"But if the brain confusing reality and literalness with metaphor and
symbol can have adverse consequences, the opposite can occur as well. At
one juncture just before the birth of a free South Africa, Nelson
Mandela entered secret negotiations with an Afrikaans general with death
squad blood all over his hands, a man critical to the peace process
because he led a large, well-armed Afrikaans resistance group. They met
in Mandela’s house, the general anticipating tense negotiations across a
conference table. Instead, Mandela led him to the warm, homey living
room, sat beside him on a comfy couch, and spoke to him in Afrikaans.
And the resistance melted away.
This neural confusion about the literal versus the metaphorical gives
symbols enormous power, including the power to make peace. The political
scientist and game theorist Robert Axelrod of the University of
Michigan has emphasized this point in thinking about conflict
resolution. For example, in a world of sheer rationality where the brain
didn’t confuse reality with symbols, bringing peace to Israel and
Palestine would revolve around things like water rights, placement of
borders, and the extent of militarization allowed to Palestinian police.
Instead, argues Axelrod, “mutual symbolic concessions” of no material
benefit will ultimately make all the difference. He quotes a Hamas
leader who says that for the process of peace to go forward, Israel must
apologize for the forced Palestinians exile in 1948. And he quotes a
senior Israeli official saying that for progress to be made,
Palestinians need to first acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and to
get their anti-Semitic garbage out of their textbooks.
Hope for true peace in
the Middle East didn’t come with the news of a trade agreement being
signed. It was when President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Hussein of
Jordan attended the funeral of the murdered Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin. That same hope came to the Northern Irish, not when
ex-Unionist demagogues and ex-I.R.A. gunmen served in a government
together, but when those officials publicly commiserated about each
other’s family misfortunes, or exchanged anniversary gifts. And
famously, for South Africans, it came not with successful negotiations
about land reapportionment, but when black South Africa embraced rugby
and Afrikaans rugby jocks sang the A.N.C. national anthem.
Nelson Mandela was
wrong when he advised, “Don’t talk to their minds; talk to their
hearts.” He meant talk to their insulas and cingulate cortices and all
those other confused brain regions, because that confusion could help
make for a better world."
Robert Sapolsky
Robert Sapolsky
"... On the contrary: he was convinced that what he had encountered could
not be real. At best it must be a hallucination: a trick of the eye or
the ear, or his own mind working against him...
... Though the reverential legends about him are often magnificent, they work as perhaps all legends do: they obscure more than they reveal, and he becomes more a symbol than a human being."
http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/episode/2013/10/31/muhammad-from-orphan-to-prophet/
... Though the reverential legends about him are often magnificent, they work as perhaps all legends do: they obscure more than they reveal, and he becomes more a symbol than a human being."
http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/episode/2013/10/31/muhammad-from-orphan-to-prophet/
So some instances call for for closeness to reality and others for furthering symbolics or a combination of both to help bring about the optimal well in evolving our interactions.
