Words&Dirt

Summary:

Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict examines how individuals and groups get stuck in self-perpetuating and mutually-destructive conflicts, as well as how we can pull ourselves out of them. Ripley defines “high conflict” as “what happens when conflict clarifies into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them” (4). Ripley claims that high conflict is “the invisible hand of our time,” a “force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else” (9). This may seem a bit grandiose at first glance, but readers will have a hard time disagreeing after engaging with Ripley’s arguments, case studies, and numerous examples from various places and moments in history. High Conflict is an important and useful book that the modern world truly needs.

Key Concepts and Notes:

• I really appreciated how the book opens with a glossary and list of principal characters. It demonstrates Ripley’s commitment to conceptual clarity in the service of her reader’s understanding.
• Exploring the causation patterns of high conflict, Ripley demonstrates that it gets ramped up by four main forces: (1) group identities, (2) fire starters/conflict entrepreneurs, (3) humiliation/social pain/shame, and (4) corruption. Given how powerful these factors become in the heat of high conflict, Ripley emphasizes that the best move in most cases is to do everything on we can avoid high conflict before it arises. She suggests building a “conflict infrastructure” to preemptively avoid the conditions that create high conflict and actively cultivate “good conflict,” which “does not collapse into dehumanization” and requires the ability to “understand and disagree at the same time” (xi, 58).
• When it comes to extracting oneself from high conflict, Ripley encourages readers to seek a “fourth way,” a path “that’s more satisfying than running away, fighting, or staying silent” (xi). She also provides the following advice: (1) Investigate the understory/root cause(s) of conflict, (2) Reduce binary thinking/tribalism, (3) Marginalize fire starters/conflict entrepreneurs , (4) Buy time and make space, and (5) Complicate the narrative, seeking complexity and nuance. She goes deep into the lives of a few different people who worked very hard to get out of high conflict, showing that it’s possible but also extremely difficult.
• Ripley’s observations about the benefits and drawbacks of group identity are particularly potent, showing how commitments to various group identities are instrumental in dragging us into high conflict and also in pulling us out.
• Also inspiring is Ripley’s emphasis on cultivating curiosity in the midst of conflict as a means of keeping an open mind and refusing to dehumanize one’s opponents.
• I benefitted greatly from learning about “looping for understanding” (AKA “looping”), which is “an iterative, active listening technique in which the person listening reflects back what the person talking seems to have said––and checks to see if the summary was right” (xii). Looping was created by Gary Friedman, one of Ripley’s subjects. I agree with Ripley that looping has a wide range of applications and “is probably the single best way to keep conflict healthy, all through life” (245). Most importantly, looping helps our interlocutors feel heard and understood, even when we don’t agree with them.
• I didn’t find the book’s final chapter very satisfying, but then noticed that there were three appendices summarizing Ripley’s findings and recommendations. I wish these had been reformatted into a final chapter rather than presented as appendices, which some readers will be more likely to overlook.

Favorite Quotes:

Lots of forces got us to this place, most of which you know already. Automation, globalization, badly regulated markets, and rapid social change have caused waves of anxiety and suspicion. That fear makes it easy for leaders, pundits, and platforms to exploit our most reliable social fissures, including prejudices of all kinds.

But there is another invisible force that, like gravity, exerts its pull on everything else. When conflict escalates past a certain point, the conflict itself takes charge. The original facts and forces that led to the dispute fade into the background. The us-versus-them dynamic takes over. Actual differences of opinion on health care policy or immigration stop mattering, and the conflict becomes its own reality. High conflict is the invisible hand of our time. (9)

The challenge of our time is to mobilize great masses of people to make change without dehumanizing one another. Not just because it’s morally right but because it works. Lasting change, the kind that seeps into people’s hearts, has only ever come about through a combination of pressure and good conflict. Both matter. That’s why, over the course of history, nonviolent movements have been more than twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.

High conflict is not always violent, but it is extremely flammable. It can easily tip into violence, which leads the opposition to respond with more violence, in an ever-escalating spiral of harm. Very quickly, the most helpful people flee the scene, and the extremists take over.

Any modern movement that cultivates us-versus-them thinking tends to destroy itself from the inside, with or without violence. High conflict is intolerant of difference. A culture that sorts the world into good and evil is by definition small and confining. It prevents people from working together in large numbers to grapple with hard problems. (13)

Conflict, once it escalates past a certain point, operates just like the La Brea Tar Pits. It draws us in, appealing to all kinds of normal and understandable needs and desires. But once we enter, we find we can’t get out. The more we flail about, braying for help, the worse the situation gets. More and more of us get pulled into the muck, without even realizing how much worse we are making our own lives.

That’s the main difference between high conflict and good conflict. It’s not usually a function of the subject of the conflict. Nor is it about the yelling or the emotion. It’s about the stagnation. In healthy conflict, there is movement. Questions get asked. Curiosity exists. There can be yelling, too. But healthy conflict leads somewhere. It feels more interesting to get to the other side than to stay in it. In high conflict, the conflict is the destination. There’s nowhere else to go. (15)

I sometimes interview people with whom I profoundly disagree. Then, looping turns out to be particularly critical. It helps me listen, even when I don’t want to. It takes a lot of practice but it has helped me experience what it’s like to understand and disagree at the same time. It turns out that is possible. You can do both. You can and you must. (58)

There are lots of ways to rehumanize people, but one way is through great storytelling. It can be more powerful than any peace treaty. (232)

We can’t avoid conflict. We need it in order to defend ourselves and to be challenged. In order to be better people. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.” But it’s so easy to slip into dishonest disagreement, into high conflict, given the right conditions.

The secret, then, is to avoid those conditions. To build guardrails in our towns, our houses of worship, our families and schools, the kind that lead us into worthwhile conflict but protect us from slipping into high. This means setting up a conflict infrastructure, the kind that preempts high conflict before it starts by helping us investigate the understory, reduce the binary, and marginalize the fire starters in our world. It means cultivating curiosity in conflict, on purpose.

Building this infrastructure creates conflict resilience, an ability to not just absorb conflict but get stronger from it. But conflict infrastructure requires serious time and dedication. (242-3)

Curiosity is a prerequisite to change. Like sunshine and water, it doesn’t guarantee growth, but you can’t get meaningful, internal change without it. (244)

Rating: 9/10