Better Conflict

The Third Harmony draws on practitioners of nonviolence in different areas to begin to suggest its universality.  In this brief selection from the film three experts in conflict resolution—the parent science, as it were, of nonviolence— drawing on their wide-ranging experiences, point up what we might call the vulnerability of violence: that despite appearances to the contrary, we human beings recoil from doing violence to another and thereby violating our sense, however vague at present, of the unity of all that lives.  Here we have an explanation for the phenomenon of “moral injury,” the mental suffering we undergo when we inflict suffering on others.

On the level of conflict resolution—that is, the early stage of conflict, before acrimony and outright violence break out —we are already drawing on that vulnerability.  This becomes even more dramatic, as Quaker activist George Lakey points out, when conflict reaches that later stage.  As Bernard “Doc” Lafayette testifies, the effects of an appeal to that vulnerability can appear to be a “miracle.”