Author: Steven (Page 1 of 6)

Celebrating Francis: A Heart for Peace

April 21, 2025 / Steven / 0 Comments

As a Protestant minister and peacebuilder, I mourn with my Catholic brothers and sisters and people of goodwill everywhere the death of Pope Francis, I am immensely grateful for his life and legacy.

A true follower of Jesus, Francis’ concern for the poor, outcast, and marginalized; the environment; and global peace will long serve as an example for Christians around the world.

I am especially mindful today of his Prayer for Peace from June 8, 2014:

Lord God of peace, hear our prayer!

We have tried so many times and over so many years to resolve our conflicts by our own powers and by the force of our arms. How many moments of hostility and darkness have we experienced; how much blood has been shed; how many lives have been shattered; how many hopes have been buried… But our efforts have been in vain.

Now, Lord, come to our aid! Grant us peace, teach us peace; guide our steps in the way of peace. Open our eyes and our hearts, and give us the courage to say: “Never again war!”; “With war everything is lost”. Instill in our hearts the courage to take concrete steps to achieve peace.

Lord, God of Abraham, God of the Prophets, God of Love, you created us and you call us to live as brothers and sisters. Give us the strength daily to be instruments of peace; enable us to see everyone who crosses our path as our brother or sister. Make us sensitive to the plea of our citizens who entreat us to turn our weapons of war into implements of peace, our trepidation into confident trust, and our quarreling into forgiveness.

Keep alive within us the flame of hope, so that with patience and perseverance we may opt for dialogue and reconciliation. In this way may peace triumph at last, and may the words “division”, “hatred” and “war” be banished from the heart of every man and woman. Lord, defuse the violence of our tongues and our hands. Renew our hearts and minds, so that the word which always brings us together will be “brother”, and our way of life will always be that of: Shalom, Peace, Salaam!

Amen.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

The Church as a Garden of Love

April 5, 2025 / Steven / 0 Comments

The great English poet William Blake once used a phrase that has become for me a guiding metaphor for the church at its truest: The Garden of Love.

A garden, even the most established and orderly, is forever in a state of change and transformation. It naturally offers a gloriously open invitation to a wide variety of creatures, each of which adds a new dimension of beauty (well, for the most part!) and has its own important role to play in the cycle of life.

In my experience, a garden is born out of the vision, planning, and work of its gardeners even as the full realization of a project inevitably takes time. There’s a blessing in the garden for gardeners whose lives are physically connected to the earth through active, hands-on tending. There’s something to be said for getting one’s hands dirty. There’s also something to be said for the gift of constant vigilance required of gardeners who need to observe any number of variables beyond their control to garden well: temperature and rainfall, frost, soil conditions, and the inevitable appearance of pesky weeds and invasive species.

The church as a garden of love can bring love to bloom in every season, offering proof of its utility and welcoming a wide array of beloved seekers in search of community, spirituality, safety, nourishment, meaning, and a place to belong and become who God is calling them to be.

However, Blake in The Garden of Love (Songs of Experience, 1794), points to the way the church can have the opposite effect. I’ll let the poet speak for himself:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not. writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

A Better World Starts in the Moral Imagination

April 3, 2025 / Steven / 0 Comments

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Baby Suggs told a group of slaves gathered in a clearing that “the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”

Few literary passages have impacted me as deeply. It was instantaneously etched in my memory.

The only grace one can have is the grace one can imagine. If one cannot see it, you will not have it. This is as true of grace as it is of peace. If we cannot imagine it, we cannot have it. If we cannot see it, we will not have it. It’s as true of grace and peace as it is of justice, kindness, fairness, equity, inclusion, and freedom.

Morrison’s passage speaks to the necessity and power of imagination in a way that resonates with what peacebuilder John Paul Lederach’s calls the moral imagination. See The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Peacebuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Lederach describes the moral imagination as,

“… the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist. In reference to peacebuilding, this is the capacity to imagine and generate constructive responses and initiatives that, while rooted in the day-to-day challenges of violence, transcend and ultimately break the grips of those destructive patterns and cycles.” (p 28)

Imagination can transcend the contingencies and limitations of the present and give rise to the possibilities of what may yet come into being.

It may well be argued that the imagination of our forebears (at least those who had the power and privilege to be heard and to act) has gotten us to where we are today. Their imaginations about an ideal society gave birth to visions of economic, political, and social systems and the institutions that form the scaffolding of our inherited reality–as imperfect as it is.

I am not naive. The world is and has always been subject to competing imaginations and the realities of power and greed curtail or co-opt the power of a truly moral imagination.

But where we are is not where we have to stay. Our imaginations can lead us to horizons well beyond what was imagined for us.

We must ask, then, what might a moral imagination be?

From my Christian perspective, such an imagination would value the inherent dignity of every human being, irrespective of who they are, where they live, who they love, what they look like, where they were born, how much wealth they have, and the ways they find meaning. It would value the environment. Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical Laodato Si’ explains,

“When we speak of the ‘environment’, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.” (par. 139)

A moral imagination influenced by Christianity would be grounded in love and framed by the ethical imperatives of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). It ought to be nonviolent as it interprets the call of Scripture through the lens of Christ’s life and ministry, his violent death and resurrection. It would echo Christ’s demonstration of forgiveness and reconciliation.

A moral imagination from this perspective would value the marginalized, the outcast, and the poor. It would flip the script of imperialism and colonialism. It will give birth to visions of a new order and, in time, a new order itself.

Impractical? Maybe. But as Baby Suggs told that group of slaves gathered in a clearing: “the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”

I invite you to enter the clearing and imagine with me. I dare you to imagine. I dare you to see it. For if we can see it, we will bring it into being–together.

The Quest for Peace: Designs with Justice in Mind

April 1, 2025 / Steven / 0 Comments

A question I often get, and one I’ll briefly answer here, is what my scholarship in peacebuilding entails and how it translates into my practice of peacebuilding.

The short answer is that I don’t claim to be an expert (though I do have some expertise). Rather, I’m continually rethinking approaches to managing and transforming conflict that can uphold the dignity of each individual involved and allow for adjustments that will lead to the lasting restoration of relationship.

A pragmatist, I readily acknowledge that this is not always possible, especially in the face of grave injustice, trauma, and hurt. Yet I also believe in the human capacity to enter well-designed processes through which individuals and groups may move from conflict or mere coexistence (negative peace) to tolerance and ultimately mutual recognition, reciprocity, and conviviality (positive peace).

My view can be attributed to my core commitments as a practicing Christian who believes in the imminent power of God’s love to bring about healing, wholeness, and restoration. It also stems from my experience in post-apartheid South Africa where, as a journalist, I witnessed firsthand the power of acknowledgement, apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Lastly, it also emerges from years of scholarship in which I have had the privilege of engaging leading thinkers and practitioners.

My evolving philosophy around peacebuilding and the need to design just peacebuilding processes is informed by my intuition that the fundamentals for harmonious and convivial relations are already in place and merely (albeit painstakingly at times) need to be uncovered or reestablished.

Perhaps it is for this reason that I do not fear conflict. Nor do I relish it. Rather, I see conflict as a naturally occurring expression of creative energies or opinions at play that may need to be managed in order to lead to constructive outcomes. Outcomes, however, is too precise a word. The objective of peacebuilding as social transformation is more distant horizon than fixed point. Honestly, though, some days it feels more like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. This is where faith and hope are essential.

At its core, my work seeks to challenge hegemonic ways of thinking/knowing and being (epistemologies and ontologies) that foster domination and oppression, whether authority- or state-centric, Eurocentric, or binary positionalities such as cis-heteropatriarchy or white supremacy and their need to create and relate to a subordinate other).

Centered on the experience of those with whom I work, and valuing deeply their dignity and particular subjectivities born of experiences and intersectional identities, I’m open to finding fresh, interdisciplinary, and radically creative ways of engaging critically with both conflict and even the idea of peace.

My current thinking about designing peacebuilding processes for everything from interpersonal conflict in an office or church to international conflict is influenced by the Design Justice Network and its 10 principles. Compatible with the local turn in peacebuilding, the network brings a much-needed innovation in the way it decenters the designer/peacebuilder and fosters liberation and sustainable healing and empowerment for communities. Libby Hoffman’s The Answers are There, in which she advocates for peace from the inside out, offers insights from an international peacebuilding perspective of how this may be put into practice.

In closing and for quick reference, here’s the list of the Design Justice Network’s principles:

Principle 1

We use design to sustain, heal, and empower our communities, as well as to seek liberation from exploitative and oppressive systems.

Principle 2

We center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes of the design process.

Principle 3

We prioritize design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer.

Principle 4

We view change as emergent from an accountable, accessible, and collaborative process, rather than as a point at the end of a process.*

Principle 5

We see the role of the designer as a facilitator rather than an expert.

Principle 6

We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and that we all have unique and brilliant contributions to bring to a design process.

Principle 7

We share design knowledge and tools with our communities.

Principle 8

We work towards sustainable, community-led and -controlled outcomes.

Principle 9

We work towards non-exploitative solutions that reconnect us to the earth and to each other.

Principle 10

Before seeking new design solutions, we look for what is already working at the community level. We honor and uplift traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge and practices.

Ready, Set … Think!

April 1, 2025 / Steven / 0 Comments

There’s a saying I often use in churches: don’t check your brain at the door. It’s an encouragement to be engaged, to be thoughtful, to question, to listen carefully, to assess continually what may be true or untrue, to engage critically and constructively.

It’s an encouragement to assume what in theological circles, specifically Biblical studies, is termed a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Hermeneutics relates to interpretation–interpreting the meaning of a text, for example, by taking into account its context, authorship, wording and the likes. Suspicion in the sense I’m using it is not the radical suspicion that had its genesis in Nietzsche, but rather a gentler way of reconciling what a person or text is relating with the ethical imperative to apply reason to it.

Yes, I said ethical imperative to apply reason.

During my formative years in a deeply religious home in apartheid-era South Africa, questioning was welcome to a point though not encouraged especially when it meant challenging accepted authority. The authority of the primary religious texts of the tradition in which I was raised was off limits. The authority of the state was off limits. Romans 13:1-6, which encourages obeisance to the ruling authorities, had much to do with this in spite of its greater context in Paul’s discourse about love.

While this did not prevent me from applying reason and critical thinking, it collapsed the horizon of possible deductions and conclusions. Ironically, the primary religious texts led me to question aspects of the political reality.

For example, I often wondered why if God created human beings in God’s image and likeness and pronounced all creation very good, how was the reality of racism permissible since it undermined the value of God’s image and likeness in some? And since the author, a woman, of one of the authoritative texts proclaimed liberation for the oppressed in body, mind, and spirit, how could the government’s and society’s racism and patriarchy hold muster?

There wasn’t much impetus to question in the Christian nationalist education I was exposed to in school either, except in a history class where Mr. Welsh intentionally exposed us over the course of my last three years of high school to historiography and different ways of interpreting events and writing history. He instilled in me the basic building blocks of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Attending a liberal arts college in the US vastly expanded this hermeneutics and laid the foundation for the ethical imperative to thoughtfully engage, question, listen and read critically, and assess continually the nuances of truth and falsehood, of that which is salubrious or deleterious. Far from a mere deconstructionist approach, my intention and practice became to apply this ethical reasoning to building up and reconstructing intersubjective relations in ways that can lead to social and political reconciliation and peaceableness. I applied this as a journalist to great effect.

In the intervening years, largely thanks to the work of Emmanuel Katongole, the hermeneutics of suspicion I have adopted in my theological and peacebuilding work starts from a simple question: what good is here? It’s not a denial of the trauma, hurt, or even evil that exists or a cheap optimistic bent. Rather, it is a way of orienting myself toward horizons of possibility as I apply reason and critique to all facets of being. It is the epistemological cornerstone on which of an ontology of hope is being constructed.

The ethical imperative to apply reason is all too often diluted by convenient and self-aggrandizing ideologies and the sloppy thought processes they rely on. Checking one’s brain at the door, so to speak, is a way of undermining the good that may be gained through critically constructive engagement through the application of reason and critical thinking.

Trust: “the coin of the realm”

December 13, 2020 / Steven / 0 Comments

Here’s a shout out to George Schultz, former secretary of state (among other portfolios), who turns 100 today. I wouldn’t know what to give a centenarian for a Birthday gift, but I greatly appreciated the gift of wisdom he shared in The Washington Post on Friday. In an opinion piece reflecting on the past 100 years, he wrote: “Iâ€™ve learned much over that time, but looking back, I’m struck that there is one lesson I learned early and then relearned over and over: Trust is the coin of the realm.” The 10 examples he provides are priceless.

Are We Seeing the End of Democracy?

December 10, 2020 / Steven / 0 Comments

President Trump refuses to accept defeat. He continues to attack the electoral system and political functionaries, even from his own party. Republican leaders are pouring fuel on the fire through open support of Mr. Trump’s narrative or by remaining silent. Few have condemned the contempt he is showing for the democratic process. Democratic Party leaders are biding (Bidening?) their time, presumably shy of open confrontation and further antagonizing the president’s vocal, sometimes-armed supporters.

Zeynep Tufekci warns in The Atlantic that Americans are facing a coup of sorts. The term doesn’t quite fit and Tifekci is reflexive about it. The grayness should not become the point. She says,

Our focus should not be a debate about the proper terminology. Instead, we should react to the frightening substance of what we’re facing, even if we also believe that the crassness and the incompetence of this attempt [to steal the election] may well doom it this time.
Zeynep Tufekci, “This Must Be Your First,” The Atlantic

Her point is well taken. It seems prudent to leave the semantics to historians and political scientists who will, in the future, have a clearer picture of this surreal time.

In the short term our attention would be better spent on understanding the president’s strategy and tactics and how they’re undermining US democratic norms and institutions. We also need to attend to the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump, a large-enough proportion of whom believe his allegations that their collective will has been undermined. It is concerning that the president’s supporters, some armed, are protesting outside the homes and offices of state and local officials. Political intimidation, while not uncommon, is inimical to democratic norms when the possibility of physical violence looms.

How can the president’s supporters be convinced of the election’s legitimacy? There is ample evidence that president-elect Biden won the election fair and square and that the result stands in spite of numerous attempts to challenge and upend it. Consider the facts:

The presidential race was called by the Associated Press, as is customary, in favor of Mr. Biden, who won with 51.4% of the vote versus Trump’s 46.9%. This gives Biden a 306-232 advantage in the electoral college. He also won the popular vote by 7 million.
Election results have been re-certified after recounts in close contests.
The Government Services Agency accepted the election result and initiated a transition.
Several US courts have rejected as baseless lawsuits alleging voting irregularities.
The Supreme Court with three Trump appointees rejected a Republican challenge to the outcome of the election in Pennsylvania. And there seems little chance that a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (now joined by several states) requesting the court overturn the results in four other states will be successful.

Even so, the polarity of the moment informed by partisan media platforms, social media bubbles, fear and skepticism, the perception that meaning is derived from power, and a raft of differing hopes and dreams for the future of America, makes the result hard to accept for some. The Republican leadership’s refusal to stand up for the democratic practices and institutions that are the pride of the United States and failure to challenge the president’s false narrative, possibly for fear of losing votes in future intraparty election contests, contributes to the growing unrest. Where there is a lack of morally courageous leadership, the people flounder. I’m left to wonder if this is the end of democracy. And I don’t mean the death of democracy – but rather its telos.

Does democracy inevitably nurture intractable divisions?

Judging by the state of the Union, this seems plausible. And it’s not unprecedented. The Civil War is a rather stark reminder. Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address,

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.
Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

The key word is “testing.” The Civil War, so viciously contested, was, according to Lincoln, a test to determine if a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that every person is created equal was – is – viable. While the Union won and emancipation resulted across the Confederate states, that test yielded mixed results at best. Emancipation did not lead to the fullness of the freedom implied by liberty. Instead, Jim Crow, valorization of the Confederate cause, red lining, lynching, and the likes were instituted. Many continue to be threatened by the notion of equality. This is especially true when politics is viewed as a zero-sum game and someone else’s right to equal economic, political, and social standing is a threat to me and mine.

The fact of the matter is that as mature a democracy as the United States is, we are still taking Lincoln’s test. We’re still determining whether a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that every person is created equal, is viable. And at present, we’re again – probably, still – failing.

To invoke the preamble to the Constitution, we’re far from a more perfect Union, from establishing justice, insuring tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Instead of ensuring their chances for reelection, perhaps our political leaders should set aside hubris and fear and lead again with moral courage toward a vision of a more perfect Union – a vision of a diverse yet unified people, embracing a common identity in spite of ideological differences that ensures the defense and wellbeing of every individual, community, and the people as a whole. This may sound naive, but let’s give it a chance. We surely have more to gain than lose.

It would seem that the end of democracy is embedded in the integrity with which we take the test. Could it be that the end is the means – the common practices, institutions, and thought orientations – that lead to greater unity, even a more perfect Union? The framers did not call for a perfect Union, but a “more perfect Union.” This may well be within our grasp if we can gain needed perspective on the identity markers and politics that separate us, provided we can let go of the fear that keeps us from embracing meaningful, actionable liberty and justice for all.

Perhaps the point is not to convince the president’s most ardent supporters, or even the president himself, of the veracity of the election’s result, but rather to convince them that we’re still taking the test and will receive better results when we take it together.

On Human Dignity

November 24, 2020 / Steven / 0 Comments

What if, in the course of our common life, the recognition of human dignity took center stage? While it has been dismissed among some as vacuous or problematically unspecific, dignity acknowledges the inherent value of each human being and, when acted upon, can significantly improve the quality of interpersonal and intergroup relations.

There certainly are a host of cultural resources from which to argue for human dignity. From a biblical perspective, one might look to the first chapter of Genesis and discern there a recognition of the value of each human being:

Then God said, â€œLet us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.â€
So God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).

This allegory then affirms that God looked out over all creation, including the human beings newly formed, and declared it all “very good.” This is surely the low-hanging fruit on which at the very least a theological argument could be built in a Jewish- or Christian-leaning cultural milieu.

In the Western intellectual tradition, one might look to Emmanuel Kant’s notion of werde, to describe the intrinsic, non-instrumental value of the human being. (Let’s suspend, for a moment, the justified critique of Kant’s Eurocentrism.) For Donna Hicks, a contemporary scholar who links the recognition of dignity to conflict resolution, dignity is a birthright composed of ten essential elements: the acceptance of identity; inclusion; safety; acknowledgement; recognition; fairness; benefit of doubt; understanding; independence; and accountability. It is thus far from a vacuous or static concept. (See Donna Hicks, 2011, Dignity: The Essential Role it Plays in Resolving Conflict, Yale University Press.) When put into practice, these elements will naturally foster a greater sense of civility, justice, and equality in any society.

Seeking further justification for human dignity, one might turn to southern Africa where ubuntu, the mutual recognition of common humanity, is poignantly expressed in terms of the statement, “I am because you are.” It is no surprise, then, that protections for dignity were written into the South African Constitution. As the first Chief Justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court wrote, “Under the South African Constitution, dignity is a value asserted to â€˜invest in our democracy respect for the intrinsic worth of all human beings.â€™ It is, as the Court has held, a value that informs the interpretation of many, possibly all, other rights.â€ (See Arthur Chaskelson, 2011, “Dignity as a Constitutional Value: A South African Perspective,” American University International Law Review, 26(5), 1377-1407.)

Sadly, it is possibly in violations of human dignity and the rights that stem from it that its existence becomes most obvious. And this makes it all the more urgent to foster more broadly in society — especially in US society at this highly fractured political moment — a greater awareness of and regard for human dignity.

Wouldn’t it be a boon for democracy across the globe if democratic practices and institutions could be rooted in a deep and abiding respect for the intrinsic worth of all human beings, of each human being?

Why I have been reluctant to write (but can stay silent no longer)

January 7, 2020 / Steven / 0 Comments

The last thing the world needs is another disembodied voice yelling into the ever-deepening abyss of opinion that masquerades as truth. In the intervening years between my last post and this one, I have consciously sought to be silent, to listen deeply for the voices I would not hear if I were instead occupied with scattering the seeds of my own thought and listening intently for the echoes of critique and accolades that might return. But now I must speak. I must respond to the emerging madness of another potential war, this time with Iran. A significant difference between now and then is that I now speak as a citizen of an aggressor nation, a nation I have grown to love and call my own.

What a devastating lack of imagination is shown by those who seek to exercise the right to take or threaten lives. Where is that imagination that transcends violence, that moral imagination that reaches beyond cheap notions of patriotism and embraces the value of life, every life, all lives everywhere? Why is it that the chest beaters are all-too-quick to claim the title of Christianity when they ignore the powerful testimony and moral imagination of the one from whose name the tradition derives its own?Â

There is a vast difference between the moral imagination inspired by the Sermon on the Mount and the one that claims for the state the monopoly of the use of force. There is an insurmountable gulf between Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies and to pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:44) and the assassination of political foes and threats of force against cities and cultural sites. Even by the laws of war, the threats of the president are an awful affront to humanity, not to mention an affront to all that is good and holy about one of the world’s major religions.

Moral courage is sorely lacking in a nation that values zero-sum outcomes and lives by the code that military and political might alone make right irrespective of the morality of any decision or action. Moral courage is lacking because the moral imagination has not been cultivated among certain so-called elites.

Imagination implies creativity. Moral imagination opens the possibility of alternative renderings of political, social, and economic outcomes. As peacebuilder John Paul Lederach puts it, “the moral imagination [is] the capacity to imagine something rooted in the challenges of the real world yet capable of giving birth to that which does not yet exist” (The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace, Oxford, 2005, p 28). The moral imagination does not shy away from real-world problems, but creatively rises above simple-minded dualistic solutions and promises to establish new realities that before seemed impossible.

Thankfully there is no lack of moral imagination or moral courage. The voices of so many are ringing out in opposition to yet another ominous expedition of killing and wanton destruction. That these voices are animated by different perspectives –religious and secular– gives me hope that there remains common ground enough on which to build and sustain a new peace movement.

Negotiator in Chief?

April 28, 2016 / Steven / 0 Comments

Explaining Donald Trump’s provocative rhetoric, a long-time Republican operative was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “[Trump has] always said privately that he’s learned from negotiations that you start from the far end. If you start in the middle you lose.” This positional bargaining tactic is hardly surprising. It might even be quaint if it wasn’t so destructive or deeply entrenched in the riggings of a win-lose binary that keeps broad swaths of humanity mired in a sycophantic devotion to self-interest.

One has to wonder where Trump has been in our post Getting to Yes world. The work of Roger Fisher and William Uri, among so many since, highlights the promise and effectiveness of principled negotiating — negotiating that rests on mutuality without compromising the need for favorable results. In its most articulate expression, it gets beyond the language of winning and losing (forsaking even the coveted win-win) in favor of creative alternatives that assure mutual benefit and lasting, productive relationships.

The world of winning and losing, winners and losers is by nature unkind and violent. It is unproductive. It leads to power grabs and arms races and pushes the planet ever closer to destruction. So much energy is expended on climbing the ladder (corporate, political, social) that the weakening of the rungs is overlooked. At stake is not just the self, but the soul; not just the individual, but the gossamer web that binds society.

Thomas Paine wrote in his influential The Rights of Man,

The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government.

Mutual dependence and reciprocal interest are the antidote to anarchy and lawlessness. Win-lose modalities support the latter and undermine the former, all the while eroding any semblance of a great chain of connection.

It’s little surprise that Trump’s populist campaign, which follows the path of least resistance with its win-at-all-costs posture, has been so effective in attracting the support of especially white males whose sense of entitlement is rooted in historical privilege. This sense of entitlement comes at great cost to society, which remains fragmented in terms of race, gender, and class (among a host of other prefabricated divisions).

In all fairness, Trump is not alone. Despite varying political agendas and approaches, it is clear that each of the candidates has bought into the dominant narrative of the win-lose dichotomy. It seems a necessity of the current practice of democracy. The Sanders campaign, for all that it claims to present an alternative narrative, does not reflect the level of rhetorical or policy awareness that would bind society more closely together. Across the spectrum of candidates in this awfully long election season, there’s an almost complete dearth of talk about working with opponents or negotiating compromises that would serve the best interests of all the people.

The angry, often bitter rhetoric sown recklessly by the candidates and exploited by the media’s self-interest in ratings that drive advertising revenues is a significant threat to the fabric of society. It belies an arrogance that conquers by dividing rather than painstakingly sowing together the tears and tatters of the great American tapestry envisioned by the Founders.

With the balance of power carefully distributed between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches — and given the specific powers granted the president — the Constitution calls forth not just a commander in chief, but a negotiator in chief. It envisions a reasonable president, Congress, and judiciary working together in service of the more perfect union called for in the Preamble, where justice is established, domestic tranquility ensured, common defense provided, general welfare promoted, and in which the blessings of liberty are secured in the present and for posterity.

This may sound naïve in light of deepening political divisions, but I believe the vision of the Founders may yet become the renewed vision of the nation. It will take principled leaders to guide the nation and principled negotiations to reframe political discourse and shift the status quo toward a more productive footing. The language of mutuality and reciprocity needs to be regained. Common interest, as Payne suggests, needs to regulate concerns and form laws so that society as a whole may be sewn together through good governance and a revived sense of common identity.