Embrace the Challenge

Transcript

[Music – You Are My Sunshine]

Yes. Greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler. With your Nonviolent Moment broadcast. And, I have to say, please don't take our sunshine away is pretty much exactly how I feel here in America at the moment.

The present moment, does not look very promising for nonviolence, to say the least. But actually, this is just where nonviolence is tested. Not when everything is hunky-dory, and there isn't much resistance to work against. It's a little bit like a muscle in that regard. And that analogy has been used from time to time.

So, if I were to designate a theme for today's program and the moment that we are in, I would say embrace the challenge. And how are we going to embrace it? Well, on various levels in various ways. One thing I like to draw attention to is the capacity of building quietly for the future. Quietly, meaning you can get much further without provoking opposition than you can if you just go out and protest.

So we should be building quietly for our future, whoever holds office. And there are some things that we can do which don't seem partisan or seem uncontroversial, like boy, getting rid of the electoral college would really be a good idea.

But even if we do that, think of what Alexander Hamilton said, you know, democracy – I'm paraphrasing, of course, democracy is fine as long as the voters are educated. And I like to boil down that education into one simple human task, to know the difference between good and evil. Simple, but very, very hard hitting. I'll be saying a little bit more about that, and make it a little bit more concrete.

But there are so many modalities in which we practice education, formally and informally. And what of course, rises up, always is some kind of an attempt to reform redirect the mass media. What we have right now is moneyed interests. And you know who you are. They purchase the media, media influences people's mind, and there goes the election.

There are alternative media, like the one you're listening to right now. And if we had that kind of money and wattage behind us, I have no doubt that we could turn things around rather quickly. History has given us examples of very rapid paradigm shifts.

One of my favorite ones is at the end of the Birmingham bus boycott. The buses in Birmingham were integrated, and the first day the buses rolled out, everybody thought, oh, what's going to happen? It's going to be such a shock, it’ll be terrible. And within a couple of hours it was business as usual, as though the buses had always been integrated in Birmingham.

So, education, trying to influence the media, build our own – partly a matter of building our own media, partly a matter of getting into the media that already exists, which is not very easy.

And the second level of building for the future is to build networks. And I think that's going on. We're seeing groups of individuals and, quite conspicuously nowadays in this particular nonviolent moment, what we've been seeing is a lot of intersectional co-operative networks of organizations.

There's almost no peace organization that I know of today – and that includes our own, the Metta Center for Nonviolence – which is not collaborating with other like-minded networks. Usually within a particular sector of the nonviolent changes that have to happen, like electoral reform, you know, political, educational, cultural, and of course, climate, which seems to always get the lion's share of the attention.

This building of networks had a very interesting recent history. In the Spanish Civil War, suddenly a large group of very dedicated, very idealistic people was confronting, armed, entrenched opposition, with a very authoritarian leadership. And what they founded, kind of spontaneously, were called “Grupos de afinidad.” And we now talk about affinity groups. Groups of about, oh, I don't know, 20-30 people, maybe less, who plan things, operate together.

I've just recently read a book by Lisa Fithian called “Shut It Down,” about how these groups sprang up on many projects, from Standing Rock on out. And it turns out that people cooperate very well in that size of organization, which actually seems to go back to the Stone Age, but we needn’t quite go there right now.

And then so, okay, there's educating, there's building networks of like-minded people, affinity groups, and then we need to create organizations and institutions for a new future. We need to pass laws that facilitate them.

So, the idea, generally speaking, is to protect what we can and above all, not to lose faith in nonviolence or in human nature, which turn out to be the same thing. We never seem to tire of getting new angles on this central truth here at the Metta Center and on our Nonviolent Movement broadcast, that nonviolence is not just a technique that's adopted and dropped. It is, as is widely recognized nowadays, a way of life. And I like to go a big step further, a giant step deeper, and say with Gandhi and others who have practiced nonviolence and discovered this, that nonviolence is our human nature.

As Saint Augustine said, “It is an irreversible part of human nature to seek affiliation with as many of our fellow human beings as we can.” And that's one aspect of nonviolence – to form community, to realize the underlying potential of the human community. And everything that we can do to make that more accepted, make it possible, will be a big step forward in the nonviolent future.

But above all, as many people have been saying, not to lose faith. And again, I want to say in nonviolence or in human nature, which have a really big overlap. And everything we recommend people to do today, this is where we’ve grown a little bit beyond movements of the past. Our suggestions are all predicated on the necessity, the opportunity, the obligation of the individual to care for him or herself. And that means inner well-being and outer well-being.

We know that, for example, if you violate the core principle of nonviolence within us, you can easily end up with something called moral injury. Articles we see nowadays about combat veterans, from whatever war we happen to be leading or have recently carried on, and how they are suffering terrific brain damage from being close to explosions. And these are not primarily explosions of weapons aimed at them, but weapons that they themselves are firing. So there's a kind of very tragic, ironic, justice, if you want to call it that. I mean, this is just one gross physical symptom of what conflict does, even to those who dish it out, not to mention those who are injured by it. 

But we are much more aware today of moral injury, and that is the pain that’s suffered in the psyche of the individual who harms another. And there are many different scientific avenues that have brought a concrete reality to that danger of moral injury. But much less attention has been paid, and I think it would be strategically wiser to do this even more, what are, logically, the benefits of human kindness, of feeling that you are part of a deep community with others, that you are not alone in this world, that the human family is not just a metaphor?

It doesn't just refer to the fact that a lot of us are around, but rather to the fact that there really is a deep familial connection among all of us. In the news broadcast yesterday, I brought up one interesting, anecdotal, but I think very telling example of that which occurred after the tsunami – the terrible tsunami that struck the coast of Sri Lanka. I think it was 1992.

There was an American military personnel on hand. And he spent all day handing out blankets and first-aid supplies and food stuffs, meals-ready-to-eat and stuff like that. He was kind of exhausted at the end of the day. A journalist asked him, “This is not what you were trained for. How do you feel about this?” And he said, I have been serving my country for 34 years, and this is the first day I ever got any satisfaction out of it. So that is the positive, other component of moral injury, which is the negative, the shadow side of the same.

We belong to one another. And when we discover that and build on that and build institutions for that, which is happening at a painfully slow rate, we come alive in a very real way. In a way which doesn't lock us in what Albert Einstein called that prison house of our own thoughts, feelings, and so forth.

So in the struggles that we are now facing in this critical and challenging moment, I don't think we will be able to avoid pain and sacrifice of various kinds. And so, we shouldn't just try to avoid it. We would render ourselves useless if we do that. And this is a time when our contribution is needed, every single one of us.

So, what to do about all of that discomfort, that pain, that suffering, that sacrifice? I think one thing it helps me is to remind myself that it's going to happen anyway. Even if we do nothing, in fact, it'll happen kind of worse. So, it's much better if we're engaged, acting and seeking consequences.

And the other principle that I've relied on and seems to work out, is that the amount of success is, usually, roughly equivalent to the amount of effort/struggle that we put into it. So, on the one hand, it's very important not to seek out suffering, but not to fear it when it comes our way.

And that's when I say, don't seek it out. I don't mean that civil disobedience is ruled out. I couldn't possibly say that here on The Nonviolent Moment. But it should be undertaken at the right degree, pointed at the right issues, and with the right attitude. The attitude namely of I am laying down this sacrifice and I hope that it will be accepted and effective.

Incidentally, I started today by talking about the fact that these are the times that try nonviolent people's souls. You know, our nonviolence is being tested. And I was remembering someone who – this takes me right back to my previous career as a comparative literature scholar, John Milton, the English poet, who wrote “Paradise Lost,” which is, funnily enough, something that I just quoted. He said in an essay, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, but one that sallies forth to meet its enemies.”

And for virtue here, his meaning of that term was closer to the Dantesque and Latinate meaning of virtu, which is connected with virility, which means strength. So, it's not just an abstract law that's put up on the wall, you know, “thou shalt not,” but an actual moral power within the human being.

So I thought I'd like to share a couple of types of stories with you before, going into a little bit of today's news. A couple of stories on the personal level. There is a famous parable, and I can't vouch for its literal truthfulness, but it definitely doesn't matter. It's about a brigand, a samurai who breaks into a Zen monastery in Japan, and he's killing people. And the abbot in the monastery is sitting there calmly. And he rushes up to him with a sword, raises the sword, and then notices that the Zen master is not even blinking.

And the samurai says, “Don't you know who I am? I could kill you without blinking an eye.” And the Zen master says calmly, “And don't you know who I am? I could let you kill me without blinking an eye.” There's a nonviolent lesson buried in that little response.

And I'm also reminded of a terrible episode that happened in northwest India when there was, a great deal of conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities. Many of the Hindu women, who were home alone because their husbands were out in the field, were harboring Muslim men in their little huts because they were neighbors. They didn't think, you know, Hindu/Muslim. They think, you know, this is my next door neighbor. We do things together and we cooperate.

And so then this mob would run up – and this is reported by a woman, named Nirmala Deshpande, whom we interviewed at UC Berkeley. And she told us that a woman would be standing at the doorway of the hut. The mob would come up and say, “We think you are harboring a Muslim in there.” And the woman would say very calmly again, “Yes, I am.” And then the mob would say, “Well, we want him out of there.” And she would say, “First kill me, then you may enter.”

And this apparently happened spontaneously in roughly the same way in many different households, and even somehow mysteriously spread to other villages, and was a very strong check on the violence that was being meted out to them.

Now, as for stories of nonviolent campaigns which dilate a moment into months or years, but often come to what we call a nonviolent moment where the two forces, the nonviolence and its opposition, come into direct confrontation. And in those episodes, if you are doing your nonviolence correctly and are harboring a minimum, or maybe no hatred or resentment, if you're not clinging to the results, “I got to get this,” if you're willing to undergo what you have to undergo, but you do not yield to a sense of alienation of your fellow human beings – I think under those circumstances, there are a few cases, indeed, where the nonviolence does not, quote, “work.”

I put quotes around work because I'm alluding to a principle that, we at Metta developed, and I explained in the book, The Third Harmony, that what I call work versus “work.” “Work” in quotes, meaning it does exactly what you wanted it to do, but just plain work without quotes, meaning that it does good work on the social field. It has a good impact, which may or may not be immediately visible.

But again, we get back to that element of faith. We have faith that when we do something from the heart, under the right circumstances, with strategic intelligence behind it, it will have an impact somewhere down the road.

And I'd like to apply that now to what we've just been through with a campaign here in Sonoma County, California, to get a measure passed called Measure J, which would have, limited the size of what are called factory farms, and with the ultimate purpose of protecting animals from being abused.

Now, I noticed when I was still at Berkeley, students would come to me very often to get my help in various projects. I remember even in the 1970s, a group of Iranian kids, you know, young people coming to see me to ask me what I could do to support them, which was a lot of emotion, but not much else.

And so, I noticed that among these groups, the ones that were the most angry were often the animal rights people. And you can kind of intuitively understand that because animals are, you know, basically helpless. Even if they're predatory, they're helpless under the ingenuity and the organizational power and the mentality of human beings.

And so, to be violent towards them, when all they can do is suffer, really is deeply, morally offensive. And I could understand that very well. So, that to me means that the idealism of these young people – and it was mostly young people, who wanted to limit factory farms, was absolutely the right thing to operate from if you are going to try to protect animals. That is compassion for the victims.

But here's the question. Here's the thing, people. To what extent – and I'm just asking this as a question. I really don't know. This is not to imply anything. To what extent did they have compassion for the farmers, for the ranchers who had those animals? I don't know. I think it probably was, you know, it was there to a degree.

I always remember in these episodes where animal suffering is involved and raises a desire to protect them. I’m remembering a campaign many years ago which had to do with seals in Canada who were being taken for their fur. And a group of activists from Canada and our country were quite outraged, understandably, and were trying to get the people to stop killing them. And they weren't getting very far. And finally, they sat down and had a talk with them, which is absolutely the thing to do, even if you don't believe you're going to get anywhere.

And it turned out, you know, that this was a livelihood. They weren't particularly happy about what they were doing. They didn't know about moral injury per se, in those days. But it's not fun to kill any living thing. On some level, it was bothering them, but it was their living. So these protesters got a brilliant idea, got their heads together and figured out other ways for these people to make a living. And the effect was magical. In almost no time, that activity came to a stop.

So, this again illustrates that principle – that in a nonviolent struggle it's not a, ‘me against you’. It's how do we join forces together to make things better, to back away from unnecessary suffering? And if there's going to be any suffering in this situation, we're going to embrace it ourselves.

Well, so that leads me to a quote that I wanted to share with you today. It's from a pastor from a French village named Le Chambon. And his name is André Trocmé. He passed away recently, and he's a great hero of the nonviolence world because during the Vichy regime, the Nazi puppet administration in the south of France, he managed to rescue refugees. Not only protect their local community, mostly Jews and communists, but it got to the point where thousands of them were streaming out of Eastern Europe, and he would hide them away in schools and farms and so forth, at great risk to himself.

And there's an interesting wrinkle here. The local commandant, Major Schmäling was asked many years after the war by Philip Hallie, who wrote the story up, called Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. That's the name of Hallie’s book. He interviewed Major Schmäling and said, “How could you not know that all this was going on?” And Schmäling said, “We knew it was going on.” He said, “But I'm a good Catholic, you know, I understand these things, and I know that against that kind of nonviolence, violence has no power.”

So, that was how our nonviolence often – and this is years and years after the event – so it has this impact which we don't know about, but which we can have faith in.

And finally, to come to his quote, pastor Trocmé said, “How can the state be nonviolent, pacific, disarmed, so long as the person who demands these things of his government, himself (or herself) remains fearful for his interests, egoistic, and vindictive?”

And today's Palestinian Chronicle, our friend Rich Forer had an article entitled The Unexamined Mind's Self-Imagery is the Source of Genocide. And this is a kind of comment on pastor Trocmé’s quote.

If we don't examine who we are as human beings, how we are intimately and fundamentally parts of one another, then violence is going to happen. And if you let it happen, it'll go step by step. Finally, in some situations, it will escalate to genocide.

So, the answer then is self-discovery. And with that final note, I'd like to leave you, friends, until our next episode of The Nonviolent Moment.