Praise for conflict

Biodiversity is a patrimony for nature. Similarly, ethnodiversity, that is, cultural diversity, is a patrimony for a society. However, diversity unavoidably takes to conflicts. In nature conflicts are one of the foundation of natural selection, but in our society we try to avoid them or, at least, to moderate them. In fact, a lot of people hope for a world of peace, a world with no conflicts. But would it be really a desirable scenario?

Let us suppose to live in a world with no conflicts, where everybody agrees on everything, and there is no resistance to any decision. Would it really be an attractive world? Often globalization is considered a synonym of making uniform all processes, methods, even behaviors. Is that what we really want? Does actually a flat world exist?

In my personal opinion an authentic flat world, a world of absolute peace, is a dead one. No evolution is possible without conflicts. On the other hand, without evolution, no society, exactly as no species, can survive to changes because has no adaptability. Of course, there is a price to pay to evolve, a price that is often paid by individuals, being their interests subordinated to the interest of the species. This would be true for a society too. The price for the evolution of a society is often paid by its members, often by a generation of members. However the outcome is surviving, which is not a bad result, usually.

So, should we accept fights and wars as a necessary evil to have a positive return in the long term? I do not intend that. In fact, the point is not the conflict itself, but the way how we manage it. As such, the conflict is not necessarily a negative event, as well as opposition in a democracy is not a problem but a value. However there are different ways to manage a conflict: we could ignore it or use the violence to impose our position, or we could use civilized methods to achieve a win-win result. The first way is typical of dictatorships and primitive civilizations, the second of advanced societies.

So, even if some standardization of processes and methods is a good approach to reduce resource consumption and to increase efficiency, it is absolutely a must to respect local diversities even when they take to some conflict of sort. What we should do is to learn how to take advantage from conflicts to improve our society and, at the same time, avoiding the risks and damage of a bad management.

Diversity is a patrimony. In physics or chemistry there would be no action or reaction without a gradient, a difference in potential, pressure, temperature, and so forth. This is the real foundation of life. So we have not to fear diversity and not even fear the conflict, because they are the way we can improve. We simply have to take advantage of them by adopting a more mature and civilized approach to live with them.