13th Valley (88 page)

Our world is coming apart and it is imperative that we go one step farther and develop a new perspective about, and response to, conflict. Conflicts are actions. Conflict is active disagreement, in its final stage violent disagreement, fights, riots, wars. Here we must set a premise—action, all human action, is preceded by thought. The argument can then be drawn, if thought precedes action then thought precedes conflict. Let us explore the thoughts, and the origins and dynamics of those thoughts, which lead to conflict
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EXPLORATION ONE: The roots of conflict and the expansion and escalation to violence grow from our competitive instincts and are accentuated by our language patterns. When we get into a conflict-compete situation we accentuate the differences in order to strengthen our position. Why? Is this innate in man or is it a part of our mythos, a culturally transferred response handed down from generation to generation? Is the mechanism for transfer language? Written and spoken? What elements in human languages cause us to think ourselves into war? What causes us to perceive a given situation as a conflict situation? What forms our character? What passes xenophobic responses?

LANGUAGE: Thought structured by language. And whose language? English. The white man's language
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Language is a verbal network developed over eons. Written language developed from concrete pictographs to lineal abstract ideography. In language, words, as symbols of reality, are connected one to the next to develop thoughts and concepts. Words evoke other words at a measurable frequency. Given a specific word the word which follows it has a pre-determined tendency to be another specific word. In linguistics this is known as a frequency response. This word to word response frequency is the structure of our language. It has been, to a great extent, formalized. Nouns as subjects of sentences are followed by verbs as as predicates. Infants are taught the language of their fathers and later pass the same language to their sons. This is the mechanism for the transfer of acceptable behavior and knowledge from generation to generation. This vast body of a society's knowledge and responses is its mythos. The mechanism for socializing an infant to his culture has a specific though complex structure and that structure controls a human being's potential thoughts. That learned structure determines how a human perceives the world about him. It controls his actions
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The verbal network of western cultures (White) to which we (Black Americans) find ourselves prescribing, accepting, assimilating, has and is proliferating from its western base (America & Western Europe) and has encompassed nearly the entire globe with the possible exceptions of the Asian countries which still maintain pictographic languages. Western verbal structure interprets interpeoples' differences as problems. This, Western Culture teaches, leads to the need for a solution. In Western Cultures solutions may be forced upon situations. This is con-frontation and conflict, and this, we are taught, leads to a higher level structure
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This network is built on a view of reality as thesis-antithesis clash resulting in synthesis—a network which forces polarization of entities, which forces, by definition, the entities to contrast, which leads to verbalization of threats, military threats, which heightens our insecurity and raises our defensiveness, which makes us ever more threatening to others and causes them to raise their defensiveness, which leads finally to warfare
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White America would do well to study Eastern thought where synthesis is perceived as the undesirable limiting of natural circles, a thought pattern where every thesis must have an antithesis for it to exist and in which the elimination of either eliminates both. It is a matter of attempting to describe hot while denying the existence of cold. They are not simply opposites. They are varying quantities of one quality and to wipe out one means not to raise by synthesis both to a higher level but to destroy the entity, the quality, itself
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Perhaps we should look to see where language has come from, what road it has traveled to arrive at its present structure. Formal language, like history, is created, established and passed on by the victorious. The winners throughout history are the ones who have passed on language forms and frequencies, patterns which structure our perceptions and thoughts. The way the defeated thought, the structure of their speech and the frequency of their words, has been lost with their military losses. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say the structure of their thought has been repressed with their losses. Victors are allowed to speak, to write, and to publish
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In English-speaking cultures we have a language tradition in which people voice their exposure and contact with other cultures in xenophobic patterns. We are not taught to rejoice in meeting strangers. We are taught to beware, to be fearful. This language also provides a set of cognitive models and expectations which guide our cultural response to publicly articulated threats, threats often posed by politicians with self-serving motives, politicians threatening us with the supremacy or domination of us by another nation. A man says, “Do you want your children to live under the domination of Red Russia?” One must answer, “No.” The “No” is built into our language system. The question is a yes or no question. You're going out of the system if you say anything else. If you say something else you're a radical. Then the Man says, “If South Vietnam falls, it will topple all the staggering unstable dominos we support. If they fall your children will be in forced labor camps and communal farms with Red Guards. Do you want that?” Our response is built into our language structure. The politicians and the, news media are very aware of the predetermined patterns (though for different reasons—one for direct control, one for sales, equals $ equals a power of sorts)
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I am proposing we break that conformity with a re-thinking, a total restructuring of our semantic network in a manner that the popular rhetoric of interpeoples differences and tensions reconstructs the experience of those tensions and then directs-our responses into alternate manners of eliminating tension. No more rhetorical questions. No more ‘Yes-No' questions. Only questions which recreate reality, not lies, and ask us to answer in manners as complex as the reality.

Perhaps part of the problem is that words are only lineal. Western languages have lineal structure. Reality is not lineal. Therefore, words are inadequate to describe reality. According to Cherry visual imagery and spatial relationships are controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain while language is an exclusive property of the left hemisphere. Is it possible Western and Eastern cultures differ so greatly in perspective because the Chinese language is pictorial, is a non-lineal language in which symbols are built to portray reality instead of strung together to describe reality? Is it possible the inscrutableness of the Chinese is due to Western language-thought being founded in the left hemisphere and Eastern language-thought being founded in the right? Neurologically the right hemisphere (again according to Cherry) is the location of what we call the subconscious and also dream and spatial relationships. It is difficult for a man to communicate between his own conscious and subconscious. It must be near impossible for understanding to pass between Western and Eastern minds because it must be like one man's conscious attempting to communicate with another man's subconscious.

Western language tradition analyzes phenomena by breaking them down into components, into separately strung together parts. Preceding parts are considered to cause following parts. Everything is broken into cause-effect dichotomies. Is it possible our political tradition of left-right dichotomy is caused by our language tradition and that by using this descriptive model we structure our perception of reality and affect our reality by forcing it to polarize? (Ref. El Paso.)

Our perception of our political world role is affected by our language tradition. If our language-determined role model is skewed toward dichotomy, toward perceiving and establishing opposing parts, is that not the same as saying, the model causes tension? Our response to tension is also predetermined in our political rhetoric. Our language and thought patterns cause us to react to insecurities both aggressively and defensively. Our actions then cause others to react to us defensively and aggressively. The severity of conflict is heightened. This psychotic behavior propels us into divorce courts, into race riots and into war. Internationally this behavior is military threats and arms escalation. Why do we believe these will lessen tension? They increase it. Is it any wonder that the Soviet Union (its leaders also under the Western language tradition) maintains that if America builds a Safeguard system to protect its Minuteman ICBM force from destruction by Soviet SS-9 missiles, then they, the Soviets, must build a system that will destroy Safeguard. If they do not, the argument goes, they will be unprepared to deter an American assault. Then America says if we do not build a Safeguard system the Soviets may make a first strike against us and with it wipe our out ability to strike back. That will heighten their desire to strike. Each side says it desires to make nuclear war so devastating it will be unthinkable. No one would start such a war. America says do it by limiting your defensives. Russia says do it by expanding your offensive. Either way all the people die. It is a paradox—the more insecure we feel the more defensive we become. The more defensive we become the more we force those about us to be defensive. We thus increase the tension in an unintentional psychotic spiraling manner because of our inability to respond in any other way. Things often are not what they seem. (Minh.)

EXPLORATION TWO: Politicians, Political Rhetoric—How the system works. From the perception of the world in thesis-antithesis terms, more simply an us-vs-them mentality, rises the politician. In America, the pattern of government separated into branches with checks and balances is both an expression of conflict mentality and a cause of future conflict (institutionalizes the pattern—Egan). The political party system is an expression of the same thing. The politician is the tie between the two. It is he who elevates differences, purposefully creating conflict whether conflict exists or not
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It happens this way. A man saying he is the representative of many men about him declares his ideology and he declares his policy and he says his are the best for everyone. In order to defend his stand he must note the differences between him and others. In so doing he establishes conflict where only differences before existed. (There is nothing intrinsically wrong or conflicting about differences.) The man's philosophy is self-serving to both him and the men supporting him. It must be. Politicians are a psychotic form unto themselves. They must gain power to serve. They live on power, by power, for power. They greedily accept it but it must be ‘sold' to the masses. An effective ‘sales tool' is fear, fear of differences the politician has just established and will now focus on selectively and accentuate. The policy becomes In The National Interest, or Manifest Destiny, or The Red Menace. The differences become conflicts, the conflicts are accentuated, the response to the heightened conflict is defensive and self-righteous. The interest of one man for the benefit of a select group of men has come to be the party or the nation's policy. The party or the nation becomes aggressively defensive and forces the group who has become the ‘bad guys' or the ‘political opposition' into a defensive posture. The mutual perception of each other's aggressive/defensive posture, the fear for one's own security, results in a crystallization of differences, the establishment of obstacles to creative thought and finally to actions to eliminate the threat
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It begins with a dichotomy structure of rationality in our language, spreads to polarization of opinions with ever increasing tension. What we lack is a structure to drain off the tension. A country prepares for war and war is very unreal to those who prepare for it and who have never fought. Politicians make it noble to do your best for the men there. For the soldier it becomes his ‘Duty' or his ‘Mision.' (Ref. Pop R.) The men are often confused
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I enjoy some of the word games we play at war. Pacification. Vietnamization. Mechanical Ambush. Do I enjoy these because they stimulate me? Do I seek simulation thusly? (Ref. Cherry.) Those are the little word games the military machine has come up with. Perhaps there are others which are so buried in our language tradition we never notice them. ‘Some are big ones. By recognizing just what language is, we immediately recognize some of the more poorly camouflaged, some of the poor substitutes for reality. These are the words and phrases with extended connotations and denotations politicians and other leaders love to use. BEWARE: Servant-of-the-people; communist takeover; human rights; civil rights; self-determination; freedom. If someone threatens you with one of these or promises you one of these, beware. Beware. Governments do not give freedoms anymore than they give taxes. Governments are in the business of restricting human action from unlimited freedom to parameters the people will find acceptable
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THE PEOPLE: That's a good one. Who are the people? Why is it that whoever ever uses that phrase is referring to himself and the people he wants to control?

Let us develop a new mode of thinking which is more closely tied to reality than our present mode. A mode where every man is independent because his language allows him alternatives. This new way to think, to speak, will, should, allow greater freedom to participate in our culture's therapy. Beware: political rhetoric is self-serving and self-limiting. In many instances it is, at best, irrelevant. The outcome of inter-peoples contacts often depends on factors totally detached from spoken words
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Using this manner of thinking in ref. to international conflict gives the individual person, the man-in-the-street, a new freedom to participate in the flow of history, in the direction of his nation's policies, in the humanity of mankind. He need not have one voice with the president and only be able to express opposition in the form of a vote, one vote every forty-eight months. We can learn to become more independent of external pressures from politicians telling us that X people is trying to destroy us, from business trying to tell us we are not whole without their product, from race leaders telling us that every man from that other race is prejudiced against us and thus we best defend ourselves
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