Metta’s Opinion

In response to the Newtown massacre: a spiritual practice

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We have not used this blog heretofore to recommend a spiritual practice, but felt called upon to offer something to the many who have come to this site or otherwise contacted us.  In the days to come, as we process our grief, there will inevitably be a current of fear that deters us perhaps from going to a public gathering and in general erodes our security and trust.  We should not let this happen, and need not.  Without by any means neglecting reasonable precautions, we can take up (or reinforce, if we’ve already taken up) the practice of a mantram — a spiritual formula we repeat whenever unwanted thoughts intrude in our mind, or almost any time.  This link will take you to a reliable source of information about this simple, but effective practice.

We are also taking action on this tragedy, not just to channel our grief but with the hope of making a real difference for all the children.  One example will be seen here; it is a draft and your comments will be appreciated.

From Misogyny to Murder: A Feminist Perspective on the Connecticut Shootings

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By Stephanie Van Hook (syndicated through PeaceVoice) 

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When reading about the murders in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, one point in particular stood out to me as a woman: Adam Lanza killed his mother.  This point reveals something essential about the nature of all violence and gives a clue as to why these horrific events take place. For though it is reported that Nancy Lanza taught her son how to shoot a gun and she believed in guns for “protection,” in order to kill a mother, you have to learn how to hate her. In order to learn how to hate one person, you learn hatred itself.  My hope is that with the call for more responsible gun laws we might in the same courageous breath witness the misogyny of his act because it provides a key for unlocking any sense of “mystery” of how this could have happened and understand that women are often on the receiving end of hatred, however subtle or however much of an “aside” it might seem. This is an important point, I think, because if we are to rid ourselves of misogyny we have to trace it to its root cause; and when we do we find ourselves striking at the root of all acts of such violence.

Here’s what I mean: At a conference in North Carolina I had the opportunity to meet Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee of Liberia. A champion of women’s rights and girls’education, she galvanized a women’s movement in the 1990s in Liberia to end the civil war. Her story is well documented in the film, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. In describing women’s experiences surrounding the war, she noted that full violence would correlate with growing misogyny. She recounted the times when women would walk through their towns and hear comments such as “I can’t wait for the war to start again, and I’ll rape her.” And the women were raped—by neighbors, friends, family members, sometimes with weapons, sometimes by groups. As she tells these stories, one after another of the lives of women in a violent environment, it becomes clear that we have to pay attention to women’s lives, to small acts of hatred directed at women, growing into outright misogyny, because its logical outcome in extreme cases is murder.

Can we deny that the United States is growing in misogyny when we hear ridiculous statements by politicians our fellow citizens have helped to elect about women’s bodies and rape—statements that frequently require several “corrections” before the message happens to condemn all rape? Can we deny that the music filling the earbuds of  today’s youth is full of lyrics and images that portray women as little more than their ability to perform sex acts?  This marginalization is in not only in our schools and universities, our religious institutions, our popular culture; step inside more than a few households and we find women in unbalanced and unhealthy situations where the husband is consuming violent porn and  he judges his wife for putting on weight or not cleaning the bathroom. Listen to the children who still expect their mothers do their laundry or wash their dishes for them but who cannot be moved from the TV screen and video games that teach them how to aim rifles domestically and wage war internationally at “enemies.” While mom turns to medication for stress, the son concludes that women are just “moody” and somehow inferior.

Misogyny has made its home in our minds.  A joke about women here, a justification for rape there, a sexist comment here, a violent film here, a degrading song there. One day, we find that our minds are alienated not only from women but from ourselves and our environment.

I know a young man, a father of two.  His Facebook page is full of memes which, as a woman, I would say humiliate and insult us and are a bad example to his children; he might say that they are funny, or harmless. Far from it.  Another gentleman I saw in Santa Rosa, California was wearing a tee-shirt  with the words across his chest “I have the [ fill in an explicit word for a male organ] so I am in charge.” He bought his ice cream, then got into his car and drove out into the world to spread that message wherever he went a little louder that day. To have it on a tee-shirt, he must have felt it was really quite harmless or funny. Or, he knew it was harmful and thought it was acceptable to offer harm in that way.  If he doesn’t have a family, this man at least knows women and was born to one.

Misogyny is not funny or harmless any more than racism: it’s serious, even deadly. It’s a warning signal of more violence on the way. When we catch it, we can heal it.

With a culture that silently, and sometimes not so silently, communicates disrespect toward women, children might grow up taking for granted, in spite of our best efforts to the contrary, that it is acceptable to choose women as targets as they act out whatever violence is within them. That woman might be your mother, daughter, sister, friend or classmate. She might be you. This is not a call to find new ways of “protecting women” that draw upon an old masculinized paradigm of security.  It’s a call for authentic transformation in the way we understand security from one based on domination, hatred and othering to one based on upholding our natural integrity as people in constant relationship with those around us. If, as gun advocates say, “guns don’t shoot people, people do” we really need more responsibility around guns and more education around gun safety. But let us integrate that part of the picture with an understanding of what drives a person to shoot a gun: hatred, fear and othering. Without addressing or even seeing these poisons at work, gun laws alone will never do. Nancy Lanza taught her son to use guns responsibly. It didn’t work.  So what happened?

The first person Adam Lanza killed was his mother.  We can choose to see this as another banal detail of yet another horrific act of violence or we can realize that it warns us to address not only our hopelessly inadequate gun laws but misogyny and other underlying conditions of such violence.

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Stephanie Van Hook (Stephanie@mettacenter.org), Executive Director of the Metta Center for Nonviolence (www.mettacenter.org), is a feminist. 

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Grief is Not Enough

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Originally posted at Tikkun Magazine:

 http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2012/12/15/grief-is-not-enough-reflections-on-the-connecticut-shooting/

 

“We are heartbroken, yes. But saying that will fix nothing. It won’t bring anyone back, and it won’t keep this from happening again.”

This lament by Lisa Belkin in yesterday’s Huffington Post is self-evidently true.  Our hearts have been broken over and over – at Columbine, in Denver, in Colorado, just a week ago in Portland; yet the litany goes on.  According to A study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, the gun murder rate in the U.S. is almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest and most populous nations combined. Evidently the ‘copycat’ effect of mass murders that have lead up to this great tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School – elementary school! – is stronger than the grief those of us who are not simply benumbed endure.

What will keep this from happening again?  The only answer – which we have yet to consider – is to identify the underlying cause behind such tragedies, and resolve it.  This won’t be an easy fix; it will need some soul-searching; but it will feel a lot better than our present helpless drift punctuated by these unbearable, numbing shocks.

Let’s begin with the fact. just mentioned: that the gun murder rate in our country is an order of magnitude higher than that of all comparable societies.  This statistic should sound familiar.  Our country also has a shockingly higher rate of incarceration than comparable nations (and is one of the very few holdouts that still practices execution).  We also spend more on war fighting and weaponry, and do more cross-border killing with all that weaponry, than most of the rest of the world combined (and are one of the few holdouts still practicing torture – though we’ve begun backing a way a bit just recently). Seeing this pattern it is hard to gainsay the prophetic words of Martin Luther King, Jr. when he bemoaned the fact that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” was his own government.

Unfortunately, violence is the kind of goods where the greatest purveyor is also the greatest consumer.  That is a law of life and no amount of misplaced pride or arcane ideology can help us avoid it.  We cannot rely on violence to save us from violence – that is the elementary logic gun advocates dare not face. We cannot go on relying on violence to keep our streets safe, or our nation safe, or our schools safe, without more and more of us dying by the same sword.

For when we “buy into” the logic of violence, we buy it at a deep, cultural – we might almost say spiritual level, namely by buying into the myth that we are separate, physical objects, and ignoring the deep, spiritual connection that in fact makes us human.  We now know the exact caliber of a weapon the deranged killer used to kill his mother and take a swath of young life with her, and we are trying to ascertain his motive.  But the caliber of the weapon is irrelevant and the motive that the police will be looking for is secondary.  What we need to know about Adam Lanza is that he was deeply, deeply alienated and that he lived in a culture that is alienating every one of us.  For him, other people were not people, but ciphers in his own tortured drama; but we who have been practicing violence in so many ways created an environment that not only failed to win him back to reality but resonated with his illness – and gave him all the weaponry to act it out.

 

So if we want to honor our grief in a way that’s truly meaningful, by doing everything in our power to stop the epidemic, we must:

We also have to liberate ourselves from the alienating climate of violence that has crept up on us to the point that it now pervades everything from our “entertainment” media to our foreign policy.  Wherever it has come in, we need to push it out: if it’s in movies, boycott them; if it’s guns flooding the nation, outlaw them; if it’s barbaric incarceration rates and death penalties, educate, lobby and protest – and if it’s pilotless drones, “secret renditions” and policies of endless war, never, never vote for candidates that support them.

This amounts to a total, inspiring campaign.  It doesn’t require us to live in a cultural vacuum, though it may feel like that at first – or make us defenseless.  On the contrary; none of these hydra-headed manifestations of violence can really be removed unless we first show people alternatives.  And fortunately, these are many, and they’ve worked beautifully where they’ve been tried.  Personally, after seeing every violence-free movie available and still hungering for some legitimate entertainment I found that studying nonviolence – the history, the theory, the heroes and heroines – filled any void that might have been left by action movies.  As for incarceration and executions, we can be effective exponents of what’s called restorative justice.  And for foreign policy, we can not only nurture peace candidates (yes, there are some) but promote alternatives to warfare like nonviolent intervention (tips on all of these here on our website).

These are big changes, but this is not a time for little ones.  I predict that if we get underway energetically, some of the worst manifestations of violence, like what happened this week in Connecticut, could wind down fairly quickly.  Maybe in my own lifetime.   And in any case, now that even elementary schools are not safe, we don’t really have a choice.  We can’t keep turning out people who massacre our own children; and we don’t need to.  We can get to the root of this problem ­– violence – and build healthier alternatives within and around us.

 

 

350.org’s Bold New Plan to Save the Climate

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By Philip Wight

From Waging Nonviolence (December 3, 2012)

It’s a cold fall evening in Columbus, Ohio, but nearly a thousand people are ready to contemplate the consequences of man-made global warming. A tall, slender man strolls on stage and the crowd instantly rises, applauding for nearly two minutes, much to the discomfort of the humble speaker. Dressed casually in running shoes and slacks, with an unpretentious digital watch on his wrist, stands Bill McKibben, a man who has declared war on the most profitable industry “in the history of money.”

McKibben, known as “the nation’s leading environmentalist,” came to Columbus on Tuesday as part of a 21-city, 26-day tour called Do the Math. Organized by the global environmental group 350.org, the tour is an extension of McKibben’s phenomenally popular article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” which appeared in the July issue of Rolling Stone (the same one, McKibben jokes, with Justin Bieber on the cover). Earning over 124,000 Facebook likes and 13,400 related tweets, the article was described by one journalist as “among the most widely read single articles on climate change…ever.”

The tour has been riding this momentum, selling over 24,000 tickets and performing 17 sold-out shows with a number of special guests, including author Naomi Klein, filmmaker Josh Fox, and musical acts like DJ Spooky. It may be more than you’d expect for something that’s got “math” in the title, but McKibben isn’t talking about just any numbers; he’s talking about the three most important numbers of the climate crisis and using them to launch a campaign that might just save the world.

The first number, 2 degrees Celsius, is thought to be the maximum temperature increase permissible without causing runaway climate change. The second number, 565 gigatons, is the amount of carbon scientists say humanity can burn without exceeding the 2 degrees Celsius limit. And the final, perhaps most terrifying number — 2,795 gigatons — is the amount of fossil fuel that companies possess in their known reserves and plan on burning.

Simply knowing these numbers, however, isn’t going to stop climate change. That hope died a long time ago with people like McKibben, who in 1989 wrote the first book on climate change for a general audience. As he noted during his talk, McKibben has rejected the idea that people would “read my book, then change.” Admitting he would “rather be home typing,” McKibben has nevertheless transcended his hesitancy and emerged to spearhead a millions-strong global grassroots organization.

That’s why the real aim of the tour is to ignite a movement that “will send shockwaves” through the fossil fuel industry. “We need to make the case, quickly, that the fossil fuel companies should lose their social license,” McKibben said. To accomplish this, 350.org has initiated a nationwide fossil fuel divestment campaign to focus on the endowments of colleges and universities. As the group’s“Fossil Free” activist guide explains, divestment “means getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds that are unethical or morally ambiguous.” The demands for universities are simple and unequivocal: “freeze new fossil fuel investment immediately” and “full fossil fuel divestment within five years.”

Since fossil fuel companies have “bought the silence of our politicians and filled our airwaves with misinformation,” McKibben contends activists need to pressure society by nontraditional means. Higher education has over $400 billion invested in endowments and nearly every university today is, at least nominally, committed to sustainability. Divesting from unethical energy sources forces institutions to be honest. Who better than students to hold universities accountable? Students are among the most informed about climate change and their future is directly threatened. Campuses are prime environments for educating, organizing and translating ideals into action.

Yet higher education is just one part of the catalyst for a broader offensive against fossil fuels. 350.org is also pressuring religious institutions, foundations and state and private pension funds. The aim is to make investing in fossil fuels socially reprehensible, which may lead to significant political action. Successful divestment campaigns will send a clear message to Wall Street and society that fossil fuel companies are unsustainable “risky investments.” As anti-apartheid hero Desmond Tutu explained in a video for the crowd, “The corporations understand the logic of money, even when they aren’t swayed by the dictates of morality.”

Much like the present political impasse for climate activists, anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s could gain little traction in Washington, D.C., so they developed alternative strategies. Tens of thousands of students successfully pressured 155 American universities to divest their endowments from companies supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime. Fearful of billions in lost revenue, by 1987 roughly 200 companies had withdrawn from South Africa (the same number of publicly-traded companies, coincidentally, that hold the majority of the world’s fossil fuel reserves). Student pressure also precipitated legislative action. By 1991, 28 states, 24 counties and 92 cities had adopted legislation imposing sanctions on South Africa. The campaign played a crucial role in destabilizing the apartheid regime and the transitioning to a democratic South Africa. “A similar strategy,” 350.org advises, “can help us topple the fossil fuel regime.”

Fossil fuel divestment organizations have emerged at over 130 different universities and already two colleges — Unity and Hampshire — have committed to divestment and started to shed their portfolios of fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the city of Seattle is formulating a comprehensive divestment plan and the undergraduate student body at Harvard also passed a resolution to divest with an impressive 72 percent of the vote. Yet the Board of Trustees quickly commented that they have no such plans. As McKibben notes, no one said it would be easy to defeat the most profitable industry in the history of money.

On my campus, Ohio University, we began organizing a month ago. With several like-minded individuals, we formed a steering committee with the aim of bringing as many students as possible to the “Do the Math” tour in Columbus. 350.org provided assistance by sending a representative to help us, designing flyers, organizing materials and offering free tickets for students. To raise funds, we asked for junk food donations outside of university convenience stores and then sold the food in front of the bars. We succeeded in providing free transportation and free tickets for dozens of interested students.

Next week we are meeting to form a permanent campus organization, Fossil Free OU, and begin the hard work of building a strong base of allies on campus. With 350.org’s continued support, we have already started circulating a campus-wide petition and look forward to hosting debates, screening movies and inviting informed professors to lecture. Eventually, our aim is to meet with university officials, deliver our petition to the university president, publish editorials in the local newspapers and begin holding creative demonstrations.

While the campaign draws much support and energy from college students, we want to utilize the talents of a diverse coalition. Because alumni play an important fiscal role for universities (as McKibben noted, colleges have a “special affection” for them), we will invite prominent alumni to speak out by writing letters, publishing ads in our alumni magazine and even withholding gifts. Gaining support from tenured professors will also be essential (as McKibben quipped, this is “what tenure was made for”).

Hopefully our coalition building, consciousness raising and pressure will succeed in convincing our Board of Trustees, but most likely we will have to escalate our tactics to involve nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. As McKibben explained with grim honesty at the end of his lecture, some of us “may need to go to jail before this is all over.”

For some that is still a tough reality to swallow, but we must remember, as McKibben noted, “There is nothing radical about what we’re asking for. What is radical is the fossil fuel industry irrevocably changing the climate of Earth.” Ultimately, he concluded, “our vision is deeply conservative and our only job is to check that radicalism.” But we can’t do it working alone. We have to “fight shoulder to shoulder” if we want to win.

 

 

 

Taking Women’s Lives Seriously: An Interview with Cynthia Enloe

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Originally published at Waging Nonviolence on September 13, 2012

By Stephanie Van Hook

Curiosity, arguably, is the antidote to the passivity in politics. When we question the assumptions of candidates’ platforms, especially with regard to women, and when we learn from movements that take women seriously, we stand to awaken something more active and empowered within ourselves. In Cynthia Enloe’s words, “This makes us smarter”; feminist knowledge is a potent form of power.

Professor Enloe is one of the most beloved scholars of feminist political theory in the United States, and has published more than a dozen books — most recently, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. She is particularly interested in the how militarism manipulates the lives of women in an effort to foster support for the agenda of war. Her voice is thus timely in the midst of so many political battles in the United States surrounding women’s freedoms. Her work is influential and gripping because it challenges us to cultivate curiosity. In that spirit, I recently had the chance to ask her some questions of my own.

Whenever I write or talk publicly about feminism, I hear people insist that “it’s not just about women.” How do you define feminism?

I think that feminism is about women, but it’s also about women’s relationships: to each other, to the workplace, to men — in families and in the workplace — to governments, and so forth. I think that the core of what feminism is keeps evolving, and no one has this down pat. They shouldn’t! It’s such a dynamic idea, and it grows historically, across cultures. I think that no one should try to have a cookie-cutter answer. But, at this point in my thinking, feminism is the pursuit of deep, deep justice for women in ways that change the behaviors of both women and men, and really change our notions of what justice looks like.

To be doing feminist work everyday, to live like a feminist, you have to take women’s lives seriously. It doesn’t mean that you have to think that every woman is an angel or every woman is politically astute — that is not what feminists believe. They believe that you have got to take all kinds of women seriously or you’ll never understand women’s relationships to men, men’s relationships to each other, or men’s relationships to different forms of activism and to governments. Taking women seriously is hard to do because it means you have to listen to women whom most people don’t think of as experts or don’t think of as politically aware, including women who seem to be very domestically confined. That’s been the biggest revelation to me in becoming a feminist — to take all kinds of women seriously so I can understand the world better.

When did you begin thinking about feminism and its relationship to nonviolence and action for social justice? 

I remember the first time I began to really pay attention and think more, and be curious actively about women, feminism, men and nonviolence — all those things together. It was during the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, in the 1980’s in England. The camp was started by a group of women from Wales who sat around their kitchen table and said, “Why is the British government working hand in hand with the American government to base nuclear missiles here?” Greenham Common was a small town in southern England and a U.S. military base. They literally got up from their kitchen tables in Wales and started a walk. It started out as a mixed walk of men and women, though the core group was women.

They camped at the base and became one of the most famous peace camps in the last century. Even now, if you say “Greenham Common” in England, people will start singing a song, or tell you they were there (or their friends or mothers or daughters were there), so the Greenham Common Peace Camp became really important in the international peace movement, and particularly in the women’s peace movement. When all these women camped there overnight, in the mud of the English drizzle, they had these endless conversations about peace activism and feminism. More and more women came from all over the country, and some came from other countries, too.

One of the camp’s most famous actions was climbing a fence, at night, into this highly guarded military base and they got up on one of the mounds for the missile silos and danced in the moonlight. Then, they actually got out again, without getting arrested — which was amazing — and began to think about the kind of activism they were doing. The first thing they decided was only to do actions that people who were partially-abled can do. It was very interesting because it got them talking about nonviolence, about disablement and able-ment privilege, about peace and activism, and about feminism. They put all those things together night after night around their campfires and began to come to some conclusions. This isn’t where they started, but it’s where they came after a peace encampment of three years. They came to their ideas about nonviolence through their thinking about which kinds of actions can do two things: capture the spirit of what peace looks like, and what would be the most inclusive.

This was really an eye-opener to me, so when I think about nonviolence and feminism, I think about the women in the Greenham Common Peace Camp, in the English drizzle. But I also think that there was something classically feminist in what emerged. One of the things they had to think about was that, if you have a peace camp, who’s doing the laundry, who’s doing the childcare if there are any children, who’s doing the unheroic stuff? If you are going to have a peace action, it can’t be patriarchal. It can’t have the men doing the physical, classically “heroic” stuff on camera and have the women serving the coffee, doing the laundry or taking care of the kids. All of a sudden you find yourself talking about patriarchy inside a peace movement, and how to avoid it.

Actually, when feminists in New York hosted their Feminist General Assembly, the Men Against Patriarchy working group did the childcare. 

Yes! And when they do it, that should be no big deal. See, that’s the next thing. You know it’s just like in households when men who are nice guys do the childcare so that the women can sit around the table and have a nice chat, and the guys are praised for the next three weeks for putting the kids to bed or doing the dishes. Everyone’s saying, “Wasn’t Charlie great?” But nobody ever said that Charlotte was great because she did what was normal to do. So the whole thing is for the guys to start doing some of the feminized work, and make no big deal of it and women make no big deal of it.

There was recent concern surrounding a poster campaign by Amnesty International during the Chicago NATO protests. The posters showed women in full hijab in Afghanistan with the phrase, “NATO keep the progress going.” Can you help us to deconstruct this poster? At the end of the Curious Feminist, you allude to the notion that we have an “addiction” to the image of women in hijab…

Photographers really are addicted to that image of women with only their eyes showing, both men and women photographers. They seem not to be able to resist it. I can’t abide it. It’s about women as unattainable, women as mysterious, women as remote, as well as woman under total control.

I was looking just the other day at a website that I respect and they used a photograph of women lining up to vote in Egypt. The point was to make clear the variety of women that were going to vote in Cairo. You could tell the photographer couldn’t resist a line of women that included a woman in full hijab. If you look at hundreds, I mean it, hundreds of images of people going to the polls in Cairo to vote in the spring, you would have a hard time finding many women in full hijab; that’s not very common in Egypt. Many women wear headscarves, but not the full veil. But those at this organization that I otherwise really like, they loved this photograph. They showed other women, but they loved having one woman fully veiled going to the polls. While it’s great that this woman was voting — that’s terrific — my concern is about what the photographer thought they were up to, and what we as the onlookers supposedly get excited about.

Amnesty International and other good organizations need to be careful about how they exoticize all kinds of women. When it comes to Filipino women, they sexualize them; when it comes to Middle Eastern women, they exoticize them using these facial images. That is turning women into commodities, even if it’s for a human rights cause.

What about the message on the poster? Do you agree that NATO is the cause of any progress in Afghanistan? 

I think any progress that’s been achieved for women in Afghanistan has been due to the guts and bravery and intelligence of Afghan women themselves. Afghan women have worked so hard as mothers of daughters, as lawyers, as human rights activists, as people running for the legislature. So many Afghan women have resisted masculinized, violent forces to carve out some space for women’s dignity, women’s literacy, women’s schooling, and women’s political and public influence. It’s a huge accomplishment that they have carved out as much space as they have, but it is very fragile and very wobbly. Again, you have to listen to varieties of Afghan women. They debate with each other about whether the NATO forces should leave. It’s not easy to be a feminist in a war zone; you are oftentimes deeply ambivalent about forces any other time you’d be opposed to. But we barely hear their debates. There are only a few journalists who listen carefully to Afghan women in their debates with one another.

It’s a cruel position they are in, and none of their choices are great. They don’t control any of the major parties, they don’t control any of the ministries under Karzai, they certainly don’t control NATO, they certainly don’t control the Taliban insurgents, they certainly don’t control any of the warlord militias that are aligned with Karzai. Karzai’s own government is very wobbly because of internal corruption within his regime, but also because he has made himself dependent on male warlords and their militias. Say you’re a human rights lawyer, or maybe you’re just someone wanting to get a paid job in a beauty parlor, or you’re trying to keep your daughters in school, and then think of how many groups who could prevent you from doing just that one thing. I think that one of the things we need to do as the U.S. and NATO pull out is increase our efforts to find out what Afghan women are saying and what they are saying they need from us. The withdraw of NATO should mean increasing engagement by us in our curiosity to find out what Afghan women are saying. It’s going to be hard, though.

What does security look like in a feminist paradigm? How can we be careful not to imitate old paradigm security in our work for social transformation? 

First of all, security from a feminist perspective doesn’t reproduce men as the protectors of women and women as the victims of physical violence and appreciative of men’s protection — that is the model of the U.S. military and the model of every military that I’ve ever studied. One really has to think of the privileges that come from being the protector because, oftentimes, it means that you have more access to the outside world — whatever the outside world is. It could be the media; it could be the site of the activism or the police around where the activism is taking place.

Real security comes from women protecting men when they need it, and men and women both learning the skills it takes to be an effective guarantor of security. Sometimes being a guarantor of security means that you can talk well — not in that you have good grammar, but that you know how to use speech to lower tensions. A lot of women have those skills, which makes them very good security people because they can deescalate those tensions. They also know how to be observant. If you know how to be observant, and how to use speech and body language without violence to get people to be more conscious of what their roles should be, you make a very good security person.

What else can we do to build feminist consciousness around new forms of security? 

We always have to learn lessons from the recent past. Talk to people who have been active in the kinds of groups you are in who are a bit older and ask what men and women did when they were in those groups — how men thought about masculinity and how women thought about femininity. I think we should not have to reinvent the wheel, and we should try to find out about what kinds of distortions went on in earlier groups that we don’t have to repeat, if we will look at them straight on.

Do you have any advice for how we begin to engage in those needed conversations about our activism? 

People need to be very candid with each other. For example, have an honest discussion about heroism: When you think of heroes, who comes to mind? See how much physical bravery is part and parcel of heroism, and what courage and bravery look like, because that’s where physical actions sometimes get privileged, and where certain kinds of “being a man” get privileged. It’s something personal, but not intrusive, and also interesting. If this kind of sharing feels risky in a group, you know you’re on to something.

 

Gaza: A time to reflect

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by Michael Nagler

This partial check to the mad violence unleashed last week on Gaza, while it comes as a great relief to all of us, should also be an opportunity to refocus our determination that this violence stop happening, and never happen anywhere again.

The big picture is this: we live in a violent system.  Overriding the unquenchable yearning for peace and unity in every one of us, and which is arguably much closer to our actual nature, is a distorting culture that possesses the world of our thoughts and emotions to the extent that we take it for granted that there is no alternative — that it is ‘natural.’  We see it in, among other things,

  •  The overriding narrative of our culture, which is predicated on a fragmented, dispiriting image of the human being,
  • Institutions, like retributive justice that operate from this narrative, or image, creating fear of saner alternatives,
  • The guiding principle of competition that has come to be enshrined in business, education, entertainment, sports — and of course war.

Within this thought-world extremists who act out violently have a kind of multiplier effect; their violence resonates powerfully throughout the social system.  A drastic example of this was the 9/11 attackers.  By laying down 19 or so lives (if we follow the official account for the time being) and an expenditure estimated at $100,000 or more they changed America and much of the industrial world forever, causing billions upon billions to be wasted, not to mention thousands upon thousands of American and allied lives plus many, many more of Iraqis, Afghans, and others.  They took from us a large part of our freedom and security.  How was a small band of fanatical men able to wreak such enormous changes on such a vast country?  Because the energy they embodied was the same energy that resonates throughout that country, pervading its value system and culture: violence.  They may have been extremists, but as the word implies they were only extreme examples of a principle that’s become ubiquitous in milder forms.

Consider by contrast an episode at the conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.  Attempting to disrupt the gains of the Civil Rights movement’s opening campaign, some extremists set off a bomb.  Normally, this would have sown panic in the African American community; but because of the powerful nonviolent spirit that prevailed at that time, the result of the explosion was … nothing.

In a nonviolent system sporadic violence can be absorbed; in a violent system it’s magnified.

This is why extremists whom even Hamas cannot control, and others whom the Israelis cannot or will not control (I’m thinking of the “Settlers”) cause us such suffering, overwhelming our deepest aspirations for peace and security, for mutual amity, even though those who of us still have such aspirations may be in a great majority.

Therefore the first lesson to draw while we have this interlude of non-conflict (let’s not call it peace) is that we must build from the ground up a system of robust harmony and respect for all human beings that can neutralize the work of extremist minorities, and eventually win them over.  We must, as part of this transformation, put behind us for good the notion that we can win security by violence.  The mounting suicides of American servicemen and women are telling us the same story.  Our bursting prisons are telling it just as loudly:

To have security we must cultivate the worldview of nonviolence in our minds and build the institutions of nonviolence in our world.  We must have restorative justice instead of punitive, dehumanizing prisons; we must have strongly authorized diplomacy and the service of unarmed civilian peacekeepers instead of a world flooded with arms and fueled by hatred.

My good friend Sami Awad of the Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem has been doing nonviolence education and nonviolence training among his fellow Palestinians for two decades.  Now, thanks to the bombings visited on Gaza, he finds himself confronted by the most intense hatred toward Israel he’s ever seen.  How is this going to make Israel —or anyone else — more secure?

A world that’s secure and free from violence will come about only when people like Sami are not voices crying in the wilderness but are understood, appreciated, and empowered by the world around them.

 

The Five Pillars of Education: Transcript

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Quote: “Civilization is always a race between education and catastrophe.”

H.G. Wells

            I’m very happy to be able to discuss this with you. I thought I’d start with a couple of little stories about why I’ve been so frustrated about this topic in the past. About 10 or 15 years ago when I was still teaching at Berkeley I got a call from KQED, which is a very liberal station– I forget whether this was radio or television–and they said “Would you be interested in talking to us about the about University of California and education?” I said, “Oh boy would I! Let’s get into this!” Well, they wanted me to talk about some minor detail regarding the organization of the university, while. I was interested in a much broader topic because I had discovered that we were embedded in a really serious problem — you know what I was saying before about a race between education and catastrophe? And how education wasn’t upholding its part of the race, it wasn’t winning.  So I stepped back a little bit and said  “I would like to look at the whole policy of the University itself — how does it relate to the people of California?” They said “Um, ok.” Then I said “Actually I would like to talk about the culture that we are embedded in and the impact of the mass media.” And they said “Ohhh.” I said, “You know what I’d REALLY like to talk about is Western Civilization.” (Laughter) They said, “We can’t use you.”  And I realized, that when I went 25% bigger they got 25% less interested until, you know, I reached infinity and they reached zero. So this I think is emblematic of the fact that we’ve created a culture, a thought-environment, where we get absorbed in details and we can’t step back and look at the big picture.

Another example of that sheds a different kind of light:  I was on a committee in the university hierarchy to discuss courses, programs, things like that, and  I said, “Hey I have a great idea, folks! Why don’t we have a public forum on what is the purpose of education?” Well, they turned out the lights, tip-toed out of the room, and closed the door. So, for 30 years — this is not an exaggeration; I do a lot of exaggerating but this is not one of them.  Almost everything I say is an exaggeration (that’s an exaggeration).  For thirty years everywhere I went in the university to try to create such a forum, I was met with blank stares. It was worse than “No, thank you.” It was like, nobody said anything. “Ok, pretend we didn’t hear that.”  I think the reason that my colleagues, who are good honest people, could not come to grips with this question is that unconsciously they knew they had lost the purpose of education.  And just look: you now have the University of North Dakota training people to carry out drone attacks; you have the School of the Americas, recently renamed WHINSEC, in Fort Benning, Georgia teaching torture, I think we have reached the absolute pit. This is the bottom. Education could not be more disoriented.

The purpose of education is to enhance life, not to destroy it. However we have found it convenient and strategic to use the power of education to be against life and against love, where you’re not interested in the well being of others. On the contrary.

So, I’m going to talk about these five pillars and what I’m going to do is to start each one with a quote or a story.  I’m not always going to be able to come down to a practical way of introducing this pillar into our educational system, so that’s where I’d like to have a mutual conversation with you.

 

The first pillar.

The first story is about a student of mine whose name was Mallory Moser.  Brilliant young woman, she took all my courses, and actually contributed a collage to the Metta Center which is now hanging in our office and you may have seen it as the masthead of our website. Mallory came from a very prestigious high school called Marin Academy. She had been an absolutely spectacular soccer star in Marin Academy and she kind of wasn’t the type, you know, physical type, or the mental type as it seemed to me.  So I said to her one time, “Mallory, why were you so big into soccer?” And she said, “At Marin Academy, you were either into sports or you did hard drugs. I didn’t want to do hard drugs, I went into sports.”  I was a bit shocked, as you may imagine, so we talked about that for a while.  These are privileged young people with everything going for them, and they’re falling off the edge of society.  Why?  She said, “Well, it was very simple. All they did was teach us head, head, head: packing stuff into our head until we felt like we were going to burst.  It was always, you had to have more stuff in your head to compete with the next person.  So you had to do something to contact another dimension of your being.”

You can imagine my shock when I came across this very powerful quote from Swami Vivekananda. You may know who he is: He was the foremost disciple of Sri Ramakrishna in Bengal in the 19th century. He came to this country the same year that Mahatma Gandhi went down to South Africa. You know, as though India sent out two emissaries in two directions with very similar messages. He came to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 where he was a spectacular success, spent about 10 years on and off in the States, and at one point he said: ”The trouble with you people in the West is that you educate for the head only. You do not do anything about the heart. That is only going to make you ten times more greedy —and it will be the death of you.”

That is a very powerful statement and I think it is exactly what we are experiencing right now.  Greed has gone out of control. Economies are imploding and we do not have the energy, the confidence, the wisdom to tackle the biggest problems on the planet. I think he spotted it. So you can imagine how I felt when I saw that quote and remembered Mallory. And this is how I come up with the first pillar, which is probably the most important one, which is:

For education to be meaningful, it has to educate the whole person.

So, what does a whole person consist of? There are different formulas for this which are useful, but one simple one is, we are mind, body, and spirit.

 

Second pillar:

I’ll begin with a story that’s in my book, Search for a Non-Violent Future. When I was teaching nonviolence at Berkeley, Mubarak Awad, a very good friend of mine who had been in the first intifada in Palestine had been deported by Israel in, I think ‘98, (even though I wrote to the Israeli ambassador and asked please not to do that. For some reason he disregarded my advice). Mubarak told us some wonderful stories about the first uprising, first intifada, which was more nonviolent than the second one.  And they noticed something. He’s a psychologist and he noticed that all the participants, all the Palestinian youth, the shabaab, who are usually the source of the violence. You know the young males 18 to 25. They had had serious drug problems and other serious substance abuse problems, and those problems stopped when they joined the intifada.  Just contrast the “War on Drugs” and what a total failure it is.

The second pillar is that

We have to teach for the hierarchy of needs, and not just for the lowest needs, which are the material fulfillment of food, clothing, shelter and maybe some health care.” What are those needs? Well there’s Maslow’s hierarchy you are probably familiar with. And I had a colleague who is a recovering biology professor; she went into Peace Studies and she decided to study human nature instead of burying herself in details and quickly rendered herself unfit for service at the University of San Diego. But she came up with this model that our three needs are for autonomy, bonding and meaning. There is an interesting tension between autonomy and bonding which I’m going to talk about again in a little bit, that we need to be with one another but we need to be a Self, which is independent. Autonomy, bonding, and meaning.

So, what happened to these youth in the West Bank was the minute that they had something meaningful to do, something that would engage their agency, they’d drop these habits. You know, these are seriously addictive habits, and I’ve actually had people in the peace movement tell me that going down to Central America, facing violence every day, coming back to the States…WHEW (with a sense of relief). And you find yourself sitting in Marin County sipping lattes, “What do you want to do with your life now?” “I want to go back” because that experience was addictive; literally addictive. Now I want to point out something startling about these higher needs — the need for meaning, the need for bonding, the need for respect and things like that. In our non-violence work we quickly discovered that when you open yourself up to these higher needs they have a remarkable characteristic: they are not finite resources, they are not exhaustible. The need for petroleum ties us to diminishing resources that gets us into not just the destruction of the planet in the physical, ecological sense but, in the social sense, it locks us into cycles of competition and violence. Most of the really horrific wars that are going on right now are basically about a struggle for a limited finite resource Basically, it comes from our image of ourselves as needing physical things to be gratified, to be fulfilled. But the minute you look at something like love or respect, you discover that not only are these things not exhaustible, some of them actually grow with use. So, it’s like a perpetual motion machine, kind of. You know, when I respect all of you which, as it happens, I do, I don’t diminish my own respect, I don’t lose respect, I gain in self respect (because we are all one, after all). Similarly, you know, as St. Teresa said, amor saca amor, when you love it draws love to you and you grow in love. You keep pushing to see how far things can be pushed and you find that you never reach the end. So there’s a tremendous relief from the sense of need, the paradigm of scarcity, and the competition and the violence that comes along with that.

Here I do have one experiment I can share with you. While I was teaching at Berkeley they introduced the freshman seminars and the thing about a freshman seminar is that you can teach it on any subject. So I asked myself “What do these freshman and sophomore kids, coming into Berkeley, what do they need more than anything, that the University would not give them? And so I devised a course called “Great Writing on the Meaning of Life.” I went into my chairman in the Classics department and said, “Don, I’m going to teach this course, I will involve a certain amount of Plato…” He knew me very well by that time and he said “Michael, Michael go away. Don’t tell me what you are going to do.  Just go and do it. Okay?” And that was one of the most successful courses I ever taught. It went on for 15 years.  My goal was not to tell the students what I thought the purpose of life was, though inevitably that did happen at some point in the semester. But rather, it was simply to give them permission to think about it because in this world that’s sucked up into these details, they never have permission to think about it. So, we read people who had pondered this subject deeply. We discussed together, they brought in their own experiences, they did very creative projects. One student came in — this was one that stuck in my mind most — and for her final project made a batch of cookies.  Don’t worry, it was an allegory: the dough stands for this, the sugar stands for that, we all have to work together to create…they were very good cookies. I discovered one interesting thing that may be relevant for you also, that when I first taught it as a freshman seminar, it didn’t work all that well. But when they added sophomore seminars it was much more successful. Because I think the freshman were too tentative about “What are we doing here, I have to find out where I’m going to live, etc.: I can’t afford to do anything off the margins.”

 

The third pillar.

Stephanie and I went down to Birmingham, AL, recently and spent two-and-a-half days with a man who had spent 23 years of his life in very close association with Gandhiji, Narayan Desai, whose father was Gandhi’s secretary. One of Gandhi’s major efforts in his constructive program was called Nai Talim which means “New Education.” So they started a school, they just found a building and invited the village kids — there’s always a terrific need for this in India— and they brought these kids in, there were 60 kids in the school. Instead of telling them what the subjects were going to be, he said, we discovered very soon that we had to end early in the afternoon because of those 60 kids, something like 45 of them had night blindness. You had to stop the school while there was still broad daylight for them to get back to the village because come sunset they couldn’t see a thing.   They discovered it took one cup of milk per day to cure those kids of night blindness.

So my third pillar is, Whatever we teach and however we teach it, it has to be grounded in reality. It has to be grounded first in concrete nutritional realities but then open itself up to deeper realities. And in this developing new education, or Nai Talim, one of the things Gandhi said was “If you do not till the soil you will forget who you are.” You will forget who you are.  Every one of us has to be involved in some way with what he called “bread labor, “ and the best way to do that was to have you tilling the earth and growing things that you yourself eat. An edible schoolyard is a very concrete way of instantiating this principle.

I’d add a couple of other things that if…there are two things that we should try to avoid. One is that we should avoid abstraction for its own sake. Intellectualization…what is that term that you used about me all the time? Conceptualization for its own sake. Because that leads to people sitting behind very clever machines and sending drones half way around the world to kill people that they don’t even see. I remember before there were drones there was the RAND Corporation during the nuclear era and they would sit around coldly, dispassionately calculating how many millions people would die if we used this type of approach and how many hundreds of millions would die if we used that type approach; utterly disconnected with reality. Somehow we must educate people so that that cannot happen to them.

Maybe I can share a quick story with you here in connection to what we were saying about caring as a form of love. When I was in grade school in New York…you know children can be incredibly uncaring. They have compassion, compassion is within them, but they can be incredibly uncaring.  Well, there was a girl in my class who was developmentally disabled. And I probably wouldn’t have done this on my own but you know as St. Augustine said “get people together in packs and all these barriers fall.” You know at home we have these deer that graze around on our meadow and we noticed that if one dog walks up the path the deer don’t pay any attention, but if two dogs come…SHEW…they’re gone. You know, pack psychology. So, I got together with my friends and we teased this girl, we wrote a note that was disrespectful to her. The teacher intercepted that note and I had never seen her so angry, nor did I ever see her so angry again. It was a big shock that awakened me to the caring: through her care for that girl I suddenly realized, in a very shocking way, what I had been doing. I was never capable of doing that again. So that’s one “DON’T”, we shouldn’t develop: we shouldn’t allow, abstraction to go on for its own sake.

The other “DON’T” is that we should not allow intellectual development to separate us, to create a caste, which unfortunately is very, very common in today’s educational system where immediately we have to be subject to testing they have to be spread out on a spectrum, who won, who’s in the middle and so on.  For this reason Gandhi, for example, was constantly stressing the non-development of the intellectual life of the peasants in the villages. That they had the same intellectual capacity as all of us do. But because they have to follow the bullock all day long, seven days a week in order to make ends meet, their intellect was never developed.  Then you had these Brahmins who felt almost infinitely superior to them. So that is another thing we have to avoid in getting students grounded in reality: superiority.

 

Fourth pillar

I’m going to start with a quote from one of my favorite philosophers, probably my second favorite philosopher from the ancient world, who is Epictetus. He was a Greek philosopher functioning in Rome. He had been a slave, in fact the name means “possession”, “object”. One of the very succinct, very powerful things Epictetus said was “The beginning of all ignorance is the failure to connect particulars with their underlying principles.” Now you might remember Goethe’s Faust who is, you know, suffering from a sense of emptiness and is willing to sell his soul to the Devil in order to discover something which I translate as “the seeds and dynamic principles of reality and stop this being a shopkeeper with words”.

Today this failure, as we can see, has reached very acute levels, leading many  to a kind of death by details. You know, anytime you read about an act of violence, it will tell you the caliber of the weapon, where the bullets were ordered, what color hair the shooter had — you will be totally, totally discouraged from ever asking yourself, “What is violence? Why is it increasing? And what can we do about it?” And of course having taught at Berkeley, studied or taught, for close to half a century, I’ve watched this proliferation of subjects such that now education is now divided up into smaller and smaller silos and we are losing touch with the basic principles of what education is for. Then when troublemakers like me come around and say “What is the purpose of education?” we are completely shut out.

One way that I’ve found handy to get this across is, I would start a course by saying “We have different capacities to learn” and knowledge is one, and this whole institution has been kind of oriented around that. But there’s a deeper kind of knowing which we might call understanding. And then there is a deeper kind of knowing still which we might call wisdom. Knowledge is where you accumulate facts, you are operating on the level of information. Understanding is where you begin to detect patterns among these facts. And you can sort them out. You can say “Oh, this was an act of violence, we should be thinking about it in those terms.” And, wisdom finally is where you begin to grasp the relevance of those patterns. You can relate to them personally: What does this mean to me? How shall I use it?  Or you can ask, will this injure life?  So, in other words, information is the lowest forms of knowledge.  Notice that we have very proudly entered the “Information Age” and people don’t recognize the irony that’s inherent there.

So the fourth pillar is: Cultivate deeper modes of knowing. This is not unlike saying “Teach to the whole person” because, you know, I have the capacity to memorize facts, and I have the capacity to understand how they fit together, and the capacity to judge what the meaning of it all is. Now I’m not saying that we should not teach facts, but we should teach them in such a way that students, can grasp underlying patterns among them and ask themselves, how does this relate to my challenge as a human being that has to live right now on this planet?  I’ve noticed that we tend to polarize so much that when you talk about understanding or wisdom, people think you mean we are not going to teach facts anymore and students will be adrift in the world (without?) knowing these facts.  But what I’m saying is that we should use facts as grist for understanding and, ultimately, for wisdom.

 

The 5th column (yes an unintentional pun).

There is a story amongst the ba-mBbuti pygmies, they’re still called that I think, in the Congo about a time when the tribe migrating from one part of their region to another, and a child was accidently left behind. It was a girl child; she grew up, she survived alright in the jungle, she was an enfant sauvage; she lived on her own in the forest.  Which is ok, except that she turned into a demoness.  If anybody went near her, she would seize that person and destroy that person in some way.  She would — I don’t remember, but it was pretty nasty: she became a cannibal or something like that. It’s a not untypical boogeyman story, ‘you do not want to come across this person in a dark forest’.

But there’s a difference.  I taught mythology for many years and I always remember what Schopenhauer said, that a myth is something that never happened but is always true.  I think this story is about alienation. When someone is cut off from the community, either because the community has scapegoated them, or for some other reason, they can survive but they become a terrific danger to themselves and everybody else. The one thing of some significance that the media will share with you these psychopathic killers that is not totally trivial, not completely irrelevant, is they were a “loner;” just like this unfortunate abandoned girl.

There’s another angle I’d like to share with you.  Perhaps you saw Amy Goodman’s recent piece on gun control; it was entitled “U.S. gun control laws: guilty by reason of insanity.” So, I was asking myself why this insanity?  We have reached a point where there are more guns than people in the United States, and with every weapon that’s added to the pool we become less secure. It almost a mathematical proportion. So why are we doing this to ourselves?  The only reason that I could think of is that each person when he or she (though it’s almost always he) decides “I’m going to get a gun”, he is thinking of himself as completely isolated from the whole. So if I have a gun, I’ll be safer. Which actually is wrong. if you have a gun you’re five times more likely to shoot someone in your family than to shoot an intruder, and 20 times more likely to have that gun stolen than either of the above. The wrongness of this on the statistical level notwithstanding, the person is thinking, I as an absolutely isolated fragment, will be enhanced, will add to my security with this weapon.  The mistake there is in that first sentence: You are not an isolated fragment, that’s where the logic of this goes so incredibly wrong.

So the 5th pillar is that if a person is to emerge from our institutions or contact with us truly educated, he or she will need a grasp of the mystery of unity in diversity. “We are apart but we are also one,” as in the marvelous quote from Martin Luther King, which I like so very much, where he said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” So far from imagining a world as a place of competition, which through the misuse of Darwin we have done, we have to realize that all this separateness, this apparent separateness that we see, is really diversity. And as the Koran says, “I made you separate people and tribes so that you could discover one another.” Some how we need our diversity to discover our unity. They things are actually complementary: diversity is more or less on the surface of life, and should be: unity resides on the heart level, which is why Gandhi taught that we need to discover “heart unity” among all our surface differences.  It was another key element of Constructive Programme.

I did some serious thinking about what’s wrong with military camaraderie. The trouble with it is that in that kind of group, or community the individual is expected to abolish him- or herself for the collective; whereas if Martin Luther King is correct (as of course it is), you can only really contribute to the group by being yourself in the deepest sense. I went through a taste of this when I became a conscientious objector: “What?  You don’t want to serve society?  “In order for me to add to society,” I said to my draft board (they totally didn’t get it but I said it anyway), “I have to possess myself. I have to be who I am. The most important part of me is not, you know, my rather small body, but my conscience. I can do you much greater service by recognizing something about the unity of life than I can by pretending I haven’t seen that for your strategic purposes.

When we were beginning Peace Studies at Berkeley, I, on a hunch, I invited a colleague of mine who was an engineer to come in and give a lecture. And for me one of the most, the biggest, breakthroughs almost of my whole intellectual career.  At first he put a lot of formulas on the board, which got my students totally terrified, but then he got to the point: why is it that biology and physics, which started out almost simultaneously, reached a point where physics has become one of the greatest intellectual achievements of humankind: beyond even Einstein we have quantum theory and string theory, incredible feats of human accomplishment on the intellectual level, while biology as a theoretical science is just sort of limping along.  ”Can we look at molecules now?” They have no theory of life at all.  (I say this with all due respect to my Dad who was a biology teacher).   My colleague asked us, “What is the reason for this?” He explained that in physics we can study the universe in a model of uniformity.  Every single proton in the universe, and there’s a lot of them out there! every single proton is exactly like every other one (except for their velocity and position which anyways we cannot talk about thanks to Heisenberg). But in biology, diversity is the essence. No individual on this planet is exactly like any other, if there were, we would freak out. You know in some tribes they would kill you if you were a twin; if you are an identical twin.  In other words, we do not have the conceptual framework to understand unity in diversity. So that is why physics has leapt ahead while biology is almost trying to still get off the starting block.

It’s not entirely clear how, practically, to go about this. But I do feel very, very strongly that this is a need of our new paradigm education: to see to it that students have a grasp of the mystery of how unity and diversity are complementary. I know that one thing Gandhi suggested was, in his new educational system every student would be exposed to a reverential study of all the world’s religions: a reverential study. Not just the way we used to teach it in Religious Studies (and I know, I chaired the program at Berkeley until my colleagues realized where I was coming from): “Oh look at these interesting phenomena. How quaint!” But more “What were our fellow human beings trying to get at with these models and these practices?” That in itself involves a kind of unity in diversity because you see the unity of aspiration throughout the human family expressed so very differently in different cultures.

Now to come close to the end with somebody that I started with, Swami Vivekananda.  When he visited this country he went to Harvard where he was hosted by a Classics professor at Harvard (which partly I am very proud of). But this Classics professor, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Swamiji, said,”Swamiji, the trouble, there is so much violence in the world because of these different religions.  What we need is one religion for all of humanity”, and Swami Vivekananda said (I paraphrase), “Yuck, that is the worst idea I ever heard of. What we really need is one religion for every individual on the planet.”  Every single person has his or her initially unique way of approaching the Real. As you get closer to the Real, of course, that uniqueness is merged into unity — the unity of the Real itself; but you will never get there if you try to bypass the individuality.

I wanted to close with just a word about, well two things really, I want to characterize, succinctly, what is wrong with the old story and how the new story has to be different and then talk, again just briefly, about the regenerative capacity of education when it is done right.

I think that in the old story, or the old paradigm, basically human beings are treated as a means to an end.  ‘We want you to grow up to be big, good citizens, to function successfully in a corporation, so that you can make money for the state of California’ or whatever.   If you go even to that highly prestigious campus, that great research university next door [UC, Berkeley], they will tell you, implicitly or explicitly, this is what we are educating you for.  Every time an administrator goes to argue with the state or the general public about why you should give us back our budget,  this is the reason, and often the sole reason given: because we make money for the state of California. That’s the Old Story.

The New Story comes from philosophers like Kant and Mahatma Gandhi who said that human beings should never be a means to an end. There was another Greek philosopher, my 3rd favorite, who said Anthropos ton mentron pantōn — “The human being, “man,” is the measure of all things; (and he goes on) of things that exist that they exist, of things that do not exist that they do not exist.”  So the new paradigm is going to have to be Kantian in that the student who comes in has to be regarded as a priceless resource to be developed, never as a means to an end.

We have at the Metta Center developed a project called “Roadmap” that you can see on our website. It is becoming very successful.  In it we’ve divided the problems of the world into six wedges and top dead center is what we call New Story Creation, and research, education, and the media are the three modes of developing and propagating the new story.

So we should close with a brief look at the power of education when it’s done right. Stephanie and I both had experiences recently of going into prisons and doing teaching there. In the program that I was part of,  in San Quentin, I was told that the rate of recidivism of men in that program — men serving 16 years to life, so they had killed one or more people — the rate of their recommitting crimes after they got out of prison was 2%. The national average is 76%. The saving of 74% recidivism, just because someone gave them the benefit of assuming that they have the capacity to learn.   It was a tremendously re-humanizing thing for them. To take this to an extreme degree, I don’t know if any of you have seen the film “Doing Time, Doing Vipassana.”  In India they have brought meditation into prisons (it’s been duplicated here in this country, too), and again it’s had a tremendous restorative effect on the prisoners.  And after all is said and done, meditation was called in ancient India, brahmavidya, which means ‘the supreme education’.  Why?  Because if you think about it, meditation fulfills all our five ‘pillars’ to an outstanding degree.  We may not be able to teach meditation on a large scale in our public institutions (though teachers are experimenting with just that, more and more successfully), but we can certainly learn from it and redesign an education from the ground up to educate the whole person with a sense of meaning and purpose.

 

Vote Power and People Power

by

By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook

Printed in Tikkun on Nov. 6, 2012 at this link

What do Belgrade, Manila, and Kiev have in common? In all three capitals, among others, people took to the streets in large numbers to protest — and overthrow — a regime that sought to hold onto its power through voter fraud. 

It should be obvious why we are mentioning it: because no American can rest assured that the vote he or she cast this week will be counted. There were various types of fraud in both the national elections of 2000 and 2004, that we know of, and various types of underhandedness have already been practiced recently, mostly in the form of disenfranchising specific populations — remind you of the poll tax laws of a bygone era? Today, unfortunately, fraud is exceedingly easy to do and exceedingly hard to detect. And, we must add, hard to arouse a reaction to even when it is detected: at least one person who was directed by his employer to come up with code that would ‘flip’ results from the winning to the losing candidate has come clean about it in public and in detail. But nothing has been done to prevent another go round; and it’s an open secret that the son of one of the two Presidential candidates (no names, please) owns substantial stock in the company that produces the voting machines!

In the long term, America will have to jettison the archaic Electoral College system, and let the people vote. She will have to lose the computers and go back to paper balloting, as is done, for example, in Germany. All the latter requires is a little patience: what’s the big deal if you can’t read who won in the morning paper? In the long term, she will have to replace the polarized, combative, winner-take-all electoral culture and get back to a system that looks more like a decision-making process than a race (not to mention a fight).

And in the short term? In the short term we will have to be very alert, and probably very brave. If we suspect foul play it will not do to remain silent, as we have done in the past; this has to be the last straw if it is not to be the last gasp of our faltering democracy. But neither will it do to explode in unstructured rage. We should be studying what happened in Kiev, Belgrade, and Manila — what worked and what didn’t — and be ready to non-cooperate, even when it hurts, undertaking all necessary nonviolent actions to get back control of a system that’s fundamental to any democracy.

Occupy showed that large numbers of people can in fact mobilize quickly, almost spontaneously, in the face of an outrage (or a crisis: in some cases they’re doing better right now for hurricane victims than FEMA). Let’s get ready to take that spontaneous energy and harness it for the long haul. Let’s show that, to paraphrase Gandhi, it’s not just generals who know how to strategize, to be flexible in the face of apparent setbacks, and keep going until we win what in this case would be a victory for everyone: honest elections.