by being outwardly polite, I can take a certain amount of comfort that I’ve done something hateful even if it doesn’t look hateful.”
  • [28:26] “I don’t think we can abolish hate. I don’t think we can abolish anger. I think these are there. They’re part of us. That’s what it is to be human. The question is what we want to do with it. I don’t think accepting the reality of hate condemns you to living in a hateful world. We can live in a world that is not a hateful world, but to do that, we have to know what to do with our hate, and that’s why I think that there are reasons that you can give to people to come to the table, as you put it, that are not to do with being nice, but are to do with, the fact is, how have you got a better chance of accomplishing your goals? How can you be heard? How can you understand the other better? Perhaps to fight the other better? How can you see where they’re coming from? Frankly, that would seem to be in everybody’s interest, but a lot of people don’t recognize that, and I often find myself flabbergasted by that. I say to people – I try not to but sometimes I can’t help myself – I say to people, ‘If you communicated a bit differently, you might get your concerns heard. You might be able to understand people a bit better,’ and a lot of people have no interest in that. So it’s a difficult enough task, even the sort of cynical model I’m suggesting is hard enough to get people to the table. Although, having said that, it works very well in international diplomacy. That is the realm where there’s traditionally been, that’s always been the model. And it works, to a degree, in the sense that we can point to all sorts of occasions when agreements have been met internationally between warring parties. But I think that most people, like you and me or everyone else, don’t think of themselves as diplomats, and so therefore aren’t working with that model. Maybe – I mean I hadn’t thought about this before but I think maybe it’s quite an idea – maybe if everybody thought of themselves as a bit of a diplomat, as a geopolitical actor, then perhaps there might be some way of bringing people to the table.”
  • [32:03] “I think a peaceful world would ultimately be a world that is weary and cautious, but also self-aware. That we’re aware that we have deep chasms separating us as individuals, but we are still nonetheless collectively committed to ruling out certain kinds of responses to those.”
  • [33:08] “Perhaps a way of imagining it [a peaceful world] is to think of peacefulness differently, to maybe reclaim it in a way that I try to reclaim civility. To sort of think of peace in a hard way, maybe in a semi-cynical way. Maybe that would make peace a more palatable option, you know, that it’s not some sort of hippie kind of concept, but a tough one. Something that doesn’t require you to abandon hate, but requires you to express it in a different way.” Gord: “And do you see, in that state, that people who hate each other would be finding ways to talk about their hate for each other?” Keith: “I think it’s possible. I think we can talk about these things. All of the things I’ve done that seem disconnected on my C.V. are really linked at some level…” Keith goes on to discuss his study of heavy metal and that one of the things he learned is the power of delving into your deepest, darkest fantasies and turning them into esthetics and art. Keith says “I think art is a really important place where we can deal with this sort of stuff. It provides perhaps a consolation that maybe, in a peaceful world, we still might make violent art, and that might be the place we put it.”
  • [37:27] “It’s very noteworthy that often, the most authoritarian regimes are often the most inclined to clamp down on certain forms of art.”
  • [38:15] “What’s different in the moral engagement of two people in conflict between the denialism phase and the post-denialism phase?” Keith: “The way I talk about denialism – I wasn’t the person who came up with the term denialism. It’s been used [before] – but the way I use it, I make a distinction between denial and denialism. Denial is something we all do. It can become pathological and dangerous, but it’s to some extent necessary; we cannot be confronted with the full force of reality all the time, with the full force of our desires. We need to keep some kind of lid on it to some degree and pretend certain things are not there. Denialism turns it into dogma, and it turns it into a systematic, often institutionalized way of thinking about the world with constructing alternate realities.” Keith discusses the holocaust and climate change as examples. “So what’s the difference between that and post-denialism? Post-denialism is my term, or at least so far as I’m aware, and post-denialism I think is the world that we are starting to transition to now. Now denialism has become very much part of the modern world in the post-war period in various areas…Post-denialism starts to break denialism down. Denialism is based on the idea on a tacit assumption that’s never articulated that certain desires cannot be spoken of publicly. They have become illegitimate in the modern world. So the desire for genocide, which is completely normal – I’m not saying it’s right, but completely normal historically speaking; it’s something that human beings have been doing for long periods of time in a wide range of societies. And in the modern world, people still do genocide, but they cannot be spoken of, they cannot be legitimated, because there’s a kind of consensus in the modern world about what it is to be human, what governments are, what people are. But people still want to do those things, so denialism becomes a way of squaring that circle. Post-denialism is a step, if you like, back towards the possibility that we can speak openly of these things. That we can speak openly about desires. But it still contains elements of denialism in the sense that it still claims that climate change isn’t happening, but perhaps at the same time, it’s saying well if it was happening, who cares.”
  • [44:26] “Particularly as a Jew, I don’t particularly want to discuss whether killing Jews is right or wrong, but that may be what we have to accept – we have to start thinking about how we actually do that, because the way the world is moving, these sorts of possibilities are starting to become live again in a way they haven’t been for a long time, and we have to find ways that we can have that kind of dialogue.”
  • [47:00] Julia shares a story from her past that puts forward the question: is peace a left-wing concept? This prompts a discussion, including Keith saying “I think dialogue and conflict resolution really need to be rebranded, and I suppose part of what I’m doing in a very modest way, when I write about civility, is partly to try to do that – with no discernable success, it has to be said! I can’t say the world has changed, but I’m certainly still trying to do that.”
  • [50:01] “What I’ve been obsessed with for years is trying to find, how can I make arguments that bring different kinds of people to the table. Or how can I communicate with different people. And what it comes back to again and again and again is self-interest.”
  • [55:35] “I think what I’m perhaps suggesting that people try in their own life is not to avoid the difficult conversations that are going on […], but how to enter some of those most difficult threads and do it in a different way. How can I present myself in a different way? Those are the questions I ask myself a lot. And I often fail, but I’m trying. And I think that may be the best we can hope for is, you know, that phrase ‘fail better.’”
  • Keith concludes this episode with a conversation about the dinners he hosted in Jewish communities in Britain, and how he learned from these experiences that extremely formal responses are useful in some matters while informal responses are helpful in others. Keith said “This didn’t bring peace to the Jewish community, but what it did do, at the very least, was in most cases, have a civil conversation between people who weren’t used to doing that.“ Keith also commented on how he learned that while he wasn’t a conflict resolution specialist, he was still able to contribute to peace.

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Julia Menard and Gordon White, in addition to being the co-hosts of the On Conflict Podcast, are also the Principals and Founders of the On Conflict Leadership Institute. Julia and Gordon firmly believe there is a strong correlation between conflict and the responsibilities of leaders, and that idea sparked the creation of the Institute. Come follow Julia and Gordon as they explore the nexus of conflict and leadership over at the On Conflict Leadership Institute (OCLI).

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