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It is, of course, arrogant, a fallacy of rationalist optimism, to imagine that all differences in the world can be settled by well-meaning conversations. Neville Chamberlain went to Munich entertaining that notion. Not every human conflict is ripe to be settled in the court of reason. Still, certain kinds of tragedy have become intolerable in the world as they never were before: the lushly cataclysmic plot development that history could once absorb (even to the extent of permitting two "world wars") will no longer do. When the world has so armed itself as to make the use of those arms a stroke of global cancellation, then the casual "Let's talk about it" takes on a ticking urgency. Che sarà sarà is not an intelligent policy this side of the Last Day.
Even leaving aside the nuclear Caliban, the future will have to be built by elaborately constructive conversations. The Third World's claims upon the First World's wealth, the rising global sense of entitlement, the abrasions of change on a crowded planet—all demand a high order of bargaining intelligence. Social solutions require space and resources (Go West! Enlarge the pie!) For many disputes and angers and injustices today, there are no solutions, only settlements.
The sort of negotiation that most postwar diplomats practice (the years-long process that has turned Geneva into the world capital of niggling, for example) has a dreary reputation; so does the brute punch and counterpunch of labor bargaining—the two sides staring at one another across the table with reptile's eyes (their bladders nagging, their minds beginning to buzz and fray, the brain cells winking out like campfires). No Exit, a purgatory of silence and cultural incomprehension and stolid grievance, waiting for the other side to crack and start giving away points.
Negotiation should have more élan than that. Negotiators ought to be the future's heroes (in the way, perhaps, that Sadat and Begin and Carter were for a time after Camp David). To make something out of nothing, to fashion possibilities out of dead ends, is to be literally creative. Negotiation is one of the serious arts of the imagination. The deeper resources of wisdom must collaborate with the nimblest reflexes: the gambler's touch, the athlete's tuning, the magician's tricks, the gentleman's equilibrium.
Negotiation rarely works if it is a merely mechanical compromise of polar extremes conducted, as the behavioral scientist says, "in a complex mixed-motive ambience of trust and suspicion." The best negotiations are inventive. A feistily savvy book, Herb Cohen's You Can Negotiate Anything, manages to convey the impression that all negotiations should even be fun; at the end of each, like the six solved faces of a Rubik's Cube, lies a "win-win" settlement—a mutuality in which both sides profit. Another recent book, Getting to Yes, arrives (a little more rigorously) at the same conclusion. The authors, Roger Fisher and William Ury, are members of the Harvard Negotiation Project, which explores various bargaining issues.