The Long Reach of Nonviolence

“Because Gandhi, after all, called nonviolence not only a force, but the greatest power mankind has been endowed with. And I think that this is true. And I think it's true because nonviolence is in some way the core of our nature. It's a core of what makes us human. It's what the philosopher Aristotle would have called our built-in telos. That a telos means an end goal, but it's an end goal which is embedded within us and needs to be unpacked and understood and developed. So, you can, in this sense, look at evolution and, of course, our human evolution, as a drive towards manifesting that telos, that nonviolent capacity within us. And that, I believe, is why nonviolence is so powerful.”

Transcript:

[Music: Farther Along]

Greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler with the Nonviolent Moment, your bi-weekly glimpse, and just a glimpse, of the real happenings around the world, which is, the nonviolent happenings in the nonviolent world.

We were just listening to “Farther Along,” and it reminded me of Martin Luther King Jr saying, in one of his most impassioned speeches, which is saying a lot, “How long? Not long. Because the forces of justice,” etc., etc.

So, one really does wonder how long it will take for the world to realize that nonviolence is the only way forward. Mahatma Gandhi, whose birthday will be celebrated tomorrow all around the world, he passed this great torch on to Martin Luther King, who said, “The choice is not between violence and nonviolence. The choice is between nonviolence and nonexistence.” A very portentous remark.

So, as mentioned, tomorrow is Gandhi's birthday, and, he was asked about it one time. “Gosh, you know, tomorrow's your birthday” and he said, “Not my birthday. Charkha Jayanti, it's the spinning wheel birthday.” And certainly that birthday comes at a strange time. It’s as a faint but urgent warning bell, if you will, that humanity is plunging headlong into a very chaotic, violent place. Especially in the Middle East.

Today, in fact, when it was Tuesday morning over there, Israeli forces did invade southern Lebanon with the open support of the United States. And I'm quoting you a report now which endorsed – that is, we endorsed what is called a “limited operations to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure,” despite warnings that a ground assault could spark a wider conflict.

And this is the tragedy into which we seem to be sleepwalking as nations today. That we do everything to bring about the danger of a Ragnarok kind of conflict, while saying that we hope it won't happen. And something really has got to wake us up.

And I was looking this morning at a wonderful quotation from Grace Lee Boggs, the author, who said, and I could not have put this better myself, “People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative.”

Now, what could be better support for what we've been saying here at Metta here all along, that it is not difficult to point out where things are breaking down. The polycrisis is referred to, left and right. But unfortunately, it's having the effect of giving people compassion fatigue and a feeling of helplessness. And why is that? Because they cannot imagine an alternative. 

So, the job at the Metta Center for Nonviolence that we're sharing with you this morning is precisely that – to imagine an alternative and not just imagine one as something that might happen in a dreamy, far off future, but has happened very often in the past.

And one of the earliest documents in the history of nonviolence, in the Western world it was called Christian Nonresistance. A book written in 1816, if I'm not mistaken, by one Adin Ballou, who said that nonviolence – I'm paraphrasing here, nonviolence has been tried, and has proven that it works. And that was over 100 years ago. And now we have enormously greater experiences. And what's more important, documentation and analysis of those experiences. So, we really are in a much better place to help people imagine that alternative.

So, in a few days, on the 5th of October, the Peace Alliance, this is the organization that promoted the Department of Peace in the US State Department. It didn't become a department, of course, but at least there's, kind of an outlying organization called the US Institute of Peace where I spoke about ten years ago.

So, anyway, the Peace Alliance is having a panel discussion on the 5th, and it's going to be called Ahimsa in Action. Ahimsa is, of course, the Sanskrit word which became nonviolence in English. Though I have argued, especially in my book The Search For A Nonviolent Future, that nonviolence doesn't really quite make it as a translation of ahimsa because of the linguistic peculiarity of some Sanskrit words.

Ahimsa really refers to the positive force that is unleashed when, not the act of injury, which would be ‘hun’, but the desire to injure, which is ‘hims’. So, that's the brilliance of that word. That even the desire, the ill will that we have towards another person, when that is controlled, a great force is released.

And in fact, Lao Tzu, the great Daoist philosopher, said, “When people no longer fear force, they bring about greater force.” So, I'm happy to quote that, although I usually quote Marshall Frady saying, “When an oppressors violence is met with a forgiving love,” and I do want to say about something about that too in a minute. But this quote from Lao Tzu, this statement of his when people no longer fear force, they bring about greater force, is really something for us to ponder. 

Because Gandhi, after all, called nonviolence not only a force, but the greatest power mankind has been endowed with. And I think that this is true. And I think it's true because nonviolence is in some way the core of our nature. It's a core of what makes us human. 

It's what the philosopher Aristotle would have called our built-in telos. That a telos means an end goal, but it's an end goal which is embedded within us and needs to be unpacked and understood and developed. So, you can, in this sense, look at evolution and, of course, our human evolution, as a drive towards manifesting that telos, that nonviolent capacity within us. And that, I believe, is why nonviolence is so powerful.

The trick is, of course, you need to understand it and know how to use it, and when. And I will be getting back to that in just a second. But I wanted to say something more about that forgiving love.

Recently, here at Metta, we watched his film called “Ahimsa Gandhi: The Power of the Powerless,” that’s Ramesh Sharma. And that title brought up, for me, one of the many frustrating misconceptions about nonviolence. And that misconception is addressed in the film. That is, that nobody is really powerless unless they've been made to think they are. Which, in fact, is an abiding strategy of control and oppression.

If you want to hear more about that, which in itself will not be particularly uplifting, but will be sobering, you can listen to the interview that we did on Nonviolence Radio with, Jodie Evans, the co-founder of CODEPINK.

But, on this question of force, it reminded me of a wonderful event that took place in a course that I was teaching toward the end of my career. I had a wonderful time toward the end of my career because I taught a course in nonviolence, a course in meditation, and a course on mystical literature. I mean, how on earth did they let me get away with that? But anyway, they did.

And so, I taught for over ten years an introductory course on nonviolence, which I like to think, was like the capstone of my intellectual career and that it did a lot of students some good. And there is some evidence of this because we do hear from them from time to time.

But in that period of time, I was commuting from my community down to Berkeley. And would take a van leaving here from Petaluma and going down, dropping us off at the foot of University Avenue. And the person in that van whom I often sat next to was none other than a general in Air Force ROTC, the Reserve Officer's Training Course. Anyway, that's what we used to call it, ROTC. It changed its name to Military Affairs.

There's a story there that I will share with you sometime because they had a huge office at Berkeley with all three divisions – Army, Air Force and Navy at a time when we were just struggling to get a little bit of space, and ended up being off campus for a long time.

But anyway, I, you know, had a kind of mischief, but a kind of sincere desire to hear from and speak to the other side, so to speak. I invited him into my nonviolence class to give a talk. And to his credit, he was happy to come and talk to us.

Now, at that time, the Kosovo struggle was unfolding and a lot of volunteers were going over to what was still, at that time, barely clinging to its identity as Yugoslavia. And some of these people were offering to go down what was called Sniper Alley and – where people had been shot by snipers. They wanted to go in there as a peace presence.

As usual, nonviolence is not some kind of wimpy thing. It requires courage. It requires risk. At least as much, if not more, than it requires risk to be in an armed conflict and be participating in it as an armed actor. Because then you’re at risk, but at least you've convinced yourself that your arms will protect you. But when you're a nonviolent actor, you do not.

So we described some of these things that people were planning to do or carrying out. And this Air Force military affairs general said, “When you do that, guys, would you please have a rifle platoon in the head of your detachment and another rifle platoon in the back to protect you?”

And I didn't know what to say. I didn't like hearing that. But I didn't know what to say. And above all, I didn't know how that would land with my students. But it was a really wonderful moment when one of my students called Ori. You know, he was this Israeli fellow. He was very close to me at the time.

He raised his hand and he said, “No, sir. We think nonviolence is its own protection.” I just could have hugged Ori. That was just the perfect thing to say. And I was a little bit regretful I hadn't said it myself. But it's even better when your students pick up the baton from you.

And, our friend, the Air Force general, standing there in his blue uniform – I really don't know how that landed with him. But I now believe, dedicated as I am to the complete theory and science of nonviolence, I believe that it cannot have failed to land somewhere and have some effect. As I like to formulate this, it’s the question of work versus “work.”

“Work” means it does what you want it to do. Work without quotes means it has an effect which is determined by the character of your actions and the degree of one pointedness, which Gandhi at one point referred to as purity of your actions.

So, it must have landed somewhere. And now let me give you an illustration of that which ties back to our Frady quote, “A forgiving love…” We’ve recently seen two films. One is a wonderful documentary. We're halfway through. It's called “Inside the Free Speech Movement.” And of course, I was not entirely dry-eyed through the whole thing because I was in the Free Speech Movement. And later on, learned a great lesson, which is in fact, covered in the film. And I'll get back to that in a second.

But the story that is told by Representative John Lewis, it was very, very, eye-opening and reinforcing for those of us who believe that nonviolence, whenever it's done, has to land. It has to have an effect, whether we see the results of that effect or not.

So, John Lewis, long before he was a member of Congress, he was a Freedom Rider. And he went down into Montgomery, Alabama, on that bus which was set upon and burned down. And he was beaten to the ground. In his own terms, he was lying there beaten to a pulp. But of course, he gets up, and he mobilizes that courage and that sense of justice that he had and becomes a congressperson. As we know, he recently passed away, incidentally, which is where I am very, very happy to be sharing this story of his that occurs in that film.

So, knock on the door, a man shows up with his son. The son is in his 40s. The man is probably in his 70s. And he says, “Congressman Lewis, I was one of those people. I beat you when you got off that bus. And I'm here to apologize. And I want you to forgive me, if you can.”

And John Lewis, without much hesitation, said, “I forgive you. I accept your apology.” And of all three of them were crying. In fact, it's a kind of – I'm tearing up a little bit, just telling that story. But it shows you it's one of those many stories that tell us that nonviolence has an effect in a long term, which may not show up in the short term.

And I wanted to share with you a personal story, if I may, in that regard. It was in the early 50s and there was a famine in China. And we were again, as usual, in a state of hostility towards China. And the Fellowship of Reconciliation sent out little miniature grain bags with a little tag on them, which was a quote from the prophet Isaiah. And the quote said, “if thine enemy hunger, feed him.”

So, you know, I was like just exiting from teenage or something at that time. And I paid my $0.35 and put a postage stamp on this little grain bag and mailed it to the White House and sat, you know, watching the news eagerly. And of course, we saw absolutely nothing in way of a response to that.

However, 25 years go on, and something called the Freedom of Information Act happens. A lot of things that went on in the White House now become public knowledge. And what we heard was that Eisenhower was sitting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted to cross the Yellow River from North Korea into China and start bombing China, which really, once again, as we're seeing today with Israel and Lebanon and Gaza, said, “This might start the Third World War, but we hope it doesn't.”

Eisenhower, however, was a much more astute military and political strategist. And he really did not want to do that. Looking for a way to get out of it, he sent one of his aides out to ask, “How many of these little grain bags came in here?” The aide comes in and leans over to him and says, “Sir, there were 35,000 of them.” So, Eisenhower simply said, gentlemen, 35,000 Americans want us to feed the Chinese. This is hardly the time to start bombing them. Meeting adjourned.”

So, we never succeeded in sending food to the Chinese, which was really, really grievous because if you watched newsreels in that day, there was something called movies, and they had newsreels. And on those newsreels, they were showing grain being burned because there was a “surplus,” unquote. They were showing thousands of gallons of milk being poured into the rivers because there was, quote, “a surplus.”

And yet, we didn't send that surplus food to the Chinese, who needed it. And that would have really put us on a nonviolent course for today. But at the very least, at the very least, we have to say, without realizing it, we stopped the worst from happening.

And again, that's a very important indication of this basic principle, that when you do the right thing, it is going to land, whether it shows up in that nonviolent moment, you know, that crisis which you try to engineer between this confrontation between the two forces, or not, it will do its work.

So finally, I want to talk about – I've talked about a film. I wanted to talk about a book that I'm reading. It's by Lisa Fithian, and it's called Shut It Down. It's about protest politics. And again, it leads to the question of what role does protest play in A: a nonviolent movement? And B: a nonviolent evolution, where that inbuilt meaning that telos of human nature can be expressed in our social forms and our daily life and our international relationships.

And I think this book is very insightful, and it does help to understand very well that protest has a role, but it is not the whole picture. We need to do more. And this cycles us right back to that very insightful statement of Grace Lee Boggs, that people, even when they see that our present course is disastrous, they are reluctant to switch to another one because they don't know what it would look like.

So, thank you everyone. I end this program where I began by saying this surfacing and nonviolent alternative is the most important work we can be doing on this planet at this time. And I'm very happy to be doing this work with you.

So that concludes our episode of Nonviolent Moment. See you again in two weeks. And hopefully in a more nonviolent world. This was Michael Nagler with the Nonviolent Moment.

[Music – I’ll Fly Away]