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David Churchman has been an infantry lieutenant, social worker, high school teacher, research associate at University of Southern California, and program officer at the National Science Foundation. He was a professor at California State University for 27 years where he held a dual appointment as Professor in the Humanities and as Chairman of Behavioral Science. In the latter capacity, he and two colleagues initiated one of the first graduate degrees in the country in Conflict Management in 1987. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan and his doctorate from UCLA.

David taught in Morocco, has been a Fulbright Scholar in Cyprus and Ukraine and a Malone Scholar in Saudi Arabia, and has conducted research on zoo visitors in Australia and Singapore. He is the author or co-author of over 150 publications, including Negotiation: Process, Tactics, Theory and Developing Graduate Theses and Projects in the Humanities.

He is also a moderately experienced wild animal trainer who worked primarily with big cats, and is the co-founder of Wildlife on Wheels or WOW, a live animal environmental education program that was reaching some 100,000 Los Angeles basin children each year. David Churchman lives in Ashland.

The second edition of his book Why We Fight: The Origins, Nature, and Management of Human Conflict has just been released by University Press of America.

EB: How did you get interested in conflict as a topic?

DC: A mildly complicated story. My main appointment at Cal State was in graduate behavioral sciences. Whenever people asked what that was, we answered “whatever we want.” I came back from a year at National Science Foundation in Fall 1979 with the idea for a single course in negotiation. It proved so popular across so many majors that my very astute colleague David Nasatir suggested that if we had more than one course we had the core for an MA. Discussion that a colleague, Marilyn Garber from History but also a lawyer, soon joined led to proposing an MA degree in Conflict Management in 1982 in which students chose family, environmental, organizational, and international conflict as a specialty. A three year approval process followed, with implementation delayed one more year by my sabbatical. When we did get going, my assignments were the negotiation course and a new one in “conflict theory” without much idea of what it meant.

EB: You describe conflict at some half-dozen “levels” from interpersonal to inter-state and draw on a very wide range of academic disciplines. What motivated that choice of exposition?

DC: When I decided to write a book on conflict theory, I considered three possible organizing schemes. The first, by type of theory, seemed to be too abstract and pedantic–and besides James Schellenberg had already done it successfully. The second possibility was by traditional academic disciplines, but each one had so much to contribute to so many different types of conflict that a book so arranged would become something of a scavenger hunt for the student primarily interested in some specific type of conflict. A substantial number of conflict theory courses seem to rest almost entirely on the major discipline of the professor, with occasional brief forays into one or two other disciplines. This is much too narrow an approach for a field like conflict study. The third possibility recognized that most people are interested in a few specific types of conflict depending on their career goals—future marriage and family therapists in gender differences in communication rather than, say, geostrategic concerns that that might interest aspiring diplomats, while both might be interested in how culture affects conflict. From these ruminations, here more coherent than the actual process, arranging the book by “level” of conflict but explaining each in multidisciplinary fashion seemed to me the most useful approach. Not that I think the proposed levels or the academic disciplines that I draw on are definitive or complete.

EB: There seems to be quite a lot about critical thinking. What was your goal in the book?

DC: Educators hear a lot about the importance of teaching students to “think” rather than simply to learn facts. But, this often comes down to telling students that all opinions are equally valid. Balderdash! To take an extreme case, Hitler’s opinion on race was not as good as that of Martin Luther King. Critical thinking requires evaluating evidence, distinguishing fact from opinion, determining where cause and effect are established. We need to give everyone a comprehensive, systematic, and objective approach to judging whether theories increase understanding, help us make better decisions or develop better methods for managing conflicts, and help us identify attempts to impose social or political agendas under the guise of science. I discuss six possible criteria in the book for judging anything we are going to call a scientific theory: it should be empirical, falsifiable, generalizable, logical, parsimonious, and useful. There is nothing new here—parsimony for example goes back at least to the fourteenth century. Furthermore, the six are useful for judging all ideas, not just conflict theories.

EB: I notice that you talk about conflict management, not conflict resolution. Can you elaborate on the difference?

DC: “Resolution” implies we can completely solve all of our conflicts all of the time, and I do not believe that we can. “Management” implies a more modest and I think realistic goal without denying that resolution sometimes is possible. I prefer the more modest term and more realistic goal.

EB: This is the second edition of Why We Fight and you’ve clearly been thinking about this for a long time. How has your thinking evolved?

DC: As best I can remember, when I agreed to teach a course in “conflict theory,” I thought primarily as a historian influenced by the combination of army service and a doctorate in applied statistics and research design. The program that I chaired included the department of Marriage and Family Therapy, an obvious expansion. There had to be something in between conflict between nations and conflict within families, which led quickly to identifying all sorts of other “levels” of conflict. Serving as the campus lobbyist for our faculty union led to thinking about labor-management conflict. A short stint at Department of State helping develop the US position on the Law of the Sea while I was at NSF and the negotiations to get the Conflict Management degree itself designed and approved got me thinking of managing disputes between different parts of an organization. Starting a wildlife education program with a former graduate student led to thinking about environmental disputes rich in political and economic issues. At some point, I realized that ideas were a source of conflict and turned to the few courses I had in European intellectual history as a starting point. That and the arguments about Vietnam and the Gulf War led to recognition of the need to consider moral aspects of conflict. And so it went. In other words, the evolution has been unplanned and serendipitous. If anything, I am much less sure of anything than when I began this journey about thirty years ago.

EB: You describe peace as the absence of war. Is there something that is the absence of conflict?

DC: I doubt it, at least in the real world and probably not even in literature, which would make for a pretty dull plot. As I say in the chapter on the search for peace, the lack of war may be a necessary condition for peace, but it is not sufficient. Following up on your point about critical thinking, it is a negative definition. It says what a thing is not rather than what it is, so is inadequate. My saying that you do not speak Mongolian does not tell anyone what languages you do speak. Rather, building on the remarks of Ralph Bunche in accepting the Nobel Prize, positive peace requires well-being, cooperation, freedom, justice, respect for human rights, and non-violent means of managing disputes. That is the goal. Sometimes our methods succeed, perhaps temporarily. Sometimes they fail.

EB: Of all the approaches you consider do you have a favorite, or one that seems to work best?

DC: I am not sure “favorite” is the right word but there are three theories that I think have the greatest potential for coalescing into a single coherent one. The first focuses on how important satisfactory resolution and how important the relationship with the opponent is to each party on each issue. Together, they predict which of five strategies each party will follow: collaborate, compete, compromise, surrender, or withdraw. The second analyzes a conflict in terms of what may be lost or gained at what level of risk to identify the most rational course of action for a particular party. The third requires preferentially ranking every possible course of action from the perspective of each party to the conflict, and analyzes these “preference vectors” to identify the one that is most likely to remain stable once agreed to. They are much too elaborate to explain here. Readers will have to buy the book.

EB: Who should read your book? Do you have a particular audience in mind?

DC: The main audiences that I have in mind are professors and students in the proliferating degree programs in conflict management and peace studies. I hope to provoke debate among them as to which theories and methods are good and even whether conflict theory is tenable at all given human ability to adapt and manipulate. I hope that parts of the book at least will be of some use to individuals involved in the particular types of conflicts—as evidenced by the endorsement of it by one US Congressman and one senior businessman.

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Author Hester Kaplan’s latest book is THE TELL (HarperCollins 2013), a story of marriage, relationships, compulsion and culture. It’s the story of Mira and Owen, a couple whose marriage begins to founder after a charming former TV star named Wilton Deere buys the house next door to be near his estranged daughter Anya. Mira begins to accompany Wilton to a nearby casino and is increasingly drawn to the slot machines, as Owen struggles with his own career and past.

Hester Kaplan’s previous books are THE EDGE OF MARRIAGE (1999) which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and KINSHIP THEORY (2001). Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories series (1998, 1999), Ploughshares, Agni Review, Southwest Review, Story, Glimmer Train, and other journals.

Kaplan teaches in Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and her work has been recognized with the Salamander Fiction Prize, the McGinness-Ritchie Award for Non-Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

EB: The title of your book seems to involve some wordplay. What did you have in mind?

HK: I think we all have a “tell,” that little tic or gesture we make that gives us away when we’re evading or not telling the truth. We read each other’s tells, even if we’re not aware of doing it.

“Tell” is a term I first heard used at a poker table, so I thought it was appropriate. (A tell, interestingly enough, is also a ancient garbage heap.)

EB: Water plays a big role in the story—Owen’s a swimmer and his father lives on a lake. It seems like the characters are drowning?

HK: I’m most content when I’m in the water, and while I’m a strong swimmer, I’m also a little afraid of the water. Owen and his father share a love of the water—ocean, pond, pool—as well as the knowledge that it can be dangerous. Owen particularly may feel like he’s drowning at times, but he has the power to swim to shore.

EB: I was pondering the idea that middle school was a type of casino. This is a novel about compulsion. Mira’s addiction to the casino, Wilton’s home shopping. Is Owen addicted to teaching?

HK: Owen is a dedicated teacher, but deeply ambivalent about his role and value in the classroom. If an addiction is about compulsive and self-destructive behaviors, then Owen is no addict. He might be hampered by fear and his ability to not see the truth in front of him, but these failings are within his control. Ultimately, his understanding this allows him to see his wife clearly.

EB: Wilton and Mira both have their tells. What was Owen’s, do you think?

HK: This is a great question. Owen is so hard to decipher, even for me. He’s a million little tells rolled up into one very tall and very enigmatic guy. He doesn’t want to be known by anyone.

EB: Did you have a favorite among the characters in the book?

HK: I love Edward. He’s straightforward, able to express what he’s feeling, and so hopeful about life. He’s careful, yet open to everything new. And he loves cats.

EB: You studied anthropology in college, not creative writing. Has that perspective helped you as a novelist? Your work seems to especially catch small details of place and culture and language, like the description of the Rhode Island accent as “bright melted plastic.”

HK: I did study anthropology in college, but I think I was really just a snoop—and still am. And I always feel a little bit on the outside of things, looking in. My nosiness about how other people live—what you kindly call my attention to details of place and culture—is what fuels my fiction. I want to see what someone else sees when she wakes up in the morning. I want to hear how she talks to her dog, her children, the woman who serves her coffee. I want to know if she stops and smells the lilacs.

EB: You also seem fascinated by architecture. What do houses tell us about ourselves? Or are they part of our compulsion? Mira seems attached to her house.

HK: Mira is attached to her house because it is attached to her. It follows her everywhere she goes and often drags her down. But it’s a magnificent place—in my mind, at least—full of rooms that still hold life in memories for her. It’s how we choose to live in our house, apartment, shack, or mansion that reveals how we want to live in the world and how we want the world to see us. Providence is full of amazing architecture, so taking a walk in my city is like listening to a thousand stories.

EB: Marriage and relationships are an ongoing theme in your books. In this book it seems that things are getting in the way of relationships? Is that what you had in mind?

HK: I’ve been married for a long time, but marriage is still a mystery to me, as it seems to be for Wilton. Each marriage is different, with its own private dynamic and rules. How is it that some marriages last and others don’t? The husband and wife in my novel hide their wounds from each other, which means they’re easy to hurt, but hard to heal.

EB: You are teacher as well as a writer. What’s your life like?

HK: I have a couple of teaching jobs, as so many of the writers I know do. I love teaching, love my students, and am enormously proud of them and their discoveries. I try to write every day, to keep my head in the story or novel I’m working on. I talk to the cats, but they don’t have any writing advice for me. I am married to a writer, so we edit each other’s work and talk about what we’re reading. Then we watch movies.

EB: Can you tell us about any upcoming writing projects? What are you working on?

HK: I’m working on a long piece of non-fiction about houses—and about the house I grew up in with two parents who were writers.

EB: You’ve established a reputation as both a short story writer and a novelist? How are those different? Which do you prefer?

HK: I like short stories better when I’m working on a novel, and novels better when I’m writing a short story. But the difference between them isn’t only about length, but about the moments that make a difference to the characters. In a novel, the moments accumulate to become change and understanding and consequence. A short story involves the recognition of that moment. It’s almost the difference between a sigh and a gasp.