Is It Possible for Humanity to Create a Peaceful World with Religion in it?

[The Grand Nudger]

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that mediation is the key to solving the world's toughest problems.   In writing this post, my aim is to suggest that mediation, along with the constructive conflict resolution techniques that it employs, may be helpful in our quest to understand those whose sense-making processes are radically different from our own.  What do you think?

I think that we -do- use mediation, on a regular basis, and always have.  It's not a new idea, though it has many new descriptions.  The world you see before you is a product opf that, and it will work as far as it already does and already has....but it won;t yield something that it hasn't...it won't make the world more peaceful than it already has or does or is. I'd say that we do have a very human interest and concern..but remember, all that destructive this that and the other, as you would put it, have lead us here, to where we are.  We didn't get here by being what we -weren't-, and mediation implies that the mediator can control the situation and parties.  How might -that- be achieved, one wonders?  This sort of thing is precisely what a victorous army might do after subjugating two other warring factions, for the common good, at least insomuch as that conquering army sees it.

If mediation -isn't- the key to solving the worlds toughest problems, then in in what way does it lead to a more peaceful world in any meaningful sense beyond anything that we already do?  If mediation could, for example..help my wife and I who already don;t go to blows over what to watch on TV, but not stop people from legitimate conflict over limited resources.........then what are we talking about?  Ways to make the already civil, already comfortable, already peaceful......mediated?   It seems so much smaller than it's being made out to be, so much more myopic in scope and expected effect.

I'm still not sure what the problem we're applying this -to- is supposed to be. That people are in conflict. In a workplace environment? Sure, why not, but I actually appreciate conflict in business..we like to scrub the term and call it competition...but it's just another way to allow ourselves to express that human concern while simultaneously creating counterproductive taboos. That people are in conflict between each other personally? Most of those conflicts are resolved as a matter of course and more than a few are legitimate - we have mediators here too, marriage council for example. That people are in conflict militarily, at the level of groups or nations? Now we're approaching tough problems, bu I'm not sure how you could mediate genocide - as an example, without, for example, first proving yourself as the mediator to be more powerful and more, at least potentially, destructive than either of the two bickering factions. If they could be talked into "x" without that show of force....unless we're assuming something incredible about ourselves and entirely shitty about both of those groups...they'd have come to that realization on their own. T my mind, any talk of mediation in a tough problem is just talk of being big brother..and imposing our value sets, by force, on groups with legitimate inter-group concerns. To save the day for the savages while ignoring that we must b the kings of the savages to even accomplish this....and in any "less than tough" problem, it's almost a non-issue. It's what we do, though there are many other ways we achieve the same effect. My children appeal to me to settle their disagreements and I do so.

All of this is riding on the assumption that we have a failure of understanding, ofc, the implication that this failure of understanding is the underlaying source of some conflict. Well, there, you and I will never agree. I understood the people who I was deployed against. There was no such failure. They understood me. There was no such failure. We didn't require a mediator to come to this understanding, and possessing it did not cease the conflict. It's as if you're wondering whether or not you might be able to chop down an oak with a butter knife, mediation only works in context of difficult problems when both parties are already relatively peaceful or can be made to be peaceful...and then, it's the "made to be' that's making things peaceful, not mediation. The parties agree in the presence of the mediator, wait a generation or two (or just a few years, sometimes) for the mediator to leave, and go right back at it...and that;s becase mediation doesn;t solve the problem that led to the conflict, it;s just a temporary state of refereeing the conflict. The scarcity of resources will -still- exist when the mediator declares "mission accomplished" and leaves, for example. The intractable ideological differences, that we have to preserve whle embracing each other to be consistent with previous statements, not based upon any lack of understanding, will persist in the face of mediation and long after mediation has ceased.

I don't mean to sound as if I think mediation is useless, I don;t. Just that the notion that it will make a more peaceful world than it already has, or is a solution to some, but not the toughest x, seems like a bit of a deepity to me. You;ve studied it, it;s an area of interest for you, I'm sure you can imagine utility where others do not see it...but that's to be expected. I think my areas of interest are applicable beyond their current deployment as well, but I try to remind myself that they simply cannot be -everything- I like to imagine them to be, or he world would be a very different place already, lol.