Two Opposing Forces
In some ways, taking to nonviolence gives one a very simple view of life. Violence, despite its seductive appeal in some quarters, is a destructive force. It doesn’t work. it’s simply the wrong kind of energy to use for any purpose. The case of Iraq today is a glaring example. We (the United States) poured blood and treasure into Iraq to neutralize weapons that were not there, to…what were some of the other reasons? Oh, yes, to bring democracy to the Middle East. Instead, this war — and related acts of violence — have brought the Middle East to a state of catastrophic turmoil. Fallujah, where we waged a horrific campaign to drive out the “insurgents” (some say it was a kind of genocide against the civilians, and certainly against international law) is again in turmoil, though press reports that it has been retaken by a branch of Al Qaeda, which did not exist before we attacked the country, are probably misleading. However that may be, as one US commander said during the war, “we are making terrorists faster than we can kill them.”
In a rational world, this would not have surprised anyone. Another commentator warned us years ago, “We failed in Vietnam, and left horror in our wake.” Israel has pursued security through military, ie violent, means for 60 years, and has become one of the least secure countries on the planet.
War is not the only kind of violence that isn’t working, but being nonetheless repeated. Our prevailing system of retributive justice, which is fundamentally a violent system, has been called a costly and disgraceful failure, while experiments in what’s called restorative justice are humanly and financially much more successful. Violent insurrections are half as successful as nonviolent ones; they take three times as long and lead to far less freedom and democracy. Now why should that be? Because freedom and meaningful democracy are positive ends, so you can only reach them by positive means: in this case the positive energy of courageous, creative, daring nonviolence.
As the Jewish sages said, two opposing forces operate in the human spirit: yetsir ha ra and yetsir ha tov, the evil urge and the good urge. St. Augustine echoed, duo amores faciunt duas civitates, “two drives (literally, “loves”) lead to two different orders.: Dualism can be dangerous if you start identifying people, countries, races or whatever as the locus of evil. But it’s helpful, possibly even essential for our survival, to realize that this duality exists within each of us. It means that human beings can choose, at any moment, to be and to act in ways that are either violent or nonviolent, with the profoundly different consequences that we see all around us, but mostly fail to recognize.
What would it take to get people to look at life through this lens, to look at any social (or personal, or international) question and ask themselves, what’s the nonviolent way to address this? One thing that would work is to calmly and patiently point out whenever we get the chance, writing or speaking, that “This method we’re using is harming people or life in general; that’s violence. It never works, in the end. Try this one, that helps people get closer and protect life — that’s actually a form of nonviolence, and that’s where we want to go.” In time that frame, grounded as it is in the simple truth, could get picked up in the media and education, in all the ways that we talk to one another and construct our world. I have enough faith in human nature to believe that even a challenging truth — for some, especially a challenging truth — cannot but prevail against a harmful and ignoble falsehood in the end.
