Blessed is the Peacemaker

The skills of cooperation

My home state, Minnesota, has been reeling from the assassination of a MN house representative and her husband recently and the uncovered plans for the assassin to murder dozens of others. MN is a good government state, with high public involvement in politics, the highest voter turnout in the country (76%), and an orientation to compromise. The murdered politician, Melissa Hortman, former speaker of the MN house, was an exemplar of collaboration with opponents. She seemed always to find a way to pull together joint agreements.

Why does it seem like there are fewer people with these cooperative, collaborative skills today? Ecological psychology provides some insight.

James Gibson (1979) focused on perception of the natural environment through the pick up of the invariants in the sensory array an organism encounters. He noted that people don’t have ‘mental representations’ of the world but directly perceive a shifting array of information through their movement in space. “[T]he intensity of light, sound, odor it encounters and the things it can touch are highly variable from place to place and moment to moment as an animal moves about” (Barrett, 2011, p. 104). Perception-environment-body triplets are built from attuned movement through a particular place. Robotic studies show how the activation of perceptual nodes occurs when coming up against invariants in a space, creating a perception-action embodied response.

Through sensorimotor movement, the whole body picks up the affordances of the particular place—the action possibilities that the organism’s body can use based on needs and perceptual capacities. Thus, for a one-year-old a chair affords walking—a place to hold on, whereas for an adult a chair affords sitting. The organism is detecting ‘information’ from the flowing energy, the ongoing array of stimulation of the body. Perception and understanding generally are a function of a mutual organism-environment relation, an embodied knowledge.

This is why young children want to actively explore their environments and sometimes repeat an experience over and over. They are learning what is invariant in response to different actions of their bodies in different contexts. A child’s full neurodevelopment requires many many hours of free whole-body exploration of a variety of environments. If they are not allowed to actively explore the environments in which they find themselves, they will have less understanding of their body in space (proprioception) and fewer skills to get along in the world.

We can apply this ecological understanding to social environments. The individual moves through social relational experiences picking up on the invariants, accruing perception-action-context triplets. The young child learns the invariants with particular people in the home context, building social habits thereby (e.g., avoidant attachment with an emotionally unresponsive parent and secure attachment with a responsive parent).

Those with extensive and varied self-directed social experience during sensitive periods of development (early childhood, adolescence) will develop more triplets, more skills for getting along smoothly with a variety of people in a variety of settings. They will have social ease that makes being with others a pleasurable experience. Evolved nest experiences during sensitive periods (e.g., early childhood, early adolescence) build such social knowhow.

These highly skilled people perceive affordances of connection and compromise that a less ecologically experienced, less skilled person misses. When guided by a prosocial, inclusive morality and communal imagination, these folks will bring about more peace in the world.

I believe that Representative Hortman was one of these people. May her spirit guide more peacemaking, and may we all raise more peacemakers.

References

Barrett, L. (2011). Beyond the brain: How body and environment shape animal and human minds. Princeton University Press.

Gibson, J.J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture, and wisdom. W.W. Norton.