Foundations 3 Some Presuppositions Underpinning These Reflective Learning Materials

Some Presuppositions Underpinning These Reflective Learning Materials

This ‘Nurturing Hope’ text is based on a number of presuppositions which we will explore in greater detail throughout the materials.

1. Every human being is unique because we are formed and shaped in very different relationships over time.

2. From the moment of conception we are formed in a relationship and, to this day and beyond, continue to be shaped and formed in all manner of relationships. Our health as human beings depends on the quality of our relationships more than on winning the power fights of life. We interact with each other continually, learning and changing in our relationships with each other, often without recognising that we are.

3. In such ways our relationships are mimetic1 in trust. Mimesis is the deep, subconscious way we imitate one another’s freedom and trust, if we are fortunate to have such relationships, as well as imitating relationships of rivalry and conflict too.

4. Because we are mimetic, we desire what the other has. And the more we desire what another has, the more they also want it. We can become jealous, envious of the success, money, relationships of others. We can come to desire the life they have and to hate the one we have. The result, if nothing stops us, is that our fight escalates, until we become obsessed. Nothing matters except that we win the fight and achieve power over the other. The danger of mimesis to ourselves and our societies is so real that five of the Ten Commandments directly address it.

5. Traditional cultures tried to stop this rivalry for power by focusing on an external ’other’ as the cause of internal conflict—a scapegoat. We found someone to blame because as long as we could all blame someone else, we stopped, or at least limited, our conflicts. The naming, driving away and even destroying of the scapegoat bought peace for the rest of us. We resolved our destructive rivalry by blaming or projecting on to another the fault for our unrest and discord. Today we still participate in similar scapegoating actions, even though there is more knowledge about these scapegoating actions, and many scapegoated people and groups have supporters who name and expose such actions. The cultural urge to scapegoat still lies deep in culture and in us.

6. The threat of rivalry and its attendant threat of violence informed the structure of everything in these earlier traditional societies. Great care was taken to separate people and to give each a ‘place’, whether of higher or lower rank, in order to prevent rivalry as far as possible. We were born into our place and the structures of society ensured that for the most part we accepted it and lived within it.

7. In our modern world, however, we have come to know that these structures and the associated social processes hid violence, and hid responsibility for violence. As the security of the old structures have disappeared, we face a new problem. We might return to the rivalry and violence from which the older structure of culture protected us; we might try to re-institute these old structures using ever more violence to achieve them. or we might choose to live in more open ways with different others. As mimetic rivalry escalates, the more we respond in either of these first two ways, the more things simply dissolve into chaos. As the poet, W.B. Yeats wrote in his poem, “The Second Coming” after the blood-bath of World War I: “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.2

8. However, one additional hopeful reality is that we can be mimetic with relationships of openness, trust and freedom between us. In such relationships, outside rivalry, we can be in relationships and structures where we all change and grow. This we refer to as ‘good mimesis’.

Meeting Outside Rivalry

This learning project is about ‘nurturing hope’. For us that means supporting and generating spaces and places to meet with one another outside of rivalry and violence. To meet outside of rivalry is to give one another a place to

• really listen

• find our own story in hearing the story of others

• experience having our difficulties held without judgement

• admit mistakes without fear of them being manipulated

• feel solid ground under our feet in a world where much feels unsafe.

• sometimes be forgiven

To meet in such a way is an experience in which each person is enriched by the whole and, in response, finds and gives room for others to have the same. This experience is what we mean by community. It puts planks under our feet; we can stand up not as enemies but as fully human beings able to make choices and to take responsibility. As long as we meet in rivalry, fighting our enemies, justice always risks becoming revenge. When we are no longer rivals, we can see the reality around us, and begin to make changes and act differently and unexpectedly. Because humans are mimetic, hope spreads, just as rivalry does. Hope spreads like a virus to lower the amount of hopelessness. Experiences of real freedom and belonging stay with us in darker times. Having hope means we look for opportunities, rather than resign ourselves to fate. Being alongside people who are full of hope, gives us hope, and vice versa. An experience of hope in small things gives us courage to do difficult things when we are in public view. This project comes out of lived experiences in situations where ‘optimism’ has sometimes been difficult.

• Northern Ireland has been a place of recurrent conflict and injustice. Learning how not to engage in the rivalry, while in the midst of conflict, has been an experience of great hope, shaping new ideas of how justice and reconciliation might be approached.

• Korea has been divided for more than 70 years, after many decades as a pawn in great power politics. How do we sustain hope, even when most of the cards seem to be in the hands of weaponised groups?

• In the United States, we have watched as divisions have become silos. Opportunities to really be together with those who differ from us are rare; and listening has disintegrated into the repeating of positions within our echo chambers. We struggle to recognise shared truths.

• Japan and Korea have a conflicted history between them that needs acknowledged and healed.

Nurturing hope is a human necessity. No matter how difficult our circumstances, only hope will make it possible for us to stay human, to say anything useful about justice and to choose to act differently and outside our fears. We believe there is an urgent need to nurture hope. These materials have been gathered as a route map, offering some steps toward meeting in a way that allows hope to emerge. We look forward to hearing from you as you work with them and find your own ways.

Individual Agency

These materials are informed by the central need to develop learning experiences that affirm our individual agency—our power to effect change for the common good in our own lives and in the lives of others. These materials are about the exercise of our voicesii, as individual citizens. Relationships, groups, or cultures can often demand absolute obedience, brook no dissent or challenge, and limit our freedom to choose. When we are caught up in submitting to such demands, the sphere of our daily relationships and wider civic life is diminished. We hope to strengthen the ability of citizens to make choices that go beyond the often limiting and controlling power of such group and social bonds. Our hope is that through these materials, as citizens, we will find our voice, examine our reasons for acting in particular ways, and exercise our choice to either continue in these ways or make a changeiii.

Our Invitation

‘Nurturing Hope’ invites us take agency in our choices, and not be or become mere objects shaped and tossed about by the societal dynamics that daily surround us. These materials support people who are exploring what may often be new choices—exercising our creativity, imagination and hope as citizens. They invite us to choose to live well ‘in difference’ and not ‘be indifferent to others.’ They are offered with the hope that we can find the courage to exercise new choices, if we wish, and move away from ways that restrict our growth and development. To make our own choices, while being respectful of others making different and even opposed choices, demands personal confidence, clarity, and strength. It can be a lonely choice; however, if it is made mindful of the different others with whom we share our society, it is an important part of finding our way into a shared future with each other.

Our Challenge

Voices that assert the primacy of strong identity bonds—whether political, religious, cultural or social—can be highly seductive in conflict-affected societies, areas of protracted conflict, or societies facing new challenges as they become more diverse. Strong and excluding identities can appear to offer safety, as well as comfort, to those of us who feel especially uncertain or threatened. Such an identity ‘force field’ can limit our individual choices. It can influence our behavior, leading to identification with particular partisan cultures or groups. If unquestioned, the cultural and relational dynamics of strong identity bonds can sweep us along and deny us our right to choose for ourselves.

Relational Space Is a Material Reality Between People

Each day we are shaped by the character of the relationships we move within, and the institutional, cultural and political dynamics around us. These reflective learning materials invite us to examine the dynamic ‘space’ of the relationships between us, and the groups, places, cultures and institutions in which we move. Will these larger dynamics skew us, suck us into patterns of behavior that diminish us and those whom we are with? Or are we developing and sustaining more open, trusting and inclusive ways together no matter the power of these dynamics? The materials invite us to examine whether and how we are acting as active citizens, modelling freedom and possibilities to one another. In the material world, as physicists understand it, space “is no longer something distinct from matter, it is one of the ‘material’ components of the world. An entity that undulates, flexes, curves, twists” (Rovelli, C. 2016, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. p 6).