Ideas - Obtaining Justice Without Demonizing Your Enemies: Martha Minow

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

In the age of growing polarization, how do you tackle injustice without demonizing your enemies? Former Harvard Law School dean Martha Minow tackles that question in her 2023 Horace E. Read Memorial Lecture.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Can struggles against injustice avoid the path to hatred, violence and destruction of our enemies? Yes, argues Martha Minow, one of the world's leading human rights legal scholars. Demonizing others strips away the humanity of other human beings and threatens to unleash the darkest aspects of human nature. the darkest aspects of human nature. For nearly a decade, Professor Minow served as dean of Harvard Law School,

where she continues to teach. In 2008, when first running to be president, Barack Obama spoke about his student days at Harvard Law School and about a teacher there who had changed his life. It was Martha Minow. Decent and smart people can profoundly disagree with each other. Come to my classes. They and we can, on occasion, even persuade one another. There's a wonderful lawyer named David Singleton, who used to direct the Ohio Justice Policy Center.

He once explained to me and to my students that people he had completely written off because they were political opponents ended up being the critical allies for the reform of the criminal laws in Ohio. Today's adversary could become an ally in another day, and looking at someone you disagree with that way is a different way to see them. In 2023, Minow gave the annual Horace E. Reid lecture at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. In the age of growing polarization, her talk explores how to tackle injustice without destructive retaliation. Here is Martha Minow, the foreign audience in Halifax. Wow. Well, thank you very, very much.

Work against injustice. As Archbishop Desmond Tutor explained, if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. And yet another wise adage is, don't demonize your foes. Until we learn that other lives are equally grievable and have an equal demand on us to be grieved, especially the ones we have helped to eliminate, I'm not sure we'll really ever be on the way to overcoming the problem of dehumanization, one philosopher put it recently. And this is especially true when societies are divided and polarized. Work against injustice. Don't demonize your enemies. Can both of these be right? I suggest that the answer is yes, and indeed urgently so. My exploration focuses on finding durable approaches to injustice and deep conflicts, and this means being mindful of ongoing cycles of violence while also understanding that the status quo for too many people involves intolerable violence and degradation. It also means making inviolable respect for individuals as political equals and bolstering the architecture that secures nonviolent assent amid ongoing disagreement.

As histories of wars and coups, collapses of democratic states show, these are very tall demands requiring active renewal and struggle in each generation, including struggles over what justice means. Concretely then, what should justice mean for communities that are riven by divisions, political or otherwise, communities confronting traumas from the past and present abuses, societies seeking to emerge from injustice? The touchstone for this inquiry comes from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail. Dr. King was held in contempt for disobeying a court order against a peaceful civil rights protest mounting against racial injustice. While he was in jail, eight white Christian clergymen opposed the civil

rights protest and issued a public call urging patience. Dr. King wrote his letter in response while he was locked up in that era of lynching in the jail in Birmingham, Alabama, and here are words from his now famous response. He said, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. This statement endures because it makes palpable how justice is and must be about recognizing how all of us are interconnected, despite deep patterns of social division and separation.

Dr. King praised the nonviolent demonstrators in Birmingham, he said, for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer, their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day, the South will recognize its great heroes. And the world, indeed, has recognized the heroism of the nonviolent civil rights movement participants in stories recounted in schools during holidays, memorial structures teaching new generations.

Or so it seemed. In the past few years in the United States, politicians in Florida and some other states have by law restricted instruction by schools or programs by employers that make anyone feel that they bear for personal responsibility for historic wrongdoing because of their race, gender, or national origin. Do such laws violate freedom to speak and to receive information? There are court challenges ongoing. I confess I'm involved with

them. The surge of these anti-woke laws and the rhetoric and ordinances related to them show how culture wars spread fears and actual menace and even ignorance. Culture wars may seem a distraction from the persistent patterns of injustice, yet understanding polarization and social division is crucial. I began work on this talk before the recent violence in the Middle East, taking the lives and safety from so many with shocking brutality and indifference to human suffering. The Hamas assault, killings, and hostage-taking violate human rights. There's no question about it, and also decency. But it should be possible to say this and at the same time recognize that the risk to civilians in Gaza are also jeopardizing human rights.

Both Israeli leaders and leaders of Hamas say that they are standing up against injustice, even as leaders on both sides demonize the opposition. The conflict imposes terrible suffering on innocent people, while triggering divisions within other watching communities, including my own campus that is right now torn up on these issues. Can struggles against injustice avoid the path to hatred, violence, and destruction? Righteous opposition to injustice can unfortunately be a rationale for acts of violence by people retaliating against what they understand to be terrible wrongs.

Narratives of resentment can overtake understanding of common humanity. Knowing this risk should lead to redoubled devotion to the principles of respecting the humanity of all and to constructing true and inclusive narratives of past and visions of the future. People from different groups must be able to see themselves in how societies make sense of the past and plan to go forward. Restorative justice efforts and cultural initiatives can be vital resources in this effort. Tools of acknowledgement, repair, rectification, transformation offer responses to injustice. Such efforts at their best work at both the levels of individuals and also social narratives, but also may fall short of changing structures and gaining more than temporary

traction. Processes of acknowledgement may help build new understanding for individuals and for nations, even when they do not themselves produce concrete political and economic change, but they can also produce backlash and resistance. Anticipating headwinds is an important element of the work addressing social division and historic injustice, and so is constructing deliberate actions that strengthen the institutions that make change durable. Can all of this be done without demonizing opponents? That's what I want to talk with you about. So first, let's look at polarization and divisions.

Over and over again, in societies around the globe and through history, oppression and violence both reflect and perpetuate lines of difference, isolating individuals and groups from recognizing the pain of others. I inevitably reflect my own context, the United States, late October 2023, while I'm also trying to be attentive to developments here in Canada and elsewhere. and elsewhere. Strikingly, people surveyed from societies across advanced economies last year report perceiving greater social division now than from before the pandemic. In the United States, the belief that we are divided is perhaps one of the very few things that Americans currently have in common. I like the joke that the world is made up of two kinds of people, the people who think there are two kinds of people and the people who don't. But current divisions are unfortunately

no laughing matter. Half of Americans report that they prefer that their country to be composed primarily of people with roots in Western Europe. Another half disagree with that view. Political polarization occurs when people's political views diverge towards the extremes and away from the center, and they build distrust. Some politicians amplify white grievances. Meantime, a majority of African American parents in the U.S. perceive persistent racism and police violence as big problems. Anti-Asian, anti-immigrant sentiments are on the rise and are prime concerns for others. American Jews perceive heightened anti-Semitism and risks of violence. American Muslims face religious discrimination

and increased rates of suicide attempts. And conflicts between religious free exercise and equal treatment of individuals regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation are mounting in workplaces, health care policies, and schools. A recent poll shows that white evangelical Christians report that they fear more than any other group in the United States what they perceive to be as threats to American culture. And many people in poor and predominantly white rural communities report that they feel left behind, disrespected, and resentful.

Divisions and distrust accompany a kind of collective amnesia about past collective amnesia and about growing inequalities. Many people, indifferent and often, opposing groups fear that their way of life, their beliefs, their very existence is at stake. In formal political settings like the United States Congress, disagreement within groups rivals conflicts between groups outside and even threatens to spill over to physical violence. And as a Norwegian social scientist recently noted, it is a dire time for a democracy if honest disagreement deteriorates into shouting matches of distrust. Well, then I have to say it's a dire time.

Current social divisions and distrust around the globe have many sources, including the unscrupulous behavior of leaders and of social media. Politicians in Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, the Philippines, and Turkey appeal to the fears and hatreds of masses of people at the expense of minorities, truth, reason, and fundamental values of equality, tolerance, and the rule of law.

The problem is not, though, a handful of demagogues. Every age has them. The problem is the discontent of millions of people facing economic instability, climate insecurity, mass migrations, technological change, cultural shifts, and vulnerable people willing to embrace the politics of fear and blame. Social media companies contribute by amplifying extreme and outrage-producing content in pursuit of engagement and revenue. Misinformation and disinformation circulate freely on social media and are more likely to be forwarded than truthful material. Even Canada cannot escape these forces, although reports of this polarization in this country may be artifacts of media hype.

Domination, division, and oppression operate in part through ideas, permeating cultures and beliefs held by individuals, regardless of facts. Drawing distinctions between groups is apparently deeply ingrained in human beings, but identifying who is us and who is them varies historically by context. There's nothing about any of the named social divisions that has an immutable reality. Ideas about racial or gender hierarchy rest on notions that lack scientific validity, and such ideas persist. Ideas about religion, disability, differences, inform people's fears and beliefs, again, without a foundation. Narratives about identity and history become part of people's consciousness, from children's exposure to adult explanations, from formal education, from social settings, and from cultural practices. Beliefs that resist facts operate as ideologies. Societies are often

organized to reflect and reinforce beliefs around group identities, and that makes them real, regardless of any factual foundation. Power maintaining such organizations can operate overtly or subtly, and conscious and implicit attitudes in people's minds and institutional patterns entrench cleavages and prejudices. Scholars for decades have documented relationships between patterns of violence and oppression along lines of difference or identity that have been adopted and reflected in institutions and attitudes and their relationship to genocide, to ethnic cleansing, to brutal separation of parents and children, appropriation of land and resources,

exclusion from opportunities, mass incarceration, and daily degradations. Every country has social conflicts and social divisions. These are ancient, and history seems to show that we need labels to define our own place. For hundreds of years, people have categorized others and treated them under a hierarchical framework. Some are treated as less so others can feel like they're more. framework. Some are treated as less so others can feel like they're more. What is new is the growing use since World War II of the language of rights rather than misfortune to talk about such things.

Legal responses to atrocity can take the form of treaties, constitutional reforms, statutory changes, criminal trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, reparations, and each do hold promise. But they also can give rise to backlash. Law enforcement can anchor commitments to justice and human rights, but it too can be abused. Moreover, even admirable pursuits of justice can generate a kind of political response that fuels cycles of violence and violations of human rights and dignity. And so it's to the subject of backlash that I turn now. Responses to injustice and mass violence sadly often take the form of more violence, more people being harmed. And narratives of victimhood play

a key role in entrenching justifications for power and oppression. In the 1870s in the United States, many southern towns and farms lay devastated by the Civil War. And the national government enacted what we call Reconstruction Amendments that accorded to blacks the same rights as whites, accorded

citizenship, suffrage, protection under the law. Many white Southerners, starting in the 1870s, responded by calling for what they called redemption, the return of white supremacy, and the removal of rights for blacks, and often used murderous violence of the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and mobs to terrorize southern blacks. Historian W. E. B. Du Bois later described the period as one, and I quote him, where the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, and then moved back again towards slavery. Resurgents of white supremacist rhetoric and organizations produced violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and contributed to the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol. Popular cultural sources in South Africa have recently

projected an unfounded claim of white genocide related to a series of murders of white farmers in the country. South Africa's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has warned against igniting the tinderbox of race hatred and said, no, these are crimes. This is not genocide. Let's respond with the legal system. Debates over land reform and worker mistreatment continue to expose the legacies of racialized differences in power and resources. There are serious problems there. Sometimes backlash also involves ignorance about the past. Ariel Dorfman, Chilean writer and human rights activist, recently warned about the effect of forgetting, and in his case, forgetting the oppression that his country experienced. He wrote an essay called I Watch Democracy Die and I Don't Want to Do It Again. Dorfman reminds his readers that between

1973 and 1990, more than 40,000 people were subjected under the regime of President Augusto Pinochet to physical and psychological torture. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans, political opponents, independent critics, or innocent civilians suspected of having links to them were jailed or murdered or persecuted or exiled, and there has been some progress since then. This is still from Dorfman speaking. But today's Chile's radical right and more than a third of Chileans have expressed approval of the Pinochet regime. Now, this is me. The percentage of Chileans who say that the military was right to carry out the coup increased from 16% in 2013 to 36% this year. Chile itself is very politically divided,

and those divisions include disagreements about how to remember the past or whether to remember it. These episodes illustrate some of the dynamic of backlash. Backlash is a strong resistance to change. Advances in women's legal and social equality have met with movements restricting women's reproductive choice in the United States, censorship in China, exclusions from schooling and employment in Afghanistan. Backlash against court orders to end racial segregation of public schools is a prime example from the United States. And

here in Canada, a recent survey reports that 53% of young women polled fear so much for their safety when they speak up against harassment, trolling, bullying, and physical violence that they are deterred from doing so. Now look, I certainly don't assign blame for backlash to those who have fought for long denied rights. But there are warnings here about these dynamics, warnings about how losers can lose in the face of backlash, and perhaps how victimization narratives contribute to that backlash. Victories for those who've historically been marginalized can have sharply negative unintended consequences or be perceived to have unintended consequences when there continues to be a backdrop of imbalance in power. When

embedded in dynamics of violence and hierarchy, even solace can perpetuate and escalate pain. Author Alice Munro, I'm a fan, captures this problem exquisitely in her short story, Royal Beatings. The story reveals a repeated family dynamic. Stepdaughter triggers anger in her stepmother, and both of them know the cycle that will follow. The stepmother calls the father to physically discipline his daughter, and after giving her a look filled with hatred and pleasure, that's Monroe's language, he lashes the daughter with his belt and then with his hands, and the beating continues long after she shrieks and cries. The daughter is a victim and knows that that is her role. Later, the stepmother comes, as always,

to comfort the daughter with a tray of food to eat in bed. Violence in a household is not the same, of course, as societal oppression, but for those caught in dynamics of violence, the interactions of behavior, emotion, narratives hold similarities. In the context of family violence, there are no easy answers. And this was underscored for me when I discussed this story, Alice Munro's story, with a group of judges in a program that uses works of literature to help

judges reflect on family violence problems. The judges were learning at the time how to implement a then new law authorizing judicial civil protection orders at the request of someone experiencing violence at home. One judge in the conversation said, I just find it so frustrating someone will come in and not complete the process. This story spoke to them. The judges immediately recognized the pattern, and the judges acknowledged that all three of the participants apparently knew each time what had happened in the past and what would happen in the future. And one judge memorably commented, you know, when a family like this comes to court, I never know whether the court is breaking the pattern or simply becoming another participant in it. The judge worried that the court's breaking the pattern or simply becoming another participant in it.

The judge worried that the court's processes could be manipulated as another weapon caught up in the party's struggle. Would the assertion of judicial power, backed by the threat of state coercion, perpetuate rather than alter the pattern of abuse? In a similar vein, opponents of the death penalty, which we still have in the United States, warn that state violence can engender more violence. Even lawful and warranted assertions of power can continue rather than end violence. This is one of the reasons for my enduring interest in restorative justice. Truth-seeking efforts such as truth commissions and restorative justice circles differ from adversarial adjudication.

The focus on collaborative truth-telling and construction of constructive steps for change, building relationships of respect among people who come at problems from very different places, I think it holds potential for breaking cycles of violence and building something focusing on the future. Sometimes gathering and sharing facts broadly can change public understandings and intervene in the dynamics of violence and suppression. An aspiring example comes from Brazil, where the secret, at first, fact-finding effort, and then

a public commission, inspired truth commissions around the globe as a mechanism for generating findings and altering prevailing silence about the past. You all know that what had happened in Brazil, the military regime between 64 and 1973 had subverted democracy, suspended legal rights, tortured or disappeared thousands of people who engaged in resistance, and then the economy changed and the political situation changed. In 1979 the military agreed to an amnesty agreement that protected the officials involved in the repressive military from prosecution and

the deal offered amnesty also for political prisoners and a gradual return to civilian leadership under a new constitution. But because amnesty also for political prisoners and a gradual return to civilian leadership under a new constitution. But because amnesty met no legal accountability, there was this regime of silence all over the country and a serious danger of suppression about what had happened. To obtain information about the torture practiced by the state's apparatus, a private investigation secretly started with the support of the Catholic Archbishop of San Paolo and the World Council of Churches. They gathered materials and produced a massive report in 1985 documenting political murders and acts of torture. It became unexpectedly a bestseller in the country. And eventually, demands for public

accountability produced the National Commission on the Disappeared that thoroughly documented human rights violations through personal accounts of abductions, tortures, death, and analysis of the systematic organization of the state power. The truth-telling process became a model then for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the transition from apartheid. The South African TRC collected and amplified 20,000 statements from victims and survivors, and the facts gathered through amnesty applications from persons who committed crimes and human rights violations informed the five-volume report. The report shows how cruel assaults on individuals and families and humanity came to pass and makes clear that every part of the society contributed and bears responsibility.

The commission's work brought many facts to life and helped many victims feel acknowledged. A public opinion survey 10 years after the TRC found compelling evidence that its work contributed to reconciliation within the country. That survey and other accounts underscore that after the TRC, South Africans reported they all understood the wrongness of apartheid as a crime against humanity. Albie Sachs, South African anti-apartheid freedom fighter who ultimately became a justice on the post-apartheid constitutional court, reflected on why the TRC worked in South Africa. And he said it worked because the truth-telling activities offered an emotional settlement for those who had suffered under apartheid. And it worked, he said, because the commission offered no space for denying what had

happened and also gave perpetrators an incentive to confess. And further, he said, it converted the information it acquired into official acknowledgement by the state and at least symbolically by the society. Now look, the TRC was imperfect. It didn't fulfill all the hopes that people held out for it. A dominant criticism is that it failed to hold responsible institutions like courts and corporations. And subsequent governments have failed to implement the recommendations of the reports. The major failure to address political and economic structures that embed racist practices in the country has led to ongoing challenges, including ongoing violence. And individuals and generations born after the TRC concluded it's been more than a quarter of a century did not experience the process.

Many younger black South Africans in particular have responded with violence to the ongoing economic injustices of structural racism. Victims of the apartheid regime, in protest, slept outside the nation's constitutional court in a campaign seeking to enforce promises of never-received reparations. A recent book reports that many white South Africans are fearful to go out in public, and many have not accepted a world where black people move ahead and white people are not superior. So the problems are not over. But the TRC, no one activity could prevent such problems. It still played an important role in building a peaceful transition to apartheid. The question is, what else needs to be done, both there and in other places that seek to learn from that experience. You're listening to a public talk by Harvard University's Martha Minow,

given in Halifax in October 2023. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA,

the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood and the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Let's return to the second half of legal scholar Martha Minow's 2023 Read Lecture at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. The former dean of Harvard Law School makes a compelling argument about how justice can be obtained without demonizing one's enemies,

in particular through restorative justice. restorative justice mechanisms promote truth-telling by individuals who've survived abuses and atrocities with encounters with other people and with a forward-looking approach restorative processes hold potential for transformative agenda especially if the process builds personal understandings and a shared sense of unity and purpose for change. So it's that that I want to talk about now. How, if at all, can the narrative building activity be amplified so that there is a sense of joint participation in creating a future. I think in this context, it's good to recognize that lawyers don't have all the answers. Cultural practices, in particular, including arts and education,

hold a very important role, I believe, in affecting the understandings of individuals and communities about social divisions and social injustice and about imagining a shared future. Rituals and art, processes of remembrance and repair, meaning making in response to atrocities that have roots in cultural practices can be incredibly meaningful. and commemorative activities afford chances for reflection by people who have direct ties with terrible events, but also people who are born generations later. An arresting study of German elections over seven cycles of elections finds that exposure to memorials commemorating victims and survivors of Nazi persecution is associated with reduced support for far-right political parties. The memorial used in the study is called

Stoperstein, Stumbling Stones. These are really the size of a cobblestone embedded in sidewalks of a cobblestone embedded in sidewalks on streets across. It started in Berlin. It now has spread to 1,100 locations in 17 European cities. And what's unusual about this particular form of memorial is that they're embedded in ordinary life. They're put in near where the victims and survivors of Nazi persecution last freely lived, their last chosen place of residence. So you're walking down the street, and you stumble on the stone, and you remember. It's more integrated into ordinary life than the memorial you have to go several kilometers to go see and probably don't. kilometers to go see and probably don't. Compelling cultural work has been led by brilliant and superbly effective lawyer and law professor I know, Brian Stevenson, who founded and leads the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery,

Alabama. Its successful legal challenges over the years have worked to eliminate excessive and unfair criminal sentencing and exposed abuses of people in incarceration and the treatment of children as if they were adults by a criminal system and secured the release of over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners sentenced to death. But a few years ago, Brian said despite these successes, he reached the conclusion that until the national narratives about race change, the problems that he and his team were challenging in litigation would persist. He explained, and these are his words, the politics of fear and anger, in my judgment, that's a threat to a democratic society. Because when you allow yourself to be governed by fear or governed by anger, you will tolerate things you shouldn't tolerate. You will accept things you shouldn't

accept. He commented that it was a choice of narrative to treat drug addiction as a crime rather than an illness, and it was a narrative choice to label children as super predators on the grounds that they didn't show remorse for violent crimes. And that choice led many state legislatures to lower the age to 14, to treat 14-year-olds as adults in the criminal system. So Professor Stevenson set about to change narratives around race and around guilt and innocence and around crime and punishment. What should be remembered about slavery, about lynching, about racial segregation, and about their connections to current day mass incarceration and racial bias. And he recognized the power of art, museums, and memorials. And he and his Equal Justice

Institute team created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which commemorates the 4,400 lynching of black individuals in the United States between 1877 and 1950. Visitors walk up a hill to encounter first a few and then eventually 800 large steel blocks, one for each county where a racial lynching took place. And each block is etched with the names, if they are known, of the victims of the lynching. And as visitors walk through this memorial, the orientation of the hanging monuments changes and becomes eye-level, then overhead, evoking the way that a lynching victim was hanged often in public spaces. Noting specific dates and the places where the lynchings occurred, these monuments commemorate individuals whose names and lives were neglected and suppressed, not to mention

destroyed. And nearby, on a site where enslaved people were forced to work at a cotton warehouse, is the accompanying museum. It combines first-person narratives in film, kind of holographic films with experiences about slavery, with exhibits about, with data and history about slavery and about mass incarceration, about lynching, about Jim Crow laws that enforced segregation and subordination. People come to visit. The initiative has sparked efforts by local communities to reckon with racial violence in their past. And since its opening in 2018, the memorial and the museum have drawn millions from around the world. Popular and academic writings reflect on it. Their presence has transformed, kind of ironically, the economy of Montgomery, Alabama. It's the best thing that's happened to Montgomery, Alabama in a long, long time. And there are people in the town that kind of gr, the economy of Montgomery, Alabama. It's the best thing that's happened to Montgomery, Alabama in a long, long time.

And there are people in the town that kind of grudgingly say to Brian, well, that was a good thing you did. A major purpose of these initiatives is to overcome the suppression or the forgetting of knowledge about slavery and lynching and to share a narrative about the nation's past that can support a transformative future. Restorative and cultural narrative building efforts that mobilize facts, education, and experience can offer means for transformation both of individuals and of communities. Necessary for transformative justice is not just narrative building, however, but also concrete actions. So what kinds of concrete actions can be fought for, can be held out to break out of existing patterns?

I think it has to work on multiple levels. These levels include interactions between individuals, individuals who have to do the hard work of treating one another with respect, even when we sharply disagree or perceive one another as threats, and know that we are right. And work at this level is essential for building trusting relationships and any kind of movement for change. But transformative efforts have to work beyond the interpersonal. And another level does include the social narratives that are absorbed in the minds of individuals and groups, the narratives that assign blame and causation in ways that trap people in biases and assumptions

and in the sense of personal hopelessness. Renovating existing institutions is another level of the work, and it needs to happen because rules and practices so often encode ideas and attitudes that get in the way of according people respect or addressing ongoing harms. Institutional and cultural practices have to ensure genuine norms of respect for individuals, and that is hard work. Democracies from ancient Athens to the present have tried to summon people to avoid turning other participants in the project of self-government as enemies. Athens excluded most of the people, but it didn't even work for them.

Philosopher Margaret Walker describes this goal in terms of morally adequate relations that assure people confidence that they share some basic standards for the treatment of each other, that people can trust one another to abide by those standards and to acknowledge fault if not. And that means that people are justified in their hope that unacceptable treatment will not prevail and victims will not be abandoned in their reliance on that shared commitment. This is a tall order, but I think it's good to make it explicit. People who have had repeated experiences contradicting these expectations are understandably wary and distrustful.

An only demonstrated experience. Warranting trust will gain trust. Respect for individual dignity means resisting the temptation to dehumanize any individual or group simply because of their identity or even when they say disagreeable things. This requires emotional self-management as well as norms of respect, as well as institutional reinforcement.

Maybe it requires learning to step back from disagreement and prevent hostility from spiraling out of control. When dealing with large groups and societies as a whole, laws and norms have to be continually renewed to channel disagreements away from violence, to deepen respect for each person, and to work on the reforms that are necessary to make that respect visible and real. And this requires something even harder, a spirit of humility and openness to learning. This is the advice of our former Justice of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was reflecting on what it takes for people to build a society that's founded in justice, liberty, and equality. And she quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century visitor to the

United States, who wrote, the greatness of America lies not in it being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults. Disagreements will be inevitable. The question is whether they can occur with civility and respect, which requires genuine openness. Decent and smart people can profoundly disagree with each other. Come to my classes. They and we can, on occasion, even persuade one another. There's a wonderful lawyer named David Singleton, who used to direct the Ohio Justice Policy Center. He once explained to me and to my students that people he had completely written off because they were political opponents ended up being the critical allies for the reform

of the criminal laws in Ohio. Today's adversary could become an ally in another day, and looking at someone you disagree with that way is a different way to see them. I know that you were lucky enough not long ago to have visiting here Fania Davis and Angela Davis, Margaret Burnham. here, Fania Davis and Angela Davis, Margaret Burnham. I was so amazed to discover that this leader of the U.S. restorative justice movement, Fania Davis, has as a sister the well-known political activist and professor, Angela Davis, once on the FBI Federal Bureau of Investigations most wanted list for false accusations that she was exonerated in a criminal

process. What's amazing to me is to see these two people focusing on repair and structural change in dialogue. And you can see their talk here that's available through ideas at the CBC. The two sisters compliment each other. In dialogue about restorative justice, Angela observes, now we're thinking deeply about the connection between interior life and what happens in the social world. Even those who are fighting against state violence often incorporate impulses that are based on state violence in their relations with other people.

It's pretty profound. What concretely would justice entail for divided communities? Altering conditions of injustice for the long term. Building support for that internal change for individuals. Developing cultural narratives and practices. I am not an optimistic person, but I am a hopeful one. And hope is renewed for me when I meet inspiring people. One such person is a man named Porig O'Malley, an international peacemaker from Ireland. And he organized the entity, the Divided Cities Initiative, that brought together people living in cities that are

subject to the governance of two different countries, and the countries can't even agree about where the city belongs. And his strategy was to bring together people from these divided cities who had been enemies of one another to see if they could help each other. He explained his guiding principle is that one divided society is in the best position to help another and I was lucky enough to participate in some of the convenings and listen as people shared their perspectives. People, the delegation from Beirut, Lebanon, Nicosia, Cyprus, a city in Northern Ireland that can't even agree on its name. It is called Derry or Londonderry,

and there's a slash, and so sometimes it's called the Slash City because people can't agree on what to call it. And sitting in the presence of these delegations from each of these places and listening to people who would say, kind of with a laugh, how they had fought each other, was really remarkable.

But even more remarkable was seeing the light bulb go on with the delegations across the cities as they realized, oh, these are patterns. This is not just unique to us. There's something that maybe we can learn. We can learn maybe not to demonize each other and to work tirelessly for justice at the same time. They did almost come to blows over soccer teams, but that's another story. Demonizing others strips away the humanity of other human beings and threatens to unleash the darkest aspects of human nature. When motivated even by a righteous indignation

against injustice to demonize others opens up passions to destroy and shame that spurs new rounds of dehumanizing violence. And my hope is that we can learn from patterns of division and polarization, that we can learn to use the resources of narrative building, restorative adjusting, transformative practices, cultural creativity, and strengthening ourselves and our institutions to deal with disagreements. And as I close, I have a confession to make. I am a fan of Star Trek. This is the franchise that grew from a very small cult television audience. I'm old enough to have been in that cult audience, to now a global media franchise that explores the 23rd and 24th century space travelers

with allegories to contemporary dilemmas. In one 1993 episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, which is the best, competing groups race across the planets to find scattered pieces of a prized relic from a prior civilization. They locate first one piece and then go to another planet, find a second piece, and then a third and find a third piece. And suddenly, one of the characters turns on all the others, having put the pieces together, and discovered that it's a powerful weapon and turns it on the others and says, it's mine. Our hero, Captain Picard, who conveniently for this purpose is also an archaeologist, orders his team to drop their weapons and clear their minds of aggressive thoughts. He says, so quickly, it's hard to believe they understood it, I was able to read the symbols on the pieces of the artifact,

and I discerned that what it says is that it amplifies anger, but peace defeats its power. Metaphorically, this tale underscores how tamping down even understandable fury is key to building enough peace to proceed with the work of building better days. A character in a more recent Star Trek spinoff says, the past is written, but the future is left for us to write. One way or the other, we will write the future. And my hope is that we will learn not to amplify hate, even of our enemies, if justice is to prevail. Thank you. Thank you. Harvard legal scholar Martha Minow delivering the 2023 Reed Lecture

at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas for more information on this program. And if you'd like to comment, email us, ideas at cbc.ca. Special thanks to Jennifer Llewellyn, Director of the Restorative Lab, and to Elizabeth Sanford. This episode was produced by Mary Link. Technical production, Jeff Doan and Danielle Duval. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. And we'll end with a question from the audience to Martha Minow. You talked about making respect real through law. My generation struggles with trust in the police and a belief that the judicial system is politically polarized. Can you talk about the role of the judicial process in reinforcing respect in a culture with those issues? I really appreciate the question. It's something I am grappling with. I don't have a perfect answer. I'll tell you a story. As was mentioned, I had the incredible opportunity to clerk for Thurgood Marshall, who was a, before he

was a justice, maybe more than any other justice of the US Supreme Court, he was as important as a lawyer, if not more important as a lawyer. So my colleague Randy Kennedy grew up in South Carolina, African American, and had heard about Thurgood Marshall as a lawyer from his father, who was a mail carrier, not a lawyer. And his father heard that Thurgood Marshall was coming to argue a case in South Carolina. And he got a day off and he went to go hear him. And what he remembered was that the judges called him Mr. Marshall. And at that time, no black men in that community were called anything other than boy or something

worse. That's emblematic of what law can do. It didn't matter what his life was like outside the courthouse. In the courthouse, he was accorded equal respect. And obviously, he was brilliant, and he and his team figured out a way to use the system to build a kind of stepping stones, chipping away at the separate but equal doctrine and changing the law. chipping away at the separate but equal doctrine and changing the law. You know, I think that there are, I'm from Chicago, I know about corruption. I think that there are tremendous problems in the criminal system. I won't call it the criminal justice system, it's not just.

But I also have seen the power of law in challenging it. Bryan Stevenson is just one example. And I don't know a better way. I don't know violence tearing down the prisons. It's not going to be very successful. In my own studies of history, what I discover is that when there are revolutions, it's the least powerful who are hurt the most. So I think it's about changing who's in those systems. It's about developing patterns to expose the problems.

has the ability to accord respect and to equalize people who in the economic world, in the political world, don't have equality. And we should build on that, not throw it away. So thanks. Thank you. So we're very grateful to have had the opportunity to be together again for the Reed Lecture and for the partnership with CBC Ideas. We hope that you will have the opportunity to listen again to this incredible lecture and to encourage your friends to do the same as it airs on CBC Ideas and as it's posted on the law school website at the same time.

And thank you very much again for joining us.