NORMS, VALVES, AND REALITIES

The word "conflict" has multiple ranges of reference and meaning in the vocabularies of the West. On the plane of biography it usually stands for inner stress and tension, as when the self evolves from childhood and dependency; when choices between rival moral challenges or courses of social action have to be made; or when competitive ideas intrude upon the mental process of seeking certainty and truth. Indeed, it is hardly possible to appreciate the stream of scientific discoveries, artistic inventions, or philosophical theories carried by this culture without realizing that each represents the resolution of conflicting principles, and that most have issued from individual lives that were fraught with numerous kinds of conflict, insecurity, and risk. For the preferred human type that emerges from the records has typically been the striving, suffering individual, pitted against destiny, the gods, or nature, defiant of authority and tradition, at odds with inner daemons, yet determined to bring harmony into life and thought by composing his personality and ordering the environment.

The norms traditionally accepted for the conduct of interpersonal relations and the organization of society reflect this ideal image of human destiny. The theme of the adversary, the counterplayer, or the opposite is thus everywhere affirmed — in the school house, the stadium, and the market place, the court room no less than the parliament. It rules modes of reasoning, discourse, and disputation such as the Platonic dialogue or the legal brief ; provides the measure of success and failure in competitive enterprises, bargaining proceedings, and elections, and may thus be recognized as the sine qua non in all collisions of interest, clashes of will, and contests of physical and intellectual skill. In short, the civilization affirms conflict between groups and persons as a corollary of individual liberty, and therefore accommodates it also as an attribute of organized political life. On this level, as on that of biography, however, conflict is valued not so much as an end in itself but rather as a process that serves to clarify issues in dispute and narrow areas of contention so as to induce some measure of ultimate conciliation or accord. Furthermore, while the need for opposition is affirmed, it is yet kept subject to the quest for harmony and balance. This value preference explains why the European imagination has fastened itself, especially from the age of the Renaissance onward, to the twin images of the balanced personality and the balanced state; why the language of politics in this culture is so rich in metaphoric allusions to the notion of an equilibrium; and why, by contrast, imbalance, whether in bookkeeping and trade, in the interrelationship of different governing bodies, or the coexistence of separate states, has so of ten been viewed as a deviation from the norm.

The records of Occidental theory and history thus relay a cultural consensus to the effect that obdurate hostility or aggressiveness in interpersonal relations is abnormal, and that continued social conflict is incompatible with the purposes of civilized society. Above all, they are found to converge upon a common fear of violence. Overt and covert, verbal and behavioral manifestations of conflict have therefore customarily been kept within definite bounds, set either by generally shared moral precepts, special rules of the game, or prescriptions emanating from governing authorities. And among these latter institutions, again, none has been as important as the law. Each category of conflict in the domains of both private and public affairs is thus found allied with a cluster of controlling norms, rules, and sanctions in terms of which it has been possible, for example, to delimit permissible from impermissible modes of voicing grievances and settling discords; to deter or punish injuries to life and property; to isolate threatening mental dispositions or conspiracies to disrupt society, and to narrow irreconcilable positions to the dimensions of justiciable controversies so as to render them capable of resolution by a court of law. Furthermore, the various legal orders in the jurisdictions of the civil and the common law stress the notion of agreement by providing contractual forms for the approximation of consensus between contending parties, as well as constitutional processes of government (such as representative assemblies) in which regulated debate is expected to transpose factional discord into compromise or unity.

No century comes to mind in which these understandings and arrangements have not been found deficient, or in which the fabric of an Occidental state has not been torn by civil discontent or violent strife. But such occurrences do not seem to have undermined the general belief that the search for harmony is a necessary undertaking, and that conflicts in private and public life can be effectively muted, managed, or resolved by resort to orderly processes of change. Peace within the morally and politically...