By Michael Nagler
Originally published on Waging Nonviolence, October 18, 2011
Remembering the agonies I went through when the tanks moved in on Tiananmen Square in June, 1989, I was relieved that most (I wish it were all) of the protestors who make up today’s amazing Occupy movement do not intend to occupy the symbolic spaces they are in indefinitely. This struggle is not about particular pieces of real estate but the institutions that may be associated with them—iconically, of course, Wall Street. And it would be a bad strategy—it’s always bad strategy—to hold on to symbols, especially when they make you an easy, concentrated target.
The movement has empowered youth (and others) in their hundreds of thousands to demonstrate in some 1,500 locations in 82 countries, creating in the process a beautiful culture of consensus decision making. But that was the easy part.
Now it is time to go from a “happening” to a movement, to not only protest against, but overturn and replace the obnoxious institutions and behaviors that have (at last) brought us together. For this, I think, three things will have to happen.
1) This has been largely a nonviolent movement; but we must realize that there’s nonviolence and nonviolence—or more conveniently put, nonviolence and non-violence, i.e. the mere absence of physical harm. The latter was well expressed by the words of a Yemeni protestor: “They cannot defeat us, because we left our guns at home.” In other words, not to irritate your oppressor is smart strategy. But the other degree of nonviolence, non-hyphenated if you will, can be heard in a ringing challenge of Gandhi’s: “It’s not nonviolence until you love your enemy.” He also characterized what he called “perfect ahimsa” (in today’s lingo, principled nonviolence) as “freedom from ill-will,” not just from weapons. In this degree of nonviolence, not to irritate your oppressor is not just strategic—useful as that may be—but a deep principle.
We need to awaken this principle if we want telling, long-lasting and deep change; and to do that the protestors will have to seperate the people from the behaviors they will no longer tolerate. Cursing “cops” as was done in Oakland last week weakens us. Gratifying as they fall on our ears, labels like ‘bankster’ will have to come off, revealing people like us who got themselves into a fix because of the climate of alienation and greed in which we live.
As we’ve been urging at the Metta Center for some time, every individual who wants to make her or his maximum contribution to the great change we all need should stop patronizing the mass media that got us into this mindset of alienation and greed in the first place. She or he should replace that culture, with its desperately low image of the human being, with the culture—for it is one—of nonviolence. Read all the Gandhi you can get your hands on. We have “moved our money.” Beautiful. But we’ll be amazed what happens when we move something much more powerful than money: when we move our minds.
Happily, judging from the idealistic young faces I’ve seen first-hand and in YouTube videos, I don’t think this is at all impossible. I actually think it’s the challenge we’ve all been waiting for.
2) It is clear that the time is now to step back and come up with a long-term strategy. We should be no more stuck on one tactic or mode—protest—than we should be on one piece of real estate. Furthermore that strategy, as Rabbi Michael Lerner has pointed out, will have to grow past protest to include serious nonviolent resistance, e.g. civil disobedience. We are up against very serious entrenched interests backed by virtually limitless money and physical force. It can be overcome, because evil is always vulnerable, because money and force are limited instruments; but we must be prepared to meet it with an equivalent force of commitment and sacrifice.
The protestors, as the media point out, have a bewildering array of issues. Well, just about all of them are valid, because the malevolent energy of the system by now reaches almost everywhere. But we will have to understand the core of that malevolence and figure out how to confront and purify it. We will have to decide on what I call a keystone issue—something that’s winnable and well-aimed enough that succeeding at it will weaken the entire system.
Driving this strategy must be an overview that pulls together the innumerable economic and other alternatives that are already happening into a coherent picture. This is, if anything, more important than the protest piece. Nonviolence, as King said, is not just non-cooperating with evil but cooperating with good—Gandhi’s “constructive programme.” And finally,
3) Let’s remember what we’re really fighting for. When we call for the dignity of every person, does that not imply, as I suggested above, that we need to vastly improve our image of the human being per se? We should all be conversant with the way both modern science and the world’s spiritual traditions agree that we are not separate, material creatures doomed to compete for scarce resources; we are deeply interconnected, with one another, all life, the planet that nourishes and houses us. Our fulfillment comes from relationships, not consumption; our security comes from turning enemies into friends, not from eliminating them.
Six years ago I stood with a large group of young people on the roof of the student union building on the Berkeley campus, ticking off the ways they were better off in their understanding than we had been in the heady, but not very sophisticated days of the Free Speech Movement. It was exhilarating to see that improvement. It’s even more exhilarating to see it on the move.
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Michael, thank you for so clearly stating what I have been wrestling with in a muddled morass of emotions and intentions! You have returned me to the place I often so easily forget-my self. The best part of your statement is its perfect connection between the inner and outer work so many of us are engaged in; this had been a recent struggle for me-to define that connection, to find that reason for taking the struggle inside me and not just outside.
It’s interesting to note that one of the recent and many blog musings (I don’t remember where I saw it) observed that the movement was in the “Gandhi stage”. This gives a very good idea of what nonviolence is up against. The Gandhi stage hasn’t really even been broached, in the main, for a couple of reasons. One is the problem of vitriol, as you note, as well as deliberate flaring up incidents with cops in order to force a more convenient arena of conflict with cop as opposed to the more difficult systematic problems that are so large and distant. Indeed, and unfortunately, such a forcing of arena works all too much in parallel with the strategy embodied by the second war in Iraq, that of creating a “better target” in Saddam in order to supplant a more difficult, vague and distant enemy of dispersed, cell-based terrorism. But more than that, it hasn’t been broached because there is little really substantive satyagraha, even when people are getting arrested, in a lot of ways, in part because actions are not being developed that are “substantive to” or related to the matter at hand. The physical location of Wall Street is a step in the right direction, but it might be that other “venues” have to be discovered that bring the possibility of more meaningful satyagraha.
But there is yet another dimension in which the “Gandhi stage” has not yet been broached, and this might be understood in your emphasis on the “constructive program”. The “Gandhi stage” is, in part, decidedly both experimental and “new age”, just as in a lot of ways Gandhi was emergent within what was understood by the term “New Age” during his era. Yet, our era may admit of experimentalism and satyagraha that is simply more up-to-date and abreast of developments that may be of critical importance and offer facility and efficacy of which people should make greater use. In this regard, we live in a world in which things like “deconstruction” have attained fairly regular parlance, for example. This is not without at least semantic kinship with the idea of the “constructive programme”.
It is best, I may simply leap into things rather than working out some crafty passage or elaborate segue, to do a few basic things:
— the movements out of which the term “deconstruction”, like its practice, have emerged are variously robust and operate in the background of the academic side of protesters, informing the spirit of engagement and rethinking that is going ont
— the academic versions of this remain ensconced in the negational form desinated by the “de-” of “deconstruction”, paralleling the negational form of the “an-” of anarchy, and likewise are situated within largely stalemated and/or capitalized regions within a dominant division between action and thought and proprieties that are assumed for how to proceed and what is the “proper place” for thought, for action, etc.
— the “constructive programme” is essentially a kind of thought-action that is an amalgam of both thought and action
— a turn on the negative forms “de-” and “an-” is possible, yeilding something like “enconstruction” and “enarchy”, which would serve as a best conceptual basis
— a “melting” of stalemates and solidified positions is possible on the basis of such a “turn”, while enabling a linking with and releasing of many of the logics involved in the developed, recent and not so recent background quite full in play in the form of “deconstruction” and “anarchy”
— this would, in turn, enable the development of new programmatic forms that people seem to want, while avoiding some of the traps of the great negational edifices
A “constructive programme” thought as enconstructive enarchism, then, could enable new forms of action.