| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Peter Hayes Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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You've just described a very interesting mix of political activism, involvement with the environment, education, and so on. Let's reflect a little on this. What are the key skills required for doing political activism in an NGO in an age of globalization?
The first operating rule is to be fearless. That means intellectually fearless as well as politically fearless. It means asking the really hard questions and not accepting glib answers, and not accepting "no" for an answer. You keep on asking questions until you find the pathway to a solution. It may be a very difficult pathway. There might be multiple pathways; but there is always a pathway to a solution. The status quo is not simply inevitable. If you take that position, you can then go in [from] any number of angles of difficulty, from idealistic demands to pushing for very marginal shifts from current policy, as your angle of approach. You've got an enormous choice within that range. But the first basic decision is to not accept the status quo, ever.
Taking that critical position, you then have to have deep research skills, if you're going to do something about the status quo, because the research skills are what enable you to survey the terrain, understand the dynamics of the problem, and figure out the multiple pathways to a solution. You know from history and you know from political practice, you know from just being alive, that going from A to B in human activity is never a straight line. You may plan to go from here to there in a straight line, but you will always be ambushed by uncertainty. So the one thing you know is that you won't go the way that you think you're going to go. That there is probably always more than one way is the corollary. You will only be able to conceptualize a strategy if you have deep research skills.
The second important skill is to have an outreach and publicity strategy that can communicate your views and information that is essential to the various parties involved in the problem, who are antagonists or involved in trying to solve a problem.
Most importantly, in the modern context, you must create a network where you can communicate in a way that creates a stock of common knowledge. If you can create that network, and the Internet is integral to this in the twenty-first century, you can align perceptions across political cultures, across political boundaries, and you can create a new information milieu. It's an agenda-setting strategy where you're very careful not to dominate the information milieu or even attempt to saturate it. In fact, the less you say, the more powerful your voice, because if you sort of drop it in the pond once a year, everyone notices because you're the convener of this information space. You can have an enormous impact justby doing that really well.
The third critical skill is to be ready for surprise. You have to be looking for uncertainty. You have to embrace uncertainty, because when you know where the uncertainties lie, where the ambushes lie, where the positive surprises lie, they're the leverage points. You have enormous leverage if you can get to one of those tipping points first, and not be surprised by it, be ready to exploit it. At Nautilus, we use scenarios methodology to do that; but there are a number of ways to do it. We're always looking ahead for surprise. After all, what does uncertainty represent to anyone who's monomaniacal about their mission of problem-solving, whatever the problem is, other than reintroducing all the relationships of all the problems to each other? That's what you're being surprised by. You're focused on this problem, you think you understand it, and you go a long way down that path to a solution. And then suddenly, wham, you're hit from the side. Usually, that comes from an inter-relationship with a proximate problem.
So you're recognizing that, really, there is an ecology of problems, just like there is an ecology of life, and it's not surprising that all these issues seem to be related. This complexity pushes you to be somewhat humble about the likelihood that you're going to have a really big impact, because the inevitable logic is, if you really focus on your own problem and you drive everything to succeed to solve that problem, you're going to create a lot of turbulence for all the people trying to solve the problems that are interrelated to yours, and thus recreate your own problem!
So the best way to solve a problem is probably not to actually solve your own problem, but to promulgate the experience and tools that you use in your problem areas to others who are working on other problems. That way, you can raise the whole tide of problem-solving and reduce the limiting conditions that everyone faces working in their own domain.
And so it's really about acquiring those three skills -- deep research; information systems, communication, and creation of new kinds of knowledge, new kinds of public goods, if you like, information public goods; and orchestrating a strategy that recognizes all those interrelationships that are key to being successful.
Where do you derive your value orientation? In other words, applying this formula to international life, in a globalized world, there's a commitment to the environment which comes from your background and from your work. What other sorts of values drive the enterprise?
Sustainability is, of course, about intergenerational equity. It's about the environmental values that frame our existences as a species. That's a pretty core value to me, intergenerational equity. But along the way, I think you also have the concept of peace. Now, in the name of the institute, we have security and sustainability.
We should say that the institute that you're head of is the Nautilus Institute, based in Berkeley, which is an NGO implementing a lot of the strategies that you're talking about.
That's right. But in many of the activities that we undertake, we talk about peace and security. We had a long debate at one point with our donors as to whether we could, in this culture, in this strategic culture dealing with nuclear weapons, talk about peace and security, or just about security. We're already so far off the spectrum if we started talking about peace, because this is Berkeley and Quaker, and so forth. And we insisted that peace belongs there as a positive value. You make peace. You construct peace brick-by-brick, human-by-human. Whereas security, conceived of primarily as the absence of war, is actually not peace, it's just a static, negative condition. The worse example of that is the balance of terror between states that are armed with nuclear weapons, if we didn't annihilate each other overnight. I've always found it hard to think of that as being secure. It may be stable, which is another key value of the strategic community, those who deal with military security, but stability does not mean peace. So I think peace is very important. Those of us who grew up in the Vietnam War [era] and those of us who've been in war zones put that at a fairly high value to work on.
The third [value] that is absolutely essential now, in the current conditions of accelerating globalization, is some measure of justice and equity. We cannot hope to achieve peace and sustainability in a world with the gross, just really extraordinary levels of inequality in income and wealth. The fact that wealth is so ostentatious at this point, and you can be almost everywhere on the planet and observe it, means that it simply cannot be ignored. That creates a huge pressure on borders, which I see as being the antithesis of nuclear weapons.
I see nuclear weapons at one end being the ultimate state assertion of territorial sovereignty and control of a border, and at the other end, cross-border movement of information, people, goods, etc. This movement is the exact antithesis of nuclear of weapons, and brings with it an enormous potential for creating peace and security. The faster we can dissolve borders, as far as I'm concerned, the better. For that reason, I am sort of genetically in favor of migration, aside from being myself a border crosser and having now a family where I'm married to a Ukrainian-American with an adopted child from the Philippines and another adopted child from Guatemala. We're a little UN of four nationalities in a family four. My kids have three passports each.
I see! That's a good statement against borders and boundaries.
Well, my children say they're from Berkeley when you ask them where they're from.
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