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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, SEPTEMBER 9, 1983
PAGE 13
to put it another way, a blinding belief in "common humanity," in
the triumph of human commonality over human differences•... Its
central axiom is that if one burrows deep enough beneath the Mao
jacket, the shapka or the chador, one discovers that people
everywhere are essentially the same....
We all have "eyes,
hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions." We are
all "fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled
by the same winter and summer." It follows, does it not, that we
must all want the same things? According to Harvard cardiologist
Bernard Lown, president of International Physicians for the Pre
vention of Nuclear War, that's not just Shakespeare, it's a
scientific fact: "Our aim is to promote the simple medical in
sight," he writes, "that Russian and American hearts are indis
tinguishable, that both ache for peace and survival."
Such breathtaking non sequiturs (cardiological or otherwise) are
characteristic of plural solipsism.... If people everywhere, from
Savannah to Sevastopol [in the U.S.S.R.] , share the same hopes
and dreams and fears and love of children (and good food), they
should get along. And if they don't, then there must be some mis
understanding, some misperception, some problem of communica
tion....
It is the broken telephone theory of international conflict and
it suggests solution:
repair service by the expert "facili
tator".... Hence the...mania for mediators, the belief that the
world's conundrums [ puzzling problems] would yield to the right
intermediary, the right presidential envoy.... Yet Iraq's Saddam
Hussein and Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini, to take just two candi
dates for the Roger Fisher School of Conflict Resolution, have
perfectly adequate phone service. They need only an operator to
make the connection. Their problem is that they have very little
to say to each other.
There are other consequences.
If the whole world is like me,
then certain conflicts become incomprehensible.... The more viru
lent pronouncements of Third World countries are dismissed as
mere rhetoric. The more alien the sentiment, the less seriously
it is taken •.••
When the Saudis finally make it unmistakably clear that they will
support neither Camp David nor the Reagan plan nor the Lebanon
accord, the U.S. reacts with consternation. It might have spared
itself the surprise if it had not in the first place imagined
that underneath those kaffiyehs are folks just like us, sharing
our aims and views....
Ultimately to say that people all share the same hopes and fears,
are all bornaria love and su:frer and d�alike, 1s to say very
little.
For it is after commonalities are accounted for that
politics.becomes necessary. It is only when values, ideologies,
cultures and interests clash that poITtics even begins.
At only the most trivial level can it be said that people want the
sametnfngs:---1rake peace. The North Vletnamesewant it, but ap
parently they wanted to conquer all of Indochina first•...