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Conflict Without Cause

Conflict Without Cause

OurPhilosophy 1 Conflict Without Cause

At every crossroad where we become divided by difference, where we confront fundamental Others, we fail to understand or even imagine what is divided and what is dividing.

When there are visible differences we can’t help supposing our separations must be across the differences most visible to us.  When our differences are not so visibly obvious, we infer separation and struggle must nevertheless be rooted in tangible causes, in real grounds divided by material categories.   Class, race, gender, history, geography – and a swelling host of ever-more fine-grained divisions of difference.  But what we keep failing to even imagine, and the reason we cannot come to grips with why we cannot stop coming to blows, is how our differences are grounded in the breakdown of meaning itself.

Black and white people do not have to conflict.  Women and men do not have to conflict.  The poor and the rich do not have to conflict.  But if or when everybody does eventually conflict?  Disputes can be negotiated.  Differences can be worked out.  Conflicts can be resolved.

There have been some very silly arguments that tangibly different peoples can never really work out their differences.  That they cannot stop fighting because they can’t understand each other well enough to work things out.  That they can’t understand each other because their necessarily differing experiences make their ways of knowing and being too different.

What makes such arguments so terribly silly are false assumptions that knowing, understanding, imagination and meaning can only be functions of lived experience.  It just isn’t so.  Sure — categories such as knowing, understanding, imagination and meaning can’t be considered completely outside all reference to experience.   But neither can such categories be thought entirely restricted by and limited to prior experience.   It is far too late in the day to keep forgetting how reliably and categorically in meaning, in understanding, in imagining and knowing we go beyond the information given –- and past every experience already had.

Whether human or artificial — there can be no intelligence without going beyond the information given.  And while no one can yet answer how spectacularly we transcend every past experience — no way does that license forgetting how reliably we do so.  To the contrary.  Epistemology that forgets or purposely ignores the creativity of human thought and language is not radical — it is just ignorant.

That’s why mutual understanding cannot be restricted to common past experience.  Why no material difference — whether glaringly visible or barely tangible — can in itself mean those divided by that difference cannot reach some understanding.  Cannot stop fighting.  No material difference can mean those divided by it must conflict in the first place.  Material differences are not that meaningful in themselves.

But some differences absolutely are meaningful in themselves.  Obviously.  Differences in meaning.

Difference necessarily transcends experience when it becomes necessarily different meaning.  When the meaning and significance of experience grows too different.  And although not every different meaning must produce conflict — there are some that do.  Some that must.  Whenever our differences become both fundamental and contradictory in meaning.  Whenever differences glare in fundamental contradiction across gaps made insuperable by inconsistency in how peoples’ most basic experience signifies.

That’s why we can never avoid or resolve so much conflict.  Because fundamentally irreconcileable differences mean people are bound to conflict.  Because fundamental contradiction cannot be reconciled — and hence people cannot stop conflicting.

There’s no basis for avoiding conflict and for meaningful reconciliation across fundamentally glaring contradictions.  Not unless there is yet more, deeper fundamental consistency and agreement to be found.  But, if there is?  Then contradictions were not fundamental in the first place.  It was only a misunderstanding.

This is how irreconcileable differences grow insurmountable.  It happens every time fundamental meanings become too glaringly inconsistent  — and conflict turns utterly obdurate to any possible material conciliation.  From some elements of criminality to cultural fragmentation to the scorched-earth between inimical cultures, violent conflict can remain the only meaningful expression when fundamental meanings become too contradictory, too glaringly inconsistent — when meaning itself fails.

How can there be anything meaningful between fundamentally contradicting meanings?  There can’t.  Not if the contradictions are indeed fundamental.  Not until one or all fundamentally contradicting voices are silenced.

Is it really hopeless, then?  Why not simply abandon contradicting meanings and truths?  Why not just give up the most divisive cultural differences?  What’s wrong with sticking to facts?

Unfortunately, we can’t.  For while more scientific stories may remain provisional, subject to refutation by experience – the precise opposite applies to cultural narratives.  We can give up our cosmologies on the basis of new evidence arriving from one day to the next.  But we can’t alter our fundamental cultural meanings, principles, and truths that way.  We could never shuffle the identities of peoples and nations so provisionally — even if we wanted to.

Culture must continually provide sufficient agreement in fundamental meanings.  The most basic coherence giving rise to the possibility of human society.  It is the ideal and ideological counter-factual glue to hold peoples, tribes, nations together against almost any disruption by experience.  But even while consistency within cultures provides invisible bonds of common thought — and the cloying bondage of common thinking.  Even while cultural consistency keeps peoples living and working together.  Contradictions between cultures can bring about yet greater incoherence.  The meaningless, violent incoherence of ideologically entrenched contradictions between cultures.  The endless human conflicts not caused — but entailed by fundamental contradictions in meaning.

Regardless whether ideological deadlock occurs on relatively small scales — as it did during the 2008/09 strike at York University.  Or if it occurs large-scale as in the Middle-East.  Or if it occurs on an absolute scale as between almost every human culture and nature.  There cannot be meaningful resolution to conflict when meaning itself fails.

By eliciting the expressions of ideologically deadlocked cultural contradictions, the Ultimate Culture Clash seeks to interrogate culture itself.  Whether there can be any meaningful way to address cultural contradiction.  Because the question is not whether cultures clash.  The question is whether they can ever stop clashing.  Particularly now, with our world so precariously hinging in the balance.

By cupedoll, on February 3rd, 2010

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