Partnerships are a way of promoting a kind of dissonance, especially for partners for whom conflict is muffled, baffled and starved of opportunity.
Ruth Duek discusses dialogue in impossible situations, in her examination of ‘antagonism’ rather than ‘agonism’ in Israeli:Palestian negotiations. One of the things she says is:
‘In the conflict between narcissism versus object love lies the danger of empathising too much with your adversary and possibly forgetting to guard your own interests….Within this conflict lies the danger of dialogue. If I understand and empathise with my adversary, I might come to love him, and this could lead to my rejecting my own identity.
So, I risk over-identifying with my adversary, who in some ways is my other – or at least an-other, if not a representation of the ‘the other’. I lose sight of my interests – and those that I represent. And in another important sense, I might lose sight of my interest, as expressed in my behaviour. Ruth Duek quotes David Bohm in this connection:
‘As David Bohm said, the point of dialogue is “not concerned with deliberately trying to alter or change behaviour” (Bohm, Factor and Garrett, 1991) but this threat may be implicit for people who come to the dialogue setting. Each side thinks they will convince the other to agree with them. Each side fears they might be convinced to relinquish their own positions and their own identity.’
The narrative – rhetoric, maybe – of ‘behaviour change’ is becoming more and more explicit in public service partnerships. This is partly because of the evidence of behavioural economics – exemplified in public health campaigns, and popularised in Freakonomics – that suggest what we have treated as individual choice has way more to do with group identity and who I see as my peers (my equals) than it does with individual autonomy. I am less of a free agent, than an example of a demographic – consciously to others, and unconsciously to myself. I lose weight on a diet only if my peers – actual and imagined – are doing so; the same goes for quitting smoking, breast feeding etc
The authoritarian stance in government, and commerce, now, and in the near future, is likely to be to ‘promote behaviour change’. This trend dilute the opportunities for conflict, except in so far as partnerships contain a requisite diversity of non-equals. They need to be unequal enough, but not too much so. When I am intimate I am in relation to my equal to the extent that we can risk some conflict – indeed, it is always there to come back to, so equal are we.
Slingshot