I was visiting my mother in my home town up North over the Thanksgiving weekend. The weather was mostly glorious: cool, dry, sunny. There were still leaves on the trees: red maples, yellow birches, orange oaks, iridescent spikes amidst the grey-green needles of spruces, pines, and cedars. I was able to indulge one of my favourite simple pleasures: to walk aimlessly in the bush in the morning, impelled by the joy of forward motion, enlivened by the autumn chill, stepping without orienting goal, just moving in open space, alone for an hour, my mind and eye open to whatever presents itself– maybe I tarry with a thought, but most I let go, perhaps a bird or tree catches my attention, but I don’t stop– I am not hunting for stories to tell but seeking release from the demands of projects, the freedom of moving my feet.

I wondered: what if, instead of baroque boardrooms and imposing wooden tables covered with laptops, important papers, and crystal pitchers full of water, surrounded by aides and flunkies, cameras and microphones, the political leaders of two sides locked in conflict met at the edge of the bush and walked side by side, deeper and deeper into the trees, without security personnel, unobserved by the media, in whatever clothes they normally wear at home when no one is looking. It takes profound trust to walk into the bush with a stranger. Each would be wary, the first steps around the corner past which they could not be seen would be taken with trepidation. But if they kept going they would both feel that release from tension that all good walks produce.

Then, maybe they could start to think outside of the self-enclosed dogma-worlds of politics. Looking down, they would see their different shoes supported by the same ground. Listening, they could hear the silence of the earth and feel its indifference. The earth supports whomever walks upon it; it does not recognize borders; it does not care about traditions; it does not speak human languages. Above, the sky would not look down upon them: it too is just there, indifferent to what goes on down below. If they could hold their tongues (but, alas, as Spinoza says, even though “the human condition would would indeed be far happier if it were equally in men’s power to keep silent as to talk … experience teaches with abundant examples that nothing is less within men’s power than to …hold their tongues.” Ethics Part 3, Scholium Proposition 2) but if they could, perhaps the felt indifference of sky and earth would help them put their historical conflicts into geological perspective.

History is short, geology is long. A century of tension and war is as nothing to the 4 billion year old planet, the 13 billion year old universe. Maybe, if they shut up long enough, and there were no cameras to posture in front of, no one to hear the pithy catch phrase or slogan, the thought would take shape in both of their heads that neither of them, nor the people they represent or claim to represent, live for even a century, and, therefore, if they are to enjoy the goods of mortal life, they have to enjoy them right now and not in some future that never arrives in which absolute justice would have been been attained.

Perhaps cool, still morning air would calm their passions and their measured steps would slow their thoughts. After kilometers, perhaps, Spinoza’s desire to talk would overcome them and they would both start to speak at once, but, freed from the coiled tension of enclosed spaces, they would both stop and say: “you first.” And that willingness to mutually yield would teach them that both of them have something to say and the right to say it, but if they shout slogans at each other at the same time, neither one will get across what they intend to say. And then, perhaps, they would realize that they are capable of staying silent and listening, and that it takes strength and courage to hold one’s tongue so that the other can speak.

They would have to mutually adjust their pace so that they stayed side by side so that one could hear when the other talked. They would give themselves over to the spontaneous logic of footsteps and conversations: walks end when the walker gets tired, talks end when neither side has anything more to say. A walk is not a race, a discussion is not a speech. Just as there is strength in silence there is strength in giving ourselves over to spontaneous dynamics. We lose sense of the passage of time, we lose sense of our self as controlling ego, we become part of a process that embraces our interests but in a more comprehensive unity with the interests of others and the world in which those interests are formed. We recognize ourselves as an active power, but in an order of things that we did not invent and cannot one-sidedly control. All understanding is understanding of limits; all understanding of limits is recognition of the implications of interconnection and relationship.

Socialists have paid much attention to political and economic structures, historical forces, and the dynamics of social struggle, but relatively little to the people that stand in social relations to each other. They have paid little attention to the inner dynamics by which people might change themselves, to free themselves from ancient hatreds, from the desire to punish and harm, convictions of absolute superiority and the righteousness and heroism of sacrifice They have tended to see personal transformation as a sub-political problem that will be mechanically solved by institutional changes. But people who are motivated by hatred, by belief in their superiority, by the need to be absolutely right will not transform into receptive, open, people capable of understanding others’ perspectives just because they succeed in making an institutional change. They will just be the same people in different institutions, and treat people as they have always treated them: as subordinates whose job is to do what they are told. Resources might be spread around somewhat differently, but social relationships, at a depth, emotional-ethical level will not have changed. Old conflicts will re-appear in new forms so long as we cannot walk side by side with people and listen to what they have to say.

Political conflicts are ultimately relationships between people, and in relationships, both sides are causally implicated in their dynamics. If they are dysfunctional, both sides will have to understand their role and change themselves. Activists might fantasize that the opponent will be completely overcome by the righteousness of their cause, but total victory that would eliminate the opponent entirely is never possible, and even if it were, it would require such monstrous levels of life-destruction that the outcome would be as bad or worse as the system it was supposed to replace and improve upon. There will be no solution to destructive human conflicts until individual people learn to relate to each other as human beings: free from ceremony and symbolism, free from history, free from rhetorical posturing, free from ritualistic displays of power and superiority, and, most of all, free from the belief that their side is absolutely right and the other side absolutely wrong.

Another way of putting this point is to say, simply, that warring sides need to learn to communicate. Communication is reciprocal: one side talks, the other side listens, back and forth until agreement is reached. Marxists tend to pay most attention to Hegel’s master slave dialectic, but they have to keep reading, to the end of Chapter Six, to find out how Spirit becomes self-consciously present to itself. Individuals recognize that they are essentially spirit (social self-conscious agents) when they forgive each other for their failures. Forgiveness is the highest form of recognition: since we are finite and fallible mistakes are inevitable, but since we are all parts of the same social whole, we have to live with each other. Freedom becomes a concrete reality in a society in which each recognizes themselves as parts of a greater whole, accepts their own and, crucially, others’ limitations. Cooperation presupposes that on its own each side is incapable of accomplishing its goals, but together they can create a world in which each of them can fully develop, contribute, and enjoy. Until people want that for the other as much as for themselves there will be no end to violent antagonism.