Metta’s Opinion

Approaching Spiritual Death

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by Michael N. Nagler

In 1925, Gandhi unveiled what he called the “Seven Social Sins” in his newspaper, Young India:

Politics without principles

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Knowledge without character

Commerce without morality

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice.

Today I think we need to add an eighth: “Entertainment without common sense.”  The idea that we can “entertain” ourselves by appealing to the worst we’re capable of is one of the most destructive notions in our rudderless world.  Reams of scientific research have shown that exposure to violent images that paint a demoralizing picture of human nature make us sick and unhappy, and eventually a menace to those around us.

Somehow, we are not able to assimilate and make use of this research — or for that matter the evidence of our own feelings and experiences.  The reason, I believe, is that we lack a good model of who we are and the importance of what goes on in our mind.  The opening line of a text central to Theravada Buddhism is very clear on this point: “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”  The images we entertain — and the drives those images evoke in our consciousness  – shape how we think and what we will do, more surely than hormones or our DNA.

Add to this that viewers are being immersed in a world of fantasy that progressively weakens their hold on reality, and how can we be surprised when a man imagines he’s in a Batman movie and opens fire in a theater?  Yet The New Yorker for August 27 casually ran an article called “Creep Shows” about a genre that turns sex into a cold, dark fantasy.  The article ends with the appreciative observation that, “Z. and his actors and crew have discovered something cold and lewd in the human heart and have found an effortlessly expressive way of dramatizing it.”  Great.  In time, they can make creeps of everyone who watches!

There is no question that things “cold and lewd” dwell in the psyche.  But so do things warm and creative.  Which part do we want to bring to life?  Studies have shown that seeing images of people like Gandhi or Mother Teresa predispose viewers to compassionate action as surely as watching the ‘cold and lewd’ stuff makes us more unhappy and aggressive.  Given that this kind of choice is so important to our happiness and our role in the world, why are we making the wrong ones?

A contemporary and very popular Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, once said that our biggest problem in the West is our indifference to the crucial difference between good and evil. As a generalization I don’t think this is entirely true, but when we ignore what science and our spiritual traditions are telling us, when supposedly sophisticated writers fail to think about the sickness or health of our own minds, are we not getting close to that kind of ignorance.

In his complacency-shaking speech about the Vietnam War in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. made the ominous pronouncement that, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”  In our entertainment life we seem to be not just approaching spiritual death but embracing it.  And I don’t think we can afford to overlook  the connection between the images we entertain in our minds – which is now heavily conditioned by our viewing habits — and how we vote.

But the bright side is, all ignorance can be cured.  What we’re dealing with here is definitely a kind of ignorance.  Not an ignorance of the facts — as mentioned, the facts are on the table but everyone’s ignoring them.  It’s a kind of tragic numbness to the beauty, sensitivity, and meaning of life.  It shows up in other ways as well; think of the infamous Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court that gave corporations the rights of human beings.  Opponents of this decision — and fortunately they are getting numerous — are rightly upset with its political effects, namely that it gives undue influence to corporations; but underlying the decision is a deeper distortion of truth that negates the inherent meaning of a human person.  “Only individuals have souls,” Marshall Frady once wrote, not collectives, especially ones organized for profit or for power over others.  Democracy — rule by the people — has no meaning if people have no meaning

Citizens United can be addressed politically, e.g. by Move to Amend which is seeking an amendment to the Constitution specifying – which should not have been necessary! – that ‘only a person is a person – and every person is a person’.  We can address creepy “entertainment” forms even more easily, just by using our individual judgment (and of course, whatever opportunities we have to encourage others to become aware of the problem and change course). Those would be key steps toward tackling the mounting problems facing us; economic, planetary, and social.  Dr. King would say that we would now be approaching not spiritual death, but life.

Reflections on a Double Strategy

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Written for and originally posted at Service Space. 

 

I know Cindy and Craig Corrie.  They were not seeking revenge when they brought a civil case against the Israeli government for the appalling death of their daughter Rachel, who was crushed under an Israeli military bulldozer when she was trying to protect a Palestinian home from demolition in March of 2003.  They were not seeking revenge, but they were seeking justice, and beyond justice maybe even some sense of recognition that this vicious conflict cannot go on.

Well, the Corries lost — the Israeli court refused to assign any responsibility for her death to the driver or the military — and yet I feel, even though I myself feel the pain of Rachel’s death to this day, that they cannot be the losers.  As Socrates said, when he also had just lost his case in court, “no harm can befall a good person either in this life or the next, and the gods are not indifferent to our fates.”  The losers are the state of Israel and their apologists, for even though no official sanction will be levied against them, they are human beings and cannot escape the reality of what they have done.

In 1988 the USS Vincennes, on patrol in the Persian Gulf, shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all 290 aboard.  George H.W. Bush, who was Vice President at the time, infamously said, “I don’t care what the facts are; I will never apologize for the American people.”  In so doing he walled himself off from human feeling and condemned us to another cycle of destruction.  We can retreat into this kind of ‘patriotic’ egotism but we cannot insulate ourselves from the costs of such alienation — witness the ever-increasing number of combat soldiers and veterans today who are committing suicide.

At some point this pain has got to register, and we will have to say we simply cannot go on with this hatred and violence; and at that point the nobility of the Corries and their unearned suffering, along with countless other people creating alternatives to war and pointing up the suffering of war without themselves succumbing to hatred will be known for what it was, a saving force pointing our way to freedom.

And as the witness of Socrates reminds us, we must not lose sight of the final consolation: that in the end, as the wisest men and women have maintained through history, there is no death.  As Rumi put it, “when were you ever made less by dying?”  There is no death; but there is justice, and some day we human beings will have to live up to it.

 

 

Art as murder

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“The only thing that you can control, and you must therefore control, is the imagery in your own mind.”

– Epictetus

Until today I didn’t even know there was such a thing as white supremacist music.  Wade Michael Page knew; the “domestic terrorist” who killed six people at the Oak Creek Sikh temple in Wisconsin a week ago Sunday had played in a neo-Nazi band called “Definite Hate” and started one called “End Apathy” in 2005. So Page, when you think of it, has something in common with his immediate predecessor in mass murder, James Holmes, who perpetrated the Aurora, CO shooting two weeks earlier.  Despite their differences, in his case also a form of contemporary “art,” namely the Batman film, played some role in the buildup to his murderous violence.

Shortly after the Wisconsin tragedy I happened to pass the local movie house whose posters line the sidewalk.  One, cleverly combining sex and violence, was an extremely offensive, larger-than-life, depiction of a naked woman being groped from behind by a robotic zombie.

As any advertiser will tell you, you can sell anything if you connect it, sub-rationally, with one of our deep desires.  In this case (as in most) the desire is designed to unite people and create life; but what it’s “selling,” ironically, is a culture of violence and death.

Mind you, we’re not talking about a red light district in Vegas; this is the main street of a smallish American town.  Schoolchildren walk by these posters every day, mostly without adult supervision. What must they be thinking?

What are we thinking?  The day after the Aurora shooting four victims of the previous day’s terror came to pay respects to the dead and wounded: all four wearing Batman tee shirts!  I guess people will cling to their culture without ever asking where it’s taking them.

If I were a typical follower of today’s media, what would I understand about the Aurora shooting?  That he drove a white Hyundai, that he purchased exactly 6,000 rounds of ammunition (all totally legal), and dyed his hair bright red.  What I would not understand — what I would find it hard to think about in that welter of details — is, why is our country having an epidemic of mass murders?  Sixty of them since 1982.

That is the real question, after all; and even to ask it is to spot a very good candidate for the answer: we have a popular culture that’s filling our minds with violent images — and news media that distract us from understanding it.  A culture that smears over the distinction between fantasy and reality (when Holmes, playing the Joker from the Batman series, started his attack many thought it was part of the movie), and journalism more interested in lurid details or bland statistics than their meaning.  If the philosopher Epictetus is correct, we have defaulted on our most important responsibility as human beings — the care of our own minds.

There is a bright side.  We can get it back.  There is nothing to prevent you and me from stemming the flow of violence into our minds, as far as possible, and thinking for ourselves.  If journalists, or lawyers, need to ask, what was it about this particular person that led him to do this particular thing — looking for reasons in those who have left all reason behind — we needn’t join that exercise in futility.  Instead, we can look at our own vulnerabilities — and power.

I would not underestimate the potential impact of each of us, you and me, taking back responsibility in this way.  We are not talking about bodies or votes here, where numbers really are important, but ideas and images, which have a power of their own.

Clearly, if we want to be free of these murderous rampages we will have to face one very awkward fact: that the people who do these killings are part of us.  They have crossed the line between fantasy and physical reality, but that line is getting blurrier all the time for all of us (look at “Stars Earn Stripes,” NBC’s new war game reality show where celebrities play soldier).  The mental world of fear and darkness they live in is only an extreme form of the world we’ve created all around us — and therefore within us.

Mind, I am not against art.  I taught comparative literature at Berkeley for 40 years.  But stirring up our crudest animal drives is not art.  Driving ourselves into prisons of mental isolation is the opposite of art, a perversion of its purpose.

When an FBI spokesperson was asked why the agency did not keep closer tabs on an obvious lunatic like Wade Michael Page, he replied, there are “thousands of them” in the white supremacy movement (not to mention others).  Will we ever be secure trying to guess who is about to go over the edge?  No, but we will be if we can create a new, sane culture.  And while legislation may come in handy at various stages of that process, this is something we can only begin one mind at a time.

Teaching Nonviolence by Building Community in the First Week of School

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It’s time to go back to school! As Dr. Gabor Mate explains, “Educators should be in the emotional attachment business before they are in the academics business.”

Before you can even think about teaching your students, you have to give them a reason to appreciate your class. In other words, students won’t care about what you teach until you show them you are a teacher who cares. Today I would like to share with you what practices I use to start the school year off with with compassion, empathy, and nonviolence.

 

1) NAMES: I begin the year by making sure every student in the class knows the names of every other student. We do name games, name challenges, and take a names quiz to make sure they get it right. It’s important to build community because knowing names helps rehumanizes and renews connections to other people. What’s more, it helps you for the rest of the year because the students work together to learn each others’ names at the start. I take the quiz with them, usually on the first Friday after classes begin.

 

2) VALUES: Instead of an exhaustive list of rules, I have a list of six values: Awareness, Honor, Audacity, Perseverance, Quality, and Community. We spend time defining and exploring what it means to live by these values. We also talk about the opposite, or lack of, the values (EX: the lack of Awareness is distraction). Then I use them as a basis for my classroom management. If the students are not emulating the values, we have a discussion about how they can do better. I give awards every semester for the student who most demonstrated each of the values. You are welcome to choose values that you believe in; the most important thing of all is that YOU model and live by the value you choose.

 

3) TEAM-BUILDING: If you show your students at the start of the year that they can work together on challenges, fun games, and other teambuilding activities, they will have success throughout the year when they learn the material you are teaching: especially if you use a similar format where they learn cooperatively. Feel free to engage in teambuilding activities throughout the year as well when students have flagging morale.

I hope these tips help you start off the year with nonviolence! These are some first steps to help students see you are a teacher who cares, and that other students in the class care about them.

Raising the curtain on “Gandhi Center Stage”

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“History … is a record of an interruption of the course of nature. Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history.” —M.K.Gandhi

I have never bothered to respond to Gandhi detractors because, like the Mahatma himself, I tend to think their pathetic writings are best left to die a natural death—the eventual fate of all untruth. Nevertheless, when Michael Lerner urged me to reply to “Gandhi Centre Stage,” the article by Perry Anderson that appeared in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, I assented.

satyagraha

Gandhi takes part in the Bardoli Satyagraha in 1928. Credit: Creative Commons.

Anderson is a brilliant traditional historian; his article (the first in a series) is well written and very well researched. His article provides a detailed and at times astute analysis of Gandhi’s life and career—from a political perspective. It is, in short, a brilliant failure.

Reading Anderson’s Gandhi, I felt as though I were watching a play where the curtain had gotten stuck about six inches off the stage: you hear the muffled voices of the actors but can only guess, from their feet, what’s really going on. Let me start with a real howler. At the end of the day, says Anderson, “Satyagraha had not been a success.” Excuse me? Are we saying that the British still rule India—or they just decided to march out for some other reason? As early as 1926, when Gandhi wrote the preface to his classic, Satyagraha in South Africa, he spelled out the step-by-step advance of Satyagraha in India from the earliest campaign, against the Viramgam tariff lines, through the brilliant success in Champaran and finally nationwide non-cooperation. All that experience set the stage for the campaign at Bardoli, in 1928, which Anderson calls “farcical” but was actually a perfect testing ground for the climactic Salt Satyagraha of two years later. Similarly, Anderson writes that the decision to launch “Quit India” twelve years later on was “sudden,” by implication capricious, but in reality it was twenty-six years in the making. In his own assessment, after fifty years of experimentation with Satyagraha in every walk of life, Gandhi declared that he “knew of no instance in which it has failed.”

Not all historians miss this essential point, to be sure. Arnold Toynbee said, “He made it impossible for us to go on ruling India, but he made it possible for us to leave without rancor and without humiliation.”

Who was Gandhi? A British prelate once made the mistake of approaching him with the words, “We’re both men of God, Mr. Gandhi, aren’t we?” The Mahatma replied, “You are a politician disguised as a man of God; I am a man of God disguised as a politician.” Why did he take on the disguise?

According to Eknath Easwaran’s Gandhi the Man, Gandhi once said:

To see the universal and all-pervading spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into politics.

Because a satyagrahi (practitioner of Satyagraha) relies on a not-very-visible “living power,” as Gandhi called it, and does not think of her or himself or anyone else as a merely thinking, cost-benefit calculator (not to mention as an enemy), Satyagraha works at a level  different from  ordinary political struggle. One has to know what to look for in order to evaluate whether a given episode succeeded or failed (the latter result being  not possible in Gandhi’s understanding of the principle). In Satyagraha, as Gandhi’s biographer, the late B. R. Nanda, explains, “it is perfectly possible to lose all the battles and go on to win the war.” That is because you are trying to win over the opponent as well as, or even more than, force him to make different political arrangements. Hearts and minds don’t show up on the radar screens of political scientists, but in the long run they definitely shape political as well as other human realities. Gandhi scholars are quite aware that while the Salt Satyagraha, to take the climactic example, failed to change the salt laws to any significant extent, it showed that “all hope of reconciling India with the British Empire is lost forever” (D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma). It was a perfect example of what we call today a “dilemma action,” where the opponent either lets you do what you want (which the British tried at first) or has to use such brutality to stop you (as they subsequently did) that either way you win. This win was the big one. After what the British-led Surat police did to unresisting “raiders” at the Dharasana salt pans ( May 21, 1930), everyone knew that India was now free.

And yet, even that momentous change was only the beginning. In the words of American correspondent Webb Miller, closely paraphrased in Attenborough’s Gandhi, “any moral ascendancy the West has held was lost here today.” Nobel prizewinner Albert Szent Gyeorgyi got it in his book The Crazy Ape:

Between the two world wars, at the heyday of Colonialism, force reigned supreme. It had a suggestive power, and it was natural for the weaker to lie down before the stronger.

Then came Gandhi, chasing out of his country, almost singlehanded, the greatest military power on earth. He taught the world that there are higher things than force, higher even than life itself; he proved that force had lost its suggestive power.

If one is unfamiliar with the dynamics of Satyagraha  it is often difficult to connect the dots. In the event known as “Prague Spring” (1968-1969) Czech resisters failed, once their leaders were co-opted, to hold the Warsaw Pact armies at bay and carry through with  reforms. But in this “failure”  the activists got a taste of what popular nonviolent resistance can do. As Petra Kelly observed:

The Soviets were able to reassert their authority and delay the reforms of the Prague Spring by twenty-one years. But through their sacrifice and suffering, the people of Czechoslovakia … later did indeed succeed in their ‘Velvet Revolution.’ These events demonstrate the power of nonviolent social defense.

Another statement of Anderson’s also shocked me:

His autobiography was subtitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, as if truth were material for alteration in a laboratory, or the plaything of a séance. In his “readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment,” he was freed from any requirement of consistency. ‘My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements,’ he declared, but ‘with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment’…. The result was a licence to say whatever he wanted, regardless of what he had said before, whenever he saw fit.

We have to sympathize with Anderson’s frustration. Many of Gandhi’s associates felt it, too. For example, when he explained that his phenomenally successful “Epic Fast” against separate electorates in 1932 was prompted by his hearing the voice of God and therefore not open to counter-arguments (compare Socrates’s daimon). But for Gandhi, as for Socrates, the ability to hear “the Inner Voice” is real (though there is no question that others, probably most others, who make such claims are fooling themselves): “I have stated a simple, scientific law that can be verified by anyone who will carry out the necessary preparations.”

It might be helpful to bring to light the basic assumptions that underlie the logic that Anderson and many other detractors follow.

  • There is no such thing as a God-conscious person.
  • Gandhi claims to be a God-conscious person.
  • Therefore, Gandhi is a phony.

I do not accept the first premise. To me it seems that Jesus, St. Francis, the Buddha—fill in your own list—became aware of God more or less the same way that Gandhi said he did, namely by “a course of long, prayerful discipline.” I believe that these people are not phonies (what an understatement!), although their behavior is bound to cause befuddlement, if not consternation, to the vast majority of us who simply have not (yet) developed that blessed awareness. Anandamayi Ma, the Bengali mystic who was a young girl at the time of the Epic Fast, would pack up her whole retinue and tear off on a train to some spot hundreds of miles away at the prompting of her kheyal, or inner command to go to a devotee who, she had somehow sensed, was in some kind of trouble.

But if Gandhi was prompted at times by the “Inner Voice,” many of his decisions appeared inconsistent only to those who missed the subtleties of his logic. When violence broke out during Quit India and Gandhi did not call off the Satyagraha or fast as he had done in 1922 when police officers were killed by protestors at Chauri Chaura, a liberal British MP, Robert Bernays, asked him about the inconsistency. Gandhi appreciated the chance to explain: in 1922 he had been in sole charge of the Satyagraha, which was no longer the case. He had had to prove to the people that he was dead serious about the inadmissibility of violence, while now they were at a different stage both in their national “conversation” and their dialogue with the British. The thing to do now was “let their lamp of nonviolence continue burning in the surrounding storm.”

Yet, in the end, there will still be things that appear inconsistent to even a careful observer who does not share a Gandhi’s spiritual insight. You cannot expect to pour spiritual wine into political bottles. Toward the end of his life, when Gandhi was asked why so many of his associates left him as soon as Independence came into view, he said, referring to the region of the Himalayas where sages have long withdrawn to practice their disciplines, “I was on the train to Rishikesh; they got off at Delhi.” If you cannot see what a Gandhi is seeing, you either throw up your hands (as Anderson does) or stand back in admiration (as I do).

Let me mention just two other serious errors of interpretation in “Centre Stage,” and then draw what I think is an important conclusion for all of us.

Anderson claims (again in an offhand remark) that Gandhi “admired Hitler.” In the same breath he characterizes difficulties posed by the notorious Subash Chandra Bose, or “Netaji” (the Leader) as “an affront which Gandhi, who was not prepared to let democracy get in the way of his will, swiftly punished.”

Here we are perilously close to intellectual dishonesty. Anderson cannot possibly be unaware that Bose was advocating violence, that he in fact would take up arms against the British, go on to pay a visit to Hitler, and appear with him in public before a cheering crowd. Does Anderson not know the difference between violence and nonviolence—or not care? He may not, but for Gandhi the difference was one of night and day. There could be no room for advocates of violence in a party which was trying, for the first time in history, to show that nonviolence could prevail in politics. Gandhi could not possibly accept “by any means necessary,” not even in the name of “democracy”—as though you can sustain democracy, which is based on the dignity and priceless worth of the individual, by violence, which is the contradiction of that principle.

In short, the words “affront” and “punished” in Anderson’s characterization are completely out of place—and we have the irony that Anderson calls Gandhi, who wrote a letter to Hitler begging him to desist and telling him that he was “no friend of the German people,” an “admirer” of the Nazi leader while Bose, who really was such an admirer, gets no such critique. Gandhi did strain to find some good things about Hitler’s character, but to say on the basis of these good qualities that Gandhi, with his uncanny generosity of spirit,  “admired” the German dictator misses the point: for one such as Gandhi it would be a fatal hypocrisy to hate any person, however much he hated their doings. Finding the good hidden in even Hitler was one of the greatest tests of Gandhi’s ideals, which he passed. Unfortunately for us, in doing so he also passed the limits of ordinary comprehension.

Unlike many products of the burgeoning industry of Gandhi detractors, Anderson’s article is a serious, though I think misguided, piece of work and is not vulgar. Unlike Joseph Lelyveld and his followers, Anderson only mentions in passing, as a snide but not prurient observation, things about Gandhi’s behavior in the sexual arena that Westerners find difficult to understand. That much we can certainly appreciate. But by now you will realize that the mischaracterization of Gandhi and the failure to understand the significance of violence and nonviolence go hand-in-hand, and are precisely the confusion we are facing, e.g. in the Occupy movement, when those who, seeing only the political level of human experience, call for a “diversity of tactics.” For Anderson, who sees only failure in Gandhi’s Satyagraha campaign (because it did not always deliver precisely the desired political result), “his great achievement lay elsewhere, in the creation of a nationalist party.” This would be like saying that Einstein’s great achievement was playing the violin.

The lesson of this sad failure of even a brilliant intellectual such as Perry Anderson to understand Gandhi is that we spiritual progressives have to be creators of a new culture.  We must everywhere, calmly and persuasively, uphold the new narrative: that all life is one and the spiritual force that aligns us with that reality is invincible.

 

This was edited by and posted at Tikkun on August 7, 2012. Visit this page for more information.

A scientific approach to peace

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Originally published on Petaluma Patch, August 2, 2012

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. 

-UNESCO Constitution

Recently, a friend was shocked when he called his son to the dinner table and heard: “I’ll be there in a minute, right after I kill this guy.”

I gave a nervous laugh when I heard this, because I have heard it in my own home, and I bet that I’m not alone.

It is not young peoples’ problem alone that in playing dehumanizing video games where they are actually being trained to kill, to accept killing as entertainment. Fathers, mothers and sisters play these games together, buy them for each other, bond over them, and don’t take them that seriously.

But what if we did take this kind of murderous entertainment seriously as a hypothesis, as a clue to understanding the mechanisms that enable us to think violence is ‘natural’ in our relationships to one another, not to mention our political landscape and foreign policy.

Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists will attest to the fact that it does not matter whether the act of violence we see is real or imagined, our brain will respond in the same way.

For example, if read about violence or if we see it, we will experience it in physiologically similar ways, e.g. release of stress hormones, tensing of chest, and so forth–no wonder we try to discount violence when we watch it or hear about it – our very bodies are trying to tell us something’s wrong.

Hard science aside, if we were merely passive observers of the world, then these video games and other forms of dehumanizing entertainment would not matter. In general, we as Americans have been conditioned to believe this.

However, since we are in fact active builders of our shared culture, and the imagery in our minds matter, then they might be considered tools of conditioning us to accept an unnatural state of agitation and separateness because there are those who make more money when we feel disconnected from one another, whether that is in the form of gross consumerism, i.e. buying things we hope will make us secure and happy, or in the form of war, i.e. war profiteering.

If this seems implausible, just consider the fact that NBC has introduced the “sport” of “War-o-tainment” into the Olympics! In Stars Earn Stripes, celebrities will pair-up with members of the U.S. military to compete at warlike tasks, creating the illusion – just for fun, you understand – that war is a sport.

There is a way out. Did you know that military recruiters have a quota for new recruits? That in economic downturns, such as this one, they easily meet these quotas, while in times of economic prosperity, they find it very difficult?

Did you know that a year ago, military suicides surpassed the number of soldiers killed in active combat? These clues might tell us something about what really is natural and unnatural about violence — and reveal something about our humanity.

Maybe our humanity is not reinforced through violence and exploitation, but it is in our ability to maintain healthy, supportive relationships and communities. It is in our ability to find ways of becoming closer as a society, in extending our camaraderie to an ever-widening circle of people.

It is our way of relating that matters, not what we buy. Imagine if we were given more chances to accept this hypothesis, without sounding overly optimistic or naïve—the fate of anything related to peace in a militarized culture.

What kinds of institutions might we have to resolve conflicts when they arise? What kinds of policies would we have around health, education and foreign affairs? How would a family relate to one another, to their community? What would happen to exploitation—would we still think it is normal?

It’s not too late to begin asking these questions, and taking the answers seriously. In fact, this is part of the democratic process and the meaning of a “more perfect union.”

Syria: Lamp in the Storm

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How can we can create the right vision to support indigenous nonviolence and unarmed civilian peacekeeping?

 by Michael Nagler
posted Jul 30, 2012 posted at Yes! Magazine

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During the climactic “Quit India” campaign launched by Gandhi in 1942, there were outbreaks of violence. Earlier, in 1922, similar outbreaks had led him to suspend the non-cooperation movement. This time, however, he said, “let our lamp stay lit in the midst of this hurricane.”

This is very much the precarious situation of nonviolence in Syria today. A bit of background:

In the Quranic version of Cain and Abel, Abel says to his jealous brother,: “If thou dost stretch thy hand against me, to slay me, it is not for me to stretch my hand against thee to slay thee, for I do fear God, the cherisher of the worlds.” (Quran 5:28) In other words, the first murder is accompanied by the first act of nonviolence, a refusal to kill, even in self-defense, through mindfulness of a God who stands far above partisan conflict.

Islamic scholar Sheik Jawdat Said based his book, The Doctrine Of The First Son Of Adam, apparently the first book in modern Arabic to proffer nonviolent solutions to the region’s problems, on this verse. Said’s ideas were well received in some intellectual circles in Syria but did not lead visibly to any appreciable change in the political or social environment. The wave of agitations touched off by the Iranian revolution (though it itself had, and still has, some nonviolent character)—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, to a limited extent Syria itself—were in one way or another nationalistic but not particularly nonviolent. But a group of young men (shebab) who had fallen under the influence of an open-minded teacher at a school that was soon closed by the regime were receptive to the ideas of the distinguished sheik. With the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2001 they began to take some modest actions that were, particularly in one case, provocative to the regime. They began to clean up the streets of their respective neighborhoods. This may not seem very revolutionary to us, but in Syria people did not feel that they owned their country. Inside they lived in clean, orderly houses, but the public streets belonged to the state—which did nothing about them. In other words, while it’s doubtful any of them knew this, it was a perfect example of a Gandhian “Constructive Programme:” taking matters into your own hands in a way that puts the regime in a bad light if, as often, they interfere. Which they did. There were arrests. The regime knew these shebab were giving the people back ownership of their country.

Then came Arab Spring. Protests began in Syria in late January of 2011. In the early months Opposition forces were creating defections among military and government—critical for the success of non-violent insurrections—but many of the defectors and others turned to armed struggle in the face of the repression. According to Erica Chenoweth, the author, with Maria Stefan, of the highly influential study, Why Civil Resistance Works, such movements usually require two and a half to three years to take hold. There have been cases of nonviolent campaigns persisting in the midst of armed elements on both sides, and sometimes even rising to capture the legitimacy of the opposition from those armed elements, usually with some international recognition behind them, and going on to win the struggle: South Africa, the Philippines, and at some point (inshallah) maybe Palestine. This is crucial because, as Chenoweth and Stefan point out, nonviolent insurrections are twice as likely to succeed and vastly more likely to lead to conditions of real liberty (yet to happen in Egypt). In Syria, however, the fledgling movement was rather quickly overwhelmed. Extreme violence creates mobilization challenges that fledgling movements may find difficult to overcome. Some movements manage to maintain—or even increase—participation in the face of extreme violence (the Pashtun Khudai Kidmatgars in 1931, Iran in 1977-9), whereas others find themselves in disarray.” As Bsher Said (Jawdat’s son) informed me, when people are arrested and questioned they generally tell their captors what they want to hear—“Oh, yes, it was armed gangs that did the killing.” It has prompted Bsher to comment, pointedly, that “If we could stop the lying we wouldn’t need a revolution.” So far the wall of fear has not cracked, so we are lacking the sine qua non of successful insurrection—or successful almost anything.

Yet, as Donatella Rivera posts in her recent blog, “The young people I met—including those who had been injured—said they have no intention of stopping their protests.” And while the state actors of the “international community,” even if they resolve their differences, feel that they can do nothing, or worse, global civil society is not so inhibited. There is more going on than I am free to describe here, unfortunately, because of security concerns and the delicacy of some issues, but nonviolence training, badly needed visioning of a future for Syria, reconciliation work, and weekly discussion groups across borders are all going forward. As for higher level operations, we all know that the UN has sent in some 300 monitors, the so-called “blue berets” (joined by a smaller number from the Arab League). But this is the main point.

Summing up the failure of the nonviolent movement of Syria so far, Bsher succinctly says, “we were not ready.” Well, neither were we—the watching world. Three hundred monitors? When it comes to blue helmets the UN is ready to field 16,000. These unarmed monitors are a great step in the right direction, but they should have been at least ten times more numerous and ‘armed’ with a more robust mandate. As Mel Duncan, founding director of the Nonviolent Peaceforce, shared, they must be ready to protect Alawites as well as Sunnis: anyone under threat. They should set up cross-sectarian teams who can call in international help to forestall retaliatory violence when the transition takes place. Duncan should know. Nonviolent Peaceforce and other Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping groups have been doing this successfully, and with almost no casualties to speak of, around the world since the 1980s, and have recently made highly successful contacts with offices of the UN. As Duncan adds, to show the world we have a real alternative to doing nothing or using military force “we need—and can provide—proof that this works.” I quote the following from a special report to a high-level UN briefing:

Over the past thirty years, various (small) civil society organizations have systematically developed and employed innovative protection and peacekeeping methods, without relying on weapons or the use of force. Always working closely with local stakeholders and communities, their methods have included:

  • Proactive presence at flashpoints, sometimes even as buffer between combatants
  • Protective accompaniment of vulnerable individuals and populations
  • Community-based early warning and rapid response mechanisms (‘predict and pre-empt’)
  • Empowering what communities themselves can do— faster and better— through training and capacity building, leaving behind self-protection skills and more
  • Rumor control
  • Grassroots mediation techniques and creating safe spaces
  • Compliance monitoring of agreements (ceasefires, peace deals).

What’s happening today in the major cities and villages of Syria is not just Syria’s problem, it’s our problem. The refrain of the media is that we have no choice. That is because “we” are wedded to the wrong principle, which in turn is based on a wrong vision of reality. Open our eyes to the right vision and it becomes obvious that we can support indigenous nonviolence in and unarmed civilian peacekeeping for areas that need them. Michael Beer and colleagues at Nonviolence International have compiled lists of what governments and people can do for the people of Syria. Considering all that is going on beneath the media radar, it might not be too late for them; it is certainly not too late to prepare for—and prevent—the next conflict.

My favorite bumper sticker reads, I’M ALREADY AGAINST THE NEXT WAR. This is how to be against it: by being for the arts of nonviolence and peace.

The Batman Massacre: A Response

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By Michael Nagler

I want to make an offer to my fellow Americans who are, like myself, reeling from the worst “random” shooting the country has ever seen.  My question: Have you had enough?  Because if you have, I can tell you how to stop this kind of madness.  I know that’s a bold claim, but this is not a time for small measures.

We cannot fix this tomorrow, because we didn’t cause it yesterday.  We have been building up to this domestic holocaust since – to take one milestone – television was made available to the general public at the conclusion of World War Two.

If you are still with me, you are prepared to believe that it was not a coincidence that this massacre took place at the scene of an extremely violent, “long-awaited” movie.  Psychologists have proved over and over again that – guess what – exposure to violent imagery produces disturbances in the mind that must, in course of time, take form in outward behavior.  The imagery can be in any medium, nor does it matter whether on the surface of our minds we think what we’re seeing is real or made up.  This is a natural, scientific law.  Exactly who will crack next and in what setting is nearly impossible to predict, and in any case it’s ridiculous to try to run around stopping the resulting violence from being acted out after the mental damage has been done.  The only sane approach is not to do it in the first place.

As Lt. Col. Dave Grossman pointed out in his book, Let’s Stop Killing Our Kids, the video games that the Army uses to prepare ordinary men and women for combat, in other words to wipe out the normal empathy and inhibitions against hurting others that we’ve built up over millennia – a process known as civilization – are the very same games our young people buy across the counter throughout the country.

Of course, there are other factors.  At some point we will have to talk about readily available weapons; at some point we’ll have to realize that a nation that engages in heartless drone warfare, torture, and extrajudicial killings cannot expect to live in peace.  But until we liberate our minds from the endless pounding of violent imagery I fear we won’t be able to think clearly about those factors (or for that matter anything else).

With rare exceptions, film and video game producers will not stop turning out these dehumanizing products as long as there is profit to be made from them – and not enough sophistication about culture or the human mind to warn us about their dangers.  But there is a way, one that has worked well on the small scales on which it has so far been tried: don’t watch them.  Captain Boycott had the right approach.

Right now police have been posted at theaters where this same movie is being shown – still.  But ask yourself, what are they protecting?  Is it perhaps the belief that violence is just entertaining?  People, tell me when you’ve had enough.