“Exploring Our Moral Sensitivity” — Daily Metta

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December 22:

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“To answer brutality with brutality is to admit one’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy, and it can only start a vicious cycle.”

—Gandhi (Harijan, June 1947, p. 174)

As usual, Gandhi’s vision is both theoretical (“moral bankruptcy”) and intensely practical, pointing to the effect we can all observe today, that brutality leads to a “vicious cycle.”  For most of us today, it’s the practical angle that we can best relate to.  Didn’t a U.S. military officer in Iraq say, “We’re making terrorists faster than we can kill them”?  And that was before the emergence of ISIS.

But the moral, or visionary side is becoming more and more evident, as more and more military personnel (for example) are telling us that their PTSD is because “it gets into your heart, it gets into your soul, it gets into your mind.”  That’s an ex-drone pilot describing why the drone program is losing more pilots than it can recruit despite the Air Force’s offer of huge monetary bonuses.  Apparently there are some things money can’t buy — like peace of mind.

Fortunately, however, Gandhi never leaves us hanging.  He never talks about these hard truths without having, at least in the background, at least implicitly, the glorious alternative of which he gave the world an “ocular demonstration:” nonviolence.  That’s a lead we should all follow.  In fact, rather than accusing people of “moral and intellectual bankruptcy,” which doesn’t go over very well if you’re not a mahatma, it’s just as if not more effective to point out the practical dilemma violence has gotten us into and lay out the alternative that’s still not too late to take:  for example, diplomacy + nonviolent intervention in the case of the Middle East.  That we we’d be trusting people’s own moral sensitivity, which these defecting drone operators are demonstrating so clearly, and trusting that they have the imagination to grasp onto nonviolence.  The more we trust them, the more it will come about.

Experiment in nonviolence:
Have you got a co-worker or an in-law who “doesn’t get it” about nonviolence (and  consequently will not see the dilemma of violence)?  Try them on some patient persuasion, even if there are no immediately visible results.  Be sure you have facts and figures — and good arguments on how the dynamics of nonviolence work.