Happy families

Steven Spielberg captures it so well: our image of the Good Life centres on a loving family. Arguably, our politics reflect our different presumptions about how to map that to civil life. Or perhaps, how to recover in adult society a remembered or imagined happiness. Pinker reminds us of the lessons of evolutionary psychology: that families encompass real conflicts of interest, between siblings, and between parents and children.

If communication helps to reduce conflict, it isn’t because conflicts just conceal misunderstandings. Where interests conflict, resolution needs some larger context in which the combatants share an interest. In families, the family itself is so prioritised, by culture and by inherited behaviours.

Sisters of Mercy Other groupings present themselves as extended families to adduce for themselves the priority we innately give to family. Brothers in arms, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Family of Man; liberté, egalité, fraternité; blessed are the cheesemakers. (If the purpose is to control conflict, brotherhood naturally figures more prominently than sisterhood.)

Without an overriding common interest, communication has nothing to offer.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel Fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of Creation.
Douglas Adams · The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Killing one’s adversary is the ultimate conflict resolution technique.
M. Daly & M. Wilson · Homicide, cited in Pinker

If we’re going to have peace in the Middle East, we’re going first to find interests in common. The more I learn about what happened there over the last century or so, the more challenging a task that seems.

We could start by identifying and acknowledging why we (Britain and the US) invaded Iraq. We can now be confident it wasn’t for the reasons given so we voters so could approve the expense of blood and treasure. It was some other agenda. But what that was remains a matter for speculation.

I suspect that the deception is of the kind we practise on ourselves; we deceive ourselves about our motives to preserve our manifest sincerity as Good Joes. Tony Blair is the poster boy for Sincerity. When we start telling the truth to ourselves about our motives, we can start dealing with the consequences. I shall have more to say in this line later.