Evolution Meets Foreign Policy

Last week, my wife and I attended an intriguing workshop on how and/or if evolutionary theory could help American foreign policy makers deal with some of the seemingly intractable problems that “keep them up at night,” including climate change, mass migration, economic inequality, and more. The event was organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Stewart Patrick (foreign policy) and ProSocial World’s David Sloan Wilson (evolution). Both of whom realized that the event needed to incorporate the kind of peacebuilding perspectives organizations like the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) provide along with those of evolutionary scientists which is why we were there and brought a few likeminded colleagues with us.

A Meeting (?) of the Minds

As regular readers know, I lead at any opportunity to bring strange political bedfellows together. At least since the 1980s, I’ve sought ways to bring people on the left and right together in a wide variety of settings with a wide variety of goals.

In this case, however, the differences we wanted to address were not ideological. I doubt that anyone in the room planned to vote for Donald Trump for president.

Rather, our goal was to bring together people who use dramatically different intellectual models for analyzing and responding to foreign policy dilemmas.

On the one hand were traditional analysts and policy wonks who tend to take the Westphalian state system and the rest of the current paradigm for granted. They may not like the policies it leads to, but they have a hard time imagining an alternative, let alone how we would get there.

On the other were people like David Sloan Wilson and others who think in terms of evolutionary change for whom the paradigm itself is part of the problem. Their approach does not revolve around genetic-based and other forms of physical evolution. Rather, they and others who have a long-term historical perspective think in terms of cultural and social change and think of our civilization as far more fluid than traditional international relations scholars.

We were there because we straddle both worlds and could provide something akin to simultaneous translation for ‘both sides.” Although we spend less time with the kinds of people that Carnegie invited to the workshop than David Sloan Wilson of ProSocial World assumed, all of the people that Gretchen and I brought to the event had spent a fair amount of time in mainstream foreign policy making circles.

Still, it was one of the youngest people at the workshop who also straddled both camps who contributed the most to defining what it was all about. Not just once but twice.

The first actually occurred before the workshop began. I had actually met Lee-Or Ankoli-Karlinski about ten years ago when he helped Beyond Conflict organize a series of workshops on neuroscience and peacebuilding which defined much of how particitioners in those two fields work together to this day. Although I knew that he had left Beyond Conflict to go back to grad school, but I had no clue that he was working on issues that would get him invited to this conference.

Even before we met at Carnegie, he reminded me that Beyond Conflict had actually organized four workshops over the course of a couple of years which I had attended. It was only after the third or fourth one that we reached anything like a common agenda we could pursue.

In short, all of us who organized the Carnegie event knew that we would need to get together several times before we could develop an actionable agenda either as scholars or as practitioners.

Lessons Heard More Than Lessons Learned

So, I was not surprised by my first conclusion from an intellectually jam-packed day.

Military planners often joke that lessons-learned exercises are more likely to be lessons-heard events. Hearing the evidence that something did or didn’t work is not the same thing as actually acting on what you see or hear.

Skeptics often use that one liner as reason to ignore those encounters. My version of Lee-Or’s recollection is that being exposed to new ways of thinking can be an important first step.

And that happened for both sides.

We were able to make two broad points that the foreign policy makers and mainstream international relations experts at least began to take in.

The first came from David and others who focus on the interconnection between evolutionary and cultural change. We perhaps could have spent more time on Eleanor Ostrom’s Core Design Principles for dealing with shared resources and problems or the idea of psychological flexibility, both of which are central to ProSocial World’s message.

Still, at least getting the notion that paradigm shifts anchored in evolutionary thinking on the table was worth it.

Second, David made certain the National Academic of Engineer’s Guru Madhavan gave a short keynote talk on wicked problems as the new reality of life as the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws to a close. Again, we might have dug deeper on a) why wicked problems are new at least as far as defining the realities of life and b) why they can’t be successfully addressed using business as usual.

Guru also introduced the word of the day—monocausotaxophilia—our tendency to think that any problem has a single cause and the problems which that “disease” engenders. I’m not sure how far we got with that idea other than the laughs that it elicited.

Still, at least getting the notion that wicked problems matter on the table was worth it.

From the more conventional side of the aisle, we got to hear about the pain points and frustrations mainstream foreign policy makers feel these days. Many of the participants had worked in government, mostly as advisors to the State department, Pentagon, and/or the intelligence community. My crowd and David’s both got to hear their frustrations loud and clear, although we would have loved the foreign policy wonks in the room to be more open to what a new paradigm might offer. Still, at least getting the notion that wicked problems matter on the table was worth it.

Still, at least getting a new paradigmon the table was worth it.

Lee-Or’s Second Lesson

Lee-Or again provided us with the biggest take away from the event. As he reflected back on Beyond Conflict’s experience running those workshops on neuroscience and peacebuilding, he focused on the three conclusions we reached over the course of four meeting. My hope is that the group that met last Tuesday will do the same.

• Seek suboptimal outcomes rather than everything all at once
• On issues evolution-inspired solutions are most likely to help and are easiest to see
• Aimed at people in decision making people are likely to be open to hearing

Lingering Questions

But I’m still left with three important, lingering questions that future events will have to explore.

How open are traditional foreign policy experts to really “seeing” a new paradigm and all of its implications. They still seemed to read data through conventional mindsets even if they that doing so has left them endorsing policies that are both hard to implement and will fall short of solving that keeps them up at night.

How we can bring models that talk about the survival of the wisest down to earth so that average citizens can come to grips with them?  Ours was a meeting of professionals who have devoted entire careers to this work and tend to talk in language that is so obscure that the term “jargon” is an understatement.

How can I take these ideas and adapt them to our work in Peacebuilding Starts at Home which faces many similar challenges of its own? That’s where my efforts will be focused in the months to come. We, too, have a hard time getting people to see beyond our jargon and to see how paradigms can be changed.

NEXT TIME—Build IRL and face-to-face social capital.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.