Metta’s Opinion

By Michael Nagler and Stephanie Van Hook

“Our highest self is our real self.”

-Michael Nagler-

At a seminar we recently taught for the Metta Center for Nonviolence’s Vice-President, Cynthia Boaz, we had a frustrating time ‘selling’ some of the students on the efficacy of nonviolence.  Once again it caused us to reflect, why people cannot bring themselves to believe, in the face of mounting evidence, that there is a power with a proven track record and a growing body of theory behind it that people can use to gain freedom and right many kinds of wrongs without reproducing the destructiveness they seek to redress.

This is why:

Violence “works” by appealing to our instinct for self-preservation. People who use threat power are trying to get something for themselves; it may not be a matter of life or death in all cases, but you are after something you want, something you think you need to preserve or enhance your own life, if necessary at someone else’s expense.  With enough advertising, we attempt to convince ourselves that we actually enjoy and find pleasure in essentially alienating behavior.  Pushed to the extreme case, we believe without question that the idea of killing, instead of being killed, is infinitely more appealing: the emphasis of advertising on self-gratification and letting our impulses run amok only strengthens this belief.  Of course there is a model of the world that leads you to this belief, namely that people are separate, material packages locked into a universe of competition for scarce (i.e., material) resources.  This besetting idea of scarcity spreads even to resources that are by nature unlimited, like respect: you think you can get it by taking it from another, i.e. humiliating him or her. There is no doubt that this instinct and this vision (whichever comes first) is in every one of us, and it’s very strong.

Fortunately, it is not the only way we see the world or the only drive we can use to change it.

Nonviolence works by appealing to our instinct for self-sacrifice.  Which is why Gandhi said that we become fulfilled by curbing, not pursuing, self-gratification for the benefit of the larger whole.  The term ‘instinct’ has fallen out of use in most behavioral sciences today, but whatever term we use, our own experiences and a long and deep tradition of human wisdom confirms that an urge to help others, if necessary to sacrifice oneself for their well-being is also there, and if anything it is even deeper than the urge for self-preservation which, under the wrong circumstances, produces violence.  According to a famous verse in the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita (III.14), the world-process is a cycle whereby rain falls to nourish plants, plants become man’s food, man sacrifices to keep the cycle going: following this law established at the creation, the Lord says, ‘may you thrive.’  In a much-admired poem by Jalal ad-Din Rumi, evolution is described from the point of view of the self who transmigrates through the various stages of existence: ‘from mineral you became plant, from plant you became animal, from animal you became a human being, endowed with knowledge, intellect, and faith . . . when have you ever lost by dying?’  When we feel moved to give up something of ourselves for another — or for the life process in general — we are obeying a law that is embedded in the very nature of reality, of life itself.  And it is not a real sacrifice, because just as the violent actor is acting out a particular vision, namely that we are all separate, that competition and ultimately violence are “normal,” the nonviolent actor, the satyagrahi (in Gandhian terms) is acting out a vision that we are all interconnected, if not actually in some way one.  As Martin Luther King put it, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”  Even in the few decades since Martin Luther King first wrote these words (in the Letter From Birmingham Jail, 1963), science has added powerful experimental support to this mutuality, in fields from quantum physics to neuroscience and psychology.

The tragedy that surfaced briefly in that seminar is that we are using the tools of culture — and these are powerful tools in this electronic age — to reflect back to ourselves, and thereby normalize and exacerbate, only the first, and more destructive instinct.  The film “Titanic” vividly depicted the selfishness and cruelty of men in the panic for self-preservation on the sinking vessel.  Yet to this day there stands on the New Jersey shore a plaque that is lovingly dedicated by the women survivors to the men of the Titanic who gave up their own lives to save them.

Are we the only ones who feel that this plaque is more thrilling than the grubby illusion created in its stead by a hit movie? Probably not, for we know that behind the thrill lies a glimpse of our highest human potential. While we who believe that we can actually use nonviolence to convert our negative drives into positive, constructive and healthy ones are in a minority at present, there is no reason to be daunted by the challenge before us, because the first myth to fall away when we become aware of our nonviolent potential is that we are not as powerless as we were taught to believe.

This is why at Metta we have long felt that boycotting media that present a demoralizing — and false — image of humanity, and instead learning everything we can about nonviolence is crucial to not only our personal sanity but human progress.

By Michael Nagler

When is a whistleblower not a whistleblower?  When he’s a scapegoat. Pfc. Bradley Manning is an unfortunate – and a challenging – case in point, and to understand why we need to see it in context.

The military and large corporations — two institutions that play defining roles in our industrial civilization — tend to drape themselves in the legal fiction that a person can pass his or her responsibility off on others. In the military, the concept of “just following orders” is still invoked though it was discredited by the Nuremberg trials.  In traditional corporations with publically traded exposure not only are employees required to follow a similar chain of command, but shareholders invest capacity into the entity without being legally accountable for any misdeeds it carries out in the course of its activities.  The equivalent of “inc.” in German, “GmbH” stands for ‘group with limited responsibility.’  But we lose something of ourselves, something essentially human, when we give away responsibility for our own actions — or think we can.  In our case we now have the bizarre situation where corporations are considered ‘legal persons’ while actual persons are deprived of their humanity by an established fiction!  The possibilities for abuse are endless.

The need for this legerdemain is inherent in the purposes of these two institutions.  The military, tasked with carrying out society’s ‘legitimate’ violence, and the corporation, designed to generate material profits, need to pretend that they can reassign responsibility, since one cannot make oneself an instrument of violence and/or greed without committing misdeeds, whether or not they are recognized as such in law.  I am not saying that this is all that corporations, or even I suppose the military do; but they do enough of it to constitute a danger that we have to address, and the fiction of transferred responsibility prevents us from addressing them.  If these two institutions cannot operate without this legal fiction and all the violence that fiction enables we may have to find entirely different ways of doing business and defense.

To be sure, the need for this pretense says something positive about human nature.  It is like the phenomenon that psychologist Rachel MacNair calls Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress: the phenomenon that is tormenting so many troops who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan only to commit suicide at home.  As David Swanson recently wrote in War is a Lie, those “who survive war are far more likely now to have been trained and conditioned to do things they cannot live with having done.” But neither that remorse nor the legal fiction that they were not responsible for what they did can by themselves save the soldiers or the society they serve.  We have to learn the lesson of that remorse and that need to dissemble. We have to realize that they are telling us to find alternatives to the abusive systems that caused them — alternatives like nonviolent defense, needs-based rather than consumption-oriented economies, and so forth.

Scapegoating has been around for a long time.  It was invented by nearly all cultures, who went to great lengths to convince themselves that it was legitimate, and effective.  It may seem absurd to us that the sins of a community could be loaded onto a goat and driven out into the wilderness, but the Israelites needed to believe it, and so they did.  No doubt the idea that a close subordinate can be designated to “take the heat,” be “thrown under the bus” whenever a president is caught doing certain types of misdeed (the particular types that matter can vary erratically — this is how Bill Clinton was hung for doing something that had been passed over in silence since the beginning of the Republic) will be just as absurd to future, hopefully more enlightened generations.

René Girard has devoted his career to exposing the dynamic of scapegoating: its dire presence in many cultural forms from antiquity onwards (or much earlier, if you look at some primate behaviors), the characteristic signs of the designated scapegoat (they turn out to be remarkably uniform across many cultures — incest or other sexual irregularities show up everywhere), and how as civilization progresses institutions like law and monotheistic belief systems were created as, among other things, attempts to replace the scapegoat response.  He notes that in Jewish law, for example, if a person is accused by everyone in the community he must be set free.  This counterintuitive prescription was introduced because “unanimous violence” is a telltale sign that what’s going on is scapegoating, and it is better to let a few guilty ones go free than give rein to a system that destroys so many innocents — to so little good.

For scapegoating at best can defuse or deflect violence without resolving it.  In itself it can at best bring some conflicts to a stalemate, while dangerously inflaming others.  It can never bring peace.  It is time to move on.  If Girard’s historical reconstruction and interpretation of Judeo-Christian experiences is correct, it has been time for two thousand years.  The reason modern examples of scapegoating have been so violently destructive on such a huge scale (think of the holocaust) is precisely that they belong to a bygone era and should have been outgrown long since.  (The very term ‘holocaust’ comes from the ancient Greek word for the kind of sacrifice where the victim is completely consumed by fire — if you believe it, dedicated to the gods — instead of being shared out to the community as food).

One of Girard’s more brilliant discoveries was that to maintain the fiction of its efficacy the scapegoating system must conceal the inconvenient fact that the victim had nothing to do with the problem.  Scapegoat literature never allows the victim to speak, unless it puts convenient confessions of guilt into their mouth, as in the case of Sophocles’ Oedipus, who not only admits that he is guilty of incest but punishes and expels himself so that the community is spared the trouble — and the pollution that can accrue to sacrificers, You could not ask for a ‘better’ victim.  Job, on the other hand, introduces new moral era.  When he refuses, in the text we now have, to admit that he is guilty because he in fact isn’t, he breaks the cycle, and God (the real one, capital ‘G’) responds entirely differently than the pagan consumer-gods who ‘accept’ the sacrifice. We need hardly speak here of the words of Jesus: “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

This is now the critical point: do we?  Do we know what we are doing when we let military ‘justice’ subject Pfc. Bradley Manning to the inhumane punishment of solitary confinement — the equivalent of expulsion from the land of the living — now for going on nine months on the grounds of ‘Prevention of Injury’ for which there is no psychiatric justification.  Manning’s attorney David E. Coombs, writing in the Washington Post, on January 21^st, said, “The fact that they won’t articulate any basis for it leaves you with no other conclusion than it must be punitive” . . . or that no articulate basis is needed when your thinking is not really legal but mythic.

There is such a thing as moral progress.  That is why the suicide rate among combatants has steadily increased with Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan — because the moral awareness that war is a very wrong thing to do is increasing.  As the social evangelist Kirby Page said in the simplest terms at the beginning of the last century, “War is a sin.  It is the greatest social sin we are responsible for.” Our refusal to come to use that awareness becomes steadily more problematic, throwing us back onto progressively more outmoded forms of coping.  War is becoming an outdated institution.  So is scapegoating.  The more outdated, the more destructive they become.

Some praise the likes of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange for their courage, while others hate and fear them.  Both reactions are understandable.  But if as a society we scapegoat them we are only trying to shift our own burden of guilt onto their shoulders, and to think we can get away with that for very long is a dangerous delusion.

By Michael Nagler

The night after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and six others were shot I happened to be officiating at the celebration for the career of a close friend of mine who has devoted his life to the search for nonviolence and peace.  There were nearly 200 of us from a great variety of organizations, all of which had stories about nonviolent actions and projects they had done that worked.

I must confess that when the shock of grief has worn off after an event like this horrific shooting I hear myself asking my fellow Americans, in some exasperation, how long do you want this to go on?

Happily, this time things were a little bit different, in one respect.  For the first time I am aware of there was, in almost all the commentaries, the hint of an apparently forbidden truth: that we bring violence on ourselves when we promote it, glorify it, or legitimize it, as in this case by the extreme rhetoric associated with former Governor Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

Let us by all means seize on that hint.  It is exactly right that when we are goaded into violence by our words or thoughts we – and not just a few deranged killers – get that much closer to ‘losing it’ and acting out some form of destruction in real life.  Massive scientific evidence confirms this connection, which is anyway obvious if you know anything about human nature.  What we think we eventually do; when we think righteous hatred we will do vile things that are unworthy of us as humans.

Now that the path from Tea Party rhetoric to the bloodying of democracy has been exposed, then, we should hold onto that insight, for it might just save us.

But to make full use of it we have to take it further.  We have to realize, as I suggested above, that this connection is the tip of an iceberg.  Before there was the ‘let’s get ‘em’ rhetoric of the Tea Party there was the incessant, pervasive violence of nearly all our commercial mainstream mass media that makes such rhetoric sound normal.  “Find out how much fun it is to rob, attack, and take out contracts on your friends.”  This is not the raving of an isolated lunatic: it’s the open advertisement of a recent, and I gather a quite popular video game.  We have grown so used to this violence, with its steadily increasing brutality and sophistication that we consider it a normal way to entertain ourselves – and the grim consequences roll on.

The iceberg has another dimension, too.  During the Detroit riots of 1967 President Lyndon Johnson complained, ‘we have passed through a week that no nation should be forced to endure’.  But he had been forcing Vietnam to endure much worse for two years.  He missed the connection.  We must not.  A nation that dedicates itself to the use of violence for its foreign policy (and its entertainment forms, and its criminal justice system) can never expect to live free from violence in its own social fabric.  Life – the human mind – doesn’t work that way.  If we want to live free from violence we have to turn to healthy forms of culture, away from retributive to restorative models of criminal justice, and a foreign policy more like the methods and vision that my friends were sharing in San Francisco the night of the Tucson massacre.  Toning down the incivility and incitement in today’s right-wing rhetoric is a good start, but let us use this tragedy to go much further.

Jared Loughner, the perpetrator of the rampage, is in the hands of the law.  That means that at this point we could make, if we’re not careful, a dangerous mistake: to think that we had solved anything by visiting either our clemency or our desire for revenge on the one person who did the shooting that terrible day.  To wash our hands of the whole affair and our indirect responsibility in it in this way would be to miss an opportunity of national significance.

So let us by all means see to it that the rhetoric of political assassination ends now; but let us also look to all the dimensions of violence that have invaded our culture and politics and replace them with healthier alternatives, lest what died in Tucson be our chance at a robust democracy and a humane life.

By: Stephanie N. Van Hook and Michael N. Nagler

In 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church called “Beyond Vietnam,” where he declared that his conscience would not allow him to remain silent on the question of Vietnam, on the horrors of war, on the threat of violence to our existence. In this speech he pointed out the irony that young men of color were welcomed to join the military in order to burn villages and kill the people of Vietnam in the name of a democracy and of freedoms not yet granted to them in the country for which they fought. They could kill and wreak havoc side by side with white Americans in combat abroad, but they could not sit by one another in the same school or eat together at the same restaurant back home.

I could not help but be reminded of this speech when a colleague suggested that the repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” legislation showed that, again in King’s words, “the arc of the universe bends toward justice.” But this colleague left out the most important word in that sentence: “the  arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” What is “moral” about war?  War is and will always be immoral because it demands of us to violate the first principle of moral conduct: thou shalt not kill. And while it is moral and right to stand firmly for conscience, which the lesbian and gay community achieves by not hiding their sexual identity, preferring to be open about whom they love, it is the moral right of no-one to wage war and to kill.

Members of the lesbian and gay communities, this legislation is not a step toward justice. Marriage would be justice. Ensuring funding to eradicate anti-gay or anti-lesbian hate-crimes would be justice. Serving in the military openly? Sure, it is a victory. It was fought for, tooth and nail and won.  It represents a new generation for whom sexual identity is, politically, a non-issue. It could even possibly chip away at the war system from within if one is apt to believe that homophobia breeds militarism. But, please, friends, do not call it justice. Remembering King once more, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and drone attacks on Pakistani villages carried out by US service men and women–regardless of their sexual identity–is and can never be justice–never.  I am not thinking only of the victims on the receiving end of this violence: as David Swanson recently wrote in his superb War is a Lie, those “who survive war are far more likely now to have been trained and conditioned to do things they cannot live with having done.”

On the other hand, we stand to learn something from the successful campaign to end sexual discrimination in the military, precisely by being aware of this deep contradiction, by realizing that this victory in the matter of sexual identity was purchased at the cost of a much greater sacrifice; the matter of conscience about war. Don’t ask about the families of the people in Afghanistan. Don’t ask if they love life or have children the age of your children. Don’t ask if they may have the capacity to love even the ones who have bombed their village. Don’t tell that you question the motives of the government who sent you abroad to wage war. Don’t tell that you are scared to death. Don’t tell that you have nightmares. Don’t tell that you think of committing suicide upon returning home if not before. Don’t tell that you are lost, isolated. Because asking and telling such facts opens up the possibility of ending a military career — and in time, who knows, ending militarism itself through the power of truth.

Violence is the weakest possible force for change we have available to us, and the most destructive to those who use it.  It does not take a strong person to use violence, nor does it leave one stronger for using it. Don’t tell anyone about this…

Dr. King said that we have a choice: nonviolence or nonexistence. Only a person who has understood nonviolence would be willing to give up their career for conscience; to render service to a country by building up and not tearing down, to make a lasting contribution to the whole of justice, not only what feels like a kind of justice for oneself.

It has often been my observation that we of a progressive persuasion can be easily fooled by our relatively narrow focus on  equality for one or another group, forgetting the question of equality for all.  Poor people can step up economically by being conditioned to kill for the state; now lesbians and gays can emerge from a social shadow (and I do not minimize the value of this) by undergoing a far deeper kind of dehumanization.

These are Pyrrhic victories.  Let us not rejoice until we have won the only kind of victory that endures: the victory of everyone over the violence that hurts us all.

On the bus from Incheon Airport to Seoul where we were going to participate in a six-nation seminar on nonviolence and the possibilities for reunification we found ourselves across the aisle from a young fellow who was eager to show us pictures of his recent trip to the North where, we would soon learn, groups had been regularly going to try to sew the fabric of the divided country back together.  In fact, we were soon to experience at first hand the yearning for reunification among people in South Korea, and infer that it is at least as strong in the North.  The war games going on right now – at least as far as the Korean people is concerned – is a lovers’ quarrel.

But that is the trouble: there is not much room for the Korean people to work this out on their own.  Superpowers rarely show much concern for the nations in whose fates they intervene – or for that matter, much wisdom.  That is why the Korean conflict seems intractable — and also why it has to be resolved.   From this conflict, global hostilities could be reignited.

So it was with interest that I scanned a recent editorial in a newspaper of record listing possible scenarios and four things we (the U.S. and available allies) could do.  The first was violent.  So was the second.  So were the third and the fourth (that the U.S. and South Korea could simply outmaneuver the North with our superior technology and weapons).

Anyone who studies conflict knows that there are two ways to go about resolving one. There is of course a violent path, that leads ultimately to war, but there is also a nonviolent one that leads to reconciliation and the resumption of normal ties.  Scholars and activists alike know that the latter are far less costly, in life and property, and constitute really the only choice if we want a permanent solution without the residue of hatred that follows conquest.  But public discourse and state policy are perfectly innocent of this knowledge, almost as if the world of video games and “action movies” rather than historical experience and scientific logic circumscribed their vision.  So some conflict science, if we can inject it into the discourse, might just work wonders.  What would it tell us?

As in any conflict, large or small, one has to start with the assumption — so far conspicuously absent here — that the people of North Korea, yes, including their leadership, are rational.  They have a problem: they want respect, fulfillment of their basic needs, security and (as far as the people themselves are concerned) freedom.   If they use extreme and sometimes counterproductive methods to achieve these results it is because they do not know any others.  Do we?

If we do, our approach should be not to force them to give up on these goals but to help them find other, less extreme ways of achieving them. So far the approach I’m describing is well known and has a well developed technology, if you will, that goes by the name of  Nonviolent Communication, or NVC.

But what if it doesn’t work?  What if the North Korean leadership clings to their destructive pattern of behavior, as is not uncommon in extreme conflicts?  Then it will be time for what Gandhi called Satyagraha, which has the power, as he demonstrated and explained to “compel reason to be free”  Koreans are no strangers to this science.  They used it successfully in their dangerous uprising against the Syngman Rhee regime in the “April 19^th Movement” of 1960.  Last year Buddhist monks, who for centuries kept to themselves, joined with popular demonstrations against the insane government-sponsored scheme to dig a canal across the Korean peninsula (the results of that campaign are pending).

Popular resistance based on the nonviolent methodologies that have sprung up steadily since Gandhi and King, could be used to compel the government to adopt reconciliatory, mutually respectful approaches to the North, despite U.S. pressure.  In fact, though space prevents me from going into details, nonviolence could be brought to bear both within the two Koreas and between them.

Furthermore, nonviolence is not limited to resistance.  The other string to the nonviolent bow is what Gandhi called “constructive programme.”  There is much Koreans could do – with the judicious help of international non-profits where needed – to build bridges toward northerners, who after all have some dire physical needs that could be addressed in a respectful way (as was done in Sri Lanka by the longstanding Sarvodaya movement).

While I’ve been stressing what Koreans could do without, indeed despite, U.S. or other foreign intervention, it is not to say that we should take a hands-off attitude.  Rather, we should say to the policymakers we can reach, ‘if you want to interfere, interfere usefully.’  U.S. intervention came down (for once) on the side of the student-led uprising against President Slobodan Milośevič in Serbia ten years ago, with the result that he was deposed bloodlessly and inexpensively (after a hugely expensive NATO campaign had failed to do this in much more time than it took the 2000 uprising).

Nonviolence can be learned, up to a point, as can any other method of peace and reconciliation.   At present there are no peace studies programs per se in the educational system of the South (not to mention the North!); the South Korean system could be rapidly brought up to speed, ensuring that the next generation would not have to wait until tensions rose as high as they are now to resolve their conflicts.  Koreans themselves are quite ready for this (the second translation in which my book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future was published is Korean.)

There has been a tentative diplomatic opening between the two sides recently, which we should take advantage of.  But let us not be content with just another standoff, which is about the best normal diplomacy, left to itself, would bring.  The Korean people and the world want and deserve more.  They want and deserve real peace, leading in due course to reunification — and with the right means all of this is possible.

Michael N. Nagler

Rabbi Michael Lerner’s recent call to the progressive community to run a candidate who would put pressure on President Obama to move back to the agenda he laid out, or rather implied, in his inspiring campaign of November, 2008 puts attention back on the natural, but misleading question of his personal style and positions.  We should realize that his rousing success in 2008 was based on political skill, not a concerted attempt to educate the public about the validity of his views.  “Hope” and “change” are emotions, not policies, and while you and I may have read into that hope and change what we wanted those stirring words to mean, others were free to take them as meaning something else, and no one was made any wiser during the bruising electoral process.  (The last political leader I know of to insist that his followers understood exactly what he was doing, and why, was Gandhi – who never stood for office in free India’s government).  The Republicans, smarting from what they perceived as a defeat (in days of yore it might have been accepted as a political decision, not a popularity contest) bent every effort to stonewall his agenda, and despite the enthusiasm that greeted Obama’s 2008 campaign they succeeded handily. The fact is that they can influence the minds of the most voters far more easily than progressives of any stripe.  Whatever may have been his failures and miscalculations, therefore, we must take into account that the President – or any of us for that matter – is not playing on a level field.

The field is unbalanced by two potent factors, one so secret that no one talks about it and the other so obvious that no one seems to notice it.  It is not fun to talk about the first, but we must: whatever may be the democratic structure of our government —and for my money it’s the best in the world, on paper — there is a criminal element operating within and around it, who will stop at no outrage.  I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I know enough physics to know that three buildings of the World Trade Center, one of which was not struck by an airplane, did not collapse from the impact or the ensuing fires of 9/11.  I am not a conspiracy theorist but I have followed the writings of Jim Douglass and others closely enough to know that JFK was almost certainly not felled by a lone gunman firing three incredibly accurate shots from the Texas Book Depository Building on November 22, 1963.   Let’s face it: whatever you and I decide at the ballot box, these people can reverse in the real world.  They can carry out the most outrageous crimes with impunity — their own conscience aside.

The vast majority of Republican voters and office-holders are, of course, no part of these cabals and that is not what I am suggesting.  Most of them would disagree with the actions of these shadowy operatives as vehemently as we do.  Nonetheless they are, simply by the nature of their policies, less of a threat to them than progressives – and consequently less threatened by them.  A George Bush need not fear assassination from this quarter, but a Barack Obama does have to live in the shadow of that threat.

There is little an ordinary citizen like you and me can do directly about this political cancer, but there may be a way to affect the general culture that supports it.  Think about Rush Limbaugh.  This man envenoms the minds of 25-35 million unsophisticated potential voters every day.  And he is only one representative of this brand of hate radio that in the long run can be as damaging, if less overtly so, as the radio stations that instigated the Rwandan genocide.  But he could not do this in a vacuum: he does it in a climate of incivility, a culture where, to quote a colleague of mine at Berkeley, “we are increasing violence by every means possible.”  Every conversation that takes place, every public decision that is made, virtually every thought that is thought inside of us takes place in this toxic environment.

Michael Tomasky recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books that Republicans have the great advantage of being able to speak grandly about “freedom,” “saving America from Socialism” and other exciting themes that are by no means less compelling for being false, while “any sense that the Democrats are now making a coherent argument about what kind of country they want has vaporized.”   But this is easy to understand when the majority of us still subscribe to an image of the human being as a bodily object, struggling for survival in a world of ever-diminishing resources.  How can you rouse enthusiasm about health care when most of our fellow citizens consciously or unconsciously believe that another’s suffering does not affect them and we are doomed to carry out our private struggle for existence in an unforgiving world?  What’s the use of protesting war when most people, however much some of them hate it, believe that war is the only way to protect themselves in a perpetually hostile world?

There is a way, then, that Democrats — or any of us — can start to weigh against the toxicity of our cultural matrix: we can be very bold about the world we believe is possible.  However naïve it will sound to some, we can state clearly that, no: we are not finite, material, separate beings acted upon by random forces in a universe without meaning.  We are spiritual beings, the manifestations of a consciousness that is unitary throughout the universe, and we have come into being to discover that very unity.  Therefore we are not doomed to competition and violence against each other and our natural environment; on the contrary we are destined to create beloved community on a healthy planet.  Without this vision, nothing that we intuitively want makes sense: with it, nothing else does.

Please share this article with friends and consider subscribing to our “Beloved Community Subscription Circle”on our site.  Questions or comments on the ideas presented in this article can be sent to “ask Metta.”

Dear Friends,

Many non-profits (or as we like to call them, social profits) take time in this Christmas season to reconnect with their friends and colleagues, share a few words about what the year has meant for them, and make an appeal for funds.  But which of them can make the proud claim that their staff, volunteers, and board members have dedicated their lives to promoting the very principle that has made this time of year special throughout the world – the principle of nonviolence and peace?

It gives me much warmth and happiness, then, to share with you that despite the many dark clouds of 2010 – or indeed partly because of them – the Metta Center for Nonviolence has grown inwardly and reached out to touch the lives of many more people around the world.   Over the past month we have received urgent questions from journalists in Ecuador, school teachers in Ohio, interfaith communities in Michigan, and activists in Israel and Afghanistan.  Promoting nonviolence in a world that seems obsessed with cruelty, holding aloft a noble and promising image of the human being in a world that unaccountably seems to put its own dignity last, could be lonely work.  We would do it even if it were, because that is our inspiration and the meaning of our lives; but fortunately we don’t have to because we feel so close to you.

The other day in one of our monthly conference calls that has brought people from India, Israel and elsewhere into the circle we said that a person in need can either demand help or request it (and that the former is something akin to violence while the latter is less so).  It occurred to me that there is still a third stage, for when one is in need it creates a situation of opportunity for others to do something we all need and crave (whether we’re aware of it or not): to connect with others through loving service.  So beyond demand and request there is the most nonviolent alternative of all, to invite others into “loving community.”  We want to extend to you the opportunity to join us in the planet’s most needed work by inviting you to invest a loving financial gift in the mission of Metta Center for Nonviolence this holiday season. We encourage you to do so in the name of a family member or friend, especially, in this season of generosity and caring.

We gratefully accept both checks at our main office at 1730 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berkeley, California 94709 or credit cards on our website by clicking here.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once remarked, “No social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals.” Every monetary investment from you cheers us on in our persistent efforts as we experience, with deep appreciation, your loving support.

Onward toward a nonviolent future,

Michael N. Nagler,

President and Founder