We are not in a ‘polycrisis’. We are in a spiritual crisis.

Nonviolence, to be practiced with effect, requires training and preparation and strategy. It requires astuteness in understanding your situation. And underneath, giving life to all of that, an understanding that every one of us has an instinct towards the feeling that what happens to our fellow human beings in some way also happens to us.

Transcript

So, my name is Michael Nagler. I’m with the Metta Center for Nonviolence, and our purpose is to help people practice nonviolence more safely and more effectively. And the purpose of this show is just to make a little bit better known the resources that we have to help people do that.

I think we are still at, quote, “The best of times, and the worst of times.” That was the quote from Dickens', Tale of Two Cities, of course, a very famous line. 

And, what we're going to be doing on this program is to try to put whatever small weight we can, towards the best of times.

And I want to say, as an approach that we take here at Metta, we really put most of our effort into elevating the best, and almost none of our effort into getting rid of the worst. Because we feel that the best will automatically attract consciousness and attention, and the worst will be shriveling away to practically nothing. This is our approach to nonviolence. 

Now, today, it's difficult not to be bewildered by what we call the polycrisis. And being bewildered is not a comfortable state. And what’s worse is it can lead to our being paralyzed and not having the confidence that anything we do on issue A will have an effect on the other issues, B to Z.

But I’d like to say, and I think this is helpful in a practical sense, that this really isn’t a polycrisis. It's what I would call a monocrisis. And there is a term, a very convenient term, for the underlying disruptive force which is showing up across the board in so many forms. And there’s also a counter-name for the other force that we're going to try to elevate here.

So, first of all, to frame, this crisis, when I say it's not really a polycrisis, it's what I would call a spiritual crisis. And in fact, that is the title of a little book that I wrote back in 2005. The book is called, Our Spiritual Crisis: Recovering Human Wisdom in a Time of Violence.

So, there's our clue. We are living on the cusp, or in the tension, in the dyad, if you will, between violence and nonviolence. And our situation is this, that the violence is self-evident. I want to qualify that in a minute. But the nonviolence is not. And so the purpose of this little series of talks is to draw due attention to nonviolence, elevate it in our consciousness, in the world's consciousness, actually, starting with our own.

And I think I’ll try and say more about all of these things. But to get back to the fact that the violence I said is self-evident, it really isn’t in a way. Because we see the manifestations of violence, but we tend not to see that underlying all of them is one single disruptive principle, which we call violence.

And it's quite unfortunate, that we don’t see that because we can't solve the problem by tackling gun violence here, racial violence there, you know, international war here, domestic conflict there. All of these things are useful. But somehow, unless we step back and see the big picture, they will be piecemeal and they will not solve the problem. That's how I feel about it. 

So, as I say, the purpose of this series is to draw attention to the fact that all of these manifestations come from one force, and more than that, to elevate the only counterforce that can overcome it. 

And that is to begin with our own consciousness and spread to the consciousness of the world. That is less impossible than it sounds. Because when you talk about, okay, voting. You have to go house to house. You have to convince this person, and then that person, and then this family, and that family.

But consciousness is a very mysterious, nonphysical thing. The term that's actually used a lot these days in scientific explorations of consciousness, which is a new thing, the term is non-local consciousness. That is, if I elevate my consciousness, I have helped to elevate the consciousness of anyone in the vicinity. How this happens, we are only just vaguely beginning to understand, but it is an undoubted fact. That on the one level, yes, we need to go out into the world and walk the streets and pound the doors and get people to change their voting and so forth. But in addition to that, or underneath all of that, is the elevation of consciousness. 

So,  I've been talking about the worst part of the times. The best part of the times is this, that we now have libraries, institutions, training centers, educational programs, and, of course, many organizations which are actually carrying nonviolence out in the world.

And some of these organizations are relatively venerable by Western standards, like the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which was started on a railway platform in Germany in 1914. Little personal note here, I paid my homage to that very railroad platform. [German], in – gosh, I forget what city it was now. These two friends, a German and an Englishman, were on that train, they get off on the platform, and they read the news, that war has been declared between their two countries. 

They were shocked, they face one another, they shake hands, and they say, “Whatever happens, this will not disrupt our friendship.” And so, that led to the founding of the oldest peace organization in the world, International Fellowship of Reconciliation. Called in its original German, [German]. And so we have some venerable old institutions like that, but some are really quite new, and they are springing up just about every day. 

Now, let me say what I mean by a nonviolent moment. And in order to do that, I'm actually going to quote from a New Yorker writer whom I think a great deal of his name is Marshall Frady, and he wrote a series in The New Yorker on Martin Luther King.

And he really brought out for me the essence of King, and who he was, what he was doing, in the following paragraph, which I'm going to share with you. 

“King started from the essentially religious persuasion that in each human being, black or white, whether deputy sheriff or manual laborer or governor, there exists, however tenuously, a certain natural identification with every other human being; that in the overarching design of the universe, which ultimately connects us all together, we tend to feel that what happens to our fellow human beings in some way also happens to us, so that no one can continue to debase or abuse another human being without eventually feeling in himself or herself, at least some dull answering hurt and stir of shame.

“Therefore, in the catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong, when an oppressor’s violence is met with a forgiving love, he can be vitally touched, and even, at least momentarily, reborn as a human being, while the society witnessing such a confrontation will be quickened in conscience toward compassion and justice.”

I, after all my decades of work on nonviolence, I don't think I could improve on that paragraph of Frady's. If you notice, he’s referring to the overarching design of the universe in which all nonviolent actors believe we cannot accept that we are thrown here on this planet – which is arbitrary and, often quite oppressive – but rather that life is very meaningful, and it is possible for us to discover that meaning and act it out.

Frady talks about catharsis, a good Greek word incidentally. Catharsis meaning a purification. “A catharsis of a live confrontation with wrong when an oppressor’s violence is met with a forgiving love.” So this is the best definition that I know of of the nonviolent moment. 

Nonviolence, to be practiced with effect, requires training and preparation and strategy. It requires astuteness in understanding your situation. And underneath, giving life to all of that, an understanding that every one of us, as he says, has an instinct towards the feeling that what happens to our fellow human beings in some way also happens to us.

As a kind of foil to this, I often use when I'm doing some slides, a billboard that I passed one day on the way into the studio here. And I said, “Stop the car, I want to get out and photograph it.” That billboard says, “Our pain is your gain.” 

And that struck me forcibly because it shows that the entire commercial culture in which we live is a contradiction of this underlying truth that Marshall Frady refers to, and that Martin Luther King was so vividly aware of, in which he brought into dramatic effect in the civil rights movement in our country.

I also wanted to point out that using the term “forgiving love” when an oppressor’s violence is met with forgiving love, whether Frady was conscious of it or not, he has touched upon a very important difference in the field of nonviolence today. And yes, there is a field of nonviolence today. We’ll be giving examples of that from time to time.

And that is, to use the terms that used to be, you know, very popular. They aren't used terribly much today, but I think they're very convenient. The difference between strategic and principled nonviolence. Principled nonviolence is a sense, somehow we know not where or how, that in fact, each of us is interconnected at that very important, spiritual level. Where you might call it, but I don't think that's as useful, a moral level. 

That is, that your pain is my pain and not my gain, and vice versa. Your gain is my gain, and we do not live in a state of competition. We live in a state of cooperation, which is in long arc of evolution actually migrating toward a state of absolute unity.

People can practice nonviolence purely from a strategic perspective. There's a quote from some protesters in Yemen some years ago who said, “They cannot defeat us because we left our weapons at home.”

And that is a recognition of the very, very, universal and underlying dynamic that when you use violence against others, you make it very likely that they will use violence against you. And this is the story of our times, that we never learn this. I’m not going to quote examples here, they're just a little bit too depressing. But we think that our violence will overcome your violence. That'll be the end of it. That is not how the universe works. 

So, people can use nonviolence as a strategy because they're aware that, quote, “If we leave our weapons at home,” we will be less vulnerable, less liable to counterattack. So, you can do it for that reason. 

But if I wanted to paraphrase that from the perspective of what we're calling principled nonviolence, we would say not they can't defeat us because we left our weapons at home, which is true, as far as it goes. But we will prevail in the end for the good of all, because we have left our hatred at home. Because we recognize our common humanity with the other. Because we are confident that the goal that we're aiming at, it’s in the best interests of all of us.

One other phrase of Frady’s I’d like to comment on if I have time, and that is, he says that “the other person's conscious can be vitally touched,” and he adds “at least momentarily.” Now, I would say that yes, on the surface that's true. Someone offers you violence. Instead of being angry or frightened, or rather dealing with your anger and your fear, you respond from a nonviolent perspective, a nonviolent standpoint, a nonviolent position, at least momentarily they are affected by your position. 

And when Marshall Frady wrote this some years back, he was not aware that there was a building scientific momentum, demonstrating that there actually is a physiological basis for that. And at some point, we will talk about mirror neurons, etc.

What we've tried to do as nonviolent actors, nonviolent people dedicated to shifting the whole culture, changing the whole paradigm, is to recognize that what happens momentarily is part of an underlying dynamic upon which we can build. 

So, the fact that we're doing an online course right now at the Metta Center, and that I'm having the great honor and privilege and enjoyment of sharing this series with you, is part of a building paradigm shift which is happening in science. Where, as I say, there’s opened up the study of non-local consciousness, which is the modality by which my mental state affects your mental state. And, something that is just starting as we speak, the development of nonviolence itself as a practice and institution. 

Just yesterday, we had lunch with a friend of ours who is part of an organization called Nonviolent Peaceforce, which has now trained thousands of people to muster their courage, overcome their fear and resentment, and go into conflict areas unarmed and provide, at the very first instance, a nonviolent third-party witness which changes the dynamic of a polar conflict. You know, which is basically me against you. And then, in other ways, elevate the human unity that’s underlying in every situation and overcome the violence. 

Now, not to be outdone, I also would like to read a poem and share it with you today by way of closing out. This poem is number three in a series of poems called The Nayler Sonnets.

They were written by a very good friend of mine, who passed away in 1983. His name was Kenneth Boulding. And Kenneth and Elise, between them, were basically the founders of scientific peace research in the West. Maybe anywhere. Well though you know nonviolence, ahimsa, had a very deep, what shall I say, dimension to it in the culture of India and some other places. I think in the Western sense, the development of it as a coherent science here in the West was done, first of all, by these pioneers, Kenneth and Elise.

Now Kenneth was a remarkable guy. By training, he was an economist, and he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in economics. And he didn't get it, which I think was a mistake. He was also a member of the American Academy of Sciences and a founder of Peace Research, he taught at Boulder, and left a great legacy there. And on the side he was a poet. And, in fact, Kenneth was rather good. 

He wrote this series – they were Quakers, by the way, Kenneth and Elise. And he wrote this series of poems to honor a Quaker named James Nayler. No relative, Michael Nagler. And James Nayler was an early Quaker in the UK, who was actually martyred for his beliefs.

And so to elevate him, Kenneth wrote this long series of sonnets. The title of each of these sonnets comes from a line of a longish paragraph that James Nayler wrote. And this one, I think I’ll look up the whole series for you later, but this one is called, “Nor To Revenge Any Wrong.” And here is Kenneth’s poem.

Now I am veined by an eroding doubt,

Insidious as decay, with poison rife.

ls love indeed the end and law of life,

When lush, grimacing hates so quickly sprout?

I thought in ignorance I had cast out

The sneaking devils of continuing strife,

But as the cancer thwarts the surgeon’s knife,

So does revenge my sword of reason flout.

But though hate rises in enfolding flame

At each renewed oppression, soon it dies:

It sinks as quickly as we saw it rise,

While love’s small constant light burns still the same

Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong,

Yet hate is short, and love is very long.

Thank you, and until next time, look up Kenneth Boulding’s Nayler Sonnets and enjoy them. And ponder what we've been saying about the nonviolent principle and how it manifests itself in a dramatic moment.

[Music – Last Night I had the Strangest Dream by Pete Seeger]

Well I was about to say it's time I ever listen to that particular song of Pete Seeger’s without choking up, but then I did. So, this has been Michael Nagler with your Nonviolent Moment. And you could learn more at MettaCenter.org. Until next time, be nonviolent.