Alternative Editorial: The Zero-Sum Game
World Cup 2014 was memorable for a combination of joy and upset. Carnivalesque pictures beaming across the world from Brazil - the home of football - followed by a catastrophic semi-final in which the home team were humiliated 1-7 by the German team that went on to win the tournament. Brazilians were plunged into a period of mourning for a dream punctured by reality: the team was not as good as it once had been.
That same year, Brazil's political dream also collapsed. The revolutionary Workers Party - led first by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and then Dilma Rousseff, authors of a seismic shift in the rights of the people and the environment - was suspended due to accusations of corruption. After an interim government held by Michel Temer and the Brazilan Democratic Movement, the Social Liberal Party led by Jair Bolsonaro was voted in.
In the years that followed Bolsonaro became syonymous with populism, Covid vaccine denial and the destruction of the rain forest - the lungs of the world. It's poignant that only days before the 22 World Cup opened, Lula was voted back into power. Good luck Brazil, we say.
Try as sport might, it's hard to keep real world politics out of the football dream of neutrality - and this year is no exception. As we write, the BBC - awarded the license to broadcast the tournament - has unilaterally decided to skip screening the World Cup Opening Ceremony on its main channel, in favour of a discussion about Qatar's human rights, largely between its presenters.
Fair enough, many would say: these issues cannot be swept under the carpet. Qatar was a controversial choice and the electing body was accused of corruption. In the face of unsuitable weather, limited football history and a poor history of human rights, money clearly speaks volumes. Even so, FIFA President Gianni Infantino attempted a wide ranging defense only 24 hours before, accusing the global media of hypocrisy and racism.
Sharing his own trauma past of being bullied at school, Infantino protested: “Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker,”. And later " “We are taught many lessons from Europeans, from the Western world... but what we Europeans have been doing for the last 3,000 years, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons.”
While the BBC presenters clearly thought they could make an easy and clear case against Infantino, thus signalling their own, unquestionable virtue, in real time it proved more difficult. Alan Shearer's old club, Newcastle FC, was recently elevated to the status of “richest football club in the world”, having been sold to a consortium made up of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, RB Sports & Media and PCP Capital Partners. When asked about Saudi Arabia's stance on human rights, Shearer was unable to square the circle between a "clearly poor record there" and the "wonderful football the Newcastle fans are now able to enjoy". He didn't even try to apply the same judgement to himself as he was laying on Infantino: he grinned and shrugged it off.
Seema Jaswal gave a strong account of how exclusive this World Cup is, making it unsafe for a significant proportion of football fans - women, the LBGQT community, those on low income - to attend. However, she also mentioned that it was only four years ago that there were no female presenters on the BBC World Cup team. Look how fast it changes when you wake up, she said.
And maybe she inadvertently joined up Infantino's point and the BBCs. If you look at human rights from the point of view of time - and then of history - Britain has only wobbly legs to stand on. Being responsible for the worst of abuses as a colonial master and slave trader, it is only relatively recently that we have begun to make amends. As COP 27 closes, the very first signs that the wealthiest countries are willing to own their dominant role in climate catastrophe surfaced. After 11 years of trying to get compensation, an agreement for 'loss and damage' was struck. We are very late, maybe too late, to our own party.
More so, the consistent demand from social justice activists to move to a post-colonial economy and mind-set is still heavily derided here. We have a British government and mainstream media that is 'anti-woke' - delighting in humiliating the human rights of those they might, on the COP 27 global stage, acknowledge as victims of our white imperial past.
Our legal system is currently intent on withdrawing from the European Human Rights agenda.
When Queen Elizabeth passed away, we had a complete moratorium on free thought around her role and the idea of Empire that she upheld. The media went into a time-warp and were prevented from showing anything at all that might demur from her brand as servant to the Commonwealth. Despite their usual, strongly conflicting values, the BBC, Daily Mail and Sun all presented as singing from the same song sheet.
On the other hand - and there is another hand - free speech rarely leads to freedom for everyone. Instead, the loud voices of a few liberated egos can drive whole communities into hiding. Tolerating those with extreme views - of any persuasion - in a passive way, without serious engagement, is a recipe for fascism. We need containers and carefully designed methods of fair discussion in our conversation around the future: a rare event in our complacent democracies.
But even then we can't rely on facilitators to bring everyone into agreement, as a resolution for real diversity. It's a mistake to think that peace is a negotiation - a zero-sum game in which we come to a division of the spoils, or even an agreement to disagree around a settlement. Conflict resolution—in which minor grievances are sidelined—too often sows seeds for the next fall out.
When US Democrats watered down the Criminal Justice Bill to 'get it through the Senate' they imagined scoring an important goal against President Trump's manipulation of the political system. lnstead, the bill did not deliver on its most important points. What's worse, it allowed Trump to make a claim that he was on the side of black people in their fight against unfair incarceration.
In a healthily diverse community it's unlikely that we will all end up collaborating around a consensus, adopting the same values. People will set their own agendas and seek advantage on their own terms. So what then are we aiming for?
In our work with Perspectiva - sometimes known as a soul-tank - we have been developing a method of community conversation called Anti-Debate. As the name suggests, it takes the energy of conflicting views but plays them out differently. It's still in the experimental stage, but at the recent Realisation Festival we kicked it off with an online Pol.is inquiry around the question, Is War Natural? (For those who know little about pol.is see here).
Pol.is invites the targeted community to begin with 20 statements in response to 'Is War Natural?' that all participants can agree, disagree or pass on. Importantly, everyone can also add their own statement for participants to consider. In so doing, they were co-creating the questions that will shape the Anti-debate. The data that arose gave a very rich picture of the diversity of the group before they met, including what they most agreed and disagreed on.
Taking that cold data offline, and into a room with live bodies, is what Nora Bateson might describe as a shift to exploring warm data. How does that diversity, easily expressed in a poll, translate into real time engagement around a difficult question? Using a series of facilitating games and tools, we found that the community came to ever more complex distributions of agreements and disagreements. But in ways that allow each twist and distinction to be articulated, heard, and sat with. What you had in the end was a room without a clear divide on an issue - or a winner - but a much better sense of itself as a mutually derived, relational and complex entity. That shared awareness can become the container for moving into the future together.
Imagine if we could move into our World Cup experience with that sense of a complex community which we are co-creating? It's not easy to imagine, within the FIFA framework, where $200 billion is being spent along the way. However, it may be enough for each football team to do its own work within its community of fans. The English team committing to diversity through a One Love badge, or taking the knee. Or the Iranian players refusing to sing the national anthem while the people riot against their political regime. Both paint a more subtle picture of right and wrong within - rather than simply between - nations. A much subtler view, indeed, than the BBC’s esteemed pundits opened with.