“We have more in
common than what divides us.”

Jo Cox.

When we started 1000 Voices Speak for Compassion in 2015, I
had a vision, a hope. In that vision, the voices of ordinary people with a
common desire to spread compassion, made a difference in some way. At the time,
the world seemed ripe for change, tired of violence after incidents in Paris,
Nigeria and elsewhere.

I was quietly hopeful that across the globe, humanity was
ready to unite in awareness of our common bonds and that by adding voices of compassion
we would be some small part in aiding that awareness.

Two years later in the run-up to the Brexit referendum,
British MP Jo Cox was murdered by a right-wing extremist, who objected to her
campaigning to remain in the EU.

“We have more in
common than what divides us.”

Can we still say that when MP Jo Cox, mother to two young
boys, was murdered for her opinion? Can we still say that, when authorities say
that they have no way of knowing what happened to possibly thousands
of children who were separated from their on the USA-Mexican border? How
can we still say that when around half a
million people have died in the Syrian war? How can we say still that when in
the USA almost 60%
of black women killed by police were unarmed? How can we still say that
when in almost every country in the world, we see division and anger, with
people laying the blame on the other side?

Over the last decade, violence has increased. According to a
report issued by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in June 2018,
conflict decreased in 71 countries from the previous year but increased in 92
with both North America and Europe showing overall deterioration. The IEP
measures several factors including: wars, military spending, corruption,
political repression and incarceration levels. The USA came out 121st out of
163 countries, and is right at the bottom of countries with “medium” peace
levels and well below Rwanda, Serbia or Bosnia & Herzegovina – all
countries with war-torn pasts. The UK, where I am from, was ranked 57th, and in
the “high” state of peace category. Only 13 countries around the world have
“very high” states of peace.

Do we really have more in common than what divides us?

Let’s return to Rwanda. How could a country, where
discrimination and hatred were once integrated into the school curriculum, now
rank 18 places above the USA – ostensibly a peaceful country – on the IEP’s
scale?

There have been several paths to Rwanda’s “medium” peace, and
the more I dug around, the more I discovered why their peace isn’t considered “high.”
While the government has done much to promote reconciliation initiatives,
according to reports in both Time
Magazine and the BBC
website, government mandated reconciliation has not been without cost – in
particular a government that exerts a high level of control and discourages
dissent.

However, there does appear to be genuine reconciliation in
many villages throughout the country and this is generally credited to “Peace
Clubs” where perpetrators and victims of the genocide meet and talk. Felix
Kanamugire, spent time in prison for taking part in the killings. He now
regularly attends Peace Club meetings and says, “I have uprooted that
hatred that was inside of me.” However, he also points out: “We don’t
pretend to think it is done. This has to be a continuous process.”

Irene Mukaruziga would have good reason to hate Felix: he
killed her husband and destroyed her house. And while forgiveness was by no
means easy for her, she says, “We only started to speak because of the
club.…Now, we have a lot in common. The teaching …has been helpful. They teach
us how to identify hate and indicators of when things are going wrong.”

Now, we have a lot in
common.

If a woman can say that about the man who killed her
husband, then there is hope for all of us, hope for the world.

However, hope isn’t enough. We need to understand at a deep
level what causes violence in the first place and to be willing to dig deep
inside ourselves to let it change.

Rwanda’s problems span generations, s far back as the early
twenty century, when Belgian colonists created identity cards with people
classified by ethnicity – and the Belgians regarded the Tutsis as superior
to Hutus. It won’t surprise you to know that the Hutus resented this. The 1994
mass murders were not the first – in 1959 more than 20,000 Tutsis were killed
and many more fled to neighbouring countries. When the Belgians left Rwanda in
1962, Hutus gained power and Tutsis were the scapegoats for
every crisis.

The current president is Tutsi – to his allies he is a
visionary, to his critics a man who rules by brutally suppressing
opposition. 

Even Hutu who opposed the genocide have been made to
publicly atone, and some warn that if things don’t change, another, even worse
revolution could come.

They could be right. Publicly shaming Hutus is unlikely to
create true healing. For 35 years, to investigate the causes and prevention of
violence, James Gilligan interviewed violent prisoners. What he came to see was
that the prisoners he interviewed felt a deep sense of shame – of feeling
humiliated to the point where they would prefer death to giving in. Punishment
served only to increase their violence – because punishment increased their
sense of humiliation. When Gilligan asked one particularly violent prisoner
what he wanted so badly that he had lost all privileges, the man replied,
“Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem.” He would rather die than submit to the prison
officers’ demands.

Gilligan discovered that every murderer he interviewed had,
as a child, experienced abuse, neglect or abandonment – leading to
feelings of shame, not feeling loved or good enough. As adults they were deeply
attuned to checking for insults and disrespect and saw it where it didn’t exist
– leading to such tragedies as a man murdering a child who “refused to stop
crying.”

After Gilligan realised this deep-rooted shame was the
trigger for violence, he also discovered that many of his colleagues had seen
the same thing, as had philosophers such as Aristotle and the authors of the
Bible. In the first recorded murder Cain killed Abel – because he believed God
respected Abel but not him.

Gilligan says, “when people suffer indignity, they become
indignant.”

John Douglas, a former FBI profiler who was a consultant for
Silence of the Lambs, as well as subject of the 2017 drama Mindhunter,
concluded that any “ultimate violent act is a result of a deep-seated feeling
of inadequacy.”

In his work John Douglas interviewed many serial killers.
One of those was Charles Manson, who sat on the back of his chair during the
first meeting. Manson was a small man and doing this made him seem bigger than
Douglas. By letting it pass, Douglas won Manson’s trust.

So perhaps it pays to allow even violent men some dignity.
That’s certainly Gilligan’s view. He believes that constraint is necessary, but
punishment is not. Punishment, he says, stimulates rather than deters violence.

Gilligan’s says that the more a person feels shame, the less
they are able to feel guilt that might stop them taking violent action.

This is an interesting hypothesis. The most common
distinction between shame and guilt is that when we feel shame we feel that we
(as a person) are wrong, whereas with guilt we feel that our actions are wrong.
Therefore shame will feel hard or impossible to rectify, whereas with guilt we
have a choice to change behaviour.

Gilligan approaches this slightly differently and I would
say that his definition of guilt is at times closer to what I think of as
empathy. He sees it has an emotion that inhibits violent behaviour before it
happens – because the person doesn’t want to harm those about whom he is having
violent thoughts.  

Gilligan acknowledges that everyone feels shame, and says
that there must be other conditions present for it to lead to violence. The
painful childhoods his interviewees experienced would be one condition, with
poverty, poor education and belonging to a group that is shamed by society
frequently adding to that pain. (Male socialisation is another factor
– shaming nonviolence as cowardly. He points out that during war, those
who kill are hailed as heroes and rewarded with medals, while those who refuse
to kill are branded cowards.) When the person no longer has enough non-violent
ways to salvage self-esteem, he will resort to violence.

So if punishment and shaming won’t change people, maybe it’s
time we stopped doing it? Yet, currently these techniques are used repeatedly,
in the hope that somehow we can convince those we disagree with to come around
to our way of thinking. I only have to scroll through Facebook or Twitter to
see post after post of people mocking, ridiculing and ranting.

It’s understandable.

And it’s hopeless.

It also, often, misses the bigger picture. Today, for
instance, three politicians resigned from the UK Conservative party. One of
them is Heidi Allen, who, in her resignation speech, said, “We have deepened
the suffering of people on benefits, while having the power to fix it.”

Several tweeters wrote that Allen had voted for austerity
policies she was now deriding, and said she was a hypocrite. What they missed
was that she has recently been on a tour of the nation’s foodbanks and was
deeply disturbed to fully understand the depths of poverty, humiliation and
despair that her former party’s policy’s had created. That she was moved to
compassion by that tour is no reason to shame her now – it makes more sense to
delight in her change of heart.

It’s not enough to say that others need to stop shaming. That is just the same old, same old. If compassion is to win, it has to start with us – with me.

We need to begin close to home – actually in our own homes, workplaces and in our interactions on social media. It begins with deep listening. It begins with learning the language of shame – Gilligan points out that shame is so prevalent that we have dozens of words for it: feeling mocked, taunted, defeated, losing face and “dissed” to name a few. I would add not feeling heard, not being given credit or being seen as stupid.

When we hear those words from someone else, we need to feel able to support them to express those feelings, and we cannot do that unless we also deeply listen to ourselves and heal our own shame. If compassion is to win, as always, it begins with us.