The word of the month for July is “pono.” In Hawaiian, pono loosely translates to “truth and justice” or “righteousness.”
The state motto of Hawai’i is: “Ua Mau ke Ea o ka ‘Aina i ka Pono,” which means “the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.”
Truth. Justice. Righteousness. Sounds like the tagline of a superhero movie released in theaters on Independence Day. (Could even have been the tagline of 1996’s Independence Day!) With such a tagline, we might expect a story of bad guys, good guys, and the inevitable fighting required to defeat evil and protect our way of life.
But doing what is pono is not about being violent or coercive. Consider the first definition of pono from the online Ulukau Hawaiian Dictionaries:
- nvs. Goodness, uprightness, morality, moral qualities, correct or proper procedure, excellence, well-being, prosperity, welfare, benefit, behalf, equity, sake, true condition or nature, duty; moral, fitting, proper, righteous, right, upright, just, virtuous, fair, beneficial, successful, in perfect order, accurate, correct, eased, relieved; should, ought, must, necessary.
Here, righteousness is associated with goodness, welfare, morality, equity, order—concepts that help ground society and interpersonal relationships in a broader peace coterminous with truth and justice. Pono is an inclusive vision of righteousness that treats others with respect; it is a righteousness not predicated on gratuitous state force or private vigilantism (as our action movies, including Independence Day, often depict).
My father is Hawaiian, and since I was a child I have loved reflecting on the definitions and sounds of Hawaiian words. Now that I’m old and wizened, I have additional perspective around the malleability of language and the problems that can crop up from assuming fixed meanings.
This is especially true for conflict professionals. Making progress in conflict is hard, in no small part because of how much empathy and calibration are required just to understand the parties’ starting points. Anyone working in alternative dispute resolution has had to swim against the tide of preconceived notions, background rules, deeply held assumptions, and internal schemas of (1) what conflict is and (2) how conflicts are resolved.
Just the other day one of my students said that he recently realized that apologizing doesn’t make you weak—and he sounded surprised when he said it!
We have so many confused and conflicting messages around what we think are shared cultural values, and the values associated with the Fourth of July (freedom, liberty, equality—and yes, truth and justice) are no different. ADR practitioners empower and enlighten parties in conflict by, at a minimum, helping surface this confusion and opening space for deeper conversation.
