THE

S EARCH

FO R A

NONVIOLENT

FUTURE

A Promise of Peace for Ourselves,

Our Families, and Our World

R

MICHAEL N. NAGLER

INNER OCEAN PUBLISHING

MAUI, HAWAI‘I • SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

Contents

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Foreword ix

Inner Ocean Publishing, Inc.

Preface xi

P.O. Box 1239

Makawao, Maui, HI 96768-1239

Acknowledgments xviii

© 2004 by Michael Nagler

Introduction xxi

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means or in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher.

1. Hard Questions, Hard Answers 

Book design by Lisa Schulz Elliot/Elysium

2. Hope in Dark Times 

Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data

3. No Power to Describe: The “Nonviolent

Nagler, Michael N.

Moment” as Peak Experience 

The search for a nonviolent future: a promise of peace for ourselves, our families, and our world / Michael N. Nagler. —

4. “Work” Versus Work 

2nd ed. — Makawao, HI: Inner Ocean, 2004.

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5. A Way Out of Hell 

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Hills Books, 6. Constructive Programme 

c2001, under title: Is there no other way?: the search for a nonviolent future.

7. A Clear Picture of Peace 

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 1-930722-40-0

8. Fighting Fire with Water 

1. Nonviolence. 2.Violence. 3. Pacifism. 4. Passive resistance.

I. Nagler, Michael N. Is there no other way? II.Title.

HM1281 .N342 2004

9. Toward a Metaphysics of Compassion 

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Epilogue 

D I S T R I B U T E D B Y P U B L I S H E R S G RO U P W E S T

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please contact Special Markets: 866.731.2216 or sales@innerocean.com.

Resources and Oppor tunities 

Index 

To my beloved teacher, Sri Eknath Easwaran January 2, 1911–October 26, 1999

Foreword

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I T M AY N O T be the perfect analogy but I can’t help feeling that the state of the world today resembles the state of an individual who is terminally ill. Well, you might say, what is new about this? Namely, that the world is terminally ill with violence? We know this too, perhaps. But my imagination has gone wild with the similarities.

The individual is an inveterate smoker. He or she is well aware of the hazards of smoking but he continues nevertheless in the brazen belief that nothing serious is going to happen. He is more or less forced to believe this, because in fact the habit is more than he can control.

(I had one friend who became so panicked when a doctor told her she had only a few years to live if she didn’t quit that she ran out to have a smoke!) However, when the individual does get lung cancer he rushes to the doctor and pleads for a cure. The doctor suggests a complete recovery might be possible only if drastic changes in lifestyle are sincerely made. Beginning with no more smoking. For the moment the patient swears he will do everything the doctor wants. Just as we recoil right after a war or a particularly heinous act of violence—for a while.

The patient goes home with a new lease on life. Once cured, though, the old habit reasserts itself and he finds himself smoking once more. As we all know, this tragic scenario can end in death.

Do you see the point I am trying to make? The world is terminally ill with violence, and when the disease assumes a virulent form we plead for a remedy; but when we are cured we go back to our old destructive ways. As in the individual, so in societies; cures can only be as effective as one’s determination to change bad habits into good.

For centuries the world has been saturated with a Culture of Violence to such an extent that it has seeped down to the very core of our being. Or so it seems. But violence is no more natural than letting your innards be destroyed by constant smoking. If we persist in living, Foreword ix

thinking, and being in the Culture of Violence then we will not find Preface

the way out of that culture; it is almost as impossible to find a patchwork solution as it would be to stay dry in a swimming pool.

R

To understand the insidious nature of the Culture of Violence it is important to realize that violence has many facets.There is not only the physical violence of wars, fights, riots, beatings, rapes, murders, etc., S O M E T H R E E M O N T H S before the horrific events of September but the more destructive “passive” violence, where we hurt people 11, I attended a panel discussion at the “J School” (School of without using physical force. This is more destructive because it is as Journalism) on my campus that the dean, Orville Schell, had arranged unseen as cancer. Passive violence manifests in a thousand different in order to open a debate on the new president’s resurrection of “star ways, like wasting resources, overconsumption, hate, prejudice, name wars,” space-based missile defense.The first speaker was a representa-calling, and hundreds of seemingly innocent acts that hurt people even tive from the Lawrence Livermore labs, one of the nation’s two unconsciously. Passive violence fuels the fire of physical violence, which nuclear weapons facilities, where, of course, there is stake in promot-means if we want to put out the fire of physical violence we have to cut ing such projects. But there is also a strong undercurrent of alarm off the fuel supply. How? “We must become the change we wish to see about them among nuclear scientists, some of whom I had had the in the world,” grandfather Gandhi said.

pleasure of speaking with during the Cold War when a group of us, Think again of my analogy, for a moment.You can make someone professors like myself, along with theologians and weapons scientists, stop smoking temporarily by scaring him.You can make him stop a bit participated in a floating roundtable that went on, at one retreat or longer by using a nicotine patch, but that still does not address what-another, for several years. It was one of the most intellectually satisfy-ever drove him to smoke in the first place. Finally, you can give him ing give-and-takes of my career. But this night I was in for a shock.

something to live for—some higher purpose—so that he finds the The speaker, a well-informed scientist with a flair for public will for a permanent cure.

speaking, took complete command of his audience.The first question This book, written by my good friend Dr. Michael Nagler, does all up for discussion was, Would the technology work? “Of course it three. It makes us feel how repugnant and how unnecessary violence would,” he sneered. “Technology always works.” (Hmm. Has anyone is in all its forms. It tells us many stories that explain how nonviolence here ever used a computer? I mused.) Then it got worse. “We [the works and reports on many organizations and projects that are United States] have so much money,” he went on, “we can do pretty coming up with creative, constructive alternatives to violence in much what we want and nobody can stop us.” I will spare you the rest.

many forms—including forms we may have thought were inevitable, It was, all in all, the most abrasive and vulgar display of arrogance I or “justified.” And it inspires us to find our way to the kind of reward-could remember seeing before a campus audience. He acted, and even ing life that will permanently protect us and our families and our looked, like Mussolini, whom I had seen in newsreels that I had had world from this cancer of violence. I hope this inspiring book will be the misfortune to view over and over again in high school, and now he read and used around the world.

reached the climax of his talk: “Welcome,” he crowed, “to the next American century, and if you don’t like it, maybe you should wait A RU N G A N D H I

another hundred years for the next one.”

Founder and President, M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence By this time I was flushed with fear. From somewhere deep in my x

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Preface xi

mind a thought spoke itself in a voice that was almost not my own: Oh analysis happened? Have we asked ourselves, why was our nation so God, we’re going to be hit. Before my inner eye flitted the image of a cruelly attacked—and what must we do now to secure ourselves from tackled giant, crumbling to earth.

such violence?

Three months later I sat gripping the seat in front of me on the One of the reasons I felt so terrified listening to the lab scientist commute van as one of my fellow riders, who had a portable radio, was that I know that people in his position are close to White House stammered out that the towers had fallen.As we left the van and stood policy and reflect the mood of officialdom; and, as most of us know in shock on the sidewalk in front of my office, Noel’s comment was, by now, the word arrogant is heard very often when commentators

“The world will never be the same.” He was so right.

outside the United States—and sometimes within it—seek to charac-But in another way he was exactly wrong. The world is still the terize the second Bush administration. And anyone who knows any same, and it will always be the same. This is what that highly placed history, or has pondered the dynamics of human relationships in his or scientist did not understand. Violence always begets violence—and her own experience, knows what this clever scientist did not: that no the violence that has been begotten by violence begets more violence.

amount of money, no fierce arsenal of weapons, has ever brought Those who enter that cycle do not easily escape. There has to be security to a person or a nation that waxes arrogant and disregards another way.

the rights of others to secure its own happiness. Violence in any I have been, therefore, very gratified by the enthusiastic reception form—and arrogance is certainly one of them—begets violence.

of this book and the chance to write a post-9/11 preface to this new Choose violence and bid security goodbye.

edition. But there was not much that I needed to revise.The search for The events of the past year have made many of us familiar with a a nonviolent future is certainly no less urgent now that the violence of bit of technical jargon from the CIA: “blowback.” Panama’s Manuel the present has broken in on us so cruelly. “In a dark time,” wrote the Noriega, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden himself, and, yes, Saddam poet Theodore Roethke, “the eye begins to see.” Many people were Hussein were all heavily supported and funded by the CIA. The CIA already feeling the gnawing emptiness of modern civilization; now and/or other “security” agencies saw fit to promote these violent men even those who were complacent about that have begun to realize that to do things they thought would benefit the United States, of which finding a solution for that emptiness—for the bankruptcy that is the vast majority of us were hardly aware—and then these people materialism—is no longer a luxury.We are being dragged into a mael-turned their violence on us. This kind of blowback, though, is only strom of violence, and when we realize what’s happening to us, one one part of a much larger picture, of which the dangerous arrogance after the other, our will breaks through our lethargy to sound its of my scientist colleague was another. Blowback is a place where the anguished hope for some way out. Despair is never a successful strategy, inexorable logic of violence plays itself out in a way that’s open for all but desperation can often force us to find one. That is happening all to see—for those who will see. The fact is, all violence blows back, over America as I write these words on the anniversary of the disaster.

not just the kind to which governments give covert support. Perhaps One example appeared in the New Yorker’s commemorative issue the most poignant examples you will find in this book pertain to the this very week. “This is a week of emotion, but not only emotion,”

first open conflict with Iraq, in 1991.

wrote David Remnick and Hendrik Hertzberg. “September 11th has What is the most common response of people who saw the also, from the start, compelled sustained analysis of a series of ques-disaster at the World Trade Center, either live or in its many television tions that remain very far from resolved.”1 I entirely agree. But has the replays? If you recall, it was, “I thought I was watching a movie.”

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Immediately, they connected what they saw in real life with a very I’ll be quoting later puts it, democracy and violence). These two common motif of the fiction they have chosen to surround themselves forces, call them what we will, determine the outcome of all human with: disaster, blood, bodies, explosions—what fun. Young Dylan interaction. Have we not often noticed how quarrels, say, ones that we Klebold and Eric Harris left behind a video as they went off to perpe-ourselves are having with someone close to us, though they seem to trate the massacre at their high school in Columbine. In that video be about substantive issues of one kind or another, are really about they told of their dream to hijack a commercial plane and plow it into bruised feelings and rankled self-esteem? It is when we ignore this New York, “killing as many people as we can.” What the terrorists simple reality that we find ourselves getting into difficulties of every did on September 11 was atrocious. But if we are honest, we cannot kind—unable to see why, for example, the more we spend on arma-say it was unthinkable. We can’t say that because we have created a ments, the more countries we threaten with them, the more of our culture in which we, especially our young people, think of violence all own democratic liberties we sacrifice, the less secure we feel.And are.

the time—a culture in which, as a colleague of mine said the other Security is not about bomb-sniffing dogs and spy satellites; it’s about day, “we are promoting violence in every way possible.”

learning to live so that others needn’t move out of the way to make In some cases we can see a direct connection between violence room for our happiness. More positively, it’s about building what and the loss of security—as with our government’s blind support Martin Luther King called the “loving community.”

of Israel today. In others, like the ones just mentioned, it is only a 9/11 was a wake-up call.This is what NewYorker writers Remnick suggestive echo speaking to our intuition. But we must come to real-and Hertzberg reminded us. But the waking up is proving to be a lot ize that every form of violence erodes our security and our happiness.

harder than turning out of bed on a cold morning; a lot harder than If we want to be free from terrorism, then we have to ask ourselves, going to war. I recall an advertising poster in San Francisco some years systematically, where are we choosing violence and what could we ago that had an appealing picture of a candy bar and the message choose instead? That is the agenda of this book.

“Go ahead, hit the snooze button one more time.” The life of self-indulgence is indeed a kind of sleep. Endless physical gratification I am a veteran, and I oppose violence in all forms. I’m is no more fulfilling than a dream, and its pursuit has tied us to an not proud to have served [in the Gulf War]. But I’ve economic system that Gandhi warned nearly a century ago is based on learned from my mistakes. Others have too. My hope the “multiplication of wants,” and was for that reason doomed.Waking is that we come together on September 11 to remem-up is realizing that we are not pleasure machines, that there is a spiri-ber our losses, to reject a culture of violence and militarism, tual meaning in life that alone can make us happy.

and to create a lasting movement for justice and peace The war on Afghanistan, which killed, as far as we can tell, more for all.2 (my emphasis)

innocent bystanders than the attacks of 9/11, has had the result, we now know, of scattering the remaining al-Qaida militia all over the As one of her first acts of conversion, Krystal Kyer, who wrote the world, making them fiendishly difficult to locate—and adding fuel to above recently, “turned off [her] television for the last time.”

the fires of hatred that legitimize them. According to today’s New York Unrelated and unnecessary? No, central and indispensable, Times, “Anger at the United States, embedded in the belief that the because human life takes place in a dynamic of kindness and cruelty, Bush administration lends unstinting support to Israel at the expense empathy and alienation, respect and dehumanization (or, as a scholar of the Palestinians, is at an unparalleled high across the Arab world, xiv

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according to analysts and diplomats in the region. . . . More than There are several ways that this tension could end in disaster—

in previous bouts of anti-Americanism in the region, the anger and one in which it would not. The forces of reaction, feeding on a permeates all strata of society, especially among the educated, and hysteria for “security,” could overwhelm these hopeful social experi-is tinged, people acknowledge, with disillusionment at their own ments, leaving the United States an embattled fortress under siege in long-entrenched American-backed leadership.”3 We are dreaming if a hostile world. Or the tension between these communities could tear we think this kind of activity will make us secure. The nightmare of the country apart more violently than did the Vietnam War.

war is no answer to the wake-up call of reason.

Or the discovery of nonviolence could save us.

In the event, the call functioned as a sharp fork in the road of The contribution of this book is to make more visible, more com-America’s destiny.A slender majority of Americans, and almost all her prehensible, and more accessible the vast unexplored possibilities of present leaders, have taken the path of vengeance—of answering that force.We need to understand it, all of us, more than ever.Those cruelty in its own coin. But others, in increasing numbers after the of us who maintain that the country is not being well served by vio-initial shock, have been going quite another way. They have reached lence are still being vilified—absurdly—as unpatriotic; those who out to Arab Americans, they have thought about their own fuel point to the tremendous success of nonviolence in the fields of social consumption; one colleague of mine said, “Here’s my contribution justice and liberation and try to show how these lessons could be to the war on terrorism: I bought a Prius.” And they have redoubled applied to terrorism are still, tragically, misunderstood as naive utopi-their efforts to create forms of peace, and peace culture, like those ans. I myself have been told by people who apparently don’t subscribe discussed in the following pages.

to the motto “Our grief is not a cry for vengeance” that I would feel According to studies by Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, tens of differently if I had lost a family member in the attacks.They are wrong.

millions of Americans now share the fundamental insight I’ve just I dedicate this preface to my cousin Chick, who suffered a heart mentioned, that the determining factor in human life is not the econ-attack and died after his wife, Sylvita, staggered home late that night omy but the dynamic of kindness or its opposite.4 More and more of from her job on the first floor of the World Trade Center.

these people have set to work living accordingly. The example of an alternate economy, which I touch on at the very end of this book, is September , 

merely a glimpse of the social experiments taking place in that field and in others, as we can now see quarterly in the pages of Yes! magazine (see Resources and Opportunities).

Yet at the same time, the nation as a whole is moving in the opposite direction.We are seeing militarization on an undreamt-of scale in this country; an abridgment of civil liberties that propels us back to the era of McCarthy, if not beyond; a tampering with truth and human rights worthy of a Milosevic (the USA Patriot Act, hurriedly adopted by Congress and signed into law six weeks after the terrorist attacks, tipped laws in the government’s favor in 350 subject areas involving forty federal agencies).We may be headed for a showdown.

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Acknowledgments

Years ago Candice Fuhrman read this manuscript when it was in dreadful shape, and had the courage to say so. In fact I have been blessed with outspoken readers and editors: Mary Lamprech of R

University of California Press liberated me from the notion that I was writing another academic book (she called this project “Walden Three”), the sharp-eyed Bernadette Smyth went out of her way to be I T T O O K M A N Y years and much help for me to write this book, encouraging even as she was slashing away at typos and idiosyncrasies, and I apologize in advance if I fail to acknowledge everyone who lent and so did Gail Larrick. My editor-publisher John Strohmeier has a hand.

been intellectual foil, friend, capable businessman, and visionary rolled First, thanks go to Sri Eknath Easwaran, who took me under his into one—a joy to work with.This is publishing as it was meant to be: wing when I was long on passion but dangerously short on wisdom, human-scale, personal, responsive, and driven by meaningful values.

and who is still and always shall be the guide of my life. I thank him To my friends at my nonprofit, METTA, especially Jim Phoenix, and his wife, Christine, in the same breath, always.

Megan McKellogg, and Barb again, and in the nonviolent peace force Of the many others I am pleased to recall, first mention goes to project—David Hartsough, Mel Duncan, and the whole gang (you my research assistant, Julie Anderson, who, armed only with modest know who you are)—through you I have been “plugged in” to the research grants from the university, helped me hunt down many most important social work on the planet and supplied with informa-references (often on the obscurest leads) and corrected the irrational tion and hope for decades.

punctuation that accompanies the creative process, in my case. Julie I thank my two grown children, Jess and Josh, and especially Jess was a sensitive reader before she turned tireless researcher. Barbara and Rick’s nearly grown children, who at times had less of a grand-Gee, who had just the skills I lacked and the free time to put them at father than they might have had for the sake of this effort, and of my disposal, did everything from the sublime to the mechanical in the course my spiritual brothers and sisters at our community, the head-last hectic weeks. Veronica Bollow (not even armed with research quarters of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, who have shared grants) saved Julie and me from the effects of our computer illiteracy, their life and struggles with me for over thirty years. Carol, for one, and finally Christine Nielson and Suraya Breen did the last needfuls.

not only challenged me when I was getting intellectually complacent Glenn Paige was among the first of my peace research colleagues but had to chase me down when I was deep into some subtleties of to give this manuscript, or one of its ancestors, a critical read. I nonviolence when I should have been deep into some hot, soapy dish-wonder how much Glenn will recognize in this published product, water. I think too, always, of the children of our community, who or whether he will realize how helpful his comments, negative and remind me of all the world’s children, who are the reason for every-positive, have been.The most recent in the same collegial category is thing.Without my community, children and adults alike, not only this Elise Boulding, who has helped everyone in the peace world at one book but everything I have become would not have been possible.

time or other.Where would we be—where would the world be today Lastly, I think back on the innumerable people with whom I have

—without her? Colman McCarthy, the nation’s only nonviolence thrashed out these ideas down the years, and first and foremost the journalist, was always there to mentor me in one pithy phrase that students (more than a thousand now) who have taken PACS 164 with would save me a lot of floundering. (“Don’t try to say everything at me at Berkeley, some of whom are today risking their lives to bring once, Mike.”)

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about the kind of world aimed at in this book. I honor them more than Introduction

I can say.

And special thanks to Lauren and Jason, who put me up in a hotel R

in Los Angeles so I could finish the references to this book one marathon day before their lovely wedding.

I have likewise had much help in preparing this new edition, and O N A N U N L I K E LY, treeless savanna miles from anywhere, Paolo take pleasure in thanking my resourceful agent, Karen Sheehan; the Lugari Castrillón planted his dream. It was 1971. Off in the eastern wonderful editor she put me in touch with, Karen Bouris; all the llanos of Colombia, sixteen hours from the nearest city, he and an ide-people at Inner Ocean Publishing; and students and friends who alistic band of followers founded what is now Gaviotas, a thriving, pitched in once again: Pieternel de Bie, Sarah Harling, Matthew self-sufficient, sustainable, and model community in many ways—

Taylor, Danielle Brand-LeMonde, and Nalini Ramji. If anyone who socially, ecologically, economically—which caused Colombian novelist should be on this new list has slipped my mind, my sincere thanks Gabriel García Márquez to dub Lugari “the inventor of the world.”1 At nonetheless.

Gaviotas (named for the nearby river gulls, las gaviotas) kids shriek as My heartfelt thanks to all who have, in whatever way, poured they pump each other up and down on seesaws, but at Gaviotas there’s themselves into the greatest project now confronting humanity, the an extra edge to their satisfaction, for they are also pumping the water project of putting an end to violence, to which I hope this book may for the irrigation system.The music hall’s curved stainless-steel roof is make a small contribution.

also an intensely efficient water heater; in fact, solar collectors of a special Gaviotan design are providing heat for tens of thousands of buildings in Bogotá and throughout Colombia.

By dint of much research, diligence, and insight the Gaviotans discovered that a particular type of Caribbean pine that was doing well in nearby Ecuador would take to the barren llanos. Patiently, they planted seedlings, they tended them, and today millions of these pines adorn—and transform—the local ecosystem. For from the soil underneath them, much to everyone’s surprise, a richly diverse primordial rain forest has sprung up, evidently from seeds that were hiding in the shallow soil, waiting who knows how many eons for the right conditions to bloom again.2

This book will be about a renewal that, if we can make it happen, will resemble the miracle of the pines at Gaviotas, for it also will evoke forces that lie hidden in the thin soil of our impersonal,

“bottom-line,” violence-prone civilization, where human meaning has faded and human bonds are often scattered like the dust. As with Gaviotas’s unexpected forest, the seeds of this renewal do not have to xx

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be created; they are waiting there in the soil of our own existence—

milk supply with a heretofore unknown, altogether invisible, and cun-waiting for us to create the conditions to awaken them. Like those of ning poison. At that moment I knew from the depths of my being we the new-sprung rain forest of Gaviotas, they are primordial, I will were going to have to “stop the machine” (as Mario Savio would later argue: far more native to the human condition than the world of abra-say), but how? Many people my age who felt the same disillusionment sive relationships we have surrounded ourselves with in this industrial were “dropping out” and trekking to India (or at least New Mexico) to era. And, again like the Gaviotans’ surprise rain forest, we don’t have find some way out of the oppressive, boring materialism of a culture to know ahead of time what the renewal we hope to achieve will look that was weirdly inimical to life. For some lucky reason all I had to do like. At least not exactly.What we have to be very clear about is how was walk from my office to the Student Union Building.

to create the right conditions; then we can let nature—in this case Sometime I will write the story of my meeting with Sri Easwaran human nature—do the rest.

and all it has meant to me and so many others; for now, what matters My own renewal began in the fall of 1966, where a lot of renewis how it turned one particular compartment of my life from ing was being attempted in those days: Berkeley, California.That was anguished frustration to creative action. I had hated violence since when I met my spiritual teacher, Sri Eknath Easwaran, who was right long before this fateful meeting, almost as far back as I can recall anyon my campus, teaching the form of meditation he himself had devel-thing about myself. By the time I came to Berkeley, already a oped, on Tuesdays at noon in what was then known as the Meditation

“peacenik” with the rhetoric of the civil rights movement echoing in Room of the Student Union Building.A friend of mine, Javier Castillo, my ears, I had of course heard of Gandhi—but like most Americans, knowing that I was looking for something, some kind of answer to the I knew little enough about him.A few days after my eleventh birthday emptiness left in many of us by the free speech movement, which had I saw a picture of the Mahatma’s cremation and the wild grief of the started with such hope and ended in such dissatisfaction, suggested we mourners on the cover of Life magazine, which left a distinct impres-go and “check him out.” I needed some renewing.There was an inner sion of otherness, even weirdness, about the man and his culture, and emptiness that Javier may have sensed, perhaps more than I did. I had the little I later heard—about his fasts, his asceticism—did little to just been “regularized,” i.e., advanced from acting assistant professor dispel this first impression. I admired his achievements, but they to the real thing on the completion of my dissertation, invited from seemed almost more than human. I felt that he was probably a great the vestibule into the halls of academe; so there I was, teaching man, and I was not, and that was that.

Classics and Comparative Literature at Berkeley—the career to die But when Sri Easwaran began to weave his own reminiscences of for. I had a family with two angelic kids in a cozy little house across Gandhi into his inspiring talks, slowly and from many angles shedding the street from a regional park redolent with eucalyptus trees and light on who Gandhi really was, an entirely new picture emerged.

laced by twisty paths, one of which took you down to a perfect lake I began to see that Gandhi was at once much greater and yet more for a before-dinner dip after a hot California day on campus. I thought relevant—even to my own little life—than I had imagined.

I was on top of the world, but where was that world taking me?

This was, of course, only one of many changes, and not even the One day, a few years earlier, I had stood in the living room of my deepest wrought by those early talks. Sri Easwaran was gradually mak-Berkeley apartment looking at my newborn daughter when the news ing it clear to me that the emotional anguish I was passing through was came over the radio that strontium 90 released into the atmosphere by not unique to me and, more important, that it had a cure, that my atomic bomb testing was poisoning the spring rain, thus lacing the political dissatisfaction—with all its passionate intensity—was really xxii

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spiritual and could be given a more meaningful direction. With his trees might end up looking easy by comparison.

combination of expertise, patience, and boundless commitment (he Second, the Gaviotans give us a lead that is more than metaphor-sometimes quipped that his initials stood for “Endless Enthusiasm”), ical. Like them, we know that though the results of our efforts may lie he inspired me to make meditation the mainstay of my life. With his beyond the mists of an uncertain future, if it is to be a future that we values, his compassion, and his vision, along with his personal experi-really want, we will have to make one right choice very similar to the ence of growing up in Gandhi’s India, he enabled me to grasp who the one that brought Gaviotas into existence: the choice for constructive Mahatma was and to sense the practical meaning of his legacy.

action over (and in the face of) an enormous prevailing negativity.

So it came about that no sooner had I gotten my foot on “the lad-Paolo Lugari chose the godforsaken llanos because, he thought, “if we der” (academic jargon for a tenure-track teaching post) than I began can do this in Colombia . . . people can do it anywhere.”3 In that trying to set it over to a different perch—something rather difficult to same spirit we can choose to craft a life of security and vitality even do with a ladder when you’re standing on it! I used my faculty creden-here, perhaps especially here, where a culture of violence seems tials to sponsor my new teacher in an experimental course on the to dominate. I am not being quixotic. A surprising number of the

“Theory and Practice of Meditation,” a magnificent experiment that projects we’ll be looking at in the ensuing pages led to results—good drew over a thousand students and yet could find no permanent home results—beyond what the actors had a right to anticipate. Often their in the formal structures of the university and was discontinued after best and most enduring successes were not quite what they intended; two goes. I tried being the chair of Religious Studies for a while, but indeed, sometimes what they intended to do failed. But in every case that was doomed—the academic approach to religion and mine were they did one right thing: they chose persuasion and inclusion over on different planets. And finally I began teaching my course on non-threat power and hatred and domination.They chose nonviolence.

violence and Gandhi.That worked. It grew into a spate of articles, the beginnings of peace studies at Berkeley, this book—a career. More important, it grew into many lifelong friendships with the extraordinary young people who have taken the course over nearly a quarter of a century. Only someone who has taught, perhaps, will appreciate how much these students engaged me with their enthusiasm, challenged me with their intelligence, and above all inspired me with their demand for a better world.

That is the background, and this is the conviction that led me to write this book: that after several decades’ exploration of nonviolence, I have no doubt whatsoever that we can bring a loving community to birth out of the worldwide crisis we are passing through. Precisely what such a future would look like is difficult to specify just yet, and perhaps we don’t need to spell it out completely at this stage, but two things are certain. One is that, like the “miracle” of Gaviotas, it’s going to take one heck of a lot of work. Most miracles do. Planting a million xxiv

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Introduction xxv

Chapter One

HARD QUESTIONS,

HARD ANSWERS

R

All major natural and human systems are in crisis or transition.The signs of this change range from the crash of fisheries around the world, the depletion of rainforests, the declining credibility of government, the growing inequality between rich and poor, and the crisis in meaning and sense of emptiness that comes with an overemphasis on material consumption.

—Positive Futures Network Newsletter

For pain does not spring from the dust

or sorrow sprout from the soil:

man is the father of sorrow,

as surely as sparks fly upward.

—Job :–

A F RO N T- PAG E photo in the Sunday New York Times on August 17, 1997, showed a grieving woman, Linda Reid, putting flowers on the gravestone of her son, who had hanged himself at the age of seventeen. He was the sixth teenager from that community to hang himself or herself that year.Why? The well-written article describing the suicides in this south Boston area talked about community pride putting too much pressure on young people, about racial tensions, lack of economic opportunity—all things we are well aware of but that hardly explain why a young person in a country like ours would take his life.

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 1

Or hers.The real explanation must lie much deeper than community think about violence itself.

pride and economic opportunity. In 1998, the surgeon general The right questions, then, are not: Why are very young students reported that children between the ages of ten and fourteen are twice turning their schools into battlefields? Why is there an increase in hate as likely to take their own lives as they were fifteen years earlier.What crimes right now against gays in Florida or a decrease in sex offenses is the explanation? As though sensing that all the talk about community in New England? They are:

pride and the like was a smoke screen, the writer finally quoted a local What is violence?

priest: “There really aren’t any answers.”

Why is it getting worse? and

I refuse to accept this. I refuse to believe in the journalistic cliché How do we make it stop?

“meaningless violence.” I refuse to believe that there are no answers to the cheapening of life and the rise of violence against it. Two young men murder their own parents to get their money; a murder-suicide Stirrings of Change

leaves a celebrity and his wife, apparently happy for years, dead in their palatial home; a teenager is shot dead in the street for his run-Despite discouragement by the mass media, there is evidence that ning shoes—why? It may be easy to say that there are no answers, but people want to confront these questions; they are becoming more dis-it’s not acceptable. If we have no answers to such a basic matter as why satisfied with the “no answer” school and other forms of dismissal—

we can’t live in peace with one another, often can’t go on living at all, rightly, for to dismiss something as dangerous as rising violence is maybe we’re asking the wrong questions.

treacherous. The tendency to deny violence has been with us for a In one respect, it’s only too clear that we are doing just that. It’s long time, to be sure, but there are signs that it is weakening.

even clear why: violence is “reported” to us every day by the mass Considering the enormous role played by violence throughout history, media in a wash of meaningless detail. “Joe X, twenty-six, was shot Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic study On Violence in 1969, “It is . . .

three times with a 9-millimeter handgun purchased the previous rather surprising that violence has been singled out so seldom for Tuesday for $23.” Or, “This month the homicide rate in Dayton was special consideration.”1 She was reflecting the fact that a new aware-1.8 percent lower than last month.” Frequently, we are solemnly told ness is dawning, that many feel the time to get past denial and face the the trivial “reasons” offered by flustered survivors who hardly under-issue head-on is right now. It has been half a century since Gandhi stand what is happening to them, and there is no limit to how absurd, observed that the world was “sick unto death with blood-spilling,”2

how downright insulting to human nature these can be. In what would and at about that same time, French philosopher Jacques Ellul made be called today a frivolous lawsuit, the wife of James Oliver Huberty, the shrewd observation that our era “is not at all the age of violence; who killed twenty-one people in the McDonald’s San Ysidro massacre it’s the age of the awareness of violence.”3

of 1984, said that her husband’s murderous rampage was caused by In other words, what really characterizes our time is not so much the excessive MSG in McDonald’s hamburgers.The way violent events that there is so much violence—there have been such times before—

are reported (and this is a large part of what we read and think about but that we are challenged, possibly as never before, to deal with it.

today) is virtually always trivializing. It comes to us as a barrage of This being true, the mass media could not have chosen a worse time incidental details, often of cold statistics. Engrossed in one sensational to make violence appear trivial and incomprehensible.They are doing detail or another, one particular violent episode or another, we never a singular and untimely disservice to human civilization.

2

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 3

Confronting violence is a little like turning around to face a bright attention before now, she was giving us a scholarly hint that we have a light that’s been projecting all kinds of fascinating images and shadows natural inclination to avoid thinking directly about violence, which is out in front of us (yes, I’ve been influenced by Plato). It’s hard to peer understandable: we would be thinking about the most negative side of into that glare, but when we succeed, we find ourselves going through human nature, which means the most negative side of ourselves. I don’t a kind of Alice’s looking glass. Suddenly we feel like the character like this any more than you do. But although it must be done, it doesn’t from that popular sixties poster, with his head stuck into a whole have to be done destructively.That is, we can peer into the depths of other universe—or that convict in a cartoon staring wistfully through human nature—of ourselves—in a balanced way, seeing what is good the bars at a little patch of sky while all along the door to his cell as well as what is discouraging about us. Today, by emphasizing the stands wide open behind him.

shadow side of humanity—and “emphasizing” may be too mild for It is a much wider world out there; the light is harsh at first, but our obsession with the ugly and violent today—our culture seems to when we face it, problems that seemed impossible to cope with now be making us more and more ignorant of our human stature. Let me seem to come teamed with all kinds of solutions—solutions with throw that claim into relief by quoting a brief passage from an era, unexpected good side effects, instead of bad ones.

namely, the fourteenth century, when that was not yet true: The prevailing method of dealing with violence has a dreadful tendency to create more problems than it solves. For example, we try to Beneath you and external to you lies the entire created stop young people from bringing guns to school by installing metal universe. Yes, even the sun, the moon and the stars.

detectors. It does cut down on the number of guns they bring in, of They are fixed above you, splendid in the firmament, course— and it demoralizes the students because it implies that they yet they cannot compare to your exalted dignity as a cannot be trusted. It intensifies the excitement of the “game” of sneak-human being.4

ing guns into school. And most of all it normalizes the violence. It blunts the shock. How could we have allowed a situation like this to It seems almost fantastic to us that a writer could matter-of-factly happen, where young people have guns at all, much less carry them in describe humanity in these glowing terms; but it would have seemed school? And without that shock, where do we get the motivation to act?

just as fantastic to him that we matter-of-factly bill ourselves as “nat-Where’s the impetus to confront the real problem, of which guns in ural born killers”—just as fantastic and much more dangerous.

school is only one form: the problem of violence?

The obsession with negativity that we take for granted paradoxically makes it nearly impossible to understand our negative side; it has blocked us from getting down to the causes of violence, those that lie Moving Toward the Truth

within us, by creating a sense that only causes of violence lie within us. As we shine our light into the murk, therefore, it is essential to I have been identifying the mass media as a major source of our be watching for the seeds of change and regeneration that surely lie problem, and I’m going to continue, for one simple reason: that is hidden there along with the drives, the impulses, and blindness that where it would be most effective to make a change. In all honesty, make us violent. Opposites can strangely be the same.

however, we cannot put all the blame on them.When Hannah Arendt The other day as I was walking across Sproul Plaza, made famous said it is “rather surprising” that violence has not been given special in the sixties as the scene of the free speech movement, I saw a cluster 4

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 5

of students handing out leaflets around a hastily knocked-together of Australia’s Department of External Affairs and now a well-known kiosk. Nothing unusual, for Berkeley.They were clearly agitated (also scholar of conflict, wrote, “In so far as specific problems are being tack-not too unusual), and I went over to read their large, hand-lettered led by authorities as though they were separate problems, there can be sign: “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes on the Rise.” I was shocked and hurt.

no lasting cures for any of them.” What civilizations are passing through, At Berkeley, so many of my students and friends and colleagues are he pointed out, is in reality a clash between the systems we’ve built and Asian that this hit me personally and hard, quite apart from the fact the actual human needs they were supposed to address.5 Not, that is, an that this kind of thing should not be happening in Berkeley or any-isolated clash between group and group.

where in this century. But I’ve learned something over the years: if I The trouble with trying to stop one leak at a time is, first of all, that wanted to do something about this, something effective, something it does nothing about the others. Have a teach-in, raise consciousness, or, that would last, I would have to get my initial reactions under control; if you really want to be unimaginative, provide Asians with more “secu-I would have to take a step back and try to see the bigger picture.

rity” measures.You may see some reduction of anti-Asian hate crimes (I To be more precise, in this case, I would have to take three steps will be arguing later that even this isn’t guaranteed), but what about anti-back. Like letting myself down a chain into murky waters, hand over black, anti-lesbian, anti-Caucasian hate crimes? What about road rage?

hand, I would have to back down in my thinking, from: What about war?

anti-Asian hate crimes

On the other hand, if you could somehow do something to control to hate crimes

hate, all the manifestations of hate would subside to that degree.The effect to hate.

on specific hate crimes might be less obvious at first because it would be Hate is the real problem.The more hate there is, the more it will indirect, but in the long run it would be much, much more reliable.You express itself in whatever form. Some of those forms will be illegal—

simply cannot have anti-Asian hate crimes if you don’t have hate. On the crimes, in other words—and some of those will be directed against whole, this is so obvious that the only reason to repeat it is that as soon as Asians. But the underlying reason anti-Asian hate crimes are on the some particular form of violence gets in our face, so to speak—witness rise—in Berkeley or anywhere—has nothing to do with Asians or my first reaction at the kiosk—it draws all our attention to the details.

even racism: it is that hate is on the rise. Today it might be Asians; Emergencies are great motivators, but they create a terrible atmosphere tomorrow it could be Jews, it could be blacks, homeless people, gays for really solving problems. To solve problems you need to have a little and lesbians; yesterday it was Communists—but since these are all self-control, a little distance, a lot of patience.You need to see, for exam-only the targets of some people’s hate, only forms that hatred then ple, that the problem is not hate against group A or B: it’s hate.

takes, trying to cope with each victimized group individually is like Incidentally, as I headed back to my office, whom should I run across trying to fix one leak at a time in a rusted-out plumbing system.

but a well-known Berkeley personality haranguing the passersby in a Wouldn’t it be more effective to shut off the water? Or, to modify that voice I recognized all too well. It’s the kind of voice that makes you wince image, hatred is a tide that raises all boats: we won’t get far trying to before you even hear what it’s saying. I’m not sure what his problem is rescue the boats—or even groups of boats—one at a time.

or why he chooses to bring it on campus, but he’s extremely angry and These students were not the only ones trying to deal with one attacks people for hours in a voice raucous with bitterness. He’s popu-problem of victimization in isolation.We are all doing this, because it larly called the Hate Man. I had the odd feeling that I might be the only has become our culture-wide style. As John Burton, former secretary one on campus noticing the connection.

6

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 7

Science and Serendipity

who had been systematically encouraged to cooperate with each other were more cooperative than ever. Apparently their cooperation training It sounds simple, but no sooner have we worked our way down the not only protected them from frustration, it allowed them to thrive chain from anti-Asian hate crimes to hate crimes to hate—which is on it. They were able, that is, to divert the negativity it released not easy to do when we’re caught up in a hateful situation—than we within them into constructive channels. Psychic tension, it seems, is have not only an answer to the question, why this kind of crime?, but neither good nor bad in itself; it can be thought of as raw energy the beginnings of a way to solve it. Once we’ve gotten down to the that becomes destructive or helpful when it is made to flow through emotional cause, we start seeing a pragmatic measure that we’ll be aggressive or cooperative channels. Peace could be a simple matter able to apply, mutatis mutandis, to just about every form of violence: of training.

since the underlying cause of the violence is hate, we could fix the As you have guessed from the cans of film and the projector, this problem if we had a way to turn hate into something else. And there study by Joel Davitz was published over fifty years ago, at the height is evidence that this trick may not be as impossible as it seems.

of the Cold War.6 Many political commentators were saying back then In a remarkable experiment first reported in the Journal of that if we made it through that year, 1952, we could survive anything.

Abnormal Social Psychology some time ago, schoolchildren of the same It might be thought that at such a time the question of what human age were divided into two groups: one group was encouraged to be beings can and cannot be trained to do with their aggressive drives aggressive and the other to be cooperative. (In our culture most chil-would be of first importance. But Davitz’s study was by and large dren are “trained” to be aggressive even before they reach school, but ignored.This was the heyday of the “innate aggression” theory; at that it’s fairly easy to overcome that training with a little encouragement time the idea that human aggression is biologically programmed and of their innate tendency to share, cooperate, think about each others’

there is nothing anyone can do about it, an idea now largely discredited welfare.) Within a few weeks they were behaving quite differently.

(but still uncritically believed by the mass media and the general pub-Both groups were then brought together and subjected to an acute lic), was about to break over the public in a series of pseudoscientific frustration: They were sat down in a nice big room with a projector publications by Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative would come that was flanked by several cans of film. For good measure, each child out in 1966), Raymond Dart, and several others. The heyday of that was given a candy bar but told not to start in on it just yet.The room sensationalistic “science” is now behind us, however, and we are free was darkened and the first film started—suddenly, without a word of to imagine that there may indeed be ways to turn hate and other neg-explanation, the experimenters snapped on the lights, shut off the ative energies into something else; that, as this experiment suggests, projector, confiscated the candy bars, and packed the children off to human nature may contain the cure as well as the cause of the violent their respective classrooms. Science is rough! But the issue was impor-trend that’s engulfing us.

tant—to see if the cooperative training would hold up under such Science has not stood still since 1952, and we know a good bit unmerited mistreatment—and the results, duly filmed through the more about cooperation. Mediation training in schools has become a classrooms’ one-way glass, were extremely suggestive. The children growth industry, for example, but the implications of the Davitz with pro-aggression training were of course hell on wheels; their frus-study are still far from fully realized.The study itself is known among tration boiled over in fights, arguments, and general mayhem more peace-oriented psychologists, but its implications have not been than ever.That was not very surprising. But the rest was: the children systematically explored despite their potential importance. With or 8

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 9

without popularizers like Robert Ardrey and their “swashbuckling”

one clue: we start doing this the minute we stop being taken in by the theory of innate aggression (I borrow that adjective from philosopher details that the media think is in their best interest to deluge us with, Mary Midgley), pessimism about human nature is the norm in public and do some reflecting about what is going wrong; the minute we step opinion and, I’m afraid, in mainstream science. People study, talk back from the hurt and anger about what’s happening to us personally about, and explore the shadow side.We have to look hard to find the and start to think about inhumanity itself.

side we need.

In the summer of 1998, a dedicated teacher and school principal in South Africa, Sister Theodelind Schreck, was shot and killed in an apparent robbery while driving to pick up her niece. Although In Search of Prevention

KwaZuluNatal province has a long history of political violence, this slaying was a shock. “Sister Theodelind Schreck was dedicated to her Berkeley students, among whom I’ve studied and taught for more teaching and religious duties,” said Ben Ngubane, premier of the than thirty years and who will always have a special place in my heart, province.Then he made an observation that rose above the fuss about are, as I say, far from alone in showing us the need to let ourselves why her, about this murder being unacceptable, and provided useful down the chain of causality. If you really want justice for your own insight for all of us. “Violence remains violence, irrespective of moti-group, or any group you identify with, you have to step back in your vation.”7

vision and your emotions, not for the purpose of caring less, but to This shows exactly how we have to think about violence in order give yourself the space for a better-aimed passion. This is what all of to cure it. There is a hopeful side to this view: since violence is vious have to do if we are ever to see a life secure from violence, even if lence, anything we do to reduce violence anywhere will do something we’re nonminorities living in a comfortable community—like south toward reducing violence everywhere.

Boston.Whether we are activists angered by some form of injustice or Premier Ngubane’s insight is borne out by scientific research.

we just want to get from our car to our house without being mugged, One of the papers read before the British Psychological Society in we are going to have to change our way of thinking.We have to slow 1994 was about the negative impact of TV news bulletins. By then it down our initial reactions—not by any means the same thing as losing was well known to social scientists that the parade of bad news that we the intensity of our feelings about the problem, but on the contrary, see on the media depresses us.What was surprising, however (but perin order to convert those valuable feelings from fear, panic, or resent-fectly logical, when you think about it), is that the anxious and ment into determination.The more clearly we can see the underlying depressed states we get into from watching this news—or various causes, the better we’ll be able to identify the long-lasting, and only forms of “entertainment,” which paint the same dismal picture of real, solution.

human nature—have a very general impact: we start seeing everything But there’s an important point I only just began to mention: why more negatively. Evidently, the negativity we take in—and other stud-wait until we’re being mugged, or people with ugly attitudes have ies show that it doesn’t much matter whether we think we’re seeing started insulting our communities? Obviously, it’s tons more effective news or fiction—“tend[s] to promote a negative frame of mind in not only to be working at the root of the problem instead of the which negative events, thoughts and memories are likely to be dwelled leaves, but to be working steadily instead of being caught by surprise on and positive ones filtered out and ignored. ” 8 (my emphasis) every time there’s a violent incident. How can we? We’ve already had Clearly, that could lead to a vicious circle—and clearly, in fact, it 10

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 11

Recently, at my daughter’s house, I watched a PBS documentary has.There is a lot of bad stuff in the world; by seeing it up close, out on the aftermath of colonialism in the second half of the twentieth of proportion, we come to expect things to be that way, and when we century. The film brought out extremely well the contrast between have negative expectations, life obligingly fulfills them. That part of the aftermath in India and the aftermath in other colonial areas, the circle is easy to understand: negative expectations mask from view primarily Africa. It pointed out with unusual sensitivity, I thought, our positive potentials, which are the very ones we need if we’re going how despite India’s many problems she remains the most populous to avoid and resolve problems like violence.

democracy on the planet, with robust institutions to keep her that Note that the London psychologists compared the effects of bad way, and enjoys rewarding relationships with the former colonial news to what they called “neutral” news—not to actual good news.

power—all this in contrast to names that make us wince today, such Maybe there wasn’t enough good news out there to build a sample.

as Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, the Congo, Ghana, Algeria.The film, as But this is the main point: the principle that they were dealing with, I say, brought this out very well.What it didn’t think to mention was the principle that negativity generalizes in the viewer’s mind, is one of why. It is as though the filmmakers did not dare to say that nonviolence the most important things to know about violence. Think how (which was, with a few lapses, the liberation method chosen in India) differently we would form policies and regulate our own viewing led to one result while violence (which predominated in Africa with a habits if we became aware of what it’s doing to our outlook on life, few exceptions) led to quite another. By the end of this book you will what it’s costing us emotionally and spiritually, to take in so many vio-see why I dare to say exactly that.

lent, depressing images and stories.

Let me emphasize the simple but important step we’ve already In practical terms, though, the real importance of the London taken in this direction. As journalist Daniel Schorr wrote recently, study comes out when we turn it around. To take in uplifting images

“Television, celebrating violence, promotes violence. . . . By trivializ-and stories must have exactly the opposite effect. Logically, that would ing great issues, it buries great issues. By blurring the line between make things better as surely as seeing violence makes them worse. But fantasy and reality, it crowds out reality.”10 But if television and other somehow we never think to explore the bright side of the principle.A media celebrate, promote, and trivialize violence, that doesn’t mean recent news story on “emotional literacy” (a current term for the kind we need to. My hope is that after reading this book you’ll never hear of cooperative training Davitz was talking about fifty years ago) for a news report or see a violence-packed film in quite the same way example, had the title “Today’s Lesson: Curbing Kids’ Violent again. While the details of that crime report are being reeled off—

Emotions.”9 You could put it that way. But what if, just for the argu-what caliber was the gun, where was the wound, what was the motive, ment, we were to title that article “Today’s Lesson: Unleashing Kids’

if any —something in you will cry out, “This is violence. Forget every-Compassionate Emotions”? Unthinkable; but actually more correct. It thing else and figure out what’s going wrong!” Let that reminder come is a better description, I believe, of what is really happening in young on over the cultural messages of negativity or meaningless detail.

people when they are trained to be compassionate.Their natural drive That step taken, we can take the next: to see through events to an to cooperate, when keyed to positive emotions like compassion, takes underlying story that contains scintillae of hope, and a few examples up some of the energy that would otherwise be fueling their aggressions.

of that follow.

The results of this simple process took the Davitz experimenters quite by surprise—like the Gaviotans when they created the conditions for a rain forest they didn’t know was there.

12

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 13

Strength Is Strength

Nelson Mandela may not have liked F. W. de Klerk, but he used his strength of character to overcome his personal dislike; and we can As part of wrapping up the second Christian millennium, Time magazine clearly trace, through his change of roles, the thread from his strength ran profiles of one hundred key people who, in the editors’ opinions, as a prisoner on Robben Island to his strength as president in had left their marks on that embattled century. It was not inspiring.

Johannesburg.This intriguing connection does not appear in the ordi-What they did with Gandhi was shockingly bad, but they did manage to nary way most of us think about conflict and human relationships, but relate an eye-opening story about Nelson Mandela.11When the young in the emerging new way of thinking about conflict and relationships Mandela stepped onto the quay with a boatload of other prisoners at it’s clear enough: the capacity to stand up to a bully and the capacity the infamous Robben Island, where he was to spend so many years of to forgive one—the strength of character to rise above anger, even if his life, guards shouting “Huck! Huck!” tried to herd the new arrivals that anger is perfectly justified—are closely connected.These qualities like cattle, to force them to trot up to the prison, and to submit them not only can coexist, they explain each other: strength is strength.

to other humiliations; but Mandela and a friend refused and kept on We miss this whole fascinating connection if we think “strength”

walking calmly though the guards threatened, “Do you want me to kill means the ability to prevail, to dominate, and only that. Mandela’s you?” Once inside, the head warder, Captain Gericke, went a little too great role model, Gandhi, would, by contrast, often confess his blun-far, calling Mandela “boy.” “Look here,” Mandela calmly told the star-ders in public; he seemed to enjoy it, much to the consternation of his tled Gericke, “I must warn you, I’ll take you to the highest authority coworkers. Once, his sister was alarmed at what seemed to her a par-and you will be poor as a dormouse by the time I finish with you.”12

ticularly damaging confession, and he said, “Tell sister there is no defeat

“Incredibly,” Time reported, Gericke backed off.

in the confession of one’s error.The confession itself is a victory.”14

But is this so incredible? Don’t bullies frequently cave in when That real strength is so much more than “power over” another they meet with unexpected resistance? We’ve all seen examples of explains the strange conversions of angry, violent people that keep this, and in the next chapters we’ll not only see a few more but will cropping up in the annals of peace. When segregationist George start working out their scientific explanation.

Wallace became governor of Alabama, he kept his campaign promise Let’s follow the lead the Time writers missed. First connection: and literally “stood in the schoolhouse door” to block black students intuition leads us to a famous event a quarter of a century later, when from entering the University of Alabama in June of 1963, making him-Mandela was in a position of strength, in fact the first president of a self a national symbol of defiance in the cause of segregation. But in the free South Africa. As most of us remember, during his inauguration course of time, something apparently happened to lift the fog of hatred speech he paused, turned to his arch enemy, F. W. de Klerk, took his from his mind, and on March 11, 1995, he came in his wheelchair to hand, and said, “I am proud to hold your hand—for us to go forward the celebration of the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march to together. . . . Let us work together to end division.”13

apologize to the marchers, black and white, whom his state troopers What is the connection between these two events? In the ordinary had clubbed and fire-hosed thirty years before. That took guts—but way of seeing things, nothing. In the ordinary way of thinking, every then, so did the way he defied the whole country back when he saw conflict, if not every interaction, has to have a “winner” and a “loser.”

things differently. From an icon of segregation he became, on the front Did de Klerk win or did he lose when Mandela made his gesture of rec-cover of Life, an icon of reconciliation. No wonder Gandhi often said onciliation? Absurd question. What about Mandela? As an individual, that there’s hope for a violent man to become nonviolent, but not for 14

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Hard Questions, Hard Answers 15

a coward. In nonviolent logic, this makes perfect sense: what we’re result of hard work and sacrifice; it followed the rules of the game seeing is the same courage and strength, put to better use.

with perfect predictability.You do not have to glean news about non-Second connection: Now link both these events in Mandela’s life, violence on special Listservs, as I do, to be more aware of these rules; the defiance and the generosity, with his impressive leadership—his if you have a hunch that life is not so haphazard as it appears, that ability to pilot a brand new state that had just emerged from horrendous everyone responds to love or hatred when it’s offered to them, you conditions with still-unresolved tensions of frightening magnitude.This will know what I’m talking about.

is a little subtler than the courage to defy and/or forgive: is someone My colleague and friend Sergei Plekhanov, then deputy director of who forgives his or her enemies, in public, a good leader? Of course.

the Soviet Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, was not in Moscow He or she will tend to have access to creative resources for order, on the critical day the coup was thwarted. A year later I heard him which we’ll have a chance to explore later (especially in chapters 5

describe what he had gone through when he saw the starkly juxta-and 6). For now, let’s consider one more nonviolent event that was posed television images of the Kremlin, ringed by grim walls and misunderstood—and this time not just by the press.

armored vehicles, and the Russian parliament building, in white marIn August 1991 a counterrevolutionary coup that would have ble and glass, guarded only by unarmed people, almost a mythic image pushed Russia back to Stalinism was thwarted by a popular uprising.

of civil authority under attack by violence. I still remember the quiet This is how one important liberal magazine characterized the event: passion in his voice that so gripped the international scholars gathered

“The coup failed. The regime collapsed. For once, the world was around him: “And what do you have against them?” he said.What can lucky.”15 (my emphasis) But the successful popular resistance to the you wield against those tanks and armored personnel carriers?

August coup was not “lucky”; it was the result of deliberate acts

“Nothing. Nothing but spirit, a sense of legitimacy, and the willingness carried out by courageous nonviolent resisters who had been systemat-of some people to risk their lives.” I hope the delicate irony was not ically studying nonviolent tactics for months, in part through workshops lost on my colleagues, for this “nothing” is the classic recipe for suc-run by experienced American trainers (one friend of mine had done cessful nonviolence: spirit, a sense of legitimacy (that one’s cause is an average of two such workshops a day all over Russia throughout just), and the willingness to sacrifice—if necessary, to lay down one’s that summer). All of this was totally unknown to the press. “The life. Those are precisely the three things that make resistance to an August coup was not a surprising event,” wrote conscientious objec-unjust regime successful. Basic Nonviolence 101.To miss this is to be tor Alexander Pronozin shortly after it occurred. “The real surprise unable to explain what forces were at work in the confrontation of was how quickly the coup was brought down and that the ‘weapon’

August 1991—and why the people won.

that won the day was nonviolent social-based defence.”16

I will say more later about this remarkable form of defense (chapters 4 and 8), and when I do, I hope to clarify what it could mean for The Purloined Answer

the majority of us, who are not likely to participate in a “people power” resistance. What I want to emphasize now is that the rapid This side of the Iron Curtain there was a land called Yugoslavia, where success of the resistance to the coup, which seemed so inexplicable, so people of different cultures and ethnicities lived side by side. They

“lucky” to the news media and general public—and, I have little worked together, despite their tensions.They went to schools together.

doubt, to the political leadership of the time—was neither. It was the They quarreled; they intermarried. This went on for centuries. Then 16

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If there was no violence on the television less people one day, when the lid of centralized state-socialist control came off, would make violence on the streets. Also I think less the three major cultural groups (they are not ethnic groups) blew people would be shot, murdered, kidnapped and apart.The result was the most appalling violence seen in Europe, and other things.18

possibly anywhere, since World War II. Many asked, “Why? How could they be putting people in cattle cars all over again?”

They sure would. It’s as simple as “violence in, violence out,” a As usual, there were those who said there was “no answer.” Others result that is obvious to science, common sense, and our own personal cited “history,” as though memories of the famous battle of 1389 had experience, and that we nonetheless like to regard in some circles as to be avenged even though the people who fought it had been dead for controversial. It isn’t. If we play up violence, we’ll have more vio-500 years.

lence; if we play up money and greed, there will be more robberies; and in the words of another wise twelve-year-old: “People get a lot of But in all this, one banal factor has been overlooked: ideas from sex [on television] and think it’s okay and then they rape the poisonous power of propaganda.The Slav popula-people.” Several writers have recently pointed out that the same video tions of the other formerly Communist East games the military uses, off the shelf, to prepare soldiers for combat European countries just to the north, in Hungary and are being played by our young people, for example the young people Romania, developed a hearty skepticism about what who have left us one of the most painful memories in America—

they saw on state television or read in government-Columbine.19

run newspapers. For some reason, that kind of doubt It seems so—well—stupid to do this to ourselves that one can died in Yugoslavia if it ever existed. People here have understand the bitterness behind these hard words of Wendell Berry: always believed, and still believe, what they see and hear on television.17

Always the assumption is that we can first set demons at large, and then, somehow, become smart enough In a way, this is nothing new; we all know about the “yellow jour-to control them.This is not childishness. It is not even nalism” that put the United States into conflict with Spain in 1898.

“human weakness.” It is a kind of idiocy, but perhaps Then it was mainly newsprint; now it’s television (or, in the case of we will not cope with it and save ourselves until we Rwanda, radio). But the difference between then and now is not just regain the sense to call it evil.20

technological, or for that matter political: it’s the difference of half a century’s “background” message of alienation and violence, the cumu-If it helps, call it evil. But be careful: there is a world of difference lative mental poison that makes all of us more edgy, dispirited, and between calling something evil and calling some one evil. The first prone to react with violence along whatever fault lines present them-strategy mobilizes resources against the problem; the second only selves, be it between races, between cultural subgroups in a formerly recycles the ultimate cause of the problem, which is ill will, resent-viable community, or between two cars on a crowded freeway. The ment, lack of empathy, and eventually hatred.

London study I quoted earlier points to this effect; so do the wise When the members of a European contact group sutured together words of Daniel Schorr; so do these from a twelve-year-old school-a “peace” for the remains of Yugoslavia in 1998, they made no provision child in Santa Rosa, California.

18

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for reeducation; incredibly, no one paid any attention to the govern-our young people become so alienated that their own self is “other” to ment-run television stations that kept right on whipping up the same them? In any case, it is the phenomenon of teenage suicides that forces hatreds that had started the violence, particularly in Serbia. As one of us to step way back and look at the whole picture. Let me put it as sim-my colleagues on the scene ruefully told me, “Most people continue ply as possible.

to be fed a steady diet of nationalism and propaganda, hatred, half-Life has a purpose. Animals can live without discovering this, but truths, and prejudice.” The war over Kosovo soon followed.

people can’t. In the course of historical time, civilizations can get off When we see someone deliberately fanning hatreds in this way, on a tangent, get fascinated by some sidetrack, and lose sight of why we have to feel the hurt of it so deeply that we cannot rest without they are alive.When this happens—and it seems to happen periodically doing something about it—but calling it “evil” is a tricky way to go.

—a whole culture can no longer see where it’s going.That’s when life Where there’s evil, there has to be an evildoer—someone other than loses its purpose (or seems to), and individuals, in the grip of a gnaw-us.Very “other.” But in fact, the media are our media; we patronize and ing despair they may not be able to articulate, start to give up on life support them. There is a reciprocity to this process, to be sure: they itself. Then we see teenagers committing suicide as though it were a feed us violence and vulgarity, and we then get a taste for it and fad, we see doctors who help people die instead of helping them live, demand more, which they obligingly supply—a truly vicious cycle, we see the return of the death penalty—all symptoms of what the but where shall the spinning finger of blame land?

pope has called a “death-oriented” civilization. It’s not really death-On the whole, I prefer to think that we are unleashing these oriented per se; it’s death-oriented by default. When life doesn’t seem demons through a kind of tragically blinkered vision (what Berry calls to offer us a goal to live for, then, by default, repellent things can actu-

“idiocy”). Still not very complimentary, but it’s a more practical ally look attractive, because they’re the only things that are at least approach, as we will see in chapter 2.

“exciting.” Death and violence take on a lurid appeal.Yet, as an ancient Indian classic puts it, “Those who get drawn to the shadow side of life go to blinding darkness.”21 To play with the dark side of human nature The Why of Living

is to end up in a crisis of violence and not understand why.

So the violence we’re seeing today is intimately linked to the “cri-The media have purposes of their own; helping us grasp the sis of meaning” cited by the Positive Futures Network in the epigraph significance of violent events does not seem to be one of them—much heading this chapter. The network listed it as a symptom; I would less helping us find our role in eliminating such events. That is why argue that the crisis of meaning belongs center stage. If people don’t when they run out of superficial answers for one act of violence or know where the journey of life is leading them, why should they be another, they have taken to saying that there isn’t any answer. But enthusiastic about continuing? Teenagers can be very direct, and here there is.We have seen part of it already. It’s that we, collectively, have is what one of them said when President Clinton advocated an educa-created such a climate of violence and negativity that life doesn’t seem tional campaign on the dangers of smoking to dissuade teens from terribly worth hanging onto—ours or anyone else’s. At the same doing it:

time, violence begins to seem an intriguing, pseudomeaningful,

“exciting,” and normal alternative. Suicide fits into this picture as a In my opinion, many young people who smoke and kind of inverted violence directed against oneself—or have some of say they don’t know why are subconsciously choosing 20

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death. So telling them over and over that smoking about 600 words, the word machine occurred thirteen times. This is will kill them is not the answer. . . . If the president is what’s called in literary circles a “subtext”: even while the writer was serious . . . he’s got to find ways to help them imag-telling us about a great human achievement, he was also telling us, in ine a future.22

that powerful stream of suggestion that runs underneath the literal meaning of our words, “You’re a machine, you’re a machine, you’re a When a young person ends his or her life in south Boston or kills machine . . .”24

someone along a California freeway, when a father turns on his own

“For our culture as a whole,” Huston Smith recently pointed out, family or a nation sets off nuclear explosions, it is not about money or

“nothing major is going to happen until we figure out who we are.The jealousy or traffic. Ultimately, it’s because life has lost its meaning for truth of the matter is, that today we haven’t a clue as to who we are.

them—they cannot “imagine a future” with any hope or purpose.

There is no consistent view of human nature in the West today.”25

Money and all those other factors can precipitate violence, but only

“Who we are” is a question that will be hovering in the back-among people for whom, consciously or otherwise, life has lost its ground of every argument in this book. Are we separate, material meaning—or more accurately, who have lost sight of life’s priceless creatures—in which case it’s hard to see how we could not be doomed value and what a Greek philosopher called its “inexhaustible meaning.”23

to competition and conflict—or are we invisibly connected through Because the media so effectively obscure the meaning of life what Mahatma Gandhi called “heart unity” underneath all those today, they are, again, potentially a most effective way to shut off the real-as-far-as-they-go differences of body, culture, likes and dislikes, rising tide of violence, but only one way among others. My young ideologies, and fashions? In the latter case, life may have a profound friend Sean is taking intensive German to help him with his senior hidden meaning after all; and in that case, we’ve got a lot of learning thesis project on the poet Rilke, at Johns Hopkins. After I helped ahead of us.

him out a bit with that awhile back, we found ourselves talking about The dark side of modern science—and unfortunately it has one—

his friends who were studying science at places like Berkeley and does not arise from science itself, still less from any of the facts of MIT. “I can’t understand,” Sean said. “It’s as though there were no nature. It arises from the impression we allow science to give us: the controversy about it, as though everyone agrees that there’s only the impression that we are merely biological machines in a meaningless physical body and laws and molecules—haven’t they heard of some-material universe, which reinforces the already disquieting sense many thing called the mind?”

moderns have that life is devoid of purpose. Science has every right to I found myself thinking of an article I had read the day before in a confine its attention to the physical, i.e., the outside world; it has no newsletter from my own campus, about a truly remarkable break-right to say, when it has done so, that it has given us the whole story.

through in molecular genetics. My colleagues had been able to “pho-When scientists, some of them, talk about “the biological basis of tograph” the very site on the cell where genes are “switched on” or off, violence,” they are out of their depth. Science, at least as they practice where DNA is told to go ahead and produce messenger RNA to begin it, can study the infinitely vast reaches of outer space, but it cannot making part of an organism. While I was reading along, marveling very well study the inner dimensions of the human being. As a result, how far we have come since my brief stint in medical school (never in course of time, those who turn to science for their answers to life mind how long ago that was), my literary senses were setting off a come to feel they do not have such dimensions. They feel empty.

little alarm. I stopped and counted something: in this brief article, Human will, nobility, beauty, and life’s overriding purpose are all in 22

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Hard Questions, Hard Answers 23

the category of things scientists do not study and that some eventually

“We have no idea how destructive a situation we have created. It is a come to believe, quite without justification, do not exist.

social experiment on a grand scale with virtually no controls.”27

This drive toward reductionism within science becomes exagger-But this book is about solutions, not just problems. Some of the ated in the minds of nonscientists, especially when it is greatly stories I told and more that I will tell are really about ordinary people amplified by the mass media. The media report new “discoveries” in doing in their way what Dostoevsky described in his grand register—

material determinism at the rate of about a gene a day: obesity, sexu-people rising toward the “infinitely great” through response to the al preference, intelligence, sex appeal, and whether you like peanut reasonably good. For we have arrived at not one, but two answers to butter—they’ve just found the gene or the hormone or the what-the question, what can be done to keep young people from despairing have-you that “causes” it. No responsible scientist would actually claim of their lives? What almost all people can do to create a nonviolent that we can trace something as complex and subtle as anger or crav-culture is to reduce violence and to find a new sense of purpose. And ings or attitudes to a gene or a hormone, but we in the general public as we’ve begun to see, these two grand projects are closely related.

are spared such subtlety.We come to feel we do not have a will, that there is no redemptive drama going on in the human being, that we are without meaning or direction, and so, as Dostoevsky said in The Possessed, we die of despair.

The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living and will die of despair.26

The six south Boston teenagers were examples of that, and today there are many, many others.

When a family becomes “dysfunctional” (a remote euphemism for the tragedy), the children grow up deficient in security and self-esteem, easy prey to what the Positive Futures Network called “the crisis in meaning and sense of emptiness that comes with an overemphasis on material consumption” through which our civilization is passing. They find it most difficult to discern the meaning of life, or believe that there is one, and begin to “die of despair,” in a thousand ways—even if they never see a television set.

When I think about the new world of mass media, I’m reminded of something a social worker recently pointed out about child care: 24

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Chapter Two

at first—of the soldiers, but no one from the team had had to face arrest before (to date, no international volunteer has been killed in HOPE IN DARK TIMES

Central America despite the enormous violence all around them) and from another room Marcela heard the soldiers describing them as

“terrorists from the Episcopal church.”1 Their spirits did not improve when the two women, along with other detainees, were loaded onto R

a truck, taken to an army barracks, blindfolded, and subjected to five hours’ interrogation about their alleged connection with the guerilla I do admit that the destructive energy is there, but it is evanescent, FMLN, while sounds of torture and the sobbing of victims came from always futile before the creative, which is permanent. If the destructive one nearby rooms. Karen knew that PBI would quickly alert their world-had the upper hand all sacred ties—love between parents and child, brother wide network about the arrests, but she also knew that time was and sister, master and disciple, ruler and ruled—would be snapped.

short—there was no telling what would happen in that barracks if someone didn’t get them out before nightfall.

—M. K. Gandhi

PBI had in fact activated its worldwide network, and before long hundreds of people were sending faxes to the Canadian and If public opinion would but frown upon violence, it would lose all its power.

Colombian embassies, calling and sending e-mail messages to their

—Lev N.Tolstoy

representatives to urge Karen and Marcela’s immediate release. All this got no response at all from the Colombian embassy, but Canada brought official pressure on the Salvadoran government, no doubt A S O F T H I S writing, hundreds of young people from North hinting that its extensive trade relations with El Salvador could be America, Europe, and elsewhere have gone to Central America and compromised if Karen were not released immediately. Whatever it other places to protect threatened human rights workers with their was that got through to whoever was in charge, Karen found herself presence.Their work is still largely unknown to the American public walking across the barrack grounds toward a waiting embassy official

—the news media shroud this fascinating experiment in profound a few hours later, a free woman. But when the soldiers had removed silence. Nonetheless, they are there.

her blindfold inside the barracks she had caught a glimpse of Marcela, Karen Ridd was one of them. In 1989 Karen and four other inter-face to the wall, a “perfect image of dehumanization.”2 Glad as Karen national volunteers were working with a group called Peace Brigades was to be alive, something tugged at her. Feeling terrible, she made International (PBI) when they were suddenly arrested by the some excuses to the exasperated Canadian official who had come all Salvadoran National Guard. Three of the five were Spanish nationals, the way from San Salvador to get her, turned, and walked back into the and they were promptly deported, leaving Karen, who was Canadian, barracks, not knowing what would happen to her in there, but know-and her friend Marcela Rodriguez, who was from Colombia, to face ing it could not be worse than walking out on a friend.

whatever was coming. Fortunately, Karen had had time to call the The soldiers were startled, and almost as exasperated. They Canadian consul and alert another PBI volunteer who happened to call handcuffed her again. In the next room, a soldier banged Marcela’s in at the right moment.This was some comfort, as was the civility—

head into the wall and said that some “white bitch” was stupid enough 26

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Hope in Dark Times 27

to walk back in there, and “Now you’re going to see the treatment a do things with only a carrot or a stick, he argued: we get things done terrorist deserves!” No more mister nice guy. But Karen’s gesture was by three different kinds of suasion we can exert on those around us.

having a strange effect on the men. They talked to Karen, despite He called them threat power (“Do something I want or I’ll do some-themselves, and she tried to explain why she had returned: “You know thing you don’t want”), exchange power (“Give me something I want what it’s like to be separated from a compañero. ” That got to them.

and I’ll give you something you want”), and integrative power (which I Shortly after, they released Karen and Marcela. The two women would paraphrase as “I’m going to do what I believe is right, some-walked out together under the stars, hand in hand.

thing authentic, and we will end up closer”).

This story speaks for itself, but it will do no harm to spell out All three kinds play their respective roles in the episode we’re what it says. Karen did something that changed the minds of some considering—and such a mixture, Boulding was quick to add, is how unsympathetic, indeed pretty dehumanized, soldiers. What was it? Is real life usually works.That the Salvadoran soldiers were using threat it something we could learn to do? It’s as though her very vulnerability power is only too obvious. The Canadian government also relied on put in her hands some kind of force that worked a minor miracle, even threat power of a kind, but they relied more on exchange power since though Karen had not counted on it. She had not thought through how they hinted they would pull out of trade agreements unless they got the soldiers would react when she walked back into that hellish what they wanted (in addition to economic trade, a subtler medium place—she only knew she could not walk out on a friend.

of exchange, respect, and legitimacy was no doubt also involved).

Events like this (and they’re not all that rare) are virtually never But Karen used the third, unfamiliar form called integrative power.

reported in the mainstream media—nor are, for that matter, what We need not be too surprised if we are relatively at a loss to explain international volunteers have been doing in Central America, Hebron, how this power works. As Boulding pointed out, “Threat power is Haiti, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, etc. The fact is, our usual way of particularly the concern of political scientists; economic power, of thinking about conflict offers no ready explanation for such an occur-economists . . . [but] the study of integrative power seems to belong rence.When and if we turn against violence we have bumper stickers to no particular discipline.”4

that encourage us to “practice random acts of kindness and senseless Let’s start our own discipline, then.We can start with this reason-acts of beauty”; but something is going on here that isn’t random and ing: wherever there is a human need, there is a kind of power, insofar senseless. There is a kind of logic to events like this with which we as others can be in a position to supply or withhold that need. One of simply haven’t reckoned.

the strongest needs of the human animal is for integration, for acceptIn the slowly emerging field of peace research, however, people ance, community, fellowship. In her book Human Nature—Revised, my have begun to piece together the dynamic of such events. One of the friend and colleague, biologist Mary Clark, pointed out that all human foremost peace scholars of the twentieth century, Kenneth Boulding, beings strive for three things above and beyond food, clothing, and developed a model toward the end of his long, polymathic career that shelter: (1) bonding (unconditional acceptance by other human seems to explain the situation very well. Boulding, a Quaker, distin-beings), (2) autonomy (freedom of individual behavior), and (3) mean-guished economist, poet, and once president of the prestigious ing (a sense of purpose in life). I think Clark did well to put bonding American Academy of Arts and Science, who had already made enor-first.William Blake put it beautifully in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: mous contributions to peace research, wrote a book toward the end

“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man, friendship.”5 Everyone has this of his life called The Three Faces of Power. 3 We don’t get one another to need; even “lower” forms of life exhibit a powerful tendency to form 28

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communities, as life scientists are well aware. In fact, long before sci-What Is Violence?

entists of the modern kind documented this drive, Saint Augustine made it the basis of the peace theory he developed in his monumental The “three faces” model can be resolved into a still simpler one of two classic The City of God. In the following passage, which to my knowl-opposed forces.We can call them, conventionally, violence and nonvi-edge is the first time in Western civilization that peace has been the olence—but to do so is to invoke words that are less than crystal clear.

subject of more than a passing mention, Augustine observed that even The word violence comes from violare in classical Latin.That is use-animals form families and societies of a kind: ful, for etymologies often allow us to peer into a time when some things were more innately understood than they are now. Violare It is even more so with man. By the very laws of his means “to bear in on with force” and in the classical period it came to nature he seems, so to speak, forced into fellowship mean “injure, dishonor, outrage, violate.”7 Like all important words, and, as far as in him lies, into peace with every man.6

violence has extended, metaphorical meanings.We speak about “a vio-

(my emphasis)

lent storm” or say, “I got a violent shock when my car hit the pothole,”

but that’s not the kind of violence we’re concerned with in this book.

It is by this law of nature that an act like Karen’s has power, Even the predatory behavior of animals isn’t really that kind of vio-because she both opened the soldiers’ eyes to Marcela’s humanity and lence; a lion may be very hard on a lamb, but that’s how nature works offered them an escape from their own hostility. It is because of this (or one way nature works). The lion does not “dishonor, outrage, or law that we are always moved by stories of reconciliation, more so violate” the lamb that instinct drives it to kill; it just kills that lamb.

when they come after bitter alienation. Think of former governor Another way of looking at it is, there is no bond between the lion and George Wallace coming to the reenactment of the Selma-to-the lamb that is torn asunder when the predator strikes. Animals have Montgomery civil rights march to apologize for his former racism or, a wide range of emotions, but righteous indignation isn’t one of them, a bit earlier, the Time cover photo of Pope John Paul holding the hand so far as we can tell.

of Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who had tried to assassinate him two Violence, as I mean the term, is a human phenomenon. We are years earlier. Who doesn’t thrill to scenes like these? Even though violent when we injure one another, or any part of the subtly inter-Homo sapiens do an impressive job of hating and demonizing one connected biosphere—of life. Elevate to the highest degree that sense another, apparently there is still some primal need within us for com-of sacred connectedness that violence harms and you can say, with munity, for integration, which we can smother but cannot utterly French resistance fighter Jacques Lusseyran, “God is life, and every-destroy. Nonviolence is the science of appealing to that need.

thing that does violence to life is against God.”8 Animals compete with The human being is, as Aristotle named us, a “community animal”

and prey on each other, but they do so in a mysteriously balanced, har-who craves fellowship despite himself or herself.That is why solitary monious, and ordered way that could go on indefinitely—that is, in a confinement is the worst form of punishment for even the most unso-word, sustainable. Not so humans. When we prey on each other, ciable of people. And why, conversely, anyone who plucks up the something goes shockingly wrong, and it has led to the devastation of courage to offer opponents a way out of their conflict can find herself whole societies. In that sense of violating the order of things, only or himself wielding an unexpected power.

humans can, properly speaking, be violent—or nonviolent.

Now, the concept of violence as injury also has to be limited, in 30

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two ways. First, even in the case of human beings, it is not violence barely denting the crime rate out on the streets); our approach to when a person injures someone or something by accident. The law world peace seems to be leading to an endless series of wars; the “war recognizes that. One person can injure another accidentally and they on drugs” and the “war on terrorism” are costly, violent failures. So it’s can remain friends—happens all the time. But if one person injures a great relief to get our finger, finally, on the pulse of the problem, another purposely, one or both of them is going to have to do some even if it turns out that we’re holding our own wrist.

work to erase that injury. And that work, incidentally, is a part of the In recent years, we have all become aware of one further nonviolent process.

clarification. To say that violence arises in the mind is not to say that Second, once we understand that violence tears the fabric of life, all violence is done with our conscious will.There is a kind of violence it follows that the real violence lies not in the act but in the very inten-we commit without being quite aware of it; in fact, a lot of what we’d tion to injure, and this is exactly the meaning of the Sanskrit word for have to call violence today arises not from any felt hostility but violence, himsa. Here we have to dip into the science of language for through passive or even unconscious willingness to take advantage of one brief, but crucial point. Himsa (the “m” indicates a nasal sound as others. Does the nice shirt I’m wearing come from a comfortable facin the French dans) comes from the root han, “to strike, slay”; but himsa tory in Wisconsin, or a sweatshop in Thailand? Is that homeless man is thought to be a special form of that root. It may well be what lin-the price of my company’s success? Or my country’s defense spend-guists call a desiderative: it means not the act but the desire or intention ing? Was a rain forest razed somewhere to bring the food I’m looking to do the act, in this case injure. The mind is very real to these at right now onto my plate? Exploitation built into a social system is ancients: “You have heard how it was said to our ancestors:You must called structural violence, a term we owe to another great peace scholar, not kill. . . . But I say this to you, that anyone who is angry with his Johan Galtung. Although structural violence is very widespread today brother will answer for it.” 9 In fact, we at least pay lip service to this because of the way modern economic systems operate, it probably mind reality: does not the UNESCO Charter state, “War begins in the existed as soon as human beings got organized into complex societies.

minds of men”? The point, though, is learning to use that perdurable When the Buddha defined a nonviolent person centuries ago he used wisdom, so it becomes not just a truism gracing some high-sounding the telling phrase Na hante, na hanyate, “He or she does not kill nor documents but a practiced reality.

cause to kill. ” He or she does not consciously cooperate in any system All violence arises, then, within the mind. By the same token, the that hurts life.

hurt caused by violence can be psychological or spiritual as well as Even in the case of violence of which we are not quite aware, how-material and physical, which brings us close again to the meaning of ever, the key issue is intention.There is a saying in Latin, Quod ultimum the Latin word, “violate, dishonor.” This is both good and bad. Bad est in executione, primum est in intentione, “What finally comes out as because it is disquieting to realize that we can be violent when we’re action was first in intention.” Children growing up in a world that’s just sitting there, harboring bad thoughts but not hurting anyone phys-partly built on structural violence may take a long time to become ically.This is not particularly comforting—but after all, it is better to aware of its presence, and until they do they may unwittingly benefit be aware of it if it’s true.Almost all the approaches to violence we are at the expense of others: no one would call them violent for doing so.

currently taking are failures. Most of them, even if they manage to Only when they go on cheerfully benefitting after becoming aware of contain the problem over here, make it worse over there. Our this can they be called in some degree violent—which may be one rea-approach to crime has put more and more people in prison (while son people resist being educated about violence. It would be misleading 32

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to call unwitting participation in a wrong system violence; in other our health to hate, to be unable to forgive.13Violence, by any meaning-words, suppressed awareness is different from awareness that has not ful definition, is a phenomenon that cries out to be repaired, something yet dawned.

that in an ideal world human beings would not do to one another—or All these considerations lie within the very useful definition of to the environment or any of its living inhabitants. More important, it violence arrived at by Galtung: violence is an avoidable insult to human is something they’d be very likely to stop doing if we could somehow needs. 10 This definition keeps in view the hidden, or “structural,” vio-make them aware that they’re hurting themselves along with their vic-lence that I have just been describing, a violence that makes its way into tims. Keep this thought in the back of your mind, because it’s the key the institutions of virtually all known societies. But it also suggests to an entirely new way to deal with violence. It’s the key to the new something extremely important about that or any kind of violence: the world we’re looking for.

word avoidable suggests that life could be lived without such insults, that in an ideal world all violence could be avoided.This is an important article of faith shared by all who have believed in the possibility Three Lenses

of widespread nonviolence down the ages, not excluding our own time. Accidents happen, conflict is inevitable, disputes will normally Some years ago, the city of Walnut Creek, California, ran into an arise. But none of these necessarily cause violence. Conflicts and dis-intractable problem that is still coming up in many American commu-putes can be creatively resolved without violence. Violence is an nities.A gay teacher was under attack by parents who had a somewhat unnecessary evil.

fundamentalist outlook. They did not want their children influenced Here again the model of integrative power can be helpful. At a by such a “sinful” person. Unfortunately for that community, the peo-deep level, whoever commits real violence, i.e., nurses an intention ple who wanted to defend this man’s right to teach and the people to harm someone, suffers from the very intention—never mind the who wanted him out of the classroom could not communicate with consequences of any resultant action. We have all heard by now of each other, and the reason was that they were using incompatible Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But there is a new concept models to characterize him and to think about what was at issue.The psychologists are studying called Perpetration-Induced Traumatic defenders saw it as a question of his civil rights, while the irate parents Stress (PITS) that documents exactly this kind of trauma.11 Violence saw it as the religious well-being of their kids. In other words, the for-cuts both ways. If the web between two parties is torn, both parties mer were using a political model and the latter, a religious, or a moral, feel the tear (in fact, in a more remote sense, everyone in the web model. This is a very common kind of dilemma today, and it can cause feels it). Thus violence is a question for psychologists before it bitter confusion.

becomes a question for lawmakers or criminologists, and Saint It’s clear that the way we think about violence is extremely imprac-Augustine, once again, who knew the mind as perhaps few others in tical, because violence goes on increasing; and if you think about it, the the Western world do, put it beautifully: “Imagine someone thinking main reason for this is that we use the logic of violence itself in our that his enemy could do him as much harm as his own enmity that he attempts to control violence: the “war on drugs,” the “war on crime,”

harbors against him.”12

the “war on terrorism”—one researcher even referred to modern In our modern culture, perhaps the best way we can appreciate medicine as a “war on bugs.”All this has led to virtually no useful meas-this principle is in the extensive medical evidence on what it does to ures for making violence a progressively smaller part of our life.

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violence at last. Instead, almost the opposite has happened: “violence”

What we need is a completely different logic, or, as the Walnut has become something we want: “The new action thriller which crash-Creek example shows, a different window or frame of reference with lands at Bay Area theaters has all the modern virtues,” said a Chronicle which to think about the problem. I’m going to outline three such review on June 6, 1997. And what were those virtues? “Violence, vol-windows, or “lenses” (to use a term from Howard Zehr’s important ume, stupidity”—all those good things. While this review may have 1990 book, Changing Lenses): one that’s most commonly in use; a better been partly tongue-in-cheek, check any video store or mass-market one that’s coming into use; and one that I, at least, think we should use.

bookshelf: you’ll find that “violent” now means “thrilling”—the sense of right and wrong is gone. What is the use of calling violence an The Moral Model

unnecessary evil, which it is, when no one can relate to the term evil The way we think about violence today is closely akin to the moral except as a technical term in some people’s religious vocabulary?

model invoked by the distraught parents in the Walnut Creek school; Using the moral model as a window on violence can also intensify we tend to think of violence as a sin (something that violates the laws rather than mask the nature of violence—and here the problems of God) or a crime (something that violates the laws of society, of involved are, if anything, more serious. Since we still do have a strong humankind). Unfortunately, we no longer have a generally agreed-emotional response to violence (which in itself is a good thing), to upon concept of what “sin” or even “crime” means: how do we define label a person or group as “violent” can bring down on them the what’s “moral”—those of us who still invoke the term?

strongest feelings of hatred and righteous indignation.The next step is In modern culture, human relationships seem to be sliding more to slap polarizing labels on them, like “impure” or “guilty,” which make and more into a state of raw competition; more and more of the inter-us quickly forget that those people are, after all, human beings.This is actions between us are thought of in a win/lose framework. As the called scapegoating, and though it can arise as a knee-jerk reaction to definition of what is legal becomes increasingly a matter of negotiation violence, it is, ironically, itself a dangerous form of violence. It is no by lawyers, our agreed-upon concept of natural law, that which for-coincidence that the architects of the Holocaust deliberately used mal legislation is supposed to represent, is steadily weakening. The images of dirt and impurity to put their intended victims beyond mass media are a bad influence in this unfortunate process. As far as reach of human sympathy, and they have had many imitators.

the media are concerned, a legal process, like the political process When my book America Without Violence appeared in 1982, I was itself, is construed as a power struggle between the participants—

interviewed on a major radio station late at night in New York. I was and, secondarily, entertainment for the general public. “Mafia Murder shocked at the reaction of the listeners. It seemed that every caller was Trial Provides Colorful Theater for New Yorkers,” ran a recent head-blaming the violence (all of it) on his or her own favorite enemy: “You line of the San Francisco Chronicle. 14

know perfectly well it’s the Puerto Ricans.” “Have you read the statis-Looking on violence as a crime or sin, when both crime and sin tics on blacks under twenty-five?” “It’s white men that are causing all have become so vague, has had an extremely unfortunate effect on our the violence,” and so forth.This is the same mistake the Berkeley stu-thinking. Recall Jacques Ellul’s characterization of our age, the age dents were making when they focused on hate crimes against Asians, when we began to become conscious of violence in a new way. We only here it was the victimizers instead of the victims who were being have now an unparalleled opportunity to take a great step forward in singled out in groups, as though groups, not violence, were the issue.

human culture, by taking advantage of this new awareness to deal with Since that time, we’ve remained far from taking the necessary steps in 36

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our thought from the manifestation to the cause (and no one’s deny-Social Responsibility and its European counterparts so effective was ing that some groups of people commit more violence than others, for not just the fact that doctors have a deserved authority for most peo-whatever reason), and a more tragic category has been singled out for ple, or even that the extension of their role from preserving people’s blame: “It’s the teenagers.” Racism is bad enough, but if we’ve reached health one by one to keeping them alive by the millions is only natu-the point of scapegoating our own children, then our approach to vioral; it was the vivid image of the war system as dysfunctional—sick, if lence is going to cost us more than the malady. It could cost us our civ-you will. That made it much easier for millions of people to work ilization.

against this system, including many who had uncritically thought of The failures of the moral window are particularly obvious in the war as highly patriotic and a form of “defense.” That new lens made area of criminal justice, and we’ll be revisiting this area in chapter 5.

antiwar activists who had been stridently protesting war preparations What I propose to do now is just close the moral window altogether.

quite a bit more effective, since it gave people something sensible We don’t need to find out who is to blame for all the violence; we just rather than recriminatory to do about it. Politicians are people, this need to find out how to make it stop.

model reminded. If you reason with them you can get them to understand you; while as long as you’re pointing fingers of blame at them, The Medical Model

they will only shrink away and harden their stance, if not their hearts.16

The power of the medical window became very real one summer A newer model that has been much more effective is the medical day in 1993 in the emergency room of a Los Angeles hospital. A dis-model. In this way of thinking, violence is not unlike a disease, and traught woman entered the hospital intending to gun down a nurse peace is a kind of health. This is probably a much more accurate way she believed was having an affair with her estranged husband. She to think about violence than to construe it as a sin or crime. Note how found the woman she was looking for and shot but did not kill her.The readily medical people are able to cut to the chase and not be caught wounded nurse lurched down to the emergency room with her up in the particulars about violence in the following from the first assailant in pursuit. ER nurse Joan Black was on duty. She had heard issue of Medical Abstracts Newsletter:

the code signal that a person with a gun was loose in the hospital moments before her wounded fellow nurse and then the woman, .38

It is the leading cause of lost life in the U.S. today. It in hand, burst through the door. Black, sixty-two, reacted with the kills more people than AIDS or cancer. It has shown instincts of an experienced medical person: “I put my arm around her no signs of cure. It is violence . . .15 (their emphasis) and started talking to her. She kept saying that she didn’t have anything to live for, that this woman had stolen her family. I kept saying,‘You’re Violence as disease is not a new idea, of course. Augustine made in pain. I’m sorry, but everybody has pain in their life. . . . I under-good use of it in developing his famous definition of peace as stand and we can work it out.’”17 (The story about the shooting was

“the harmony that comes from the ordered relationship of all parts”

front-page news; Nurse Black’s heroic saving of the situation appeared of, for example, the body. But most of us will remember how, only in a later section.What can you do?) Talking steadily like this, and during the antinuclear era, the peace movement was carried to in the meantime pushing down the gun every time the woman tried unprecedented heights by doctors, and in particular one very elo-to kill herself with it, Black finally calmed her down.

quent and caring doctor, Helen Caldicott. What made Physicians for The classicist in me has to point out something here before we go 38

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on. Nurse Black instinctively followed, point for point, the pattern to bed . . . the guy who did this to me is going to be in here in about laid down by the ancients for calming distraught or inconsolable people.

an hour.” It was partly meant in jest, partly male bravado, but First of all you identify with, rather than blame, them (“You’re in pain.

Prothrow-Stith, a medical person and the mother of a teenage son, I’m sorry . . .”).Then you give them some detachment by reminding pondered what he had said. The futility, the absurdity of patching up them of the first thing we all lose sight of when we’re in such a state—

the victims of violence after it has happened, without doing anything that what they’re going through is a universal human experience about the causes, was made clear to her. It was against everything she (“Everybody has pain in their life”). Remember Hamlet’s uncle: “You was learning in medicine: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of must know your father lost a father / That father lost, lost his . . .” You cure, for the disease of violence as for any other. Later, when can also remind them that the unbearable moment they are experienc-Prothrow-Stith went on to become the Massachusetts commissioner ing has got to pass, then finally exhort them to snap out of it (“We can of public health, she founded an educational and mediation program work it out”). The fact that Nurse Black was inspired to deliver this to prevent teen violence with a curriculum that has been followed in perfect imitation of a classical consolatio at such a moment illustrates 325 cities in forty-five states. She put it well: something about the universality of human dynamics that we’ll make use of later.

The mission in the criminal justice system is to estab-Joan Black must be a great ER nurse. Certainly in this case she lish blame when there has been a violent episode and succeeded in quelling an extremely violent situation partly because to institute the punishment. That’s an appropriate she was a nurse, and on duty in an emergency room. All this allowed mission but it’s not a preventive mission. So what we her to see the situation quite differently than if she had, say, been con-advocate in [my book] Deadly Consequences—and in fronted with a gunman in a dark alley. She did not “see” a criminal this movement to look at violence as a health problem coming through the door, but a patient. She literally said: “I saw a sick

—is that we start talking about prevention.18

person and had to take care of her.” The newspapers almost entirely missed the point; always wedded to a wrong model of violence, they Interestingly, Prothrow-Stith also gave a superb definition of seized on a remark of hers that is completely misleading: “That was structural violence in a widely aired interview: probably the stupidest thing I’ve done in my life.” But that’s the newspapers’ problem, and not ours, as long as we don’t believe in them.

Quite honestly, if you define violence very narrowly Joan Black was a hero and she was able to do an extraordinary thing as physical injury, then you limit your understanding in the face of violence. Why? Because she saw the perpetrator as a

. . . a lack of opportunity, an education system that patient, a person in trouble, not a criminal.

doesn’t work, even a family that doesn’t work—those Three thousand miles away in another emergency room, a med-are very violent experiences.19

ical student named Deborah Prothrow-Stith had a rather different epiphany. Fortunately, she was able to grasp and hold onto it—in fact, Health and illness are very good analogies for peace and violence; to turn it into an institution. It happened one night after she stitched to use them is far more practical than trying to use the concept of up a young man who had just been wounded in a knife fight.While she crime and punishment, however appropriate that may sometimes feel.

was getting him ready for release he turned to her and said, “Don’t go Thinking of violence as disease takes blame out of the picture: unless 40

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you’re George Bernard Shaw, you don’t blame people for getting sick.

done in that very failure to see that we’re one—violence to the truth.

For another, it puts your focus where it belongs, where efficiency and Ignorance, as Swami Ramdas implies, can be cured. Failures of compassion want it to go—on prevention. When you can do some-imagination can be reversed. Love plays some kind of role in both thing creative that addresses the root causes of violence Prothrow-these processes.

Stith just cited, deep in the societal and family systems, you are doing something vastly more effective than putting more police on the streets or stronger deadbolts on your front door; something that some OK, What Is NON violence?

health professionals, borrowing a term from peace scholar John Burton, have called provention.

My good friend Alain Richard and I were commiserating in an out-of-the-way restaurant in San Francisco just before he went back to his The Educational Model

native France after many years’ work as a leading nonviolent activist.

The topic of our commiseration was how unhelpful the word nonvio-Despite the utility of the medical window, I am going to open still a lence often is, and how no one has come up with a good substitute. But third one. If violence is not a sin but more like a disease, it is even Alain had found a brilliant way to describe nonviolence without call-more like a kind of ignorance. I believe that a beloved mystic of mod-ing it that when he was giving workshops in rural Africa some time ern India, Swami Ramdas, meant it perfectly literally when he said: back. Forget nonviolence, he told me: “I started off by asking them, have any of you (they were mostly village women) ever used inner, Ignorance is the cause of all quarrel and strife in the moral power against physical force?” Sure enough, he told me, hands world. Ignorance is not a crime. It does not deserve shot up. One woman offered this story: Her husband used to beat her to be condemned, but it has to be removed. And by a lot. Once, though, something snapped inside her, and instead of try-the power of your love, you can remove ignorance.20

ing to protect herself she stood up and looked him right in the eye and said, “Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with?” He never This seems to me to sum up the nature of violence in a nutshell—

struck her again.

and direct us toward its “provention.”To look at violence as a kind of Everything I’ve said about the “shadow side,” about violence, was ignorance helps immediately to see wisdom and love as the solution.

a good preparation, but only that, for the real job that we can tackle Once I was in a heated discussion at an impromptu seminar with a now, which is understanding the power that so dramatically changed group of journalists in San Francisco. A Berkeley colleague turned to this woman’s husband.Violence is disintegrative, while nonviolence is me and said,“OK, what is violence?” and I shot back,“A failure of imag-integrative power; it is, like the intention to harm, first of all a ques-ination.” While I’m still not entirely sure what I meant, I think I was tion of mind, and only then an expression of a state of mind in action.

groping in my own dim way toward Swami Ramdas’s insight. If And it can be learned. It is the implications of that learning process that I don’t have the imagination to realize that you and I are one, despite mainly concern us.

our physical separateness and the differences in our outlooks on life, As the Davitz experiment showed, it can be surprisingly easy for what’s to prevent me from using violence if I think you’re getting in my people to learn positive, cooperative, and even self-sacrificing behavior.

way? You might almost say that there’s a kind of violence already being This is because, upholders of nonviolence argue, what they’re really 42

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doing is un learning aggressive, competitive, and other-sacrificing Ahimsa is not really a negative term, as to our ears nonviolence behavior, which has been superimposed on the former.When I say that decidedly is. Ahimsa suggests something profoundly positive, which nonviolence can be learned, I do not mean that it wasn’t there already.

would not be possible to name directly. Ahimsa, a kind of double It actually was, but a lot of the conditioning that makes us social negative, actually stands for something so original that we cannot humans today seems to obscure it.The conditioning is secondary, and quite capture it with our weak words.

can therefore be dislodged relatively easily: last in, first out. The I have put you through all this linguistics because—well, for sev-biggest problem with civilization as we know it is that it has somehow eral reasons. Because it is humbling that modern languages are still taken the shadow for the light.

struggling for a word to express everything that was enshrined millen-Let me call on etymology, as I did with violence.

nia ago in the word ahimsa. Because that ancient term was so far ahead The term nonviolence (or non-violence, as it is still sometimes of us in prioritizing the mental dimension of violence/nonviolence; spelled) is barely a century old (unlike the term violence! ), having first because, finally, in that misleading translation of ahimsa into an English appeared, to be exact, in 1923.21 Nonviolence serves as a literal—but, negative we see the most important misunderstanding of violence, the as it turns out, misleading—translation of the Sanskrit word ahimsa, mental block that has been preventing us from having the realization the negation of himsa, “(desire, intent to) harm.” In accordance with that, as Ellul suggested, our age needs to fulfill its promise: the real-what we’ve already seen, ahimsa would mean “the absence of the ization that nonviolence, by whatever name, is a positive force that desire, or intention, to harm.” But this negative (the a- prefix in holds the solution to most of our major personal, social, and global Sanskrit is basically like the same prefix in Greek, which we take up in problems.

English, cf. amoral) needs a little explanation. Unlike the situation in Gandhi faced this obstruction from the outset of his career in English, the non word in Sanskrit is as old as its opposite: ahimsa South Africa.When they first met with his disconcerting new form of appears in texts even older than Gandhi’s venerable “reference book,”

resistance, Westerners and Western-educated Indians looked for the Bhagavad Gita (written down roughly from 200 B.C.E. to 200

something at least partly familiar that they could compare it to; it C.E.).And again unlike the English situation, in Sanskrit abstract nouns must be like the tax refusal of “nonconformist” (i.e., non-Anglican) often name a fundamental positive quality indirectly, by negating its denominations back in England, they mused, and particularly like the opposite. Thus courage is conveyed by abhaya, which literally means women’s suffrage movement that was raising eyebrows at that time.23

“non-fear”; or we encounter akrodha, “non-anger,” for “kindness,” and There, too, a minority was fighting for its rights without using physi-the Buddha’s avera, “non-hatred,” meaning “love.”22 The reason ancient cal violence—but there, alas, the resemblance ended. The superficial India’s great thinkers expressed themselves in this apparently oblique similarity was “apt to give rise to a terrible misunderstanding,” Gandhi way is that phenomena like love, absolute courage, and compassion feared, and it was, ironically, a staunch European friend of the move-are primordial things that cannot be fully expressed in fallible, condi-ment whose fate it was to fall into the “terrible misunderstanding” in tioned human language. As many texts remind us, whatever we think such a way that Gandhi had no choice but to pull him up short, in pub-or say about God falls short of the truth. English does not do that lic.23 In the pivotal year 1906, when the Indians’ resistance had shown (though “infinite’’ might invite comparison), with the result that non-its mettle and the white settlers were thoroughly alarmed, this friend, violence in English does not really convey the meaning of ahimsa in William Hoskens, arranged a meeting of prominent Europeans to Sanskrit.

hear what the Indians were up to, and at that meeting he introduced 44

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Gandhi with the following well-intentioned remarks: even greater, that the satyagrahi (a practitioner of Satyagraha) renounces the use of physical force, voluntarily and on principle.

The Transvaal Indians have had recourse to passive Later, back in India, instead of being a minority of 13,000, the resis-resistance when all other means of securing redress tors would be almost 300 million people, opposed by a mere 150,000

proved to be of no avail. . . . Numerically, they are British colonials.The Indians still used Satyagraha, by choice.

only a few. They are weak and have no arms.

Yet to this day, almost a century after Hoskens’s gaffe, we go on Therefore they have taken to passive resistance which repeating it—with no Gandhi around to correct us. A well-known is the weapon of the weak.25

journalist declared recently that Israeli settlers in Hebron, fully one-quarter of whom are heavily armed and fanatically ideological, are A modern nonviolence scholar would wince at this classic mistake.

using “Gandhian tactics: i.e., passive resistance”27 He did not know, When he heard it, Gandhi dropped the nice speech he had prepared and most of his readers would not know, that nonviolence and passive and contradicted his well-meaning friend point for point. He wanted resistance can actually be as different as nonviolence and violence.

to make it as clear as possible that the Indians’ movement was different Satyagraha is not passive and you are not being “Gandhian” when you in kind from that of the suffragists, even though both causes were just are full of hatred but happen—for the moment—to be keeping your and neither relied on physical violence. First of all, Gandhi explained, finger off the trigger. One could go on and on quoting examples of this confusion.They would be laughable if they were not so damaging.

the suffragist movement did not eschew the use of It’s often easier to see this confusion on a larger scale. It’s fairly physical force. But brute force had absolutely no common knowledge now that peace is more than the absence of war place in the Indian movement in any circumstance, (though what it is remains unclear to decision makers and most of us).

and . . . no matter how badly they suffered, the I’ve mentioned that the Dayton accords were supposed to bring peace Satyagrahis never used physical force, and that too to ex-Yugoslavia but failed to address what was causing its wars—

although there were occasions when they were in a ethnic hatreds stirred up on state television by nationalistic politicians.

position to use it effectively.Again, though the Indians This absence-of-war state today is rightly called “negative peace.” One had no franchise and were weak, these considerations of the most egregious examples was greeted by well-deserved derision had nothing to do with the organization of by antinuclear organizations when it was put forward, in all serious-Satyagraha.26

ness, by the Department of the Navy. They proposed to define peace as “perpetual prehostility.” This is peace? (Can you imagine Jesus, his As we can see, Gandhi had already invented a new word for what hand upraised in blessing, saying, “My perpetual prehostility I give he was doing—so misleading are both nonviolence and passive resistance.

unto you?”)

Satyagraha, or “soul force,” as he often paraphrased it, is no double But it’s just as absurd to think that nonviolence is only the absence negative. It literally means “clinging to truth.” It is not the “weapon of of (physical) violence as it is to think that peace is only some kind of the weak,” as Hoskens thought, but the weapon of the strong—for interlude between wars. In both cases we would be trying to under-there is a kind of strength that does not come from numbers or from stand a light by studying its shadow. It is time to turn around and see weapons. It is in favor of this strength, which the nonviolent believe is what’s casting it.

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When I wrote America Without Violence back in 1982, the idea of conflicts are avoided—or how, when they do occur,

“nature red in tooth and claw” had a firm grip on popular imagination, relationships are afterward repaired and normalized.

and I had an uphill battle trying to show that the picture painted by As a result, people tend to believe that violence is certain popularizers of ethology (the science of animal behavior) was more integral to human nature than peace.28

wrong. Only a few scientists and philosophers, like Ashley Montagu and Mary Midgley, were trying to correct what Midgley called the This revelation sounds familiar to anyone working on human vio-

“swashbuckling” view that nature is a violent place and the human lence.The first time I read this passage it occurred to me that at a time being is a puppet pulled by nature’s strings.That has begun to change.

when five million teenagers were signed up for volunteer service jobs Soon after my book appeared, UNESCO convened a seminar of some in their communities, and two teenage boys committed a particularly of the world’s most distinguished behavioral scientists to make a pub-repellant murder, guess who got the coverage?29

lic statement on this theory of innate aggression. Unheralded, but The important thing to remember is, whatever model we use to crucial, the resulting Declaration of Seville, released in 1986, pillo-think about human potential, whatever we believe we are, will tend ried the popular view that a complex behavior like human aggression very strongly to be self-fulfilling. Not to know that nonviolence is pos-could be programmed by our genes, that we were therefore stuck sible, or to think that it’s only the province of a few hard-pressed with it.

activists on some ragged social fringe, is to be resigned to the ever-This is not to say that the general run of behavioral scientists—not increasing violence in our culture, and therefore condemned to to mention the general public—would easily give up the “swashbuck-endure it without remission.To know that nonviolence is possible, to ling” image. The riptide of cynicism within our present culture pulls know that it’s not a non-something but a force grounded in nature and many of us back into the sea of hopelessness just when we have a exampled in history, is to begin getting our culture back on course.

chance to get up onto dry land, but here and there some scientists are To say that nonviolence is possible means two things, and both are starting to turn that tide.

important.The first is that we have it in us to be nonviolent, to “offer One day in 1975, about a decade before Seville would appear, the Satyagraha,” as Gandhians put it, even under tough circumstances.The Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal had a career-changing break-second is that when we are, it “works.” It will become clear why I put through in the Arnhem zoo. He suddenly realized that his chimpanzees

“works” in quotation marks later, but let me make some preliminary had an extensive system of reconciliation behaviors—and scientists observations about how nonviolence helpfully affects those around had never studied it.

us—or ranged against us.

A remarkable statement was made the first time Satyagraha was Fires start, but fires also go out. Obvious as this is, sci-offered full blown in the modern era, during the Indians’ struggle to entists concerned with aggression, a sort of social fire, recover their stolen dignity in South Africa, by a secretary to General have totally ignored the means by which the flames of Jan Christiaan Smuts, head of the South African government in the aggression are extinguished. We know a great deal Transvaal, and Gandhi’s chief adversary in this struggle. It gives us a about the causes of hostile behavior in both animals glimpse of what it feels like to be offered high-quality Satyagraha by and humans, ranging from hormones and brain activ-committed, well-trained activists:

ity to cultural influences.Yet we know little of the way 48

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I do not like your people, and do not care to assist without success. Then one night he had a dream that he was walk-them at all. But what am I to do? You help us in our ing through a churchyard. As his dream eye moved over the days of need. How can we lay hands upon you? I often tombstones, one epitaph caught his attention and he found himself wish that you took to violence like the English strik-zooming in on it:

ers, and then we would know at once how to dispose of you. But you will not injure even the enemy.You HERE LIES BILL.

desire victory by self-suffering alone . . . and that is QUIT SMOKING AT LAST.

what reduces us to sheer helplessness.30

He never lit up again.

As Midgley says, nature has to be green a long time before she is I submit that a successful nonviolent episode also works at this red. If we read between the lines of this testimonial (and there are preconscious level.The Salvadoran soldiers suddenly and—as Gandhi similar things on record from the Franco-Belgian invasion of the implies, and Smuts’s secretary confesses—almost in spite of them-Rhineland, some twenty years later, and from other events), we can selves were allowed to “see” Marcela not as a thing tied to a chair, a sense something quite compelling at work that we might readily call

“victim,” but as a person because of Karen’s act of extreme caring for an appeal to something deep and perhaps not normally visible in her, and the brilliant connection she made between that concern of hers human nature. Gandhi’s own explanation for the power of such an and their own comradely feelings for one another—their compañeros.

appeal constitutes, I think, one of the most insightful descriptions of Her courage, her love, and her assumption that they, too, were human nonviolence ever made:

beings capable of such feelings were the ingredients of her transfor-mative effect on the men, her magic waking potion.

What Satyagraha does in such cases is not to suppress This kind of awakening, this rehumanization, is the highest kind of reason but to free it from inertia and to establish its education, and it is the kind at which the nonviolent actor aims. As sovereignty over prejudice, hatred, and other baser we’ll see from many following examples, nonviolence is a whole-passions. In other words, if one may paradoxically put being experience, which has much more long-lasting effects than it, it does not enslave, it compels reason to be free.31

those obtained—or sometimes obtained—by threat power.When the German ranks broke in July of 1918, French infantrymen were heard Talk about an educational model! Any teacher will tell you that to mutter at the fleeing enemy, “Ils reviendront. ” They’ll be back. How this is the kind of education we dream of, where the student doesn’t right the seasoned soldiers were, much more right, as we know to our just learn some facts, doesn’t just learn how to put facts together, but devastating cost, than the giddy celebrations of the triumphant world, awakens to a new realization. It is more a growth experience than just which only sobered up when, twenty years later, in a hail of shredded acquiring knowledge, and after this kind of learning one does not go treaties, they came back, all right, with a vengeance.

back to sleep.

Any act of coercion must produce an equal and opposite reaction.

I once had a friend who smoked three packs a day. Bill knew—

In his cell on death row in the Georgia State Prison, Brandon Astor with his head—all about the effects of smoking on his health, but he Jones saw the following message, literally a handwriting on the wall, somehow went right on smoking. Several times he tried to stop, left by a previous inmate of that cell: “I will act the way I am treated, 50

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so help me God.” Jones recalled, “Suddenly a chilling fear of—and way also happens to us, so that no man can continue for—society engulfs me as I remember the poignant pencil message to debase or abuse another human being without scrawled on the wall” in Cell 38.32

eventually feeling in himself at least some dull As Hannah Arendt observed, “The practice of violence, like all answering hurt and stir of shame. Therefore, in the action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, when an violent world.”33

oppressor’s violence is met with a forgiving love, he Real nonviolence, by contrast, rarely has a backlash, because if it’s can be vitally touched, and even, at least momentarily, real nonviolence it does not operate by coercion. It operates by per-reborn as a human being, while the society witnessing suasion, often a kind of deep persuasion that moves people below the such a confrontation will be quickened in conscience conscious level. “Compelling reason to be free,” or as Gandhi put it toward compassion and justice.34

elsewhere, “moving the heart,” is qualitatively different from merely forcing others to do something by punishment or sanction. Since the opponents have changed willingly, they are not looking for an oppor-Reconsidering History and Science

tunity to get back at us. When Satyagraha works, it doesn’t just change one party’s position, it changes the relationship between par-We have now begun to see some of the deeper implications of the edu-ties. Once they have “seen” the situation from our point of view, those cational model as the approach of choice for reducing—who knows, who once were our opponents move closer to us in spirit.This is inte-perhaps someday eliminating—violence. It is through this model that grative power. It is apparently no mean force, for Karen’s courage did we most easily grasp the key fact that nonviolence is fundamentally a something that the entire government of Colombia was unable or kind of force. Gandhi, at least, used that kind of language in his earli-unwilling to do.That’s a lot of power! Something wakes up in a Karen est period:

Ridd or a Gandhi—or you and me—and that something is going to change people. It is not something learned with our intellect (though Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by fear of pun-the intellect can later help us understand it) but heart knowledge.And ishment, and the other by acts of love. Power based one of its characteristics is that it communicates itself on the same “gut on love is a thousand times more effective and perma-level” to onlookers.

nent than the one derived from fear of punishment.35

[Martin Luther] King started from the essentially reli-Or again:

gious persuasion that in each human being, black or white, whether deputy sheriff or manual laborer or Sanctions are of two kinds: one, physical force, and governor, there exists, however tenuously, a certain two, soul force—Satyagraha. Physical force is noth-natural identification with every other human being; ing compared to the power of truth.36

that, in the overarching design of the universe which ultimately connects us all together, we tend to feel Today, science itself is learning to speak another language. The that what happens to our fellow human beings in some mind-boggling discoveries of “new physics” are widely felt to hold 52

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deeper significance for what we think the world is than any conceptual because we’re part of it, hard to see things that are in the woodwork breakthrough in recorded history, and the implications for areas instead of sitting out there on the table.The ancient Greeks, that most beyond the physical world (one of the major breakthroughs has been inquisitive people, discussed how to wage war and manage slaves at precisely to breach that barrier between the material and other great length, but they never discussed war or slavery as such, or for worlds) are intriguing but far from understood. As this new language that matter economics, or the position of women. So the history of has slowly made its way from the minds of physicists to the world at nonviolence is just beginning to be written and there’s as yet no large, it has given us a new and promising vocabulary to describe the account of it in standard behavioral science.This was a galling frustra-nature and the effectiveness of nonviolence, which was rather difficult tion for Gandhi. By the time he wrote his classic 1909 manifesto, Hind to account for in the “hard” language of Newtonian objects.37 The Swaraj, or “Indian Home Rule,” he knew that he was up against more noted criminologist Harold Pepinsky is one person who has taken than an empire; it was nothing less than what we would call today an advantage of the new, more powerful vocabulary (where he has said outworn, inadequate paradigm. “History” as we knew it in this para-

“responsiveness,” I would say “nonviolence”): digm was constitutionally unable to help.

Violence and responsiveness operate by the same The fact that there are so many men still alive in the principles at all levels, from the interpersonal to the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms international. Every human being . . . is at once the but on the force of truth or love. . . . Little quarrels subject and the object of both violent and responsive of millions of families in their daily lives disappear energy. Crosscurrents of violence and responsiveness before the exercise of this force. Hundreds of nations run constantly in all of us, and help to account for live in peace. History does not and cannot take note perversity and unanticipated behavior at any given of this fact. History is really a record of the interrup-level.38

tion of the even working of the force of love or the soul. . . . History, then, is a record of the interruptions However we name these forces, we human beings experience of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is them as a deep choice which is extremely simple—and here Pepinsky not noted in history.40

uses more conventional language: “From moment to moment, it is a profoundly religious choice whether to commit to violence or to Those are sobering words, which anyone who has tried to get the democracy.”39

press to cover a nonviolent event can verify.The case of the unreported Whether we use a scientific or a religious vocabulary, Pepinsky’s teenagers doing volunteer service to their communities I mentioned is insight brings out something quite odd: why is it that we are usually only one example of millions. During the sixties a daylong student so unaware of nonviolence? If it is a moment-to-moment reality, demonstration at Columbia University was disrupted for exactly one should we not be talking about it cogently and often? Should it not be minute by a fracas of some sort, very possibly caused by outsiders and common fare in history and science, among other venues?

even provocateurs. That evening, on the network news, exactly one Sometimes, it seems, we are better at perceiving what are not minute was dedicated to reporting on the students’ demonstration.

moment-to-moment realities, just as it is hard to “see” the Milky Way Guess which one? 1909 to 1969—nothing changed. The press was 54

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still doing this, albeit with a slight budge of difference, in Seattle in Traces of the Future

1999. How many people died, I wonder, while the learning curve lay there, flat as a Kansas prairie?

A few years after the execution of Jesus, in 39 C.E. to be exact, the Yes, the news media sometimes suppress stories of corruption in emperor Caligula conceived the insane idea of having a statue of him-high places; that is political bias. But there is a cultural bias that runs self as incarnate Zeus installed in the great temple in Jerusalem. To even deeper and may be doing us much more damage in the long run.

Caligula, for whom excesses in the pursuit of egotism were no vice, By this bias, nonviolent stories are not so much suppressed as they are this must have seemed a wonderful idea, but for once his excess was plain not observed.

going to blow up in the imperial face. As his Syrian legate, Petronius, This cultural bias is a paradigm that embraces all aspects of human advanced on Jerusalem to carry out the disastrous order, people of all knowledge, like an embrace with only one arm. Some years ago, when kinds and stations began flooding into the capital—men, women, and I was serving as a dean, I got a call from a graduate student who was children—collecting together in their alarm from cities, villages, and looking for some leads on aggression among primates. No scientist farms from the whole area west of Galilee. They came without myself, I was known around campus for my interest in this area, and weapons in their hands, some of them holding emblems of allegiance the student had been sent to me by one of the best behavioral scien-to the empire, but they told Petronius in no uncertain terms that this tists at Berkeley. There was something odd about our conversation, sacrilege could not be allowed. Petronius of course threatened to and I was shocked when I realized what it was: he had not the foggiest unleash his troops on them.They replied that they were perfectly will-idea that the theory of innate aggression was controversial. He just ing to die rather than see such an outrage to their religion.42

assumed—his mentors had led him to assume—that our primate Petronius, no particular friend of the Jews, was nonetheless at a cousins behave with raw aggression, competition, and win/lose loss about how to handle this unarmed resistance. Unable to persuade struggle—period; though, as Gandhi observed, if nature was set up to them, and loath to massacre them wholesale (something that legates work that way it would not have lasted very long. In the words of Frans had done enthusiastically with violent uprisings), he backed down and de Waal:

took the risk of writing to Rome to make some excuses for stalling the emperor’s less-than-brilliant scheme. Caligula, true to form, immedi-I speak from years of frustration with the literature ately sent orders for Petronius’s execution. But at this point fate inter-on human behavior. . . . Except for reports on prevened. Caligula was assassinated, which saved Petronius, and, for now, school children [as we saw in the last chapter] and an the Jewish religion in its homeland.

occasional anthropological account, I am unaware of This successful Satyagraha, however much it took Petronius data in this area. . . . I recently asked a world-unawares, was not an isolated occurrence. Apparently, there was renowned American psychologist, who specializes in something in Jewish culture at that period that evoked this response human aggression, what he knew about reconciliation.

from masses of people even though the “normal” kind of resistance, Not only did he have no information on the subject, violent resistance, as we well know, was not ruled out and would but he looked at me as if the word were new to him.41

finally prevail, with disastrous results. Jesus was without doubt on the nonviolent side to the extent that his teaching bore on any kind of social action. In any case, scholar John Crossan finds no less than seven 56

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that is changing.

popular uprisings of this very different type between 4 C.E. and 65

Nonviolence is law, not luck. Satyagraha is not hit or miss.There C.E., and reports that “all . . . were nonviolent, all had very specific are undoubtedly, as Pepinsky says, elements of “perversity” and surprise objectives, and four out of the seven achieved those objectives with-outcomes when we’re dealing with something so subtle as a “living out loss of life.”43

force” (as Gandhi called it); that does not mean that we can’t learn Now that’s history. If nonviolence is a law, as we have been more about that force and begin using it more systematically. Because suggesting, it should have left traces all over the historical record.And a computer goes down, for reasons known only to itself, that doesn’t we find—now that the bias toward violence is beginning to relax—

mean there is no such thing as electromagnetic energy or that we’ll that it did. Its history, more forgotten, more overlooked even than the never succeed in putting it to work. Even though we can’t always pre-history of women’s experience, with which it is in several ways intercon-dict exactly how a nonviolent intervention will turn out on the visible nected, is beginning to be recovered.This vital work is being done not surface of things, we can still develop nonviolence exactly as we would just by historians of nonviolence per se—and here we can acknowl-a force of nature. In fact, nonviolence is a force of nature—only it hap-edge our debt to Peter Brock, Thomas Weber, Staughton and Alice pens to be a force of human nature, which is the trickiest kind. We Lynd, among others—but by mainstream historians like John Crossan human beings are, as science writer Louise Young put it, “complex, who are beginning to show greater sensitivity to the role played by volatile, and impressionable.” But to repeat, that does not mean that organized nonviolence in the stream of human events.This is essential.

no laws govern our behavior. Or that only negative ones do.

Our object must be to elevate nonviolence from the tiny, specialized field it now occupies and show that it is the concern not of activists, The message that comes down to us from Easter not of the downtrodden, but of everyone. It is our heritage. It is some-Island is the way violence breeds more violence. Acts thing every one of us can use, and if we want not just to reduce a of cruelty become progressively easier to commit particular type of crime or protect some particular victims but to get when they are reinforced by example and supported violence out of our path, it is probably the only thing we can use.

by tradition. On the other hand, acts of kindness and If we put the temple statue Satyagraha alongside the much smaller compassion can be reinforced in a civilized society.

action of Karen Ridd that we began with (smaller in terms of how Human nature is complex, volatile, and impression-many people were involved), we see that the same driving force lay able. Capable of both good and evil, it can be behind each of them, and we can understand why many have not influenced by life experiences. An education in vio-hesitated to call that force love—meaning not the emotion that we lence uncovers the beast in the human nature.44

usually call by that name, but a self-sacrificing devotion such as Karen had for her friend (and her cause), which was so strong that it over-And an education in non violence? We have the pleasure of explor-came her fear for her own life, just as the Jewish masses’ intense love ing that right now.

for their religion, their culture, caused them to put their own lives without hesitation at the mercy of the Roman swords. And this force, for which love seems to be a reasonable term, is always there in human consciousness. It is unfortunate that, particularly in times like ours, we find it so hard to see that force beneath the surface of events. But 58

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Chapter Three

“Do you think I like to keep him penned up like that?” he explained. “But what can I do? A new cage would cost me more than NO POWER TO DESCRIBE:

a month’s earnings.”

“Would you be willing to use a decent cage if I could get one built THE “NONVIOLENT MOMENT”

for you?”

“Of course.”

A S PEAK EXPERI ENCE

Next stop: the local carpenter. By luck, he turned out to be a Kerala man also. Easwaran explained the situation and then came to the point: “You give me your rock-bottom price for a new cage.”

“Brother, I have a family to feed, but for you . . .”

R

Then back to his angry friend: “Suppose we could get a better cage built for so-and-so many rupees and the owner agreed to use it, Either I don’t give in to my rage, which means going crazy . . .

would you put up the money?”

or give in to it, which means I go to jail.

“Gladly. . . . But that owner will never agree.”

—Franklin Smith, American teenager

“He’s already agreed.”

Sri Easwaran was as angry as his friend at the sight of the dumb animal’s suffering. It’s important to realize that, but equally important W H E N M Y S P I R I T U A L teacher was still living in India, on the Nilgiri is the key difference in approach. One saw a path to a solution, and Hills, he had a friend who was very much like himself: a compassionate, quickly took it, while the other was hung up between the choices sensitive nature and strong feelings about justice and fairness. One we’re all too familiar with, the dilemma that teenager Franklin Smith morning the two of them were walking through the bazaar and came called “living a crazy man or dying a sane one.”And so he fumed, while upon a villager with a caged bear. The cage was so small that the poor Sri Easwaran set about writing a happy ending for the bear, for his beast could hardly turn around; it seemed to Sri Easwaran and his friend friend, the carpenter, the owner—and doubtless himself.

to be crying out with its eyes.They walked off without speaking. Later Only a minor event, if you want to look at it that way. But you could that day, Easwaran went to call on his friend and found him trembling also look at it as a parable. How many crises does our government face with anger. “I’m going to take my gun to the bazaar,” he burst out. “I’m every year to which it reacts with either violence or capitulation, either going to set that bear free, and shoot anyone who tries to stop me.”

imposing sanctions, as with Iraq, or fuming helplessly, as with Bosnia,

“Wait a minute,” Easwaran put in hastily, “hold on just a bit; let me East Timor, and Tibet?

see what I can do.”

It is all rather reminiscent of the two kinds of students—or rather First, he went to the owner to try to reason with him. It turned two kinds of training given to students—in the Davitz experiment.

out that the man, a simple villager, was from his own state of Kerala, The nonviolent are not people who don’t feel anger—on the conso it wasn’t hard to broach the subject after chatting awhile in their trary, they can often prize anger (at least, the kind of anger Sri native language: “Look here, don’t you think that creature is suffering Easwaran and his friend felt) because, first of all, that capacity to in such a small cage?”

feel for others, which sometimes means getting angry over what is 60

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happening to them, is one of the things that makes us fully human.

knew they could not want to stay forever asleep. That is how he was Second, and more important, that kind of anger is potentially the able to find the third way between running home to India and suing emotional power to correct the situation. For, in light of the Davitz the railroad company.

experiment, we would not say that Sri Easwaran did what he did in Imagine the old-fashioned locomotive carrying this “coolie barris-spite of his anger; he did it with his anger. By not giving in to his angry ter” from Durban up the mountains to Pretoria, standing at the station impulse to do something to that bear owner but instead looking for a in Pietermaritzburg with a good head of steam.You could shovel in constructive way to help the bear and its owner, he unconsciously more coal and just bottle up all that power and even pretend it wasn’t converted the energy he was feeling as anger into constructive effort.

there, until finally it exploded, or you could just open the valves and Emotions are power. By themselves, however, they are not necessarily scald everyone on the platform—but surely you would want to use it wisdom.Wisdom was for him to choose, which he did. In that choice, to drive the train.This is what Gandhiji was going through with all the when he blocked one path, the other opened.

emotional power built up in him by the accumulated insults he had This impromptu “shuttle diplomacy” was actually a fairly obvious met since his arrival at the Durban pier. He chose neither to “pocket solution, when you think about it. The trouble is that when we get the insult,” as he said, nor to lash out at the immediate source of the angry, most of us can’t think about it. Just when we’re motivated to do pain. He launched what was to become the greatest experiment in something, we lose sight of the obvious thing to do: as an old proverb social change in the modern world.

puts it, “Anger is a wind that blows out the lamp of the mind”—unless Within a few years of this event, Gandhi was working fifteen our mind is alert enough to set its sails for a better course.

hours a day, seven days a week, at a pace that would frighten even an If you still think this was a small event, think back to one that had advanced workaholic.Two secretaries could not keep up with his cor-exactly the same dynamic, but changed the course of history. I am respondence any more than they could keep up with his breathtaking thinking of the anger Gandhi experienced that fateful night of May 31,

“walks,” when he scampered off down the road each evening like a 1893, when he was thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg a week sandpiper. On a lecture tour in Gujarat, taking him to two, sometimes after his arrival in South Africa.This was no minor irritation; accord-three, villages a day, he had to remind those arranging his punishing ing to his own testimony, Gandhi was furious.That, along with the fact itinerary that he was only mortal. He would keep up this pace for fifty that Gandhi is more than usually articulate about his inner experi-years, taking breaks only when conveniently detained in “His Majesty’s ences, is what makes this event (among millions of similar insults prison.” What untold damage that energy would have wrought if it had human beings endure at one another’s hands) such an important win-been stifled inside him, as it was in millions of other Indians groaning dow into the dynamics of nonviolent conversion. The first clue as to silently under the heel of imperialism, or vented as raw violence, how he finally succeeded, after a night of bitter reflection, to see the which was dangerously close to happening with many of them.

creative way out is that he didn’t take the insult personally; he saw in it the whole tragedy of man’s inhumanity to man, the whole outrage of racism. Not “they can’t do this to me,” but “how can we do this to Peak Experience

one another?”The second clue is the state of his faith in human nature.

Already at that period he believed that people could not stay blind to The escape from violence is often experienced as a kind of strange joy.

the truth forever. He did not yet know how to wake them up; he just You pay a price, often a heavy one, but the sudden discovery of the 62

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creative path out of the dilemma between fear and anger, capitulation marchers confronted with threat power in Birmingham, different as and counterattack, comes with a great feeling of release. It has been those experiences are, give a sense of how potent a force is involved called, as in Buddhism, the “middle way,” but the best expression for here and how many ways it can manifest itself. What overtook the it comes from someone who experienced it under extreme duress, Birmingham marchers would seem to be as strong as mob violence, Andrew Young, who used the words of an old spiritual, “the way out only somehow its reverse.What is the source of this power?

of no way.”

In both cases, the source is an intense fear reaction, which was not An episode that beautifully illustrates this way occurred during a acted on. It was acted out, you could say, the way Sri Easwaran did not march for voter’s rights in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1964. The act on his angry thoughts but channeled them into creative action.The marchers, mostly black, were converging on the city hall when they marchers could have given up and gone home, or they could have suddenly found their way blocked by a phalanx of police and firemen.

attacked the police and firemen. But they didn’t want to just react, They hadn’t prepared for this eventuality, and not knowing what else like automata.They were on a higher plane just then. Shortly before, to do, they knelt down to pray. One of those marchers reported what one of their leaders had said, “We’re going to win our freedom, and as happened next:

we do it we’re going to set our white brothers free.” The vision of unity uplifted them. They breathed the heady air of freedom, and

[After awhile, we] became “spiritually intoxicated,” as walked on.

another leader described it . . . . This was sensed by And the firemen whose hands were frozen on the nozzles of their the police and firemen and it began to have an effect hoses? In them, as Gandhi would put it, their dormant reason was on them. . . . I don’t know what happened to me. I

“compelled to be free.” A confrontation like this, where feelings are got up from my knees and said to the cops: “We’re intense on both sides and one side undertakes a clear and clarifying act not turning back. We haven’t done anything wrong.

of courage that precipitates a successful outcome, is what one scholar All we want is our freedom. How do you feel doing calls a “nonviolent moment.”2 From the point of view of the nonvio-these things?” The Negroes started advancing and lent actor, we can call it a peak experience. A peak experience is one in Bull Connor [the notorious segregationist police which we are thrown back onto deeper resources by an emotional commissioner] shouted: “Turn on the water!” But the challenge.

firemen did not respond.Again he gave the order and One of the participants in the Freedom Rides who was beaten by nothing happened. Some observers claim they saw a racist mob offers some clear insight into the psychology of such an the firemen crying.Whatever happened, the Negroes experience. “You feel the pain,” he said, “but you don’t become bitter, went through the lines.1

you don’t become hostile . . . you sort of lose yourself . . . you become involved in the circumstances of others.”3There is nothing supernatu-Political power, we hear, grows out of the barrel of a gun, but in ral about this kind of struggle, and there is certainly no guarantee—

this case the police had all the guns, while the marchers, it would given the world we live in—that it won’t cause us some suffering. But seem, had all the power.

like a mountain climber pushing forward into the thin, bitter air of an Whether we call it “integrative power” or say this was an “act of icy peak, or a ballet dancer pushing her or his body beyond limits, love,” the experiences of Joan Black in her emergency room and of the there is such a thing as rising above pain. In the 1996 Olympics Kerri 64

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Strug gave her coach “one more jump,” though she had a badly her generosity, but that didn’t prevent her from benefitting from it.

sprained ankle, and the whole world winced watching her face twitch She explains:

at her otherwise perfect landing.There is this difference: the nonviolent actor is deliberately seeking to manifest the pain that others are I’ve forgotten about the attack completely. I used to trying not to see. So in his or her case, the pain is not just something get nervous when somebody came up behind me, but to put up with along the way; it’s part of the point.

that’s gone now. There are so many more important The fact is, even if you don’t stick your neck out in today’s world, things to worry about in the world.4

pain happens. It’s very important to remember this when people say, and they’re perfectly right, that nonviolence is risky: people get But wasn’t she angry? Of course, but she had something to do with attacked when they’re minding their own business and not even her anger, so it left no scars. How did she manage it? Remember dreaming of changing the world, and there is a nonviolent way to Nurse Black? “I saw a sick person and had to take care of her.”We saw respond to that kind of pain as well, as the following story illustrates.

this early on in the case of Karen Ridd, and we’ll continue to see it One day in 1992, an eighty-year-old woman was mugged and behind every example of real nonviolence we meet. One of the things badly hurt in New York City. Eileen Egan, however, was not your that accompanies the peak experience, that maybe makes it possible, typical mugging victim. She was a lifetime peace activist, a coworker is a higher vision. It is because, in the nonviolent person’s outlook, of Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, who naturally saw things a little even an attacker is a person; he or she will not dehumanize another differently than most people. A good writer, she was also able to human, even one who has dehumanized himself (or herself).

articulate her vision, for example, in a pithy interview with Parade That vision has another aspect. Practically all the rescuers who magazine two years after the attack, called “I Refuse to Live in Fear.”

risked their lives to help Jews and other refugees during the Holocaust Egan is another insightful spokesperson for the kind of experience felt “that what an individual did, or failed to do, mattered,” that “they I’m talking about, and its long-term results.Without using the word could influence events . . . [and so] what they did, or failed to do, mat-nonviolence (a wise move, since so few understand it correctly), she tered a great deal.”5 Along with the vision that we are all human managed to describe precisely what makes this principle work, and all together, each of us equally real, there is a sense that human action and in everyday language anyone could follow. She started from the our own emotional struggle to act well is meaningful; we’re deeply assumption, she tells us, that the worst result of the attack was not her aware that our efforts have an impact on the world. As Egan says, “If broken bones but the potential “brokenness” of her fellow feeling somebody has chosen a life of violence and doesn’t get the result he toward the man who attacked her. Like the effect of TV violence, the expected from his victim [i.e., fear and anger], it may help him to see effect of real violence will, if we let it, spread into our feelings toward life differently.” Kindness begets kindness; visions communicate; all our relationships. Egan was extremely concerned not to let that mood affects mood. Advertisers exploit our impressionability all the happen. Instead of letting herself get vindictive, then, she tried to time—why can’t we? As of 1992, Egan had not seen much of a make friends with her attacker, staying in touch with him as he wended response from her former assailant. Not a problem.Very likely he was his way through the prison system, and she describes how it helped touched, but not ready to let on; in any case, she certainly reaped her avoid the post-traumatic stress that might have followed such a benefits from her attitude, benefits that a professional counselor brutal attack. Note that at this point he didn’t seem much affected by would be thrilled to impart.

66

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Berta Passweg was a Jewish refugee who had escaped to Egypt.

He asked all of them to “search their hearts” and take the pledge One day, a friend in Alexandria said, “Berta, you should pray for only if it were really a matter between each of them and God, Hitler.” Seeing Berta’s shock, she explained, “Not that he succeeds notwithstanding what anyone else or the group as a whole would do.

with his evil intentions, but that God changes his mind.” When Berta In other words, though the oath taking was to be done en masse it was was finally able to do this, she found that “I don’t think it had any effect not a mass action; it was a summation of individual actions.That was on Hitler, but it had an effect on me: . . . all hate and bitterness against to remain its sustaining power.

the Germans had just vanished and I could meet and talk with them Eighty years later, Cardinal Jaime Sin would say this about the without resentment.”6

huge “people power” uprising in the Philippines: For Berta Passweg and Eileen Egan, unlike Joan Black or Karen Ridd, the violence had already happened. In the former cases we are It was amazing. It was two million independent deci-talking about healing, not preventing, violence—healing and not let-sions. Each one said, in his heart, “I will do this,” and ting it spread. We are also talking about an individual rather than a they went out.8

group, compared to the Freedom Riders or the Birmingham marchers. These would seem to be incidentals that don’t affect the Since violence and nonviolence come about subtly, long before basic principle or the way the peak experience feels and works: either they are seen in outward action, it should not be too surprising if way, purpose overrides pain. Given a higher purpose, physical pain can certain traits of character or norms of a whole culture are causing vio-leave us humanly deeper.

lence without our being aware of it. Our modern culture has quite a I mentioned that we can see the same dynamic in groups or in indi-few of these, and one of them is the way “we’ve started to understand viduals.Yet it is important to start with the individual, rather than the every human encounter as a symbolic clash of group interests,” as big march or the strike, even though most people associate nonvio-writer Louis Menand points out. “Violence can be talked about in the lence with big group actions. Actors can, of course, get swept up in a abstract, but violence, like sex, never occurs in the abstract. . . .

wave of group enthusiasm, but the real source of nonviolent power is Groups are essentially imaginary. Souls are real, and they can be saved, still coming from within them, and neither they nor we should lose or lost, only one at a time.”9

sight of that. Groups don’t have emotions; only individuals do. The As with labels, there is a certain dehumanization inherent in the founding moment of Satyagraha, in my view, is the famous oath taken temptation to see people as a group—be it a corporation, a state, a in the Empire Jewish Theater of Johannesburg on September 11 (inter-race, even a gender—instead of seeing them as individuals. In nonvi-esting date!), 1906, when a packed audience of Indians swore not to olence, at any rate, you never do this. How could you? For “soul force”

obey legislation that was about to deprive them of their basic human you need souls. In a group act of soul force, numbers can be handy, dignity. Gandhi’s explanation of the oath’s meaning for each one in that but they’re never essential. “In Satyagraha it is never the numbers that vast crowd sheds light on the roots of its power in the individual: count,” Gandhiji said. “Strength of numbers is the delight of the timid.

The valiant of spirit glory in fighting alone.”10

It is quite unlikely, but even if everyone else flinched leaving me alone to face the music, I am confident that I would never violate my pledge.7

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Developing Nonviolence:

wouldn’t be hurt—but that I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Making the Moment Last

And this can be addictive. Maybe that’s why we kept A few years before Karen Ridd’s team got to El Salvador, Sue Severin, going back.12

a Marin County, California, health educator, found herself so frustrated and angry over the terror imposed on Nicaraguan villagers by the We began this chapter with a story that illustrates the conversion policy of “low-intensity conflict” during the Reagan era that she set of anger. Now we’ve seen that fear, too, can become fuel for the fire aside her career and volunteered for a highly dangerous project: to of unsentimental, active love when one chooses the nonviolence join a faith-based citizens’ group going down to document terrorist response.

activity along the Honduran border. It was an effective way of con-Sue Severin’s reminiscence offers a number of other insights. She verting her anger to useful action, and, like many nonviolent projects, clarified something about the feeling of empowerment, almost of it led further than she anticipated. It was on this mission that Sue and invincibility, that sometimes comes over nonviolent actors and enables the other North American team members stumbled onto the power of them to face and often overcome danger with preternatural nonviolent interposition, or more specifically the technique that is now courage—the Birmingham marchers’ “spiritual intoxication.” As she called protective accompaniment: wherever they went, particularly during pointed out, it is not a naive feeling of invulnerability, as though they their longish stay in the formerly besieged village of Jalapa, there were were temporarily teenagers again. It is something both subtler and no Contra attacks.

more realistic: what empowers you is the conviction that what you are So on their return to the States, Sue and others decided they had going through is meaningful. In Sue Severin’s words, this is what you no choice but to go back and offer the protection of their presence to are “supposed to be doing”; these words are echoed by Marge the people among whom they had lived, and to do it in as many areas Argelyan from Chicago, who did very similar work in Hebron in as possible. Naturally, this was a frightening prospect, and she was as 1996: “This experience had the most integrity of any work I’ve frightened as anyone while sitting in her comfortable, safe home in done.”13 They were echoed by Solange Muller, daughter of the assis-Marin County reading about what “the Contra” was doing in those tant secretary general of the United Nations, at a meeting in New remote jungle villages. But, as Dutch child rescuer Cornelia York: “When you find work like that, you never go back.”14

Knottnerus also found, “the best antidote to fear is action.”11 Strangely In times like ours, when life has become meaningless for so many, enough, while Sue and the others were actually in Nicaragua, fear was it’s not hard to understand how the taste of nonviolent struggle can be never a problem.

“addictive.” Just listen to these testimonies from a subgenre of history that can add much to our understanding of nonviolence, the words While I was there I never felt fear. I think the main of women and men who risked their lives to save victims of the reason was, I was there out of choice. . . . I found—

Holocaust.

much to my surprise—that I became very calm in Professor and Mrs. Ege played a prominent role in one of the danger. I’m a Quaker and don’t go very much with most successful group examples of the rescue of the Danish Jews. In

“God” language, but the only way I can explain it is, Mrs. Ege’s words: “We helped the Jews because it meant that for once I felt I was in the hands of God: not safe—that I in your life you were doing something worth-while. . . . I think that 70

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the Danes should be equally grateful to the Jews for giving them an looking for: the moral equivalent of war.

opportunity to do something decent and meaningful.”15 A trapeze In our own “nonviolent moment,” a flash of spiritual light momen-artist, Speedy Larking, said it with less restraint: “I feel . . . hang it . . .

tarily rends the darkness of the prevailing image of ourselves as a sep-I feel like throwing myself down on the road and saying, ‘thank arate, competitive, neo-Darwinian animal who knows nothing but you!’”16 But it is a physician, Dr. Strandbygaard, who really takes our threat force. This leads us to a very important question: how can we breath away: “Isn’t this strange . . . . It’s almost like experiencing again keep that light switched on? If nonviolence is “addictive,” how do we the overwhelming love of one’s youth.”17

feed the habit?

Heady stuff.These intense, fulfilling moments, as we have seen so Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck gives a good description of just this far, come from the inner struggle to control our built-in fight-or-flight process:

response. Such a struggle can lead to a peak experience that often has its effects on our opponents. It always has effects, like those we’ve just I do not know what creates a mystical experience. I been hearing about, on the doer—on ourselves. In the next chapter, know that fatigue can loosen “ego boundaries.” I also we’ll focus on the obvious question: how and with what degree of know that I am now able to do voluntarily what happened reliability can we expect our opponent to “get it”? But there’s a bit to me then involuntarily: to see, whenever I remember more to be said about the world of the actor’s own inner experience.

and choose to do so, that all my enemies are my rela-In the grip of nonviolence, people experience more intensely; life tives and that all of us play roles for each other in the feels more “real.” It is like the strange feeling of Yeats’s Irish airman, order of things.19 (my emphasis)

who has no earthly reason to be risking his life fighting for the British except for that feeling.

One time or another, I think we’ve all had glimpses of a peak experience. Though it happened over thirty years ago, I vividly Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

remember one afternoon in Berkeley when I was playing basketball Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

with five other guys in Live Oak Park. All of a sudden—maybe one of A lonely impulse of delight

us had just sunk a really pretty shot—my teammates and I were in a Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

rally. We were invincible. It was magic; every pass connected, every I balanced all, brought all to mind,

shot sank—it was more like a ballet than three guys playing ball.Then The years to come seemed waste of breath,

it ended. The spell—or whatever it was—broke. We went back to A waste of breath the years behind

being our bumbling selves, and I don’t even think we won the game.

In balance with this life, this death.18

An actor, an athlete, a dancer, even a professor has peak moments when suddenly he or she “gets it” or “it clicks.”The difference is that a It is like that experience, of course, but rather different. In war professional actor or athlete learns how to reenter that state on you are risking your life to kill others; in nonviolence you’re risking demand, so that with enough training he or she can make it happen your life (if necessary) so that no one else will be killed, ultimately so whenever it’s needed. There is nothing particularly mysterious about that no one will ever have to face death again at the hands of their fel-this, even though the “learning” that’s involved has to be more than low humans. Nonviolence is what psychologist William James was just at the conscious level. The training of a “career satyagrahi,” who 72

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will need to keep certain “natural” reactions under control when he or Training I: Outer Work

she is on that picket line—or of someone who wants to stay alive in a dark alley—is very similar. We learn to be calmly alert under stress, What was that long training and discipline? This was one of the most and then the magic happens.

misunderstood aspects of Gandhi’s leadership. When he asked his The fact is that neither Joan Black nor the Birmingham marchers close coworkers to live simply, identify themselves with the poorest in nor Karen Ridd nor Sue Severin nor Eileen Egan was totally unpre-the land, make their own cloth—even observe certain dietary rules—

pared for a nonviolent moment. Joan Black was on duty in an emer-he was not laying down moral precepts in our sense of the word. He gency room; her medical training and her setting predisposed her to was actually training them to be a little “spiritually intoxicated” all the see a distraught person as a person—someone who needed help.

time. He knew real nonviolence is not the kind that just happens when Karen Ridd and Sue Severin were carrying out a nonviolent mission the chemistry of the situation is right. He would have applauded the for which, again, they had had a modest amount of training. The words of the popular Buddhist leader Thich Nhat Hanh: Birmingham marchers were in the midst of a long, drawn-out nonviolent struggle, in which they had perhaps some training and certainly If you wait until the time of crisis, it will be too late the rare benefit of inspired leadership.

. . . even if you know that nonviolence is better than This was also the case with Jawaharlal Nehru. Like thousands of violence, if your understanding is only intellectual his countrymen, the future prime minister of free India was drawn to and not in your whole being, you will not act nonvi-the Mahatma’s nonviolence, but there was more to it than just getting olently.The fear and anger will prevent you . . .21

the idea, as he discovered when he was caught in a lathi charge by mounted police during a peaceful demonstration in Lucknow in 1928

If you know in your whole being that “your enemies are your rel-

(a lathi, or lathee, is a metal-tipped bamboo staff that Indian and British atives,” you can have a spectacular effect on those around you. One of police used liberally in those days).

my close friends, David Hartsough, who is white, was sitting in with a small group of civil rights activists at a segregated lunch counter in And then began a beating of us, and battering with Virginia in the early sixties. They had been sitting there without get-lathees and long batons both by the mounted and the ting service for close to two days, harassed almost without letup by an foot police. It was a tremendous hammering, and the increasingly angry crowd. As neither the sitters nor the proprietors clearness of vision that I had had the evening before backed down, tension increased. Suddenly David was jerked back off left me. All I knew was that I had to stay where I was his stool and spun around by a man who hissed at him, “You got one and must not yield or go back. I felt half blinded with minute to get out of here, n—— lover, or I’m running this through the blows, and sometimes a dull anger seized me and your heart.” David, a birthright Quaker, stopped staring at the huge a desire to hit out. I thought how easy it would be to bowie knife held at his chest and slowly looked up into the man’s face, pull down the police officer in front of me from his to meet “the worst look of hate I have ever seen in my life.” The horse and to mount up myself, but long training and thought that came to him was, “Well, at least I’ve got a minute,” and discipline held, and I did not raise a hand, except to he heard himself saying to the man, “Well, brother, you do what you protect my face from a blow.20 (my emphasis) feel you have to, and I’m going to try to love you all the same.” For a 74

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few frozen seconds there seemed to be no reaction; then the hand on important part of our mind; to grow as a people, by working out a real the knife started shaking. After a few more long seconds it dropped.

solution to what divides us. A nonviolent response originates in the The man turned and walked out of the lunchroom, surreptitiously struggle to master emotional forces inside ourselves; and my guess is wiping a tear from his cheek.22

that this very struggle is what feels so meaningful and makes the non-Not all nonviolent moments are this harrowing. This one shows, violent peak experience “addictive.” Conflict is an opportunity, though, what a difference you can make when you see life differently because negative emotions are an opportunity, for conversion.

and practice what you see, so that your love of nonviolence starts putA black teenager gave perfect expression to this after he had had ting down roots below the mere intellectual conviction Thich Nhat a loaded gun held to his head by someone who robbed his backpack.

Hanh refers to, and starts to occupy “your whole being.” David is a His first reaction was pretty knee-jerk: “I should have been packing.”

committed Quaker, as were his parents. They practiced acting out A moment later he realized that carrying a gun would hardly have their peace convictions as their lifestyle, thereby reinforcing their con-made him more secure in that situation. Finally, on really mature viction that there is “that of God” in everyone. And he had undergone reflection, he realized that if he had had one, “I’d have gripped the hana fair amount of special training, as far as one can ever be trained to dle instead of coming to grips with my fear.”23 Speaking for a small respond creatively to such an emergency. Like policemen, even sol-group of American volunteers in Hebron, where they were trying to diers, he had learned through belief and practice that when someone stand between Israeli bulldozers and Palestinian homes and orchards, opposite you is upset, you don’t have to be.

Randy Bond said, “We were a small group of ordinary people doing These, then, are the ingredients for developing nonviolent some rather extraordinary things in a hurting part of our world. We responses so that they become part of one’s personality: a deep had to stretch ourselves and our capabilities to do these things; that’s conviction about the unity of life; the inspiration of real nonviolent the only way we grow.”24

leadership; practice in real, or failing that, in “role-playing” situations; Isn’t growing what life’s about?

and finally—Gandhi’s special legacy—a life lived by nonviolent principles. One would be really lucky to have all of these—leadership is especially hard to come by in today’s world—but with some combi-Training II: Inner Work

nation there’s no reason to doubt that anyone could deepen her or his innate capacity to become an effective “actor of love.”

Emperor Ashoka ruled most of northern India from around 269 B.C.E.

Because this capacity is an innate response, there’s really no rea-to 232 B.C.E., and he ruled as very few in human history have done: son to fear that we’re repressing anything when we set out to develop by nonviolence. His rock edicts, a number of which are still to be read it. On the contrary, when we find the “way out of no way” between all over India, tell us how his guiding principle was not aggression but anger and fear, we are disinhibiting a natural capacity we all possess the moral order, or dhamma (in Sanskrit, dharma). This meant, among but of which most of us are not aware. Most of us don’t try to devel-other things, the renunciation of wars of expansion, tolerance toward op it, for the simple reason that we don’t know we have it. But that is all religions, protection of the helpless, even hospitals for animals.The due to our cultural conditioning. I think in fact that it’s violence that’s mute rocks speak in a voice that can “resonate in our ears across two artificial; it’s violence that is a mechanical “solution” that cheats us out millennia or more, evoking a liberal vision with an incredibly contem-of an opportunity to grow—to grow as individuals, by mastering an porary ring.”25 Following is Edict Forty:

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People can be induced to advance in the Dhamma by Patañjali’s definition of yoga (meditation, in this case) comes, as I only two means, namely moral prescriptions and said, from his famous collection of sutras, or aphorisms. Such texts meditation. Of the two, moral prescriptions are the were meant as scientific manuals, if you will, consisting of bare formu-lesser, meditation the greater. The moral prescrip-las meant to be expounded by a competent authority. So in practical tions I have promulgated include rules making certain terms, a few things have to be added to his aphoristic expression to animals inviolable, and I have established other rules show us how to actually do this, especially in the modern period.

as well. But even in the case of abstention from injur-First, as Eckhart said, meditation is not a state you slip into but a ing and killing living creatures, it is by meditation that discipline you work at. Clearly, you have to have a tool to do this people have made the greatest progress in the

“prodigiously hard work.” In my case, that has meant that I practice at Dhamma.26

regular times every day, under the guidance of a superb teacher, and I do it by concentrating with all the willpower I can muster, minute by Meditation may be the only word in the English language with a minute, on an inspirational passage that I’ve previously memorized.

less agreed-upon meaning than nonviolence; and as we see from the This allows me to keep spontaneous thought waves from arising, close connection Ashoka draws, that may not be a coincidence.

and/or to not pay them any attention when they do.

The classical definition of meditation is provided by a famous text To describe it this way, meditation may seem like a dreary exer-thought to be roughly contemporary with the Buddha, the Yoga Sutras, cise, hardly the thing to make heroes and heroines out of any of us, but which begins, “Meditation is the obstruction of thought waves in the that would be because we know so little about the capacities of the mind.”27 By “thought waves,” or citta-vrtti, Patañjali, the otherwise mind. “So far as we know,” wrote neuroscientist Robert Livingston, unknown sage who composed this text, includes any mental event—

“the usefulness of cognitive processes such as consciousness, percep-a feeling, an image, a desire—not just a linguistic thought. It could be, tion, judgment, and volition have not begun to meet any limits.”29

for example, a wave of anger or fear—which shows us immediately Our first examples in this book were of individuals or groups of indi-the connection of meditation with nonviolence, and why Ashoka felt viduals who were thrown into a deep state of concentration by an that meditation was better than rules and regulations, even moral reg-emergency, like Joan Black or my friend David Hartsough at that ulations, for creating a nonviolent regime.

lunch counter. We are talking here about learning to reach deeper Getting the mind under control—that’s a tall order! Meister states of concentration even without an emergency. Once when Eckhart put it beautifully:

Gandhiji visited the ashram (spiritual community) of a well-known sage in southern India, the sage remarked to his students after he left, This needs prodigiously hard work. . . . A man must

“Today we have been blessed by the presence of a real yogi.” They be closeted within himself where his mind is safe asked him how he knew that, and he said:

from images of outside things. . . . Second, inventions of the mind itself; ideas, spontaneous notions or When you look at him you can see that he is absorbed images . . . he must give no quarter to on pain of scatin yoga, for whenever he looks at something he pays tering himself and being sold into multiplicity.28

all his attention. He never glances at anything else.

Many other leaders came with him, but they were 78

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looking everywhere, as if they had five or six pairs complete fulfillment. In this first stage, dharana, our attention is often of eyes.30

on something outside (like whether Craig or Taylor is in the clear); the second stage, meditation proper, is the systematic control of the So let us not overlook this seemingly humble, if not irrelevant, activity within our mind (remember the two areas of control Eckhart capacity: one-pointed attention is the psychological key to nonvio-talked about); and the third stage, or samadhi, is—well, hard to lence. And to illustrate its power, and at the same time its accessibility describe.

to non-mahatmas, let me borrow a description of a peak state of Joe Montana put his unusual gift to rather different uses than the performance from a more familiar, not to say unlikely, source: sages in their forest ashrams—or Gandhi in his modern one, but like them, he must also have tried to get some kind of permanent grip on Despite his off-field manner, which is often ordinary, the capacity he had glimpsed in peak moments. There is nothing even prosaic, Montana is special because when he particularly Eastern or Indian about the capacity for meditation, or faces danger, he is . . . completely concentrated.What one-pointed attention. It was more systematically and continuously we don’t know is how he does it. . . . Sometimes cultivated in India than with any other civilization that I know of, but things happen in slow motion for Joe at the most cruit is hardly unknown to others. Some of the “heaviest” meditators in cial time. The world slows down and things get big the world, like Meister Eckhart or Teresa of Avila, sprang up in the and he feels as if he has total control. He was in that West. Nor has its discovery, or periodic rediscovery, always happened world when he threw the winning pass to John Taylor in the context of a religion, as we’ve seen. Following is a remarkable

[in the crucial game of the 1989 season, against the insight of William James about education, which he described in his Cincinnati Bengals]. Montana simply went about Principles of Psychology:

playing quarterback as if the 49ers were ahead and there were still two quarters to go. “It happened sort The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering of in slow motion,” Montana admitted. He had attention over and over again, is the very root of judg-dropped back to pass and suddenly everything slowed ment, character and will. No one is compos sui if he down and became totally clear. Joe saw two defend-have it not. An education which would improve this ers go after Roger Craig and he saw Taylor break into faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is the clear and he threw his pass. Then he lost sight of easier to define this ideal than to give practical direc-the ball, heard the screams of the fans and the world tions for bringing it about.32

returned to normal speed.31

I doubt James was consciously aware that he was paraphrasing one Strange as it might sound, this is a precise description (minus the of the names for meditation in ancient India, which is brahmavidya, or stuff about pass receivers and fans) of a state of consciousness that

“supreme education.” Yet his description of bringing back a wandering Indian sages call dharana, or “firmly held attention.” They taught that attention “over and over again” is precisely what meditation is. It is dharana was the first of the three stages—attention, meditation, and indeed difficult to find practical directions for bringing this about! In complete absorption in the Supreme Reality—in the long journey to both civilizations, this once-cherished legacy has all but disappeared 80

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behind the glitter of materialism.33 But materialism can never keep its disarmament,” which enables us to intervene right where violence hold on us indefinitely, as we can see from the dramatic way that inter-starts, at the very root of hostile thoughts—our sense of separateness.

est in and knowledge about meditation has exploded since Swami There is no question that whichever way we go, whether it’s working Vivekananda dramatically introduced India’s ancient legacy at the on our behavior or through the direct and most difficult regime of Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 (the very year, interestingly meditation, or both (my personal formula), the mind is subtle and enough, that Gandhi went to meet his destiny in South Africa).

resists correction.That is its nature; this is not easy for any of us. But Today, many people are familiar with William James not as the through training, as the Gita says, it is doable, and as we make progress author of the above remark, but from his classic essay, “The Moral in this line, one of the rewarding results is that nonviolence can Equivalent of War.” That he had both interests is hardly a coincidence.

become second nature. That is a two-edged reward: training pacifies

“War begins in the minds of men,” after all. The Bhagavad Gita, the the mind, and a mind of peace cannot but project a harmonic force beloved Indian scripture that so deeply influenced Gandhi, not only into the world around us.That effect on others is what we can turn to confirms this insight but gives us a clear sense why the untrained mind next, but this has been a pretty dense introduction and could do with spawns violence—and what to do about it.This teaching is dramatized some summarization.

in a famous interchange between the hero, Arjuna, who represents you and me, and his friend and charioteer, Sri Krishna, who happens to be God. There’s nothing wrong with the mind that training won’t Wrapping Up

cure, Krishna tells Arjuna; one must simply learn to “still the thought waves in the mind,” in accordance with the ancient wisdom. Arjuna Nonviolence begins in inner struggle—specifically, the struggle to laments, in language we can all appreciate, “But Krishna, the mind is keep anger, fear, and greed from having sway over us. It’s a struggle so shaky and agitates so violently—you may as well ask me to control that has immense benefits for the individual and leads to an exhilarat-the wind.” Krishna’s answer is, “I agree, but it will come under our ing sense of purpose that is very often lacking in modern life.A Dutch sovereignty—with a little detachment, and constant practice.”34

couple named Vos was among several who took in Jewish children The moral equivalent of war is the “war within,” because in that during the Nazi occupation, putting themselves and their own chil-

“war”—our individual struggle to pacify our minds—no one gets dren at considerable risk. The inevitable day came when Mrs. Vos’s hurt, and on the contrary, our innate, powerful capacities for nonvio-mother came to visit, and was understandably upset to find refugees lence come into play more and more as we succeed. It has always been there in the house, endangering her grandchildren. Her daughter much harder to recognize this war than the wars we wage outside.

explained:

Today we are enjoying a growth industry in behavioral training to reduce violence; we find versions of it in classrooms, in prisons, in We find it more important for our children to have workshops for peacemakers, and in corporations. It’s a good first step.

parents who have done what they felt they had to Practicing active nonviolence is another step that’s open to all of us, do—even if it costs them their lives. It will be better and helpful to all of us, even in daily interactions. Meditation is the for them—even if we don’t make it.They will know next step. For those who care—and dare—to undertake it, medita-we did what we felt we had to do.This is better than tion is the deep training that the Dalai Lama recently called “internal if we first think of our own safety.35

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And her mother agreed.

over the years and centuries of human evolution.

This rising to heroism by perfectly ordinary people, this empow-In this chapter, we went on to talk about the two levels of training erment, can also be achieved outside such acute crises, especially that we can apply to integrative responses: the training of behavior with, but even sometimes without, meditation or other kinds of spe-

(and we’ll have more to say about the role of culture at this level) and cial training. One hears this constantly from former gang members or then of the mind itself, where the seeds of behavior lie.

troublemaking students in the many programs dotted around the Gandhi was, once we understand what he was up to, probably the nation’s schools and neighborhoods run by those who’ve bothered to one person in the modern world who most conspicuously and most reach out to these kids with an alternative. The young people often systematically made this training a way of life, fine-tuned by relentless discover they’ve always had the skills to be mediators, for example, scientific experiments. While much has been written about his but no one showed them how to use them, and when someone does, shrewdness and the results, positive and negative, of his great cam-they feel an exhilarating sense of self-worth, as one of them put it, like paigns, the inner dimensions of his struggle and its results have been

“hidden gold mines.”

relatively passed over. They are, of course, more difficult to docu-While the feelings of fear and anger that come over every one of ment.When he went into the Round Table Conference on September us from time to time are “natural,” it is also natural for us to want to 15, 1931, for the “day in court” that he had worked up to for thirty master them. The dilemma of violence, whether felt in the mind of years, he had nothing but a few notes to speak from. When Ronald teenager Franklin Smith or acted out by a nation that can see only an Duncan, who had the honor of driving him to parliament that morn-ugly choice between doing nothing or doing harm, is itself some indi-ing, asked him what he was going to say, Gandhi answered, “How do I cation that the “natural” reaction of fight or flight is not all that nature know? I’m not there yet.” His impromptu speech is said to have been has in store for us.The existence of a “way out of no way,” and above a masterpiece (the authorities didn’t allow it to be recorded). How do all the deep sense of emotional reward people have felt on following we explain this uncanny ability of his? Where did he get his boundless that way, would seem to say that this is a path, if not the path, nature energy, his ability to go on in the face of disasters that would have has had in mind all along.

floored an ordinary person, carrying his titanic pace into his seventies?

When we think of nonviolence as a peak experience precipitated How on earth did he divest himself of so much of his personal desire, by certain conditions, though, we are just scratching the surface. It is and “unnecessary” possessions? And fear? And there’s another intrigu-like discovering that some bread mold in a petri dish has inhibited bac-ing mystery.The father of a friend of mine happened to be in India in teria, or that some new kind of energy coming out of a Crookes tube the forties, a time of high tension, and was asked to carry an impor-has printed the picture of a key on a nearby photographic plate: the tant message to Gandhiji. I asked him, what was his main impression work of discovering what that force was and getting it into useable of the Mahatma as a person? He said, without hesitation, “Health.” He form then has to follow. Peaks have valleys. The occasions for poten-had never seen such ebullient good health, even though, from a med-tial nonviolent moments can be totally unexpected (like Eileen Egan’s ical point of view, some of the numbers on Gandhi’s blood pressure mugging) or a calculated risk (as at Birmingham or Lahore) or pretty were in the danger zone at that desperate time.

much staged (as at the Dharasana salt pans). But they’re still occasions.

While Gandhi is best known for his resistance to the industrial What we want is for the practices of integrative power to become lifestyle through simplicity and the “reduction of wants”—shock sustained and habitual—as somehow did the practices of threat force treatment for modern economies of consumption—he was also 84

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constantly advocating a deeper resistance to the culture that produced Chapter Four

those economies, the culture of consumption, external achievement, and conquest.Though he rarely used the word meditation itself (it had

“WORK” VERSUS WORK

become so unknown even in India that to mention it would bring on clouds of misconception), his enthusiastic practice and recommenda-tion of allied techniques like prayer and the repetition of a mantram R

(a name of God) thread through his teaching from the earliest period.

Yet even if he had never said a word about these disciplines, we would have to assume that he had practiced them, just from looking at his life Remember, violence works; big violence works better. No revolution and its achievements, neither of which could be explained otherwise ever got off the ground without massive violence.

than by the assumption that this was a man whose mind was utterly at

—Tom Metzger,White Aryan Resistance

peace. His life was his message, and the message was, “Here I am, the consummate activist, but the first field of action is my own mind.”

People try nonviolence for a week, and when it doesn’t “work” they Clearly, he belonged to those who return to the inner struggle that go back to violence, which hasn’t worked for centuries.

humanity forgets age after age.

His own testimony on how the conversion of anger affected him

—Theodore Roszak

personally is therefore a fitting wrap-up to this discussion of the source of nonviolence. It reveals, I think, one of the most important secrets of Gandhi’s life.

N O N V I O L E N C E M AY G I V E us a deep sense of purpose that’s missing in our modern life; it may be a healthy way out of the “fight-It is not that I am incapable of anger, for instance, but or-flight” response to danger, but if it doesn’t work, we may as well I succeed on almost all occasions to keep my feelings quit right now. Theodore Roszak jogs us into realizing, however, that under control. Whatever may be the result, there is whether nonviolence works or not—whether anything works or not always in me conscious struggle for following the law

—may be a little less simple than it first appears.

of non-violence deliberately and ceaselessly. Such a In this chapter I want to do two things: the first and most important struggle leaves one stronger for it. The more I work is to understand what it really means to say something has “worked,”

at this law, the more I feel the delight in my life, the in other words to get from a simplistic to a realistic sense of action and delight in the scheme of the universe. It gives me a consequences.The second is almost as important: to enlarge our field peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I of vision concerning the various forms of nonviolent action. As we have no power to describe.36

build on the events we’ve already considered, it will be more and more obvious that nonviolence is much more than a form of protest.

After these two recalibrations, we will be able to see past what Gandhi once called our “inane” conception of nonviolence to appreciate more realistically “the greatest force mankind has been endowed with.”1

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But first, let’s turn the tables on our friends the cynics and ask, In the real world, violence does, at least sometimes, to be sure, how well does violence work?

achieve its immediate purpose. There is no question of that. In Santa Sociologists Robert Jewett and John Lawrence analyzed American Rosa, California, recently, a man who had been terrorizing elderly thinking about violence in an instructive book in the seventies called people in a certain neighborhood entered one home too many. The The American Monomyth. 2 The two writers studied popular entertain-owner got out his gun and turned the tables on this poor wretch, who ment and advertising, looking for what they called a “monomyth”

is now safely behind bars. Or take a very different example: in about violence, and they found it summed up in one figure who epit-February 1991, the “international community” bombed Iraq until dic-omized the heroes of popular culture at that time: Superman.

tator Saddam Hussein was forced to pull the remains of his shattered Superman stories, they found, uniformly propagate three beliefs army out of Kuwait—and off our oil supply. Violence can get things about how violence works, meaning how it preserves law and order done: this is true, but is this all there is to it—does this cause-effect and protects the innocent:

arc really exhaust the effects of violence?

(1) Violence is never misused: Superman is incorruptibly good, Because the media present and re-present this one side of the omniscient, always on the right side.

story, we plain do not notice that a raft of other results, some of them (2) Violence doesn’t really hurt; it’s “clean”: when Superman much more important in the long run, ripple out as the “event cone”

swoops down in front of a car full of fleeing crooks and stops it dead, of violence widens. We do not notice that most of the homeowners the crooks tumble out chastened but not wounded. Maybe one of who go to get their guns are overcome or even killed by their much them ends up with a little bandage on his forehead, but there is no more professional intruders, just as many people who pull out a gun pain, no suffering—and of course there is no “collateral damage.” No or a knife in some kind of quarrel end up the victims of “victim-bystanders are accidentally hit, even in a high-speed car chase.

precipitated homicides.” We rarely think about the number of guns (3) Above all, it never, never rebounds. No “blowback,” as the CIA stolen from homes or the number of children who use them on their calls it. Superman is invulnerable (except for the occasional friends. Above all, we do not notice that every time an act of violence Cryptonite-induced dizzy spell), so even if the criminals wanted to,

“works”—and let me repeat, some of them—there’s trouble some-they could never hurt him back. But they don’t want to. They are where down the road.

always successfully neutralized. Putting them in jail is the happy end-If we knew where to look, we would see the trouble every time.

ing of the story; we never hear about what happens to them in jail—

Does the criminal who is “safely” behind bars plan to go better armed for example, that they learn more violent techniques in prison and next time? Does the dramatic story in the paper send other home-come out to seek revenge on the community.

owners out to get guns, which four out of five times end up hurting Wow.

someone in the family instead?3 If you count up all the accidental Incredibly enough, these were the narratives that shaped our way deaths and other mishaps that result from keeping a gun at home, they of thinking about violence then—and other versions of it still do so are almost forty times more common than the scenario where an now. We keep thinking that with one more clean weapon, one more intruder is scared off.And finally, does the violent solution, despite its restraining device, one more prison, the police will be able to get an edge satisfying “conclusion,” which is really only a step toward many other on crime and restore our security. But that thinking is as unrealistic as conclusions, ratchet up the level of violence in the community as a the comics on which it is, perhaps, partially based.

whole? We usually don’t even ask these questions, yet they are the 88

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ones that determine which way we’re really headed: toward safety or When President Bush launched Operation Desert Storm with the toward death, chaos or community.

ringing words, “The liberation of Kuwait has begun,” he wanted us to During the Gulf conflict more bombs fell on Iraq than were think of the liberation of Europe from Hitler’s armies (the official line dropped in all of World War II.This incredible punishment “worked”: had been all along that Iraq was bent on, and somehow capable of, Saddam Hussein did indeed withdraw what was left of his forces from world conquest). He might have been a little more careful about his Kuwait. Yes, but what else happened? About 100,000 people died; historical precedent. The massive air attacks ordered by the Allied millions of gallons of oil were burned in the open air or poured into leaders who met at Casablanca in January 1943 were an experiment the waters of the Gulf, creating an unparalleled ecological disaster. It that was designed to achieve the destruction and dislocation of the has been estimated that the war cost Iraq alone $77 billion.4 And now German military and the undermining of the morale of the German for the really bad part. Over 200,000 Iraqi children died either dur-people sufficiently to undermine their capacity for armed resistance.

ing the bombing raids or in the aftermath, when infant deaths in Iraq Since the Germans who remained alive did give up, it is easy to con-during the first eight months after the attacks rose 300 percent.Then vince ourselves that the bombing had the desired effect. Yet, as the they went on dying, the children, as continued economic sanctions great pacifist writer Vera Brittain pointed out early in the game: were kept in place to force the unrepentant dictator into line—for evidently all that bombing did not cause President Hussein to have a The “experiment” has demonstrated, so far, that mass change of heart, only to harden it. In order to thwart the Iraqi ruler’s bombing does not induce revolt or break morale.

intentions by violence, we have brought about the greatest humanitar-Victims are stunned, exhausted, apathetic, absorbed ian crisis—some, like former attorney general Ramsey Clark, would in the immediate tasks of finding food and shelter. But say the greatest crime against humanity—since World War II. That as they recover who can doubt that there will be, consequence cannot be brushed aside. It is not irrelevant to our destiny.

among the majority at any rate, the desire for revenge Let us pause here to ask, in the name of what kind of logic have and a hardening process, even if, for a time, it may be we inflicted this appalling suffering, year after year, on this people and subdued by fear?5

these children? Dictators by definition do not care about the well-being of their subjects. So by hurting their subjects . . . ? In fact it has According to many studies done after the war, and after other been pointed out often enough that our sanctions weakened the Iraqi wars, her prediction was quite correct.6 Particularly interesting is the people to the point where they could no longer resist their harsh bombing of civilian targets in the North-West Frontier Province of leader even if they wanted to.We did his job for him.

India by the British in 1930, which we’ll have occasion to return to: We could have predicted both these results, if only we understood

“500 tons of bombs were dropped over the Pathans, but their spirits the dynamics of violence. We would then have realized that in terms remained uncrushed.The number of Red Shirts increased from a cou-of the type of force applied, harsh sanctions are only quantitatively ple of hundred to 80,000.”7

different from bombing. We would have realized that we ultimately So the untoward results of the massive bombing of Iraq were not strengthened the ruler of Iraq’s hand, not because we wanted to, but incidental, or unpredictable.They were the results of very general and because we used the same kind of force he does. He relies on violence.

predictable rules: in principle, bombing does not lead to unmixed We didn’t come up with an alternative.

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results, even if it leads to some results that one side considers good.

human sensitivity. This is why the task in non violence is often to Violence is, in principle, a destructive force, and there is no way to get awaken sleeping consciences by making people aware of the pain around that. In May of 2000, Newsweek published a previously sup-they’re causing—making them feel it empathetically. That task is pressed NATO report making it clear that instead of crippling the becoming ever more difficult. Since the Gulf debacle, the U.S. military Serbian military the year before (only fourteen tanks were destroyed, has increasingly been using video games to train military personnel.

for example, not 120 as earlier claimed), NATO had terrorized the They claim—and I’m sure they believe—that they’re doing this civilian population by bombing generating plants, bridges, and other because video games have become as realistic as real combat, but I infrastructure of daily life.

claim that consciously or unconsciously they are doing it to make As Professor Pepinsky said, human beings are embedded in “cross-combat seem as realistic as video games. Which is to say, not real at all.

currents of violence and responsiveness” and we are always, at every Unconsciously they are training their personnel not just to use moment, influencing our surroundings by our “profoundly religious weapons—that’s the easy part.What has always been more difficult is choice between violence and democracy.” There were obviously still getting soldiers not to feel what they’re doing when they use their other eddies and crosscurrents released by our choice of violence in weapons on live targets. “Once I met a Vietnam veteran on an air-the Gulf: the demoralization of the Iraqi people, including a “deep plane,” Henri Nouwen wrote.

hatred” among the Iraqi youth for us, spasms of violence unleashed against the Kurds of the north and Shiites of the south—and we must He told me that he had seen so many people killed on think also of the wider world. Shortly after the Gulf War, Serbs television that it had been hard for him to believe that and Croats unleashed unparalleled violence against their Muslim those whom he killed would not stand up again in the neighbors. Was that a coincidence? Or could they have picked up a next movie.8

resonance from the brutality visited on the Iraqi people by the American and European states acting under UN auspices? The heart-So intense are the unrealities of war that we may well conclude, less bombing, the massacre of Iraqi soldiers trying to flee Kuwait, the as Simone Weil once said, “War is unreality itself.”

brutal entombment of others in their trenches (not to mention the continuing sacrifice of the children) were all examples of Muslims not I won’t dwell on the media’s role here because it’s been so graph-being treated as human beings. Was the bombing of the World Trade ically laid before the public by the books of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.9

Center in New York by Islamic fundamentalists a few years after the But the point to remember is that whenever we prepare minds for war Gulf conflict also a coincidence?

we unprepare them for life, and that hurts all of us. This is a severe The Gulf conflict had another, extremely bad result that is not hidden cost of the war system—and to some degree, of all violence.

controversial, once we give it a moment’s thought: every time we use Earlier, I used the handy image from physics of an “event cone.”

violence to solve a problem we send the signal that violence is the This is how physicists describe the fact that even the tiniest event—

way to solve problems. In the present case, it is hard to ignore the say, the emission of a gamma ray from a decaying particle—ramifies desensitization of the CNN-watching American public for whom the into the future, changing patterns and altering seemingly unrelated war was turned into a video game. In the world of violence, as we’ve events at a great remove in time and space. When you see its event seen, nothing is more dangerous than trivialization, than losing our cone, the working of violence begins to look a lot less “surgical.” It too 92

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can create a “butterfly effect” of cascading disorder. If you share the executes more people than any other state, “yet its murder rate widespread intuition that violence is a disruptive, not constructive, remains one of the highest in the country.”12 New York, which does force, that intuition begins to look a lot more plausible.

not have the death penalty, reduced its crime rate dramatically in the In his classic study Man, the State and War, Kenneth Waltz tried to first four months of 1992, largely by expansions in other, more pre-show that however deplorable war and violence are, they sometimes ventive, areas of crime control. These other areas are, incidentally, preserve “order.”You would certainly think so. Ironically, though, he ones that a state can afford to institute when it is not spending $2.3

cited the bloody suppression of the last Moro rebellion in the million on every capital case.

Philippines as an example (this caught my attention: my grandfather The closer we look, the more problematic our reliance on vio-served in the unit that brought in the famous Philippine resistance lence for security appears. Violence is a slippery way to go, with as fighter, Emilio Aguinaldo, in 1901). The war may have been an ugly many bad repercussions as desired ones. The feeling that tells us that business, said Professor Waltz, but it paved the way for a “stable violence works is not based on facts, and I suspect the reason we don’t regime” for that country—under Ferdinand Marcos!10 The “stable”

look at those facts too closely is simple: if the facts say that violence Marcos regime collapsed unceremoniously in February of 1986, and doesn’t protect us very well but we don’t know what does, those facts are its successors had trouble with the Moros for ten more years. In disturbing. The rules of cognitive dissonance take over, and facts are Professor Roszak’s happy terminology, the war “worked” but it didn’t forgotten. A teen I quoted earlier, the one who had his backpack work. It didn’t have successful long-term results. Gandhi frequently robbed at gunpoint, said, “I’ll never get caught slipping again.The next said, “Violent revolution will bring violent swaraj [regime].” Not guy who tries to run up on me is getting blasted.” Then he came to his maybe, not sometimes: he meant it as a law. Sometimes it may take a senses—partway—and corrected himself: “I’m glad I didn’t have long time for these unhappy results to mature, and then we have to be anything that day. I would have killed that fool.”13 Really? With a ready to see the connection, but it’s there.

loaded handgun pointed at his temple? Would he not rather have The problem isn’t with war only.To repeat, it’s in the very nature become—like a Sonoma County, California, woman who carried guns of violence.The majority of Americans believe, for example, that the for protection until she got killed reaching for one—yet another case death penalty deters homicide; but in one of the few reliable studies of victim-precipitated homicide?

on the actual results of capital punishment, it was found that introducing the death penalty seems to increase homicides, by about 2 percent. The state destroys a human life to “send a message” to would-be murderers;

. . . And It Even “Works”

but in reality it’s sending not one message but two somewhat contra-dictory messages. On the conscious level its message is mainly about Anyone who does what I do becomes by turns frustrated, despairing, retribution, about warning, but on a deeper level it is unfortunately and amused at the certitude with which people tell me that non-more about the expendability of human life—and the impossibility violence doesn’t work. If nonviolent volunteers tried to interpose of bringing a violent person back into the community. The title of themselves between hostile forces in former Yugoslavia, one person the study is “Deterrence or Brutalization.”11 Evidently, the deeper told me, they would just be wiped out—martyrs. “They’d all be message, as usual, is slightly more effective.

machine-gunned,” said another with equal certainty. Yet at the time Or more than slightly. As Sister Helen Prejean points out, Texas they made these statements (at a meeting of the U.S. Institute of Peace 94

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in Washington in the spring of 1993), only one person had been killed (3) They work on the much deeper level that is precisely where and three wounded in the whole history of nonviolent interposition, violence fails most reliably: every time someone uses real nonvio-a history going back to the early part of the century and involving tens lence, things get better, and the system moves forward toward stable of thousands of not overly trained volunteers. In Haiti, in ten or so peace, whether or not the actor achieves his or her immediate goal.

months of accompanying threatened people, seventy volunteers from For the rest of this chapter we’ll be exploring these claims as we Peace Brigades International defied the ruthless para-military, try to fill out our picture of what nonviolence looks like in the “real FRAPH, without taking a single casualty. As I write this, not one vol-world” of politics and history. So let’s open the file.

unteer (knock wood) has ever been killed in one and a half decades of doing the kind of high-profile, sometimes quite confrontational, work of Karen Ridd and Sue Severin in Central America, nor has anyone Down to Cases

been abducted or killed while being accompanied by them.14 (How many heavily armed soldiers and guerrillas have been killed in that I want to begin, despite some misgivings, with an event of high drama.

period?) Once, after I gave a talk some years ago at a local college Misgivings because I know how easy it is to get entranced by a spec-about the Indian freedom struggle, a student challenged me, “What tacular climax and miss the years of preparation that went into it, about the tens of thousands who got killed?” When I asked him what which is to miss the essential ground from which a nonviolent he was talking about, he started spinning out scenes of atrocious mas-moment springs. A friend of mine who was quite the ballet dancer in sacres he had seen somewhere. It turned out that he had seen them, his early life told me that Margot Fonteyn was once being gushed over all right—in his imagination. Outside of the real massacre in 1919 at by some admiring fans. Ms. Fonteyn said, “You see all this ‘effortless’

Jalianwalla Bagh in the Punjab, and what happened in Peshawar in the grace, this ‘spontaneous’ beauty; little do you realize the hours of thirties (which this student could not possibly have known about), sheer torture that went into it.” I don’t want us to miss the years almost no satyagrahis were killed in the thirty-two years of intense of careful training, but let’s start, nonetheless, at the climax of the struggle Gandhiji conducted in India. Fewer died in ten years of civil freedom struggle in India on May 21, 1930, when more than 2,000

disobedience across the south than in three nights of rioting in Watts.

unarmed volunteers walked up to the gate of the Dharasana salt None of the former deaths occurred during a nonviolent demonstra-factory in Gujarat and were beaten to the ground by guards whose tion.15 It is time for a culture-wide reality check.

vehemence went on without relenting throughout the day.This event,

“Acts of love” that arise in a peak state of self-control do work, brilliantly reenacted by Sir Richard Attenborough in the film Gandhi, beyond the psychological work they do within the actor. They work, was, as many agree, the climax of the Salt Satyagraha, and in large part generally speaking, on three levels:

of the freedom struggle itself. When American correspondent Webb (1) They persuade people to change in the ways that we want Miller saw wave after wave of unarmed volunteers, in bands of twenty-them to—and often.

five, walking into a hail of beatings without even lifting an arm (2) Contrary to all expectations, they don’t get you killed nearly as to protect themselves, he wired, “In eighteen years of reporting in often as violence does.There are no “victim-precipitated homicides.” In twenty-two countries I have never witnessed such harrowing scenes.”

other words, nonviolence can be dangerous, but not nearly as danger-Yet on they came, walking deliberately into the blows, taking only ous as violence. And finally,

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station patching up the fallen and splinting their broken bones.

afterward, giving press conferences and visiting senators. Camera Now the fact is that not only this “raid” but also the entire Salt crews were knocking down the door to our tiny office a day later—

Satyagraha campaign were, technically, utter failures. Outside of a few and Kosovo was world news. In the event, there was no big turn-minor concessions wrested from the government in the existing salt around. The “international community” (I always put that in quotes, laws, nothing seemed to change.Yet now we know that this bloody cli-because it isn’t much of a community) completely failed to stand up max made India’s freedom inevitable, because it showed what the to President Slobodan Milosevic and just left the Kosovars to their fate Satyagraha volunteers were made of, and what the oppressive system until matters got much worse and they could use bombs (which made of government that the British had imposed on India was made of.

matters much worse). But you have to be realistic—and humble. We When freedom came, sixteen years later, the agony of the 320 hospi-were a handful of unknown locals 10,000 miles away, operating on a talized marchers, and the two who died, had borne its fruit.16

shoestring, and yet we succeeded beyond our wildest dreams in bring-If Gandhi noticed the delicate irony—that the campaign that did ing an egregious situation to world attention.

the greatest work didn’t “work” at all—it did not faze him. It illusI sometimes think that the reason we can’t easily understand non-trates perfectly his formula for successful action, which comes straight violence is that the “non-inane” reality of the thing is so enormous that from the Bhagavad Gita: use the right means in a just cause and leave we’re like ants crawling over a colossal Gulliver. No one, not even the results in the hands of God. In another idiom, if you put good Gandhi, could grasp the whole thing at once.You have to sketch in the energy into a situation, good results have to follow, somewhere.

picture of how it works from various angles, like that popular form of Anyone who works for nonviolence has seen this phenomenon, Hindu worship called arati, where you take lighted camphor or an oil though usually on a smaller scale. Before all-out war broke out in lamp in your right hand and move it in slow circles around the head Kosovo in March 1998, a group I work with sent six observers to the and neck of the god you’re worshipping, be it Ganesha or the Divine region to give moral support and some nonviolence training to the Mother, or whomever.You are garlanding him or her with light.When ethnically Albanian students demonstrating against their already harsh this is done in the sanctum sanctorum of a temple, or the worship mistreatment by the Serbian regime. I happened to be coming back room deep inside a nonelectrified home, the shadows shifting as you from Denver the day after they reached Prishtina, and by mere chance illuminate the divine image from every angle give a distinct impres-I ran into our board president waiting for the same plane back to San sion of movement. Ganesha comes alive.

Francisco. Steve greeted me with some alarm. “Have you heard the To illuminate the worshipful picture of peace, we, too, have to news? David [our executive director] is arrested: they’re all in jail.” We move reverently around her, seeing her beauty from every angle.That’s read the details on my laptop: we had failed. The whole group was why I made bold to put one of my own small experiences side by side arrested on a minor technicality and sentenced to ten days in a Serbian with the mighty “experiment with truth” at Dharasana. Both illustrate, jail, followed by expulsion. What we did not know was that the even in their disparity, how deeper forces seem to take over and con-American attaché was at their hearing, and events had already taken duct nonviolent efforts to good, but not always foreseen, conclusions.

a course of their own. Within hours, pictures of the six Americans, I will share with you some examples of nonviolence (three big ones and with their shaved heads, started appearing on world news services. By a few extras I couldn’t resist) that are as different from each other as the time we reached San Francisco the press was on full alert. Our can be—spaced pretty evenly around the wide circle of the possible.

friends were released the next morning and back in Washington soon With some imagination, peace can come alive for us at the center.

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Calling Hitler’s Bluff:

following morning, from every part of the city, “as though in answer The Rosenstraße Pr ison Demonstration to a call—as though prearranged,” the women converged on the Rosenstraße detention center, demanding the release of their loved

“It never would have worked against the Nazis.” This routine objection ones.17 All day they defied orders to leave.As their numbers swelled to has to be taken seriously, because what people really mean by it is, more than 6,000, the prisoners themselves took courage and began since nonviolence wouldn’t have worked against the Nazis—i.e., since clamoring through the barred windows to be released. It was an it’s too weak to work against powerful opposition—we have to keep acutely embarrassing display. Gestapo headquarters, as mentioned, violence around to fall back on. But if we do this, nonviolence cannot was but a few blocks away. One or two machine guns could have swept work: nonviolence plus violence, nonviolence with violence held in the street clear of these troublemakers—if there were nothing in the reserve, is no nonviolence at all. That makes the objection, if it were world but threat force.

true, serious indeed.

For many years this episode provided an answer to the inevitable There are several things wrong with it, however. One is, how can

“it never would have worked,” etc., because in fact the demonstrations something not work when it hasn’t been tried? With a very few excep-worked. They created an impossible dilemma for the regime, and tions, one of which we’re about to consider, the only weapons people within a few days the Gestapo, not the women, blinked. By Sunday the knew to use against Nazism were either passivity, which, whatever the men were free. Some of them had been already deported to concen-reasons for adopting it, was a disaster; or violence, which, as we’re tration camps.They were told never to talk about what they had seen beginning to learn today, was a flawed success.The objection that non-there, and hastily put on trains to Berlin, so hastily that some of them violence would not have worked is based on sheer speculation. But couldn’t get back their own clothes.

worse than that, it’s false.

Until recently I thought, like everyone else who knew about the In Berlin in 1943, on a gray weekend at the end of February, police episode, even most Germans, that the “Aryan-related” sons and hus-and Gestapo swept through the cold streets and arrested the remaining bands were no doubt quietly rearrested later in twos and threes, and Jews, mostly men, who had been left more or less at large because they then there was no one to save them. So the demonstration had a spec-were Jews “of Aryan kin,” i.e., married to non-Jewish wives.

tacular but not a lasting success; it “worked,” but it did not work. It did There was little resistance to the unannounced roundup, as may not have much lasting effect on the whole system. Or so we thought.

well be imagined.The arrestees were brought to a large, recently con-In 1996, a full-length study appeared, with the superb title verted building on the Rosenstraße, a few blocks from a major Resistance of the Heart, documenting what actually happened, not only Gestapo headquarters, without incident. Only two weeks earlier, in in Berlin but Paris and other cities that also had the Mischling, or Munich, the student-led “White Rose” conspiracy had been betrayed

“mixed-breed,” problem, while each local headquarters watched anx-to the Gestapo, and virtually all its youthful members were on their iously for guidelines from the German capital. The book is full of way to the guillotine. However, in Berlin the “Jewish Radio,” as the fascinating details about the insanity of Nazi logic, and the contradic-still-remaining Jews’ informal phone network was called, was tions of violence—for example, that the führer himself refused to buzzing, and within hours the wives and, in some cases, mothers of make any decision. He whose “fanatical will,” he once boasted, had the arrested men learned where they had been taken.What then took

“rescued the German nation” was paralyzed. Nonviolence paralyzed place was like nothing that had ever happened under Nazi rule. By the him. The big surprise, however, is that virtually everyone snatched 100

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back from the jaws of death by their loved ones out in front of chances are that few of them were aware of what was really going on Number 1–2 Rosenstraße survived the war. As did their colleagues in in India or would have dreamed they could apply the Indians’ methods Paris and other capitals under Nazi control. In other words, tens of in their own circumstances. Some of them may have been there when thousands of people were rescued by this impromptu demonstration the führer deigned to appear briefly with a most un-Gandhian Indian by untrained women, women who had been living for more than a freedom fighter, Subhas Chandra Bose, whose way of fighting the decade under a regime of authoritarian terror, the likes of which the British was to join the Axis forces.Thus, without leadership or a sense modern world had rarely seen. Nonviolence was almost never tried of how to proceed, they were naturally not able to capitalize on their against the Nazis, but when it was, it scored a resounding victory.18

discovery.Their spontaneous demonstration therefore “worked,” i.e., The very success of the demonstrations raises a somewhat embar-it accomplished the desired result right there at hand; apparently, it rassing question: why did they stop? Why did no one see the holes in did not do much work (without quote marks) to change the system, the Fascist armor this episode revealed? As the study pointed out, because whatever the peak of courage reached by the demonstrators probably a reason the episode has been so well ignored lies in this on that occasion, they had no idea how to turn it into a movement, implication, that if one demonstration worked, others might have either by bringing about a more enduring conversion within them-done more. And imagine if they had started sooner. . . .

selves or some kind of outward organization. For that reason, we can Rather than conclude that the event was passed over in silence assume, it had no noticeable long-term effect. That was not the case because some were embarrassed by its very success, I prefer the chari-with the next event I would like to consider.

table, and more practical, view that it’s been ignored not so much out of moral cowardice as cultural ignorance.You just don’t see what’s com-The Saint of Auschwitz

ing at you from another paradigm, even if it’s right before your eyes.

The resistance at the Rosenstraße detention center did not notice-At Auschwitz one day during the summer of 1941, a Polish prisoner ably slow the Nazi juggernaut all by itself.Would we have expected it from Block 14 managed to escape. The routine punishment for such to? It’s unlikely that more than a handful of those involved even knew an event was to take the entire block, several hundred men who were the name of the force that they were wielding, much less how to build themselves hanging onto life by a thread, and force them to stand at on it. As a full-fledged insurrection, it was of course too little, too attention until the escapee was hunted down. If he were not found, late—as if the women had had any such intention. Still, the events of ten others would be culled out and put in “the Bunker,” a bare under-that dramatic weekend reveal a solid nonviolent principle: through a ground cell, without food or water, to slowly die. It was considered courageous act of self-sacrifice, the demonstrators brought about a the worst thing that could happen to you at Auschwitz. Guards and momentary rehumanization of the Jewish prisoners—their loved prisoners alike strained to catch the occasional sounds from the sol-ones—in the hardened hearts of the Gestapo. The large crowd of diers and dogs searching the surrounding swamp. Hours went by.

women demonstrators were not only somewhat awkward to massacre Gestapo Commandant Fritsch paced back and forth in front of them in broad daylight, but the incident also gave a salutary yank on their like a pendulum of doom.The miserable daily soup ration was brought captors’ ideological blinders.

out, but Fritsch ordered it poured down the drain before the eyes of But they were, needless to say, totally untrained for such resist-the starving men. Finally, toward evening, the search was declared a ance. Nonviolence training was scarce in Berlin in the forties! The failure. One after another, ten men were pulled out of formation to 102

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pay with their lives for one man’s desperate escape. “Long live mud. . . .Thousands of prisoners were convinced the Poland!” shouted one; another, a father, broke down and wept, “My true world continued to exist and that our torturers poor wife, my poor children. Goodbye, goodbye!”19

would not be able to destroy it. . . .To say that Father Then, once more, an unheard-of thing happened: a prisoner Kolbe died for one of us or that person’s family is too stepped calmly out of line and started walking toward the comman-great a simplification. His death was the salvation of dant. For some reason, no one shot him; Commandant Fritsch thousands.20

instinctively pulled out his pistol but only shouted, “Who is this Polish Schwein?” Word shot around: it was him—Father Kolbe of The “salvation of thousands” here is not metaphorical. For you and Niepokalanów. For the last two years, Father Maximilian Mary Kolbe me, a mood swing up or down is not a matter of life or death, but to had been a living symbol of human endurance and dignity for the a prisoner at Auschwitz that is exactly what it was. As every doctor whole camp. Now he walked up to Commandant Fritsch and calmly knows, when a person is critically ill, the will to live can make the said to him, in good German, “I have a request.” When Fritsch recov-difference between life and death, and in the death camps everyone ered from the shock, he barked, “Well, what do you want?” and Kolbe was critically ill. A prisoner who lost his or her will to go on visibly quietly said, “I would like permission to die in place of one of these collapsed and was generally dead within two weeks.21 It’s quite possi-men.”A priest was almost as low as a Jew in the grotesque ideology of ble that thousands, not just Sergeant Gajowniczek, who would other-the Nazis, and Fritsch scornfully granted the request, totally misun-wise have died in that man-made hell, got the courage to live on, in derstanding its power.The husband and father who had wept, Sergeant some cases long enough to see the day of liberation.

Franciszek Gajowniczek, would live; after eight brutal days, Father So it seems that nonviolence did work against the Nazis—not to Kolbe was put to death with an injection of gasoline. (Franciszek save Father Kolbe’s life, of course (which wasn’t his purpose), and not Gajowniczek died recently at the age of ninety-three in his home city only to save the life of one other person (which was), but to release a of Brzeg, having testified at the papal institution of Kolbe as a Martyr forbidden ingredient—hope—into the nightmare of dehumanization of the Church).

in which the Nazis had tried to entangle the minds of millions.

We’d be justified to call this act the climax of Father Kolbe’s spir-This was done by a single man with no external resources what-itual career.What was the effect of his final, unpremeditated sacrifice?

ever, yet in a sense it was even more effective than the Rosenstraße What good did it do? Here is the testimony of an eyewitness, George demonstration that was carried out by 6,000 citizens who were tech-Bielecki:

nically free. It is the degree of the sacrifice, not the number of the sacrificers, that gives a nonviolent act its power. Consider what Father It was an enormous shock to the whole camp. We Kolbe was up against. Hitler’s stated ambition “to prepare a generation became aware someone unknown among us in this of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless, and cruel”

spiritual night . . . was raising the standard of love on had succeeded with many like the guards at Auschwitz, some of whom high. Someone unknown, like everyone else, . . .

had been systematically dehumanized since they were children. But went to a horrible death for the sake of someone not Father Kolbe had been systematically training himself since he was young.

even related to him. Therefore it is not true, we At Auschwitz he had endured extreme abuse without succumbing to cried, that humanity is cast down and trampled in the hatred; he had intense faith that there was a supreme, compassionate 104

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reality behind all appearances, which in his case was Mary, the Mother between passivity and nonviolence. Was father Kolbe “passive” when of God, and that this reality was present even in his oppressors, he stepped forward to die for another human being, thus setting the though they were entirely unaware of it. He was, therefore, literally a whole Nazi lie on its ear? Outside of the isolated, little-known events match for them. His humanity was, to use a phrase of Gandhi’s, “math-like the two we’ve just considered, active nonviolence was rarely tried ematically proportionate” to their inhumanity.

against the Nazis or anyone else in the Western hemisphere. The Once we know what to look for, the underlying forces that deter-Munich students of the “White Rose” conspiracy, for example, issued mine the outcome of a nonviolent act are not too difficult to discern.

leaflets calling for “passive resistance,” but they had little notion what Perhaps, if we knew this science somewhat better, we would be able passive resistance was, not to mention the subtle but important to assess such cases still more accurately, or even predict their out-difference between it and active nonviolence. No, it was passivity that comes. One thing is certain: nonviolence did work against the Nazis.

was tried against the Nazis. Harsh as it may sound to say this, when It worked proportionally to the balance of the human power over the one is passive in the face of such aggression, passive out of fear, one is dehumanization trying to hold it in check. It will always work against going along with the violence, obeying its logic. This is not to con-oppressors—provided we’ve trained ourselves as well as they have.22

demn anyone caught in such a trap. To say that someone was passive It should be clear now why Theodore Roszak put the word “work”

out of ignorance of an alternative is not to say he or she was morally in quotes when he wrote that people say nonviolence doesn’t “work.”

wrong, which in any case is language I rarely use. It is not to condemn It’s extremely important to be clear about what we mean when we say those caught in such a tragedy; it’s to understand the choices so that that any act did or did not “work.” If we mean, did it do just what people will not be caught in them again.

we wanted, visibly, immediately?, then yes, nonviolence sometimes The trap that sprang shut on the “Aryan-related” Jews of Berlin on doesn’t “work.” It did not, for example, save Father Kolbe’s life. But if February 27, 1943, was the result of an evil that had gone on practi-we mean, did it have a long-term positive effect on the whole system, cally unopposed for two decades; the power that forced apart the jaws perhaps one that the actor didn’t foresee?, then we get a very different of that trap long enough to let some victims escape must have been, answer. In these terms we can make a central proposition about non-at least for that moment, just as strong. What gave these women—

violent versus violent effectiveness that’s key to understanding the leaderless, unorganized, untrained, and probably unaware that what whole subject:

they were doing has a name—strength enough to face down the Gestapo? It was love for their husbands and sons. Perhaps we can think Nonviolence sometimes “works” and always works of the bond between husband and wife, and mother and son—the while

force of love that holds together the “nuclear family”—the way we violence sometimes “works” but never works.

think of the “strong force” that holds together the nucleus of an atom: sometimes it shows its strength only when pulled apart.

Sometimes we hear a common variation on “It never would have These considerations bring us to an important element in nonvi-worked against the Nazis,” namely, “It sure didn’t work against the olent science that is often forgotten by those who object that it “never Nazis!” People who say this are assuming that the millions who went would have worked” against a very violent opponent: it makes a lot of to their deaths in the Holocaust were being “nonviolent.” As we’ve difference that Nazism went practically unopposed for so long.

seen before, it’s extremely important to be clear about the difference I have found it useful to think of the way violence feeds on itself, 106

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the escalation of conflict, as a steep curve, where time is plotted when it is not. As anger increases, “hearing” gets dim.Then a different against intensity—intensity measured not by the number of weapons level of force has to be used. Gandhi, drawing as usual on his own but the degree of dehumanization, the single most telling parameter experience, defined this psychological boundary very well: of hostility. The important thing to bear in mind is that nonviolence, like violence, also comes in degrees. In the case of violence, time turns Things of fundamental importance to the people are up a rheostat and progressively more energy is activated. Therefore, not secured by reason alone but have to be purchased when a conflict has been allowed to go on and on untended, the with their suffering . . . if you want something really degree of nonviolence we need has to “escalate” accordingly. The important to be done you must not merely satisfy the longer we wait, the more soul force we need to apply.

reason, you must move the heart also.23

For practical purposes, we can say that conflicts escalate in three stages:

We have now crossed the border, in other words, into phase two, In the first phase, on the low “foothill” of the curve, conflicts can the zone of Satyagraha. In this region the “law of suffering” that Gandhi be successfully handled by the art of conflict resolution: there is a discovered in South Africa applies, because we need to reach the other worsening dispute, perhaps, but the parties can still work things out, party at a deeper level than reason. One party has to “give when it either directly or through a mediator, by representing grievances and hurts” and reawaken the now seriously alienated opponent by volun-negotiating them; give and take is still possible. But a time comes tarily taking on that hurt—the hurt, or at least the risk of being hurt—not trying to avoid it.The women at the Rosenstraße detention center showed that sometimes just risking pain, which involves the mastery of one’s fear, can be extremely effective.

Phase

Phase

Phase

Father Kolbe carried the same principle to the extreme degree.

1

2

3

Here the dehumanization had become so intense, the power relationship so unequal, the time for acting so short, that he had to lay down his life to make it work. He illustrates how to apply nonviolence at the really steep section of the curve, phase three, when there’s nothing for it but the final sacrifice. Again the power comes, as Gandhi often stated, from the satyagrahi’s being willing to die.Whether or not he or she will actually die depends on various external circumstances, but he or she is not bluffing.When Gandhi fasted unto death, it was not a ploy.

He made the supreme renunciation and put his life on the block, leaving sity

his opponents to respond as they would. (In his case, they always yielded, but sometimes at the eleventh hour.) Inten

I find that this graph settles “would never have worked” objections Time

very well, for almost without exception, those who make the objections The escalation of conflict

are thinking of an extreme situation in which they have to imagine 108

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themselves suddenly invoking nonviolence very late in the game—for overtaken by surprise events.They did have the advantage of inspired example, when an entire nation has gone on dehumanizing its con-leadership. And most importantly, they had gone through a certain sciousness without hindrance for decades. Naturally, this stacks the amount of preparation. Moreover, they were a community of faith and cards! We in the “international community” were helpless in Yugoslavia (thanks again to the leadership they enjoyed) were able to draw inspi-because we stood around doing nothing while Mr. Milosevic used his ration and ideas and wisdom from the Indian freedom struggle with state-controlled media to drive nationalist Serbs into a frenzy of which, we now know, they had fairly extensive contacts.24 All these hatred. Nonviolence in Germany would have been much less costly in things helped them rise beautifully to the unexpected opportunity for 1918 or 1920—as in fact it was, during the Kapp Putsch—or 1932.

their nonviolent moment, even though they were not thrown back on Nonetheless, that there is a way for nonviolence to work even late in their deepest resources quite as much as the women of Berlin, whose the game is what the Rosenstraße women and Father Kolbe begin to sheer desperation we may well imagine. The modest training—and show us. How nonviolence would have worked against the Nazis impressive leadership—of the Birmingham marchers also enabled depends on when we imagine it might have been applied and by them to do the critical thing the Berlin wives could not do: follow up.

whom; whether it would have worked is not in question. Assurances to This may be the most important difference in terms of a major, systemic the contrary notwithstanding, it would have worked—in fact, it did.

effect on the future. Like a number of spontaneous nonviolent episodes, Some years ago—but his judgment still applies—the well-known Birmingham succeeded. Unlike many others, it was part of a movement activist and scholar David Dellinger, who titled his autobiography that also, in large part, succeeded, and that succeeded against a resist-From Yale to Jail, deemed that we understand nonviolence about the ance comparable to Nazism in its ideological vehemence.

way we understood electricity in the days of Marconi and Edison.This strikes me as an apt comparison. Marconi and Edison knew they were Taking It from the Top: The Holy Exper iment dealing with a natural force, and that it must have a great untapped potential, but little else. Gradually, they figured out the manner of this The events we have described at Berlin, Birmingham, and Dharasana force (despite its mysterious nature: to this day no one really knows share a similar structure, and they are the kind of event most of us what electricity is) and started learning how to use it without getting associate with the word nonviolence: a protest movement by an hurt.Which is exactly what we’re talking about here.

oppressed group resisting abusive authority. Even there, on familiar Comparing, for example, the Rosenstraße demonstration with turf, we found many myths and misconceptions that needed chipping the episode of the Birmingham marchers, we can further refine our away before we could appreciate how even rudimentary nonviolence sense of what makes a nonviolent interaction tick.The Berlin women can be surprisingly effective against determined and serious opposi-

(like the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina or the Women in tion, that is, against people with a very dehumanizing outlook whose Black in Israel or Serbia) had one powerful thing going for them: the bullying has gone unchecked for a long time.

“nuclear power” roused by the extreme threat to their loved ones.This Now we can push off into less familiar territory or, if you will, power was not there to sweep aside the fear in the Birmingham widen the lens. Nonviolence can’t be only a weapon of the oppressed, marchers, but several things were there to enhance the nonviolent any more than can electricity only appear as great flashes from the sky, power of their impromptu action.They were being proactive, for one or gravity only work on falling apples.We have tended not to look for thing. It was they themselves who were on the march, not passively nonviolence anywhere else, because we think that the powerful don’t 110

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need nonviolence while the weak have no other recourse. By now we nonviolence in the colony made a relative paradise for the indigenous should begin to suspect that both of these assumptions are wrong.

and the conquering peoples compared to the bloody shambles of a Nonviolence can of course come “from below,” but it can also be relationship that obtained elsewhere and whose legacy we have still offered from the high seats of power. Colonial America can boast one not overcome.

of the best-known examples. Almost a century before the revolution, In the Holy Experiment, nonviolence (needless to say, still an in March 1681, King Charles II gave William Penn governorship of the unknown word at that time) was no rebellion against established vast territory that today bears his name. Unlike most colonists, Penn authority; it was the established authority. Nor was it spontaneous, crossed the Atlantic with a double mandate: empowered by his king to accidental, or ad hoc as so many nonviolent episodes still are today. It administer a colony, he also came with the blessings of his spiritual

“trickled down” from the mind of George Fox, the founder of Quaker mentor, who was one of the greatest dissenters of British history and one theology and social teaching. America has been home to many utopian of the most effective promoters of radical nonviolence ever in the West experiments, but not too many utopian regimes, especially regimes

—George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends. Penn used his mind-that furnish a model—if we would only use it—for governing on a boggling opportunity to carry out what history now calls the “Holy national scale.

Experiment”—seventy years of governance by nonviolent principles.

The colony experienced problems of every kind, including fric-Even before leaving England, Penn wrote a now-famous letter to tion with the Crown, but despite them the house that nonviolence his new subjects, the Delaware Indians, which witnesses to a tolerance built on early Quaker lines showed that nonviolence could work in far ahead of its time (and, sadly, often ours). He said, in part: every department, from defense to criminal justice. It also showed that a regime based on this principle of order is robust. The experi-I am very sensible of the unkindness and injustice that ment endured until the vision faded and the Quaker party lost its hath been too much exercised toward you by the peo-mandate at the ballot box. It was not overwhelmed either by the ple of these parts of the world . . . but . . . I have great world around it or by the power of the Crown above it, both of which love and regard toward you, and I desire to win and were based on depressingly conventional principles. For seventy years gain your love and friendship, by a kind, just and it housed under one judicial roof a diverse collection of colonists from peaceable life.25

many parts of Europe and several religions who lived in a relatively high state of harmony under the “Great Law” their governor had set Penn actually carried this out to a remarkable degree. In all ways up in 1682.This law was in many ways more humane than the crime that were possible, given the growing inequality of the situation, he bill of 1991. Under the Great Law, capital crimes were reduced from tried to prevent the indigenous peoples’ exploitation by Europeans.

200 to exactly two—treason and murder—a tremendous step for-

“The result was to be an unparalleled record of some seventy years of ward for its time, which we are now reversing.27 The Great Law even almost completely unbroken peaceful association” between them.26 Of abolished war—on December 7, 1682. (Why not celebrate that, course, from our own perspective, perhaps Penn should have refused instead of Pearl Harbor?) The Quaker regime produced both internal to rule over the native peoples at all. That is easy to say nearly 300

and external kinds of security: the colony remained an island of peace years after the fact, and perhaps perfect nonviolence would have said it when storms swept over surrounding territories, traumatizing the then. But life doesn’t become perfect all at once. The beginnings of relations of the red and white races down to our own time.

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In this way, despite its problems, the seventy-year Quaker regime but instead of rejoicing, he recorded that the horror of war was borne

“laid the foundations for what became some of the . . . guiding prin-in on him by the scenes of death and suffering. That vision turned an ciples of an entire nation.”28 America as a whole owes something to the ordinary conquest into a personal crisis, a demand for self-conquest, Holy Experiment, which was based squarely upon ideals and princi-that was to change history. As the emperor described it: ples that we would recognize today as nonviolence and which tried to carry those principles out in social policy, criminal justice, religious When the King, Priyadarsi [Ashoka], Beloved of the toleration—even national defense.

Gods, had been consecrated eight years, Kalinga was As Gandhi was later to declare, “Nonviolence that merely offers conquered. 150,000 people were thence taken cap-civil resistance to the authorities and goes no further scarcely deserves tive, 100,000 were killed, and many more died. Just the name.”29 Under his leadership, it went much further indeed, and after the taking of Kalinga the Beloved of the Gods in terms of power relationships it went in three directions.While the began to follow Righteousness [ dharma, i.e., he Indian satyagrahis were resisting the Raj, they were also, on Gandhi’s adopted Buddhism], to love Righteousness, to give insistence, trying to be nonviolent toward the Muslim community that instruction in Righteousness. When an unconquered shared the British yoke with them, and toward the “scheduled castes”

country is conquered, people are killed, they die, or who were beneath them in the ancient Hindu social hierarchy. If their are made captive.That the Beloved of the Gods finds anti-British resistance came from below, in terms of political space, very pitiful and grievous. . . .Today, if a hundredth or they were also nonviolently working sideways on the communal ques-a thousandth part of those who suffered in Kalinga tion and downward toward the former untouchables, renamed by were to be killed, to die, or be taken captive, it would Gandhi harijans, or “children of God.” He came to feel very early on be very grievous to the Beloved of the Gods. If any-that these two relationships were, if anything, more important than one does him wrong it will be forgiven as far as it can nonviolence toward their rulers, that relationships of truth with their be forgiven. The Beloved of the Gods even reasons equals and with their social “inferiors”—with the underclass they with the forest tribes in his empire, and seeks to themselves had created—were an essential prerequisite to loosening reform them. But the Beloved of the Gods is not only the British hold. Nonviolence was the rule of life, not the rule of only compassionate, he is powerful, and he tells them to one kind of relationship.

repent, lest they be slain. For the Beloved of the Gods Gandhi himself never showed the slightest inclination to take pub-desires safety, self-control, justice and happiness lic office. But there was a long tradition in India of the ideal ruler, who for all beings. The Beloved of the Gods considers would hold sway over his or her subjects by integrative power instead that the greatest of all victories is the victory of of threat power, and that ideal came close to being a reality in at least Righteousness.30

one famous case I’ve already alluded to—when Emperor Ashoka, whom H.G.Wells called the greatest emperor in history, built his rule Ashoka reigned from 273 B.C.E. until he died, of natural causes, in on Buddhist principles in north-central India. Ashoka had ascended 232 B.C.E., having considerably enlarged the already great territories the throne of his father’s sizable kingdom probably in 269 B.C.E. After he had inherited from his famous grandfather, Chandragupta Maurya.

he had exercised power for about eight years, he won a famous victory, As this edict makes clear, he had no intention of abdicating the 114

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responsibility of securing his realm; indeed, he enlarged it, but he was not to hurt los gavioteros because the latter’s experiment was so never again to practice violence as an instrument of conquest. He valuable.31 On a small scale, the episode shows again that when it showed that one in power could be pragmatic and yet compassionate.

comes to the power of nonviolence, even Huxley’s imagination did He showed, if you will, that compassion not only comes from not go far enough.The novel does allow us to discern that, yes, non-strength—it begets strength. William Penn was a major contributor, violence doesn’t “work”—in novels; but its alleged defenselessness is through an important essay, to the tradition of “perpetual peace”

not borne out by the logic of science or the facts of history.With non-thinking in Europe, but Ashoka’s influence went even further, for it violence we can protect the good as well as disrupt the schemes of the was he who spread Buddhism to much of Southeast Asia.

tyrannical.

It is interesting to compare these two real experiments with the fate of a utopian regime in Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, which so Spr ingtime in Prague

captured the imagination of the sixties. Its somewhat psychedelic version of mysticism and its escapist picture of a free life spoke to that In the late spring of 1968, the Soviet high command became alarmed generation’s hungers, but in one important respect it perpetuated, by the “dangerous” liberalizations of party secretary Aleksander unconsciously, the very worldview it was trying to escape. The novel Dubcek, which were threatening to create a different kind of ends with doom hanging over the island paradise, which is about to be Communism in Czechoslovakia. Their response to “socialism with a overwhelmed by a neighboring state. The outside world is jealous of human face” was to order massive Warsaw Pact armies into the coun-the island. That’s realistic enough. And because the islanders are try. Soviet military experts predicted it would take four days to bring unaggressive they have no defense. That isn’t. Neither the Holy Czechoslovakia to heel, and by military criteria they were right. But Experiment of Emperor Ashoka nor of William Penn was defenseless those are not the only criteria on which the real world runs. Lacking against outside pressures, as we have seen. Neither was the weapon-a military way to defend themselves, the Czechs somehow came up less Tokugawa Shogunate nor contemporary Costa Rica—one of with a rough-and-ready civilian resistance that was nonviolent in char-twelve national states without a defense force, and one of the very few acter. They could not keep the Soviets out, but they could and did that does not rely on a defense arrangement with any other state—nor refuse to obey curfew orders, using that time to stroll about in the other smaller and lesser-known regimes that have renounced the streets and plant flowers in soldiers’ rifles or engage them in heated protection of violence in some way or degree.

discussions. They turned street signs around and watched armored In fact, we can check the validity of Huxley’s imaginary finale in columns rumble off aimlessly into the countryside; in one such another way.At dawn one day, the Gaviotans who provided us with the episode, an entire Polish army that tried to invade was fooled into opening image of this book were getting ready to go to work when spending a whole day circling back to the Polish border. (A friend of they found themselves “visited” by an armed unit of the Fuerzas mine was in a Prague bookstore when a Russian tank pulled up out-Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. The uniformed brigade tried to side. One of the soldiers came in and patiently waited his turn at the explain to the utopians the need for armed struggle. “There is no cash register, then asked for a map of the city, which he politely paid neutral ground in Colombia,” the commandant argued. “You’re either for in Czech money.) They published alternative media to replace with us or against us.” But the Gaviotans replied, “We’re with people, banned papers and radio stations, with Czech police often delivering not politics.”The guerillas left them in peace.They had been ordered outlawed newspapers in their squad cars. They defended not their 116

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territory but their institutions, and they did this not with weapons but were coerced into accepting a shadow compromise. Most of the new with a characteristic Czech blend of humor, courage, and solidarity.

recruits were brought in from remote parts of the Soviet empire and As far as possible, life went on as if the occupation forces were simply could not understand a Slavic language. An armed resistance that held not there.

off such an overwhelming force for eight months would have passed into Remember, they were not dealing with the dispirited Russian folklore—a new Thermopylae, which we remember after 2,000 years.

army, which was to bog down in Afghanistan and Chechnya; they were But in 1968 there wasn’t even a name for the type of resistance the dealing with half a million determined troops under orders to put Czech civilians were carrying out, and so we were left with the irony of down what they were told, and many must have believed, was a full-Prague Spring—that because an untrained people were able to offer fledged counterrevolution. For eight full months, from August 20, successful resistance for eight months without shedding a drop of blood, 1968, to April 17, 1969, these armies were frustrated by untrained the world hardly noticed anything was happening.

citizens who kept on fraternizing with them as people while deter-Now, however, we do have a name for this kind of resistance, minedly noncooperating with them as invaders. As a KGB agent ten thanks in large part to Gene Sharp’s pioneering work.32 What the years later confided, after a few drinks, to my friend Gene Sharp of Czechs did is now known as Civilian-Based Defense (CBD). CBD is the Center for Nonviolent Sanctions at Harvard, “My boy, it was a one of two main forms in which nonviolence has emerged as an alter-complete disaster!”

native to war, and I’ll give both a thorough review later, in chapter 8.

Later, when the ghastly Soviet empire collapsed from inside, We should note, for now, two principles of CBD by which a deter-taking most of world Communism down with it, jubilant Western mined and reasonably united people can withstand an invasion, as in analysts would call it the “end of history.” What are we going to learn Prague, or an internal takeover, such as the failed proto-Fascist Kapp from all this history, then? Should not the spontaneous Soviet collapse Putch in Weimar Germany in 1920; or even resist within the context (not unlike the Rosenstraße demonstrations) have prompted a sober-of an occupation, like the Norwegian schoolteachers’ strike, which ing reflection—that we could have dealt with the Communist menace prevented the Nazification of the Norwegian school system. One all along in an entirely different mode, without that expense of human principle is: a people who will not submit cannot be ruled.They can life, that mortgaging of the hope of half the world for a decent devel-be killed, but they cannot be ruled.The other is: if a people can stead-opment, not to mention the psychological trauma endured by all of fastly discriminate between a group of people and their agenda—

us when all life on earth hung at risk? “Prague Spring” showed the between the sinners and the sin—resolutely resisting the latter while innate weakness of such an oppressive system, and the glimmer of a just as resolutely acknowledging the humanity of the former, they way to exploit that weakness. It is one of the best-known examples develop an almost irresistible force. Did the Prague resistance “work”?

of spontaneous nonviolence in Europe but, like all examples of non-No, it did not save the Czech liberalization. And yet, I would say, it violence anywhere, is scarcely known to any but a small band of

“worked” extremely well, considering that it bought the country eight prophetic enthusiasts.

exhilarating months, even though it was an impromptu reaction by In the eight months that it took for Moscow to reassert control people who—as usual—had no training and no real leadership for this over Czechoslovakia, whole armies had to be rotated out of the country kind of social action, most of whom probably could not have told you and replaced with troops who had not been “corrupted” by contact what it’s called, not to mention how to apply its principles with flexi-with the civilians. Resistance sputtered on even after the civilian leaders bility and appropriateness. It “worked” well enough to allow us to 118

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think that it might have finally prevailed, had the Czechs been deter-territory. But it was also Hugenot territory, where a Protestant mined to go on until the peace was won, had they understood what minority had endured persecutions in centuries past.When the occu-they had stumbled upon.

pation came to Le Chambon, Pastor André Trocmé and his wife, And did Prague Spring work (no quote marks)? Let me draw on Magda, inspired their whole parish to set up an underground escape the testimony of an eyewitness, my late friend Petra Kelly: route that went on sheltering refugees or spiriting them out of the country, under the noses of the Vichy government and the nearby Tatar During the summer of 1968, when nonviolent citi-Legion of the SS, throughout the war. If our previous examples zens in Prague were resisting the occupying Soviet showed that nonviolence can work against bitter opposition, or from forces, my grandmother and I were there in a hotel the political top, or against whole states—if they began to give us near Wenceslaus Square, under house arrest. Even some sense, in other words, of the variety and range of its applications after Dubcek and his close associates were arrested,

—then the resistance at Le Chambon tells us something about its the people remained steadfast in their resistance.

inner consistency.

Eventually . . . the Soviets were able to reassert their The resistance of the Chambonnais is one of the few cases that is authority and delay the reforms of the Prague Spring not a leaderless, “amateur” effort:Trocmé had come to his convictions by twenty-one years. But through their sacrifice and early and knew of Gandhi through the Fellowship of Reconciliation suffering, the people of Czechoslovakia . . . later did (FOR), a venerable peace organization begun by two Quakers, a indeed succeed in their “Velvet Revolution.” These German, and an Englishman, who found themselves on a railway plat-events demonstrate the power of nonviolent social form in Cologne at the outbreak of WWI and swore never to let the defense.33

enmity of their countries come between them or their joint longing for peace. FOR has today one of the longest track records of an existing The power, in other words, to change things for the better, to peace group, and one of the best foundations in nonviolent principles.

solve unforeseen problems down the road—and sometimes those at Outside of the Danish underground’s rescue of that country’s entire hand as well. Prague Spring did not last long. But then, neither did the Jewish population, the resistance at Le Chambon was the largest such mighty empire that seemed to win that unequal struggle.

operation in Europe and has been relatively well known to a general public since ethicist Phillip Hallie wrote his study Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. One interesting question is, how did an operation of that size Say It with Flowers?

escape the attention of the Germans?

And the interesting answer is, it didn’t. Many years after the The stories of many Holocaust rescuers have been coming to light in events of 1940 to 1944, Hallie found out that the commandant of the recent years—fortunately, since a few of the rescuers are still alive.

region, Major Schmehling, had known what les responsables of Le Oskar Schindler, who is not, was made world famous by the novel and Chambon were up to the whole time, but he was so moved by the Steven Spielberg’s film about his “list,” but in peace circles one of the villagers’ courage that he actually defied the SS to protect them: “I am best-known stories unfolded in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon a good Catholic, you understand, and I can grasp these things,” he in the Haute-Loire, not far from Marseille, which is to say, in Vichy explained to the Trocmés twenty years later.34 At the time, the 120

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Chambonnais had no idea that Schmehling was protecting them at or have marched from point A to point B with placards, it doesn’t mean such risk to himself. If it had not been for Hallie’s research, neither they have been nonviolent. Not yet. And, therefore, if their demon-would we. Imagine how many things of this sort we never find out—

stration doesn’t “work” (or work, needless to say), we have no right to how many such stories are hidden in history, a science that until say that nonviolence failed. There hasn’t been any nonviolence until recently was not concerned to look for them.

there has been personal struggle or sacrifice, followed by outer Le Chambon is an example of nonviolence that both “worked” and work—both things that are, in their respective ways, quite concrete.

worked; it saved 5,000 people (i.e., it “worked against the Nazis”) and They are not requests or signs; they are acts.They may be symbols also, it created an enduring light in the midst of vast darkness. It was but first and foremost they are real.

Schmehling, who had been impressed by the sincerity of one of the But what about the protest marches Gandhi led in South Africa Chambonnais at his trial testimony, who explained to SS leader and India? Let’s look at those famous marches a little closer.The first, Colonel Metzger, “This kind of resistance has nothing to do with vio-now known as the “Great March,” was launched in South Africa on lence, nothing to do with anything we can destroy with violence.”35

November 6, 1913, when Gandhi found himself in charge of several The Chambonnais carried on their work for three years, daily thousand striking mine workers and their families. It was first of all a sticking by their choice to risk death rather than abandon the respon-deliberate act of civil disobedience undertaken by the miners-turned-sibility they had accepted. Therefore, in addition to Trocmé’s astute satyagrahis from Newcastle in Natal province, who entered the leadership, they had the advantage of passing through the crucible of Transvaal to court arrest. It was, in other words, an illegal act. Indians sustained experience. One result of this was that they moved past the who did not live there were not allowed to enter the Transvaal. It was stage that’s reached by most of the events we consider as nonviolence not about going from point A to point B to show they cared about or peace activity in the world: the stage of symbolic resistance.Things something.These mine workers had lived on company property; when began at Le Chambon the way they begin very commonly when the they walked off the job, they lost their homes, and there was nothing urge to resist awakens—as symbolic defiance, but they did not stop to do but march to the Transvaal where Gandhi would try to accom-there: “The saluting of flags, the ringing of bells, the giving of oaths modate them at his ashram.Thus, the march was not a mere symbol.

dissolved as important issues for the Chambonnais. . . .What was left They were not merely voting with their feet; they were going some-was the one activity that made Le Chambon a village of refuge: the sav-where they had to go—and defying the law in the process.

ing of innocent lives.”36 (my emphasis) This important point is so often Now recall the most famous march of all, the one that launched misunderstood that it must be stressed: in nonviolence, you don’t say the climactic Salt Satyagraha of 1930, when Gandhiji and seventy-it with symbols. When Sir Richard Attenborough’s film brought the eight ashram volunteers undertook a 200-mile “pilgrimage” to the phenomenon of Gandhi to public attention, one startled journalist, I seacoast town of Dandi to take illegal salt from the ocean in defiance recall, said that Gandhi was about “the mystery of a man just sitting, of the government monopoly.Along the way, some 70,000 people fell holding a flower.” I have seen, I believe, every still photograph and in with the civilly disobedient “pilgrims.” You may know the scene every foot of film of Gandhi that’s in public domain. He never holds a from Attenborough’s film: what you see is real people going down to flower in any of them. He has a staff, a spinning wheel, a microphone, a real sea to get real salt that had been cruelly withheld from them for but never a flower.The man used tools, not symbols.

the purpose of rank exploitation, and once again they were breaking It is important for us to realize that just because people wear ribbons an unjust law to do it.What could be more basic, more concrete, than 122

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salt? If anything, it was the absurd monopoly over salt taking that was cities and what if we said, “Do your worst: we will not give in”? Would smoke-and-mirrors, a construct that millions had taken for real until he have wanted to rule over a radioactive wasteland? In actual legal Gandhi’s brilliant gesture broke the illusion. Of course, Gandhi could and political experience, threat is a much less reliable way of getting have taken a train—but then how would he have brought with him people to comply than it seems.39 We have to react to the threat as it those tens of thousands? Call it theater, if you will, but not symbol.37

was intended or it won’t work. Tyrants rule by fear much more than Let’s look again at the Gandhian definition of power that I cited in by the actual power they have to inflict harm.To repeat, if we have no chapter 2, and mark the precise language:

fear we cannot be deterred. This is why Gandhi said that Satyagraha

“compels reason to be free,” while punishment only works on those Of power there are two kinds. One is obtained by fear who emotionally cooperate by fearing it. The Nobel Prize–winning of punishment and the other by acts of love.38 (my biologist Albert Szent-Gyeorgyi brought this out very well in an emphasis)

appreciative summary of Gandhi’s historical significance (like most people, he used the word force for what we would call threat force): I emphasize the difference between fear, on the one hand, and acts to again point up the greater concreteness of nonviolence over vio-Between the two world wars, at the heyday of lence. Symbols can play a role in the initial stage of a movement; they Colonialism, force reigned supreme. It had a sugges-can encourage people to stand up and be counted, to show solidarity.

tive power, and it was natural for the weaker to lie But once they’re all there and counted, what will the people do? If they down before the stronger.

keep on waving flags and marching from point A to point B, they will Then came Gandhi, chasing out of his country, be going against the spirit and the deepest reality of nonviolence.You almost singlehanded, the greatest military power on could almost say, at that point symbols perpetuate the very thing the earth. He taught the world that there are higher actors should be trying to dispel: the belief that only threat force has things than force, higher even than life itself; he real power, and thus nonviolence is merely an appeal to the other’s proved that force had lost its suggestive power.40

sentiment, not, as Gandhi insisted, an awakening of his or her awareness. This contradiction may be why in practice many symbols back-Violence can hurt us, but it can’t make us change our minds or fire in nonviolent action—for example the “Goddess of Liberty” put even our behavior. Only fear of violence can do that. Nonviolence, too, up by the students and other protestors at Tienanmen Square, which works on the emotions, but those of us who have used nonviolence suc-infuriated but did nothing to incapacitate, much less dissuade, the cessfully know that its native mode of operation is quite concrete.

authorities.

The Washington-based Search for Common Ground is one of the Threat power, on the other hand, does not come from punish-most successful international conflict-resolving organizations in the ment, in Gandhi’s instinctive word choice: it comes from the victim’s world, to my knowledge. They began by simply trying to get people

“fear of punishment.” No fear, no power: it has even been argued, I who are bitterly opposed to each other, who think they have no com-think cogently, that the scariest “what if ” scenario of modern times—

mon basis of agreement—for example “pro-choice” and “pro-life”

“What if Hitler had gotten the bomb?”—is really not as compelling as people—to identify some common ground to build on. John Marks, it may sound. OK, what if he had used atomic bombs on one or two the president of Search, has told me that “while dialogue is important, 124

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it should lead to something concrete.” Ideally, opponents should work it when the moment came for him to act decisively against it.

together on shared problems, like ethnic Slavs and Albanians cleaning Gandhi said of his followers and himself that the success of their up religious sites together.

efforts in the last Free India campaign in 1942 was “mathematically

“Working together on shared problems” is precisely the formula proportionate” to the purity of their nonviolence; I believe he meant discovered by a well-known team of psychologists who tried all kinds it literally, and I for one believe that it was—it is always—literally of ways to resolve conflict in a summer camp, and found that simply true. If we had some idea how to measure the forces I’m here calling having the two parties work together to fix the truck or get the well love and hate, we would probably see that there were no accidents or working did the trick. Seeing movies or eating ice cream together surprises in the long process that finally gave India her political inde-didn’t do it.41 In fact, some of the world’s most bitter conflicts are over pendence. We know how deep, how second nature in people and symbols, and some of the sweetest resolutions have come when the how institutionalized in society, was the distortion of race relations nonreal conflict was confronted with the reality check of concrete when Rosa Louise McCauley Parks refused to give up her seat on a truth.

Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955. In the years that followed, If nonviolence had no inherent power, then signs and ribbons and much of that dehumanization was exposed and released; the institu-statues would be about the most effective things you could do—but tions it had built, dismantled. How much, if we could measure it, then, if nonviolence had no inherent power, there’d be no reason to would give us the sum total of the force set in motion by Parks’s write a book about it.

training at the well-known Highlander Folk School, by her courage, by Martin Luther King Jr.’s genius and the power of sacrifice and the sustained work that he inspired in so many?

Social Warming

The weather is notoriously unpredictable. But something about it, as we know to our cost, is only too predictable: if we keep pouring For all the ugliness of his message, white supremacist Tom Metzger fluorocarbons into the atmosphere, if we keep on burning up the rain made an unarguable point in the first epigraph to this chapter: vio-forests and all the fossil fuel we can get our hands on, we will continue lence comes in degrees.There’s such a thing as “big, massive” violence, heating up the planet. Global warming is a man-made phenomenon and indeed it “works”; the bomb that destroyed the Murrah Federal we have never before experienced. Because of global warming, small Building in Oklahoma City on April 15, 1995, had more impact than perturbations in the atmosphere that are themselves perfectly normal a lone protestor railing against the government from a soapbox. This and unavoidable—maybe as small as a little updraft, causing a small would be a trivial observation were it not for the fact that the corollary, eddy somewhere over the Atlantic—can cascade into terrifically which I have been trying to demonstrate, is somehow less obvious: that destructive storms.When and where these will occur we cannot pre-nonviolence, too, comes in degrees. Any amount of love we launch in dict, but we can predict that they will occur, more and more, if we any situation will do work, but if we want it to “work,” i.e., to have a continue heating up our planet. There will be other effects of global specific effect then and there, then it has to wield enough love to warming, too.We can safely predict only one thing about the changes outweigh the hate that’s operating in that situation.The hate set loose wrought by such an unnatural development: they will hurt us.

at Auschwitz was extreme; therefore, the tremendous power of a It is just this way with violence.We cannot predict who will lose it supreme sacrifice, such as Father Kolbe made, was required to counter and walk into which high school with what kind of weapon, but we 126

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know sure as anything that as generation after generation watches times “works” but it never works; nonviolence sometimes “works” and never fails more violent TV and movies, plays more dehumanizing video games, to work to make human life somewhere somewhat better.

there will be more suffering from violence. Here is the judgment of So nonviolence is, like the weather, at once mysterious and pre-the American Psychological Association’s Commission on Violence dictable.When Gandhi said, “Nonviolence is not the inanity it has been and Youth in 1993, which was echoed over the next few years by the taken for down the ages,”43 I take him to mean both that it is far less U.S. surgeon general, the American Medical Association, and virtually limited in scope and far less arbitrary in its effects than we still believe.

all of the country’s most prestigious health organizations: “There is My Peace Studies colleague, Professor Gordon Fellman, has accurately absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on televi-described the way nonviolence is portrayed in, for example, High sion are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes Noon—a far more influential piece of fiction than Huxley’s Island. In and increased aggressive behavior.”42 When we’re boiling water, we this iconic film we see a leading lady with scruples about killing, but can’t predict which molecules will vaporize when, nor do we need to.

this “nonviolence” of hers is portrayed as “undeveloped, a simplistic, Just turn off the flame.

weak alternative with no program, no imagination, and no real The media not only elicit violence, but they incapacitate us from integrity.”44 As soon as we see that nonviolence is first of all not a kind solving it, as we’ve seen, by directing our attention to the part that we of outcry but a kind of power, strong in its own right, and that it can cannot predict, namely who will “lose it” when. If we are to be a free, be offered by anyone toward anyone, whether one is in a concentra-responsible people, we shall have to put 90 percent of our attention tion camp or a president’s suite, we begin to break out of the “inane”

back on the basic fact we can predict: violence begets violence.And on limitation of nonviolence to a mere tactic that may possibly “work,” if its converse: nonviolence begets nonviolence.

our opponent is nice.

Nonviolence is a science if there ever was one, but it cannot make That said, I’ve broached a daring proposition, which I’ll develop predictions as neatly as mechanics or electricity, for Satyagraha is what more fully later on: when we have sufficient knowledge of how non-Gandhi called “a living force,” not a physical one.Those “crosscurrents violence works and can think of the appropriate way to mobilize it, it of violence and responsiveness” Pepinsky referred to as running con-can even be used to make obsolete the scourge of war.

stantly in all of us help to account for episodes of violent behavior but And yet, we have just begun to explore its possibilities. Despite cannot predict them exactly.They do not put a formula in our hands the variety of the fields in which we’ve so far seen nonviolence in that would let us say, “If we get thirty hours less violent programming action, we have looked at only one modality of this “matchless per week, there will be 3,000 fewer homicides per year.” It would take weapon.” It has two. It should be clear the minute we realize that non-some sort of chaos theory to gain exactitude in predicting how a violence is a primary reality, not a non-something, that its classic person or a mob will react. Sometimes we’re nice to people and they expression may not be in the protest mode at all, real or symbolic. It nonetheless blow up at us.That is life.

is true that Gandhi once called himself a “professional resister” when But there is one thing about violence/nonviolence that is very he was asked his profession in a British-run court, but out of court he simple and very predictable, and again it may be the only basic thing gave a rather different account of his life’s work: “My real politics is we have to know about it: somewhere, somehow, violence will always constructive work.”45 Nonviolence is not only a method of struggle hurt, while somewhere, somehow, nonviolence will always heal. To against wrongs (as Penn and Ashoka demonstrated) but also—indeed ring a slight change on the formula we arrived at earlier, violence some-primarily—a force that builds things right in the first place. For most 128

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Chapter Five

of us, who are not protestors, this takes nonviolence off the shelf and puts it right into our own hands as an entirely new tool that we can A WAY OUT OF HELL

use every day to design the future we and our children get to live in; and to this intriguing prospect we can now turn.

R

How much more delightful to an undebauched mind is the task of making improvements on the earth, than all the vain glory that can be acquired from ravaging it.

—George Washington

Put the lover of justice to shame with your compassion.

—Saint Isaac of Syria

M U B A R A K AWA D H A S been a guest speaker in my nonviolence class as often as I can get him. A big, gentle man, an extremely engag-ing and sincere speaker with a keen sense of nonviolence, he speaks in vivid, Arabic-inflected English that always adds a note of authenticity when we discuss one of the world’s most important nonviolent uprisings, the first Palestinian intifada (literally,“shaking off,” or “shaking up”).

Mubarak, after all, founded the Palestinian Center for the Study of Nonviolence, which I suspect had a lot to do with that movement.The Israeli government certainly thought so. His most dramatic visit was undoubtedly in 1990, when he came in fresh from his expulsion from Palestine. Along with the glow of martyrdom, Mubarak had real inside information to share with us. My students already knew enough not to accept uncritically the media image of the intifada as a violent, even “terrorist,” uprising, but what we didn’t know was what it was like to be there “on the ground” facing riot-armed Israeli soldiers. Mubarak, a trained psychologist, was the ideal person to share that with us.

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The intifada began in 1987, when it became clear that the terror-Addicted to Meaning

ism and guerilla tactics of the Palestinian exiles had not worked and that it was up to the Palestinians actually living under Israeli occupa-By coincidence, shortly after Mubarak told us about all this, the tion to do something about their destiny.What they did was resist with papers carried a surprising report about substance abusers in the Gandhian techniques of selective boycotts, shutdowns, and the like United States.Three researchers, working quite independently of each (mostly learned from Gene Sharp via Mubarak) plus some indigenous other, all found to their surprise that the conventional wisdom about ideas of their own with a dash of highly confrontational stone throw-who takes drugs in America is wrong. The “typical” drug abuser in ing—an uneasy mix of what I call “non-dash-violent,” i.e., refraining America is not a black male, not strapped by poverty in a ghetto. All from (serious) violence against one’s opponent without trying to love three scientists turned up a totally different profile.

him or her out of the opponent category with positive energy.This put the Palestinian youth, in particular, under a lot of pressure: because so The same person who gets ahead in the workforce many adults were being arrested, teens were forced to take up respon-and is more of a risk taker, is more daring, [and more]

sibilities and face dangers—beatings, imprisonment, death—that susceptible to drugs. . . . [They have] a far more active most of us don’t have to cope with even as adults. This, of course, lifestyle, are much more engaged in political cam-impressed my students greatly. But what surprised Mubarak, and all of paigns, are much bigger users of information.1

us, was that when the intifada got under way, the youth of the occupied territories stopped taking drugs. Drug and alcohol abuse, until They are, in short, the most upwardly mobile people in American then a serious problem, virtually disappeared.

society, the “cutting edge.”

We asked him to go on. In the Gaza Strip and Israel proper, there None of the three scientists could explain why being more capa-was the same class of youth, ethnically and economically, as in the ble than average made someone more, rather than less, vulnerable to occupied territories, he explained, but these young people had no way drug abuse. One said it’s because of “some hidden factor”; another to participate in the uprising. Sure enough, there was no such change wondered whether “there’s something in the basic personality” of the in this “control” group: where there was no intifada, drugs and alcohol higher achievers, without proposing what it might be.The third scien-continued their destructive course.

tist was at least on to something: these people are “high sensation You may be wondering at this point what I’m leading up to. Am seekers,” he observed.Accordingly, he prescribed a program of terrific I saying that the way to get rid of the drug problem is a nonviolent sensations for them: skydiving, bungee-cord jumping and disco danc-revolution?

ing, with MTV-style jumps from one thing to the next under a barrage Of course not.What I’m saying is much more outrageous. As far of heavy metal music.This sensation blitz indeed helped them stay off as I can see, we can get rid of all problems with a nonviolent revolu-drugs—better than bumper stickers that “just say no.” But this only tion. Not just drugs; not even just crime itself—just about everything begs the question: what made these talented, energetic young people but death and taxes. How can I make this extravagant claim? If we start think they could find happiness in sensations in the first place?

from the streets of Ramallah and Beit Sahour, we can thread our way I propose to you that these active, intelligent people are not really to the answer.

looking for more sensations. They think they are, because that’s what the mass media condition all of us to think.What they are really 132

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looking for is some meaning in life.

Palestinians something to do; it gave them something meaningful to do.

True, bungee cords and the intifada both offer danger and excitement (as The Cooperative Institutional Research Program does combat), but nonviolent resistance offers danger, a sense of risk, for recently surveyed the brightest young people in the an overriding purpose. In the other cases danger, or rather the thrill of United States. It found them overwhelmingly materi-facing danger, is the purpose. And that’s not good enough. I can’t help alistic [with] an unprecedented concern with money, recalling once again the words of Sue Severin, the Marin County health power and status.The biggest declines involved altru-professional who went down to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace: istic interests and social concerns.2

The only way I can explain it is, I felt I was in the These are clear signs of people without a purpose.

hands of God: not safe—that I wouldn’t be hurt—

The Americans and Palestinians who got out of drugs in such but that I was where I was supposed to be, doing what different ways—a “high sensation” program, on the one hand, and a I was supposed to be doing.And this can be addictive.

largely nonviolent revolution on the other—had both gotten into Maybe that’s why we kept going back.

drugs for similar reasons: despite the striking contrast in their outward circumstances, both had succumbed to hopelessness about their Almost uncanny that Sue should use the word addictive in this con-lives. The Palestinian youth faced a stark future, where every chance nection, but that is how powerful meaningful work can be—strong to grow was blocked by an overpowering, often contemptuous, enough to overcome chemical dependency. Recently, Youth Outlook oppressor. The North Americans were facing a life of temporary, (YO), a San Francisco–based youth newspaper interviewed a young external satisfactions they already knew to be hollow from personal addict in San Francisco who gave a heartbreaking explanation of why experience. They were rich, but in a way they were very poor; they he takes heroin: “I want quiet peace to inject my soul with forever.”3

were what Mother Teresa called “the spiritually poorest of the poor”

He was looking for peace.Who is not? He looked for it in drugs because they could not see their way to a life of service and meaning.

because he was conditioned—and today who is not conditioned?—to So they were both looking for a purpose in life, which, I’m afraid, think that what we need comes from outside us: peace is something is not to be found in bouncing on the end of a bungee cord. I would we inject; security, health are things we buy.Yet some of us know that safely bet that after awhile the swooping sensation in the belly, the what we’re looking for isn’t outside us, that it’s the inner peace that rush of being a human yo-yo to jarring music will wear thin, and the can lift us even out of potent addictions, the peace that comes when sensation seekers may even find themselves going back to the needle.

we’ve found a convincing purpose for our lives.

Materialism and sensationalism are part of the problem, not the solu-Is my outrageous claim starting to make some sense?

tion—and it’s a much bigger problem than that facing this group in particular. It’s everyone’s problem. If we had the whole country bouncing on bungee cords, would it solve crime, homelessness, and Criminal Injustice

despair? In Roszakian language, high sensations may “work” (for some), but they don’t work.

Over the years, I have seen hundreds of young people working on Here is where the intifada was different. It didn’t just give young projects that are similar in spirit to the intifada uprising, if not as 134

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dangerous.This has been one of the great privileges in my life. Some opportunity to look at the whole question of crime.The war on drugs months prior to the NATO bombing of ex-Yugoslavia I served as mod-

(which somehow often comes down to a war on victims of drug erator for a Berkeley “teach-in” on the sufferings of ethnic Albanians of abuse) is part of our war on crime in general, and that larger war is Kosovo. On the panel were two of the young people I mentioned ear-also a drastic failure. The National Criminal Justice Commission lier who had just gotten back from two days in a Serbian jail. They reported in 1996 that “the prison population has tripled since 1980

spoke with quiet passion.They spoke from the deep security of having and expenditures on law enforcement have quadrupled. Yet crime found something to do, however small it seemed, about the suffering rates are essentially unchanged and fear is higher than ever.”5 And since in the world.They spoke cogently, without anger (though some Serb then? Matters have gone on deteriorating. “Let us begin with a funda-nationalists in the audience were charging the atmosphere with plen-mental realization,” wrote criminologist Richard Quinney at the head ty).They spoke with love. I remember thinking how I would want all of an important book called Criminology as Peacemaking.

my students—in fact, I would want every one of us—to have such a sense of quiet fulfillment.

No amount of thinking and no amount of public polI’m not saying this in the spirit of “let the kids do peace work; it’s icy have brought us any closer to understanding and good for them and it may keep them off drugs.” I’m saying that these solving the problem of crime. The more we have young people have hit upon something—a principle. It is a principle reacted to crime, the further we have removed our-we too can apply in our own ways, individually, and then corporately.

selves from any understanding and any reduction of To illustrate that, I want to enlarge our focus to a problem that is the problem.6

arguably the biggest we now face as a society, perhaps as a civilization.

At the present time, roughly half of the juvenile detention and In a word—the word of Ruth Morris, in her landmark book Penal incarceration in America is for drug-related crimes. The amount Abolition—our whole criminal justice system, not just the war on Americans pay for illegal drugs is staggering—officials noted with naive drugs, is “an expensive, unjust, immoral failure.”7

satisfaction that it came down to $57.3 billion in 1995.4 In response, we This double failure—the rise in crime and violence and the throw on another $17.9 billion to wage a “war” on mind-altering drugs.

nation’s inability to contain them—has brought our civilization to a And that war is failing. On that point, scores of analysts who have stud-defining moment. In April 1967, when we were in the grip of the ied the hapless war in detail all agree. Under these circumstances, we Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr. made the prophetic observation cannot afford not to follow up on the implications of cases like those that for every nation there comes a time like this when it faces a we’ve just been considering, cases of “spontaneous remission” of drug defining moral crisis. “Though we might prefer it otherwise,” he said abuse in America and Israel-Palestine.They seem to open up the sugges-in his famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York, “we must tion of an entirely different approach, one that is not a war on drugs, choose in this crucial moment of human history.”8 We did not rise to not a war on crime—odd as it may sound, not a war at all.

that challenge, we did not find an honorable end to the war, but in my Drug abuse, like violence, could be looked at through various opinion we did not altogether sink below the possibility of redemp-lenses, as we’ve already seen. In most of the West we have chosen, tion. Rather, as always seems to happen when such problems are not rightly or wrongly, to look at it as a crime.There are other possibili-resolved, we have lurched on to another crisis, or perhaps the same ties, but all right, let’s call it that for now, and let’s take this as an one in a different guise.

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Reference: Latin America

This is a watershed moment in California’s history, a Title: ENVIRONMENT: OUTLAW POACHERS BECOME NATURE

moment when we can take a path toward becoming a RESERVE GUARDIANS

healthier society, or when we can consign every an inter press service feature

penny of future funding toward a failed system of by roberto herrscher

human warehouses.9

buenos aires, nov (ips) — in an argentine nature This language of Vincent Schiraldi, former director of San reserve, poachers who once hunted endangered species Francisco’s Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, was echoed by have been converted into the conscientious guardians of former Attorney General Ramsey Clark in a fund-raising letter some the animals they once stalked.

time in 1998, when he said that our country is confronted with a

“stunning moral crisis.”At that time (it’s much worse now) there were the remarkable conversion took place in the ibera 1,366 people on death row in the United States and we were adding nature reserve, in corrientes province, 700 kilometers more every week. Only three countries—South Africa, China, and north of argentina’s capital.

Iran—were executing nearly as many.

in 1987, pedro perea munoz took over the directorship Shortly after Ramsey Clark made this statement, South Africa of the ibera reserve. munoz met two poachers, “mingo”

dropped out; the new, anti-Apartheid regime under Nelson Mandela cabrera and ramon cardoso, who had lived in the reserve abolished the death penalty along with racist ideology. That leaves us for as long as they could remember.

and China now leading the industrial world in penal severity, as we are in crime (the number killed by guns in the United States each year is their life was difficult. cabrera and cardoso lived deep on another order of magnitude from that of any industrialized nation).

in the swamps of ibera and survived by fishing and huntIn recent years the World Court has twice appealed to the United ing. from time to time they would travel to the small States to postpone or commute a sentence of death, in vain. That’s a village of pellegrini, on the southern border of the hard statement to have to make about the world’s oldest democracy—

reserve, to sell carpincho, deer and alligator hides.

that we’re leading the world back into punitive violence.

instead of adopting an antagonistic attitude, munoz But crime is a crisis that has “opportunity” to it as well as dangers.

understood that these men knew ibera better than anyone To see the opportunity amid these many negatives we have to look at and that hunting was their only means of survival.

things in a different light.

“they couldn’t believe it when i offered them a job.

now they are the most dedicated and conscientious Crime and Restoration

guards (at ibera),” munoz told ips. . . .

Following is part of a story from a special news group on positive

“to understand nature, one must be peaceful. these men developments as it came streaming into my computer one day back in were born with this. they were hunters by necessity, 1992:

and now, as guides and guardians, there is no one better.

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by just looking into the eyes of people entering the breakthrough, two American schoolteachers came up with the idea, reserve, they know who the poachers are,” munoz said. . . .

quite independently, of taking young offenders who were in detention and putting them in charge of some severely handicapped youth.

amongst the clear crystal wetlands of ibera live the last Sharon Roberts was one of the teachers.As she admitted, she was ask-700 members of a rare south american swamp deer—a large ing a lot of the Los Angeles school board to let her “put the most dan-mammal, whose hooves end in toes united by membranes.

gerous people in LA in charge of the most vulnerable.”10 The paradox worked brilliantly. Again, both the disabled youth and the offenders ibera’s residents also include the “aguara guazu,” a

“won.” “I was used to being a thug on the street,” says Alfred, age six-small wolf in serious danger of extinction. a variety teen, member of the Cripps, on probation for being accomplice to a of rodents, lizards, alligators and multicolored birds shooting, “but now when my home boys come around . . . I tell them complete the population of this unique and delicate I have other things to do.” Things like taking a disabled girl named Star ecosystem. cabrera and cardoso are just two of six to class, while he earns high school credits and work experience. “This guards in the reserve, but they are the favoured guides shows I can do something. It’s the first time I’ve felt like that. I feel for researchers, photographers, and members of ecologi-more kind-hearted and stuff than I thought.”11

cal expeditions.

Note how in Alfred’s mind now, being helpful is the only thing

“now that we understand the importance of the reserve, that counts as “doing something.” He has already come a long way from we see that, without realizing it, we were spending our the attitude in the prevailing paradigm that to “do something” you whole lives preparing for this,” cabrera said.

should be helping yourself, if necessary by hurting others. But the big winners are now you and me—society as a whole. Young detainees This event turns our expectations wonderfully upside down.

who would have caused worse trouble down the line, almost without Cabrera and Cardoso were technically “criminals,” and warden Muñoz exception, were given a way out of this desperate spiral by the only certainly could have treated them as such.Yet what an opportunity he method that can ever do that: they were enabled to find good in them-would have lost! Instead, he somehow decided that rather than look on selves.

the two men as the cause of the problem, he would turn to them for the In ancient Rome there was a saying, “Curruptio optimum pessima, ”

solution. They solved it. And notice two other results: (1) The whole

“The corruption of the best people is the worst kind.” We might flip affair changed from a conflict to a classic “win-win” configuration in this around and say, “Redemptio pessimum optima, ” “The reinstatement of which everyone gained: Muñoz got the job done, and Cabrera and the worst people makes them the best.” This is not too paradoxical, Cardoso changed from outlaws to employees, harmers to helpers; since as we saw in the case of the high achievers who got into drugs, everybody won—even the animals. (2) Cabrera and Cardoso got it’s often the most capable people with the highest expectations who something of profound, permanent benefit that we’re starting to get the most frustrated with modern life. They feel most keenly the recognize as a signature of nonviolent activities, namely, a sense of lurking emptiness in the modern definition of achievement, and at the meaning: “We were spending our whole lives preparing for this.”

same time they have great capacities, which have been turned to non-Pedro Muñoz is not the only person ever to have such an out-constructive ends. In the worst troublemakers lies, logically enough, landish idea about crime and “criminals.” About the same time as this the most creative potential. The trick is knowing that it’s there, then 140

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having the courage to reach for it.

helpless human being. In all these cases the “worst” had gotten that

“Peer mediation” programs have been catching on in many schools way because they saw no way to use the good that lay—often quite across the country. Teachers and administrators have been thrilled to unexpected—within them.All that benefit would have been lost if the find that not only do the programs “chill” a lot of the fighting, but a prevailing approaches to crime had been adopted.

peculiar pattern emerges wherever they try it: the biggest troublemakers turn out to be the best mediators. How perfectly natural, really, when you know what’s going on.

Cunning as Serpents

After his “conversion,” one of those young troublemakers told a friend of mine that to be a mediator you have to “check your ego at The possibility of “hidden gold mines,” of course, does not mean that the door.” You’re not just in it for yourself, is what he meant; you have we should immediately put offenders in charge of the disabled, endan-to put your own feelings aside.Then he added, still more significantly, gered species, and peacemaking. Let us be idealistic, yes, but not

“I’ve always had the skills to be a mediator, but I didn’t use them naive. Quite a few “troublemakers” might rise to the occasion, but before because I had no one to show me how.” Nor is he that special; some would not.Writer Norman Mailer discovered this to his cost. In everybody has this capacity that so very few learn to use. “We’re all 1981 Mailer was, quite understandably, repelled by the hypocrisy of like hidden gold mines.”

labeling people as “criminals” when we ourselves create the conditions His statement is a textbook of conflict resolution condensed into that promote crime. He had been in correspondence with a particular three sentences:

violent offender, something of a writer himself, Jack Henry Abbott.As (1) We have to “check our egos at the door,” get a little above our a kind of personal protest, Mailer used his influence to get Abbott own personal feelings. Some kind of spiritual sacrifice, large or small, released into his custody. Six weeks into his parole Abbott murdered is the basis of any action that can result in peace.

Richard Adan, a twenty-two-year-old Greenwich Village waiter.

(2) All it would take for most of us to learn this skill is a little Mailer realized with added shock that he had several times left his training—which, unfortunately, we rarely get.

eighteen-year-old daughter alone with this man. Abbott hanged him-

(3) And finally, given such training, we would discover that there’s self shortly afterward in prison.12

a “gold mine” in every one of us. If we don’t find a way to mine our Mailer was perhaps naive, but it was a special kind of naivete many inner resources, it causes the greatest trouble for us and society; when of us fall into when we become aware of something very wrong and we do, we can find ourselves becoming the most creative peacemakers.

react impatiently: we reverse the wrong instead of resolving it. In his Whether we start out as poachers in an Argentine game preserve or eagerness to get rid of the “victimizer” label society had put on youth offenders in Los Angeles, the most difficult among us are often Abbott, Mailer swapped it for a “victimized” label: this person had the ones most capable of helping to create loving community, if we been made bad by society, so it wasn’t his fault, therefore he was inno-would help them out of their difficulty.

cent, therefore he was “good.” Reversing labels doesn’t get us closer So what the AP writer called the “remarkable conversion” of to reality.What we really want to do is get rid of labels.That’s the only Cabrera and Cardoso is no more remarkable than the changeover of way we can see each other as people. When a label falls, like one the intifada youth who stopped taking drugs, or the “most dangerous”

of those gels they use on theater lights, between us and real people, of Los Angeles who discovered the satisfaction of taking care of another, it is the beginning of violence. Sliding that gel out of the way is 142

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rehumanization. In the world of criminal (in)justice, rehumanization Christian,Augustine said a millennium and a half ago, is: “We hate the is being able to look at people realistically and see how they became sin but not the sinner.”

lawbreakers.Then we can begin to understand what to do with them Today this ancient creed is providing the underpinning of a new and—much more importantly—what to do so that others do not go outlook, called restorative as opposed to retributive justice. Let’s give through the same process.

Harold Pepinsky the space to spell this out: Mailer’s first impulse was absolutely correct; as Ruth Morris says,

“Let’s be clear that the dangerous few [in prisons] are used by all those In decades of sampling millennia of literature across who want to keep the other 99 percent in our present expensive, traditions, and everyday attempts in any facet of life’s unjust, immoral system.”13 This is the logic by which a handful of mil-attempts to become more socially secure and safer, I itants can be used to discredit a whole struggle—all ethnic Albanians, see everyone applying one of just two social control for example, even grandmothers, were labeled “terrorists” by the systems: peacemaking, or what I call “warmaking.” In Serbian regime. Mailer was only applying a well-known principle of the context of governmental efforts to control domes-nonviolence, that noncooperation with evil must never shade over tic social disorder, Ruth Morris calls “warmaking” “the into animosity toward evildoers—not even into labeling them as retributive justice system.” . . . When one chooses to such. It may seem like a small thing— criminal is just a word, after all make war on a social problem rather than to make

—but with that word comes the whole dehumanization response, and peace with it, one adopts this system of thought: The in the case of criminal justice that means the whole system Ruth first order of business is to identify and assess blame Morris spoke of with such stinging accuracy. Gandhi was against using against those personally responsible for the danger and the word altogether:

insecurity we face; these are our enemies. Next we try to isolate them and subdue them —stamping out the The word criminal should be erased from our vocab-enemy’s will to fight.The process entails passing judg-ulary; or else we are all criminals.14

ment on enemies and punishing them (i.e., taking power away from them by locking them in cells).

But then, Gandhi, Christian that he was, felt that “man is not capa-If you decide to regard threatening social disor-ble of knowing the absolute truth and, therefore, not competent to der in the peacemaking social control system, blame punish” in the first place.15 We want to stay away from such dangerous gets in the way of cleaning up the social mess and radicals, of course. Let’s stick with some reliable professionals, like restoring antagonists’ capacity to get along safely Dr.Arnold Trebacher, criminology professor and head of Washington’s together, as in being able to turn your back without Drug Policy Foundation. Speaking from his own professional experi-fear on someone who has attacked you. While the ence,Trebacher said, “The English and Dutch have taught me . . . that preeminent task of the warmaker is to be the biggest, you can disapprove of drug use, but you don’t have to hate users.”16

baddest combatant you can be, the preeminent task of But if we don’t want to hate them, we have to stop labeling them. Dr.

the peacemaker is to weave combatants, weakest victims Trebacher is only echoing one of the most important principles in first, back into a social fabric of mutual trust, mutual safety, Satyagraha—or for that matter Christianity: the definition of a mutual security. 17 (my emphasis)

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This “new” way of thinking (as we’ll see later, it was widely prac-ing more familiar.

ticed in some indigenous societies) is not only a sentiment but has a pragmatic principle behind it. Jeremy Bentham said, in one of his Social learning theorists have demonstrated that essays, “Sanguinary laws have a tendency to render men cruel, either aggression and violence are learned behaviors. They by fear, by imitation, or by revenge while laws dictated by mildness can, therefore, within biological and genetic limita-humanize the manners of a nation and the spirit of government.”

tions, be altered by utilizing social learning principles Today, to be accused of “mildness” around crime is probably the fastest such as [role] modeling. . . . Research has demonstrated way to lose an election, yet some practices are beginning to tap pre-that utilizing positive responses which are incompati-cisely that power to make huge improvements in and around the grim ble with the act of violence (e.g., smiling; state of prisons built by the alternative.

muscle relaxation; open, clear, direct communication; active listening; the development of trust, etc.) renders the likelihood of aggression and/or violence Building the Way

much more improbable than do negative sanctions such as punishment, shame or guilt.18

A friend of one of my students, a petite, attractive young woman, was sitting one day doing a workshop in a circle with a dozen or so pris-We might want to query those “biological and genetic limitations”

oners in a concrete, windowless room in San Quentin when the lights (was Gandhi of another species?), but we can certainly accept, indeed went out. In the dark, she could hear the men shuffling around her and applaud, the “basic premise of AVP, as explained at the beginning of whispering—and the blood pounding in her ears.What seemed like a every workshop . . . that human beings don’t have to be violent with long time later the emergency lighting came on.The men were stand-each other, that human violence is not a given, even in prison.”

ing around her in a circle, arms linked, facing outward, protecting her.

Teaching nonviolent techniques, therefore, “can . . . greatly profit One of the most successful restorative justice projects in the assaultive people.” For example, teaching them (or any of us) verbal United States was started in 1975 at Greenhaven State Prison in New skills reduces their need to react to a provocation with violence (as York. Significantly, it was started not by scholars or social workers; it Winston Churchill once said, “It is better to jaw, jaw, jaw than to war, was initiated by prisoners themselves. Calling themselves the “Think war, war”). More than this, being more articulate helps them preserve Tank” (an intentional pun, I assume), they contacted a local Quaker their integrity and self-esteem in embarrassing situations. “This sense group to help them find nonviolent alternatives to prison life and what of worth,” University of South Dakota’s Lila Rucker reminds us, “is it was doing to them.What emerged from that collaboration quickly tied to our sense of connectedness to other human beings.”19

spread to fifteen states and Canada and is now widely known as the That premise is basic to the nonviolence worldview. We are not Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP). Many similar projects sprang talking only about getting some assaultive people back in line with up, like the one for which the woman in the previous story was work-

“normalcy,” but getting them over some of the spiritual isolation that ing. What is AVP? Essentially, it is a set of workshops designed to has been accepted today as normal. When they can channel some of provide a rehumanizing environment and a set of tools that allow the their considerable assertiveness into social competence, reorienting prisoners to unlearn aggression.The idea is simple, and slowly becom-their drives for “power over” somebody to “power with” others, they 146

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are having the kind of growth experience that even us “nonassaultive”

income. However, when he goes back to thank the holy man, the types could do with.

latter tells him, “Don’t stop there: if you go further on you find a As Rucker says, it “can bring tingles of excitement if we allow copper mine.” The villager is thrilled, but—not being Indian, I will ourselves to conjure up images of transforming correctional centers make this delightfully long story short—the holy man tells him, into healing centers.”20 Frankly, I agree. I admit, I feel tingles of excite-

“Don’t stop there,” until he comes to a silver mine, a gold mine, and ment about programs like AVP. Imagine if we could convert the entire finally a diamond mine.

criminal justice system from warehousing and punishment to restora-When we consider how many reform programs are after-the-tion and social healing. And this happens, often. One of the best fact, the sage would tell us, “Don’t stop there”; go deeper into the for-formulas is when progressive-minded reformers mix in certain est. Go back down the chain of causality; go deep, go into our value indigenous practices with their own innovations, as we’ll touch upon system and find the changes that will prevent crime, violence, and in this book’s epilogue.

alienation from happening in the first place. The real challenge that If we could somehow convert the entire judicial system to healing comes from the “conversions” of people like Cabrera and Cardoso, projects like AVP, it would help immensely, because those projects like the innumerable high school troublemakers who become the best arise from right principles. Those we label “criminals” are in reality mediators, like the young offenders in Los Angeles or the thousands human beings with full human potential, but who are alienated. If who have been through AVP and related programs, is not to heal the crime is alienation (a kind of violence), it cannot be healed by vindic-wounds of alienation once it has happened but to change the alienat-tive punishment (another kind of violence).The real cure must come ing conditions of this world so people like them—like all of us—can from something that is not a kind of violence and does not further live fulfilling lives. That is the only way to head off alienation of all alienate. Instead of telling offenders, “Hey, get outta here!,” as one col-types, those that lead to technically criminal behavior or to less for-orful prison activist put it, restorative programs convey, “Hey, get mal sorrows.

back in here!” It is indeed mind-boggling to imagine what it would be Is there not a certain hypocrisy in doing anything else? After all, like to convert our whole criminal justice machinery from punishing what is a “criminal”? Let me remind you of something we discovered to healing.

about one of the most bruising conflicts of the twentieth century: Yet it would be dishonest, and finally ineffectual, to stop there.

“Why are they killing one another? . . . People here [in the Balkans]

For think of how much damage has already been done by the time have always believed, and still believe, what they see and hear on tel-someone lands in prison. Ray Schonholtz, founder of San Francisco evision.” Well, frankly, “criminals” are people who believe what they Community Boards, once told me, echoing the insight of Deborah see and hear on commercial television: that people are separate, that Prothrow-Stith, “Our entire justice industry is after-the-fact, like our life is a fight, that happiness is outside us, that we are all doomed to entire health industry. It’s all after-the-fact.” Even programs that heal compete against each other for limited material goods.

instead of punishing are after-the-fact. I want to share with you a story This is, of course, a more subliminal message than the unsubtle from India about a villager who is out gathering firewood near his hate propaganda of state television from Belgrade. It is more subliminal village and meets a holy man. The sage tells him about a forest of

—and therefore more effective. And it has not been going on for a sandalwood trees deeper within the forest, and the villager is enchanted mere five years, but at least forty (to speak of television in particular).

to find them and enjoy not only their purifying fragrance but some In a culture that puts out messages like these from every radio and 148

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television tower all day long for over forty years—messages whose it is new to the public (I first saw the term restorative justice in the underlying philosophy is the very stuff of violence—it is hypocrisy to papers in June 1998), but it is no wild or particularly new idea to do nothing but punish those who succumb to that message in an ille-social scientists.To quote Ruth Morris one last time, “When university gal way. And it is folly to think that when you’ve caught those individ-programs become training grounds for orthodox guards, prison uals you will gain security. “I will act the way I am treated, so help me administrators, and lawyers and police who grind out our retributive God”; this is handwriting on the wall for all of us if we keep setting and destructive system they . . . are out of touch with the literature of loose the demons of alienation and then looking for what Ruth Morris serious research that documents over and over the inherent inability calls the “pseudo-security” of locking “criminals” out of sight. Real of a revenge system to accomplish any positive social purpose.”22

security has an altogether different face.

Restorative justice is step number one, for those whom we’ve already failed.

The retributive justice system, with its established Second:We need much more support for programs that can head hierarchical rituals, robed judges, armed police and off criminal behavior—again, especially for young people. In almost locked cells, offers quite literally a concrete substi-every American city, police and volunteer organizations try to give tute for the deeper security we have lost. More tragic youth something better to do than run around in gangs. They organ-still, we take this quick fix, and it appeases our inner ize basketball games, create places for them to spend time, and best of hunger just enough that we fail to seek true security all get in and spend time with them. One of the biggest wounds in our in the caring community, where we can be certain of society is the gap between old and young; it probably rivals the lack of love and support no matter what happens. We can communication between the genders in its destructive effects on never lock up the last offender . . . but we can create human culture. “Big brother” and “big sister” programs are a way to the kind of community where we know that, whatever overcome a part of this, but again, they are no substitute for families.

the future holds, we will be surrounded by love and Nothing is. A solid, loving family does crime prevention (or “proven-support.21

tion”) in the truest sense of the word. Barred windows and metal detectors are prevention in the most cynical sense, and they may

“work” but they do not work.

The Cultural Is the Political

By now most of us have become aware that the prison budget is draining money from the school system—absurdly, since it’s been So let’s “go further,” as the wise man in the forest would say. We can proven time and again that schooling is the second most potent way, use nonviolence to solve the problem of crime, but we need to start after the family itself, of keeping people from committing crime. Still, before the cell doors close.To go further here means to go three steps at the start of the nineties, to cite one instance, expenditures for K–12

up the chain of causation and see where and how to intervene at each and higher education nationwide increased a little over 8 percent stage.

apiece while correction for youth and adults increased 18 percent—

First: We need restorative justice for arrestees, particularly if they and since then educational outlays have almost always gone down while are young.AVP and Sharon Roberts are our pioneers, showing us what prison walls went up.

we need for the whole system.This is not a terribly radical suggestion; Wilbert Rideau is an articulate writer who killed a bank guard at 150

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age nineteen and has been paying for that mistake in Louisiana State violence into school with them in the form of more than 100,000

Penitentiary since 1962. He has no reason to pretend that the prison guns every day, one million a year?26 In this country, which now has system reduces violence and he can be pretty blunt about it. Tough more shopping centers than high schools, if we were to go ahead and anticrime measures are, quite frankly, a “crock,” he says. “People don’t restore the money to schools that has been drained away by the prison want solutions to crime, they only want to feel good.”23 He has a system, that would not solve the problem by itself, because children point. Four-fifths of the prisoners in the long-term facility at Angola would be sitting in those spacious, well-kept, air-conditioned schools State Prison are high school dropouts like himself. Instead of society learning almost nothing but how to get a job. The greatest enemy of getting tough on them when the damage is already done, “I’d like to education is not a lack of funds, though that hurts; it’s a lack of purpose.

see more efforts aimed at really improving people,” he says. “Crime is Lack of funds is only a symptom of the present culture of materialism.

a social problem, and education is the only real deterrent. . . . Put It is this same culture that also makes us think it’s safer to build pris-your money there.” A Modern Greek proverb puts it beautifully: ons than schools—and makes the schools so unsafe that young people feel they have to carry guns in them.

ÓJ” < “<@\(0 :4” FP@8Z 68,\<,4 :4” NL8”6Z.

Education has weathered a two-pronged attack that even good

“When a school opens, a prison closes.”

funding—and I agree it’s needed—does not fully address. On the one hand, our children come to school increasingly unreachable by their Or, to go in for some billboard rhetoric, “Open a school, close a teachers. Simply put, the mass media are practicing education without prison.” Education is very rehumanizing. It has even worked, in some a license. On the other hand, the general public and—I hate to say bold experiments, after criminalization occurs. In Massachusetts a this—educators themselves have lost sight of the purpose of education.

young woman who had served several “normal,” i.e., punitive, sentences They have come to feel that education means only one thing: getting for other crimes was then “sentenced” to taking a literature class. Her ready for a job. Universities, as a colleague of mine recently put it, comment was, “It’s the first time anybody ever gave me a chance.”24

“have reinvented themselves as corporations.” A very education-Should we convert the whole criminal justice system to an educa-friendly candidate for superintendent of education in California tional system? You know, we could do a lot worse. Should we bring recently dared to suggest that “we need to integrate visual and perback the money that has been diverted from schools to the correctional forming arts into the curriculum,” from kindergarten onward. I was system? We could do a lot worse. But we must also do much more.

ready to dash out to the ballot box, but then she added, “This is impor-Third:We must patiently, resolutely, take apart the culture of vio-tant . . . because of the requirements of the new economy.” Not the lence our material civilization has given rise to and replace it, part by eternal requirements of a sense of purpose, beauty, meaning. Oh well.

part, institution by institution, with a culture of peace, basing that So even those who, like Rideau, advocate education as an antidote new culture on the long-overdue “revolution of values” Martin Luther to crime must realize that putting people through schools so they can King called for in a famous sermon two weeks after his New York get jobs is not education; in fact, defining education as such is part of declaration against the war.25

the problem. As we learned about the typical drug user in America, However, while it is true that education is the antidote to vio-our culture considers certain lifestyles a “success” that are actually lence, it is not true that education means nothing more than getting resounding failures in terms of saving people from frustration and youth to stay in schools. How can it, when today they are bringing emptiness. Actual human needs can be strikingly different.

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Man [or woman] cannot flourish if his entire world people who had been diagnosed HIV positive. We were prepared to consists only of objects that he can see, hear, touch, discover, and we did, that meditation and the allied disciplines pro-taste or smell. Instinctively, whether he be a New tected them from some of the worst effects of anxiety, including some Guinea tribesman or a Wall Street tycoon, a human of its effects on their already weakened immune systems. What sur-being tends to feel that life on this earth must be sub-prised us, though, was the number of people who told us, “If I could ject to some sort of higher purpose.27

get back my health at the cost of giving up everything I’ve learned from this program, I wouldn’t do it.”

Recently, this observation was echoed by another high-level So the full, deep solution to the crime epidemic, the solution that health authority:

works before people do damage to themselves and others, is restorative not just for those who have fallen through the cracks, but for the culA few years ago the Department of Health Education ture itself.Yes, we need many more restorative programs in jails; yes, and Welfare in Massachusetts published a study, since we need to rebuild schools and let them teach young people how to replicated in France, in which scientists and statisti-live (not to mention why to live), but we also need to develop a culture cians looked once again at the risk factors for heart that facilitates, rather than discourages, “man’s search for meaning.”

disease.They found that the number one predictor of The scientist I am paraphrasing with that last phrase is Viktor fatal heart attacks, initially described as job dissatis-Frankl. Frankl, trained as a neurosurgeon in his native Vienna, passed faction, was more precisely pinned down as lack of two and a half years of his life in the living hell of Auschwitz and sur-meaning or purpose in life.28

vived to write his best-selling book, Man’s Search for Meaning, directly out of that devastating—yet for him strangely triumphant—experience.

At the beginning of this book I suggested that meaning and purpose, From the abyss of violence he rose to ask the deepest question of our namely their absence, explain the suicides of teens in south Boston. But existence: What is the meaning of life? What are we supposed to be it is not just teens. In South Africa, when Apartheid finally fell, some of doing here?

the whites who had clung to that system to give meaning to their lives Even to ask that question was somewhat restorative, but Frankl felt the bottom dropping out from under them. In one or two cases, went further. He saw that real meaning cannot be concocted; it has to whole Afrikaner families committed suicide because they felt that there be discovered: “I think the meaning of our existence is not invented by was “no way forward . . . no future for whites in this country.”29 One ourselves but rather detected.”31 Thus, while even a sense of meaning authority said of the Heaven’s Gate cult suicide in San Diego in 1997

is therapeutic (even if we get it from bungee-cord jumping, not to that the cult members fit a “typical pattern” of people who “sought a mention Apartheid), real meaning comes when we get connected in consuming purpose” for their lives.30 Typical of whom? According to the some way to a purpose higher than ourselves and beyond ourselves.

medical evidence just cited, every single one of us seeks a consuming Ninety-one-year-old Leona, who spends her spare time using her purpose for our lives. When the predominant cultural message is that expert sewing skills for others, says it so well: “I figure if you can’t we are separate, physical objects bent on consumption and doomed to help somebody, what’s the use of living?”32

compete, that purpose is going to be hard to find.

Frankl’s insight (on which his “third school of psychotherapy” is I was involved for a while in a program that taught meditation to based) is that we can’t simply make up something meaningful to do; 154

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we have something meaningful to do. The real search is to find out Prize for Peace made a joint plea for changing human consciousness in what it is. Everything I’ve been saying in this book is meant to shed the coming millennium; they named their call the “International light on that search, for I believe it’s possible to define what is mean-Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the World’s ingful for us who live in the present crisis of history. The task is to Children.” Humanity is slowly beginning to learn that nonviolence is create loving community, and the way to understand and address that a creative force that contains within itself the principle of creative task is through nonviolence.Whoever we are, there is a way we can do order. It alone seems to be a method of conflict adjudication that con-this.This is the work that will give our lives purpose, individually and tains the energy of peace in its very process. Nonviolence (and as far as a people.The most beautiful expression of this task that I know of as I can see, only nonviolence) does this by elevating rather than comes from a letter Einstein wrote when he was seventy. It is no depressing the human image; it alone leads to long-term, deep changes surprise that this little paragraph is becoming so well known: in the social system that will eventually result in the desired goals of loving community within the given society and stable peace with oth-A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the ers—in a word, loving community all around. We can now add what

“universe,” a part limited in time and space. He expe-may be the most important characteristic of nonviolence: it provides riences his thoughts and feelings as something sepa-people with a high, inspiring goal—a task that can be implemented in rate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his endless ways to fit each individual’s capacities, be it as small as turning consciousness.This delusion is a kind of prison for us, off one’s television set or as large as de-institutionalizing war.

restricting us to our personal decisions and to History has not yet given us an example of a full-scale, nonviolent affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must revolution that rebuilt a culture from the ground up. Even India’s free-be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our dom struggle, by far the biggest and the purest, went out of control circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures toward the end. But it has given us enough hints that we can see how and the whole of nature in its beauty.33

such a thing might indeed be possible. The way the intifada youth turned off drugs, for example, was part of the character of the intifada The task that Einstein speaks of is not for this age only; it is the as a whole. Because their schools were constantly being shut down by human task for all time, part of the human condition. But that task Israeli authorities, Palestinian teachers set up clandestine schools in presents itself right now with a special urgency, when loving commu-the basements of their homes or the backs of stores. Because commer-nity and “the whole of nature” are being torn at by the forces of greed cial links between Palestinians and Israelis were disrupted—some the and alienation. In the case of the crime problem, we are expelling peo-result of deliberate acts of boycott and others part of Israeli retribu-ple from society and locking them up in warehouses, not to mention tion—people created systems of their own to deliver milk, fix cars, expelling them altogether from the community of the living with the and get the injured and the sick to clinics. Particularly striking was barbaric death penalty, not realizing that it is we ourselves who remain one change that reached deep into the fabric of Palestinian life: as in prison—the prison of our ill will, our fear and anger that seal more and more children were left behind by jail-going parents, ourselves off from others.We shall escape from our prison of delusion Mubarak told my class, “Every woman became every child’s mother.”

when we let people of their prison of concrete and iron.

In that brief period when nonviolent energy was at work, the Toward the end of 1997, the still-living laureates of the Nobel Palestinians found themselves doing much more than rebelling against 156

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an external authority: they were reinventing themselves as a civil soci-The Spiritually Poorest

ety.To do this, interestingly enough, they were reawakening the time-less principle of the extended family that had indigenous roots in their So “the children of the stones” (as the intifada youth are often, and society. Even in this flawed, only provisionally nonviolent, struggle, somewhat unfairly, called) hit on something very relevant to our own loving community emerged as a by-product. And yet it was not just a dilemmas.We traced the connection step by step from drug abuse to by-product. It was—and always is—a direct result of choosing nonvi-crime itself, and finally to a lack of purpose in the industrial culture olence. In chapter 3, we saw the psychological health that shows up in we are surrounded by, each step getting closer to the cause of our the individual who makes that choice. Now we are beginning to see problems. At the same time, each step revealed more clearly an the social health brought into the group at large.

answering path from restorative programs that can heal the alienation Why, then, are nonviolent campaigns usually protests and disrup-between the assaultive person and society, to preventive programs that tions? If they contain the seeds of creative order, why this popular per-heal some sources of alienation within communities, to—what shall ception of nonviolence as a kind of revolution, and why do nonviolent we call it?—the overriding creative program of restoring the value sys-activists from George Fox to the Berrigan brothers go about breaking tem whose deformation has led us into a world of so much crime, laws and generally disrupting applecarts? We will see that it is not just among other symptoms of disorder.

because protests and disruptions are the only expression of nonvio-Mother Teresa shed some light on this goal in an observation of lence that people tend to recognize. It is because nonviolent actors are hers I referred to earlier:

the ones who are clinging to order in societies where some kinds of disorder have been taken for granted—like the British monopoly on You in the West have the spiritually poorest of the Indian salt and cotton or the segregation of buses in Montgomery. As poor. . . . I find it easy to give a plate of rice to a hun-Archbishop Romero said in homily before his assassination in El gry person, to furnish a bed to a person who has no Salvador on March 27, 1980:

bed, but to console or to remove the bitterness, anger, and loneliness that comes from being spiritually I don’t want to be an opposition, as was said of me deprived, that takes a long time.35

this week. I want to be simply an affirmation. When one says yes to one’s own conviction, one is not con-Overcoming spiritual deprivation is deeply personal work, but it’s fronting. . . . Naturally, some others don’t think the also a matter of building loving community with others—eventually, same way and thus confrontation arises.34

all others.The purpose of our life in the third Christian millennium is grounded in the personal, but how could it stop there? We want—we Applecarts that are going blindly over a cliff must sometimes be need—to take apart the entire house that violence has built and begin upset by people trying to save their occupants.

building again with the other, the opposite, kind of power.

Daunting. But we don’t have to start absolutely from scratch.

Along with all the other trouble he caused, Gandhi devised a social program with just this daring. And it nearly worked.

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Chapter Six

that young man who importuned Gandhi in 1940—they think only about the obstructive side. None other than Kenneth Boulding once CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRAMME

quipped that nonviolence was good for offense but not for defense, which, humor aside, turns out to be wrong, as we will see in chapter 8. This blinkered perception, shared by activists, some scholars, and lay observers alike, has done a great deal to hinder the development R

of peace and nonviolence. For ironically, the constructive edge is actually far more important than the confrontational/obstructive side of To reclaim our colonized political spaces, which we’re becoming relatively aware.

we must reclaim our colonized cultural spaces.

Once I met a French baron and his wife while I was working at an

—David Korten

archeological site on the Greek island of Delos. M. and Mme Evrard-Garbé invited my wife and me to their Paris apartment for dinner, which of course we readily accepted. Madame was a superb cook, and O N E DAY I N 1940, a young Indian importuned Gandhi, “What will the conversation was going splendidly when my friend Monsieur le it really take to get the British off our backs?” Gandhi replied brightly, baron casually remarked, “Oh, I completely believe in the inequality

“Phenomenal progress in spinning.”1

of the races.” My wife blanched, knowing I was likely to make a scene.

I like to imagine that this was one of those revolutionaries who Normally I would have, but several things held me in check this time.

didn’t believe Gandhi was really serious about nonviolence. He The conversation was in French, for one, and that slowed down my thought—he wanted to think—that Gandhi was just biding his time, repartee; then, too, I was in his home, eating his wife’s gracious cook-waiting for the moment to launch the real revolution. But nonviolence ing; and most importantly, perhaps, I had a year or so of meditation was the real revolution. Really, though, we are tempted to ask, with under my belt at that time. I held my tongue. Some moments later, as spinning wheels? Yes, with spinning wheels and everything they stood the conversation changed course, my host said, “You know, nothing in for. At the time Gandhi made this rejoinder, he had almost fifty years the world matters but love [charité].” I quietly said to him, “Do you of experience behind him and was no longer interested in sounding think the races are unequally endowed with the capacity to love?” He clever. We can take it that he meant just what he said. Why did he was stunned.

endow the humble spinning wheel with such power?

I probably did more to reduce the racist burden of the world that Nonviolence has two faces, that of cooperating with good and that evening than I had in a lifetime of activism. And yet, I wasn’t an iota of noncooperating with evil.These two faces, or call them two edges less angry— tant s’en faut! Unbeknownst to me, my anger was seeking to the sword of Satyagraha, are known to history as what Gandhi a more constructive outlet, making me more alert to what my host called Constructive Programme, where you create things and make was saying rather than less, even though I held it back not out of corrections in and on your own community, and what I like to call conviction, really, but simply because circumstances so dictated.

obstructive program, where you refuse to put up with others’ attempts This was for me an important personal experience of the efficacy to weaken or exploit you. When to do which is largely a matter of of anger transformed—and what I was to understand years later as timing, yet most people who think about nonviolence at all are like Constructive Programme.

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As we’ll see, the seed of Constructive Programme was planted at homework and scientific credentials as its approach.

the very beginning of Gandhi’s public life, about a year after the shock of Pietermaritzburg had worn off or, rather, had sunk in. By the twen-First we educate business leaders, politicians and scities, shortly after he arrived back in India, that seed had grown into entists in The Four System Conditions [four things Constructive Programme, a roster of eighteen projects designed to that have to be observed for the earth to be a sustain-rebuild India from the ground up. Not only did it become more elab-able life-support system] and then we ask them for orate and comprehensive along the way, but it also steadily moved to advice. Instead of telling them what to do, we say, center stage in Gandhi’s thinking. By 1940 it was his main hope. He

“How could this be applied in your world?” This was fully committed to the belief that while nonviolence had an sparks creativity and recruits enthusiasm into the impressive power to protest and disrupt, its real power was to create process instead of defense mechanisms.

and reconstruct. The tail of protesting wrongs would never wag the Any expert in her field . . . is much more clever dog of building a society.This is what he wanted his young interlocu-than you or I. If you give her the overall principles, tor of 1940, and all of us, to understand.

therefore, and then ask for advice, she finds much Today, wherever we look for successful examples of social smarter solutions than Greenpeace or I or anybody change, it seems, it’s the groups or individuals taking concrete, else can. And we are very much in need of practical, positive steps like the reconstructive projects we looked at in the last creative solutions.3

chapter that are making the biggest difference. Maybe it’s as simple as the Environmental Defense Fund’s “Safe Harbor” program, which In the early days, before Natural Step had national organizations rewards private landowners who protect endangered species, instead around the world, Robèrt would go to corporations and ask to speak to of punishing them when they do not. Introduced in three states, it has their boards about the diminishing funnel of resources they were run-

“worked” beautifully; Safe Harbor Texas alone has over a million acres ning into.Typically, they would dismiss him with a “don’t call us, we’ll under protection, according to their 1998 mailing. Or the Educational call you,” but in a week or so, they would call him.The secret is that if Fund to End Handgun Violence, which started a project called “Hands you assume people are rational, it helps to awaken their rationality. It Without Guns,” whose purpose is to show kids a world of fun and

“forces reason to be free.” This sometimes works even in cases on the opportunity outside a world of fear and violence. This positive high end of the escalation curve, when the intensity of negative passions message struck a resounding chord. From Boston to San Francisco, seems to have stifled reason. At lower levels, it works beautifully.

neighborhood teens have organized a gun buy-back and made peace Long before Gandhi threw that cold water on his impatient ques-sculptures from the collected weapons.2

tioner of 1940, twenty years earlier, when he launched full-scale One of the most successful environmental programs worldwide Satyagraha against British rule in India, he did so with the daring promis Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt’s “Natural Step.” Dr. Robèrt is an MD

ise of “Swaraj [freedom] in one year.” It was daring, but not foolhardy.

from Sweden who became immensely concerned with environ-He promised freedom in one year if he got complete cooperation in mental degradation and set out to bring many others into that circle Constructive Programme and spinning. Nothing had changed his of concern. He had, fortunately, patience to match his passion.What’s opinion between 1921 and the early forties; if anything, he was more unique about Natural Step is not so much its superb scientific certain than ever that nonviolence was the only way to go and that the 162

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true meaning of nonviolence was not in the grand, dramatic con-outsider’s offense. That was Gandhi’s first reaction, as it is anyone’s.

frontations like the Dharasana raid (those glittering nonviolent But where most movements stay fixed on “getting them off our back,”

moments), but the slow, steady humming of the spinning wheel.

he instinctively felt that this was only half the story—and maybe only In fact, to appreciate fully how fundamental constructive work the shadow half.The really powerful approach was “let’s get up off our was to his concept of nonviolent change we have to go back to the own backs.” Two things give the approach power, as we’ve seen: the very beginning, to 1894, when he had wrapped up the law case he had shift from “them” to “us” (think how much more accessible we are than been hired to help with in South Africa and could now turn his atten-they, after all) and the parallel shift from an obstructive to a constructive tion to the “evil” that had been in his face almost from the day he mode of operation. Is it not obvious that, other things being equal, it arrived in May of 1893—Apartheid. For right here, where it all is far better to build than destroy?

began, he made sure that alongside the community’s direct struggle with the government “the question of internal improvement was also taken up.”4 These were to prove portentous, and understated, words.

From Constructive Programme

In course of time, “also” would become “mainly”; the emphasis would to a Constructive Program

steadily shift to constructive work undertaken in the community itself, whether it be the Indian community in South Africa or the dis-How can we apply that insight today and in the West, facing the enor-enfranchised Indians in their own country, even though the drama that mous changes we need to bring about? Here and there, many people fascinated the world would always be the outright clashes with British like Dr. Robèrt are already hard at work at parts of this vast project: power. He meant it when he said his real politics was constructive rebuilding neighborhoods, rescuing young people from gangs, doing work. It was so simple that almost no one got it.

nonviolence workshops in prisons, saving whales. What’s missing, it A nonviolent actor will naturally be a little nervous about putting seems to me, is that all this has yet to gel.The whole that would make the blame for any wrong exclusively on others. When you are the much more beautiful sense of all these parts is not yet very clear. One weaker party and are in fact being exploited, it’s all the more impor-afternoon, a student of mine asked a well-known peace scholar who tant to remember that you, too, must have some weaknesses that got had given us a beautiful talk:

you into the situation. No weakness, no exploitation. Though he had no illusions about the ruthlessness and bias of Europeans, Gandhi As an activist, I find it frustrating that we’re trying to would nonetheless tell his fellow Indians—in Hind Swaraj, one of the stop a war here, stop genocide there, stop the arms most fiery tracts he ever wrote—that India was not taken with the race all over, and the minute we prevent one thing, sword and could not be held by the sword: “We brought the English, there are three more. What we’re not stopping is and we keep them . . . our adoption of their civilization makes their what’s causing all these things. And I’m wondering if presence in India at all possible.”5

you have any sense of what that is.

Whatever we may feel about the fairness or “morality” of the emphasis on correcting our own weaknesses, it is a powerful way to She didn’t. But I think we’re beginning to.What causes “all these resist exploitation. Gandhi came to feel that it was the best way. Like things” is called violence, and something called nonviolence is the most popular movements, Satyagraha originated as a reaction to an antidote, and something called constructive program would be the most 164

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effective mode of nonviolence, especially in between, and leading up campaign) was the sun ’round which the rest revolved. One has to to, climactic struggles like the civil rights movement. It seems to me remember that from ancient times, India had been a “forest civiliza-that two things need to happen that are not quite in place: we need to tion” whose culture lay not in the great cities like Takshishela, have a real grasp of the nonviolent principle, which will give us an Pataliputra, or Kashi (modern Benares), but in villages, hundreds of articulate understanding of how to apply it (no inanities, Gandhi thousands of them, in which people lived close to nature and to one would say), and we need some overall design—some coherent, but another.The economic signature of these villages was self-sufficiency.

all-embracing, picture—which would help us feel that we’re all work-Most village industries were carried out by families who had been ing together even if we’re not working on the same project. Not a organized for centuries into a system of interdependent castes. The whale here or a prison group there, a beat-up nose cone here and a exchange of goods and services, rather than money, was the main cur-hugged redwood there, but a total nonviolent-guided evolution.

rency of this interdependence. Among many such industries, spinners The design of the Indian Constructive Programme offers us a and weavers were a part of a “village economy” that reached far model. For the program did have an overall design, which was beyond its villages. Indian cloth was the pride of Asia. Clearly, the extremely simple and could be visualized in a single, oft-repeated absence of central organization does not mean the absence of any image: Constructive Programme was a “solar system,” Gandhi would organization, whatever the European rulers would later think.

often say, and charkha (the spinning wheel) was the “sun.”

Cottage industry was the hub—the network of many hubs—of a vig-Since Gandhi had a chance, as King did not, to develop his ideas orous trade throughout the subcontinent and beyond. Some fragment on a mighty scale, we have the opportunity to see in him reform in of that trade is being revived when one sees a Kanjiveram silk sari action on that scale—to see, for example, the interesting relationship ranking as high fashion at a San Francisco gallery opening or a between charkha, the flagship project, the campaign to wrest back Washington ball.And along with this economic self-sufficiency went a from British control India’s once-proud textile crafts by cottage indus-whole cultural system: religious institutions, education, and most of try, and Constructive Programme in toto.The great advantage to this the governance and law and order that were based in and around the configuration was its harmonic coherence; if the whole wide-ranging villages and in the hands of people who knew each other.

program seemed bewildering, you could understand it in the spinning Then, in the course of the nineteenth century, city-based industrial wheel—for example, he could say “phenomenal progress in spinning”

mills started pulling to themselves the many threads of this economy. In and you would understand that it stood for the whole thing. It was not almost no time (if you take an Indian perspective), industrial cities like a pinch of salt here and a boycotted liquor shop there; it was the whole Ahmadabad, and with it the British monopoly on textile making, idled call to truth that those and other activities represented.

millions of productive villagers, driving them off the margins of the Watch your eyes; we’re going to look directly at the sun.

social system. (Another, portentous aspect of the abuse was that most of these textile tradesmen were Muslims.) In 1928 Gandhiji visited those mills in Ahmadabad, the capital of his home state of Gujarat, and Epiphany at Ahmadabad

had an experience one might be tempted to call a vision. As he stood on the mill floor, looking at the clanking machinery, he wept. For In the broad, comprehensive spectrum of those eighteen projects, where you and I would just see machines—noisy and unpleasant, per-charkha (Hindi for “wheel” and shorthand for the home spinning haps, but just machines—he “saw” the structural violence and the 166

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greed that put them there: the city dweller exploiting the simple We must be prepared to be satisfied with such cloth villager, the impersonal corporation replacing what had been a wide as India can produce, even as we are thankfully con-network of close relationships, the craze for profit overwhelming the tent with such children as God gives us. I have not dignity of work. Legends relate that once the Compassionate Buddha known a mother throwing away her baby even though and his disciples were gazing at a particularly beautiful scene, and it appears ugly to the outsider. . . . Khaddar is the while they were admiring the snow-clad mountains and the clear concrete and central fact of Swadeshi.6

river, he saw a river of sorrow—the flowing tears of suffering humanity—and mountains white not with snow but with the bones of the Swadeshi, briefly defined, is globalism in reverse. It means self-departed. Buddha’s answer was to set in motion the Wheel of the Law; reliance and local action, growing outward from that position of Gandhi’s was to turn the spinning wheel of freedom: freedom from strength to wide interdependency and global concern. Swadeshi greed, centralization, and structural violence.

embodied is homespun, as Gandhi said.

The charkha showed that we can return to the kind of life human-Charkha was exactly the thing to do in so many ways that it’s easy ity lived before the craze of the machine took over. Not only cloth was to lose sight of the most important things. “Food, clothing and shelter involved, but an ideology—not too different from what India had are basic necessities of civilized life,” said one of Gandhi’s granddaugh-known centuries before—in which the rich would voluntarily “live ters recently. “Most of us, at some time in our lives, have rolled out a simply, so that others may simply live,” and the socioeconomic system chapati [flat, Indian bread]. Similarly, every Indian should at some time would be one of human scale. Again, the fact that the system was in his life, feel and touch the charkha, for that is the praan or soul in decentralized did not mean that its components were isolated. As in all of us.We need cloth next to food.”7 In Gandhian economics, there the past, the spinner in his or her village was joined with the farmers is a qualitative difference between the basic needs of food, clothing, who provided the cotton, and with those who manufactured, who and shelter, and anything less essential. Everyone has a right to those sold, and finally who wore the khadi (homespun cotton). Even more three basic needs. If they are not met—for everyone—a society has than the intifada, charkha was rebuilding the infrastructure of a free failed.

India with her own, sustainable way of life.

Now recall Gandhi’s other really great campaign. It’s about salt—

From the twenties onward, Gandhi urged everyone, rich and again, absolutely basic in a tropical country like India.With these two poor, to spend an hour a day spinning, if not carding, weaving, or oth-campaigns, the “obstructive” bid to get salt back from the government erwise making cloth from India’s own cotton, tirelessly explaining and the constructive project to make cloth at the village level, Gandhi that the point was to make cloth for those who could hardly afford to sought to repossess two of the most basic life-sustaining elements of cover their nakedness, to give back meaningful work to millions who any economy, food and clothing. This makes Nehru’s famous saying, had been idled by a system of subtle but ruthless exploitation, and in that khadi was “the livery of our freedom,” almost an understatement: so doing to bring that system to an end. Many Indians, especially in the fight for cloth and salt, India was fighting for control over the Westernized city dwellers, did not like wearing khadi, or khaddar. It’s necessities of life itself.

itchy, it’s rough, and it’s definitely not high fashion.This kind of argu-Nothing could be more real, then, than a spinning wheel. Of ment hurt Gandhi to the quick.

course—thinking now of the real versus symbolic issue we dealt with in chapter 4—the wheel is also a symbol. In India, as anywhere else, 168

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it’s an ancient symbol of the world process, the “wheel of existence, (2) You could do it every day.You did not have to wait for the right of life and death (samsara)”; or as in Buddhism, the “Wheel of the Law.”

time, weather, or circumstance, or depend on a big turnout on some But what brought that ancient symbol back to political life? Not a slo-special occasion; the ancient rhythm of the spinning wheel was tied gan that you hung on the back of your bullock cart, “You’re Following only to the rhythm of day and night itself. It must have reminded and a Spinner.” It was people spinning very real cotton for people who symbolized to the volunteers that they were in it for the long, long really needed it. From that concrete reality came many other gains: an haul—the “relentless persistence” that makes the difference in nonvi-income for idled, often starving, people; hundreds of local networks olence, or almost anything worthwhile. It’s interesting in this connec-getting raw material to spinners, and their products to market; the tion that Gandhi even claimed that daily spinning was a kind of spiri-provision and repair of the capital equipment of taklis (spindles), tual discipline, because no Indian believes that spiritual results happen wheels, carding bows; an ethos of simplicity; a deep sense of solidarity in fits and starts. You can realize them only by sustained application with the poorest; and, last but not least, political freedom once the over a long period.

British grip was nonviolently neutralized. A picture of a spinning (3) Charkha was proactive. You needed clothes, you made them.

wheel on a billboard or the nation’s flag (where it resides today) could This is the heart of a constructive program.Truth takes the lead, and have done none of these things.

events follow. Being proactive gives one a great strategic advantage, as In addition to these three major qualifications for charkha’s “solar”

any general knows. But it also involves the deepest principle of status, namely that it was concrete (as Gandhi pointed out), construc-Satyagraha: truth is not a reflection or an absence of something else; tive, and nonconfrontational, we can easily see a few of its other it is.

advantages:

(4) Finally—coming back now to the impatient volunteer’s ques-

(1) Everybody could do it. Working together creates a sense of tion to Gandhi in 1940—spinning was unquestionably an act of truth shared destiny and unity, as almost nothing else does. I’ve already that confronted the lie of colonialism at the deepest level, and there-mentioned the now-classic experiment carried out at a children’s fore constituted the most effective resistance.The whole colonial sys-camp where working together on common projects reunited rival tem rested on a lie: the “big lie” of dependency, which tries to make groups of youngsters more effectively than seeing movies, eating one group of human beings think it has to beg its bread from another.

together, or any other common activity.8 Potentially, everyone was That is not the way God stocked the planet Earth, but the mystique of united by khadi because everyone could spin; man, woman, or child, superiority is compelling, even to those on the receiving end. India rich or poor—no one was too humble or weak or proud or powerful had come to believe the implicit message “You are dependent on us—

to put his or her hand to this wheel. In the grand days of charkha, even you need us to give you salt and cloth (not to mention, administer congressional VIPs came home and spun their half hour every day—in justice, defend you from outsiders, and keep order).” This is what fact, especially the VIPs. But khadi was not only something you spun; Gandhi called the “sinful” and unnatural connection between exploiter it was something you wore, and this forged another kind of solidarity, and exploited; and to it the charkha hummed back, “Thank you, we can since the rich could dress just like the poor—in simple, dignified clothe and feed ourselves—as we did for 5,000 years before you homespun. Wearing their beliefs on their bodies, many well-off came.” In fact, if we listen closely, the wheel is saying, no one needs Indians found out firsthand that brotherhood is more satisfying than anyone else’s manufactured goods to stay alive; in fact, people need status.

very few factory-made goods at all. Revolutionary enough?

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In a world of falsehood, truth is inherently confrontational. A you went to the villages, you would find . . . living corpses.” He did truly constructive program in such a world is like a fish swimming not mince words with them: “Do not think of prospering on the against the current—it will bang into obstructions, even without tombs of the poor millions of India . . . cherish no hope of reviving the seeking them.The Raj began as a trading company; it ended when its old Lancashire trade” that charkha was rendering superfluous. “Don’t unwilling partners decided they would no longer go along with that attribute your misery to India.Think of the world forces that are pow-kind of “trade.” The British may have taught in schools and speechified erfully working against you.”10

in parliament about “the flag” and “destiny” and “white man’s burden,”

It was another miracle of Satyagraha: “May I say or need I say,” one but as soon as the Raj became unprofitable it lost its grip, especially man wrote, “that I as a Lancashire cotton working man, who is to since Gandhi offered the double-sided resistance that Toynbee defined some extent suffering through the action of the Indian Congress lead-so well: “He made it impossible for us to go on ruling India, but at the ers, have a profound admiration for Mr. Gandhi and a great many same time he made it possible for us to abdicate without rancour and of my fellow workers share that spirit?” Said another, after Gandhi’s without dishonour.”9

stern words, “We understand each other now.”11 Through soul force So charkha only appeared nonconfrontational; it was really going we can divide opponents from their agendas while reuniting them for the colonial jugular. A woman in her cottage, a youngster on the with ourselves.

verandah, sometimes a whole village gathered in a festive moment on the maidan (meadow), the air humming with charkhas—they sat slowly, steadily undermining the whole economic system of the Raj, and Heart Unity: Diversity

the government scarcely knew what was happening, or how to stop it Without Division

if they did. Constructive Programme provokes confrontation simply by what it is—or rather, what the rest of the world is. One hopes that Constructive Programme was a comprehensive agenda of projects Gandhi’s impatient questioner grasped that.

that dealt with virtually every aspect of the injured country’s condi-At the same time, there was a noncooperative dimension to charkha tion, but throughout them ran an underlying thread, and that was to that complemented the purely constructive one of spinning—

heal the “brokenness” of Indian society.The first plank on the platform one who clings to truth never clings to just one mode of operation.

was, accordingly, Communal Unity. Removal of Untouchability was Khadi-clad Indians burned their British trousers with as much gusto as the second—in other words, to restore harmony between Muslim and they had turned the wheel to make their own (probably more). The Hindu and to eliminate caste arrogance within the Hindu fold. No less boycott of foreign cloth was so successful that nearly three million than six others aimed at “weaving back into the community” various Lancashire millworkers found themselves out of work, and at a time groups that had been marginalized either by Indian tradition itself or of worldwide depression, when economic tempers were already the disruptive influence of foreign rule.12 Clearly, Constructive frayed. Gandhi, in England for the Round Table Conference, made a Programme as a whole was designed to build loving community; heart special trip north to explain his movement directly to the Lancashire unity lay behind its every project.

workers on September 22, 1931, which has become one of the high Let’s pause for a moment over this deceptively simple phrase.

points of nonviolent history. “I am pained by the unemployment here.

Heart unity means that I want you to be happy, notwithstanding But here is no starvation or semi-starvation. In India we have both. If our differences. In fact, to feel heart unity with others is to enjoy 172

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differences—what a flat, boring world it would be without them.And Heart unity is the basis of loving community. Which means, of real those differences can even be, for example, differences of wealth.

community.

Inequalities of wealth are an increasingly obscene feature of the global Other projects in Constructive Programme addressed health, economy. The world’s four richest men hold onto more wealth than substance abuse (mostly alcohol), poverty, and cultural deterioration, about a third of the world’s least developed countries. What else can the latter through “new education.” Taken together—and they were one call this but obscene? Now, absent a concept of heart unity, the meant to be taken together—they were to make India a viable, whole only solution that suggests itself is to wrest wealth away from the rich-society embracing her diversity. Charkha was no exception, since, if est people by whatever means necessary and then spread it around you recall, everyone, big shot or peasant, was supposed to be doing until everyone has about the same amount. Wealthy people tend not the “bread labour” of supplying this basic need together—and wearing to like this solution, and the result is bitter and unequal violence.With the results.

a heart unity framework, the approach is very different.You do not One thing is clear: if we are to benefit from Gandhi, we have to begrudge the comparative happiness of the rich (as Gandhi explained take him whole, not just try to imitate the iconic moments of high to the Lancashire workers), but you seek to awaken them to the shal-drama that punctuated his career. His trust for the future lay mostly in lowness of material wealth and the sorrow of extracting it from oth-steady, constructive work—steady rather than occasional, work rather ers who are in need. So you have to change the minds of the rich.This, than protest, self-uplifting rather than obstructing others, practical of course, is not that easy, but it’s actually easier than dispossessing and concrete rather than symbolic. No one could fight with more them of their money. For one thing, you can demonstrate your own determination when it was needed, but no one was as willing to get lack of concern for excess material wealth, even if you have access to back to constructive work the minute it wasn’t.

some. This will work; in a culture that is not overly materialistic What can we learn from Constructive Programme? Not the indi-

(which admittedly we don’t have at the moment), it will even visibly vidual programs, at least not without understanding and modifying

“work.”

them: we don’t have 700,000 villages, so “village uplift” won’t make We don’t have to go on until we’ve made the whole world a level sense in our world (although people doing community building in economic playing field.All we have to do is get the most destitute peo-their neighborhoods are doing a version of it). Our material resources ple enough to live on and nourish the hope that they’ll be able to grow are on a different order of magnitude from what theirs were then, so and express themselves like human beings.We can’t stop until we’ve khadi itself won’t be directly applicable. Not the structure of com-achieved that, but on the other hand the delineation of “rich” and mand, since we don’t have a single leader of Gandhi’s stature (but we

“poor” can be tolerable as long as the poor have enough to live on, do have an individualism that balks at giving anyone the “dictatorial including respect. We can’t have rich and destitute, as America does, but powers” the Indian masses gladly gave Gandhi).

everyone doesn’t have to be at the same economic level, only the same The impressive thing about Constructive Programme, the thing human level.There has to be empathy, which is the means and end of we can still use, was its vision and its comprehensiveness: the way it all heart unity techniques.

addressed every hurting problem with one inspired energy. We can If people of different races have reached a state of heart unity take the energy, and the organizational model. The energy is nonvio-toward one another, what possible difference can it make that they lence; the model is a broad range of programs with a “solar” project look different? Or have a different diet? Or taste in music? Or religion?

holding them all together, a project that everyone can take part in and 174

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that brings the other components into range of a single vision.

put it in the last chapter, the mass media are practicing education Perhaps it’s obvious what I think that project should be.

without a license. It is time to rebel.

Let me give just one example of what David Korten, in this chapter’s epigraph, meant by the colonization of our political and our Sine Qua Non

cultural space. Millions of Americans watched the Clinton-Bush television debate on October 19, 1992, myself among them.When it was There is a clever Canadian magazine called Adbusters dedicated to over, a network official came forward and announced, “We’ll have the exposing and often satirizing commercialism. One of its first issues results of this debate for you in just a moment.” The “results”? He came out with an extremely clever cover.

meant, of course, who had “won.” I’m sure this passed unnoticed You see a flotilla of small boats carrying men in colonial dress for most viewers, but for me, since I virtually never see commercial made up as Native Americans, making for some old-fashioned three-television, it was quite a shock. I thought the point of a public debate masters sitting at anchor. Some of the “Indians” have already boarded was to help us make up our own minds, not be told by some arbitrary the ships and are happily throwing boxes of cargo overboard. Sound

“authority” what we had just seen. I thought political debate was to air familiar? But as you look closely, you begin to register a few anachro-issues, not to sort out “winners.” Many commentators before me have nisms: the little boats are actually rubber zodiacs, and the cargo that pointed out that the media, particularly television, have changed the “Indians” are ditching in the harbor is TV sets. The caption is, of politics as we knew it, changed it from being at least partly a decision-course, “The Boston TV Party.”

making process to a popularity contest—a fight. They have reduced There is a very serious point to this irreverent pun. In a sense, we democracy to a power struggle. It is from the beachhead established have been “colonized” by people who don’t have our interests at heart by materialism and competitiveness that they have moved this far into any more—and in a way considerably less—than the officials of the our political space.

Raj cared for India’s well-being. Our colonial masters do not come It is an irony, but it’s true, that after fighting so many wars to from another country; they move among us with the same skin colors defend our way of life from foreign aggressors we have given up our and speak the same language we do (though they are butchering it by most meaningful freedom—freedom of thought—without a struggle.

degrees), and yet they systematically victimize us, the “viewing audi-We will certainly not get it back without a struggle, but the method ence,” by making us buy things we don’t want and convincing us to of that struggle and the manner of it must be different in kind from run after happiness where it cannot be found, while covering up the the forces that got us into this morass.We must put at the very center unity and purpose that could bring us real happiness. Unlike India’s of this struggle a key project that begins in personal choice—to break colonial oppressors, who came from a different civilization, speaking the hold of the mass media over our values and culture. Where the a strange language and touting an upstart religion (which they hardly Mahatma’s rallying cry was “boycott foreign cloth,” I propose “boycott followed themselves), our “oppressors” walk the streets with us and foreign thoughts. ” Where he put the wheel of the charkha in motion, I follow exactly the same religion that most of us do—materialism.

say we should spin the dial of the mass media—to “off.”

Commercial television has so altered the minds of young people that Thoughts of hostility, revenge, competition, materialism, and teachers are hard pressed, those who still try, to convey anything to greed can truly be called “foreign” to our essential nature—such, at them that doesn’t follow the materialist-competitive paradigm. As I least, is my confirmed belief. It is in this sense that my late friend 176

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Willis Harman used to use the term pseudovalues for making money California, school board asking for some help. A well-known director and “getting ahead” at the expense of having deep relationships, a was making a horror film in which teenagers were terrorized, com-vibrant family. The former are goals that fade into insignificance for plete with realistic, gory violence, and he had the brilliant idea of those who have gotten a taste of service and compassion and loving making it right in picturesque Santa Rosa High School. Why not let community. This hollow world of turmoil and darkness that we have the young people participate in their own degradation? Would I devoted our ingenuity to creating is not the essential expression of our come to a public meeting as an expert witness, asked the caller.

nature. Despite their long evolutionary pedigree, greed, lust, and Coincidentally, a former student of mine who now works with the anger are foreign to us in the very real sense that they impede us from Media Violence Project had just sent me some of the latest studies on realizing our profoundest aspirations.

screen violence, and horror movies in particular, so I told the caller I’d Children are not born prejudiced, for example; they “have to be be happy to speak, little realizing that by the time I got there the meet-carefully taught,” as the old song says, and they can be untaught ing would be front-page news.

remarkably easily, as we shall see.We can become so conditioned that I arrived at the high school early to find the auditorium already it becomes second nature to respond to a different skin color or accent thronged with an intense, buzzing crowd. Filmmaking, I had forgot-or belief system with hostility, but it never becomes our first nature.

ten, is one of California’s largest industries. The director, who shall The opening verse of the central text of Buddhism, the Dhammapada, remain nameless, had threatened to blackball our community, perhaps reads, in Eknath Easwaran’s translation, “All that we are is the result even our state, and the then-governor—always concerned with our of what we have thought.”13 Whoever influences our thoughts (fiscal) welfare—had backed him with threatening noises of his own.

influences our destiny. Are advertisers equal to that responsibility?

But these powerful men had reckoned without their host. Over 800

people soon filled the seats, and both aisles were filled with prospective speakers waiting their turn at the mike (including “spies” from the Getting Real

studio—attractive young women trying to sweet-talk some of us men out of our resistance). It was a disciplined, intense, high-level meeting, The reclamation of our “cultural space” can be, and probably must be, one of the best I’ve ever seen and perhaps the closest to an old-an everyday, everybody activity—just like charkha. And while it fashioned town meeting you’ll ever find outside New Hampshire.The begins, unlike charkha, with a “no,” it’s open to all of us to “spin” some issue was crystal clear: accept $30,000 in cash from the director, as time each day—the very time we save by not watching television or the governor pressured us to, or protect the minds and hearts of our going to a gory movie—on constructive alternatives. Even within the children.

“no” there are constructive, network-building aspects: writing letters, Speaker after speaker came forward and delivered good argu-spreading knowledge, maybe organizing a media boycott in our kids’

ments, with almost no ranting, almost all of them against the filming.

school, or church, or just among friends.

One man concluded his defiance of the film company and the gover-Media cleanup can be as satisfying as spiking trash alongside the nor by going up to the stage and plunking down $30 from his pocket freeway or dredging a toxic swamp; and though it starts in personal to compensate for the school’s financial sacrifice. (I had pointed out choice, it can give rise to a network, a campaign—a movement.

that a certain infamous betrayal in our civilization had been knocked One day a few years ago I received a call from the Santa Rosa, down for thirty shekels of silver, and while I wasn’t sure how much a 178

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shekel would go for in today’s dollars, the choice we were facing caught up with all the reading for my courses . . . we looked uncannily similar.) A woman who spoke made it onto the next began to visit different families who, during the win-day’s front page: the director had sent a message that “in twenty-five ter months, we lost contact with.

years of filmmaking I have never encountered such resistance”; to The children seemed to fight among themselves which she replied, “It’s about time!”

more often. . . . At the same time the children We made our point, and the filming was turned down. I had never became closer to us as we participated in doing things felt so good about “the American system”—even when the film ended together.14

up being made in an old abandoned estate across the road from where I live!

“The family, I feel, is pulling together tighter as a result of No Satyagraha is always a form of education. The more we can get TV,” wrote one participant in a school’s experiment in Denver.15

people to focus on what the issue really is— in this case, money versus Watching television can be an isolating experience—which is to the well-being of our children—the sooner and the less abrasively we say, a pre-violent experience, even before we get to the horrendous can solve it. The networks—thinking of television again—are in the content. Conversely, whenever and to the degree that people or fam-business for ratings; they have no ideological attachment to vulgarity ilies or friends have abstained from watching television, they have and violence as such. Even one letter that politely explains, “I have found relationships springing back up to take its place, whether it’s stopped watching your program because of its gratuitous violence,”

playing games with the kids or talking about family decisions or just with a “cc” to the advertisers who support that program, makes a talking. Five minutes of in-depth conversation is more fulfilling than difference. More make a bigger one. A movement based on truth may five hours of vicarious absorption in images of someone else’s life.

not catch on as quickly as some, but it doesn’t go away as easily either.

People and families have just about universally reported a sense of Boycotting television and most other media is, it is true, less than relief, of discovery, a sense that they were better off and more “func-inspiring as a constructive undertaking:What does it build? Or, what are tional” when they deep-sixed their sets.

we “putting in business” with this kind of boycott? Actually, quite a bit.

They have scientific support. In an interesting study reported by Families that have stopped watching television have started rediscov-Israeli sociologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, children who grew up in new, ering each other; over and over they have found that it’s far more postwar housing developments in West Germany where they were satisfying to interact with someone, even if it’s a someone you have a given wide yard space to play in were found, surprisingly, to have done problem with, than to stare at pictures of someone who isn’t there.

less well developmentally than comparable kids in more cramped

“The children spent a great deal more time doing creative things,”

quarters in older German cities.The reason, the researchers concluded, wrote Officer Brawley, a New York City policeman who turned off the was precisely that space—it allowed the children to run away from tube for two weeks as part of an experiment.

each other whenever they couldn’t get along, instead of working out their difficulties and becoming more intimate in the process, as I could begin to see where the children spent more Officer Brawley discovered.16 We need human space to grow up in, time doing things which would be of importance to not physical space.

them in their school work in the future. . . . For the My grandchildren have grown up in a world where gas station first time since I had been in school, I was completely attendants sit in glassed-in cubicles and the cashier at the movie talks 180

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to you through a speaker tube.This is a form of dehumanization, and to Sharon Tate as being anything but a store mannequin.”17 No, I’m not by virtue of that fact, an indirect cause of violence—other forms of personally afraid of violence happening in my classroom, but I’m quite which, ironically, this separation is trying to prevent. Here we go afraid that our culture has, by making us progressively less real to each again, making the problem a little worse in the long run, by isolating other, planted the seeds of violence in students before they get there.

ourselves from one another at the heart unity level, in the name of The Action Guide at the end of this book will suggest ways we can

“preventing” (or rather, thwarting) a certain manifestation of violence reconnect more vividly with one another.That’s the most constructive in the short term.

way to tackle depersonalization.The other is to use discrimination in Since I’m digressing a little, let me make the most of it. Being a what we see and hear. Create your own human image impact index.

classroom teacher in this era has had its shocks, and most of them are In the early years at our meditation community we saw every Ian due to the appearance of a generation who not only grew up on tele-Carmichael comedy available; we saw Casablanca almost as often as vision but whose parents had grown up on television. Alongside the Gandhi (well, not quite). If we all support films like Groundhog Day or downgrades you commonly hear about—that freshmen don’t know Mr. Holland’s Opus, it will help convey to producers that not everybody anything (that is, anything of permanent, cultural value) and that they likes dialogue dripping with cynicism or thinks that people betray have a terribly short attention span (so they can’t learn anything of each other and use guns to solve problems with one another as a mat-permanent, cultural value)—there is one you may not have realized.

ter of course. When producers or newspaper editors say, “But this is I remember the first time I was talking away about something and a what the public wants,” they overlook the simple fact that they trained fellow in the second row just got up and walked out. Unceremonious us to want it. It has been a two-way street, and the same two-way departures still go on—and so does my sense of shock. My students street will lead us back out. If we refuse to be an audience to bad don’t lack respect for me or interest in what I’m saying. It took me programming and the media have to endure a period of lower ratings awhile to realize what the problem is: they don’t quite realize I’m real.

until the general public is retrained, we will shape a healthier, less They walk out to get a snack when the tube is on, and they’re not

“toxic” culture, with a higher human image and better values.18

totally aware that now they’re listening to a real live person.

If someone were to ask me, “What is it really going to take to get Remember my observation in chapter 4, that when the military violence off our backs?,” I would answer without hesitation, uses video games to train combat soldiers, it’s primarily training them

“Phenomenal progress in culture.”

not to shoot straight but to shoot without remorse, to suppress their awareness that what they’re shooting is alive. It is also true that those who kill within our own society, in our streets and workplaces and Loving Community

homes, often testify that they did not see their victims as real human beings, but like moving dolls, or images—“virtual” people, just tar-Constructive Programme was, as the name implies, constructive gets. Just as Nurse Black overcame violence by seeing the person rather than obstructive.The central projects sought to weave back into behind the would-be killer, reversing that process keeps those who the community the economically depressed, marginalized, or rejected, would kill or injure from seeing the person for the label, or something using the simple but potent concept of heart unity that informed all even more dehumanizing: Susan Atkins of the Manson cult literally of Constructive Programme, as it informed—or was supposed said that her victims “didn’t even look like people. . . . I didn’t relate to inform—all of Satyagraha. The healing energy gave people a 182

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self-transcending purpose and in the end worked some of its magic guiding principle in both the constructive and obstructive modes of even between the rulers and the ruled. We have every reason to nonviolence. It states that by working in your own sphere of influence believe that the coherence of such a “solar system” model would give you create a resonance in widening circles, but if you overextend us a way to follow our individual passions (save whales, perch in red-yourself, if you try to do everything too soon, you lose power there wood trees, educate about the death penalty) without feeling we are and here.

off doing our own things in isolation; the healing energy of nonvio-And in that very connection, Gandhi added a prophetic remark: lence would unite us.

Television is said to be a form of “communication,” but the com-Well . . . it may be through the Negroes that the munication is pretty one-way. In fact, television watching as we know unadulterated message of non-violence is delivered to it does nothing but isolate us. Each of us in our “techno-cocoon,” we the world.20

commune with the unreal. By form and content it is, at least as we use it now, the very technology of alienation. Even the fact that forty Twenty-some years later, Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a million Americans watch the same “news” at the same time has an white man on a Montgomery bus, setting off a chain of events that isolating effect, for this is a good example not of unity but uniformity punctured the legitimacy of institutional racism in the United States.

—a paradox we’ll be revisiting in chapter 9. The thrust of our con-We know now, thanks mainly to Sudarshan Kapur, that the “ocu-structive program, like its great predecessor, has to be overcoming lar demonstration” of India shaking off her colonial shackles through that isolation, getting back together.

nonviolence came to the United States as a force embodied in quite a In 1936 a delegation of African Americans headed by Dr. Howard few flesh-and-blood satyagrahis, who came to the South to advise and Thurman made a pilgrimage to Gandhi in India. We can imagine the support the movement of the fifties and sixties.

sense of hope with which African Americans had been following the We also know that for both countries the movement that collected rise of the great Indian leader. Bear in mind that Martin Luther King around these great leaders is unfinished business. We teach it in Jr. was seven years old back home in Atlanta at the time of this con-schools, but we don’t carry it forward in our lives. Of late, we’ve actu-versation. Many years later, as a student at Morehouse College, he ally been losing, not gaining, ground to prejudice.

would sit front and center listening to Dr. Thurman give a rousing I had been in denial about this for some time until I gave a talk at address on the significance of Gandhi.

Berkeley in the seventies, to a group of alumni who wanted to hear about my nonviolence course. I spoke enthusiastically, as I recall, about Mrs.Thurman:We want you to come to America . . .

what we can do with this great force and how much it had done for us we need you badly.

in the civil rights struggle. But this was Berkeley. One of those alums MKG: How I wish I could, but I would have nothing had been in the thick of that movement. She came up after the talk and to give you unless I had given an ocular demonstra-tried to say something to the effect of, how could it be? How could we tion here of all that I have been saying. I must make possibly be going back to race hatred after all they had suffered and good the message here, before I bring it to you.19

achieved? She tried, but she could hardly speak through her tears.That broke the spell for me and I had to admit—first of all to myself—that Gandhi had long ago learned the lesson of swadeshi, a prominent even though the conscience of the nation had been roused by purely 184

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nonviolent principles for that brief, shining era, we were actually now recollects. “I knew he had a hard time getting around [Trapp, who has going back into the stupidest and most destructive hatreds.

since passed on, was in a wheelchair] and offered him a ride to the I needed an explanation. And after reflecting over what she’d said grocery store. . . . He just got completely quiet, and all the anger went for some weeks, it did come: Martin Luther King delegitimated out of his voice, and he said,‘I’ve got that taken care of, but thanks for racism, but he did not delegitimate violence. He wanted to, but he never asking.’”21

had the chance. Before he could get that far, someone or someones The Weissers had much more in mind, however, than just stopping killed him. Violence stayed in the warp and woof of our culture, and the harassment.They wanted, if possible, to relieve the hate this man along with it the energy of hate that it bears; and so racism, a form of was suffering, who (they later found out) had been disabled for life—

hate and violence, was bound to return.You cannot expect steam not by a beating he received from a group of blacks. They now took the to leak out through the most convenient crack in the boiler: you have initiative and called him. Not long after, they went to his apartment for to seal all the cracks—or get even smarter and turn down the heat.

a friendly visit, taking a dinner they had made. When he opened his door to meet the Weissers,Trapp pulled two rings off his fingers and handed them over to his still slightly apprehensive guests. They were What the Weissers Did

Nazi rings. He was symbolically, and actually, renouncing the Klan forever.

It is not possible—at least it doesn’t seem possible right now—to Larry Trapp, by his own admission, had been one of the most reignite the civil rights movement, nor would Martin Luther King hard-case white supremacists in the country, a man who “wanted to necessarily want us to. I am quite sure he would want us to continue build up the State of Nebraska into a state as hateful as North Carolina his legacy in the form of constructive action; in fact, that was the and Florida.” Perhaps it is for that very reason that his conversion, direction he himself was taking before reaction cut him off. And this compared to some of the other card-carrying supremacists who have would not have to start, necessarily, as a great movement. Let me made the break, was so complete. “I denounce everything they stand share with you one of the most gripping news stories of 1992, the for,” he said of his former Klan associates.

healing conversion of a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Larry Trapp, by a Jewish couple, Michael and Julie Weisser.

But it’s not the people in the organizations that I hate. . . .

Michael Weisser is the cantor of the South Street Temple in If I were to say I hate all Klansmen because they’re Lincoln, Nebraska, and a prominent supporter of democratic issues.

Klansmen . . . I would still be a racist.22 (my emphasis) In 1992 he and his wife started getting a series of threatening phone calls and hate mail. The police warned him that a prominent local This shows a sophisticated grasp of true, redemptive nonviolence Klansman, Larry Trapp, was behind most of those calls, and though

—of heart unity. I would submit that this story takes us to the heart they put a tap on Trapp’s phone they could not quite prove he was the of loving community.The Weissers’ brilliantly successful act is a model one harassing them. So Weisser was not able to do much to protect of how to apply courage and compassion to the curse of racism, which himself—by the usual methods. One day Trapp was yelling at him over has responded to virtually nothing else.

the phone, and Weisser decided, with his wife’s support, that he had At the same time, you cannot disestablish racism, or any such to resolve this for himself. “I was real quiet and calm,” Cantor Weisser division, by waiting until a spiritually ready hater who is beginning to 186

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look for a way out meets a particularly courageous and nonviolence-here is the payoff: Øberg found that “it took Croat and Serb students aware couple like the Weissers.We need not just more individuals like less than an hour to find out that they have a lot in common, in con-them but programs such that, if there were enough of them, they trast to what they have been told by their government, the media and would make emergency cures like the Weissers’ unnecessary. That often their parents since 1991.”25

means we are talking about young people, and education.

Less than an hour. How many people or groups are willing to give Elias Jabbour is an Israeli Arab, and a Christian. He has lived in Israel that hour for the young people of the world, to heal the wounds that his whole life and has yet to see the peace process work. One day in come from and perpetuate war?

1987, he decided to stop waiting for peace to come from policy makers There are not many so far, but I would like to show how much and started to ask himself what he could do himself. His scheme was good they’re doing—and how to build on it.

simple: turn his home into an “oasis of peace” (like the famous school of that name: Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam). The children spend their days “in a colorful, warm, nurturing environment where it doesn’t The Coffee Epiphany: Toward a

occur to them to treat one another differently based on race or religion”

Thermodynamic Model of Community

—until, that is, they go on to public school, and are once again segregated.23 Those who have the privilege of working with young people get This question of renewing a culture can sometimes be understood to see how easily the conditioned responses of prejudice can sometimes best by comparison with a familiar model, the second law of thermo-be peeled away. In Los Angeles, when members of the Fourth Reich dynamics.This law states that a physical system spontaneously goes to Skinheads were brought together with a group of blacks and Jews their a state of higher entropy over time, meaning that it seeks a kind of own age, once again they quickly came to accept their new friends, leav-equilibrium where everything is mixed up uniformly. Its order, or ing the “Reich” and “Skinheads” stuff in the dust.24

from another viewpoint its “information,” decreases, eventually to Jan Øberg, head of the conflict mitigation team of Sweden’s zero. Things degrade. “Isolated systems move spontaneously toward Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, returned maximum entropy.”26 The most dramatic example is the living organ-from the foundation’s thirtieth mission to former Yugoslavia, where he ism, which without exception degrades irreversibly to the state of conducted a series of “reconciliation seminars” in eastern Slavonia death. The universe itself, it is thought, is eventually approaching a with 120 Croat and Serb gymnasium students from Vukovar, Osijek, state of “heat death” to become an undifferentiated cosmic soup of and Vinkovci. For most of them it was the first time they had met “the mass-energy. Any smaller system, however (and most of them are!), other side,” even though many of them lived in the same town.Various can reverse that entropic drift by receiving energy from outside itself.

techniques such as fishbowl, role play, group discussions, and brain-One important example is our planet.

storming were used. The students got to know each other and exchanged views, made friends, and sang songs.They cried about the The state of nonequilibrium of the Earth irradiated by hurt and pain they had experienced during the war, but were careful the much hotter Sun provides an environment in not to say things like “you did this to us,” just to give vent to their which the cells of plants and animals may build grief. They allowed themselves to brainstorm fascinating ideas and order—i.e., lower their local entropy at the expense visions about a peaceful Croatia, eastern Slavonia, and Vukovar. And of their environment.27

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This is how we stay alive, even though “there is no evidence point-energy to break out of the closed circle of discourse surrounding vio-ing to any ability on the part of living matter to run counter to the lence, as living things on earth need energy from beyond our planet, principle of increasing (overall) disorder as formulated in the second from the sun, to organize themselves biologically and overcome law of thermodynamics.”28 A biological community is not dissimilar.

entropy. The prevailing culture is “running down” toward thermody-Inbreeding can cause a dangerous loss of diversity, meaning a loss of namic death for want of a new energy that can vitalize new patterns its resilience and vitality, unless new genetic information comes into of order, which can help us respond to the crisis and opportunity the gene pool from another source.

facing us.

Imagine now a society as a “black box,” or isolated system. In such Nonviolence is that new kind of energy. It is not really new, of a closed system, be it a test tube or a galaxy, energy inevitably runs course, any more than sunlight is new, but we have so turned our back down over the course of time; disorder increases and meaningful on this dimension of life that we find ourselves trying, absurdly, to

“information” is steadily lost. Similarly, do not cultures lose their vital-solve problem after violent problem as though that resource, that ity over time, does their focus not blur or their priorities start to drift energy, did not exist. One way of looking at Constructive Programme as people lose their sense of what it is they’re supposed to do in life?

(and Gandhi certainly saw it this way) was as an attempt to introduce One obvious sign of this declining vitality—one we’re only too famil-nonviolence energy into the social order on a grand scale. Through iar with—is that decision makers keep coming up with the same Constructive Programme, for example, Gandhi and his close disciple unworkable solutions to problems that go on increasing. Is alienation Vinoba Bhave birthed institutions of every description—hospitals, eroding our security? Let’s put more people in jail. Is there a rogue schools, rural institutes, spinning centers—no less than 1,200 of state in the international system? Hit them with more sanctions—and which are still going strong in India today. The innate power of non-if they don’t fall in line, more bombs. On one level, violence, as we’ve violence is so impressive, as all this institution building hints, that we seen before, is a serious lack of imagination.

might think of Constructive Programme as the Van Allen Belt, filter-One of the most studied decision-making processes in modern ing the immense power of nonviolence and stepping it down to governmental history is that by which a series of American presidents, useable amounts and wavelengths so it could enter society with mini-particularly President Johnson, kept on deluding themselves that they mum disruption and maximum ordering potential, the way the Great were about to “win” the war in Vietnam. Psychologists invented a new God, Shiva, absorbed the immense power of the Ganges onto his concept, “crisis decision making,” to explain this cramping of the divine head so he could meter it out to bring life and purification to imagination (not to mention, of compassion). One way that worked the Gangetic Plain.

was as drastic as it was simple: President Johnson surrounded himself Where our thermodynamic analogy breaks down, however, is that with a small clique of men, a black box within a black box, who would in our case the “outside” of the social system is really an “inside.”

scornfully dismiss anything but the “more-war” mentality. Anyone Nonviolence is first and foremost a kind of energy that resides within who came up with another idea was out, and so we were all doomed a human being.We do not need different individuals in power, so much to stay the course—until we sank.

as we need a different kind of power in individuals. Some of the key It was extreme, but President Johnson’s war cabinet was also campaigns of the civil rights movement—the Montgomery bus strike symptomatic of the way our thinking about violence in general is lim-and the Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-ins come to ited by narrow, self-defeating notions. We need new ideas and fresh mind—were not sparked by Martin Luther King, or Bayard Rustin or 190

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by “outsiders” coming from up north, but respectively by a black house, with wife and children inside, had just been bombed: “My seamstress named Rosa Parks and by four local college students who religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to got it in their heads to do the “disruptive” actions that would eventu-face it.” In fact, that experience came back to him repeatedly over the ally culminate in a higher level of social order.

months and years of struggle. It was his enduring strength.30

We tend to know more about how the leaders went through the We could not find a better example of what I was calling a profound inner changes that allowed them access to new faith and different energy coming into “the system,” in this case American soci-courage, simply because of their public exposure. We know that ety and all whom it influences, through the deep experience of an Martin Luther King, for example, was at first unprepared for the level individual. We should not be surprised that King was looking much of hatred that rose like an angry sea that threatened to take, and even-more toward constructive work when death overtook him.

tually would take, his life. He passed through a profound crisis, his What, though, does this mean for the rest of us? These rare expe-

“Pietermaritzburg” if you will, that almost broke him. It came to a riences do happen to people—to a rare leader in a crisis, to a group head on Friday, January 27, 1955, the day after his first jail experience, kneeling on the Birmingham sidewalk, to a nation roused by a Gandhi, when a series of obscene and hateful phone calls shook his confidence.

but we can’t count on them. We can’t plan them, but maybe we can At midnight that night, after a particularly ugly and threatening call institutionalize them. That is, maybe we can make institutional and that left him unable to get back to sleep, his anxiety mounted.

cultural changes that will encourage such experiences and make longer-lasting use of their effects. There is at least some indirect evi-And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any dence that this is possible.

longer. I was weak. Something said to me, you can’t According to an important anthropological theory of violence, call on Daddy now, he’s up in Atlanta a hundred and human groups have a kind of mob instinct that has been carried along seventy-five miles away.You can’t even call on Mama the course of evolution and has been observed very clearly, for exam-now.You’ve got to call on that something in that per-ple, among primates.31 Because of this instinct (or whatever name we son that your Daddy used to tell you about, that should use for such a pre-rational behavior), certain kinds of tension power that can make a way out of no way.

within a community can cause the community to expend its violence

. . . And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I on available victims who may have little to do with the original prob-never will forget it. . . . And it seemed at that lem. Such a response has been inscribed, as it were, in the cultural moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, code of many societies, expressing itself in varied institutions that

“Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up would fit the term scapegoating. The Holocaust was a huge example for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with of this—note that the word holocaust itself is drawn from a context of you, even until the end of the world.”29

ritual sacrifice, which was a major form of victimization in archaic cultures.

Whatever we believe this inner voice was, however we explain it, Without going further into this fascinating theory, which explains it had the immediate effect of lifting King to a higher level of function-so well how violent impulse becomes violent institution, we can use ing:“Almost at once my fears began to go, my uncertainty disappeared.”

it the way we have used other aspects of violence in this book—we Three days later it allowed him to accept calmly the news that his can stand it on its head. If destructive energy can be encoded and 192

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institutionalized, surely so can creative energy. This is what Gandhi’s as the sun around which other healing projects of our constructive ashrams were supposed to do: “The Ashram holds that . . . society can program can revolve.

be built up on the foundations of ahimsa,” he explained, and it “con-Early intervention, and especially earliest intervention at the foun-ducts experiments with this end in view.”32

dation of culture itself, is what constructive programs are about. I have This is what I had in mind when I pointed out how Joan Black, little doubt, as I’ve mentioned, that had King lived, he too would have when she was confronted with a deranged individual in her emer-moved from protest marches and sit-ins toward “cooperating with gency room, responded with behavior that followed a pattern laid good” once he got past the necessary first step of “noncooperating down by ancient rhetoricians for roughly that kind of emotional work.

with evil.” The instinct was already there, even in the first campaign, Apparently, the ancients, with their relatively slow pace of life and which was designed not to put the Montgomery bus company out of stable institutions, observed how some clever individuals had calmed business, but to put justice in business, “to achieve justice for ourselves someone down who was in a dangerous fury, or bucked up somebody as well as for the white man.”34 The arc from integrating buses to mired in a depression, and they literally wrote the script for anyone securing voting rights to building economic opportunity was bending who needs to do this. And this is what Gandhi, King, and others lived toward an American constructive program; how do we complete the for: so that no matter how much they had to suffer to show the power circle?

of nonviolence, we could come along and understand what was I have stressed two ways, privileging the first: our own personal involved and learn how to make it work more systematically, eventu-engagement. As King said, “Nonviolence in the truest sense is not a ally to make it not the odd exception but the way conflict is resolved strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment; and life is lived. In this sense, culture, like science, works by serendip-nonviolence is ultimately a way of life that men [and women] live by ity, noting examples of successful living and passing them on. In this because of the sheer morality of its claim,”33 or, as I’ve been putting it, particular transmission, we cannot afford to fail.

because of the quality of its energy. The other way is institutional For this reason we have, in the above discussions, peered into the change, starting with those institutions that shape our basic values.

abyss of crime and into the abyss of racism, to see how nonviolence Why are we never told in school that the human being has an innate can send a ray of light even into those dark areas. In a moment, we need for integration with others and, “as far as in him or her lies,” with will do the same with war. We have already seen moments of great all life? Why are we never told that no one can live fully without real-illumination happening in sudden emergencies, at the climaxes of izing that his or her life has an overriding purpose? Are we to turn our movements, and most importantly in the defining moments of certain back on our deepest needs simply because advertisers have no way to individuals.And we already know that if we don’t want to go on lurch-exploit them?

ing from one emergency to the next, we have to let ourselves down A nonviolent moment can be regarded as a kind of epiphany, a the chain of causality, from spectacular late interventions like the sudden eruption of some new and unexpected energy.Whether it be Weissers’ to earlier and less hair-raising ones like the Oasis of Peace an individual bent over a midnight cup of coffee or a crowd suddenly school, or Elias Jabbour’s private version of the same, or numerous roused to a higher mode of activity, this energy can be captured and projects like those mounted by the Search for Common Ground.The developed. As reform or resistance, it can raise the consciousness of one thing needed for such moments and such projects to thrive is cul-many and leaven the mainstream to the great benefit of us all.

tural support—which is why reforming the media takes pride of place In these last two chapters we have been exploring how nonviolence 194

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—in “the truest sense” as King put it, a nonviolence universal in scope Chapter Seven

and deeply founded in individual commitment—could be systematically applied to two huge social problems, crime and racism. Our A CLEAR PICTURE OF PEACE

theme was loving community; our preferred mode of action was constructive.And so they will remain, as we move on to grapple with “the scourge of war.”

R

If passive resistance could conquer racial hatred . . . Gandhi and Negroes like King would have shown the world how to conquer war itself.

—W. E. B. DuBois

S O M E S I X W E E K S after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of distinguished nuclear scientists met in Chicago. It was here that Enrico Fermi had carried out the first chain reaction; now the bomb had shown its awful power and humanity had to face the question of how to live with it.The scientists were acutely aware that history had opened a window of rare possibility for them. On the one hand, the world was shocked and sickened by the horrors of war, and on the other, they who had created the weapon that ended it were held in an almost priestly authority. No one else had quite the prestige they enjoyed to chart a course for humanity that would lead toward peace.

“Yet,” Glenn Seaborg sadly recalls,

no clear picture emerged of how we could achieve the objective nearly all of us had in mind—a world without nuclear weapons. It was as though the seeds of a nuclear arms race were embedded in human nature and political institutions.1

The seeds of a nuclear arms race are indeed embedded in human nature and political institutions—and so are the seeds of stable peace.

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those seeds will flourish and predominate. As we have seen often, else; I can barely restart my computer when it crashes. But what, there is absolutely nothing in human nature, as far as human nature is exactly, does that have to do with the nature of violence or the psy-known to scientists or sages, that predetermines which of these out-chology of deterrence? Have we become so obsessed with machines comes civilization will eventually reach. If by “nature” we mean the and technology that we’ve forgotten that the most important things in deepest aspirations discoverable in the human psyche and the evolu-life are neither?

tionary mechanisms designed to implement those aspirations, then I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who said that there are the cards are, in fact, fairly obviously stacked toward peace. If we are some subjects about which almost anyone you meet on the street heading right now in the other direction, that is not nature calling, but could enlighten you more than the experts. Peace is one of them. In a kind of perverse conditioning that is diverting us from the course of the search for peace, “experts,” like the solemn “news” reports of the our rightful destiny.

media or the pronouncements of the elite who make our foreign poli-This was the picture the scientists did not see—understandably, cies, often do little more than obscure the common-sense intuition because while they were brilliant men in their field, their expertise, that, after all, can light up the path.

no matter what the public might think, was more or less irrelevant.As The Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979 went to Mother Teresa of Kenneth Boulding pointed out, the field of integrative power has been Calcutta. The world’s reaction, basically a paean of joy, was one of left fallow. No one—that is, no category of “experts” we currently those sparks of intuition. “Now the mother of Bengal is the mother of recognize—makes it his or her special study to learn and teach how the entire world,” said an ecstatic Bengali on the streets of Calcutta.

to fertilize the field of peace and reap its rich harvest. Scientists and Mother Teresa had been honored by Pope Paul eight years earlier with well-meaning people that they were, the Chicago group were the first Pope John XXIII Peace Prize, and now she was awarded the nonetheless caught in the same constricted vision as the rest of us; like Nobel, though she had never played a role in a negotiation, signed a us, they tended to see the world and its potential from within the treaty, or used her influence to prevent a large-scale conflict.Yet world shadow side—the sad, greed-driven, media-constricted image of opinion rapturously approved the award, unconsciously sharing in the what is possible.

logic it implied—that he or she who lifts the human image out of the I have a reason for stressing this point. For a period of time, I was gutter, as Mother Teresa had literally done in the streets of Calcutta part of a remarkable series of meetings with nuclear weapons scien-and around the world, does more for peace than haggling statesmen tists, theologians, and professors convened by the bishop of Oakland, or threatening armies.

California, when the American Catholic Bishops’ pastoral of 1983 had And in fact, Mother Teresa demonstrated her peacemaking power expressed grave concern about the morality of the nuclear arms race.

dramatically in 1982 when, upon hearing that an orphanage for dis-Our discussions in the privileged atmosphere of a Catholic retreat abled children in Beirut had been abandoned to its fate during intense house in the hills above the Central Valley were remarkably frank and fighting, she announced her intention to enter the city and rescue the searching. It was one of the best opportunities I had ever had to pres-children. And so she did: for ten days the mere presence of the ent nonviolence to an influential audience. I noticed, however, that a diminutive nun, who owned virtually nothing and had access to no physical science colleague from Stanford laid claim to—and was state authority, brought the spasm of raging conflict that no UN-granted—special authority because he “was the guy who knew how to brokered force, no Syrian presence, no Israeli armies had been able to restart the Stanford Linear Accelerator.” I was impressed, like everyone control to a strange peace.

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So the Nobel award, and the world’s rapturous approval, were Can nonviolence be used to defend a whole state—can it be led rare threads of bright intuition in a fabric of confusion surrounding to a replacement of the war system? Even in the largely unworked peace and war. In the Beirut rescue drama, there resided, however, field of peace itself some scholars will declare that nonviolence is not one of the wilder ironies of modern times. Mother Teresa’s antagonist relevant to the solution of international conflict; it just can’t reach that in this struggle, the man who ordered the rain of bombs and rockets far: “Nonviolent action has never been and will never be a replacement on south Lebanon, was the prime minister of Israel, Menachem for warfare.”3 (my emphasis) But that thread of intuition we picked up Begin—who had been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize the year before!

in Calcutta and traced through Beirut and Oslo seems to be leading to This award was not given in cynicism. Prime Minister Begin and a yes.As W. E. B. DuBois said, it indicates that those who cultivate the Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat had jointly signed a “peace” agreement that put

“arts of love” like King and Gandhi and Mother Teresa are the ones a temporary slowdown on hostilities between Israel and Egypt (the who bring peace to the world, not those who hold others at bay in an award had been given to Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger for a simi-uneasy equilibrium of naked power. DuBois was speaking incredu-lar achievement in 1973). This is what is called “negative peace,”

lously, even sarcastically; but I will be confirming it in all seriousness.

arguably better than positive war, and in this sense the award to Begin For Gandhi, it was very clear— only nonviolence can replace warfare: and Sadat was not made in cynicism. But it was certainly done in con-

“I can say with confidence that if the world is to have peace, non-fusion, the confusion between the two definitions of “peace” that are violence is the means to that end, and [there is] no other.”4

now “reigning,” as Emerson said, “in the minds of many persons”: the I. I. Rabi, who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1944, later confusion between “negative peace” (à la Begin) and “positive peace”

said ruefully of the nuclear arms race, “It gets worse and worse. I don’t (à la Mother Teresa), between a standoff characterized by the absence know why we failed. It’s a mystery. It’s the great mystery of the post-of physical war and an island of loving community nourished by the war period. . . . Anything that reduces nuclear weapons, I’m for.”5

presence of spontaneous mutual concern.

But isn’t it intuitive that we cannot get to peace through the Incidentally, the attack Prime Minister Begin had launched on torturous maze of war? The reason the way to peace is such a mystery Lebanon in 1981 was code-named “Peace for Galilee.” That was cynical.

is, most of us cannot get from the heart intuition that we share with None other than Robert McNamara said, “Mother Teresa deserves Mother Teresa to a coherent idea how we ourselves, who don’t Nobel’s Peace Prize because she promotes peace in the most funda-share her vocation, can nonetheless follow her lead. Politicians give lip mental manner, by her confirmation of . . . human dignity.”2 But in her service to her kind of contribution, but who tries to move that own acceptance speech at Oslo, speaking in what she called “her own acknowledgment from the lips to somewhere near the heart? Let’s special brand of English,” Mother Teresa defined even more simply the dare to be intuitive. I suggest that the way to see the “clear picture”

contrast between her kind of peace and that promoted by presidents sought by the nuclear scientists, so far in vain, is to step out of the and prime ministers: “I am called to help the individual.” Violence is shadows.That is, not to be always thinking how to stop war so much always against the individual; the human individual is always the as how to start nonviolence.

source, and individuality the ultimate beneficiary, of nonviolence.

This makes all the more arresting the idea that nonviolence can be used in war, which is the largest-scale form of violence, in which the actors are the largest groups or states.

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Body, Mind, and Spirit I:

material age. In the seventies there was a Reader’s Digest series on health called “I Am Joe’s Foot” or “Heart” or some other organ. As Sri Thinking Peace

Easwaran began to collect enthusiastic meditators around him on the When Joan Baez led the first group of protesters into Sproul Hall on Berkeley campus in that era, one of his oft-expressed desires, not the Berkeley campus, launching what is now known as the free speech entirely tongue in cheek, was to write an article called “I Am Joe’s movement, she stopped at the head of the long, wide stairway for a Mind.” He even had his opening sentence: “Joe thinks he’s me.” It moment, turned, and said with her famous smile to the huge crowd would have made the Reader’s Digest a journal for all time.

of students who were all but intoxicated by the historic significance of Peacemaking is nothing more nor less than the application of soul their entry into the forbidden building, to remember that we weren’t force to human violence at its greatest scale.Therefore, it must begin, going in anger but with love in our hearts.We were going to be non-somehow, with deep changes that take place within the person—

violent in thought, word, and deed. She was echoing what Martin where the soul is. It doesn’t stop there, to be sure.The fact is, it’s nearly Luther King before her and many nonviolent activists before and after impossible to keep soul force from having effects on the world, even-her have said. Real nonviolence comes from each of us, from within tually quite visible ones on the material aspect of the world.To begin ourselves.We have to do something about our thoughts, our speech, to show how soul force, somehow resident in or reachable through the and our outer behavior to have a nonviolent effect on the world.

human mind, could become a peace system in the world, I am going The trouble is, or was, that in 1964 even those who were inclined to envision three steps, or projects, that, in the spirit of Joan Baez’s to agree with Ms. Baez didn’t have the faintest idea how to be nonvi-rallying cry, illustrate three stages of the great change that has to happen olent in thought.To get any sort of systematic handle on our thoughts

—three threads to weave into an eventual fabric of peace: thought, was never discussed in education; indeed, it was scarcely dreamed of, word, and deed.

anywhere. Meditation was still an empty or a badly misunderstood Whatever else the “new age” paradigm may have accomplished, or word, outside of the rarest circles. How quickly that all changed. By failed to, it has made it easier to talk about the baffling problem of the time the free speech movement was over, in little less than a year, large conflicts by making it somewhat more natural to bear in mind alongside the political style that could in a way go back to centuries of their connection with consciousness. Consciousness is within, but not student rebellion now filtered through what we took to be Marxism limited to, the individual. However vast, however complex and “out (none of us ever read Marx or Lenin, to my knowledge) came the “new there” the war system may be when it finally plays itself out, “wars age” consciousness that was to create yet another subculture. In the begin in the minds of men.” Emerson had long ago foreshadowed this same cafés where we had sat discussing Camus and Fanon over cups of truism of the UNESCO Charter in his musing about the Concord plain coffee, some of us now talked excitedly about Vivekananda and armory that I’ve often quoted: “It is really a thought that built this por-Buddhism over lattes.

tentous war establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away.”6 The Time will sort out what is real in this new way of thinking and nonviolence that can overcome war must also begin in the minds of what is romantic wish fulfillment.The “new age” is a reaction against men and women.Any and all of us. During the Cold War that followed materialism, which richly deserves one, but many reactions somehow hard upon that resounding, but ignored, first clause of the UNESCO

end up stuck in the outworn creed that they’re rejecting. It is still Charter, British historian E. P.Thompson was dismayed by the danger-difficult to talk about—even think about—the mind in this still very ous fixation on nuclear weapons as things—prophetically, because this 202

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trivialization of war was to reach a climax in the Gulf conflict some

“Wonder why more people don’t realize that.”

years later. He remarked then, rather chillingly, “The deformed

“I’m so smart!”

human mind is the ultimate doomsday weapon.”7 Emerson said,

“Why on earth doesn’t Genevieve appreciate me. Like the other

“Timber, brick, lime and stone have flown into convenient shape, obe-day . . .”

dient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons”;8 now Whoops, there we go again. When our thoughts are slow and steel, silicon, glass, and radioactive isotopes have obediently flown positive (and slow and positive tend to come together, just as fast and into shapes far more destructive. Our thinking has not improved, and negative do), it is relatively easy to keep them off that most boring of so the “improvements” in our technology take us backward into grave subjects—ourself. Our mind quickly regains its native responsive-danger.

ness, i.e., to the needs of others. The fact is, when we speak of an I would, however, propose a more compassionate, and in the end uncontrolled mind, we are being a bit inaccurate. A mind that our a more practical, handle on Thompson’s grim observation: the undis-better judgment does not direct is not really uncontrolled; it is ciplined human mind is the ultimate doomsday weapon. Minds become controlled by forces of which we would not approve. Meditation is deformed by lack of discipline, and formed by discipline. As the thus an ever-deepening tug-of-war between our better judgment and Buddha said, “More than those who hate you, more than all your ene-forces like anger, fear, and greed, which are in turn driven by the mies, an undisciplined mind does greater harm. More than your ultimate, chaotic principle within us; call it the ego or something mother, more than your father, more than all your family, a well-more colorful—it is the “doomsday machine” in our own mind. We disciplined mind does greater good.”9 An undisciplined mind is the dismantle that machine definitively on the gala day when our better most dangerous kind of loose cannon.Whoever owns such a mind will judgment gains spontaneous, unbroken control over the thoughts, feel insecure no matter what situation you put him or her in and will images, and feelings produced, now more slowly and less seemingly spread insecurity to all those around, which in course of time can randomly, in the factory of the mind.

become the mass insecurity known as war.

In the centuries after Jesus’s passing, tens of thousands of men and The most powerful, direct, and immediate way to discipline the women took to the deserts of Egypt or the hills of Syria to practice mind—to get our hands on the “master idea” reigning over it—is the what they called the “secret regimen.” Later they would call it “the method I extolled in chapter 3: meditation. Meditation—again, as I prayer of quiet” and practice it in monastic enclaves all across Europe, understand it—is “choosing responsiveness over violence” over and or at enclaved moments during otherwise normal lives. Today, over again, systematically and doggedly putting the mind back in a relearning from the East what we have forgotten from our own tradi-positive channel (in my case, the inspirational passage) every time it tions, we call it meditation—and the name matters little. If we look starts wandering, as it will, to hell and gone.The relevance for nonvi-into our own pasts, millions of our fellow human beings have recog-olence of such a struggle is that distractions are not as random as we nized that the mind as we know it is a problem that has to be solved think. Scratch any thought that’s trying to distract you from something for our own fulfillment and the world’s peace.

you are trying to think about, and you’ll find that even the most inno-Today, of course, the mass media have, seemingly by their very cent-seeming, the most pious train of associations is leading you into nature, made it more difficult than ever to recognize this problem.

an ambush only two or three associations off the trail.

D.W. Griffith, the famous film pioneer, made some innovations in

“Ah, that’s a great verse.”

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drastically accelerated scene changes in the typical one-reeler of the speak.What can we do now, while trying to work these deep changes day from about a dozen separate shots to as many as sixty-eight.10 This on the mind and lay the secure foundations of peace from below?

is the same man who, you may remember, produced one of the most There is—and we are leading up to it—a form of direct action pro-violent films of all time, the notorious Birth of a Nation (1915), a ordinary people can take part in that, in my opinion, will help to roll film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan and, as the title implies, what back the monstrous momentum of the war system more effectively Griffith saw as the “nation building” significance for the United States than urging our representatives to sign treaties or withhold some of vigilante racism. To watch MTV today is to see the mind being monies here or there from the military budget. But there is also an made jerky and uncoordinated—and, once you understand the con-important middle ground between thought and action.

nection, wide open for violence.

What causes, or allows, a human being to do inhuman actions?

In meditation you are dealing directly with that mysterious Here are the statements of two such people who found themselves connection between speed, fragmentation, and violence. Key to the swept up in World War II. Former soldier Shiro Azuma participated in practice of meditation is not only the positive content of the passage the massacre of civilians in Nanking. Sixty-one years later, stricken you’re meditating on, but your efforts at slowing down the rate at with remorse, he explained quite simply, “We were able to kill them which you’re going through it. I sometimes feel like a cowpoke, grab-because we despised them.”12

bing the mind by the horns (the words it’s thinking) and wrestling it Once, after I had given a talk in Pasadena for the American down, causing it to go through the passage as slowly as I can, until the Friends Service Committee, a man came up to me and told me that blessed day when compulsive thinking does actually stop.

he and his wife had grown up in a small suburb of Berlin, where her And along with it all its violence. This is the ultimate in making father was the rabbi and was much respected in the whole community.

—and experiencing—peace. Then we will know for ourselves why As persecution intensified in the late thirties, orders came from Berlin Emperor Ashoka declared that there is nothing like meditation for to inflict greater and greater indignities on the Jews. But in this com-making progress in the law of life.

munity, people found themselves unable to carry out those orders, at least when it came to the man’s father-in-law.They were not particularly opposed to the Nazis, he told me, and certainly not openly Body, Mind, and Spirit II:

trying to resist the government; they simply could not overcome their innate respect for the rabbi. A respect that nonviolence itself had Talking Our Walk

roused, it occurred to me, in the case of the Birmingham marchers.

To the extent that we can make peace rule our thoughts, to that Respect, then, is a powerful antidote to violence. But it is the extent, our speech and actions will be pure peace.When Gandhi said, testimony of a second witness that I want to focus on: Adolf

“I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve Eichmann, who was hunted down and brought to Israel to stand trial what I have achieved,”11 he was not talking about founding spinning for his crimes against humanity. Eichmann reportedly said that it centers or leading salt marches. He was talking about the inner peace hadn’t been hard for Nazi leaders to commit such acts, thanks to their that, as he said, others often envied.The perfecting of this long, long language. Hannah Arendt explains that the Gestapo leaders were process, however, is a long way off (judging by myself), and people are ordered to communicate, and therefore ended up thinking, in a causing each other death and suffering all over the world even as we bizarre code of euphemisms. No one spoke of killing, but of “final 206

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solution,” “evacuation,” “special treatment.”

who went in for endless discussions of megatonnages and “throw

–weights” or trying to talk to them about “the morality of the arms The net effect of this language system was not to keep race,” which would evoke nothing but a cold shoulder, which we per-these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to haps deserved. To make others feel bad about what they’re doing prevent them from equating it with their old, “nor-rarely works. Usually it just guarantees that they will stop listening, to mal” knowledge of murder and lies. . . . Eichmann’s protect their smarting conscience.

great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, When the Peace and Conflict Studies program was just underway combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, at Berkeley, I used to invite a captain from the Army ROTC (now made him, of course, an ideal subject for [these] “lan-called Military Science at Berkeley) to talk in the introductory course.

guage rules.”13

He usually stood up to my students’ impatient criticism very well, but on one occasion he casually mentioned, as people do, that of course We may be getting somewhere. If we look back on the Cold War

“there have been wars throughout history.” Fresh from reading Marija era, it can give us a weird feeling of disorientation to see ordinary peo-Gimbutas, I piped up, “Do you realize that that’s not actually true?

ple like you and me blithely contemplating the extermination of the First of all there’s the whole ‘Old European’ civilization, then there planet Earth, and to remember how we thought and spoke about it. It are scores of societies, for example a broad swath of Native American was not a time of democracy (times of tension and hysteria never are) cultures who did not . . .” It was too late. He had changed the subject but one in which a small elite had a handle on our way of thinking, already. Wherever people are faced with the fact that their behavior which they seemed bent on cranking in the direction of more and doesn’t accord with what they say, “the theory of cognitive dissonance more anxiety and war. A number of us scholars who were looking for suggests that [they] change their beliefs to be consistent with their a way out of this freakish condition hit on the idea of studying the lan-behavior,” not the other way around.14

guage of the Cold War discourse going on among these “experts.”

So our group began exploring the world of language and Perhaps we could understand something of how we had gotten into metaphor, where we could hope to engage the defense community in that crazy way of looking at things and help them, the “defense intel-constructive dialogue—and where, I now want to add, we can all do lectuals,” understand it, too.

some constructive work today. People are not going to take charge of The approach had attractive features.We know how maddeningly their thinking process in great numbers any time soon, for this difficult it can be to get someone who’s opposed to us to change his involves the hardest disciplines in the world and the farthest removed or her thinking. A nonviolent moment can turn that trick, but we from the mainstream culture’s field of vision, but language is the key know how rare that is. So it occurred to our group of scholars that we to thoughts, and language can be worked on independently.Whether could look at the imagery, metaphors, nuances, and suggestions in or not we are systematically trying to control the process of our think-which these people speak and write and, by putting that aspect of their ing, i.e., through meditation, we can pay some careful attention to its language under scrutiny of reason, help to show them—and the gen-content. So what did that content look like in the Cold War era?

eral public—how they were deceiving themselves.Wording began to In an influential article called “Sex and Death in the Rational look like the place to stir up the dovecote (or should we say hawk-World of Defense Intellectuals,” psychologist Carol Cohn led the way.

cote). It was anyway more constructive than simply despising those Spending two weeks in a seminar with civilian “defense intellectuals”

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(“a feminist spy in the house of death,” she fancied herself), Cohn shed

“designed for” them, or we say we are going to “impact” something some rather frightening light on the way this elite community was instead of have an effect on it (making a verb out of a noun, to boot), shaping the most fateful decisions of our time—indeed, if they had or when we say something is “competitive” when we mean it’s good.

their way, perhaps of time itself. These men (and an occasional Noticed or not, these locutions—and the implications behind them—

woman) thought of their mission as “formulat[ing] ‘rational’ systems register in our consciousness. If they did not, there would be no such for dealing with . . . nuclear weapons,”15 but what Cohn picked up, lis-thing as poetry. Or advertising.

tening in as a woman and a political outsider, was an odd language shot You might think with some justice that the words and imagery through with interlocking metaphors of eroticism and violence.

we’re discussing here are too subtle to be called violent. But the Weapons “marry up”; some are called “slick-ems”; they try to achieve effects of such speech are not so subtle. Some time in the seventies, I

“deep penetration.” One stereotype of these men was that they were recall, an Irish revolutionist was taken into custody in this country, if anything too rational, with their cold calculations of “megadeaths”

and the British wanted to get their hands on him. Should we extradite?

and innumerable chilling euphemisms like “surgically clean strikes”

The life or death outcome of this question, at least as far as the press and “countervalue attacks,” but in an important way they were far was concerned, hinged on whether this person was a “freedom from rational. With the lives of every one of us in the balance, they fighter” or a “terrorist.” These are extremely polarizing words. In real-were psyching themselves up on the sex-and-violence appeal of ity, of course, he was neither. In reality he was a person, one who had Armageddon!

used violence to get what he wanted.We could certainly have talked Cohn’s important study focused on the key issue of gender and about what to do with such a person—but the possibility for such the rather bruising concept of maleness that’s served up in our discussion disappeared behind a debate over which stereotype defined modern culture, but her work has even broader implications.

him.This is dehumanization.

Language—all levels of language, from the individual word to the It is when we go from labels like these to the imagery and metaphors complex argument—is a powerful handle on the mind. Within the in ordinary language, however, that we really see the power of words to interstices of our own language we can often encode—and thus to a construct and at the same time conceal. Consider this remarkable degree conceal—arguments we do not want to spell out. Modern passage from an interview with General Oscar Humberto Mejía, the language is so pervaded by aggression now that we no longer notice military dictator (or was he chief of state?) of Guatemala, who described we’re using the language of conflict, even when we’re doing peace.

his campaign against the nation’s guerilla army in the eighties: UNESCO distributes rucksacks to institutions which It’s a curious thing, but sometimes the population are part of its Network of some 4600 associated supports the guerilla more than they support their schools in 147 countries.Teachers and educators can own army. I don’t know why.We were just doing our add material targeting the specific needs of the region duty.We didn’t start the war. But the population was or community . . .16 (my emphasis)

the water and the guerillas were the fish.We realized that to kill the fish we had to drain out the water.We Oh dear. “Targeting” peace materials at schools! But we all do this had to pull the indigenous population over to one side,

—when we say, “This project is targeted at inner-city youth,” instead of and this is why we created the civil patrol system.”17

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The guerillas were the fish.That’s a long way down the food chain under the surface of our awareness, it is hard to identify who changes from human beings!

the surrounding language that makes such a shift possible. Do we all But the indigenous people fared even worse in this conceptual fan-do it together; do we follow certain leaders, who may themselves tasy; they were water, i.e., not even animals.They were inert and pas-be scarcely conscious of what they are doing? The images just seem sive (like the army, which “had to” expel them), hardly relevant except to shift by themselves—but of course this is impossible. Rather, the as a hindrance to killing the “fish.” And so one of the cruelest cam-elusiveness of this controlling process should make us aware of the paigns of the cruel twentieth century, in which an entire people was potential importance of each speaker, of you and me.

reduced to living in terror, became easy, the same way it became easy Relearning to talk—this is about as much fun as relearning to for Adolf Eichmann to mastermind the slaughter of tens of thousands walk or eat. That is why James O’Connor opened the Cuss Control of human beings. It became easy when the perpetrators imagined they Academy in Chicago and wrote Cuss Control:The Complete Book on How were not killing and destroying, they were just “pulling the indigenous to Curb Your Cursing: because if people can learn to communicate bet-population to one side.” I can almost hear the words of Mike ter, he rightly says, they will also learn to cope more easily with life’s McCullough, research director for the National Institute for Health inconveniences, thus leading straight to less violence.20 The rise of Care Research: “Imagery is a major vehicle for increasing anger.”18

cursing is keyed to the decline of idealism and compassion, but it’s We could try to make people stop using images and metaphors only part of the story.We have to painstakingly revisit old habits and altogether—except that we would soon find ourselves unable to make ourselves conscious of many things that are automatic: are we speak, or even think very much. Language is entirely based on using euphemisms as an anaesthetic, are we indulging in the “techno-metaphor; even the word metaphor is a metaphor, being a Greek trivialization” that now takes the place of our thinking about war, have expression meaning “carry across” (i.e., from one frame of reference, we succumbed to the “pseudospeciation” that turns people first into one meaning, to another). Rather, what I’m exposing here tells us to guerillas and then into fish—drops people out of sight by reducing be careful how we metaphorize and create images, especially for people.

them to labels and finally to objects?

Just as we have sensitized ourselves to the need to watch our tradi-Cultivating “right speech” is annoying, vexatious, socially awk-tional language around issues of race, gender, etc., we can sensitize ward—and definitely worth it. There is a famous verse in the ourselves to the power of language to disguise and promote violence Bhagavad Gita describing the highest kind of happiness, which applies toward all of us in general.19

here: “What is poison at first but turns to nectar at the end.”21 Well, Carolyn Merchant showed in her eye-opening book The Death of

“nectar” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but if my own experience is Nature that the guiding myth of our culture profoundly determines in any way typical, we do enjoy a sense of realness, of solidity, when how we see everything around us. By changing the traditional under-we begin to drop misleading euphemisms, evasive technicalities, and lying image of the earth as Mother to that of an inert thing, a process dehumanizing stereotypes—a sense of relief.

Merchant correctly calls “desacralization,” our immediate ancestors One kind of wrong speech in particular repays close attention.

destroyed a safeguard against the despoiling of their own environ-Euphemisms, as we’ve seen, can be as dangerous as stereotypes.

ment, opening a way to the near destruction of the planet that is now Scrupulously calling things what they are is a form of Satyagraha—

facing us. I said “by changing,” but who actually carried out that clinging to truth. Underneath all its conditioning, the human mind change? In the case of a huge cultural shift like this, a shift that goes on still inherently rejects violence; we have seen evidence for this in the 212

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etymology of the word violence itself, in behavioral science (when it have drawn a cloak of denial over the sanctity, or, if you prefer, the looks for such evidence), and in numerous historical examples.There supreme value, of life, and then we find that some of us have turned is enough innate rejection of violence inside a person that Satyagraha around and vainly imagined life in inert machines—in the machines, can often work just by making the violence in a situation unmistakably in fact, of death. We denied life and worshipped death. Would the visible.

word blasphemy be too strong for this mistake?

Euphemism has another side, which became all too manifest in the One more example before we get from peace in thought and horrors of the Cold War rhetoric Carol Cohn analyzed. Remember word to peace in deed.

that the all-important issue in violence is dehumanization, so graphi-Bill Kennedy is a financial guru (think about that metaphor for a cally accomplished by the language of General Mejía. It is in this sense minute!) who gives highly successful seminars for the rich on how to that “truth is the first victim in war,” that the truth of the others’

get very rich. Kennedy is a forthright sort of man. He likes to refer to humanity is denied in all violence. In a way, this is understandable: his program with a rather unusual, attention-grabbing moniker.

before you can bring yourself to kill others or injure them, you have to reduce people to “enemies” or animals or, even better, to objects.

I came to the decision that “war college” was an But during the Cold War, the sword that violence wielded against appropriate name. . . . What better metaphor than truth in speech cut two ways. In this discourse, the living were dehu-war for the battle of accomplishment every person manized (cities became “targets,” disasters became statistics) and must wage to survive . . . amidst the financial nonliving objects were artificially invested with a borrowed life.Think firefights that are sure to follow the inevitable crashes of what it means to say a “rich harvest” of nuclear “kills” when you’re of the 1990s.23

talking about destroying enemy missiles (housed in “silos”), or what it means when “friendly” missiles colliding is called “fratricide.” Think Social Darwinism can go no further—all life is a fight, in fact a about the implication of “smart” bombs.This is the language of life—

war. Human accomplishment, nay, human survival, is about making only what it’s actually describing is certain death.

more money than other people. “Investing is not a win/win proposi-As Martin Luther King said, “We have guided missiles and mis-tion,” Mr. Kennedy blandly tells us, so come to study with this “truly guided men.”22 The choice between God and Mammon is in a funda-illustrious faculty . . . famous military leaders, acclaimed scientists, mental way a choice between honoring life where it is, in living economists, journalists, historians and foreign dignitaries, . . . Defense beings, or transferring that reverence to things. Materialism, in other Department, and CIA.”24 And by the way, only people with half a mil-words, is fundamentally linked to violence. In an age of materialism lion in assets can apply to the Kennedy War College, so don’t be too we slide all too easily into the mental violence of calling cities “targets”

hasty to get out your uniform. I wonder what a mother on welfare or and then turning around and naming missiles as though they had per-an indigenous farmer in Chiapas would say about this definition of sonalities (the two atomic bombs actually used in war were dubbed

“survival.”

“Little Boy” and “Fat Man”). We have to worship something, as There is another element in this bizarre construction of the Dostoevsky reminded us—that is one of the redeeming features of the world, which I can only touch on, not so much because of limited human being. But under the spell of violence we can end up putting space but because of my personal inability to deal with it.As a teacher, that worship where it does not belong. In order to carry on war we I have found the dedication of education to moneymaking, which is 214

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now the norm, so personally painful that it’s one of the few issues I we have become incapable of seeing that they could be, instead, links don’t trust myself to talk about.This use of the words college and faculty in the net of loving community and peace. During the 1994 guberna-

—this idea that “education” is to help individuals fight each other for torial race in California, senator Tom Hayden was asked what he money—this is grim news for the culture of human beings at the thought of his opponent, Kathleen Brown. He startled the journalist beginning of the third Christian millennium. Recently, I was put on by saying something to the effect of, “She’s not my opponent; she’s my hold while waiting to talk to the produce clerk of a nearby food mar-friend. We’re running for governor. It isn’t a sport." A few more ket that was, it happened, trolling for new employees. Naturally, I was remarks like that and we could put an end to politics as we know it not paying too much attention to the announcements, until I heard and start returning to politics as it was meant to be—the decision-them say, “After all, working for us will give you more experience making process of a democracy, not the power struggle of the arena.

than any other educational institution.” Any other educational institu-While most of us are not “defense intellectuals” or senators, we all tion? This is Safeway State? I can only say that the steady, unremarked constantly participate in a mental environment with various subtexts shrinking of “education” to fiscal prowess that has overtaken our of love and hate over which we have a certain measure of control.This whole society over the last twenty or so years is profoundly relevant to world of thought and speech is a quiet but very real place in which to the rise of violence. For if the purpose of education, which prepares us build a peace culture, and it’s open to everyone. Personally, I try never for life, is to make money, what does that say about the purpose of life?

to say something is “competitive” anymore when I mean that it’s good, The main point this description of the Kennedy War College raises never “target” anyone when I mean I’m doing something for them, for our concern with nonviolence and speech could be put as a ques-never say “impact” instead of “have an effect on” (or use “impact” as a tion: what do war, sexual aggression, business, sports, politics, and verb, for that matter). I don’t use euphemisms like “three strikes, criminal justice have in common? As activities, next to nothing; as you’re out” when I’m talking about putting people in prison for the expressions of the urge to compete, however, practically everything. If rest of their lives, and for some reason I don’t even say that a particu-this is how you think about life, they can all be reduced to forms of lar restaurant has pasta “to die for.” When unsuspecting people say to competition, all played out in a paradigm of scarcity and separateness, me that “this will help the economy grow,” I calmly reply, “You mean as a zero-sum, win/lose proposition. But why stop there? After you’ve

‘expand,’ don’t you? Only living things grow, right?” I make myself done this to everything that can reasonably be construed as a fight, thoroughly obnoxious, but I do this because the thoughts and images everything that has at least an element of give-and-take, go on to make and feelings that go on in my own mind create the intimate environ-everything a fight, even relationships between doctor and patient, stu-ment that I live in, and they determine my contribution to the mental dent and teacher, and—of course—husband and wife. I remember a climate of the world around me. It’s worth it. Even when I think, divorce being covered by the papers some years back in which the much less speak, I try to be as careful about dehumanization and husband explained that he was fighting his ex for custody of the chil-shoot-’em-up images as I am about sexist bias.

dren because “I have to get something out of this relationship.”

Feminists have made some progress in getting us to change This is another way that a certain amount of control over our gender-biased language.We should take that lead and go on, go deep-speech can be effective. Because we nowadays tend to think of every er, to the issue that concerns every one of us as human beings. The sporting event, every business decision, every diplomatic exchange, other day I was in a big hardware store, standing behind a customer and more and more every personal relationship in terms of “winning,”

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clerk behind the counter told him they didn’t have it in stock, he said, Yet if hurting somebody is bad, surely hurting everybody is worse.

in the casual violence of the day, “Oooh, I hate you!” I happened to be When violence “escapes the barrier of our teeth,” as the poet Homer looking at the man behind the counter, and I saw him flinch. These used to say, it hurts everybody at once on some level. And so, just as things matter. In the long run, they matter much more than hinges.

surely, the opposite is true: taking some care to use nonviolent, accu-Whatever we are talking about, under the surface we are carrying on rate words and imagery becomes second nature in course of time and a constant dialogue with one another, about one another, about our creates an incalculable influence toward peace.The habit of truth also relationships.When we say “I hate you” instead of “rats,” we are sendis formed by small, repeated, doable efforts—only in this case they ing a damaging message when we could easily have sent a neutral, have to be conscious efforts for longer than usual, because the whole maybe even a healing, one.

speech environment we live in is tilted the wrong way. I don’t hesitate A friend of mine was told by the same store a few weeks later that to call such humble efforts “constructive program.” They constitute, they had in stock a certain item that she needed.When she got there, each of them, a truth act, available every moment, to everyone.They it turned out that they do usually stock the item, but didn’t have it are nonconfrontational, even unpolitical, if you will, and yet so pow-there that day. Up came the usual words in her mind, “Why on earth erful.To speak and eventually to think as though life were sacred and did you . . .” Never mind. She silently repeated her mantram and human relationships mattered—that would be so powerful. Because, decided to smile, stay calm, and say something soothing. It probably after all, it is so true.

helped that clerk a lot. It definitely helped my friend, who felt good about it for days after. Instead of spreading “road rage,” “air rage,”

“workplace rage,” why don’t we try to spread non-rage, i.e., love?

Then one day we might wake up and find that instead of war we finally have peace.

The effect of each individual thought or word is very small, yes, but taken together, the effect of our thoughts and images is not at all small.When certain kinds of thought and image become a habit, they can become a worldview.What can we do about all this, when it is so pervasive and so automatic? No matter how sweeping the changes that have to be made, or how beyond our reach an Eichmann or a General Mejía may be, we can begin with what appears to be the smallest and most remote point of leverage—you and me. This no one can ever take away from us. It matters what we say and in what terms we think.

As far as the issue of violence/nonviolence goes, it matters crucially.

Whether we refer to a city as a “target” or a bustling community of human beings matters as much as whether we call a thirty-year-old woman a “girl” or a black adult “boy.” The only difference is, in the latter case we know whom we’re hurting, so we’ve tried to stop.

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Chapter Eight

I met Ernesto Cardenal at Berkeley during the early eighties when he was minister of defense in the Sandinista government in FIGHTING FIRE WITH WATER

Nicaragua—and by no means an advocate of nonviolence. I was eager to ask him whether the Witness for Peace groups in his country had helped any to deter Contra attacks.These are the groups, you remember, in which volunteers like my friend Sue Severin stumbled upon the R

protective effect of an unarmed presence. But at the same time I was a little apprehensive, because I knew nonviolence was not his thing. I Perhaps the careful study of man’s past will explain to me much that need not have been. “We need more of these groups and need them seems inexplicable in his disconcerting present. Perhaps the means of quickly,” he told me with great feeling. “Wherever they have been salvation are already there, implicit in history, unadvertised, carefully there has been no violence!”

concealed by the war-mongers, only awaiting rediscovery to be A little later, when he was speaking through a translator to the acknowledged with enthusiasm by all thinking men and women.

small group who had gathered to hear him at the faculty club, he

—Vera Brittain

repeated what he had just told me privately: wherever these little groups of internationals went there were no attacks, no violence. At this point his translator unconsciously made a slight “correction.”

B Y L I B E R AT I N G O U R own minds from the culture of violence Evidently unable to quite believe what he was hearing, the translator (I keep coming back to the mass media here), and by consciously said, “. . . there has been nearly no violence.” Cardenal caught that at making our own thoughts and speech peaceworthy, we are preparing once and slammed his fist on the table: “I said, absolutely no violence!”

ourselves to act effectively for peace. It is now time to consider what I beamed. Cardenal was not a believer in principled nonviolence. But that action might look like.

he was man enough to believe what he saw and not to “normalize” it away.This is all we need to see the antidote to war that intuition tells us must be contained in the repertoire of nonviolence.

Body, Mind, and Spirit III:

What Cardenal did not know—even I was not quite aware of it at the time—is that the idea of “armies of peace,” volunteers trained in Armies of Peace

nonviolence instead of threat power who could intervene in large-I want to focus on a dramatic way that peace activists are confronting scale conflict situations, was about fifty years old when my friend Sue violence, and I choose this way not only because of its high drama but Severin and others left their safe homes and careers in the United because, while it has been done by a rather special set of people so far, States to stand with villagers in the “low-intensity” hell of Nicaragua.

there is room for everyone to take part and help them. Bear in mind Gandhi, who seems to have wrestled with every problem in the that while the work done on our thoughts and speech is “proventive,”

modern world, did take on the big question of whether, and if so how, and therefore indispensable, we will now be talking about much later-nonviolence could put an end to war. As soon as he began to see the stage interventions, not so much about what to do before conflicts get power of the “new” method he was using in South Africa, he began out of hand as what we can still do after they have.

to realize that it could be used not only in the social struggle of the 220

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disenfranchised Indians there, or any downtrodden groups like them, is blasphemy to say that non-violence can only be practised by individu-but against the “principalities and powers” that had led humankind into als and never by nations which are composed of individuals.”3 In his own recurrent wars since the dawn of recorded history. Satyagraha was the imagery for the South African struggle, the words “army” and “soldier”

opposite of war; it could be the cure for war. But how could a method, occurred frequently—even more often than “pilgrim.”

albeit highly successful, that was devised to resist injustice within a By the year 1913, around the time Gandhi felt destiny was call-country be applied between countries?

ing him home to confront the British Raj in its lair, he was talking He must have sensed, probably from the earliest days when he openly about Shanti Sena, or “armies of peace,” bands of trained vol-realized that “passive resistance” was the wrong word for the Indians’

unteers whose nonviolent presence and nonviolent skills would make struggle, that the seed they were planting in Africa would one day give the police and national guard unnecessary.4 They would be locally rise to a plant strong enough to break its way through the centuries-based, thus ending the reliance on outside power—a society that can-old concrete of the war system, to bloom into a world order that was not manage its own disorder can never be free—and even more truly, not cynically, new. This conviction never wavered: even at the important, they would be completely nonviolent, thus ending the very end of his life, when the newly separated India and Pakistan went age-old reliance on threat power that perennially bedevils our hopes to war over Kashmir, he held out the claim that the Kashmiris, whose for a better future.

cause was just, could have protected themselves through nonviolence.

At the same time, Gandhi knew perfectly well that a nonviolent The Congress should be able to put forth a non-construction of peace lay, as he put it, “in the womb of the future.” It violent army of volunteers numbering not a few would fall to others to see this particular promise of nonviolence thousands but lakhs [tens of thousands] who would be through to fruition; his job was to rebuild India, to midwife her out of equal to every occasion where the police and the mil-the British grip and, by so doing, expose the illegitimacy and fragility itary are required. . . . They would be constantly of colonialism—enough work for a single lifetime, even by Gandhian engaged in constructive activities that make riots standards! There could be no doubt, however, that the “ocular demon-impossible. . . . Such an army should be ready to cope stration” of Satyagraha’s power being staged in India was meant for with any emergency, and in order to still the frenzy of the whole world. Gandhi stressed repeatedly that what may appear to mobs should risk their lives in numbers sufficient for be India’s problem—exploitation, greed, violence, race hatred—

the purpose. . . . Surely a few hundred young men is the world’s problem,1 and stressed even more explicitly that the and women giving themselves deliberately to mob technique used against communal strife in India, “though apparently fury will be any day a cheaper and braver method of conceived to apply to a corner of this world, is really intended to dealing with such madness than the display and use of cover the whole world.”2

the police and the military.5

Similarly, once we understand the power of nonviolence, we will see that it applies, mutatis mutandis, to all forms of violence, not Gandhi is here talking about a nonviolent equivalent to the police, excluding the biggest. Nonviolence does not stop at national bound-and the military used as police; it’s only a short step to replacing the aries any more than, as I’ve mentioned, the law of gravity applies only military where they are normally used, in war. In 1942, when India to apples. On this point Gandhi was not inclined to mince words: “It and the Raj were cowering before the prospect of a Japanese invasion, 222

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he took that step. While the British rattled their sabers (for show, it women, and a weaning away from violence, but he had not come to turns out—they had no intention of defending India) and many Calcutta to hear Gandhi. At that time the honeymoon between Indians themselves rushed to enlist, Gandhi startled everyone by pro-Muslims and Hindus that warmed the first part of the decade was posing that India could defend herself with nonviolent “armies.”6

largely history. There was not much love lost between the two com-Ironically, in view of popular concepts of “strength,” while Churchill munities, and Khan had come to Calcutta only to attend a meeting of was trying to prepare Roosevelt for a British collapse, Gandhi was the Muslim League.

“preparing his unarmed countrymen to resist to the last man rather It was, however, an unruly and distasteful meeting of the League than submit, if the Japanese landed on Indian soil.”7

that year; in fact, it soon broke up when one irate delegate pulled out He was never given a chance to put this bold vision to the test.The a knife. So, more or less at a loss what to do with himself so far from British put him in prison for most of the war years, and even most of home, Khan dropped around to the Congress pavilion. There, as it his own Congress party members found they were not ready to fol-happens, Gandhiji was speaking to the accompaniment of a relentless low him that far. Historically, wars always thin the ranks of pacifists.

heckler. Strangely, rather than being rattled, Gandhi seemed to get When danger stares one in the face, it is difficult to keep faith with an no end of amusement from his unruly “friend” and went right on untested future.

speaking through his chuckles. Khan was deeply impressed. A leader One man, however, had already taken Gandhi at his word. By far himself, and gifted with an eye for the outwardly small things that the most dramatic shanti sena the world has ever seen was organized in reveal nonviolent power, he at once understood what he was seeing in what was then the North-West Frontier Province by the Mahatma’s the Mahatma’s unflappable control of the situation. He went back to close disciple, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan; and Khan did this not among one of the Muslim leaders and suggested, rather naively, that they gentle Hindus but the notoriously warlike Pathans.8 These are the might get further with a little of that forbearance themselves. “So,” the same people who, along with other Afghans, would stand up to the irate leader cut him off, “the wild Pathans have come to teach us about overwhelmingly superior military force of the Soviet Union half a cen-tolerance!”9 This is exactly what Khan would do.

tury later—and then, tragically, tear themselves to pieces in armed We must tarry here a moment because Khan’s story explodes no factions. But that was later, when they went back to more traditional less than four serious myths about nonviolence, and the Muslim methods of fighting. Our story concerns the days, under Khan’s inspir-leader’s curt rebuff illustrates one of them, namely that nonviolence is ing leadership, when nearly 100,000 Pathan fighters—all devout only for gentlefolk, i.e., the weapon of the weak. Gandhi would explain Muslims—vowed to resist the British without weapons in their hands that one had to be capable of violence before one could renounce it.

or violence in their hearts, and kept that vow under unbelievable It was precisely the Pathans, whose frontier-style traditions of revenge provocation, adding immeasurably to the unstoppable drive toward and violence went back uncounted centuries, who would most readily freedom.

follow their badshah, their leader, when he created a new kind of army Abdul Ghaffar Khan first heard Gandhi as a young man at the All without weapons. These were the famous Khudai Khidmatgars, or India Congress party meeting at Calcutta in December of 1928. He

“Servants of God.” Years later, when Khan himself was at a loss to had heard of Gandhi, of course, and must have been intrigued that the explain how his Pathans were still nonviolent when most of the Mahatma was doing in grand style what he had been doing for his own Hindus had bolted, Gandhi explained to him, “Nonviolence is not for people through village uplift, education, empowerment of the cowards. It is for the brave, the courageous.And the Pathans are more 224

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bringing down the Soviet regime. When the “Red Shirts” refused to knuckle under to ordinary methods, the British sealed off the North-West Frontier Province and set to work humbling the proud Pathans in the way of imperialism everywhere, as though they had not heard that they themselves were supposed to be a civilized people. Homes and crops were razed; people were beaten, stripped, and dragged through cesspools—civilians were bombed from the air for the first time in human history (ten years before Fascist planes bombed Guernica, which is usually cited as the breakthrough in this form of barbarism).They regarded the Pathans as “leopards” and treated them accordingly.

The following is an eyewitness description of the attack on a crowd of nonviolent demonstrators protesting Khan’s arrest at the Kissa Kahani Bazaar in Peshawar on April 23, 1930. It does not give the impression of a people whose fair-mindedness made them a pushover for nonviolence.

All of a sudden two or three armored cars came at great speed from behind without giving warning of An army without arms. Abdul Ghaffar Khan at the first meeting of the Khudai Khidmatgars, April 1930 (Gandhi Peace Foundation) their approach and drove into the crowd. Several people were run over, of whom some were injured and a courageous than the Hindus. That is why the Pathans were able to few killed on the spot. The people . . . behaved with remain nonviolent.”10

great restraint, collecting the wounded and dead.

A second widely accepted myth, as we’ve encountered often, is that since nonviolence is weak it can only work against weak opposition. It Despite this, the Congress Inquiry Committee report noted that: only worked in India, we are repeatedly told, because the British are so fair-minded; (brace yourself now) “it would never have worked

. . . the troops were ordered to fire. Several people against the Nazis.” The British, however, were not so fair-minded with were killed and wounded and the crowd was pushed the Servants of God. They dubbed them “Red Shirts” and used their back some distance. At about half past eleven, control of the press at home to play on age-old fears of Communism endeavors were made by one or two outsiders to per-and invoke the mystique of the “Great Game” Britain had played for suade the crowd to disperse and the authorities to over a century against Russian influence in the Hindu Kush—quite remove the troops and the armored cars. The crowd an irony, considering that it would later be the Pathans who would was willing to disperse if they were allowed to thwart Soviet power in Afghanistan and thus be instrumental in remove the dead and the injured and if the armored 226

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cars were removed. The authorities, on the other carried out in practice.12 Of course, the Prophet and his followers hand, expressed their determination not to remove fought for their place in history. Of course, many Muslims today the armored cars and the troops.The result was that believe, as many Christians and Jews believe, that they must fight their the people did not disperse and were prepared to lay way to peace through the sword. But those who pray “in the Name of down their lives. The second firing then began and, God, all Mercy, all Compassion” cannot believe that their Prophet was off and on, lasted for more than three hours . . .

primarily a bringer of the sword, their Prophet who said, “Those who commit violence—God has given them respite only until the day their Gene Sharp continues:

eyes become glazed.”13 There is another important hadith, or traditional saying, to the effect that the Prophet one day told his When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, followers, “Help your brother, whether he is an aggressor or a victim those behind came forward with their breasts bared of aggression.” When one of them asked, “How are we supposed to and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that help the aggressor?,” he replied, “By doing your best to stop him from some people got as many as 21 bullet wounds in their aggression.”14 The Religion of the Prophet, in other words, entails not bodies, and all the people stood their ground without just a sentiment but a sophisticated comprehension of nonviolence.

getting into a panic.A young Sikh boy came and stood And Badshah Khan was quite aware of this:

in front of a soldier and asked him to fire at him, which the soldier unhesitatingly did, killing him. . . .

There is nothing surprising in a Muslim or a Pathan This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o’clock like me subscribing to the creed of nonviolence. It is in the evening.11

not a new creed. It was followed fourteen hundred years ago by the Prophet all the time he was in Enough said. The fierce repression gained the imperial power, in Mecca. . . . But we had so far forgotten it that when the end, a Pyrrhic victory.The Khudai Khidmatgars’ leader was jailed Gandhi placed it before us, we thought he was spon-over and over again, and his organization was disbanded and passed soring a novel creed.15

from the scene.The Raj itself soon followed.The Khudai Khidmatgars had played a signal role in the liberation struggle by which force Myth number four, which is the “blasphemy” that we’re primarily would no longer intimidate India, and their efforts worked where they concerned with here: nonviolence can’t be used in, or instead of, war. At may have seemed not to “work,” showing again that nonviolence can its height, during the repression of 1930, the Khudai Khidmatgars prevail, in its own way, against cruel and determined opposition.

numbered more than 80,000.They were trained, drilled, uniformed, Myth number three, and perhaps most crucial for today: nonvio-and organized.They were committed to their leader and followed his lence is OK for Hindus and Buddhists; it is not for Muslims. Whatever may orders even when they did not understand him—even unto death, as be our stereotypes of “Islamic terrorists,” the jihad and so forth, the they demonstrated at the Kissa Khani Bazaar. That is, they were an Religion of the Prophet was not based on violence. No religion is.

army in every sense of the word, except that they were not armed Like all other major world religions, Islam has a core devotion to with the physical instruments of death but rather, as far as they under-positive, inward peace, however unevenly this commitment has been stood it, with the inner powers of life.The Servants showed that just 228

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as people can be trained and organized and steeled for war, they can school and ordered them to separate themselves into Hutus and Tutsis.

be trained and organized and steeled for peace.

The children knew what it meant.They refused.The soldiers yelled at them, but the children were undaunted.The soldiers gave up and went away. Amid all that slaughter, when the value of life had all but disapA Vision Is Born

peared, the mere willingness of some schoolchildren to suffer for justice made a blood-crazed band of soldiers “not able to repeat the When the British invited Gandhi to the Round Table Conference in experiment”; in fact, not even carry it out.

1931, they also invited his subversive ideas on peace. During his visit Some ten years after the “Thermopylae” speech, back home in an to Romain Rolland in Switzerland on his way home, Gandhi had a India panicked by the prospect of a Japanese invasion, Gandhi would chance to air those ideas when a skeptic questioned the applicability elaborate how this strange, new kind of defense would work. One of of nonviolence to national defense:

his talks is worth quoting at some length, because it shows that he not only had perdurable faith in the possibility of a nonviolent defense but By enacting a Thermopylæ in Switzerland, you would had worked out its main principles in some detail.

have presented a living wall of men and women and children, inviting invaders to walk over your corpses.

Japan is knocking at our gates.What are we to do in a You may say that such a thing is beyond human expe-non-violent way? If we were a free country, things rience and endurance. I say that it is not so. It was could be done non-violently to prevent the Japanese quite possible. Last year in Gujarat, women stood from entering the country.As it is, non-violent resist-lathi charges unflinchingly, and in Peshawar, thou-ance could commence the moment the Japanese sands stood hails of bullets without resorting to vio-effect a landing. Thus, non-violent resisters would lence. . . .The army would be brutal enough to walk refuse them any help, even water. For it is no part of over them, you might say. I would then say . . . an their duty to help anyone to steal their country. But if army that dares to pass over the corpses of innocent a Japanese had missed his way and was dying of thirst men and women would not be able to repeat that and sought help as a human being, a non-violent experiment.16

resister, who may not regard anyone as his enemy, would give water to the thirsty one. Suppose the In our time, we have seen so many “killing fields” that the Japanese compel resisters to give them water, the Mahatma’s faith may seem naive. In reality, though, those massacres resisters must die in the act of resistance. It is con-are not the kind of suffering he is talking about. He is talking not about ceivable that they will exterminate all resisters. The people herded unwillingly to their death but people going out willingly, underlying belief in such non-violent resistance is that when all else fails, to meet their death. This is not passivity, but the aggressor will in time be mentally and even endurance, the capacity of suffering voluntarily borne to awaken con-physically tired of killing non-violent resisters. He science.There is some evidence that he was not so naive, after all. In will begin to search what this new (for him) force is Rwanda a tribal militia, bent on genocide, herded children out of their which refuses co-operation without seeking to hurt, 230

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and will probably desist from further slaughter. But

“worked”? Absent those preparations, would the kind of defense the resisters may find that the Japanese are utterly Gandhi outlined have actually thwarted a Japanese occupation?

heartless and that they do not care how many they Unfortunately, we will never know. It’s always easy to say “nonvio-kill. The non-violent resisters will have won the day, lence wouldn’t have worked” if we don’t give it a chance.18

inasmuch as they will have preferred extermination Gandhi’s way was to extrapolate from the known successes of to submission.17

nonviolence to the cases where it had not yet been tried. Nothing said to him that armies of ordinary citizens steeled for nonviolent Bear in mind that we’re talking about the most difficult possible resistance would not work, or even “work.” He called for organized situation, way up on the high end of the escalation curve when all dice nonviolence when fighting broke out over Kashmir right after inde-are loaded against you. This is outright invasion by a determined pendence, as I’ve said; he called a major meeting of the Shanti Sena for enemy with overwhelming military force; in other words, conflict at the beginning of February 1948. Only death called off that meeting, the most advanced stage and the biggest scale. If we look closely at for the assassin’s bullets struck Gandhi’s chest the evening before he Gandhi’s plan for such an extremity, however, we see nothing that is was to go.

not familiar from the principles of classic nonviolence. It may call for The dream of nonviolent substitutes for war, however, did not die greater sacrifice because the conflict is already so far advanced, but the on the path to the prayer meeting at Birla House on January 30, 1948.

dynamics are the same: the consciousness-raising impact of the “new”

force, the way nonviolent resisters mobilize that force by refusing to identify the humanity of the individual aggressor with his intention A Vision Lives: Civilian-Based Defense

(the sin is not the sinner), and finally the dramatic declaration that success is primarily spiritual and long-term rather than visible and While the Mahatma had been making his great plans, other people immediate.These are all familiar landmarks of nonviolence, and each began to notice how spontaneous, unarmed crowds here and there of these principles has been known to work.That much is history. So were getting in and plugging up the war machine—something that is, as Gandhi pointed out in the “Thermopylae” speech ten years ear-had probably been going on, all unnoticed, forever. Excited peace lier, the possibility of self-sacrificing courage on a big scale. The only activists have recently been documenting them: thing different is the boldness of imagination, Gandhi’s signature, the audacity to make such a scheme public in all seriousness, as though

• Fighting broke out in Algeria in 1962 between the regular army in every one of us were capable of so much more than we realize. And exile and rebel forces in control of the country. There were over a who knows . . .

hundred deaths, whereupon workers, women, seniors, and children

“If we were a free country, things could be done non-violently to got in between the two groups and stopped them, leading to an prevent the Japanese from entering.” This again is a very important agreement.19

point. If the government had not tied their hands, the Indians could have begun nonviolent preparations much earlier. If they had, Gandhi

• Philippine citizens, with the full blessing of Cardinal Jaime Sin, pro-claims, they may well have put their bodies on the line to prevent the tected heavily outnumbered troops of General Fidel Ramos from invaders from entering the country in the first place.Would that have government forces still loyal to dictator Marcos. Peace observers 232

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were not blind to the irony that there were unarmed civilians pro-there were no nonviolent leaders to inspire or advise the people on tecting a segment of the armed forces rather than the other way how to proceed with their chosen strategy, if they even knew what to around. “Both [General Enrile] and Ramos no doubt . . . realized call it.

that they and the rebel forces were being protected far more by What we call it today is Civilian-Based Defense (CBD).We know unarmed supporters than they could be by the equivalent number of cases involving external invasion, as in Prague Spring, and internal of armed supporters.”20

takeovers, like the miserably failed Kapp Putch in Weimar Germany in 1920, when ultranationalist Wolfgang Kapp’s attempt to overthrow

• In 1968 in Beijing, when the “cultural revolution” raged, two Maoist the fledgling Weimar Republic was aborted by workers’ strikes.

student groups, each claiming to have the “right line,” opened fire Ideally, “classic” CBD could be said to operate on three principles: on each other from different corners of the university. About (1) The resisters do not physically prevent invading troops from 50,000 people moved peacefully and spontaneously into the univer-entering their territory, which is often a costly symbolic barrier; they sity; they got between the two groups and shouted slogans like, are more concerned with the integrity of their institutions.23

“Use your sense: nonviolence.” One group stopped firing at once; (2) Everyone participates in the resistance—men, women, and the other went on, wounding over 700 people, but laid down their children.This is not merely a matter of numbers, of course, and goes weapons the following day—“unable to repeat the experiment.”21

beyond the solidarity function we touched on when we were considering charkha; it has to do with taking responsibility for your own

• The Tienanmen Square demonstrations ended in slaughter, but the defense, rather than fobbing it off on an elite. In military defense you debacle “should not make us forget that, at least twice, the military cannot avoid creating an elite, and that will seriously compromise the command to retake Tienanmen Square could not be carried out democracy you’re trying to defend.

because thousands of Beijing citizens had placed themselves between (3) Ideally (again), the resisters are scrupulously careful not to the army and the students.”22 (My own campus was witness to a reject their opponents as people, while firmly noncooperating with miniversion of this when members of a small group called Berkeley them as invaders.When your intended victims stop relating to you as Students for Peace positioned themselves between Callahan Hall,

“Captain” or “Sergeant”—not to mention “fascist” or whatever—but then home of the ROTC, and a large group of angry protestors as a person, that tends to remind you that under all the trappings that descending on the place with rocks and bricks. Crisis averted.) is, after all, what you are—human like them.

Prague Spring undoubtedly owed something to the fact that the

• As we’ve seen, thousands of unarmed citizens stopped bloody con-Czechs had a long history of honoring nonviolence.The first stirrings frontation between coup and government forces in Moscow, 1991.

of Protestantism in what was then Bohemia had a strongly nonviolent trend that went back to the late fourteenth century, and which we All these cases involved rival factions within the same country, and associate with names like Jan Hus and Peter Chelicky ´(ca. 1380–1460).

the third parties were the citizenry of that country. But we have Chelicky’

ś classic, The Net of Faith, was first published in 1521. Its per-already looked at a case that was much more like a war: the Prague suasive arguments that Jesus meant what he said, that Christians Spring resistance to the Soviet invasion of 1968–69. I mentioned at should not swear oaths, that they should definitely not live by the sword, the time that this resistance held out for eight months even though led to the founding of the Czech Brethren, an important example of the 234

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periodic rediscovery that Jesus was nonviolent; this classic work acknowledged, and funded, could they not, when the “international would later provide strong support for Tolstoy when it came community” is paralyzed between passivity and brutality, supply that his turn to make the same discovery. It is perhaps because of this

“third way” by going and standing in the way of war?

background that the Czech people were able to respond to their dire It’s easy to imagine that they’d simply be crushed, swept aside but situation with a superb mix of humor and courage—an ideal recipe as we’ve so often seen in this conflict business, it is easy to imagine for nonviolence.

many things that are not true. The women at the Rosenstraße prison There are times on this planet of ours, however, when the people, were not swept aside—they saved their men. Karen Ridd was not trained or untrained, cannot by themselves act in time to protect swept aside—she went in to handcuffs and a blindfold and came out themselves from violence.The conflict may be so unequal that resist-alive and well, with her friend Marcela to boot. In the three cases I ance is crushed before it begins—think of some of the regimes of mentioned—in the Philippines, Beijing, and Moscow—the people Central and South America, or Burma, or Cambodia. Merely to make who stood between hostile armies or between a hostile army and its your presence known sometimes in such regimes is to be “disap-intended victims were not swept aside, and these are only a few of the peared” by shadowy para-militaries, accountable to none or—as in cases on record.

Kosovo for one long decade—by heavily armed Serbian police Building on the salutary shock of their voluntary presence, these ordered by Belgrade to terrorize the Albanian majority. There are groups would do a variety of things, depending on the situation.They times when conflict reaches such a pitch of madness that even if there would curb rumors (as Shanti Sena members often did in India), offer is no clear victim and victimizer, mutual slaughter erupts before any-themselves as go-betweens for the hostile factions, stand in solidarity one can, or will, intervene: Somalia, Rwanda, Croatia. Sometimes the with the threatened, aid and comfort the injured, and—in the worst chaos is so extreme there are not even “sides,” properly speaking, as in case—interpose themselves in the line of fire, making their bodies Madrid during the Spanish Civil War or more recently, again, in the speak where no one would listen to anything else.

Balkans. It is here that we need a somewhat different mechanism than Maybe they are killed, in the worst case, and then maybe another CBD, and to create it, contemporary visionaries have carried the group comes, the way wave after wave came on at Dharasana. The Mahatma’s scheme a step further.

way, we hear, when the shah’s soldiers killed a mullah who had stood What if there were a network, they have dared to imagine, of up to address a crowd, another mullah stepped forward to replace

“rapid response teams,” which instead of belonging to the government him, and then another, until one soldier couldn’t stand it anymore and of one nation or another were composed of international volunteers, turned his rifle on his own commander—and then on himself. Maybe.

and instead of being armed were recruited and trained to carry out And if so, then the world will see that there is something other than nonviolent intervention? They would be courageous, these volun-conquering others that’s worth dying for. Martyr means “witness.” In teers, peace-oriented, and knowledgeable about the region they were the worst case, they will have borne witness to the world that there is going to and about nonviolence—possibly they would somehow have another kind of power, there is another meaning and definition of developed a knack for it. The raw material is not lacking. People, human relationships.And in course of time and suffering, the shooters mostly but not only young people, are volunteering as we speak to go will strangely find that they cannot repeat their experiment.

to dangerous places and try to interpose an element of peace in But that is the worst case, and even it is far better than the appar-intense conflicts. If they were better trained, better supported, ently bottomless pit the world is enduring right now: in Kosovo, East 236

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Timor and Aceh, the Moluccas, Chiapas,Tibet, the Sudan, Colombia, But they all survived. And turned the wheel of peace a bit more Algeria, Afghanistan, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Rwanda, Israel/Palestine, forward. Military force works by amplifying the weak physical power Armenia, Iraq. . . . As Hans Scholl, the young leader of the “White of the individual, and thereby forfeits his or her immeasurable spiritual Rose” conspiracy, said before his execution, “Better an end in terror power. Unarmed accompaniment renounces the negligible physical than a terror without end.”24

power to produce an effect that is not only protective in the short You have to start small. Absent a Gandhi to inspire and organize term but peacemaking on into the future. Large or small scale, the such a worldwide “army,” a number of international groups (about principle on which this works is the same, and it has been well twenty, as I write this) have taken on specific, doable, small-scale expressed by another of these groups, Quaker Peace and Service peacemaking tasks that can become the “points of light” in this brand (QPS), which was operating in Sri Lanka:

new picture. One kind of work that can be done by very small groups indeed is to accompany human rights workers and others whose lives While demonstrating a willingness to see the human-are in danger. It has been remarkably effective. When faced with the ity of everyone in the conflict, QPS could also help to systematic assassination of their leadership in 1985, a daring human break down misconceptions the various groups had of rights organization in Guatemala, Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), their alleged “enemies.” This aspect of the work was asked members of Peace Brigades International (PBI) to accompany fundamental to QPS’s belief in the power of reconcil-them.When team members moved into the apartments and offices of iation.27

remaining directorate members, Liam Mahoney reported, the assassinations stopped.25 This had the effect of opening up space for political Incidentally, when PBI began that fateful accompaniment of the dialogue in Guatemala. PBI members think they played a key role in otherwise-doomed women of GAM, the PBI “team” was one person, moving Guatemala from armed chaos into a peace process, and so do Alain Richard, who had to leave the country just then to renew his I. This activity is what brought Karen Ridd to El Salvador, as we’ve visa.28

seen. It’s called protective accompaniment, and it is here, one-on-one, The dream now is to put third-party capabilities at the disposal of that we can often best understand the dynamic of nonviolent rehu-the world. At the Hague Peace Conference in the summer of 1999, manization. Karen was, if you will, a peace team of one when she vol-two North American peace activists, Mel Duncan and David untarily interposed herself as a third party between the Salvadoran Hartsough, discovered each other.They had been working full time on soldiers and her compañera Marcela Rodriguez. The protective power this vision of a standing nonviolent “army” without knowing about of her interposition was not physical, of course, but moral, or, if you each other for years.At the time of this writing, only a few years since will, psychological. As Patty Motchnick, the PBI volunteer who had that historic meeting, the “Nonviolent Peaceforce” has garnered a the honor of accompanying Rigoberta Menchú and her associates worldwide tide of enthusiasm. Nobel Prize winners, the UN

through a particularly harrowing period, testified: Millennium Forum, organization-savvy businesspeople, an occasional head of state, and hundreds of volunteers have signed on as the over-The actual physical protection I offered her was worked visionaries scramble to make it happen.

absurd, and to myself in that moment, laughable. I This has created three levels of opportunity for you who see the was absolutely vulnerable, and so were they.26

power of this vision and want to put a hand to an oar: (1) Support any 238

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organization involved in third-party nonviolent intervention with raised his camera. The police lowered their clubs and went away.30 A time, money, or both (details at the end of this book). (2) Support a group of angry Israeli Defense Force soldiers was threatening a small volunteer financially, logistically, or emotionally—remember, peace-band of Palestinians in Hebron, but between them stood a Christian team work requires as much or more courage, training, and support Peacemaker Team (CPT) of three people, one of whom, Marge from the home front as war fighting does. (3) If you’re over twenty-Argelyan from Chicago, stepped in front of a soldier and told him, five and think you have a taste for it, go ahead and sign up for a

“Every time you point your rifle I’m going to point my camera.” As dangerous, thankless mission that will probably be the most reward-she would do this, “the soldier’s grip would loosen and the fury would ing experience of your life.

dissipate.”31

It may not be out of place to reiterate how nonviolent interven-The previous incidents are a mere sample of what happens to tion works and often “works.” War polarizes; our then-secretary of come across my desk in the form of newsletters or e-mail. As Gandhi state John Foster Dulles defined the mental framework of the Cold gave voice to the “dumb millions” of colonized India, international vol-War perfectly when he declared that it was “immoral” to be neutral.

unteers are shining friendly light on those who suffer in darkness.They A third party stands outside the “with us or against us” mentality; he are giving eyes to a world that did not know, or perhaps very much or she dissolves that all-too-simple polarity, embodying a universal care, about their suffering.

longing for peace that is above all labels and all hatreds. A French Of course, there is another kind of example, too. In one particu-peace-team coordinator put it this way:

larly telling exchange, also in Hebron, CPT member Cliff Kindy was roughed up by a very angry settler while trying to protect a Even as a foreigner from far away, each of us can act Palestinian being beaten by soldiers. “I don’t think we’ve ever met.

so as to bring to bear a little of our own humanity and What is your name?” he asked the settler, holding his hand out. “My solidarity. Even if the volunteers do not interpose name is Hate and I hate you!” the settler said, and pushed Cliff off the themselves between the belligerents their action con-sidewalk.The CPT team has been in Hebron for a relatively long time tributes to . . . rein in the logic of war and the hate in and the salutary shock value of their third-party witness has worn thin people’s hearts. Inasmuch as it does that, it is nonvio-with these ideologically blinded settlers.The death threats against the lent action.29 (my translation)

team have been so serious that the FBI visited them in their Chicago office.Yet even in this case (and it’s a relatively infrequent type, even in Hebron) the mirror did some good. It forced the settler to con-A Vision at Work

front, or at least name, his own evil. No one can do that indefinitely without eventually rendering oneself, as Gandhi said, unable to repeat The worst had happened. The Contra soldier was leading away a that experiment. However enraged, however blinded the hater is, the Nicaraguan villager at gunpoint, his thumbs wired behind his back, nonviolent mirror will pick up the glint of an underlying humanity when suddenly an American journalist ran up, camera clicking, and and reflect it back to the hater.You can’t count on such a person to shouted, “International incident!” That villager lived.A group of plain-snap out of it then and there, as “Mr. Hate’s” example shows.The com-clothes policemen in Sri Lanka, waving their clubs, bore down on mitted nonviolent actor is willing to take that chance. She or he is women protestors when a foreigner stepped in front of them and willing to wait for the inevitable good her or his witness evoked.

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As any schoolyard monitor can tell you, stopping fights must have but it has dire consequences on the human level, even for ourselves.

been a part of life since before history was recorded. Nonviolent As Bishop Tutu said in connection with Bosnia, “Our own humanity is intervention, sans the name, must have helped keep societies from affected very deeply” when we ignore such suffering: destroying themselves with their own violence long before we became human—the evidence of de Waal and others makes this conclusion You can’t watch people behaving in a debased and inescapable.The Buddha is said to have prevented a war between rival dehumanized way and not, in fact, be affected. If we kingdoms in this way, and in the Chou dynasty, four centuries before don’t recognize that we have a common humanity, we Christ, the philosopher Mo Tsu made it his habit to travel to distant are all going to be losers. . . . We are affected very kingdoms whenever war threatened to break out between them, put-profoundly, even when we don’t at the time note that ting his philosophy of “universal love and mutual benefit” to the test.

this is actually happening to us.32

So there is nothing new about individuals and groups trying to stop wars by getting between the conflicting parties (one of the small What’s actually happening to us is, we are living a lie. When we peace-movement groups that arose during the antinuclear days called ignore the suffering of others, the message is, “Tough, but we’re not itself the “Mo Tsu Project”). What is new today is the conscious you.” This is simply not true. Every wisdom teacher who deserves the attempt to do it systematically, on a global scale.The goal here is not name has stressed the precise opposite, that we are all co-involved in only to stop this or that war, but eventually to stop war itself—by each other’s happiness. This is why, although it sometimes seems a providing a nonviolent alternative to the whole system.

harsh judgment, Gandhi classified passivity (and cowardice) in such cases as a form of violence. They are, if you will, an existential untruth.

More Non-bang for the Buck

So to be torn between doing nothing and dropping bombs, between invasion or crushing sanctions, is, again, to face a “choice”

As we start to think about nonviolent intervention, its vast advantages between violence and violence. In terms of the real forces that move over the known, conventional methods really start to shine. For what human destiny, this is no choice at all.

are those conventional methods? They are two: fight or flight, threaten From this nonviolent viewpoint, armed peacekeeping is only an or ignore. Don’t be fooled by the debate between sanctions and apparent exception that proves the rule, even if we mean the work of bombs, as so many were in the case of Iraq in 1990; from the nonvio-the “blue helmets”—UN peacekeeping, as mandated by Section VII of lence point of view it’s a “choice” between threat power and threat the UN Charter—and not the more dangerous precedent of militarily power.The sanctions imposed on Iraq have killed more than 1.2 mil-strong states bombing select dictators into grudging submission. (A lion human beings, the majority of them children, the majority of young friend I worked with, a Kosovar Albanian, was tortured in a these not even born when their president made his fatal move. It is not Serbian prison after, and no doubt partially as revenge for, the “libera-a humane alternative. As Gandhi often said, “I care little whether you tion” of Kosovo by NATO bombing.Thus, I may be forgiven a trace of shoot a man or starve him to death by inches.” In a way, shooting is bitterness about this kind of operation.) While motivated by the best better: it makes more noise.

possible impulses, UN peacekeeping is nonetheless, again from the The alternative of not getting involved may keep our hands clean, point of view of nonviolence, a badly mixed bag. It is an attempt to get 242

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to positive ends through hurtful means—to make peace with weapons awareness that opposites are after all opposites and weapons don’t cre-of war. Having weapons and not using them (UN contingents are ate peace. It’s not that the blue helmets lacked courage; it is that, like generally supposed to return fire only when attacked) is the violent Shakespeare’s Edward, they could not be valiant where they were not person’s idea of nonviolence. Real nonviolence, remember, is not honest. Peacekeeping with weapons is doomed to fail, in the long run.

abjuring the instruments of threat power but relying on the appeal of It cannot call up the special power that comes from matching right integration—not pulling punches but extending a hand.

means with consistent ends. Another example: There may be a place for armed peacekeeping in certain cases, but because its means and ends are so fundamentally at odds, we can never Khalil Atout of Pharmacists Without Borders was expect it to be more than a patchwork solution—a case of “work”

assessing medical needs of refugees at St. André without work. It is because of this inherent contradiction, certainly School in Kigali, Rwanda, accompanied by a French not because of any lack of courage or will in the men and states photographer. Hutu militia surrounded the school involved, that the history of UN peacekeeping shows a few modestly and began shooting through the windows and walls, successful operations but nothing like enough peace power to meet seriously wounding adults and children in the school, the demand for interventions that suddenly increased in the flare-ups and also the photographer. Some were killed. UN

of ethnic conflict after the Cold War. The record boasts a few opera-observers were in vehicles outside the school, either tions like the Cyprus Resettlement Project, which has apparently put unarmed or armed only with pistols, and were unable that island on a road toward peace, but when UN peacekeeping was to help.33

called on as the way to move forward with peace as a whole, projects began to meet with ignominious collapse.

Who could have helped? A peace team that was heavily armed—

A friend of mine was in Somalia, trying to maintain a badly needed with soul force.They could have stood in front of the militia and taken orphanage during the chaos of that region’s competing warlords.

the suffering on themselves; there’s a good chance the militia could (One morning, symbolically, the UN compound was attacked by not have gone on with the experiment very long.

machine-gun fire, and Jim, who had been meditating, went out and I have said that the volunteers who tried to be of some help in shook his fist: “How the hell’s a guy supposed to meditate with all this Bosnia in 1992 were hastily recruited and virtually without training.

going on!”) In those days, Jim confided, convoys of food guarded by That doesn’t mean they didn’t have good instincts. A group of them UN contingents would head out toward the refugee camps, only to managed to reach the outskirts of besieged Sarajevo in a few beat-up meet up with a ragged band of fighters off in the desert. The bandits old buses. Before them lay “sniper’s alley,” which meant death for any-would fire a few shots in the air, and the UN escort would immediately one the hidden Serb riflemen felt like shooting. The UN peace force surrender its weapons. The fighters—often seventeen-year-old boys for the region, UNPROFOR, offered them protection: UNPROFOR

—would jump into the trucks and giddily drive them off—weapons, could put an armored vehicle or a tank before and after their column food, and all. The UN soldiers were plenty brave; they were well and guide them into town. After a brief consultation the volunteers trained and had the latest equipment. What went wrong? Where politely declined; that kind of “protection,” they explained, would viti-we usually go wrong in the modern world: in the big picture—the ate everything they were there for. And they went down to Sarajevo basic understanding of the dynamics of violence and its opposite, the on their own. And no one shot at them.When ends and means meet, 244

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something happens that is more than the sum of those parts.

power—they were set up at a time when that was the only kind of When they do not, we are in the world of incessant contradictions, power generally understood.The answer is to reorganize these systems and that applies not only in the international arena but closer to home.

and let them act as channels for another kind of power. Nonviolent Joe Loya is a good writer who served time in Southern California intervention in severe conflicts is the perfect example.

for bank robbery. (Hopefully, not all of us writers end up that way.) In Gandhi’s Peace Army: The Shanti Sena and Unarmed Peacekeeping, After his release, when two New York City policemen were charged one of the earliest books written about peace teams, Thomas Weber with torturing a Haitian prisoner, Abner Louima, Loya was able to quotes from an Indian Shanti Sainik, or peace army volunteer, who shed some light on this act of violence that shocked the city and the served in Cyprus: “Whereas intimacy was a hindrance for a violent nation with its brutality. Don’t pick on these two policemen as though army, it was an essential for an effective nonviolent army.”36 This is the they were solely to blame, Loya urged, or on New York in particular.

exact converse of what Joe Loya and E. M. Forster observed. In a It’s the prison system itself that turns responsible, feeling people into threat system, intimacy is a disaster.World War I almost came apart on cynical, sometimes even sadistic, tough guys. “I saw a lot of new cor-the first Christmas, when “enemy” soldiers who had been pinned rections officers come into the prison, fresh-faced, young, eager and down in trenches within hailing distance of one another declared their sometimes a bit idealistic,” he wrote. But in course of time “they all own truce and milled around in no-man’s-land, swapping stories and began to resemble us . . . using gutter-level profanity, swaggering like sharing photos of their loved ones back home. Panicky officers on hoodlums and ironically. . . [they all] adopted our contemptuous atti-both sides had to threaten the men with draconian punishments to tude toward the ‘good guys.’”

restart the war. In other words, war engages the wrong energies and Alas, Loya observed, “It never worked the other way around.

cannot but lead to the wrong results; to quote journalist Chris Inmates didn’t begin to look like the fresh-faced boys who first came Hedges, who has seen more wars than he cares to think about, “The to law enforcement.”34

very employment of violence corrupts those who carry it out.”37

Loya was catching sight of the important principle that when a When Lieutenant Max Plowman was court-martialed for resigning his system is based on threat power, it cannot but reduce the human commission in WWI, he explained to the judges that “disorder cannot beings who move within its circle to creatures of threat power.

breed order. Doing evil that good may come is apparent folly.”38

Reading his comment, I was struck by the parallel to the perceptive There are, it could be argued, two legitimate functions of the observation of Dr. Aziz in E. M. Forster’s novel of the Raj, A Passage to present war system: intervention, when that is necessitated by severe India: “They have no chance here. . . .They come out intending to be conflict, and defense. What we have seen now is that both can be gentlemen, and are told it will not do. . . . I give any Englishman two addressed by peace teams.That would put us on an entirely different years.”35

road. “Nonviolent action implants, by anticipation within the very The prison system, the imperial system, and the war system—all process of change itself, the values to which it will ultimately lead.

are based on threat power. The answer is not to just get rid of those Hence it does not sow peace by means of war. It does not attempt to systems, much as we may like to, because to some degree the first and build up by tearing down.”39 Perceiving this, Johan Galtung has actu-third at least serve necessary functions that no contemporary society ally defined nonviolence as “peacemaking by peaceful means.”

can do entirely without, nor is likely to for some time to come. But as Because it treats people with concern and respect, never dehu-we know these systems today, they are pure conduits for threat manizing them, nonviolent peacemaking succeeds even when it “fails,”

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while “peacemaking as usual” fails to bring us closer to a more peace-we’ve just heard from in Hebron: “This experience had the most ful world, even when it “succeeds.”Think of the old Roman paradox, integrity of any work I’ve done.” People are people; the kind of action

“If you want peace, prepare for war.” In the ever-spiraling dynamic of you put them into, the kind of energy you expose them to, very largely the Cold War, as in all arms races before or since, we experienced the determines what they will become.

folly of trying to live by such a paradox, yet what’s a threatened country to do? Well, a population that would ready itself for the response of disobedience-cum-fraternization that Gandhi envisioned for India, Make Love REPLACE WAR:

and Czech citizens partly carried out in Prague, offers no threat what-The Vision Gets Real

ever to the safety of other societies. It would be able to prepare a strong defense without in the least provoking an attacker.

The point of this discussion has not been that peace teams can end Nonviolence threatens no one except dictators, and then only if they war. It has been that nonviolence can end war.We have now thought understand what it can do.

some about the three levels of change that have to happen—changes In chapter 3 we talked about the testimony of Sue Severin who, in thought, speech, and action—for the creative influence of soul with other volunteers from Witness for Peace, stumbled onto the force to be applied by ordinary people toward creating a regime of power of protective accompaniment in 1982—how she found the peace. For this is what we want: a robust system of conflict absorp-psychological reward of it “addictive.” She was not alone. Randy Bond tion able to deal with war in such a creative way that it resonates with went to Hebron with a small band organized by Michigan Peace Teams other changes leading to meaningful and lasting peace. Like all and wrote, “We were a small group of ordinary people doing some dynamics of major change, whether it be the “catastrophe theory”

rather extraordinary things in a hurting part of our world.We had to that tries to account for how an argument becomes a war or the “tip-stretch ourselves and our capabilities to do these things. That’s the ping point” that makes hush puppies a rage, there is a point at which only way we grow.”40 The Vietnam War, by contrast, went on killing the pressure toward peaceful change is enough to tilt the balance, Americans long after the last helicopter left Saigon. It killed by the where we could build what is now unthinkable to us—a world free anguishing psychological pressure of having to do horrible things to from war.41 No one knows exactly how much that amount is, or people for no good reason, as became increasingly clear. One veteran where the tipping points are, but there is clearly what Gandhi called friend of mine came back unhurt in body but for years afterward went a “law of progression” such that successes build on earlier successes.

into cold sweats and panic every time he heard a helicopter; it took Clearly, the amount of energy needed to start the changes is very high about a year to cure himself after he’d learned to use a mantram, and when we begin the process, but later, when there is a discernible many were not that lucky.The post-traumatic stress has been so ubiq-momentum, less can do more. All big changes are like that, and all uitous that it was once believed that the number of Vietnam veterans real changes start out looking outlandish and at a certain point who committed suicide after getting “safely” home to the States was become the norm.

more than those killed in action in Vietnam itself.Yet a marine who, When I was first involved with meditation courses at Berkeley, in by contrast, served in Somalia to do the famine relief in 1992 told the 1970, we had to explain to students (let alone to deans) what medita-press, “This was the most satisfying work I’ve ever done,” echoing tion was from the ground up. We often had to face raised parental what nonviolent actors often say, such as Marge Argelyan, whom eyebrows. Now I have to specify what kind of meditation I’m talking 248

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about, such is the smorgasbord available in most progressive college winter of 1991, when human beings in Bosnia forgot they were human towns across the country (“passage meditation,” we decided to call it).

beings.

Fairly often, students tell me, “My parents got me into this—they’ve The volunteers were not to meet with success that winter in been meditating for years.” Once it was a grandfather.The rhythm by Mostar, in Sarajevo, or in Tuzla—and I daresay that if they had, the which the world does finally phase from a war system to a regime of world at large, given its priorities right now, would not have noticed.

stable peace may be like that.

An “ocular demonstration” doesn’t work if nobody’s watching. This Peace teams will play a special role in realizing this vision, for pretty clearly defines the two changes, in the movement and in the several reasons. Peace teams, along with Civilian-Based Defense, are world, that we should work on to get peace teams off the drawing the kind of nonviolence that we could use to stop a war even after it board and into the historic drama of leading us up the path to stable starts.We could use them in the kind of extreme emergencies that are peace.

endemic in various parts of the globe, or slow-fuse emergencies like Remember: all the experiments so far have been carried on the “low-intensity” conflicts that were waged throughout Central with a “chronic lack of resources . . . inadequate infrastructure, America, where protective accompaniment was born. We could use poor communications, and limited training opportunities,” not to them in inner-city conflicts throughout the industrial world, which mention the near-total cold shoulder from the mass media and would be more like what Gandhi had in mind for them. The biggest

“little popular understanding of the dynamics and history of this objection to the idea of using nonviolence in war is, of course, that “it manifestation of nonviolent action.”42 Just imagine what could be would never work in a tough case.” But these are tough cases. Often, done with adequate resources, a good infrastructure, and commu-in terms of dehumanization, the very toughest. If we can show that nications, with public support, and with free, alert media. Imagine nonviolence can work here, we will be on our way to understanding what the picture would be like if there were not a few thousand but that it can work anywhere.

“lakhs” of volunteers, well trained, decently supplied, and appropri-Imagine a well-trained peace team defusing a war where the stan-ately recognized.We could make “compassionate response teams” a dard methods had failed—say in a far-gone situation like those that fixture.

seemed to appear out of nowhere in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, or Nonviolence of any kind requires special preparation, much more Indonesia. International volunteers would show, first of all, that the when it’s deployed in the crucible of an advanced conflict in a foreign world does indeed care what happens to other human beings, even country.The triumphs and tragedies of former Yugoslavia showed the when there is no strategic concern like oil or other “practical” interest peace-team movement that before volunteers go into situations of they have to protect. Further, the successful nonviolent intervention intense conflict they need to have careful training.

would begin to change the “bottom line” in global security, showing They also need support. And this is where we come in. For every that nonviolence, not violence, is the ultimate sanction we can rely on soldier in the trenches during the Great War there were hundreds, no for international peace and defense.That would shake the war system thousands, of supporters back home: the ladies who knitted socks, as it has not been shaken during all these turbulent centuries.And that the kids who collected scrap metal, the speech makers, the decision was just the hope of over a thousand volunteers who flocked to the makers, and at last the taxpayers. Likewise, the institutionalization of makeshift offices of “Seeds of Peace” and “Balkan Peace Teams” in Italy, peace will open up needs for supporters with many different talents.

Germany, Holland, the United States, and elsewhere during the grim That support will be more moral and less financial (far less financial), 250

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and it will have to include something that a conventional war does become an institution, and . . . being an institution, can be abol-not: it will need what’s called “interpretation.” The world at large ished.”43 What I am saying here is the converse, and the missing understands (or thinks it does) how violence works. It does not practical component to what Lorenz, like Margaret Mead and so many understand how nonviolence works. Even a dramatic success by a others, has discovered: peace can be institutionalized. When it is, then nonviolent peace team would likely be ignored or so mishandled by people will be willing to send war on its well-deserved way to the the press that it would not have its educational effect. We have seen cabinet of bad memories.

so many examples of this, not only in individual cases (Joan Black) but others on a handsome scale (the intifada, Kosovo), so that we can’t afford to hope that even a well-carried-off peacemaking opera-Looking Down the Road

tion using the kind of power appropriate to peace would make its mark. The logic of war may be deeply flawed, but it’s dreadfully Everything we know about paradigm shifts—for that is what we’re familiar and paralyzingly simple; it follows directly from what we like talking about—tells us that this kind of enormous change is hard to to think we know about human nature: that people are separate from create but definitely possible. It leaves us in the realm of the unpre-each other and respond only to force. This is not the case with the dictable with regard to when or exactly how such a shift could occur.

logic of peace. Good writers, speakers, artists—every kind of cul-We know only a little about how it can be guided and facilitated. But ture maker and communicator, academics and ordinary folks talking it seems certain that this particular shift will need more conscious to their neighbors—have a highly creative job cut out for them: to direction than many that have taken place in times past.This is partly explain peace teams and the logic of peace itself. Today we tell each because the global situation we now face is so complex, and partly other the stories of war ad infinitum, ad nauseam: we shall have to because the speed with which the conversion to truth has to occur is learn to tell the stories of peace and spell out what they mean, at least now so great.There won’t be much left for humanity to rescue if we at first.

wait for this process to happen by itself.

Even protective accompaniment, the smallest, one-on-one kind of To understand the needed change we should think about a slightly intervention, has already had wide repercussions, as we saw with the different kind of shift than the ones on which Thomas Kuhn based his creation of “political space” in places like Guatemala, where it turned Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that made “paradigm shift” a a process of pure terror into one of grudging dialogue.A Haitian team household expression. We should think about the incredible shift of of only sixty-four people mounted by a PBI coalition defied the deadly consciousness awakened by the suffering of the first adherents, fol-FRAPH militia for six months, saving countless lives. At one scary lowed by the hard work of the Fathers (and Mothers) of the Church, moment in Guatemala, as we saw, the PBI presence was a “team” of who created a thought world with the sanctity of the individual and one. Nonviolence can be done, if necessary, without large numbers.

the One God at its center. That great shift, too, came from a deep The thing is, it cannot be understood and institutionalized without groundswell of belief and needed a lot of careful thought to explain large numbers.

how the new system worked. Absent divine intervention, we have to The famed ethologist Konrad Lorenz—not a wild-eyed idealist work on this huge job in many ways.

but a distinguished scientist—decided after extensive scientific inves-So it is helpful to remember the two big things that make such an tigation that war is not programmed by nature. “Modern war has enormous change possible.The first is that peace is the deepest drive 252

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in our human being. Underneath all our conditioning—which admit-tions, the Pathans of the North-West Frontier—many groups and tedly can go pretty deep—“there is no human heart that does not countless individuals have lived and died to show us the utility of this crave for joy and peace.” Appearances can be very dark. Right now force.This is the time to learn their lesson. Let me restate what I think they are very dark, indeed, but they still are only that, appearances.

their work and suffering has taught us: the task is not so much to stop war as to start nonviolence.

Think of men who are bent on war. What they want The Chicago scientists had no way of knowing it, but the clear picis to win, that is to say, their battles are but bridges to ture they sought that day in 1946 was already beginning to emerge.

glory and peace.The whole point of victory is to bring opponents to their knees—this done, peace ensues.

Peace, then, is the purpose of waging war . . . Notice that there can be life without pain, but no pain without some kind of life. In the same way, there can be peace without any kind of war, but no war that does not suppose some kind of peace.44

Even those who wage wars do so to reach some kind of “peace”

within the limits of their understanding, as Augustine said—and these are limits that we can always push back by culture and education.

“Peace is the quest, nay the hunger of every soul.”45 Through conditioning, we can come to think that threat force and destruction are unavoidable, but nonviolent logic rises to show up this superstition, and we quicken.Yes, it is a huge task to eliminate war, but it’s the task we’ve all been called to, and we will not rest until it’s done.

This is why, as Sherry Anderson and Paul Ray have recently shown, fifty million Americans are looking for a way out—which nothing points to on the standard political compass.46

The second encouraging truth is that, while many things have been tried in our sporadic approaches to this great task, one has not.

Soul force has never been systematically put to work to create the conditions and institutions of sustained peace. So, as Norman Cousins used to say, “No one knows enough to be a pessimist.” Before the twentieth century we never had the tool to apply nonviolence to world peace systematically—or did not know we had it. Gandhi lived and died to show us that we do; the women of Gujarat whom he me 254

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Chapter Nine

pity of war” and what that kind of violence does to women and to the family and what kind of society you have if the only kind of “peace” you TOWARD A METAPHYSICS

know is an uneasy respite in the shambles of intermittent conflict.

One line of Homer in particular keeps coming to my mind to this day.

O F COM PASSION

It is spoken by the god Apollo in the final book of the Iliad, Book 24

(or as scholars say, Omega), line 54.

R

For look, he is outraging the mute earth in his fury.1

It is plain that the law against the slaughtering of animals is founded rather

“He” is Achilles, the semidivine hero who represents war incar-on vain superstition and womanish pity than on sound reason.

nate, and the offense he’s committing is grave indeed. He’s dragging the dead body of his enemy Hector ’round the camp from the back of

—Spinoza

his chariot.Apollo is trying to persuade the gods to intervene and stop the desecration, and this haunting hexameter concludes his exhorta-Compassion is the radicalism of this age.

tion. In life, Hector was a warrior who in the course of defending

—His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Troy, his homeland, slew Achilles’ companion, but in death, the Greeks believed, he no longer belongs to his city or to Achilles, who slew him in turn. He belongs to the earth. Hector is no longer the B E F O R E I T O O K to meditation, the two things that kept me in individual person he was when alive; his human accounts are settled.

touch with reality were poetry and nature. There wasn’t much Now he belongs to the cycle of nature itself.Achilles can take Hector’s

“nature” in Brooklyn, to be sure, but my family would spend summers life—that is the warrior code—but not his psyche, his soul. What high in the Adirondacks, and the smell of deep pine woods on a hot Achilles is trying to do now by refusing to relinquish Hector’s body to summer afternoon has never quite left me, even when I hike through the earth goes beyond that code. It is an outrage—in other words, the tart smell of eucalyptus glades in California. As for poetry, I grew violence (the same word in early Greek, hybris, means both).

up in a warm household that was television free until just before I Just prior to verse 54,Apollo has made a point about violence that went to college, and that left me relatively able to preserve my sensi-is as sophisticated as this line is poignant: “For Achilles himself cannot tivity to the nuances of language—and the human comedy in general.

but lose by doing this.” By desecrating the body of his fallen enemy, For the first part of my academic career I spent many fruitful years and thus violating the prevailing war code, he will destroy the very studying the earliest and greatest poet in Western civilization, Homer, value system on which he himself depends for the meaning of his own whose epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were to a large degree consti-life and honor. Again, the innate contradictions of violence. Violence tutive for the value system most of us grew up with.There were many begets more violence, Apollo implies, and no one wins.

things that kept my ear to his music, one of them being his profound The “mute earth,” however, is a striking image, one with as much understanding of war and what Wilfred Owen famously called “the resonance in the Vedic poetry of ancient India as in Homer’s tradition 256

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(the two were distantly related), and it resonates to this day.The “mute Earlier this month [May 1998], several members of earth” is Draupadi, whose humiliation at the court of the Kurus the Iraq Sanctions Challenge stood at the bedside of launches the gigantic Mahabharata war; she is Sita (“furrow”) abducted Mustafa, one of at least a dozen dying children in a by the archdemon of the Ramayana epic; she is the Trojan woman of crowded, wretched ward of the main hospital in Euripides’ classic plays; she is whatever and whoever cannot make Basra, Iraq’s southern port city. His mother, tall, thin her voice heard in distress; she is all that is vulnerable. Achilles killed and quite beautiful, sat cross legged on the mattress many, and the warrior code absorbed that; what Achilles is killing beside him, waving away flies, as the doctor explained now is pity. No culture can absorb that and live. I would like in this to us that the child, hospitalized for the past twenty chapter to talk about pity, to evoke it and connect with it a concept days, now suffered from dehydration, diarrhea, acute that may help us understand as well as feel it.

renal failure and extensive brain atrophy. Lacking Who will hear the cry of the earth?2 Apollo has been magically equipment and medicine to diagnose and treat protecting Hector’s body (and Achilles’ reputation) from harm while Mustafa, the doctors could only stand by, helpless and the still-living hero vainly drags the body of his fallen enemy around frustrated, while the child’s condition worsened over his camp. Now he persuades the other gods to intervene, since noth-three weeks’ time. If Mustafa survives, he will be ing less than the whole value system, and by extension the world severely crippled. Ima Nouri, his mother, is 35 years order, is at stake. Interestingly, there was a plan to steal Hector’s body, old. Her serious eyes, large and luminous, followed us but the gods did not go along with it. That would not work because as we paused before each bedside. She seemed sur-what the system needs is the hero’s change of heart. Although Homer prised when we asked her to tell us a little about her-doesn’t explicitly talk about interior life as we do, he clearly tells us, self.We learned that she lives in a rural area north of when the gods refuse to steal Hector’s body, that the change has to be Basra and has two children at home whom she misses inside Achilles; it has to come from his will.

very much.We asked the doctor to tell her that we are Achilles’ mother—Thetis, a goddess—soon comes to persuade so very sorry, that we want to tell people in the US her him, with very maternal logic, to give Hector’s body back to his fam-story, that we will try hard to end the sanctions. She ily for proper treatment, but it’s almost unnecessary; the hero has smiled slowly, nodded.Then we mentioned that peo-already changed. The great scene that follows, between Achilles and ple in the United States were celebrating Mother’s Hector’s father, Priam, when the old man steels his courage to kiss the Day on this day and asked if she had a message for

“man-slaughtering” hand that took his son’s life, is a gripping climax of mothers in our country. Ima suddenly became animat-hard-won reconciliation; with it, the poem is ready to wind down.

ed. “Yes,” she said, “I have two messages. First, tell Poetry is powerful where it speaks to all of us. We are all a little them, from Iraqi women, that these are our children like Achilles. On our own scale, we too become blind to pity—and and we love them so much.” Stroking Mustafa’s face, like him we can all open our eyes again. Absent Homer’s genius and she continued, “Ask them to please try to help us prohis tradition, perhaps the following thoughts and images can help: tect them and take care of them. And, for American women,—I want them to feel what I am feeling.”3

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If we only could. In the valley of La Verna, as one tradition has it, Saint Francis asked Jesus to give him the uncompromising love he had felt for all that lives, and for the stigmata he had borne in his very flesh because of that love. The word compassion means literally “suffering with.” Of course it hurts. But when we suffer with others we grow, and when we close our hearts against them we die within. In Hebrew, the word for compassion is rehamim. It is the plural of rehem, “womb.”

To have compassion is to be toward someone, in a little—or not so little—way, what every mother is to her own child.

This is an eternal issue, but it has a historical context.The painting that you see to the right was done by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1768, sixty-four years after Sir Isaac Newton taught that matter was built up of “solid, massy, hard impenetrable, moveable Particles,”4 in other words, near the beginning of modern materialism and its decisive break with the ancient traditions that had pictured human beings An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, as having an organic relationship with the living earth.

by Joseph Wright. (National Gallery, London.) The adult facing us in the painting is a traveling science lecturer, if you will, a circuit rider of the new religion, demonstrating a vacu-Astyanax, when he is frightened by his father’s war helmet. Shortly um pump to the rapt onlookers. He is pumping the air out of a glass after that laugh, however, Achilles kills Hector in that splendid hel-cage, and to make that fact visible there is a bird inside the cage. By met, and shortly after that the victorious Greeks throw Astyanax from watching the bird gasp for breath, in other words, they can see that the city walls so he can’t grow up and avenge his father.Who is to be there’s no more air in the cage, and be impressed with what technol-laughed at? Whose vision was more realistic?

ogy can do. But what other impression are we to receive? The real Flaubert, who saw An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in 1856, dramatic interest in the painting, what grabs our eyes and holds them, noted in his journal, “Petite fille qui pleure. Charmant de naiveté et de is the children. For them this is not about the wonders of science. In profondeur.” That is, “A little girl crying. Charming in its naivete and their innocence they do not follow the explanation of the pump and profundity.”5 It is the naivete (if you want to call a child’s unmediated the air; they just think a man is killing a little bird. The real story of awareness of life naive) that is the profundity.

the painting is in the contrast between the glazed lecturer holding the Today we stand at the other end of the arc that began when Wright audience spellbound, a kind of high priest of technology, and the dis-painted his enthusiast demonstrating the vacuum pump and the power tress of the children—and the fact that they are children, and the of man over nature. Science and technology have taken over in a way adults just ignore them. When we hurt nature, it is not that we lack that even the most enthusiastic rationalists in his eighteenth-century warnings. Not all of us lose our sensitivity at once.The real tragedy is audience could hardly have imagined, and we now stand, or we should to ignore those who are still aware of what we’re doing—the way, in stand, aghast at the results. What we have done to the environment, the Iliad, Hector and his wife, Andromache, laugh at their little son, and to the fabric of human life within it, could not have been imagined 260

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in 1768. Spinoza to the contrary notwithstanding, we must take a lion than a man, capable of eating his enemies like a savage beast, but

“womanish” pity—and we must understand that it goes along with, by the time his mother comes to him with the gods’ message, he has rather than standing in conflict with, sound reasoning. We can no already come back to his senses. If we tend to think of Homer as war longer afford to set aside the simple, unmediated responses of the poetry, it may be surprising to encounter such a change of heart—

children.

such a recovery of heart—serving as the climax of an epic that fur-Who even understands children today? The other day I went to my nished war ideologies to two millennia of Western cultures, but it is granddaughter’s ballet recital—an art form millions have enjoyed not unrealistic; we’ve seen several such recoveries in the preceding since the seventeenth century. But in the twenty-first century I was pages.There is nothing unrealistic about the tension between compas-appalled by the choices of the well-meaning directors, for none of the sion and savagery in the same person, because that is the condition in pieces they had choreographed was anything a child could relate to or which we find ourselves.

enjoy.As the parents wildly applauded a particularly sexy number, the phrase “children without a childhood” came sadly to mind. I wondered how those parents would feel if their daughter came home pregnant,

“Dumb Earth,” or Deaf Humanity?

or worse.

The plight of children today makes Dickens’s London seem like a Homer told his story in a traditional language that came embedded paradise. In the decade 1985–95, two million children died in wars, with ideas much older than himself. One of these, which comes to the and nearly half a million fought in them. Somewhere between four surface in Omega 54, is the conception of Earth as a living, sentient and five million were forced into refugee camps around the world, being, a goddess. Fitting, that when Homer wanted to image twelve million were left homeless, and some 200 million were humankind’s crying need for compassion, he depicted a warrior out-engaged in child labor. In the United States, six million children under raging the “dumb” earth, oblivious to a pain that only the gods could age six—that’s one out of four American children from that age hear. It makes me think of the stunning line that is said to be either a group—live below the poverty line. Juvenile crime increased 50 per-Russian proverb or a line of poetry: “Every bullet finds its target in a cent in the five years from 1989 to 1994 (though at the moment it’s mother’s heart.”

participating in the downturn of violent crime). Los Angeles Superior Seeing connections like this is the basis of nonviolent conscious-Court Justice Charles W. McCoy Jr. noted that “when a juvenile is ness. Recently, one of my students offered, as we were groping for a tried in court, more than half the time no parent even shows up.”6 And definition of violence, “If you damage anything you’re damaging the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations have killed a mil-big picture,” for example, the earth. It should be so much easier to see lion children in Iraq.

this today, when fiendishly destructive bombs and rockets, not to By the time we see Achilles dragging Hector’s body behind his mention chemicals and toxic organisms, are hurled at our enemies, chariot (the way American soldiers dragged the body of a Vietcong and how prescient Homer appears, to have sensed this connection soldier behind their tank in an infamous photograph, the way three when warriors were fighting one-on-one with swords and spears. His KKK members dragged a black youth to death in 1998), the hero had was the poet’s deep vision that sees that violence is violence, “damag-lost all sense of compassion in the madness of battle. He lost what the ing the whole picture,” as only the gods knew. He was prescient, but Greeks called eleos and aidôs, pity and respect, and became more like he also had an advantage over us. He believed in the worldview—and 262

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sometimes I wish we still could—that Earth is alive.

At this shocking suggestion, Richard Rhodes laconically points The Greeks also had a myth that Agamemnon had to sacrifice his out, “The German delegation walked out.” As well they might. They own daughter so he could get to Troy for the war of all wars. The were, after all, Nazis first, and scientists afterward. This was not just myth’s meaning is unmistakable: that war fighting and the family, the

“Jewish physics” they were listening to (Bohr’s mother was in fact traditional preserves of men and of women, are in eternal opposition.

Jewish), but a worldview utterly inimical to Nazi values, a challenge It is either one or the other, because underneath all complexities to their whole concept of human being and human value.

they are based on fundamentally different values: destruction and

“Totalitarianism,” in Hannah Arendt’s famous definition, “strives not preservation, triumphalism and nurturance. But in our age, when toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are mothers appear in the news in their combat uniforms, leaving their superfluous.”8 Bohr’s idea, that every race and community and even children in America so they can go and bomb other mothers’ children every individual has his or her role in the scheme of things, and that in Iraq, what will awaken us?

we need one another if any of us is to be fulfilled—this is gall and wormwood to Fascists. And therefore may well be the worldview to underpin a future of compassion.

From Paradox to Paradigm

Because Nazism represents the logic of violence carried to its ultimate and unsubtle conclusion, we can see in it several things that go In the summer of 1938, Niels Bohr, the “Grandfather of Quantum along with the decision to use brute force to get what we want, Theory” addressed an international gathering of physicists in though the connection may not be immediately obvious. The first of Copenhagen. Bohr was best known to the general public for his these—and probably the first thing to consider about any world-famous theory of complementarity, describing the built-in limit to view—is its image of the human being. Hitler was kind of blunt about human understanding of the outside world, meaning that to com-this. It’s said that he once explained to an American journalist, “You pletely describe anything “out there” we always need at least two know, every man has his price—and you’d be surprised how low that mutually exclusive models, like a particle and a wave. The thing we price is.” Violence is keyed to the lowest image of the human being.

want to know about—be it photon, electron, or any quantum entity, Nonviolence is keyed to the most exalted. This is one of the reasons which ultimately means anything—is neither a particle nor a wave; it violence drives us apart, while nonviolence appeals directly to the will appear as one or the other depending on how we observe it. On mysterious unity among all of us, which is the hidden glory in each of the occasion of this distinguished international gathering he applied us. It is one of the reasons that a nonviolent attitude leads to works his famous idea to things rather bigger than the electron: that confer a sense of meaning, while a life of violence confers at best fleeting and shallow satisfactions. From today’s Germany, where many We may truly say that different human cultures are youth have taken a lead in putting the Nazi legacy behind us, I recently complementary to each other. Indeed, each such cul-received a handsome brochure blazoned with “Nonviolence” along ture represents a harmonious balance of traditional one side and “Self-image” across the bottom9—an intuitively right conventions by means of which latent possibilities of connection.

human life can unfold themselves in a way which reveals Bohr’s disruptive words were ahead of his time and we are still to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety.7

barely catching up to them. He saw that at the heart of the Fascist 264

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worldview was a concept of order utterly contrary to what we know family, and growing. That does not matter. From the standpoint of to be true of biological life. Every biologist knows that the essence of unity in diversity each of them is invaluable.That foundational insight life is diversity, but the Nazis held that life was two-dimensional and is growing dimmer instead of brighter at this time.The reinstatement essentially uniform, with an extreme hierarchy such that only one of the death penalty, euthanasia, materialism, the countenancing of race, one regime, ultimately only one person, was legitimate, clean, grotesque human rights violations, even the letting-slip of the family or whatever, while everyone and everything else was “with us or against and the support systems that nurture a child—these are all ways we us,” destined to be assimilated or subordinated to the One Right Way.

are compromising that insight because we see no other choice at pres-We might call this worldview “disunity through uniformity.”The most ent but to keep on using violence to control violence. But for every direct antidote to Fascism on this level is the very different idea Hegel nonviolence advocate throughout time, it has been axiomatic that life called unity in diversity. As a frame of reference, unity in diversity is a is sacred, i.e., invaluable, that while the sum total of all life is in a way way to acknowledge the unique value of each life, through grasping its more precious than that of a given individual, in a way it is not. Infinity connection with all of life. Note Bohr’s expression, “The latent possi-equals infinity.

bilities of human life can unfold themselves.”10 This is exactly the In totalitarian logic, “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a definition of nonviolence that a young fellow Northman, Johan statistic”13 or “if you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.”

Galtung, would propose some years later: “the fulfillment of the indi-Nonviolent logic does not work that way. Rather, “each is good, and vidual.” Conversely, Galtung would define violence as any “avoidable taken all together very good, for ‘our Lord made all things very compromise of human needs”—anything that inhibits that good.’”14 So to the nonviolent, one death is a tragedy and a million fulfillment.11 In this spirit the Dalai Lama, speaking from the margins deaths is a million tragedies, even though our imaginations may not be of the UN NGO Human Rights Convention in 1993, said, “If we are able to grasp that enormity. In a way, a million deaths is not worse than prevented from using our creative potential, we are deprived of one the death of an individual: nothing is worse than the death of an indi-of the basic characteristics of a human being.”And he added, “It is very vidual.That’s what the sanctity of life means.

often the most gifted, dedicated, and creative members of our socie-Now, Gandhi, as a traditional Hindu, had a solid metaphysical ty who become victims of human rights abuses. Thus the political, basis for this principle, and he liked to quote a traditional wisdom social, cultural and economic developments of a society are obstruct-proverb that articulates it: “yatha pinde, tatha brahmande,” “as with the ed by the violations of human rights.”12

fragment, so with the whole.” Otherwise put, the macrocosm is in the There is, therefore, a close connection between compassion—

microcosm. Everything that exists “out there” exists “in here,” as which is really more than a feeling but the force that holds family, soci-philosophers say, in potentia. This is not the way we generally view ety, and the planet together—and the concept, or vision, that all life things, but why should we think that when we’re walking around in is precious in its diversity and its unity. Bohr was apparently trying to our normal buy-and-sell consciousness, we’re seeing things as they trace the extension of biodiversity, which we understand relatively really are? Quantum physicists, mystics, the world’s faith traditions well, to cultural and individual diversity, which we do not. Unity in with their awkward belief in the sanctity of the individual—and a diversity goes hand-in-hand with nonviolence; unity in diversity is, if lurking suspicion in all of us in our more reflective moments—keep you will, the theology of compassion.

returning to this vision again and again.This vision prompted George There are now more than six billion individuals in the human Orwell, for example, to muse, as he watched the movements of a 266

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young Hindu over whose hanging he was about to preside, “One life frightened of the Nazi presence. Perhaps he feared it would even jeop-less; one world less.”15 This is what drives good citizens to the picket ardize Sweden’s neutrality.

lines when the state decides it has the right to snuff out a life, what As it happened, though, a famous Danish physicist was hiding out makes them say the death penalty is “the supreme moral issue of our in Uppsala. When he heard about the dilemma, he calmly sent word time,” as a recent mailer from Death Penalty Focus said, because life is to the king that if the refugees were not taken in he would turn him-so precious that we dare not snuff it out under any circumstances, self over to the Nazis.The king immediately relented and accepted the however impractical that may appear.The challenge instead is precisely refugees. Moved by political expediency or awakened compassion, he the reverse: to make the supreme value of each life the basis of our responded perfectly to Niels Bohr’s Satyagraha of one.

practicality.

To do this, we turn to the positive corollary of the injunction against killing, namely, that in this microcosm that is each one of us are Heart Unity: Diversity AS Community the seeds of the whole world order.We know the drop is in the ocean, but it’s a mysterious truth that the ocean also is in the drop.This is why Every spring I show my class a stirring film about the civil rights the Talmud, and the Koran, say in nearly identical language, “Whoever movement that features a snatch of a sermon by Martin Luther King saves a single life, it is as though he saves the whole world.”16 In a very Jr. delivered in Montgomery. I can hear these words (and the audience real sense, he (or she) does. It only took one individual, waking up and chiming in) as I type them:

slowly unbending his back, to break up the colonial system and evap-orate the myth that “it is natural for the weaker to lie down before the And we’re not wrong in what we’re doing. (No!) stronger.” Physically, a ridiculously small fraction of our DNA is If we’re wrong, the Supreme Court is wrong.

brought into play to manifest our bodies, while the rest lies latent and (Uh huh!)

unused; analogously, in the depths of our consciousness, there is If we’re wrong, the Constitution of the United enough “information” in each of us to regenerate a world.

States is wrong. (Yeah!)

Nonviolence states, negatively, that life is sacred. Each life, If we’re wrong, God Almighty is wrong . . .

regardless how humble it may seem to us, is too precious to be destroyed. And it states the positive corollary that the resources for I feel, in a small way, that I’ve just been paraphrasing him: “If creating the world order we want are born every minute, though they nonviolence is wrong, then unity in diversity is wrong—then the become fully realized only once in many centuries.

sanctity of life is wrong, then the basis of civilization is wrong.” If we One fall day in 1943, 7,200 people, virtually the entire Jewish give up on the sanctity of life, which we are doing right now, step-by-Danish population, were smuggled out under the noses of the occupa-step—for the convenience of assisted suicides, for the convenience of tion by the Danish underground. The motley flotilla, made up of abortions, for the convenient delusion that executing “criminals”

fishing vessels and everything that would float, pitched and tossed in makes the rest of society safe—we are giving up on the principle of the rough sea but made Sweden with its huddled, seasick cargo by our civilization.

morning. Then, just when everyone thought they were finally safe, Of course, the idea of unity in diversity seems a bit paradoxical: word came that the king of Sweden was afraid to give them asylum—

“The more clearly one studies the character of individual human 268

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increase, but the value of imitating each other does not. Too much souls,” wrote Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, “the more baffled one

“unity” on the surface (where it’s really more like uniformity) always becomes over the great differences between personalities. . . . It is, turns out to involve some kind of domination and/or dependency: however, precisely through their differentiations that they are all united belief in that kind of “unity” drove the Fascists out when Bohr toward one objective, to contribute toward the perfection of the described the real thing.

world, each person according to his special talent.”17 (my emphasis) Attempting to water down the Dalai Lama’s appeal to the A certain amount of paradox is OK, no doubt, especially when a

“international community” for help in securing the basic rights of his worldview is just being shaped, but in fact nonviolence gives us a captive people, the Chinese regime cynically played a card that has simple way to resolve this paradox.The “unity” we’re talking about is often been played honestly and well, namely, that this kind of “inter-

“heart unity”; it’s a unity beneath the surface while the diversity we’re ference” would be an imposition of Western values on a non-Western talking about is on the surface—a diversity of outward characteristics.

people. His Holiness showed the flaw in that argument, using good Gandhi never wanted Muslims to give up their religion or Brahmins Buddhist principles:

to stop teaching or performing rituals and depend on spinning rhadi to make their living; he wanted everyone to stop feeling superior, or All human beings, whatever their cultural or histori-inferior, to each other—in other words, to stop feeling alienated.

cal background, suffer when they are intimidated, Brahmins would stay Brahmins, Christians would become good imprisoned or tortured. . . . There should be no Christians, but all in a context of identifying with one another’s difference of views on this. We must therefore insist welfare.And, as we’ve seen, he invented the term heart unity to desig-on a global consensus not only on the need to respect nate that.

human rights world wide but more importantly on Heart unity, the empathetic desire for the welfare of others, could the definition of these rights. Recently some Asian also be called “rejoicing in diversity.” We are one in our underlying governments have contended that the standards of consciousness, which has no divisions. In practice I get in touch with human rights laid down in the Universal Declaration that unity when I want you to be fulfilled in the way you can be of Human Rights are those advocated by the West and fulfilled—not necessarily the way I’d be fulfilled. That we can and cannot be applied to Asia and other parts of the should both be fulfilled is a cardinal principle of faith in the world Third World because of differences in culture and of Satyagraha; that we have different ways of getting there is equally differences in social and economic development. I cardinal. Unity of aspiration, down there in the heart, goes with diver-do not share this view and I am convinced that the sity of attributes, of individuality on the surface.You really can’t have majority of Asian people do not support this view one without the other. And this is not unduly paradoxical; unity is the either, for it is the inherent nature of all human beings signature, the fulfillment of our inner life; diversity, the natural char-to yearn for freedom, equality and dignity. . . . The acteristic of our outer life. Now, Gandhi did want Hindus to wean rich diversity of cultures and religions should help their Muslim brethren from cow slaughter, by means of love; he wanted to strengthen the fundamental human rights in all Brahmins to take some time off and do “bread labour,” but voluntarily.

communities.18

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Indeed, even the august concept of human rights may not be species—that they aren’t human.Today it is “criminals” and of course vibrant enough to make us hear the cry of these basic needs. Speaking

“terrorists”; yesterday it was “Communists,” and who knows who may in the context of the struggle for animal welfare, Mary Midgley wrote be the next group to be thrust beyond the “discourse of that the biosphere “is the whole of which we are parts, and its other reason”—unless, as Einstein said, we “remember our humanity and parts concern us for that reason. But the language of rights is rather forget all the rest.”

ill-suited for expressing this.”19 Let us say, rather, that the drive to find Nonviolence helps us remember it. As a young activist friend of happiness is close to the core of our being, and that is why it’s identical mine recently said, nonviolence is when you “humanize your enemy in each of us. On the “heart level” there are basic needs and aspirations and let your ‘enemy’ humanize you.” When you respond with courage every human being has in common. We all have a need to serve, and and respect under duress, it raises your image, humanizes you, in the we have the need as Augustine pointed out, to be united with each opponent’s eyes—and helps, in however small a way, to enhance the other—both areas in which modern societies let us seriously down.

awareness of humanness in the global culture.This awareness, in turn, We have an inalienable, universal need for respect, meaning both to defuses some of the world’s violence. Pick any conflict—in the get basic human dignity and (as Dostoevsky said) to have someone or Middle East, in the Balkans, in Africa, in America: we would never be something to respect. Nonviolence makes full use of both of these seeing the kind of unreasoning hate that’s erupting around the world dimensions. In the famous “people power” revolution in the if our general worldview were not so dehumanized.There would still Philippines (1983–86), yet another term for nonviolence was coined, be problems like water rights and social entitlements, but they would and maybe the best yet: alaydangal, to “offer dignity.”

be just that—problems.You don’t hate problems; you solve them.

There are, and must be, minor differences playing across the surface And so the idea of the world as a machine, made up of separate, of this unity of the needs we all share in common, which strangely solid, Newtonian particles, “even so very hard, as never to wear or complement it.There can only be one Michael Nagler (happily, some break in pieces,”20 had bad consequences, as Joseph Wright foresaw. It may think), and while there are certain things I think will make me was a new idea when he painted An Experiment and still is relatively happy as an individual (the opportunity to teach nonviolence, an occa-new in the sense that it replaced a myth humanity had held for count-sional hike through unspoiled forests), my desire for happiness is the less centuries. Realizing this, many have thought—and I may seem to same as, and has the same validity as, that in every person, indeed in have implied—that what we need to do is bring back that myth. It every blessed creature. Violence denies both this surface uniqueness won’t be easy. Having spent much of my early career studying myth, I and underlying identity. Nonviolence affirms both, at their respective know well that along with the changes Wright was illustrating, myth levels. Active nonviolence—a calling for each and every one of us—

itself has been weakened as a way of modeling our understanding of uses both in its blueprint for loving community.

the world. Science became and remains, as my late friend Willis Today, as the world is convulsed by ethnic and pseudoethnic and Harman often said, “the main knowledge-validating system of our still other hatreds, people caught up in such hatreds cannot remotely culture.”

remember that they share an underlying unity with surface This is not a problem for nonviolence. Gandhi himself constantly, differences; they see only differences, which then take on monstrous and appropriately, presented nonviolence as a science in both the proportions. They fall into a condition that ethologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt practical and theoretical senses of that term—meaning that it could called “pseudospeciation”: the illusion that others belong to another be practiced systematically and explained within the canons of human 272

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logic. From the science of nonviolence, as it develops and becomes EPILOGUE

widespread, will grow again the “myth,” in the nonpejorative sense of the agreed-upon world model, that there is life and consciousness interweaving all creation. After all, as Carolyn Merchant’s study so well documents, it was because our forebears, in their zeal to R

industrialize, no longer wanted to believe that Earth was alive that they stigmatized that concept as a primitive, animistic, superstitious belief.

If you are deemed worthy of peace, you will rejoice at all times.

Today we desperately need to reawaken our innate awareness that life Seek understanding, not gold. Gain peace, not a kingdom.

is sacred. Scientific people that we are, it we’ll be better off if we understand that beneath all the diversity we see lies some kind of

—Saint Isaac of Syria

unity that we do not.

During a period of terrible riots some years ago in Gujarat (Gandhi’s home state), a “Hindu” mob descended on a rural village,

“ T H E S E A R E E X C I T I N G times,” wrote Vandana Shiva in her book primed to kill. Almost all the village men were out in the fields. The Stolen Harvest:The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply: women reacted quickly, however, and took in their Muslim neighbors to hide them from the mob. As they lived mostly in one-room cot-It is not inevitable that corporations will control our tages, it often meant “hiding” the Muslims in the puja corner, under-lives and rule the world.We have a real possibility to neath their household altar.The mob stormed up to home after home shape our own futures. We have an ecological and screaming, “You are hiding Muslims in there!” “Yes,” the women calmly social duty to ensure that the food that nourishes us is replied. “We are coming in to get them!” Then the women, one after not a stolen harvest . . . .

the other said, “First kill me, then only you may enter.” Every Muslim We have the opportunity to work for the freedom in the village was saved that day.21

and liberation of all species and all people. Something Who are these women? We need their courage, their instinct, as simple and basic as food has become the site for their vision.We need their faith.Who are they? They are every one of these manifold and diverse liberations in which every us, brought to intense life by the intersection of a culture that still had one of us has an opportunity to participate—no mat-remnants of humane vision and an extreme emergency. Broadly ter who we are, no matter where we are.1

speaking, we are all in such an emergency today, and there is every possibility that we can rebuild our culture to support us when we face The examples that excite Dr. Shiva, who was one of India’s our own opportunities to mobilize that kind of faith and courage. If leading physicists before she became one of the world’s leading envi-we succeed (and we can afford nothing less), we shall be proud of our ronmental activists and thinkers, are cases of spirited resistance by contribution to an otherwise bleak epoch of the human spirit.

ordinary Indians—grassroots, usually village-based, often consciously Gandhian—to the piracy of earth’s food resources by major transnational corporations. Several things about this struggle justify her enthusiasm.

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For one thing, and it is not lost on her or many of the “uneduca-together. More than half of IRA deaths have been caused by their own ted” villagers, this is a life-and-death matter, ripe for nonviolent atten-members. This is not a fluke, as we should now realize; this tragic tion. Recall that two of Gandhi’s key campaigns were about concrete, absurdity comes from following the law of violence, and that law, as basic staples of life: cloth and salt. From the theft through privatiza-Ireland’s John Hume says, is “obsolete.”2

tion of salt, which is a basic enough staple of life, similar world forces The resistance to nature theft has also, like the resistance to polit-have now moved on the earth’s seeds. By marketing “terminator” seeds ical freedom, gone down different roads. The same ecological strug-that will not reproduce and crafting international trade agreements gles have been both violent, as with the early efforts of Earth First!, or that force farmers to buy them, and by other means, corporations like nonviolent, as with the famed Chipko movement in northern India.

Monsanto hope to make world farmers as dependent on their corpo-Another reason Dr. Shiva is enthusiastic about these resistance move-rate systems as they ever were on colonial regimes of yore. Before, ments is that they are committed to nonviolence and—something exploiters had to wait until crops grew, or salt washed up on shore, new since Gandhi’s time—are a grassroots phenomenon answered by before confiscating them in the name of whatever structures of a much more “top-down” awareness of nonviolence than was possible authority they concocted; now the same shortsighted greed, more in his day. UNESCO graced the start of the millennium with an ambi-globally organized and more technically sophisticated, has got its tious Culture of Peace program; the parent body has declared the first hands on the reproductive resources of Nature herself. Enter the millennial decade to be a “Decade of Education for a Culture of Peace

“Seed Satyagraha.”

and Nonviolence”—exactly the right focus. There have always been One of the reasons violence can’t win out in the long run is, quite good fights, but rarely were they fought in a commensurately good simply, we don’t really want it to. Violence gets vulnerable when it way. If these times are exciting, it is because the new way, the way goes too far because eventually the violent themselves recoil.Then it’s consistent with the goal, is gaining ground.

only a matter of, once again, “compelling reason to be free.”And so we My friend Lee, a highly skilled physician’s assistant, recently moved are witnessing setbacks to the seemingly inexorable multinational cor-out to join our community in California, bringing her delightful deep porate advance called globalism, setbacks that are occurring as it Baton Rouge accent and all her compassion and experience. Lee found crosses the line from exploiting people, which is bad enough, to herself a nice position in a small medical practice, but shortly after she exploiting the very nature from which people derive their lives. Even joined the pleasant, semirural operation in Sonoma County, the prac-in this age of insensitivity, when machines and money seemed to have tice was “acquired” by a health-care corporation. Not one of the most blinded nearly everyone to the sacred nature of life and the sacred life rapacious; in fact, it was the Seventh Day Adventists, who have fine hos-in nature, that awareness is coming back.

pitals dotted around the state. But Adventists or not, they thought like When, as it inevitably must, violence pushes people from poverty a corporation.Within weeks, all the nurses were fired.The staff were into destitution, when people see their last hope of fulfillment being now “personnel,” not doctors or nurses, and the new managers started robbed, or when, in his colossal arrogance, man lays claims to parts of ordering them around and issuing bureaucratic directives that dropped nature on which others have lived for centuries, they fight back.

like a guillotine between them and their patients, mostly friends they And they must. But how makes all the difference. Members of the had served for years, making their work tedious and demeaning. Lee is Irish Republican Army (IRA) have killed six times more people in sticking it out, for now. She hopes the senior doctor will come back—

their struggle than the British army and various police forces put when he recovers from his heart attack.

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That’s corporate medicine. Corporate journalism is no different.

“John Henry” to approximate guitar chords and more enthusiasm than Neither is corporate coffee (though, at the time of this writing, one musicianship. John Henry, the legendary “driver” of railroad ties, was major chain has agreed to sell “fair trade” coffee, which greatly helps pitted against the new steam drill everyone secretly hoped would not small growers, mostly in Central and South America).As I said earlier, outdrive him.

I don’t even want to talk about corporate education. Chain bookstores are a particularly nasty threat to diversity. As Ivan Illich pointed out John Henry, he drove his fourteen foot.

some time ago in a stunning and oft-reprinted article, violence always Steamdrill, it drove only nine,

compromises diversity.What are we doing to ourselves?3

Lord God, steamdrill, it drove only nine!

We are automatically following a Western tendency to centralize, which first took the form of a one-city empire (Roman), then a world But think about the absurdity of it all: who built the nasty steam religion (Catholic), and now globalism—a world corporate network.

drill/computer in the first place? Did it arrive from Mars, or slouch up This idea of order is destructive, however, for two reasons: (1) on land from a Jurassic swamp? Why do we work so hard to do some-Because when they outgrow human scale, corporations lose sight—

thing we hope will fail? I have no answer to that question, but I do let’s be precise: the people in them lose sight—of the larger picture know one thing: it means that we are not as committed to bleaching and of humane values. They end up doing anything for profits (there the world of life and diversity as we think we are, and that gives us hope are some exceptions to this, but not many) and are no longer even that the corporate Goliath has a soft forehead—I’m sorry, has a soft aware of what they’re doing to the earth and the people in their way.

heart that can be won over by the modern David’s nonviolent witness.

(2) Because it just isn’t right to corporatize people, not to mention nature; it leaves no room for our diversity. So the corporate world order will one day have to go the way of the world empire, the world Native Wisdom

church, and the yet-unrealized idea of a top-down world federation.

Dr. Shiva’s enthusiasm is that she may be seeing that day’s dawn.As she The Chipko movement began in the seventies when Sunderlal often says, “I think the movement is stronger than it realizes and that Bahuguna, a Gandhian coworker, helped mobilize the villagers of the corporate rule is more vulnerable than we imagine.”

Uttarkhand district of the lower Himalayas to resist the government-Shortly before he passed away, the much-missed E. F. Schumacher, inspired deforestation that had left the forest bereft of its native trees, author of Small Is Beautiful, came to Berkeley, and I had him in to talk robbing the villagers of not only their livelihood but often their very to my students. His first remark as he gazed around the featureless, lives when they stood helpless before each season’s disastrous floods.

underground classroom was, “Look how much trouble we’ve taken to To a significant extent, the villagers, mostly women, have recovered get away from light and air so we can spend so much money to pipe control of their lands and their message has spread far beyond the them in again.” I remembered this a few years later when a Russian Garhwal slopes to be a hope to nonviolent environmental movements chess master was pitted against a computer. This computer had been everywhere. I said the Chipko movement began in the seventies, but dubbed “Hal,” if I recall. I was not fooled. Along with practically you could also say it goes back centuries. In truth, it was only brought everyone else, I rejoiced when the wretched machine went down in back to life in the sixties by the Gandhian spark: women and men had ignominious defeat. In high school my friends and I had often sung sacrificed themselves en masse, and successfully, when the maharaja of 278

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Jodhpur came for the trees in 1731. It was reborn on March 27, 1973, Navajo healing works through two processes: first, it when someone at a village meeting, possibly an old man, remembered drives away or removes the cause of the illness; and an important piece of folk wisdom: “When a leopard attacks a child second, it restores the person to good relations in sol-the mother takes the onslaught on her own body.”4

idarity with his or her surroundings and self.

It is not a coincidence that the Chipko Andolan (“movement”) has Navajo justice . . . favors methods which use sol-indigenous roots.We were less violent when we were closer to nature.

idarity to restore good relations among people. Most Nor is it only environmental struggles that have mined this resource. In importantly, it restores good relations with self.7

other domains as well, the search for a nonviolent future is being carried forward by thinkers and activists who are rediscovering, or daring In the restored, and restorative, Navajo system there are third-to draw upon, wisdom that industrialism made us forget. This is con-party mediators chosen by the community to bring about reconcilia-spicuously true in the domain called criminal justice. Many cultures had tion between the community and the offender. The mediators are much more restorative concepts of reconciliation in place before dehu-called “peacemakers.”They are chosen on the basis of their reverence manizing modernity overtook them, and are seeking to reassert them for life, and, to make Pepinsky’s and Quinney’s dream of “criminology against their industrial overlay. It is happening from Canada to New as peacemaking” complete, the new legal institution set up for them is Zealand, from the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP) to called the Navajo Peacemaker Court.

the Family Group Conferencing (FRG) meetings that combine modern It is unwise to romanticize about the unspoiled past. Many of the restorative approaches with Maori ones to bring about a marked reduc-conflict-avoidance mechanisms developed in preindustrial societies tion in recidivism among young people.5 “I was reminded of my tradi-are unworkable in our enormous, complex current societies, and tional way of dealing with crime, actually referred to as ‘brokenness,’”

some, which worked for countless centuries before, collapsed when wrote a Methodist theology student from Kenya. “The elders recog-they encountered modernity. But it would be even more unwise to nized that a punishment that led to bitterness was counterproductive ignore gems of traditional wisdom that glitter in societies across the for healing a ‘broken’ person. Justice was supposed to be for preserva-world. We can use them to brighten our own approaches to conflict tion of life, not its destruction . . . punishment was always imposed for resolution, peace, criminal justice, sports (many cultures had non-the purpose of enhancing the life of the person in community.”6

competitive ones), the environment, and any part of life that has been Closer to home, Hon. Robert Yazzie is the chief justice of the damaged by alienation.

Navajo Nation. Like many of his community, he only discovered after The effort to recover these useful culture ways will be—it already graduating from Oberlin and the New Mexico School of Law that an is to some extent—itself an act of healing, for it throws a bridge of alternative to the galling system of justice that relies on hierarchies mutual respect across a relationship that has massively ruptured from and power and aims at punishment (and produces alienation) lay right its absence, the relationship of vulnerable, simpler cultures and the at his doorstep. Much of what he says about Navajo concepts echoes industrialized world that is still, in some guises, trying to exploit them.

what we have been seeing throughout this book: After all is said and done, we are all human whether we live in an urban or a natural jungle; and wherever we are, compassion works and Navajo concepts of justice are related to healing hatred destroys. Somewhere in Georgia in the early part of the because many of the principles are the same. . . .

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Poverty Law Center helped bring them to justice.The mother of the peace. Among many groups and organizations that have picked up the dead boy was there in the courtroom when they were tried and con-echo of nonviolence today, there is at least one that aims specifically at victed. One of those young men broke down on the stand. He looked this universality, calling itself the Seamless Garment Network. I do at her and said, sobbing, “I only hope that someday you’ll be able to like that image. It reminds me of Pepinsky’s idea of “weaving combat-forgive me.”

ants, weakest victims first, back into a social fabric”10 and Stuart She said, “Son, I’ve already forgiven you.”

Cowan’s call to “the great work of reweaving the human economy,

“Lay hold of goodness, not justice,” wrote Saint Isaac of Syria.

process by process, product by product, industry by industry, back

“Have clemency, not zeal, with respect to evil.”8

into the Earth economy.”11

I would like to conclude with three principles that can help us sys-First principle: a seamless nonviolent ethic toward all life and a nonvi-tematically follow what that mother did, so that we can participate in olent praxis for every life-threatening problem.

the great project of liberating life from violence, as Vandana Shiva says, (2) Remember that means and ends are one and indivisible. Some

“no matter who we are, no matter where we are.”

still see no contradiction in using violence to protect the earth, the (1) When William James wrote his classic essay on the “moral unborn, the lab animal in its cage.We can sympathize, but these reac-equivalent of war” in 1911, he definitely had part of the right idea, that tions are self-defeating (as Earth First! discovered from experience).

the only way to take the inevitability out of war was to give young Spiking trees, bombing clinics, hurling insults at researchers, or people something else to do with their restless energy. But what?

parading around with gruesome photos of lab animals being tortured

—those means spread the poison they are intended to defeat.Taken to If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of extremes, this would be like Ted Kaczynski blowing up people with military conscription a conscription of the whole technology to defeat technologism. It was on this note that we began youthful population to form . . . a part of the army this book, was it not? We have to be against not this kind or that kind of enlisted against Nature. . . . They would have paid violence, but violence.

their blood-tax, done their part in the immemorial It is a big demand, but remember that the time is ripe. After the human warfare against nature; they would tread the terrorist attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the knee-jerk earth more proudly.9

reaction swiftly followed: bomb somebody. This time, though, the press here and there felt visibly uncomfortable. There was even a It is sobering to realize how in half a century the “immemorial”

headline that read, as I recall, “Strikes: Futile but Essential.” Are you struggle against nature turned out to be a shockingly wrong approach OK with that logic? Neither is anyone else, really.

to life.What could have saved James from that error? If he had known (3) And thirdly, remember that nonviolence is a science. We do need that nonviolence is a law threading through every relationship. The the naive profundity Flaubert appreciated in Wright’s painting. We nonviolent writ runs everywhere; we have to start it in the imagery of need to look at life with the sensitivity of children and to protect it our minds and spread outward to include everything that lives. As an with the sophistication of very well-informed adults—the innocence Indian sage said, “If we don’t see God in all, we don’t see God at all.”

of doves and the cunning of serpents. In the modern age that, for better No substituting a war on nature for a war on people, no substituting or worse, we inhabit, we will not succeed by doing nonviolence on a television violence for real violence—not if we want to know real hunch (though we’ll get further than being violent on a hunch). We 282

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need a compelling logic that both lights up the path and reveals less.” It occurred to me that this goal goes even beyond “sustainable.”

pitfalls. Imagine if we thought, for example, that the parable of that And later, helping Paul and Annie feed, water, milk, and talk to their forgiving mother in Georgia meant we should let all those who offend four cows (I did pretty well on the milking, for a Brooklyn boy), I was against life walk free. Not at all. We forgive totally in our hearts (or deeply impressed with their relationship with animals. “We have no strive for that ideal), but when others’ violence is out of control idea how much we’ve lost,” my friend Steve later reflected. “Apartheid they—and we—have to be kept out of their own harm’s way. Yes, wasn’t just in South Africa, and it isn’t just about people.” By remov-forgive, for your own sake if none other. Yes, use forgiveness to ing animals from our streets and from our sight, by relegating them to rehumanize and reconcile. But don’t put people in harm’s way before zoos and circuses, we lose, they lose, and even the economy loses.

they’ve had a chance to regain their sanity. And above all, remember Violence gains. As the philosopher Porphyry, a student of the great that our nonviolence will not be complete unless we follow through mystic Plotinus and the first in the West to write extensively about and ask ourselves, all right, what caused this problem? Where are the vegetarianism, said, “For he who abstains from [harming] every thing unseen connections here? What can we do to stop such horrors animated . . . will be much more careful not to injure those of his own happening again?

species. . . . But he who confines justice to man alone, is prepared, like one in a narrow space, to hurl from him the prohibition of injustice.”12

Paul and Annie are as down-home as you can get. When I spent What I visited those two days was nonviolent agriculture. As two days on their farm in central Michigan—two days without store-Annie put it, “We don’t hate—not the aphids, the viruses, or even the bought food or mass media—I learned a lot about community-rats.” Which doesn’t mean they tolerate the rats. It was one thing supported agriculture, for the Community Farm they’ve run for a when the sleek rodents ate the cow’s grain and their own vegetables, decade or more is no mere family operation, nor is it a for-profit but when they started trotting out their families to meet the visiting business (though Paul and Annie are quite well off, within the range children (“Oh look, Mommy, what an interesting woodchuck!”), Paul of their sensible needs). Both committed meditators, these founders and Annie had to do something. They did something, but they didn’t of Community Farm (think færm, in the broad a of the northern hate. They used poison—once, in an emergency (the children, after Midwest) have given birth to an institution as important as it is all), and then they tried an ancient, improbable remedy, throwing unpretentious, for it represents a parallel economic universe that is together ingredients, that sounded to me more like the witches of happening in scattered pockets all over North America. On farms, in Macbeth at work than science (biodynamic farmers call it the “woo-communities, in vegetarian co-ops, and sometimes enclaved in the woo factor”), and it worked.There’s not a rat in sight. “Even if we had wilds of a big city, people who are often barely twenty years old are gophers,” Annie predicted, “we wouldn’t hate them.”

walking away from the money economy and its values, not unlike the These are exciting times.

way we did in the sixties—only with a lot more practical know-how.

Paul and Annie may look folksy, but they also travel the world lectur-ing on the new/old science of biodynamics.

The nonviolence of Community Farm goes deep,Annie explained.

“There’s the whole practice of replenishing the earth as you live off it, so that while you get your nutrition it too gets more nourishing, not 284

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Action Guide

discovered in the course of this book, especially the arch principle that nonviolence (like its opposite) begins within us and moves out from the personal to the political. In fact, to act on this realization itself R

begins to end the big lie of the violent world we live in, namely, that you and I are not important as individuals, that we achieve significance Of Hope and Practice: Five Steps

only as corporations, governments, or some group identity.

Totalitarianism—which is violence in its political form—strives “not to Your Own Nonviolent Future

toward despotic rule over men,” in Hannah Arendt’s chilling words, A friend of mine was in Washington not long ago to lobby for the pro-

“but toward a system in which men are superfluous.” The first step posed Department of Peace (HR 1673). One evening she stepped into into a nonviolent future is taken when we put women and men—the a hotel elevator to find four men in military garb, obviously there on individual—back at the very source of all change and power. It would, a similar but opposite mission. They fell to talking, and the men of course, make the system a little less bad to pass better laws, and we explained what they were lobbying for—a new weapons system; what should do that. But if what we want is a whole new system, we can only was she there for? When she told them brightly it was for a grow it from within, which we do when we embody, promote, and Department of Peace, one of the men, who had been silently staring enjoy the life of nonviolence.

at the floor the whole time, looked up and said, with much emotion, This is not to say that the suggestions that follow have to be taken

“Please hurry.”

up strictly in order.We can write letters to our congresspeople before The war system and the whole pyramid of violence on which we have totally given up television (yes, I’m leading up to that). We it rests can seem unshakable, but it is weak from its own internal can work on these suggestions when and as opportunities arise. But contradictions. Peace has friends everywhere; nobody really wants it’s good to remember that without a good base in step one we won’t violence unless he or she has not heard or cannot grasp the power of get very far with step two, etc. Think of them as being in order of the alternative. The war system—and the materialism on which it priority, if not of time.

rests—could give way quickly before the felt presence of a better world. Nonetheless, we visionaries have much to do to make that 1. Truth in Thinking

alternative a felt reality.

I was, therefore, very pleased when, on the campuses, in the My dad, God bless him, wanted us to be the last family in my neigh-churches, bookstores, and other places I’ve spoken since the first edi-borhood to buy a television set.At the time I resented this no end. But tion of this book appeared, there was always someone, speaking for I now know that he was not only motivated by, shall we say, his fiscal many perhaps, asking me, “Yes, but what can I do about this?” The conservancy. He also had an intuitive sense of values. When he did unprecedented success of MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country shows finally let us install the big box on the porch off our living room, he the same thing on a wider scale: we Americans are ready to act to save had me build in a toggle switch so we could cut out the sound during our democracy and our destiny. Accordingly, I came up with five commercials.There’s nothing like the sight of an actor soundlessly try-things every one of us can do to play our part in the search party for ing to wax ecstatic over chewing gum to give one an ironic distance a nonviolent future.They all come directly from the principles we’ve from the world of advertising. It has lasted my whole life.

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So perhaps it was, thanks to Dad, relatively easy for me to keep about certain things.

commercialism, and the values of materiality and competition that Which leads me to the other function of the mass media: enter-it leads to, at arm’s length. Even so, it required a lot of effort and tainment. We need it, but we’re not getting it from the media.

self-knowledge and alertness even for me. I heard recently that the Agitation and the further fragmentation of our minds, already reeling average city dweller is exposed to 30,000 commercial messages a day.

from what Gandhi called the “multiplication of wants” in our current Remember, every one of those messages has a subtext that, in one way value system, are not entertainment. I have discovered a superb alter-or another, resonates with the value system that belongs to a world of native that is real entertainment: people. Friends. Friends can be a pain violence. Too many of us (I would say one is too many) live a virtual in the neck at times, but they’re real.They’re people; they’re what life life instead of a real life, are driven by a lust for excitement instead of is all about. I will come back to this in suggestion number three, but a search for fulfillment. Too many of us come to regard others and by spending time on relationships on the one hand and finding our finally ourselves as objects. And I say, paraphrasing Attenborough’s personal repertoire of alternative media on the other, we can position Gandhi, “It must be fought.”

ourselves to let the cord that binds us to the hollow ideas of commer-But how?

cial civilization gradually thin, and snap. Concretely, suggestion num-Individually, of course. Individual, family, circle of friends—

ber one is, cultivate substitutes for and then divest ourselves of exposure to tomorrow the world.And today it’s much easier to disengage from the the big mass media. Don’t watch TV. It’s that simple, and that powerful.

commercial mass media than it was when I soldered my toggle switch into the sound system of the family’s primitive TV, even though the 2. Taking Care of Ourselves Spir itually mass media are now more sophisticated and powerful and ubiquitous.

Because today we have an alternative: the ever-expanding world of On September 20, 2001, the Peace Studies students put on a teach-in independent, alternative media.

at Berkeley to discuss 9/11 and the impending disastrous response of Almost none of the key stories you have read in this book came our government. It was, as you might imagine, a hugely successful and my way through the mass media. How could they? They came partly emotionally charged meeting. The high point came when Rabbi from my personal contacts in the peace movement, partly from Michael Lerner said what was in the back of many minds that evening: books, largely from local independent news sources like the North Bay

“This is a spiritual crisis.” He got a standing ovation. When E. F.

Progressive—a high-quality paper with a circulation of about 1,000

Schumacher said we need a “metaphysical reconstruction,” when folks in the Sonoma Coast region, and—for in-depth commentary by Martin Luther King said we need a “revolution of values,” they were distinguished, in-the-field journalists—sources like the New York Review saying the same thing.

of Books. These, plus a steady flow of blogs and e-mails that have to be Spiritual crises call for spiritual remedies.That’s why I spent some expertly skimmed, yield priceless information not available from time describing meditation in chapter 3, and why I talk about it when-mainstream sources. I do read, selectively, the local paper. And that’s ever I get the chance.As a friend of mine said at a conference recently, about it.That’s about my only voluntary exposure to the commercial

“Television is the perfect antidote to meditation.” The reverse is just mass media.Yet I consider myself pretty well informed.When my stu-as true. Those 30,000 commercial messages I referred to agitate our dents say, “Man, are you out of it,” they are usually not thinking about minds whether we want them to or not; they infect us with a frenetic current events but what seem to them my quaint moral attitudes excitement about things that do not matter and, what may be worse, 288

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with an indifference toward people, who do. Even if we can take euphemistically call “incivility”; more honestly, it’s a form of that the cold-turkey remedy for TV and the movies, it will require a distancing, which is always a distant precursor to violence.

bit more for us to regain our balance and become aware of the hope Let me share a small trick with you, because nothing you can do that’s hiding in the midst of all the turmoil.We need live contact with in the way of relating more deeply to others is really small. I meet inner peace.

many people, in widely different contexts—students, other peace The good news about meditation is its incredible promise. The activists, meditators, and fellow bus passengers. It’s not easy to bad news is its fiendish difficulty. Helpfully, meditation is coming in remember so many names! But I’ve noticed that there’s a certain tim-for overdue attention in the mainstream today, not only as a way to ing to forgetting someone’s name: if you can fetch it back just as it’s health, which it is, but in a raft of scientific studies that show the disappearing over the edge of memory, you can hold onto it much evolutionary predisposition of the human being to selflessness.1

longer.Accordingly, after I’ve met someone I will often remind myself Health, the successful coping with stress, is the first fruit of a spiritual of who they are a few minutes after the conversation.That was Jack, practice.There are many others. But in the end, spirituality is a highly right? Very helpful.

individual thing, and I should leave you with the encouragement to So along with those “random acts of kindness,” practice revolu-undertake your own exploration, and refer you again to the one tionary civility. Find creative ways to live in a human world instead of resource I personally find most inspiring, my own Blue Mountain a world of objects, in a world of ever-expanding and yet deepening Center. However you choose to explore your path, and you should relationships.

choose it with some care, I encourage you to search out some reliable This is an extremely rewarding challenge. We are rehumanizing discipline that enables you to find, and in the end reside in, that state the world with every conversation, every encounter. We are also of inner peace that wisdom assures us is our heritage.

enhancing our own health, as numerous studies show—but it’s always the case that when we do the right thing its benefits spread out in all 3. Truth in Relating

directions.

The first step on the Buddha’s eightfold path is “Right View.” I have 4. Nonviolence Literacy

addressed this now with my first two suggestions. He also said, “Trust is the best of relationships.” We go further from trust with every new Congratulations! You are (I like to think) well into point four already

“security” measure we employ. We go further from it every time we if you read this book. Seriously, however, in this day and age anyone get cynical.

who cannot perceive, understand, and evaluate a nonviolent event is This is all a sad part of the dehumanization that I’ve frequently not educated, whatever letters trail behind his or her name.

cited as a root cause of violence.The good news is that as individuals Educational institutions are slowly beginning to recognize this need.

we can do a lot to repersonalize, which means to rehumanize, our We can applaud their efforts, but we cannot afford to wait for them to lives. Often it only requires the conscious effort to go through the catch up, nor need we wait for them. Learn and share the basics of non-

“convenient” barriers to communication in our lives. Call instead of violence—its history, its logic, and its promise.

write, meet and talk instead of calling, give people your complete We also learn by doing in this field, of course, but it will go far attention when they talk to you, and consciously avoid what we toward changing our culture if we can simply detect and understand 290

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what Gandhi called “the greatest force mankind has been endowed takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite, intelligible with.”2

plan for carrying that ideal into practice.” Nonviolence definitely takes the imagination by storm, the moment we begin to grasp what 5. Action for Peace

it really is. Where we need more work is the “definite, intelligible plan,” or plans, to show its applications to peace in all its aspects.

The war system, seemingly ubiquitous in our culture, our budget, our One superb framework for doing this is the Five Hundred Year Plan circumscribed vision of the possible, is really nothing more than an for peace developed by the Sarvodaya organization of Sri Lanka (for endlessly propped-up house of cards. Every time we try to solve a impatient Westerners, a hundred-year plan may have to do).A more problem militarily, its counterproductiveness becomes more obvious, direct answer to the war system is, of course, the Nonviolent and the alternative becomes more appealing. We who would help to Peaceforce—see Resources and Opportunities for both, and www make that alternative real should remember always that every human

.transformingviolence.org for a database of peace organizations.

heart holds within it an unquenchable longing for peace, a longing that Saint Augustine hymned so beautifully in Book Nineteen of his City of

• Don’t place much emphasis on or hope in projects that are symbolic only.

God and that we still vaguely sense even over the din of war.The very This is especially true if the intensity of the problem has developed uselessness of war in this age of terrorism helps bring that eternal past phase one of the escalation curve that we described in chapter 4.

longing closer to our grasp.

Yet the war system is everywhere, and we are few, and we must

• Don’t put all your energy into a single-issue campaign that’s not likely to know how to direct our efforts for maximum effect. Fortunately, the resonate with our overall aim: to create a nonviolent culture. Saving the perspective of nonviolence offers pretty clear guidelines for doing that.

turtles is worthwhile in itself, but won’t help much if we’re losing the oceans. Saving the turtles by a conspicuous use of creative, prin-

• Always look for articulate, positive alternatives. Especially in writing or cipled nonviolence will be more helpful, since those effects will speaking, the temptation is to start by making our opponents feel resonate with the “revolution of values.”

guilty, but that kind of start is usually also the end of the conversation. Toynbee said that Gandhi “made it impossible for us to go on

• Never sacrifice the future for the present. Violent solutions do that so ruling India, but at the same time he made it possible for us to abdi-characteristically; think of how we have laced Afghanistan and Iraq cate . . . without dishonour.”3 It is our job to point a way out. We with depleted uranium (DU), in order to destroy a tank or break are not in this to feel good (steps one through four address that), into a bunker during a given battle. DU poisons the ground and but to make the world better. Just as a constructive program has a water for a quarter of a million years! A project informed by prin-natural priority over an obstructive program, though each has its cipled nonviolence will never do this; on the contrary, its good place, so positive alternatives obviate much of the need to condemn effects will go on multiplying. So wherever you choose to grapple or blame others.Always remember our silent friend in the elevator.

with the juggernaut of war—be it the military budget, exposing It was also Toynbee to whom is attributed the oft-quoted war crimes that are often carried out in our name in some remote observation that “apathy can only be overcome by enthusiasm, and part of the world, counseling conscientious objectors, or refusing to enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal which pay taxes for war—try to find projects that carry forward into the 292

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future. As mentioned, to the extent that we engage principled non-Notes and References

violence on anything, it will resonate with nonviolence generally, and so we will be able to, in Mathew Arnold’s poignant phrase, R

“keep up our own communication with the future.”4 We are in it for the long haul.

CWMG = The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, CD-ROM (New Delhi: Government of India). (See Resources for more information.) Most quotations from Gandhi are drawn from this source. If they can also be found in readily available books, these

• Reach out. Way out, if you’re up for it. I went to the extent of letting sources are listed in addition.

myself be interviewed on two of the hate radio programs that are doing so much damage around the country. It was an exercise in Preface

masochism, if not futility. But if this is too much, find someone—

1 The Talk of the Town, New Yorker, September 16, 2002, 32.

the mail carrier, your brother-in-law, someone at work—and learn 2 Krystal Kyer, 27, member of the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace to reason with him or her, politely but confidently. America is (OMJP), e-mail.

3 Jane Perlez, New York Times, September 11, 2002. Filing her report from Cairo, breaking down into isolated groups, and it is up to us to build Perlez added, “The resolve of President Bush to use force against Iraq, they say, bridges across them, because those whom violence has in its grip compounds the antagonism, which is expressed with particularly unvarnished will not.The logic of violence does not stand up to the light of rea-dismay in Egypt and neighboring Jordan,Washington’s crucial Arab allies.”

son. Patient and compassionate communication is bound to succeed 4 Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million on some level.

People Are Changing the World (New York:Three Rivers, 2001).

Introduction

Here is a wallet-sized version of what we’ve just covered: 1 Alan Weisman, Gaviotas:A Village to Reinvent the World (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green, 1998), back cover.

• Use alternative media (and commercial media only with extreme 2 Ibid., 14, 175–76.

care)

3 Ibid., 33. For further information, see http://friendsofgaviotas.org/about.htm.

Chapter One

• Take care of yourself spiritually

1 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 6.

2 CWMG, vol. 53, 354. Also in Harijan (April 14, 1946): 90.

• Relate kindly and personally to others

3 Jacques Ellul, Contre les Violents (Vienna: Le Centurion, 1972), 7.

4 William Johnston, trans., The Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Doubleday, Image

• Learn nonviolence

1973), 129.

5 John W. Burton, Violence Explained:The Sources of Conflict,Violence and Crime and Their Prevention

• Build peace

(Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1997), 10.

6 Joel R. Davitz, “The Effects of Previous Training on Postfrustration Behavior,”

Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 47 (1952): 309–15.

7 Ben Ngubane, Associated Press, July 27, 1998.

8 David Sobel and Robert Ornstein, “Bad News on TV Is Bad News All Around,”

Mental Medicine Update IV.1 (1995) 1.

9 Joel Goleman, “Today’s Lesson: Curbing Kids’Violent Emotions,” San Francisco 294

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Notes and References 295

Chronicle, March 5, 1992, D3, D6.

the Protection of Human Rights (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian, 1997), 176.

10 Daniel Schorr, “TV Violence:What We Know but Ignore,” Christian Science 2 I am drawing in this section on verbal reports from several PBI workers (this Monitor, September 7, 1993, 19.

story was well known in PBI circles before Mahoney’s and Eguren’s important 11 Andre Brink, “Time Magazine’s 100 Leaders and Revolutionaries of the 20th book appeared).

Century,” Time 151, no. 14, 1998, 188–90.

3 Kenneth E. Boulding, Three Faces of Power (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989).

12 Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope: The Authorized Biography of Nelson Mandela (New 4 Ibid., 10.

York: Harper & Row, 1990), 218–20.

5 David V. Erdman, ed., The Poetry and Prose of William Blake (Garden City, NY: 13 John Daniszewski, Associated Press, “Mandela, de Klerk Debate,” Santa Rosa Doubleday, 1970), 36.

Press Democrat, April 15, 1984, A5.

6 Saint Augustine, The City of God XIX:12 (my translation).

14 CWMG, vol. 75, 409.

7 Charleton Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford 15 David Remnick, “Dumb Luck: Bush’s Cold War,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, University Press, 1962), s.v. “Violare.”

105.

8 Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light (New York: Parabola, 1987), 178.

16 E-mail to Peacemedia mailing list (peacemedia@gn.apc.org), Peacenet 9 Mt. 5:21–22.

Conference, September 28, 1991 .

10 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 17 British independent TV journalist Gaby Rado quoted on location, Washington 6, no. 3 (1969): 168–70. Galtung restated this definition several times else-Spectator, February 1, 1994, 2.

where, with minor changes.

18 This quote and the next from a Sonoma County school newsletter, Kid 11 See Rachel M. Macnair, Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (Westport, CT: Konnection, July 1994, 21.

Praeger, 2002). Also see her The Psychology of Peace (Westport, CT: Praeger, 19 See Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria Degaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to 2003).

Kill:A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence (New York: Random 12 Saint Augustine, Confessions I:xviii (my translation).

House, 1999), and Kara Platoni, “The Pentagon Goes to the Video Arcade,” The 13 See Everett Worthington, ed., Dimensions of Forgiveness: Psychological Research and Progressive, July 1999, 27.

Theological Perspectives (Radnor, PA:Templeton Foundation Press, 1998); and 20 Wendell Berry, Standing by Words (San Francisco: North Point, 1983), 65.

Michael E. McCullough, Kenneth I. Pargament, and Carl E.Thoresen, eds., 21 Isha Upanishad, verse 12 (my translation).

Forgiveness: Theory, Research, and Practise (New York: Guilford Press, 2000).

22 Rich’ard Magee, quoted in Youth Outlook, September 11–15, 1995, 6.

14 San Francisco Chronicle, July 8, 1997, A4, citing an article from the Los Angeles 23 Heraclitus frag. B 45: “You will never reach the limits of the soul [or, life prin-Times.

ciple], travel as far as you will by any road: so deep is its meaning” (my transla-15 Medical Abstracts Newsletter, 1993.

tion).

16 Cf. Robert L. Ivie, “Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention of Cold War 24 Robert Sanders, “Berkeley, LBNL Scientists Snap First 3-D Pictures of the

‘Idealists,’” Communication Monographs 54 (1954): 165–81.

‘Heart’ of the Genetic Transcription Machine,” Berkeleyan, January 19–25, 17 Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, August 11, 1993, B7.

2000, 3.

18 Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Harvard Alumni Gazette, April 23, 1992, 23.

25 Quoted in Steven Glazer, The Heart of Learning (New York: Jeremy P.Tarcher/

19 Ibid., 24.

Putnam, 1999), 218.

20 Swami Ramdas, Ramdas Speaks, vol. III (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1957), 26 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Possessed (New York:The Heritage Press, 1959), 571.

149.

Though this sentiment is put in the mouth of an unlikely character, there is no 21 See Pam McAllister, You Can’t Kill the Spirit: Women and Nonviolent Action doubt Dostoevsky himself subscribed to it.

(Philadelphia: New Society, 1988), 9.The reference here is to Western writers: 27 Dorothy Conniff, “Day Care: A Grand and Troubling Social Experiment,” Utne the word appeared earlier, of course, in Gandhi’s English writings or translations.

Reader (reprinted from The Progressive), May/June 1993, 67.

22 Cf. the following quote from Roshi Jiyu Kennet, “Buddhism states what the Eternal is not. (I use the term Eternal rather than God. God has the implica-Chapter Two

tion of being a deity with a beard and a long stick.) It does not state what it is because if it did we would be stuck with a concept. Buddhism states specifically 1 L. Mahoney and L. Eguren, Unarmed Bodyguards: International Accompaniment for what we know for certain. It will not state that which is taken on faith.We can 296

The Search for a Nonviolent Future

Notes and References 297

find this out for ourselves . . . but we cannot state what it is.” Lenore resource.)

Friedman, Meetings with Remarkable Women (Boston: Shambala, 1957), 168.

2 Yehudah Mirsky, “Jewish Perspectives,” in Perspectives on Pacifism, David R.

23 James D. Hunt, Gandhi and the Nonconformists (New Delhi: Promilla, 1986), Smock, ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1995), 23. I cannot sub-54–56.

scribe to Mirsky’s commonplace interpretation of nonviolence as passive, but I 24 CWMG, vol. 34, 94. Also see Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmadabad: Navajiovan, otherwise recommend this perceptive article.

1928), 103.

3 From the film A Time for Justice (Atlanta:Teaching Tolerance, 1992).

25 Ibid.

4 “I Refuse to Live in Fear,” San Francisco Examiner Parade, October 23, 1994, 26 Ibid.

22–23.

27 Robert I. Friedman, “An Unholy Rage,” New Yorker, May 7, 1994, 54.

5 Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1994), 6, Friedman’s claim is misleading in another respect as well: the settlers’ actions 59.

he cites are only symbolic. As we’ll see, this isn’t Gandhian either.

6 Michael Henderson, All Her Paths Are Peace:Women Pioneers in Peacemaking (West 28 Frans de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates (Cambridge: Harvard University Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1994), 162.

Press, 1989), 1.

7 CWMG, vol. 5, 335. Also in Satyagraha in South Africa, op. cit. , 100.

29 Bill Bailey, America’s Good News Almanac (New York: Simon and Schuster, Pocket 8 Cf. Stephen Zunes, “The Origins of People Power in the Philippines,” in Books, 1996), 40–42.

Nonviolent Social Movements:A Geographical Perspective, Lester Kurtz, Stephen 30 CWMG, vol. 34, 267.

Zunes and Sarah Asher, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 151.

31 Pyarelal, The Epic Fast (Ahmadabad: Navajivan, 1932), 35.

9 Louis Menand, “The War of All Against All,” New Yorker, March 14, 1994, 74.

32 Brandon Astor Jones, “Cell 38,” New Internationalist, no. 294 (1997): 35.

10 Eknath Easwaran, Gandhi the Man (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1978), 92. Also 33 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 80.

in CWMG, vol. 35, 365.

34 Marshall Frady, “The Outsider, II,” New Yorker, March 10, 1992, 70.

11 Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage, 228.

35 CWMG, vol. 30, 66–67.

12 Personal communication with author. I was startled to find, after writing this 36 CWMG, vol. 9, 392.

section, that there is actually now “hard” evidence that altruistic behavior causes 37 See chapter 8 for more on this strange similarity between “new” physics and a “high” like that of taking drugs or doing something intensely pleasurable.

nonviolence.

Much of the evidence is summarized by Natalie Angier, “Why We’re So Nice: 38 Harold E. Pepinsky, The Geometry of Violence and Democracy (Bloomington: We’re Wired to Cooperate,” New York Times, July 23, 2002.

Indiana University Press, 1991), 44.

13 “Walking the Talk of Nonviolent Intervention,” Signs of the Times (Christian 39 Ibid., 127.

Peacemaker Teams newsletter) VI, no. 1, 1996, 2.

40 M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule (Ahmadabad: Navajivan, 1938), 14 Solange Muller, talk given to ad hoc organizational meeting for peace teams, 70.

New York City, 1992.

41 Frans de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates, 233.

15 Harold Flender, Rescue in Denmark (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 144.

42 John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish 16 Ibid., 149.

Peasant (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 130–32.

17 Ibid., 148.

43 Ibid., 136. See also Keith Akers, The Lost Religion of Jesus: Simple Living and 18 “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” The Collected Poems of W. B.Yeats (New Nonviolence in Early Christianity (New York: Lantern Books, 2000). Gandhi once York: Macmillan, 1955), 133.

observed that the only people who are not aware that Jesus was nonviolent are 19 M. Scott Peck, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace (New York: the Christians.

Simon and Schuster,Touchstone, 1987), 35. See the study by British psycholo-44 Louise B.Young, “Easter Island: Scary Parable,” World Monitor, August 1991, 45.

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