Essay: THE NEED FOR CONCILIATION

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RARELY in history have mankind's conflicts seemed quite so hard to resolve. Vast social changes are causing almost daily clashes that defy law and logic; from courts to legislatures, the old peace-keeping institutions are too often archaic and unresponsive. Blacks and whites, Arabs and Israelis, students and administrators, Frenchmen and Charles de Gaulle—all seem pitted against one another in postures of unmalleable pride.

Witnessing this worldwide obduracy, writers as disparate as Naturalist Konrad Lorenz and Novelist Arthur Koestler have redefined Homo sapiens as Homo maniacus, arguing that man appears doomed by some inherent quirk to follow the dinosaur into oblivion. Among the apocalyptically minded, the only question is where Armageddon will begin. Harlem or the Hotel Majestic? The Sorbonne or the Sinai Peninsula?

Such pessimists ignore conciliation: an ancient art that has served mankind through centuries of quarrelsome existence. To be sure, attempts at conciliation are often futile until the combatants reach exhaustion. Henry Clay's compromises merely delayed the Civil War that Abraham Lincoln had to win before the Union could be restored. It is not the United Nations that prevents World War III but the balance of nuclear terror.

Not surprisingly, history rarely mentions conciliators: man's sense of the dramatic is more aroused by violence than by the "effort to establish harmony and good will." Among U.S. heroes, George Custer outranks William Penn, who pacified Indians with kindness rather than carbines. How many American boys would rather win the Nobel Peace Prize than the Medal of Honor?

Still, from the Biblical Solomon to the ecumenical Pope John XXIII, conciliators have polished a craft that succeeds in a wide variety of negotiable situations. The U.S. once boasted the world's bloodiest labor movement; now it has such effective conciliation machinery that remarkably few slayings have occurred in labor disputes since the 1950s. For all its failings, the U.N. has helped to keep most of the world's angry opponents at arm's length, producing a host of skilled conciliators in the process—Sweden's Count Folke Bernadotte, Canada's Lester Pearson, America's Ellsworth Bunker. Common to such men is a firm belief that conciliatory techniques (negotiation, mediation, arbitration) apply equally well to all disputes, marital as well as martial, between races and generations. It is a faith based not on Utopian dreams but on hard-won experience.

Constructive Conflict

The key to conciliation is an understanding that conflict is universal, indeed necessary. All living creatures want things that others do not care to relinquish. Without some conflict, there are no solutions, no yin and yang, the classic Chinese harmony of opposites. The humbling fact is that animals achieve such harmony better than humans. Unlike men, animals retain instinctive devices that end their conflicts short of murder. When one wolf defeats another in a fight for territory, the loser commonly exposes its jugular to the stronger opponent—a form of honorable surrender that the winner peaceably accepts without further aggression. Not only is the loser preserved in the process—so is the species.