Podcast — EP 66: Peace building amid the rise of global conflict

Intro (00:04):

Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology, and those who simply have a good story: all make up the fabric that is George Mason University. We're taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates; and higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Mason President Gregory Washington, this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

 

President Gregory Washington (00:27):

The December, 2024 conflict index by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data nitiative reported that global conflicts have doubled over the past five years. Now more than ever, we need experts in conflict analysis and peace building, and George Mason is ready for that call. Mark Gopin is the James H Laue Professor of World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution, and a director of the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution at George Mason's, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution. He's a prolific writer and accomplished speaker, and has trained thousands of people worldwide in peace building strategies for complex conflicts. Mark, welcome to the show.

 

Marc Gopin (01:31):

Thank you. It's a pleasure to see you again and be here.

 

President Gregory Washington (01:34):

In 1983, you were ordained as a rabbi at the Yeshiva University. Were you always interested in pursuing rabbinical study?

 

Marc Gopin (01:46):

I've been studying since I was five years old in private school, and I was particularly motivated to do intensive study with my elders. I had master teachers who were master teachers of Talmud, but also PhDs from the University of Berlin in philosophy. So I was always fascinated by the combination of secular wisdom and secular science and religious traditions going back thousands of years. So I just totally immersed in that from the time I was kind of little.

 

President Gregory Washington (02:16):

Well, I always see those who learn the word, so to speak, you learn it from the perspective of being able to teach it, right, to spread it to others. But something had to move you, to inspire you to move from religious leadership into activism and teaching. So can you talk a little bit about that?

 

Marc Gopin (02:42):

Well, that's an interesting question. I think there are multiple motivations. I did grow up in a community that was both very provincial and very worldly at the same time. I grew up in Boston. I grew up in a community where many of my teachers were survivors of the Holocaust. I was keenly aware of war and its effects on people. My father was in the military in World War II, my uncles. So I was very aware of global events and yet also was nurtured in a very quiet space of religious people, but also doctors and healers. And so I guess from the influence of the doctors and the philosophers and the people experience the horror of genocide, I became very, very interested in what brings societies to the point of destruction and what brings them to the point of redemption. Because I grew up at a time when the very same society that had committed such a massive war crime and killed 40 million people, uh, in World War II, became a leading democracy.

 

Marc Gopin (03:44):

I'm speaking about Germany and Japan as well. And so the question of how people change and why they descend into absolute barbarism at some times and why they become within a generation, the the leaders of democracy, it fascinated me about the human nature. What does it say about human nature? Where can we go in order to move human nature towards compassion and enlightenment and rationality versus barbarity? And that was always the choice that I was, from the time I was little looking at these beautiful survivors of the Holocaust all the way to the science and philosophy that I studied. I said, you know, this is global. This is way beyond my community. And so I have to make a commitment to globally look at this and actually practice experimentation with people in war zones. And that's what drove me to war zones by the time I was in my twenties.

 

President Gregory Washington (04:41):

I've been looking forward to this conversation for some time. It's because this one is so timely relative to what's happening globally as we speak. So you pioneered peace building work across the Middle East, which is a confluence of three major world religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. And so what role does religion play in developing conflict as well as resolving conflict? And given your rabbinical background, there's a very strong connection there.

 

Marc Gopin (05:18):

Well, I came to have a very healthy respect for the fact that religion is a passionate catalyst of the best of us and the worst of us. It becomes a tool of enlightenment in the hands of those who are rooted in compassion and a capacity to listen to many narratives at once. And then it also becomes a tool of rage and apocalyptic rage when people are so wounded that they look to the religion and they find what they need to find in the religion in order to justify an extremist or violent a direction. What I started to see was a pattern around the world from Judaism, Christianity to Islam, to Buddhism, and to Shintoism and Hinduism. Everywhere you looked, this double-edged sword of religion said to me that this is a potential to help in diplomacy, not just be a danger for society. So there has to be conflict resolution and conflict healing.

 

Marc Gopin (06:18):

And I focus on healing very much from my background, that conflict healing needs to take place between secular and religious segments of society, between liberal and conservative in order that religion should not be utilized and weaponized by those who are angry or destructive and lack a self-examining capacity. One of the things that I've emphasized in my writings and in my experiments in the field is that self-examination is the key to enlightenment. So it's not true just on a philosophical level. It's true at the level of conflict management, conflict resolution, negotiations, self-examination is everything. And there are religious foundations of that, and there are secular foundations of that, of those capacities, the psychosocial healing. So I started to see that people are making a mistake of religion versus society or religion versus secularism, and that the two could be allies if they are understood properly in all of their manifestations, the positive manifestations and the negative, just like secular, uh, there's a positive manifestation of capitalism. There's a negative manifestation.

 

President Gregory Washington (07:28):

No, I understand. I understand. You know, that kind of opens up a different question. We often have this discussion of Israeli, a person who's Jewish, and a person who's Zionist, right? I'm one of the belief that there are differences between the three. Can you talk a little bit about what those mean from the perspective of the modern state of Israel?

 

Marc Gopin (07:57):

Well, this is where we get into identity studies, and my colleagues and I at Carter School focus on identity and religion and culture, and they interact quite a bit, and they're fluid. So we have to accept the fact that for some people, Christianity means one kind of identity or another. And it's the same in Judaism. For some people, their Judaism is wrapped up in practice, in, uh, ritual, in ethics. Their Judaism is ethical monotheism, their Judaism is the observance of the Sabbath. For others, their Judaism is wrapped up in defending the Jewish people or building the Jewish people into a flourishing entity that can be safe in a post holocaust world. For such people, the state of Israel becomes part of their religious identity. For other people, it's a mixture. And there are many very religious people for whom the state of Israel is important in terms of saving Jewish lives.

 

Marc Gopin (08:55):

But it's not the expression of Jewish identity. It's a state. Others, a lot of young people today are very critical of the state for its policies, and some of them are in Israel, some of them are here, and their identity, their Jewish identity, is much more complex and nuanced than saying they're either Zionist or anti-Zionist. Everybody's choosing, it's a very fractious people. But I used to think that there was more uniformity in Christianity. There isn't, I used to think that in Islam there was clear uniformity. There is not. People are identifying and defining their religion all the time, and they're evolving in that. There's a very big evolution, even in my own lifetime, where now 50% of Jews live in Israel, are Israeli citizens, but 50% are not. 50% include lots of people in Russia, in Ukraine, on two sides of war, mostly in Ukraine. There are 5 million American Jews: a very, very tiny people with very, very different opinions about where does the state of Israel fit into their identity.

 

President Gregory Washington (10:01):

It's been a year, over a year now, since the events of October 7th and the most recent outbreak of violence between Palestine and Israel. As of the recording of this particular podcast, the ceasefire has held, continues to hold. You're seeing the exchange of hostages on both sides. There's so many opinions on how the conflict between Israel and Palestine should be resolved. And as an expert in peace building, from the perspective of peace building, what is something you wish people understood about this long standing conflict?

 

Marc Gopin (10:47):

I wish people understood how many thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have worked on coexistence and a two-state solution and equality for over a half a century. I wish people understood that there were many, many viable solutions other than the total destruction that's envisioned by extremists on either side of the other side. They dominate the news, just like violence always dominates the news. But unfortunately, information systems and digital ecosystems have come to radicalize all of us in thinking there are only violent solutions to things because fear sells the digital ecosystem. But I can tell you, because I witnessed it and I participated in, I created for 40 years an incredible number of idealistic Israelis and Palestinians who work together. Many of them live together. There's actually a village, a very vibrant community south, uh, near Jerusalem called Oasis of Peace, Neve Shalom. And there are many other experiments in coexistence and many people who fought for equality in Israel and also that build bridges.

 

Marc Gopin (12:10):

I also went between the enemy sides, even in the height of wars and bombings, and we were always overwhelmed by outsiders who were funding the extremists. Christian extremists were funding the settlers and Jewish extremists, of course, and then the funders of Islamic extremism were funding the radical groups that undermine the secular Palestinian idea of a democratic state. And that still holds. I wish people could realize that because then they wouldn't think in extreme solutions. They would realize that we have to do the hard work of reconciliation and building relationships in every country that wants to remain a democracy. Here too, it's the same analogy. You can't just legislate, you can't just have a couple of pieces of civil rights legislation. You have to build relationships, one community, one church at a time, and that peace building money is not there. It's not there for people-to-people relationship building because the powers that be did not take it seriously.

 

Marc Gopin (13:19):

So I wish people would know that this could have gone very, very differently. Now, we're in a state of catastrophe, but in the darkest days, you always want to know what's possible. We never thought a half a year ago that Syria would ever recover. I've worked for 20 years in Syria with my Syrian friends and inside Syria, in a police state, in the worst genocide imaginable--500,000 dead, 12 million removed from their homes, tens of thousands tortured. And here we are with a mass return to Syria of extraordinary Syrian citizens in the worst dictatorship in the world after North Korea. So to say that it's impossible to achieve coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis is to have a lack of imagination. And that's what I want people to realize. Things can always change in the blink of an eye with the right leadership and the right new ideas.

 

President Gregory Washington (14:19):

That is great food for thought. There are so many opinions on how the conflict should be resolved, right? And there have been previous ceasefires. So why do you think these previous ceasefires failed? Is it this lack of imagination piece you're talking, is it the external influences?

 

Marc Gopin (14:38):

Yeah, on all sides. On the Palestinian side, on the Israeli side, on the American side, on the European side, there was a tendency to disempower people-to-people, relationships. They did fund some of that relationships. There are many good efforts that have been funded by the United States, but it was too controlled from the top with very narrow agendas to what would be allowed and what would be acceptable. In my mind...I, I never saw a single grant for Palestinian and Israeli cab drivers to speak to each other. I never saw a single major grant for thousands of women to relate to each other across enemy lines, which is what turned the tide in Liberia, for example.

 

President Gregory Washington (15:21):

That's exactly right.

 

Marc Gopin (15:21):

And so in many countries in the world, there are surprising constituencies that when you allow them to speak to each other and build relationships, they have the solutions that the wealthy elites don't have, or the military elites don't have for lack of imagination. We need to invest much, much more in average people to build relationships. And we have done that in other parts of the world. For example, after World War ii, the Franco-German relationship had been, uh, two countries that had been at war with each other for a thousand years on and off. And now a Franco-German war is inconceivable. So history does change with people-to-people businesses, relationships. Many nationalists I've come across, many people who really can't stand the other side say to me, you know, I'll do some business with them. I, I've had very fanatical people say to me, I'll come on one year trips to do some business.

 

Marc Gopin (16:21):

So business sometimes is...where reconciliation cannot be, but business can be the link. Sometimes it's sports, sometimes it's other kinds of psychosocial healing or therapy, music, et cetera. But what we did for 40 years is that we did it only for very wealthy kids, chosen carefully from each side. And we didn't really get to the grassroots, to the refugee camps. I worked in refugee camps in Syria. I worked in refugee camps. I brought Mason classes many times to refugee camps in Turkey, refugee camps in Palestine. And our work, our great work of relationship building, it didn't reach those places. And that's exactly where the extremists recruit. They recruit from the people who are really dumped on by all sides.

 

President Gregory Washington (17:09):

How can Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East move forward? There are current discussions, and I'm gonna ask you about those, but first I want to get your take on, you know, look, we are where we are. What's the move forward from here?

 

Marc Gopin (17:24):

Well, if I could wave a magic wand, I mean, the way forward from here would be a deep investment in the Palestinian authority that is reformed. In other words, Abbas is pressured to create a younger generation of leadership. I was just in Ramallah not long ago, and it suffers from the fact that a group of very aged men, a very small group, are in total control and young leadership is not allowed to move forward. That young leadership has prescriptions for how both secular and religious Palestinians could unite into one state, how they could control the terrorists, and then build relationships, which they already had years ago with the Israeli leadership, with the Israeli military. If they were all willing to give this a go to eliminate Hamas from the area, to build trust, build respect, apologies for harm done on all sides. October 7th was the worst Jewish atrocity since the Holocaust.

 

Marc Gopin (18:31):

And it's unimaginable how much suffering has spread. The amount of missiles that kept people in shelters in the north of Israel and the south, the hundreds of thousands of people, it changed people for the worst. So there's apologies for that. And then there's apologies for what is done on a regular basis in the use of excessive force in Gaza in other places. This can be arranged if the parties and the Gulf states are willing to allow people to speak for themselves. And that's the consensus that we need. And I believe the Palestinian authority is waiting there as a potential partner for Israelis who are ready for a two-state solution. That's not the current leadership, but I believe that with a strong third party presence, we could push that. We could insist on building a partnership with Palestinians who are willing to make a deal in order to keep the rule of law and build safety and security for every citizen on all sides.

 

Marc Gopin (19:38):

And in the end, it's going to have to be a Jewish state, a Jewish majority state that has equal rights for Palestinian citizens. Don't forget, there are 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. And then the state of Palestine is going to have to be a state with Jewish citizens who remain a minority, but who are protected in ways that are clearly guaranteed as equal citizens. And that is a formula that could also re-envision Gaza as well. Both sides need to get used to coexistence. There's no way around it, but we have to build with people who are serious and willing. And I think they exist on both sides.

 

President Gregory Washington (20:19):

Okay, well, well, let's take the current conflict that's on the table. We're in agreement that something has to happen now, right? At some point you get to an outcome where you have settled on what's happened with the hostages, right?

 

Marc Gopin (20:41):

Right.

 

President Gregory Washington (20:42):

Folk have been released on both sides. And at that point you have to start talking about what is the future of Gaza,

 

Marc Gopin (20:54):

I think, sorry.

 

President Gregory Washington (20:54):

And so, and so, what happens then? What, what do you think will happen at that stage? Because that stage is most likely coming.

 

Marc Gopin (21:02):

The antecedents of this is that Iran, which is a rogue state, took advantage, and Russia was happy to participate, in an arc of power stretching across the Middle East all the way to Lebanon. That has now been decimated by the Israeli defense forces, particularly the destruction of he Hezbollah. And that created a chain reaction to release Syria from a, that--

 

President Gregory Washington (21:27):

That's how Syria--

 

Marc Gopin (21:27):

Dictatorship.

 

President Gregory Washington (21:28):

That's how Syria fell.

 

Marc Gopin (21:30):

Right. So this is an opportunity for the Gulf states that are publicly, and I believe sincerely, anti-Hamas, anti-terrorism. And that includes the UAE, and it includes the present Saudi Arabia. I believe this is an opportunity for them to work with the Israelis and work with the Palestinian authority on the rebuilding of Gaza together with the Europeans. And I believe it can be rebuilt for Gaza. And I believe it can be the basis for a two-state process that will give Palestine a seaport, it'll give them a lot of wealth. Eventually that could be invested in by everyone. It could be the seeds of renewal of the dream of a two-state solution if Palestinians are treated equally, and if the Gulf States and Israel and the King of Jordan and others guide a process of rebuilding this for Palestinians. It's not such a terrible thing if a few Jews wanna live there.

 

Marc Gopin (22:33):

This is where everybody's gotta get, you know, there are 2 million Palestinians living in Israel with citizenship. It's not terrible if a few religious Israelis wanna live in Gaza. These are not terrible things as long as there's equality and safety and security for all. And I believe that this wiping of the slate clean, this total destruction could be the opportunity. And maybe President Trump is gonna get tired of dealing with belligerence on all sides and say, yeah, I'm, this was just my opening gambit. And then people start coming forward with alternatives, which hasn't happened yet. Said, yeah, that's it. He often will say outrageous things in order to stimulate change. Right, right. And then he claim, then he claims credit for it. So, so what was agreed to in, in Canada, look

 

President Gregory Washington (23:19):

And look, if it works, it works, right?

 

Marc Gopin (23:20):

Yeah. What it, what it worked in Canada is that they, they agreed to what Biden had already agreed to <laugh>, and then that was the solution to the tariff problem. So if this is a game of threatening and therefore achieving some real change, uh, that would be a wonderful outcome, a surprising outcome. But it's possible. The slate was cleaned and wiped, unbelievable destruction in World War ii, and yet Germany and France and many fascist countries rose to become leading democracies. We have to believe that human change is possible because it's not a fantasy, it's actually a neuroscience reality. You can shift your brain anytime you want. And, and with leadership, we can do that.

 

President Gregory Washington (24:05):

So what happens to Hamas?

 

Marc Gopin (24:07):

Hamas is a tool of Iran and, Iran--eventually that regime must fall because the vast majority of Iranians inside and outside Iran want that regime to fall. The question is how to do it with the least amount of human destruction. There's a lot of consensus on that. The last thing to do is to give them a reason to be the great saviors of the Middle East with keeping terrorism alive to fight the Wicked Israel. And you do that by a bipartisan, multipartisan collaboration for rebuilding. Then it delegitimizes the destructive solutions, and that's gonna weaken Iran. And eventually their people are gonna take to the streets and never leave. That's a separate question, but I believe the way to do this is to weaken the current Iranian regime by creating a multipartisan approach to rebuilding Gaza.

 

President Gregory Washington (25:05):

Interesting, interesting. I had never heard that concept before. And so that's, that's a good one.

 

Marc Gopin (25:10):

The majority of people in Gaza, by the latest polls that were done before the destruction were all against Hamas. It was 80% against Hamas. But as there were more violations in the West Bank from the IDF and from settlers, then people were shifting towards Hamas. But those who have lived under Hamas hate Hamas, the majority, and we have to give them voice too, as to what they want.

 

President Gregory Washington (25:38):

George Mason's Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution holds several global education programs for students to see the impact of conflicts around the world. Studies include Bosnia and Turkey, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine, and Jordan. What is the value in students directly engaging with the people and places of conflict?

 

Marc Gopin (26:10):

Well, we have a good 40 years of theory development and conflict analysis, conflict management, conflict anticipation, my own theories that I've built on conflict, healing, compassionate reasoning. All of these things are wonderful, but theory is helpless without practice Theory is only built by practitioners who then reflected on their own actions. Every generation of young people needs to build for themselves their own exposure to what it is to be in a refugee camp, what it is to have empathy and pain from two sides, where does vision come from, and a focus on the future. My next book is on future healing, because future and vision is a remarkable part of the brain that builds rationality. It builds ethical principles. All of this cannot be appreciated without sitting with traumatized kids who are going through a wonderful program in Jordan on healing from what they witnessed as refugees.

 

Marc Gopin (27:16):

So the programs in Jordan and Turkey were all with Syrian refugees, for example. And before that, I knew the Syrians before 2011, worked in Damascus for many years on public diplomacy. But then we shifted towards refugee work with children and women, et cetera. So when I take students to these places, they say that this is the most important moment of their lives. People have changed careers over this because to immerse yourself in a conflict zone is to change your perspective on the nature of the world. I try to steer them toward it not being traumatizing and toward it being a concrete exploration of what they can do that's meaningful. Many of us are searching all the time for meaningful life. And that's where the students find that in that practice. They immediately start writing papers on what we could do back in Chicago, in the educational system and many other places, 'cause conflict is a part of life in every place. And now we have major American conflict, and we need exactly the skills that we have practiced in violent conflict zones. We need them right back here. And the United States, and I specifically direct the students on a regular basis, say, okay, you see what's happening here, let's extrapolate. You see that incredibly resilient person helping the kids. What do you think their best characteristics are? And how could you apply that elsewhere? It's a constant inquiry and exposure to the real world.

 

President Gregory Washington (28:51):

You know, we deal with conflict constantly, global conflicts between nations to interpersonal conflicts between friends, family, and other acquaintances. And sometimes it feels like conflict is such a natural component of our lives, that it's inevitable. What strategies from solving large scale global conflicts, can be applied to the smaller scale conflicts that people are dealing with in their everyday life?

 

Marc Gopin (29:24):

Well, what we discovered is that all the things that work in the height of war also have remarkable effects, positive effects inside family life, inside all relationships. So when French and Swiss and German people were trying to hide Holocaust survivors from being shot or being killed, they had to develop an ability to both have empathy but not be destroyed by the empathy. They had to find a visionary way to figure out one step at a time what could be done. If you remember the movie Schindler's List, on the possibility of change on the fact that even a perpetrator and a criminal and a crook could turn around and become, uh, like an angel. And that belief in repentance, that belief in change is something that works in violent war, but it works in families. The belief that, I don't see it right now, but the belief that, I don't know who it is in the family, but we have to always hold out with a compassionate hand to the possibility of evolution and change.

 

Marc Gopin (30:34):

It also requires a lot of moral reasoning. And I write a lot about the skills of seeing everybody's ethical position. And that's very important in family life, is that even when you disagree with somebody's moral position, you look for the principle that they're guided by. You say, you know, that's not fair. Well, what's your principle here? What's your theory? And it works. So I have a series of steps that involve listening skills, the use of the word, the use of the deed, imagination, and the use of imagination in a joint way...basically simple questions. One police officer who then became a chief of police in Massachusetts, said to me, once he saved somebody's life who had a knife, he was in a domestic violence situation, he had every right to shoot him. And then he thought to himself, he protected himself. And then he asked the knife wielding fellow who was out of control, he said to them this, he said, "how are we gonna get outta here today so that we both get back to our families?"

 

Marc Gopin (31:38):

So what that chief of police said was that he stimulated the brain with a question, not with an attack, not "you stupid guy, what's wrong with you?" You know, "how could you hold that knife to somebody you love?" It's "how can we get out of this? How can we get out of this to back to family?" And that brought out the best in the criminal. He dropped the knife and he was very sorrowful.

 

President Gregory Washington (32:04):

Really?

 

Marc Gopin (32:05):

Yeah.

 

President Gregory Washington (32:06):

It worked that easily.

 

Marc Gopin (32:07):

It just worked like a magic because he shifted his brain away from rage and counteraction and humiliation and shame and defiance to how do we get to tomorrow? It just had a remarkable effect on reshifting his brain towards a vision of himself in tomorrow. That has a remarkable impact on many, many simple fights in families, is just to ask people and say, okay, I hear you. Let's stop the tit for tat. What do you wanna do? Like, how, how are we gonna be a a family in two years from now? What, what would you like it to be? What does it look like to you? I do a lot of neuroscience study now.

 

President Gregory Washington (32:45):

And so that stimulates what...?

 

Marc Gopin (32:47):

It stimulates the default network of the frontal cortex that focuses on vision and imagination and planning for things that are not yet there. And that is related to compassion more than the amygdala, which is related to rage and resentment. So when you shift people, when you start swearing at people, it stimulates their amygdala. You know, you say a swear, they say a swear, and it's like your amygdalas are talking to each other. It's useless 'cause it just descends. But if you say, how are we gonna live together? What do you think we should do? And you authentically are asking a question, then suddenly the default network of the prefrontal cortex gets in, and your compassionate sense of how can we both get to the future? How can we live together? What is it gonna look like? How can we both take care of mom together? That reformulates the brain towards the future. And it's not a simple path, but it's far less violent, it's far less angry, it's far less vengeful, and it's very much focused on compassion. I call it compassionate reasoning. And there is actual neuroscience proof for this in the work of Olga Klimecki on the neural pathways of compassion that are closer to reasoning.

 

President Gregory Washington (34:08):

Well, speaking of that, that's your book, right?

 

Marc Gopin (34:12):

Yeah.

 

President Gregory Washington (34:12):

And in your book, "Compassionate Reasoning", you state that compassion is one of the most amazing and important emotions and ethical principles that brings healing and hope to human beings.

 

Marc Gopin (34:25):

Compassion stimulates the best biochemistry that lowers your heart rate, that lowers your blood pressure, that lowers your body temperature. Whereas rage increases your cortisol. It makes you need to get outta there, fight or flight. And empathy, when you feel the pain of another, which is a good value, it actually isn't very healthy because the more you feel the pain of the other, the more it sends you into despair, which is why a lot of the progressives who focus on pain and despair are missing the boat on how to stimulate a bipartisan approach to the future. So compassion though, is much more like, how can we all be happy? How can we all be safe? Those kind of questions stimulate a very different focus that is all-inclusive, more democratic. So basically, compassion is an ally of medical health, and it's an ally of democracy. It focuses on a much more all-inclusive approach to pro-social relations, and that part of the brain that's the most highly developed brain for solving problems.

 

President Gregory Washington (35:39):

Well, I wanna shift gears a little bit. You have given our audience a lot to think about relative to the Israeli, uh, Gaza conflict. Let's talk about the US for a moment. You know, a common refrain nowadays is how divided we are as a country. Is there any hope for us as a country? Uh, is there any hope to bridge the gaps between our differences and to heal that divide? Right? If you go back and look at our history, we're, we're almost as divided now as we ever have been. And so I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

 

Marc Gopin (36:16):

Well, this all comes down to leadership. And I think there's been a failure of the two party system to create common values and common policies that do unite people. And in this sense, we're far too focused on party identities and identity identification with a bipolar party system is a prescription for civil war. There are countries in Africa, for example, that every four years they go to war because every four years they have an election. The election actually brings out the worst. It's one country in particular because the tribes divide at that point, who's gonna be the majority tribe, and then they go back to normal afterwards. So multiparties and multitribalism, and Republican and Democrat have become tribes, is the worst possible way to get policy moderation and new policies and imagination. Bernie Sanders focused on policies, and of course a lot of capitalists are terrified of Bernie Sanders, but he was the one that went down and worked with the religious right.

 

Marc Gopin (37:22):

He spoke to the religious right. He was able to cut across the boundaries of identity. I've had political leaders say to me, I said, why don't you talk to more rural people? Why don't you engage the rural community? Uh, these were progressives. They said, what would be the point? That's exactly the opposite of the conflict resolution skills. We have seen work around the world. Around the world, engagement changes consciousness and for, uh, liberals to work with rural whites, with young white people, and to hear them both wealthy and poor, and for people on the more conservative side who are terrified of the violence that's going on, to listen and engage progressives, those skills and moderating those kind of conversations and building with imagination and compassion, some third ways, that's gonna be the key to the United States. It's happened before. I think it can happen again.

 

President Gregory Washington (38:26):

So I hear you saying, and, and I'm, I'm gonna ask it, could compassionate reasoning be a solution here?

 

Marc Gopin (38:34):

When I frame all of these things, I mean compassionate reasoning. I mean that the more that you humanize a relationship with people who you are afraid of, you develop compassion and then you morally reason together on the things you can agree on. And it turns out Americans agree on many things. They agree on the critical importance of freedom. Well, how would that express itself? What can we agree on in terms of freedom? What does it mean to us? And you build slowly policies that are bipartisan, and then you lobby for bipartisan policies. Let's say civil rights. A lot of people agree in principle to equal civil rights. You wouldn't think that with all the rhetoric flying around, but all it was was legislation. We legislated civil rights, we legislated that people should be equal. Well, it doesn't work that way. It works that way only through relationships, only through compassionate reasoning. In every church, in every synagogue, in every community. And then you figure out what equality will look like.

 

Marc Gopin (39:39):

But in the end, legislation only goes so far in building trust and positions with people on education. You have to do it one relationship at a time. I would like to see in the future, millions of dollars go into relationship building between people of different political points of view in this country. We have never taken civil rights to that level of deep relationship building. I think that's the key to the future. It is compassionate reasoning. It is conflict healing. I don't care about the label. I mean, I don't need my label to be on anything. It's more about the relationships and shared reasoning and building a point of view that there are people on the other side, and I have those relationships. That's how I survived in Syria. That's how I did work in Afghanistan and Iran. That's how I did work in Israel Palestine for 40 years on both sides, running across borders all the time.

 

Marc Gopin (40:37):

Because you have to embody it in yourself to be able to listen to multiple narratives and to say to all of those narratives, how can I help? How can I help Jewish identity? How can I help Palestinian identity? How can I help you get back to being a proud Republican? How can I get you to get back to being a proud Virginian? What does it mean to be a proud Virginian? Wouldn't that be a wonderful conversation?

 

President Gregory Washington (41:03):

What does it mean to be a statesman?

 

Marc Gopin (41:05):

Yeah, that's great. You know,

 

President Gregory Washington (41:07):

You, you, you get what I'm saying?

 

Marc Gopin (41:07):

Yeah.

 

President Gregory Washington (41:08):

These are the kinds of things that we gotta get back to. I think you are hitting the nail right on the head.

 

Marc Gopin (41:13):

So it's a question which is good for the brain, and it's a vision which is good for the brain, and it's enticing in terms of returning to something optimistic. And Marty Seligman's work on optimism, Stephen Pinker's work on optimism suggests that optimism is far more--Jane Goodall's work on this--it's far more embedded in human nature than we realize. We just have to get control of the digital information systems because people have divided us according to the digital ecosystems, which is an AI question. And I have some ideas on that in terms of the algorithms of what we should...

 

President Gregory Washington (41:51):

Well, well, well, let's you know, well, let's talk about that. Technology and technological advances are changing the nature of conflict, right? We know this. According to the United Nations, artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to enhance cyber, physical, and biological attacks. By making 'em more targeted, more accessible, and actually harder to trace. We've seen now mass communications and engagement through social media frameworks and the like. We know that bots and other artificial-like entities have exacerbated, uh, some of those conflicts, right? Have been used to inflame people. How do we flip that? Right? Because what can be used for negativity, what can be used for disruption, can actually be used to build people up? So, how do you do that?

 

Marc Gopin (42:52):

So I'm working with trying to influence peace tech people on this very subject, people who work on the algorithms of conversations globally. I believe that with the right words, see, just like words are used to harm and words are used to polarize, words are also used to bind people together. So there are ways to steer global conversations in more constructive directions and building relationships across enemy lines with algorithms that you put in, in a subtle way, and that you keep repeating. People in the business school, people in advertising, people in information technology, they know this very well. We have to create this technology together. We can even make it profitable. Let's say a company wants feedback from their, their employees. You can make a tech that encourages algorithms of can-do optimism. They don't cover up things, but they simply shift conversations towards what's possible and what's better.

 

Marc Gopin (43:55):

That's a technology and a skill that we can insert into our AI requests. I do it all the time with AI. I ask positive questions. I ask, what is I ask for good news? You know? And every day I try to fill my head with some of the new good news, like for example, that the bee population of the world is rising for the first time in many, many years, which is the key to the survival of all of our fruits and vegetables. I look for the fact that many of the patches of plastic across, uh, the ocean in five years could be completely sucked in by new technology that could take it out of the ocean. There are many exciting discoveries, and those discoveries are a way, if we insert that into the AI aspects of our algorithmic digital ecosystems, I think those ecosystems are gonna stimulate young people, especially to new ideas and new possibilities that are, uh, the opposite of polarization and fragmentation.

 

Marc Gopin (44:57):

If we can do that with American kids, American kids, and we keep politics out of it, you're gonna see a tremendous amount of excitement, especially if it creates jobs or if it creates companies that makes political polarization a little bit more silly, immature, and a waste of time. So if you can redirect people's energy towards things that are not polarizing, I think you can do that with AI. I think you can do that with global conversations. And we could think about what would be those conversations. For example, Mason has so many different campuses and we have different point--political points of view. What would be the conversations that would yield the most positive feedback that would yield the most participation with people of multiple backgrounds? And then how would we reinforce that and make it move forward? That's an interesting question for information tech, and for the business and marketing, and for conflict analysis and resolution.

 

President Gregory Washington (45:59):

As I wrap up here, I have one final question. In your TEDx talk at Berkeley, you pose the question where and how we become good despite the worst of circumstances, where and how we become good despite the worst of circumstances, which in some cases, especially in Palestine and Israel, that's kind of what we have now, have you found an answer to that question? And if so, what is it?

 

Marc Gopin (46:33):

I forgot how you had asked that question. And I like it. Not surprisingly, my experience with the wisdom traditions, all the way from stoicism to Buddhism, to Dalai Lama's wisdom and, and then the secular philosophies, and now the neuroscience and especially is seen through cognitive therapy, that it's the smallest memes and the smallest statements that guide people in a direction that's less destructive towards more constructive. So for example, some people have memorized love your neighbor as yourself. Some people have memorized that everyone is created in the image of God. Some people have memorized, I see this in cabs all over the Middle East, that Allah made everyone diverse in order that we can come to know each other. Almost every cab driver knows that verse from the Quran. So what matters when you're faced with misery and horror is what can you train yourself to flash in front of somebody's mind?

 

Marc Gopin (47:35):

And that has a lot to do with kindergartens and education and public advertising and what we choose to make the, the essential wisdom pieces of what it is to be human. I think we have to pay more attention to that and to think about repetition and repetition of truly deep inclusive truths. What is it to be a democracy? And you have five or six things that you say, you know, uh, quotes from Lincoln or, or others or from the Gettysburg address. You, we simply have to work harder at those memes, those things that occur to us naturally. This is what it is to be an American. This is what it is to be American. This is what it is to be a Christian. Love your neighbor as yourself. Great, but what is it to be an American? How do we bind as an American? We don't have enough American civic education that comes down to those core teachings.

 

Marc Gopin (48:33):

Uh, and I think we can, and I think it'll create a shared ethics. The postmodernism and enlightenment is great, but we also lost a lot of common ethics. We can build those ethics with basic truths that we can all agree to that are catchy, that can roll around in the brain and roll around in conversations. This is what it is to be American. You know, I think we have enough bipartisan instincts on that to recapture that and then move it forward to build. Okay. What then? What do we do together? So you keep asking questions, building on those wonderful values.

 

President Gregory Washington (49:11):

Outstanding. Outstanding. Well, we're gonna have to leave it there. Marc, thank you for your tireless work to build peace both around the world and in our own backyard. I am George Mason University President Gregory Washington. Thanks for listening. And tune in next time for more conversations that show why we are all together different.

 

Outro (49:44):

If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students and graduates in higher education. That's podcast.gmu.edu.