The Good, the Bad and the Conflict: Dream, Come True?

A commonly shared story dates the first sign of civilization back 15.000 years ago to – a healed femur bone. This claim has been attributed to an anthropologist named Margaret Mead, who was asked that question by her student. She continued to explain that, in nature, animals were hunted and eaten before they could heal. Thus, a healed femur bone (the largest bone, connecting the hip to the knee) meant the injured person received help from others in order to survive.

To believe in this story or not is irrelevant to this article but it paints an interesting picture of why people believe in it – because we deeply believe that humans are not only capable of doing good, but that doing good is a part of who we are. But is this really true or do we just hold ourselves to a (very) high standard?

Why is kindness a virtue?

It is strange to view beneficial actions and peaceful opinions as an exception to human nature that needs to be praised when present. Especially since humans are social animals that have been prosperous because of the actions of a few, for the benefit of many. The entire world kept on changing (and still is) because conflicts keep being introduced and solved, for better or for worse. And the solution was often spearheaded by one prevailing thought, usually championed by a small faction or even a single person.

To put this into context: by some calculations there have been 50 billion people on Earth in the past 2000 years but much of modern civilization is built on the preaching of two men who lived roughly 1950 years apart. The first one followed a non-conflict philosophy of loving each other and forgiving those who had wronged you; the other one acknowledged that conflict existed in human relationships but saw a solution in equality amongst people in everything but the human character. But, alas, both men met a tragic end because they usurped the status quo and introduced conflict to the ruling ideas of their times. A conflict which was met with negative reactions.

Conflict, what is it good for?

The truth is it is impossible to qualify humanity as good or bad or the conflict it is built upon, for that matter. James Gordon Rice, an associate professor in anthropology at HÍ brings up that notion several times when talking about the complexity of researching conflict.

“‘Conflict’ implies a clash between opposing views or a struggle between parties. It can refer to intimate, low-scale interpersonal conflicts between individuals or small groups of people, […] to large-scale, global conflicts between nation states or multinational blocs like NATO with other factions. On my part, I tend to leave the macro-level approach to historians, political scientists, and security studies and interpersonal conflict to others like psychologists. Anthropologists tend to work more at a mid-range.”

He goes on by comparing two different studies that seemingly oppose each other as they put a different importance on the conflict in their communities.

“Jean Briggs published a famous ethnography in the early 1970s called Never in Anger, with one of the last groups of Inuit people in Canada’s arctic, living what you could call in a ‘traditional’ manner. In this environment, conflict and expressions of emotion, especially anger, are held in check. Infants and children are expected to lose control of their emotions, not adults, with anger being the most frowned upon form in this society, let alone open conflict. In contrast, around the same time Napoleon Chagnon published the controversial The Fierce People, an ethnography of an Amazonian people, the Yanomamö, which portrayed a rather stark opposite, in which violence was not only seen as a legitimate means to an end, but basically a virtue.”

Honoring his profession and personal interests, James believes that the connotation of conflict being at the heart of human nature is an unnecessary conversation to have because if we are to learn from it and move forward, we can only do so by focusing on the social aspect of it.

“Changing our nature as a response may not be possible or practical, so what we get are social responses and this is how we have handled conflict throughout history, for better or worse - customs, mediation, morals, ethics, laws, forms of punishment, warfare and so forth designed to deal with conflict prevention or resolution.”

I have a cheek...

Many aspects of life are not intrinsically good or bad; it is rather the human reaction to it that gives it the moral and ethical value. Conflict is just like that – the state of things, the fact of the matter – that can bring positive or a negative income, depending on the people involved, their internal beliefs, and the strength of their convictions. It is unfortunate that those few that have the power to incite changes and direct the conflicts, often act out of the interests of specific groups they themselves belong to or represent. So much of the modern world is unfair, unjust and unbalanced but only because it is built on fragility of the ego, by flawed beings.

Maybe the right path forward lies in the hands of the many, where the interest of the greater good would be put above the individualistic values that the modern world nourishes. Maybe if humans were inherently good the conflicts we would face would always take us one step forward into a better world. But until then we are left with the other cheek, a dream and the knowledge that no amount of fizzy drinks commercials with “famous” people will help solve it.