Metta’s Opinion

By Michael Nagler

San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell, may your walls fall and may I live to tell;

May all the world forget you ever stood, may all the world regret you did no good.

San Quentin I hate every inch of you,

I’ll walk out a wiser, weaker man

Mister Congressman why can’t you understand

Johnny Cash

At 12:45pm on Friday, May 27, the gates of San Quentin State prison closed behind me.  I had come, with Metta Vice-President Cynthia Boaz and her colleague at Sonoma State University, Dean Elaine Leeder, to give a workshop on nonviolence to some thirty men who were in the prison for fifteen years to life for crimes of violence, mostly homicide.

The criminal justice system is one of the most broken and corrupt of many systems that are failing us in the United States — particularly here, as comparable democracies in most parts of Europe, not to mention a few countries like New Zealand and Rwanda, have experimented with indigenous systems based on an entirely different principle that are far more effective.  For Cyndi and myself, this was our first visit inside one of the nation’s prisons.

I began by sharing with the men that when I recently told someone that I promote nonviolence she shot back, “What kind of violence?”  Nonviolence is all but totally unfamiliar to the average person, not because it’s not there (as Gandhi said, it’s “as old as the hills”), not because it’s in any way unnatural, but because we are so wrong, in this “thing-oriented” civilization of ours, about what human nature is.

In our culture the human being is still regarded as a body, separate from the rest of reality, doomed to compete for scarce resources, ultimately through violence — basically a “bag of genes” (as one scientist recently put it) without transcendent meaning in a random universe.  But science has made remarkable breakthroughs in the last quarter century that bring inspiring confirmation to what the wisest human beings have always said: that no, despite possible appearances, we are not material bodies acted on by chance.  We are not separate, not at all condemned to competition and violence.  We are not — life as we know it is not — a ‘finished product.’  Cooperation is stronger than competition even in ‘raw nature.’ We are conscious beings endowed with choice (and the parallel responsibility) and have only begun to realize our potential.

In this ‘new story,’ nonviolence makes perfect sense.  Gandhi called it, “the greatest power at the disposal of humankind.”  When mobilized in large groups over sustained periods, it has utterly changed history, ending the colonial period and in our own country dealt a blow to racism.  According to Gandhi, who is so far the only person in history to have experimented with nonviolence on a large scale over fifty years and ‘reduce it to a science,’ it is the only force that brings about lasting, positive change.  The reason for this is precisely that it belies all the falsehoods about human nature that we’ve just mentioned. It elevates both the person offering it and the person to whom it is offered.  The word ‘nonviolence’ very poorly represents this all-important capacity. That is why I consider the Tagalog term for nonviolence that came to the fore briefly during the Philippine “people power” uprising of 1986 a vast improvement: alay dangal, to ‘offer dignity.’  When someone threatens you, he or she is offering you disrespect, in extreme cases trying to humiliate you, along with harm.  He is treating you not as a person who can be coerced through fear.  When — and this is the key element — we refuse to let that fear master us (not even to feel it is an advanced stage reached only by very few); when we refuse to do something we regard as unjust but refuse to hate the person trying to get us to do it, we are retaining our own dignity and not only treating them with respect, despite their behavior, but offering them a chance to stop disrespecting us.  And perhaps more than a chance:

“What Satyagraha does in such cases is not to suppress reason but to free it from inertia and to establish its sovereignty over prejudice, hatred, and other baser passions.  In other words, if one may paradoxically put it, it does not enslave, it compels reason to be free.”

The recent discovery of “mirror neurons” has shown an actual neural pathway for this compelling effect Gandhi refers to.

In addition, we are refusing to go along with the lie of radical separateness the threat situation represents, the ultimate lie that one person can benefit by harming another.  Disrespect and separateness, closely linked and both false, dehumanize us.  As Gandhi said, “nonviolence is the law of the humans,” because nonviolence of his conception means respect for all that lives and what he called “heart unity,” the faith that, as Martin Luther King said, we are all embraced in “an inescapable network of mutuality…a single garment of destiny” regardless of the differences that may appear to divide us on the surface.   The truth of nonviolence has a good deal of power, and that power comes into our hands, as Gandhi maintained, when we can love our enemy.  Not sentimentally, perhaps not emotionally, but spiritually, with this kind of faith and courage.  When we resist an impulse to hate or fear the considerable energy of those drives is converted, often without our awareness, into creative action of the kind that, on the large scale, brings down dictatorships and changes history.  That inner change accomplished, the rest is strategy.

What would a criminal justice system look like if it were based on this vision, this power?  Fortunately, the question is not entirely theoretical.  The men were quite familiar with restorative programs like the Prison Ashram Project, Alternatives to Violence, and others.  Some of them knew about the remarkable, and successful approach to youth crime that has been adopted in New Zealand, where an offender sits down with his or her direct victims and representatives of the community to discuss what led him or her to offend, how the alienation he or she caused can be repaired and other problems adjusted.  They also knew that education — which we were engaged in — is a powerful antidote to crime (and other forms of violence).  Where the national recidivism rate hovers around 70-73%, among prisoners receiving degrees while incarcerated it drops to 12-33%; among the graduates of the program we were engaged in it drops to 2%.

If nonviolence ‘offers dignity,’ and education is a powerful way to restore dignity, imagine the power of nonviolence education: and not only for those many whom we have incarcerated, but for all of us.

We begin this education as soon as we take off our moral glasses and putting on educational ones.  We stop saying to the offender, as Bo Lozoff of the Prison Ashram Project likes to put it, “Hey, get outta here!” and start saying, “Hey, get back in here.”  We stop regarding him or her as incapable of changing — a potently self-fulfilling prophecy of our current criminal justice system.  We reverse the decision explicitly made in 1976 to change the purpose of the State of California penal system from rehabilitation to punishment.

There are two features of successful experiments in restorative justice, whether urban or indigenous, that are both easy to explain from this new perspective: first, as is well known, the offender must accept his or her responsibility.  Responsibility is in a way the opposite of guilt: it empowers, guilt paralyzes.  Responsibility is for something you have done, not something you are.   When you own your responsibility you become fully human.  Note that two major, defining institutions of industrial life begin by trying to shelter individuals from their responsibility: the publically traded corporation and the military.  This brings us to the second common feature.

In restorative systems, the crime affects the whole community, and its resolution is effected by the whole community.  In a society like ours where violence and materialism and massively promoted by our powerful mass media, what kind of hypocrisy could maintain that an offender acted on some isolated impulse: in effect, jjust as he or she must own responsibility, so must all of us.  And in addition, any act of violence sends shockwaves through an entire society — including the violence of caging a human being.  Nonviolence is ‘truth-force’ (a rough translation of Satyagraha); in restorative justice the lie that human beings are the result of chance and that we are radically separate from one another is confronted by the truths that each of us is a responsible agent, whether for good or ill, and none of us is unaffected by the acts, words, or possibly even the thoughts of others.

I suggested to the men that they could learn all they could about nonviolence, avoid exposure to the commercial mass media, consider taking up a spiritual practice (nothing like it for counteracting the dismal image of the person in commercial culture), humanize their relationships with one another even — especially — in that dehumanizing environment, and finally get involved in some project that is open to them to make the world a better place.  I hope I made them feel that their efforts, their lives, matter and spiritual forces are not stopped by walls.

But we have a long way to go.  Despite the proven power of education, and of nonviolence, we conducted our workshop in a prison laundry, shouting over the voices from a class on the other side of the wall. On our way across the crowded yard after the workshop we stood looking up for a while at the grim walls of death row.

(NB: This op-ed was edited and first posted with our partners at New.Clear.Vision.)

Nonviolence Is the Essence of Democracy

by Stephanie N. Van Hook

“The voice of the people should be the voice of God.” — M.K. Gandhi

The prophetic proclamation of the death of God by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘madman with a lantern’ continues to stir the imaginations of Western society over a century and a half later: “God is dead. God is dead and we killed him.”

I probably first read this scrawled on a building in Paris, and later, sitting in a circle in a room of eager philosophy students in Virginia. This ‘revelation’ from a madman ostensibly conjures the end of religion or the end of morality as immanent, given the trajectory of a society growing new roots in the rocky soil of the machine: destitute, desacralized, and alienated.

I could imagine another story, one where we are left with the burden of ensuring that God does not return, as a mythical explanation for why we kill human beings, most recently Osama bin Laden, before him Saddam Hussein, before him Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy — not to mention the nameless hundreds a day in wartime collaterally, directly, and structurally. We raise killers in our children with violent programs, toys, and values; still not enough for the sacrificial fires of a dehumanized world. We are on the same path these days with democracy. Isn’t it time to change our course?

I feel like walking down the streets of this small northern California town screaming, “Democracy is dead, and we killed it!” I imagine I would get some strange looks, and perhaps, some screams back. Something to the tune of, “We live in a democracy!” or the converse. This is the problem: our reliance on a materialist worldview emerging from industrial increase in productivity has led us to believe that democracy is a structure, something we can live in, like subsidized housing or a corporation’s headquarters. It is not.

Democracy is not a state (nor is it a State in any official use of the word); it is an organizing principle requiring ongoing action and pressure on our elected officials to build and maintain the world that we want to live in.  We do not “live in a democracy” just because we have the guarantee of fundamental human rights (sometimes respected, other times ignored), or because women have the right to vote or that all sexual orientations can now serve openly in the armed forces. Democracy is a dynamic, living process whose ends are freedom, justice, and liberty. It is more than a ballot. We live democracy, and we can only protect it by living it.

This is why Gandhi proclaimed that nonviolence is intrinsically democratic, as it is compatible with the ends sought by the democratic process. Nonviolence allows not only for our desired ends to emerge, it changes the way we think about the world. At its best, it can lead the individual to arrive at a higher state of consciousness — to see our most treasured principles, and human beings as something other than mere physical objects, something other than consumers with a violent nature who can only understand violence. It is only through nonviolence that we are led to truly begin to grasp the interconnected nature of our world — the way we must challenge our beliefs and habits to decide whether we build prisons or hospitals for the next generation.

Nonviolence draws its force from the changes each individual cultivates in herself or himself. When we question why, for example, we find our public representatives in bed with corporations, or why they decide to wage war for oil and other natural resources, it becomes clear that in spite of our vision of a peaceful tomorrow, we have the representatives we deserve, who work to serve our interests as they — and we — understand them: we are interested in making money; we are interested in driving long distances unnecessarily and flying across the world for pleasure and culture.

When we question ‘why’, we need look no further than our own habits and addictions on a large scale: every product bought, every gallon of gasoline, every disposable computer screen is a silent vote for their production and rapid availability by whatever means necessary. If we want to exercise democracy, we start with ourselves, with the silent votes we cast. Our collective voice is in the sum total of our actions.

Have our habits given any sign that we are no longer under a government protecting those deadly interests of our culture? I am not convinced. The recent four-year renewal of the Patriot Act, for instance, is a sign of the on-going Islamophobia of average US citizens. I’ve had questions asked of me in talks, “What are we going to do about Islam?” and I know that questions like this are representative of a significant number of others who think in this way. But it is not possible to appropriate democracy (or freedom, or security) to one population and deny it another; we only prevent the principle thereby from expressing itself in positive, constructive change.

Langston Hughes once said, “I swear to the Lord
, I still can’t see 
why democracy means
 everybody but me.” Rosa Parks stood up (by sitting down) and showed the world that democracy includes everyone — or it includes no one. Democracy means that we always have a choice. It implies that we are responsible for exercising that choice.  As Howard Zinn said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

We can’t be neutral and live democracy; we cannot keep silent. We must make our collective voice — and actions — too strong to ignore. We must allow it to encourage us to action, to constantly create — and recreate — a more perfect union. And union is what will get us there.

By moving away from the inertia that seduces us to take the easy road of passive violence, by choosing the path of selfless service to our planet and our species, we wake ourselves up from the dream of separation fed to us by the consumer mass media; otherwise, we deny ourselves the highest forms of happiness and love that can never be bought or sold. Let’s collectively change the American dream: one day we will end the killing of others and hatred toward others and seek the true promise of democracy — the ability to perfect and effect change in ourselves. The next time a ‘madman’ appears, he will prophesize something so possible, so hopeful, that our lives will never again be the same, and the Earth will breath a sigh of relief: “Greed is dead, and we killed it.”

When “Positive News” Isn’t

By Michael Nagler

The outbreak of democratic aspirations in Egypt, which was relatively nonviolent — and successful, was something of a triumph of the human spirit.  We could use the boost.  The human spirit is under attack not just in despotic regimes from Burma to Bahrain but right here in our own society.  Our way of doing it may be subtler, but it’s no less dangerous for that reason.  Possibly moreso.  Think of last year’s 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (Citizens United v. FEC) that granted corporations the status of human persons.

We should be very glad that citizens’ groups are organizing to reverse this decision, like the Environmental and Social Rights Amendment, now before the House of Representatives as House Res. 156.  But that decision did not come from nowhere (any more than the Egyptian uprising, for that matter).  It was the logical, inevitable outcome of a deep cultural trend that has been pushing its way into our consciousness and taking over our worldview at least since the industrial revolution.  As my colleague Carolyn Merchant makes clear in her important book, The Death of Nature, in order to clear the way for industrialization, people, by some unconscious consensus, pushed aside a millennia-old worldview in which the Earth was a living being.  In effect, they desacralized nature in order to exploit her (or it).  The leaders of this trend later hailed Darwinism, which seemed to ‘liberate’ them from the idea that life was driven by some meaningful purpose, that there might be a higher consciousness behind the apparently random play of matter and energy that makes up our visible world.  We have had almost four hundred years now of a ‘science’ that reduces everything meaningful about us to genes and hormones, or to neurons: as one popularizing neuroscientist, V. S. Ramachandran, recently interpreted some of the latest findings for us, “If all this seems dehumanizing, you haven’t seem anything yet.”

Even more potent than ‘science’ in this gleeful destruction of our image is popular culture itself.  We are exposed to between three and five thousand commercial messages a day, each one telling us that happiness comes from outside us and we are doomed to compete for diminishing resources in order to find it.  Recently four very young boys, the oldest of them fourteen, broke into a school and vandalized it, taking the children’s pet hamster and torturing it to death.  When they were asked why they did all this they could not come up with a reason, because the real reason is the all-pervasive violent imagery of the TV, movies, and videogames that soaks through their consciousness without their knowledge.  According to a massive study recently reported in the New York Times, narcissism, depression, and anger in the lyrics of popular songs have “increased significantly in the past three decades.”

Orwell had it almost right: an attack on human dignity has come to characterize our age, but it is not out in the open like the paralyzing image he leaves us with in 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”  Rather, it has become a quiet part of the woodwork of our mentalities, leading us to stand by while lawyers provide cunning justifications for torture and judges transfer the sanctity of human life to profit-making corporations. During the Cold War, I pointed out that we were doing a similar misallocation of reality: cities full of real people became ‘counter-value targets’ while inanimate bombs were named ‘fat man’ and ‘little boy.’  I used the word ‘blasphemy,’ for I did not think then and do not think now that it’s too strong a word for that process.

Some may wish to dismiss all this as a philosophical, or even theological issue, but it has inescapable political consequences.  Dr. Ramachandran’s breezy acceptance of dehumanization should send a chill and sound a serious warning, not only because this is manifestly bad science but because dehumanization is both the ennabling condition and the final effect of all violence. You cannot build a world in which human rights matter if you have a worldview in which human beings don’t really matter, when we are collections of particles acted upon by chance — when, as another scientist put it, “we are bags of genes.”  It is no coincidence that it was Martin Luther King who said, “we must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ civilization to a ‘person-oriented’ civilization.

My latest encounter with dehumanizing science was, of all places, in a progressive journal.  The big ‘news’ in this article was that trust, love, and sex-drive are now “known” to be the result of certain brain chemicals.  The journal in question is called Positive News (no. 6, Winter 2011, pp. 1 & 9).  Personally, I think this is the most negative news imaginable, not just for progressives, who are seriously undermining their own programs by perpetuating this dismal worldview, but for every one of us.

There are signs that this depressing image is losing its grip, that people are looking around in growing desperation for something nobler to hold onto.  A growing number of scientists, for example, are saying no: consciousness, free will, faith, love, are all potent realities.  If science can’t account for them it is not because they don’t exist but because we don’t have the right kind of science — or the right frame of reference to interpret what science tells us.

Anyone who wants to help this great change should realize that it cannot be brought about only by political or legal arrangements.  A humane world, a world of justice and freedom, will not be ushered in by a wave of the political wand.  It will come into view when we become aware of the implications of our deeper beliefs and courageous enough to stand up for a noble — and ultimately realistic — vision of the human being.

Dear friends,

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you — and then you win.”

Gandhi detractors come and go and usually we pay no attention to them.  Some scabrous reviews that take off from the recent biography by former NYT editor Joseph Lelyveld, however, have sent shock waves across the internet and many friends have written to ask us to respond.  We do, in what follows.  Please forward to your network or anyone worried about these attacks; and take this opportunity to deepen your familiarity with the Mahatma’s legacy.

—

By Michael Nagler

If the greatness of a man or woman can sometimes be measured by the vehemence of his or her detractors, then Mahatma Gandhi is surely the greatest human being of the Twentieth Century, and perhaps more.  Surely he deserves that tribute that Einstein paid him, that “Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this trod the earth in flesh and blood.”

That is the problem with Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography, Great Soul — or at least with the review by Andrew Roberts in the Wall Street Journal for March 26, 2011 (The book itself is sometimes insidiously suggestive but rarely as bad as this and some other reviews which are spreading shockwaves around the internet).  He (Roberts) scarcely can believe that Gandhi could possibly have risen above the reductionist, downtrodden image of humanity into which we have allowed ourselves to be dragged by the culture of modern industrialized and commercially advertising societies. Roberts tips his hand himself when he writes, “Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.”  What a travesty on a man of whom one follower said “it was as if he was always blessing you with his eyes” and others explained they were happy in the ashram “because we are near Bapu [Gandhi].

No, Gandhi was not Ivan Karamazov.  Who was he?

He was a human being who “by a course of long, prayerful discipline” (in more modern language, over years of meditation and allied disciplines) so utterly reduced the ego-function that he could claim, in all humility, to have ceased hating anyone on earth.  Our problem is, we don’t really have a category into which to put such a person.  “Saint” won’t work, for most of us.  Even in India, Gandhi’s self-realization was unusual in that he went all the way with the third, and until recently less-travelled path of karma yoga or realization through selfless action according to the implicit formula of the Bhagavad Gita that I summarize as: Choose the right task (in accordance with your dharma and with the overriding Dharma [eternal Law]), carry it out with the right means (aka nonviolence), and take no ownership of the personal results.  Working 15 hours a day for fifty years to liberate India from the greatest empire the world had ever known — showing the world in so doing the inestimable power of nonviolence — and ending up owning about $10 worth of material possessions: he followed the formula perfectly, and yes, generations to come have scarcely believed it was possible even though it happened.

This lack of a category in which to understand someone of Gandhi’s stature, plus the sheer inconvenience of recognizing his challenge — Gandhi himself had insisted that “any man or woman can do what I have done” — makes it extremely difficult to accept the towering message of that life.  It is not the first time.  The young Rush Limbaugh went on the air after immediately Attenborough’s substantially accurate portrayal of Gandhi appeared in 1980 with the standard litany of detractions that critics fire off from left and right when anyone, especially a nonviolent champion, is mentioned.  And as Gandhi himself said about our civilization, rather cuttingly, “the only people who don’t realize that Jesus was nonviolent are the Christians.”  Because he’s the biggest challenge for them — and the biggest inspiration for Christians who accept that challenge, like those in Christian Peacemaker Teams, Pax Christi, and many others.

Given the recent successes of nonviolence against seemingly entrenched regimes it is not surprising that those who are in alignment with such regimes should seize on these desperate, and shameless attempts to tear down its greatest inspiration.

There are downright falsifications in Roberts’s brief account also, for example where he says that “In August 1942, with the Japanese at the gates of India, having captured most of Burma, Gandhi initiated a campaign designed to hinder the war effort and force the British to ‘Quit India.’”  As a matter of fact, this was one of Gandhi’s greatest feats of restraint.  The British secret war plan, later leaked, was to abandon India the minute the Japanese invaded.  They had prevented him from preparing the country for nonviolent resistance (of the type called Civilian Based Defense, which worked well in the Ruhr invasion of 1923-25 and was to work brilliantly, within a certain frame, in the “Prague Spring” uprising of 1968, etc.) and they declared India at war with Germany without asking her.  Despite all this, Gandhi carried out his policy of “non-embarrassment,” as he had done brilliantly in South Africa with the European railroad workers’s strike of 1913, and offered a “Satyagraha of one” in the person of Vinoba Bhave that specifically did not interfere with the allied war effort while demonstrating India’s continued opposition to her colonization.

But there is really not much point arguing from specifics, because detractors like Limbaugh and Roberts and many others I have argued with over the years are not basing their beliefs on specifics.  They are choosing, or doctoring specifics to fit their beliefs.  Or rather, lack of same: to fit into the narrowness of their vision.

I would recommend to anyone upset by this firestorm to read some truly balanced, reliable biographies like Rajmohan Gandhi’s recent one or Eknath Easwaran’s Gandhi the Man, and above all to keep our minds and hearts open to the possible greatness of the human person, no matter how unfamiliar or out of reach it may appear.

During his lifetime, Gandhi had a genius for turning apparent setbacks in to opportunities.  I have a feeling he’s going to do the same with this one.

By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook

Tamayo and Mitsuo do not have to demonstrate this week.  Our friends from Hiroshima (Mitsuo founded the Center for Nonviolence and Peace in that city) had been going out every week to protest the construction of a new nuclear plant; but this is no ordinary week for the people of Japan, who have seen first hand the horrors of nuclear bombs and now face the threat of nuclear meltdowns.

Today, faced with the possibility of serious nuclear fall-out from several units of the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, the Japanese government has issued a temporary freeze on the construction of new plants, leaving many, many people like Tamayo and Mitsuo to attend to their fellow citizens in need, and to appreciate one another. This, at least, is a strange and painful victory amidst an ocean of catastrophe, and within it we can see a valuable teaching moment for an entire world culture on the brink of collapse and societal, not only nuclear meltdown.   The catastrophe was a form of violence — the violence in nature, abetted by violent practices in the human world.  We should be asking, what is a nonviolent response?

While nonviolence has recently attracted the attention of the world because of its dramatic successes in, for example, Egypt, that is only a fraction of its potential.  Nonviolence is closely linked to the innate creative resources in all of us, though to be sure there is a kind of perverse creativity that can be roused by violence also.  “We are constantly being astounded these days,” wrote Gandhi, “by new developments in the field of violence.  But I maintain that even more astounding developments will be made in the field of nonviolence.”

And he was right.  To illustrate this, let’s look at a slower, even more man-made catastrophe. A neighborhood in North Philadelphia had been made unlivable by the tensions caused by structural violence of racism and poverty—those slow cancers of our society. Apathy ruled, no one had a higher vision for deliberately creating neighborhood of vibrant beauty, assuming that as it must eventually hit bottom, and something better would arise from the ashes.  This is a dangerous kind of thinking that has actually driven some to accept nuclear holocaust by its apocalyptic logic. This is why we take this story as potentially an allegory for our entire situation.  Artist Lily Yeh, however, had a different vision for this neighborhood. She helped to transform it into a viable, healthy village rebuilt by the hands of the children who called it their home.  Where others saw destitution, she saw the potential to create something, the raw material of beauty.  What she did — rousing people to do the needful from local resources without waiting on governments — would be called in nonviolence “constructive programme.”  It is the other half, along with the kind of active resistance we saw in Egypt, of what people can do to rebuild the world in the only way that it will stay rebuilt.

Like Lily Yeh, we have to believe that in spite of collapse, if not because of it, there is potential for us to actively create a more beautiful world from the toxic wasteland on which our planet at present ebbs.  As our colleague, Prof. Randall Amster, has recently written, “It’s all too easy to slip back into complacency, and by now many are no doubt suffering from a sense of ‘disaster fatigue.’ . . . the ultimate disaster would be to ignore this most recent alarm and hit the snooze button instead.”

What Lily Yeh did we must do on a much broader scale.  We are faced with not a neighborhood but a stricken world.  We cannot go on simply rebuilding cities or factories after every setback; we are at a limit.  There is no such thing as a ‘clean’ war with no collateral damage (all damage damages all, on some level); there’s no such thing as a ‘well-built’ nuclear reactor that won’t turn into an environmental monster in the next quake or leave behind unspeakable poisons that endure ten thousand years.

Even if there were, the problem with the consumer culture we have built will not go away. It will still depend on constant “growth” and the obsolescence of ever-more-useless goods.  Worse, it will still go on commoditizing values, ultimately even of people.

It will still promote an illusory habit of mind whereby whenever anything fails ‘we’ll get a new one.’  We’re not going to get a new planet — or a life.

It was Gandhi, again, who put his finger on the core of the problem a hundred years ago (102, to be exact) when he pointed out, in his famous pamphlet Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, that we have built a civilization based on the multiplication of wants instead of the satisfaction of needs.

It is interesting that in Tokyo today, as friends there are telling us, while chain stores and super markets have yet to get their complex systems back on line, local suppliers and mom-and-pop grocery stores are feeding people.

The Japanese people have responded to their crisis with their traditional courage, generosity, and selflessness.  It is inspiring to all of us.  But it is not enough.  We must honor their suffering and their self-sacrificing resilience, but take it further: we must get out of this consumerist civilization altogether.  To do that we will have to learn to live simply, to argue strenuously, and to fight nonviolently when the powers that be try to ignore us.

by Michael Nagler

March 8, 2011, submitted first to Tikkun Magazine.

The nonviolent revolution in Egypt has spread across the Mideast, but in Libya, unfortunately, the “revolution” was picked up without the “nonviolent.”

I have been asked whether there is anything that nonviolence could nonetheless do in the face of the bloodbath that is going on before our eyes in that country. There is, but I would like to consider not one but two questions: what can we do now (which is very little), and what could we be doing if we lived in a more nonviolence-aware world. As we will see, the two questions fold together at one point.

Libya’s convulsion once again caught the “international community” (it’s more like an international schoolyard) flat-footed. Open warfare has already broken out: the scale and stage of the violence are extreme. Yet there is still a way to respond that, while extremely difficult to pull off, could be called nonviolent. We in the nonviolence field will recognize this as a “madman with a sword” analogy. Gandhi said flatly that if a madman is raging through a village with a sword (read: assault rifle — or Glock Automatic) he who “dispatches the lunatic” will have done the community (and even the poor lunatic) a favor. Here are Gandhi’s exact words, from The Hindu, 1926:

Taking life may be a duty…. Suppose a man runs amok and goes furiously about, sword in hand, and killing anyone that comes in his way, and no one dares capture him alive. Anyone who dispatches this lunatic will earn the gratitude of the community and be regarded as a benevolent man.

From other sources, however, we see that to use lethal force without actually being violent is extremely tricky. Remember always, by the way, that we are talking about an extreme emergency. One cannot prepare to use lethal force against such a situation because if one has time to prepare one can prepare nonviolence. Arming airline pilots in case there are hijackers does not count. That understood, several other conditions must be met:

• One must act as far as possible without anger or fear. One must harbor no hatred of the deranged party. Even lunatics are people.
• One must not complain if one is injured in the process. Life will not always appear fair to our limited vision.
• And by far the most important condition: One must not feel that s/he has solved the problem once the maddened person is successfully stopped and innocents protected. Instead, one must dedicate some serious time and effort, to asking how we have created a world where this can happen — and how to change it.

This last, crucial point brings us squarely to the second question. As things are, we have very few options that are not military. Conceivably, the Arab League or some other trusted party could offer to mediate; if the tension were to somehow subside a superb mediation agency like TRANSCEND could also be used. But hatreds are so high now that neither side is likely to call in such a resource. If, or to the extent that, one could intervene with force in the spirit described above and, for example, impose a ceasefire, it could be considered a nonviolent act. Remember that the literal meaning of ahiṃsā (nonviolence) is actually “the absence of the desire to injure.” In other words, if one really acts to protect and not to punish, one is being nonviolent even while using coercive force. But how many of our military personnel are trained not to hate and dehumanize their intended victims? Alas, their training is precisely the reverse. It’s as bad as the “training” young people get from video games — but that must be the subject of another article.

Our options are very thin because we have not explored more creative options than brute force, which always operates after conflict has already flared. Military intervention is now the least bad solution from the point of view of nonviolence, but it is bad. What else is left to us? Of course, we grieve for the victims on both sides: yesterday a three-year-old boy was among the many dead. Of course we pray, repeat our mantram, or do whatever turns our compassion toward the suffering. But the most nonviolent thing any of us can do now is to ask ourselves how we could have been better prepared to head off this tragedy. There is progress being made in all aspects of nonviolence today, but it is agonizingly slow. The following suggestions, among others, could put our grief to work helping that progress along:

• Learn all we can about nonviolence, particularly but not exclusively its applications to large-scale conflict. We at the Metta Center may be able to help. In a nonviolence-aware world, the Libyan people themselves, for example, might have begun with Constructive Program (action taken within the community to build structures, systems, processes, or resources that are positive alternatives to oppression) instead of falling in with the “days of rage” scenario. They might have trained themselves for organized nonviolent resistance when the latter became necessary. And we might have been ready to give them much-appreciated support.
• Use our influence to get peace and nonviolence education into our schools and colleges (at time of this writing, Congress is trying to defund the only official government peace education institution, the U.S. Institute of Peace).
• Get involved with or at least support a group such as Nonviolent Peaceforce or Peace Brigades International. These groups, doing what is now called Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping, have been operating in some of the world’s most serious conflicts for over twenty years, with great success, and if the world had known about them we could have sent teams into Libya — and Yemen, and Bahrain, and so forth — and turned impending disaster to creative progress.
• Inform yourself and act upon measures that can address the root causes of large-scale violence in our world. (In Libya, for example, our “need” for oil caused us to play with a dictator and ignore the plight of his people.) How about supporting Tikkun’s call for a Global Marshal Plan?

Gandhi claimed that he “knew of no case” in which nonviolence had failed, or could in principle possibly fail, although it was perfectly possible that people could fail to understand or use it correctly. Which is what we have been doing. But at least, as the Dalai Lama said, “if you lose, don’t lose the lesson.” The lesson of Libya is to learn about nonviolence and start using it before tragedies like this happen again.