Ain't War Wonderful

Robert Kaplan (Imperial Grunts), like Teddy Roosevelt before him, believes that an occasional war is good for the national spirit. The thinking goes: war ennobles us, enlivens us, wakes us,rescues us from the superficiality and numbness of peacetime.  Kaplan assures us that our soldiers fighting in Iraq are "having the times of their lives."  The loss of life - American and Iraqi - far from being the collateral damage of war is in fact its currency, the high stakes that are  essential to the enlivening process. One can see the truth in this: danger mobilizes us, peace deadens us. (This is too simplistic a formula, for it is also true that in the face  of unrelenting danger, we move beyond mobilization and enlivenment to disintegration and total breakdown.)

A question worth asking is: Why do we need war to bring meaning and zest to our lives?

The Power Lab is war writ small. For one week, participants in the Power Lab are involved in an intensive class struggle. The very existence of vast differences in wealth and power among three classes living in close proximity to one another generates ongoing tension. There are regular confrontations across and within class lines (within each class, there regularly emerge conflicts between the hard-liners and the moderates.)  People in the Power Lab demonstrate many of the same enlivening characteristics that Kaplan describes in the front-line soldiers at war: strong emotional bonds, a sense of being part of something larger than oneself, risk-taking beyond one's usual limitations.

War and the Power Lab have something else in common: their enlivenment and self-enhancement is externally-driven; it is dependent on circumstances that create the confrontations to be faced and dangers to be overcome. This is not to deny or belittle the courageous acts people take in the face of these circumstances, but simply to point out the obvious that, in the absence of these external circumstances there is no impetus for enlivenment.

At the end of the Power Lab, we acknowledge how full of themselves participants are. We also want them to note how much their current enlivenment owes to the conditions they experienced over the past several days. The caution is this: When they return home, those circumstances will no longer be present; they will be facing the dangers of a numbing, deadening, sleep-walking peace. So the challenge is this: If you don't want to lose your strength - like Superman in the presence of krypton - you have to create danger, make trouble for yourself, take on the difficult project, set real challenges for yourself. In short, when the external circumstances are not there, you need to create them for yourself.

Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of relying on the horrors of war for our self and system enhancement, individually and as a society we looked to ourselves and our personal responsibility for creating excitement, danger, challenge, and growth in our own lives.

Riots in France, Deadlock in Bosnia

Riots in France and deadlock in Bosnia. From a systems perspective, the crises these countries are facing stem from imbalances in two critical system processes: differentiation and homogenization. What connects Bosnia and France is that for years very real ethnic differences were suppressed. While Tito ruled Yugoslavia sectarian issues were buried - We are all Yugoslavians. Yet, when Yugoslavia disintegrated, those buried differences exploded into the worst European war in 50 years - 200,000 dead, millions left homeless.

France has been living with a similar illusion - We are all Frenchmen.The notion in both cases is that by burying difference we create uniformity and harmony. It works quite the other way around; the suppression of difference leads to its eventual eruption into violence.

The solution is not to diminish differentiation but to put equal and opposite energy into homogenization, identifying and developing our commonalities, working on our sameness just as we are working on our differences.

Differentiation without homogenization is explosive as are attempts at homogenization that bury differentiation.