Part Two: The Conflict Resolver’s Paradoxical Identity

Readings:

The Conflict Resolver’s Paradoxical Identity: From Conflicted to Hybrid by Robert Gould (pre-publication version)

DuMont, R. A., Hastings, Tom H., & Noma, Emiko. (2013). Conflict transformation : essays on methods of nonviolence. McFarland & Company, Inc.,

Quote:

“You are a longitude and a latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non-subjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its singularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it.”

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, p. 162)

Key Difference and Dilemma of Identity Difference

Statistically and culturally, some identity groups are oppressed and some identity groups are privileged. The conflicts between individuals of oppressed groups and individuals from privileged groups must be transformed by giving more power and voice to the individuals from oppressed identity groups and less power and voice to individuals from privileged identity groups.

On the other side of this difference and dilemma, individual persons, throughout all identity groups, differ widely in their experiences, their levels of suffering, and their levels of resilience. Some individuals from oppressed identity groups have had more privileges than individuals from so called privileged identity groups, though this is certainly not the norm.

Review of List of Navigation Strategies for Seemingly Intractable Conflicts, Differences, and Dilemmas:

Introduction:

Why should conflict facilitators think about identity? Many conflict resolvers are trained to hold and enforce the process, and let the disputants work through the differences that they have with each other. Often, the disputants are encouraged to find common ground amongst their contrasting or conflicting interests. Once this common ground is found, then a resolution or strategy can be developed that helps them work productively together, whether in the workplace, neighborhood, interest group, or home. In all of this work, why is it necessary to examine, or worry about, the identities of the disputants or the process facilitator?

This objection to thinking about identity, within the techniques of conflict facilitation, is reasonable. Consequently, many conflict-process trainings focus on just those techniques, with no need to go deeper. However, I suggest that we can improve our ability to positively facilitate conflicts of many different types, if we examine the different ways that people identify themselves and are identified by others. In the following, make the case for paying attention to identity, and I make some suggestions about how to do that before, during, and after a facilitation session with disputants.

Dilemmas of the Role of Identity in Conflicts:

• Can internalized oppression be overcome or will it always be part of the fabric of human life?
• How much do I choose my identity and how much does my social group determine my identity?

Is internalized oppression curable or inevitable?

Internalized oppression occurs when individuals and social groups internalize the negative imagery and labels that come from one’s lifelong exposure to prejudice, negativity, fear, disrespect, stereotyping. For example, the narratives of hate for minority groups can be internalized by members of minority groups (race, gender-fluidity, sexual orientation, transgender, etc.), so that they have an internal voice of self-hate. Therefore, in mainstream society, minority groups are oppressed directly and through internalized oppression—two devils to curse them from the greater society.

Technically, mainstream white people do not experience internalized oppression though they might have self-hate for other reasons (appearance, poverty, ignorance, disability, etc.) Therefore, mainstream white people may suffer from severe forms of psychological self-hate, but they are not victims of internalized oppression.

The distinction between socially-enforced internalized oppression and psychologically-enforced self-hate is a difficult to be clearly defined because people define minority groups differently, and because those suffering from internalized oppression may also suffer from self-hate.

As conflict facilitators, we must remember that disputants may suffer from internalized oppression and/or self-hate, and this fact may impact the conflict at hand. In preliminary interviews with disputants, we cannot directly bring up internalized oppression and self-hate because disputants are likely to experience questions associated with these two psychological dynamics as too personal. People who suffer these two pathologies can experience them as undermining the positivity of their identities, so we need to be sensitive to any indication that negative identities are playing a role in driving the conflict at hand. If conflict facilitators suspect that internalized oppression and self-hate are aggravating the conflict, then they will need to gently raise a concern that the conflict may involve triggers that are based on identity issues.

How can internalized oppression and self-hate be overcome?

Since self-hate is largely a psychological problem, it can be addressed in psychotherapy and a treatment plan can be recommended to strengthen one’s self-image and confidence. On the other hand, the roots of internalized oppression are deeply social, cultural, and economic. People suffering the psychological effects of internalized oppression might find help with the same kind of psychotherapy, as those with self-hate. However, the larger social oppressions and injustices do not go away without radical social change. By some measures, positive social change is happening; however, on other measures, negatives remain—and, sometimes, are getting worse.

Who chooses one’s identity: oneself or one’s peer group?

Personal Observation: When I wanted to change my identity, I changed by social, work, and neighborhood groups. My new groups reinforced my new identity; however, I still can feel out of place because my old identities are still present in my personality, and reflected in the people from my past.

However, there are people who cannot, or do not, want to change, even if their social group identity is causing conflicts for them?

From these observations, it becomes clear that peer groups can dominate one’s identity (on the one end of a continuum) and other people rebel against peer group identity (at the other end of the continuum). Consequently, some people choose their identity and some people let their social group choose their identity. However, in a certain circumstance, like a conflict, it may be difficult to know how much identity plays a role in the dispute because rebels might conform to other rebels, in one context, and rebel from peers in another. To resolve this muddle, a conflict facilitator needs to investigate the role of identity in each particular conflict.

Getting Stuck in Ones Identity to the Extent of Intolerance for Different Identities

People get unproductively and negatively stuck in their identities when they cannot tolerate different identities. They believe that their identity and personal preferences are better than others. This identity-rigidity will sometimes be the conflict, or at least potentially aggravate a conflict.

Conflict facilitators first need to model empathy and acceptance of difference and diversity. This sort of universal empathy and acceptance seems to require conflict facilitators to positively identify with others. To be a good model for empathy and acceptance is to be continually aware of one’s tendency to dislike or hate other people. For example, if a conflict facilitator dislikes criminals, or even hates some of them, then it will not be a good fit for that person to work in the field of victim-offender reconciliation or restoration.

The conflict process itself needs to foster empathy and acceptance—to encourage disputants to be able to walk in another’s shoes. Asking disputants to paraphrase and validate each other’s feelings and experiences within the conflict process is a way to create a climate of empathy and acceptance.

Seeking positive identification of difference and diversity can create inner conflict.

When disputants validate each other’s difference and diversity in a conflict, each disputant may internalize the different values and identities present in the conflict, creating an inner conflict (cognitive dissonance). However, this conflict can be resolved by positive identity hybridization. Such hybridization positively internalizes the Other, making empathy authentic. The problem with this is that it also complicates one sense of identity. Once hybridized, who am I?

“Who am I?” is one of the most vexing questions we can ask ourselves. Much more mysterious that asking ourselves what we want for breakfast. Well, pretty much all of the big questions are mysterious: Why did I come into existence? What happens when I die? What career should I seek? What talents should I develop? What is the meaning of life? Are people telling me the truth? Who can I really count on? Why is life so stressful? Do I really know those close to me? Are humans fundamentally flawed? Do animals have a sense of humor, and are they laughing at us behind our backs? Other questions about day to day life are much easier to answer. Why are the hard questions so hard? Why all the mysteries?

“Who am I?” gets more complex as the world gets smaller:

Questions about identity haunt us in more complex ways as we are exposed to increasingly diverse cultures and philosophies. Both globalists and nationalists are challenged by the problems of identity. The quest to understand identity started long ago within many different traditions. In the Western philosophical tradition, the notion of “identity” seems to start with the question, “How shall we think about an object’s identity?” The key to an object’s identity has been understood as its stability. On some level, it was supposed that every object has an identity that does not fundamentally change.

Plato and the Forms:

Plato thought that this fundamental identity resided in the realm of the Forms. We might think of energy as a fundamental identity. As an example, the capacity of firewood to heat a room is in its potential thermal energy. When that potential is transformed into thermal energy, the energy is transformed from a material state to thermal energy state. In this way, the thermal energy of firewood retains its identity at the level of energy (though firewood and fire seem to be quite different!). The law of conservation of energy seems to reinforce this idea. If we say that the energy of physical objects is their fundamental identity, then that fundamental identity seems stable and is conserved over time. However, we are really only saying that there is one object in the universe that has a fundamental identity and that is energy, if energy can be considered an object at all.

Subatomic Identity:

However, when we investigate energy further, we move to the subatomic arena, where pre-quantum mechanics, physical laws are being challenged, and even the continuity of energy may not be so unproblematic. Most importantly, we may find that, in the case of some objects, their identity may only remain stable for a moment in time and space, hardly reassuring if we are trying to find identity stability.

Our notion of identity becomes even more complicated when we consider animate objects.

Human Identity:

We say that someone’s identity can change over time, like when someone changes occupations, religion, nationality, etc.; but does that mean that their fundamental identity has changed? Is there something about a person that never changes? A person’s history may remain the same, but that means that one’s identity only covers the past—“I was that, then.” However, it is often the most dramatically interesting to witness a transformation in a person’s identity, going forward in time, like when she is born, marries, dies, or is transformed by a powerful experience. Conflict work is just such an activity where people can be transformed by the powerful experience of identity transformation and hybridization. And for conflict facilitators, there are two potential identity hybridizations: the disputants, and the conflict facilitator herself.

Do indigenous people have a clearer sense of who they are?

Indigenous people, who have not been thoroughly submerged under the cultural domination of “civilized people,” seem to know who they are. They are members of families and communities (tribes, bands, villages). They have gone through rites of passage that confirm at least three kinds of comingled identities: their unique individuality (encoded in their names); their collective identity, shared with family, community, and traditions; and their fundamental identity, as creatures of nature and the earth.

These identities are so stable that the question of “Who am I?” may only arise in their rites of passage, which is designed to provide the answers to this question.

What identity-producing rites of passage remain for those outside of intact indigenous groups?

In the “civilized world,” we have generally lost the kinds of rites of passage that define indigenous people. In that void, we struggle to understand who we are. We tend to turn to identity groups, whether that is the family, peers, fellow facilitators, or other identity groupings, focused on race, ethnicity, orientation, interests, politics, or habits. The irony of these identity groups is that, while supporting something that each group member has in common, they tend to deny the parts of individuals that differ from other members of the group. Rather than help individuals find their unique identities, identity groups can submerge the true differences of the individuals involved, and force group members to suppress differences in themselves that challenge the peer identity and groupthink.

Personal Story:

Over the years, I have insisted on asserting my differences, and have, therefore, been subtly and passively excluded from group affiliations over the years. Now, I am content to live on the borderline of many identity groups, never fully embracing a single identity group—and never being fully embraced by any identity group. Other conflict facilitators may find this to be true for them, as well. My somewhat fragmented community is a non-group of diverse friendships, who, if I asked them to be in one room, may find out that the only thing they have in common–is me! And, more importantly, that they are all nice, decent people.

Identity Conflict:

Perhaps the most crucial difference facing humankind is the difference between identities. Privileged identities fight to keep their power. Oppressed identities fight to gain power. Some people mask their real identities because of shame or fears of prejudice, while others create artificial identities to make themselves appear to have more power, status, wealth, and influence than they think they would have if they didn’t create these false perceptions. National, ethnic, and revolutionary identities fuel conquest and war. People internalize the identities projected upon them by external cultures, institutions, and the media. These internalized identities can generate internalized oppression or internalized superiority. These identity differences show up, in varying degrees in almost every imaginable conflict. Therefore, we must learn to recognize identity differences to get a clearer idea of the dynamics between disputants.

The role of identity in collaborative processes:

In typical Western conflict facilitation processes, the identity difference between the mediator/facilitator and the disputants can also create a dynamic that disputants can experience as manipulative. I have been in group discussions where the mediator clearly had an agenda and sided with one faction of the group, at least partly because the mediator was hired by management, and the mediator understood the conflict from the perspective of management. Because someone has hired a mediator/facilitator, the mediator/facilitator has a bias toward her future employment by the hiring body. So, sometimes unconsciously, the mediator/facilitator absorbs the perspective of the hiring body or some other biasing perspective. Even in cases where the mediator/facilitator is a volunteer, there are unconscious biases that can emerge from the mediator/facilitator that disputants need to call out. Only a mediation, that fully empowers disputants to monitor and challenge the mediation, can be called fully collaborative. Again, if a collaborative process is not fully collaborative, it cannot legitimately be called a collaborative process. All participants in a collaborative process need to make sure that it is consistently democratic.

Black and white identity in the 1960s and 1970s:

Eldridge Cleaver, in “Soul on Ice,” writes about the identity difference between African Americans and White Euro-Americans. In this first part of his writing, he harshly portrays white people. In the second part of his work, he portrays young white people as potential allies in the struggle for the full liberation of African Americans. By giving both judgmental and compassionate perspectives on white people, he encourages us to navigate between the two, mindful of the negative view, and building on the positive view. This tradition of criticism and alliance continues in social justice work today.

Identity Survival:

I suggest that human beings struggle for survival on many levels. Obviously, we struggle for physical survival because of so many threats to our bodies and minds. We also struggle for identity survival, where we try to find our true identity—the real me—and we struggle to be accepted as a respected person, being our “real me” by the acceptance of our peers. We also have our aspirational identity, our dream of who we want to be—who we want to be that will be considered successful by our peers. All of these struggles for different levels of survival are at play in conflicts.

Dilemma of Paradoxical Identity: If we internalize more than one identity, how do we navigate the conflicts between these identities?

Internal, as well as external, conflict work:

We often think of conflict work as an external process, where conflicts are resolved between people. However, we also know that successful conflict facilitators address their own anxieties that are driven by internal conflicts. This internal work is crucial, so that conflict facilitators can provide a peaceful presence that will ease the stresses of conflict, and also prevent the problem of facilitators projecting inner conflicts upon disputants.

In this section, I propose that conflict facilitators develop a mixed identity, beyond mere exposure to different identities, but internalizing them to the degree that they become part of one’s own sensibility. This hybridization process is not meant to replace our fundamental sense of ourselves, our histories, our experiences; rather, it is meant to help us navigate between identities, even help others translate experiences across the gulf of difference.

Bicultural people have the advantage of already being culturally hybridized:

Bicultural people often have the capacity to translate between two cultural identities, so they have an advantage over mono-cultural people (white people in the U.S.), when it comes to conflict work. Of course, bicultural people may have one of their cultural identities subjugated to white culture, so they need to be aware of the way that this subjugation can generate internalized oppression in themselves and the oppressed people they work with.

Cultural Oppression and Internalized Oppression:

An awareness of the connection between cultural oppression and internalized oppression is crucial because those with oppressed identities, who choose to be conflict facilitators, must not hybridize themselves with their oppressors’ ideas of who they should be. In the United States, internalized oppression means a degree of self-hate, leading to a rejection of oppressed identities. Consequently, oppressed people are psychologically forced to identify with white culture, being more heteronormative, more fixed-gendered, more able-bodied biased.

White People Hybridization is Different from Oppressed People Hybridization:

The hybridizing of Eurocentric, heteronormative, white people is quite different than for those oppressed by the dominant culture. Conflict facilitators, who have been defined by the terms of oppression, need to affirm and cultivate a thoroughly positive identity, not contaminated by the dynamics of internalized oppression. Hopefully, oppressed people’s hybridization is built on the positive experiences that they have had with members of the dominant majority. As a white person, I hope that oppressed people will have more positive experiences with white people!

Deep Empathy:

In addition, I suggest that successful conflict facilitation depends on deep empathy—and such deep empathy requires one to be able to authentically identify with other people—not completely, as that would be impossible—but enough to make a connection. This sort of empathy seems to require conflict facilitators to identify with others, and this identification process can create an internal identity conflict. However, this conflict can be resolved by internal identity hybridization.

Identity Hybridization:

This hybridization internalizes the Other, making empathy authentic. The problem with this is that it also complicates one sense of identity. Once hybridized, who am I? Uncertainty in how to answer this question can lead one back to a less hybridized sense of self. The aim of this chapter is to help hybridized people feel comfortable in their evolving identity so that they need not retreat to less complex forms of identity that can recreate internal conflicts, and exacerbate distances within the external conflict facilitation process.

Both Singular and Multiple Identities:

My proposed solution is that conflict facilitators think of their identity as both singular and a synthesized multiple. The tension between singular and multiple identities is tragically dramatized by the 2011 mass killing (77 dead) in Norway by someone who believed in preserving a Norwegian ethnic purity at the expense of the most vicious ethnic cleansing. This kind of tension happens, usually much less tragically, throughout the globe and in each of our daily lives, by the way that we manage difference and diversity.

Identity Alternatives for Conflict Facilitators:

In this context, the field of conflict facilitation can proceed in the following five ways

1. Singular Identity: Neutral to disputants; advocate for a neutral process. First, a conflict facilitator can perform the techniques of conflict facilitation, while keeping the conflict at a safe distance, never internalizing the identities of the disputants, and never changing one’s professional identity as a conflict facilitator. In this mode, the conflict facilitator does not ask the disputants to identify with other disputants and internalize each other’s identities. In other words, the conflict facilitation process is not an experience of transformative empathy; it is merely the crafting of a win-win settlement of a conflict. The problem with this form conflict facilitation is that conflict processes are not culturally neutral; they carry cultural bias.
2. Singular Identity: Neutral to disputants; neutral to resolution or non-resolution. This form of conflict facilitation is not ethically required to achieve resolution. The conflict work is understood as intrinsically enlightening, not goal directed. The problem with this view is that disputants may be wedded to the goal of resolution, and disappointed if none is achieved.
3. Singular: Neutral to disputants: advocate for power-balancing. This form of conflict facilitation is ethically required to transform human relations to be more equal and power-sharing, liberating us from power-over, oppressive, dynamics. The problem with this process is that disputants may be uncomfortable with the pressure to balance power and resist oppressive authority.
4. Singular Identity: Love and compassion to disputants; expectation of a compassionate resolution. In this form of conflict facilitation, conflict facilitators might adopt a Buddhist perspective, and embody love and compassion in the hopes of being a role model for the disputants. The problem with this form of conflict process is that there is pressure to resolve the conflict, where some conflicts are ill-served by hurrying a resolution.
5. Hybrid: Transformed identification for disputants and facilitators. In this conflict process, the conflict facilitator consciously seeks to internalize the identities of the disputants (being hybridized by them), and seek to be a role model for internalized transformation. I am interested in the third mode of conflict facilitation because I find it to be the most powerfully empathetic, without pressuring a hasty resolution. This form of conflict facilitation is ethically required to help transform and hybridize the identities of both disputants and facilitators, so that ongoing conflicts will be better understood and managed. The problem with this process is that disputants may be uncomfortable with the pressure of transformation and hybridization.

Therefore, conflict facilitators need to decide how much to adapt their processes to the expectations of disputants, and how much of their process needs to conform to their ethical imperatives. This is yet another dilemma for us to navigate.

The distinction between the fourth and fifth approaches to conflict facilitation is a subtle one, deserving more clarification. If I practice love and compassion for another, I might do so in an I-It, rather than an “I-Thou” relationship (Buber, 1970). In the “I-It” relationship, I may be loving and compassionate, but not fully connect to another person by not identifying with her or him. In the “I-Thou” relationship, one’s personal identity melts into the other and is internalized as part of a newly hybridized identity.

To state this simply, one is what one identifies with. At the very least, I am a professor, activist, husband, and outdoorsman. I identify with other professors, activists, husbands, and outdoorsmen. I socialize with them, I read what they write, and I imagine myself being like them. It doesn’t matter which is the cause and which is the effect, there is a crucial, cyclical reinforcement process that consolidates my hybridized identity. Understood this way, we are all hybridized to a certain extent.

Ongoing Hybridization:

However, I’m suggesting that conflict facilitators need to continually embrace this process with every conflict that they encounter, thus maximizing their hybridization, their connected empathy, and their success constructively working with conflict. However, I wonder whether this hybridization process creates a conflict around the stability of identity; does it make answering the question “Who am I?” unbearably difficult?

Who I am not:

Identity is a timeless question that haunts us in more complex ways, as we are exposed to increasingly diverse global philosophies and cultures because “who I am” is overshadowed by seemingly millions of other identities that I am not. The quest to understand identity started long ago within many different traditions.

This Identity of a Category:

In at least the Western philosophical tradition, “identity” categorizes things that are the same, and also shows how they are different from other categories of things. Europeans are the same as each other, in the sense that they are in the same category, and they are distinct from Africans. Additionally, European/Africans are a category that is different from Canadian/Africans. In these examples, identity is established by an external relationship.

Identity as a Self-Concept:

Identity gets more complicated when it is internalized into a self-concept. In our self-concepts, we might find our inner identity changing over time, or we might struggle to keep it the same in the face of our inner identity conflicts. We can be torn between having to re-categorize our identities and maintaining a singular category of identity.

Stable Universals Create Stable Identities:

Plato thought that the fundamental identity of different things resided in the realm of the Forms (Plato, 1966). In this realm, the Forms are stable universals or categories with continuity over time. What is interesting about this view is that it denies that basic categories might evolve and change. It also assumes that the world fits into tidy categories, rather than being mobile across a wide range of continua. However, what we thought was heroic might be different today than in Plato’s time. Even our notion of what it is to be human can evolve and change. On this view, our inner identities can switch categories, and the categories themselves can change.

Ethnic and National Identity as Eternal:

Nationalists might suppose that ethnic and national identity is eternal, but this seems to be rejected by the observation that ethnic and national identities are constantly changing because of changing circumstances and interests. (Said, 1995, p. 332).

What is a Person’s Fundamental Identity, When So Much Changes?

We say that someone’s identity can change over time, like when someone changes occupations, religion, nationality, etc.; but does that mean that their fundamental identity has changed? Is there something about a person that never changes when physical and psychological states are constantly subject to change? We say that it’s the same person who changes, but what makes her the same person? The history of a person may remain the same, but histories are subject to revision and reinterpretation, using different categories of description, and depending on who tells the history. Surely, one’s identity is projected into the future as one makes plans and engages challenges. One’s identity can be projected into the future. But how do we know that the future won’t dramatically change a person? We certainly cannot rely on the person’s name making her the same person over time because names change. So, where are we to turn to find a person’s fundamental identity?

Does One’s Soul Stay the Same?

We could say that the soul remains the same, even as the person changes; but where are we to find this soul? There is no empirical basis for it, so it has to be an object of belief. David Hume claimed that personal identity is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” (Hume, 1888, p. 252) I am happy to allow that some people presuppose the existence of the soul to reassure themselves that we have an identity that does not change.

However, there may be a better solution.

We might wonder if we need an essential something to justify that someone is the same person over time. Perhaps all we need to do is to have grounds to support the continuity of the person: I recognize her, or she reminds me that I know her. But this requires that she and I to have the capacity to remember this continuity. Amnesia or dementia may diminish this capacity, so how is she the same person?

Another Alternative:

We can argue that she is the same person because persons are such beings that have lifetimes and we understand a person as being the same person over his or her lifetime. A lifetime of person-singularity is what it is to be a person. So, we can establish what it is to be the same person over a lifetime, but this is from an external perspective.

What is it like to be the same person in one’s inner experience?

Our inner experience of identity emerges as we refer to ourselves as a “me” or “I” and reflect on what makes me “me.” Though we don’t stop referring to ourselves as “me” or “I” during our lives, our experience of being “me” or “I” certainly can change over a lifetime. Furthermore, psychological theory suggests that, although we might refer to ourselves as “me” or “I,” we do not have a unified self, but rather a framework of multiple selves, as we mature and age.

The Ego and the Alter:

For Baldwin (1897), there are two aspects of the self: the ego and the alter. The ego represents the way one thinks about oneself, and the alter represents the way one thinks of others. The various roles that one plays in life, and the various roles that others play in one’s life, are internalized into a framework of multiple egos and alters. Ogilvy (1977) says that our multiplicity of selves function with a decentralized organization. Each self interprets personal experience differently, based on different forms of interpretation. These different intrapersonal selves have different personalities, and our central sense of self is merely a mediator of a vast collection of relatively autonomous selves.

The Master Self:

Ouspensky (1949) suggests that one self becomes a temporary master over the other selves, but this mastery only lasts for less than thirty minutes until a new master takes over, while denying the existence of other selves. Clearly, a hybridized self is a potential product of Ogilvy’s mediated self, and the multiplicity-denying, singular self, falls in line with Ouspensky’s dominance-shifting self. In other words, both descriptions appear to describe different populations accurately. It seems that identity hybridization may happen quite naturally for people in diverse societies, and perhaps in monocultural societies as well. However, people may be in deep denial of their own hybridization.

Consciously embrace your hybridization:

I am suggesting that conflict facilitators may need to assert and embrace their hybridization, and affirm it as a powerful element of professional empathy, as well as their personal navigation across a culturally diverse world. One of the reasons that people have difficulty acknowledging and embracing hybridization is that we often think of ourselves in terms of a unitary self-concept. This self-concept is a person’s self-perception, which is formed by one’s experiences and interpretations. However, the unity of this self-concept is challenged because other people play a strong role in the formation, change, and maintenance of one’s self-concept. (Shavelson, Hubner, & Stanton, 1976).

Multifaceted Self-Concept:

Consequently, our self-concept is “multifaceted in that people categorize the vast amount of information they have about themselves and relate these categories to one another.” (Marsh & Shavelson, 1985). “Self-concept becomes increasingly multi-faceted as the individual moves from infancy to adulthood.” (ibid). Sometimes those changes in self-concept can happen quite quickly.

Witnessing the rapid transformation of one’s own identity is one of the most dramatically interesting events of one’s life, as when one grows up, marries, ages, or is changed by a powerful experience.

Conflict Processes and Identity Hybridization:

Conflict facilitation is a place where people can be transformed by the powerful experience of identity hybridization. For conflict facilitators, there are two potential identity hybridizations: the disputants, and the conflict facilitator herself. The identity hybridization of conflict facilitators can be an important aid to the conflict facilitation process, and as a role model for disputant transformation.

Buddhist Transformation:

Buddhists are particularly interested in transformation as they seek enlightenment, but they tend to believe that selfhood is an impediment to enlightenment. They tend to believe that in the face of universal change, one cannot find peace and stability in one’s self. One must reject the permanence of the self in favor of the permanence of background truths that seem to function like Plato’s forms, providing stability and balance in the face of the instability and imbalance in our daily experience. In Buddhism, one’s identity can be thought of as merely the instantiation of the principles of love and compassion. One takes refuge in the Buddha by embodying the principles that express his enlightenment. To the question of “who am I?” Buddhists can reply that “I” am not anything other than these eternal principles, infinite and everlasting. Not a bad trade-off.

Strongly Identified Buddhists:

Some Buddhists identify themselves as Buddhists and do not call themselves non-Buddhists. In their encounters with non-Buddhists, they do not internalize the other such that they become hybridized Buddhists and non-Buddhists. Rather, the Buddhist strives to become more perfectly or purely Buddhist, especially the devote monk. Even as these Buddhists may reject the self, they do not reject their “higher” principled identification, or their identification as a particular kind of Buddhist.

Buddhists who Minimize their Buddhist Identity:

However, there are other Buddhists who are comfortable identifying as Buddhists and non-Buddhists. They believe that their higher identification with love and compassion is their true identity, and unifies them with every other sort of identity. Therefore, the contradiction between Buddhist and non-Buddhist melts away, as a trivial identity issue.

Conflict facilitators hybridizing identity is similar to the latter kind of Buddhist.

Constantly hybridizing conflict facilitators changes their identity with each conflict they facilitate, or participate in as disputants. Whether the conflict is resolved or exacerbated—or even in non-professional occasions, they encounter another in an identity-transforming way. By doing this, conflict facilitators can indeed hybridize with the non-conflict facilitators within disputes. Conflict facilitators can be both conflict facilitators and non-conflict facilitators, without their identity being undermined. As an example, I am a professional conflict facilitator, but my wife is not; when we have conflicts, I identify with her to the degree that my identity as a conflict facilitator dissolves into our shared identity, as spouses working through a dispute.

Paradox of Singular and Multiple Identity:

This brings us back to an underlying question: If the reader agrees with me that it is desirable to cultivate identity hybridization to facilitate deep empathy, how does one make sense of one’s identity as having some kind of unity or singularity? Indeed, in the face of constant hybridization, who am I? When I become someone, who has elements of identities that used to not be me, I face the paradox of being both myself, and not myself. This dilemma is heightened by the observation that otherness or alterity may have a stronger role in identity formation than ego. (Therborn, 1995, p. 229). The force of others’ identities may be stronger than the force of our “me” because we define ourselves in terms of other people’s identities more than any created category of our own. This explains two phenomena: First, we can rather easily lose a unique sense of ourselves and be absorbed into the identities of others through imitation and role-internalization. Second, we may feel that we have to fight to maintain a unique sense of self. As Connolly (2002) explains, “Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.” (p. 64). We may need to construct difference and otherness in order to have any kind of identity.

Self-Certainty and the Necessity of Otherness:

From this, the question, “Who am I?” in the face of hybridization becomes even more problematic for conflict facilitators. We do not want to lose ourselves into the identities of the disputants, nor do we want to fight to maintain a fixed sense of our own uniqueness against the identity of others. Conflict facilitators should not answer the question “Who am I?” by simply asserting one of the following: “I am one of them” or “I am not one of them.”

The Singular Identity of our Past Narrative:

The provisional answer to this dilemma is to return to the singular identity of our past. If we need to have some comfort in knowing who we are, we might simply find that comfort in the singular conception of our past identity, combined with the satisfying achievement of adding new elements to our past identity, through the ongoing hybridization process. The recognition of a narrative that encompasses our singular life can grant us the ongoing identity-singularity that we find necessary.

Overcoming identity conflicts, so we can feel comfort in whom we have become:

There is a problem with the above formulation, where I have supposed that we have a singular identity in the past. Does one ever have a singular identity, when we both consciously and unconsciously internalize others into who we are—and we have ongoing inner conflicts between these internalized identities? One might argue that we are cultural hybridizations, whether we intend to be so or not. We might embrace and cherish these hybridizations, or we might reject and hate them. We might love being a hybrid of our role models, loyal friends and supportive family, and hate being hybridized by our detractors and tormenters. The drama of this love and hate becomes the stuff of our dreams and nightmares. If one subscribes to the constant hybridization thesis, the question of “Who am I?” becomes: “How do I resolve these inner conflicts?” and “How can I find comfort and pride in who I have become?”

Acceptance of our past conflicted selves, and the moral achievement of how hybridization expands our humanity.

One approach to this problem is to assert that I have no particular need to specify my identity in singular, non-paradoxical, or even non-hypocritical terms. However, I do have a need to have a baseline of comfort and pride in who I have become. Otherwise, I have an identity crisis, where I am uncomfortable and ashamed about whom I have become. I am glad to have that comfort and pride challenged by identity conflicts because conflict is the basis of the identity hybridization process. However, I do not wish to be disrespected (by self or other) for the long process of my becoming. I trust that my long, ongoing, process of becoming expands my humanity and the common good.

Overcoming Internalized Disrespect:

Key to this position is the problem of internalized disrespect. Long-term or traumatic disrespect can easily be internalized and undermine one’s positive identity, or prevent a positive identity from ever emerging. With this analysis, I am suggesting that the problem of “Who am I?” does not seem to emerge, unless one’s identity is either already conceived as empty or negative: I am nothing or I am inferior, a failure, and a fraud. On the other hand, if one’s identity is thought to be positive, then its singularity, multiplicity, or even description, does not need to come up as a driving question in one’s life. In the former case, inner conflicts can be threatening and confusing. In the latter case, the hybridization process can be comforting and validating.

Personal Story:

In my case, over my lifetime, I have had numerous identities both positive and negative, but the positive have outweighed the negative, except for a few times of crisis. During those times, as the hybridization process turned from positive to negative, I would ask myself: “Who am I?” or “What have I become?” Only when I was able to reconstruct a positive identity, with the help of family and friends, could I appreciate the positivity of the ongoing hybridization process. The help of family and friends facilitated a deeper hybridization with them. But most importantly, the key was the internalization of their positive regard for me. Unfortunately, not everyone is so lucky.

Singular Identity and Fear of Death:

With these insights, how should we think of the need for a singular identity? I suggest that, in addition to resisting negative hybridization (as explained above); people’s need for a singular identity may be generated by their fear of death. First, an eternal soul seems like the kind of singular identity that survives death; this view is common to the Christian and Muslim religions. Buddhists believe that if they identify with the eternal principle of a “ceaseless becoming of the universe,” (CBU) they also survive death, but not as a “soul” or “self.”

Other religions seem to address the fear of death in ways that require some version of a singular identity. The shared view of these religions seems to be that without a singular identity, it is hard to conceive of what might survive death. On their view, hybridizations, like compound molecules, seem to be destined toward decomposition, just like our bodies. On the other hand, a singularity seems more likely to survive death because it is elemental—and elements, by definition, seem to be eternal, just like the fundamental laws of nature.

Existence is not guaranteed by language:

Our linguistic definitions do not assure us that the object being defined exists, similar to Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument for the existence of God, definitions do not guarantee existence. Just because we define a soul as a singularity does not contribute the actual existence of a soul. Rather, definitions tell us about the curious structures of language, not the reality that is sometimes being expressed. In other words, humans’ conceptions of reality seem to be more tied to linguistic forms, such as singularity and multiplicity, than direct unmediated experience.

Mystical experience is direct, not mediated by language.

Unmediated mystical experience, on the other hand, defies language almost completely, making it virtually ineffable. If mystical experience is where the answer to our fear of death dwells, then no number of worries about singularities and multiplicities directly address the reality that these concepts are employed to explain.

Cultural Need for Singular Identity:

Singular identities are also culturally generated to secure group bonding and loyalty in families, peer groups, professional groups, communities, ethnicities, sexual orientations, religious groups, and nations, to name a few common categories. Indeed, singular identities are encouraged practically everywhere. On the other hand, hybridized identities seem to be the result of the internalization process that sometimes occurs in diverse societies; however, such hybridizations are also commonly resisted in those same societies. Curiously, cultures push identities in two directions: toward singularity and toward multiplicity–singular by the need to place people into categories, and multiple by the internalization of diverse identities.

Conflict Between Hybridization-Resistance and Hybridization-Advocacy:

What are we to make of the conflict between hybridization resistance and hybridization advocacy? On one hand, hybridization seems to be an observable and measurable empirical phenomenon that seems to play a powerful role in deepening one’s empathy and promoting transformative conflict facilitation. On the other hand, people have numerous reasons to resist conceiving of themselves as hybrids, in favor of simple, pure, and singular identities.

The Paradox of Me:

I remind the reader that my recommended way of resolving this conflict is for each of us to be happy with the paradox of both being a “me,” pure, simple and singular, along with an impure, complex multiplicity, that is in a continuous hybridizing/synthesizing process. Along these lines, we need to find comfort with what each of us has become, comfortable with both our simplicity and multiplicity. We have no need for a singular identity that explains “me” any better or further than “I am just me.” We can be happy to recount our influences, role models, and the diverse social roles that we embody, without further stating the nature of “me.” In this way, we don’t need to commit ourselves to an identity any more categorical than “me.”

Loose Ends:

Disappointingly, my resolution to this conflict is not as tidy as it seems because we might still have worries about death. Secondly, how can our friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors trust us when we are contradictory and paradoxical hybrids? Don’t they need to place us in a comfortable category, so they can know who we are and rely on that identity over time?

Returning to Death:

First, let us return to the death problem. What happens to “me” when I die. What happens to the unique being that I have been? What happens to all of my unfulfilled aspirations? What happens to my connections with loved ones? Does all of that disappear when I die? Sure, some people might remember and miss me, but that is not as powerful a loss as what my death means to me. I believe, as Buddhists, in identifying with the “ceaseless becoming of the universe,” but that doesn’t help me with the losses that occur at my particular life’s end. Maybe I have a problem letting go, but I can’t help feeling sentimental about my life and my loved ones. I would expect my dog be just as sentimental, so does my dog have a problem letting go? Of course, I feel worse for people younger than I, especially children who die, losing the opportunity to realize many of the ambitions that I have realized as an older adult. To be honest, all of this loss is crushingly depressing. Why do we live only to experience the seemingly complete loss of others, as well as ourselves, and the absence of future experiences doing what we love to do—like writing these words?

A Path Beyond Grief:

From this grief, I wonder if the “ceaseless becoming of the universe” (CBU) needs to be so abstract and impersonal. Perhaps we can be part of the CBU, while retaining, in some mystical way, a personal “path” where we reside in a kindred network of beloved others’ “paths.” Does such a ceaseless network of kindred paths commit me to a singular identity? Not necessarily; I think it only commits us to similar paths with similar trajectories with loved ones and loved experiences.

Regaining the trust of those around us:

Second, can my friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors trust me when I am such a paradoxical hybrid? If I represent so many viewpoints, might those close to me wonder what I really think? I have had this problem in more ways than I am probably aware. Colleagues in the philosophy department, where I used to work, openly worried about what I really thought when I went into conflict facilitation mode. Other people in my life doubtless have the same worries, but are not so confrontational. My response to this worry is to say that identity hybridization is not merely a collection of conflicting positions. Identity hybridization means resolving different perspectives in a reasonably coherent way.

Personal Story:

As an example, my appreciating how conservatives honor tradition, family, loyalty, and industry does not undermine my commitment to strong public institutions, social equity, full employment, nonviolence, and sustainability. My appreciation of heavy metal and rap music is not undermined by my love of jazz and classical music. There is a certain discomfort in being a collection of unresolved and conflicting personality fragments; however, there is an enriched comfort in being a synthesized hybrid of myriad influences. The former should be viewed as a lack of individuation; the latter should be embraced as the best identity for an empathetic conflict facilitator.

Compassion for those who categorize us:

Returning to the problem of other’s need to place us within specific categories, we might wonder why they have this need. Such rejection of people with hybridized identities might stem from the insecurity of those with an obsession about maintaining their own singular identities. Fighting off the influences that threaten to give us conflicted identities is certainly understandable, so I sympathize with those who have this struggle, and the insecurity that it entails. It seems that only when one is able to resolve one’s inner conflicts through hybridization, can one feel comfortable with multiplicity, and the prospect of living with the singular/plural identity paradox.

Support from the fellowship of conflict facilitators:

Given the difficulties that prevent the social validation of those of us who have become cheerfully hybridized as conflict facilitators in every aspect of our lives, I suggest that we seek validation from each other. I am a faculty member of a conflict resolution department, and I have observed that alumni of our graduate program seem to stick with the friends they made while studying with us. My friendship pool is also populated with kindred faculty and alumni. We understand and support each other’s hybridization process, even as others often look at us tentatively and skeptically. Logan (1981) and Romanyshyn (1982) assert that one’s identity reflects the worldviews that emerge in one’s era. As hybridization, through inner transformation, emerges as a worldview in the current era, then more and more identities may be shaped by it. I hope that conflict facilitators can lead the way internally, as they resolve conflicts in the world around us.

References

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