Lesson 2: The New Story
Objectives:
Explore the relevance of the New Story (for our times, for nonviolence and for the Roadmap)
Understand the basic elements of the New Story
Explore some examples of alternative education, as part of the new story
Introduction
In the first lesson, we contrasted the old and the new story. We thereby described a story as a universal, largely unconscious vision that is not easy to change. The 'old story' is the world view that human beings are separate matter 'floating around' purposelessly in the universe. It gives us a sense of powerlessness. The 'new story', on the other hand, helps us to regain power by realizing that we are not helpless and purposeless and that we are part of a bigger whole, of humanity and of the whole universe. We also explained that the new story is both an enabling factor and implicitly an effect of any and all progressive change. This is because the new story starts as an imagination of new opportunities, and as several movements and projects are acting for social change, this develops or ‘produces’ parts in the new story in the material world. For example, people are wondering how they could reduce Co2 in the air, which contributes to climate change and think windmills are a good option. The windmills are then a materialisation of the change. But some solutions happen by coincidence. For example, someone found that algae produce oxygen and absorb carbon and then different people used that to reduce CO2, like the “algae building” in Hamburg (Germany) which is a carbon neutral, self-sustaining, and renewably powered structure.
So, in the Roadmap there are two ‘subsections’ that emphasise the sharing of the new story, and one that highlights creating the new story. With creating, we mostly mean doing research that demonstrates new ways of thinking. These new ideas have arisen because of the growing awareness that it will be impossible to continue living the way we do; it is simply so unsustainable that it ultimately leads to human extinction! We thus desperately need a new story that will provide new perspectives for how we live on this planet in ways that we can survive and ideally thrive. We have to critically look at what has not been working. As we briefly mentioned already, the old story does not only destroy the planet, but also hasn’t really contributed to human happiness. Consuming, after all, doesn’t give us a real sense of purpose, which is an important ingredient of happiness.
So, let’s examine the old story in more detail to understand some of its basic building blocks and how it has started to crumble.
The Crumbling-down of the Old Story
Nagler recounts that the world he was taught to believe in could be said to rest on Newton’s physics, Darwin’s evolution, and Freud’s psychology, which eventually led to the demoralizing theory of innate aggression and what’s been called our culture of narcissism. And he describes how several scientists have contributed to undermine the existing paradigm.
First of all, we must also consider that the Zeitgeist, “sensibility of the age”, functions in the same way that bias functions: it makes people inclined to interpret information selectively and according to a fixed, preexisting worldview. This is also what happened to Darwin’s work: his message was filtered through the lens of this bias, and sadly misinterpreted. Origin of Species pertains mainly to prehumans, and there survival of the fittest is featured; however, in The Descent of Man, in which Darwin deals with human evolution, he actually apologizes for the stress on survival theory. “Selfishness” is mentioned only twelve times (in 848 pages), whereas “love” appears ninety-five times, “moral sensitivity” ninety-two, and “mind” ninety. “Survival of the fittest”? It is found twice.
What emerged is called “social Darwinism”, which in fact wasn’t aligned with what Darwin actually had tried to illustrate. Such a strictly mechanistic theory of evolution convenient to justify a social order based on competition and fitted perfectly with the mechanical model of Newtonian physics.
One scientist who started to disprove what’s called veneer theory, the Freudian theory that we are essentially cruel and “actuated by self-interest,” with only a thin veneer of civilization between us and our worst behavior, is Frans de Waal, a biologist that studied animal behavior. He demonstrated that cooperation is actually very widespread in the animal kingdom. Very few animals have survived without some form of cooperation. Moreover, in 1988 scientists discovered so-called “mirror neurons”, which are neurons fired-off in the same part of the brain when we see another being, as when we’d experience something directly. They thus reflect the actions and emotions of other creatures, and prove that humans (and some other animals) are neurologically wired for empathy. And so, Nagler concludes, when people are civil and kind to each other, they’re actually revealing what it means to be human, rather than this being only a thing ‘veneer’.
The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman wrote a whole book about this topic, translated into English as “Human Kind” (2020) arguing that when cities are subject to bombing campaigns or when a group of boys is shipwrecked on a remote island, what’s notable is the degree of cooperation and communal spirit that comes to the fore. (While the classic “Lord of the flies” is fiction depicted as “realistic”, he found out that there was a real story of six boys who got shipwrecked on an island for 15 months and cooperated all this time to survive.)
Also important are the discoveries made in the field called “quantum mechanics”, a field of physics studying the structure of our existence, so to say. Quantum research showed that we live in what they call a participatory universe, where in any act of observation on the quantum level the observer influences what’s observed. It’s not the case that an objective, material reality really exists “out there” whether we’re observing it or not. In other words, our consciousness of the world has an impact on the world. A similar principle was found in the study of genetics, where scientists found that instead of random mutation, a key-stone of Darwin’s evolution theory, what occurs is adaptive mutation, meaning that they are a result of a response to the environment. Genes do not determine our behavior, but are rather functioning like a library of information that are read by proteins in a long chain of events, probably influenced by how we perceive the world around us. And therefore, it is thus crucial that we change our perception, as it can in fact, change our reality!
To sum up: in the old story only the ‘fittest’ survive in a competition of life, and humans are thus inherently violent, but able to act ‘civilized’ when they make an effort. In the new story, cooperation has helped humans to survive, and that probably gave rise to a biological ability to understand other beings around them and respond with empathy. Secondly, in the old story life evolved through random mutation and the universe exists of separate particles that are bound by certain ‘natural laws’. While in the new story life evolved through adaptive mutation and active participation in it, interaction thus creating certain outcomes rather than laws that are set in stone.
‘Creating’ a New Story or: the building blocks
As already pointed out, with creating the new story, what we mean is discovering some new principles, that provide a different new look on the world and ourselves and these views combined together form a new story. Let’s thus examine what are the building blocks of the new story and the three harmonies.
First, let’s sum up some of the key points as it relates to human nature, as mentioned in The Third Harmony:
We are conscious beings, far from limited to these ephemeral bodies (miracles though they be).
Therefore we do not need to ravage the earth for material goods to be fulfilled.
We do not need to defeat enemies to be secure; that’s done by building relationships of trust and community.
We have control over our own destiny, at least to a significant degree.
Among our spiritual capacities, the most characteristic of our species is the capacity to offer and respond to nonviolence.
And finally, evolution itself is moving toward ever-greater consciousness and unity.
In the new story, the way to solve the problems of starvation and poverty and save the planet in the process is to become aware of our higher needs and the inner resources we have to answer them. When we begin to sense that we are spirit, this brings with it a sense of connection with others, whom we also begin to see as spirit, and it becomes easy to make the arrangements that work for everyone. In fact, it becomes a joy. This is the reasoning behind Gandhi’s famous observation, which otherwise strikes many people as unrealistic, that there is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.
Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was based on the lives and incomes of nearly half a million randomly selected U.S. citizens. They demonstrated that no matter how you turn it, once your basic needs are taken care of, money and other rewards don’t make you happier. Once we have enough to satisfy our basic, first-level needs, the further satisfaction that we all need and deserve has nothing to do with external possessions. It has to do with bonding, autonomy, dignity, meaning, and the like; in other words, our inner resources, which are not at all scarce and never need to put us in competition with others. Of course, basic needs are basic. Those of us for whom these needs are reasonably met need to build a system that does that for everyone. And such a system can be based on a culture that gives every person a higher image of themself and points out a way to serve life as a whole.
The First Harmony: “We Are Stardust”
The universe could not possibly have come about by chance. As the Quantum Gravity Research Group puts it in their clever film What Is Reality?: “there’s no decent evidence for randomness in the universe”. Secondly, the most impressive and significant thing that has been developing throughout the long travail of evolution from pure energy to matter to life is consciousness. Think how much more conscious we are than the inert matter-energy that exploded out of the big bang. Yet, consciousness itself has not evolved; beings have evolved, who are progressively more able to benefit from the inestimable creative power of consciousness. A small number of human beings— Jesus, Buddha, and in our own age Gandhi and a few others not so well known—have expanded their consciousness to an extraordinary degree and show us where we ourselves are headed—what we can become.
The Second Harmony: “We Are Animals”
Sages never held, as the old story does, that the earth is an inert object that’s there to be exploited, and that we can exploit it pretty much indefinitely. Earth is more like a living being than an object. It is there not to be exploited but to be cherished. Earth is an exquisite system that can sustain itself indefinitely in a constantly renewable balance—if we live in accordance with its laws and our own legitimate needs. “We are animals,” a motto in stage two, can help us restore our sense of reverence for the Earth and abandon our arrogance as its masters and exploiters.
The Third Harmony: “We Are Nonviolent”
When we discover our inner resources, it becomes unnecessary to exploit the earth for its resources; when we discover our spiritual unity, that exploitation becomes not just unnecessary but impossible. And it also becomes impossible to injure and exploit others. Indeed, doing what we can to help others—for example, by using nonviolence when we have to resist their injustices—brings us a fulfillment that nothing else can match. We human beings, who represent the apex of the process of growing consciousness on planet Earth so far, can play an active role in our own evolution and consequently that of our species. The discovery of our capacity for nonviolence, connected as it is with higher consciousness, or love, is a key to this development.
Virtually all indigenous cultures have a living sense of our relationship with nature at the heart of their worldview. No small number of them also enjoy nonviolent practices as well. Quite a number of them provide models, for example, not only for reverence for the earth but also for the practices of restorative justice—in fact, much of what we know about RJ comes from them, particularly the Navajo and Maori. Yet anthropologists often find that because of their relative isolation these peoples stop short of extending their sense of belonging, or what Einstein would call their circle of compassion, beyond their own community. Some tribal names turn out to mean “human,” for example, implying that whoever might be outside their tribes might not qualify. In other words, like the Semai of Malaysia or about fifty other groups that have been studied from this point of view, they have developed a nonviolent culture—for the world they know. Our job is to develop it for the world itself.
From Business as Usual to a New Story
A different, but also interesting approach that connects to the new story is that of the long-term activist and scholar Joanna Macy. She points out that there are three stories that different groups of people hold:
Business as Usual: the story that the industrial growth has to continue and where the central point is progress;
The Great Unraveling: the story that draws attention to the disasters that the business as usual has been causing;
The Great Turning: the emergence of new and creative human responses to the unraveling that enable the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society.
As you see, the stories build upon each other. But for the moment they still co-exist in the world we live in today.
Moreover, within the story of the Great Turning, there are three spheres in which you can work: stopping damage, creating alternatives, and shifting consciousness. As you will see, the Roadmap captures all three of these, just with different names. Shifting consciousness is the work of creating and sharing the new story. As well as the cultivation of our inner resources, for example through meditation. Creating alternatives is what we call Constructive Program, and stopping damage is obstructive nonviolence. Also Joanna Macy advocates for stopping damage nonviolently. Gandhi often pointed out that the means are “ends in the making”, which is another way of saying that we cannot have a nonviolent outcome by using violent means.
Alternative media
People turn to media for education, or entertainment. As we shared in the introduction, media is an important means through which violence is normalised in our societies and a media fast would probably do good to your mental health. However, you may wonder what alternatives there are. In fact, there are a couple!
The Metta Center has a radio show for example, Nonviolence Radio (KWMR, Point Reyes Station, California), broadcasting live on alternate Mondays and alternate Fridays, respectively, featuring approximately thirty minutes of nonviolence-related news and analysis from the Metta viewpoint. Podcasts appear regularly on iTunes and Spotify, and are syndicated via the Pacifica Radio network.
Waging Nonviolence: Founded in 2009, Waging Nonviolence is an independent, nonprofit media platform dedicated to providing original reporting and expert analysis of social movements around the world. In addition to producing original content, Waging Nonviolence features a membership-based Community section where peace and justice organizations, along with universities, publish their own stories.
Minds of the Movement: This blog by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict runs stories, interviews, and commentary highlighting the ideas and experiences of people on the front lines of civil resistance. Minds of the Movement keeps readers up to date on the latest developments in civil resistance around the world. The blog is a resource for those who seek to understand the art and science of nonviolent struggle, and it is a forum for nonviolence activists, scholars, students, journalists, and members of the INGO and policy community.
Nonviolence News: Each week, Nonviolence News brings readers thirty to fifty stories about nonviolence in action, illuminating the scale and scope of how nonviolence is actively shaping our world. These news stories reflect nonviolent action and nonviolent practices, including constructive programs, alternative institutions, and policies rooted in structural/systemic nonviolence. This weekly list is curated from a diverse array of movement and media sources by the novelist and nonviolence advocate Rivera Sun. Nonviolence News is a sister project to the awareness-raising campaign Nonviolence Now. Subscribe to the free Nonviolence News list on their website.
Peace News: Peace News presents stories about people taking risks for peace. The stories highlight the opinions of ordinary people who want nonviolent solutions to their political differences. When the stories at Peace News cover war zones, they aim to contribute to building trust and reconciliation, whereas most international news today is driven by sensationalism.
PeaceVoice: PeaceVoice distributes op-eds, articles, and commentary written by professionals from a perspective of conflict resolution, positive peace, and nonviolence. As such, this distribution service acts as a free literary agent to busy peace professionals. PeaceVoice gets these informed voices into mainstream media so more Americans can decide on public policy questions based on full information and many more options.
Small Victories: This occasional newsletter can be found at smallvictories@peaceisloud.org.
Solutions Story Tracker: A project of the Solutions Journalism Network, Solutions Story Tracker is a curated database of rigorous reporting on responses to social problems. Every story is tagged, enabling readers to find coverage of effective or promising ideas and approaches—by issue, location, journalist, and success factor (strategic insights that emerge as patterns). The database includes stories about restoring dignity for women giving birth while incarcerated and about cultivating local food economies. Story Tracker houses a broad range of media, from major publishers like National Geographic and the New York Times to local media like the Columbia Missourian.
Tikkun: Since 1987, Tikkun has been a platform for young writers to emerge as public intellectuals and for established thinkers and academics to posit groundbreaking philosophies and radical ideas. It has also been a stage for novelists and poets to flex their minds, and for spiritual progressives and social change activists to urge self-reflection, inner psychological and spiritual healing, and direct action.
Transcend Media Service: Since 2008, the Weekly Digest by Transcend Media Service (TMS) has published tens of thousands of analytical briefs and commentaries with the unique perspective of independent contributors from around the world. TMS works to broaden and diversify expert discussion by focusing on hidden aspects of international politics and on unconventional thinking that stimulates transcendent solutions and actions. Johan Galtung, the pioneering scholar of peace studies, writes a monthly editorial.
Democracy Now! This daily independent news hour is hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Their reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues. On Democracy Now! you’ll hear a diversity of voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes provocative perspective on global events. The daily show is broadcast across the United States and Canada as well as in other countries around the world.
Global Voices: With a multilingual newsroom team that reports on people whose voices and experiences are rarely seen in mainstream media, Global Voices also provides training and mentorship to local underrepresented communities who want to tell their own stories using participatory media tools. Through its Advox team, Global Voices advocates free speech online, paying special attention to legal, technical, and physical threats to people using the internet to speak out in the public interest.
Transformation: Housed at openDemocracy, Transformation tells the stories of people who are combining personal and social change in order to reimagine their societies. Their publishing team believes that love, equality, and social justice are the principles on which new forms of politics, economics, and social activism can be built. Transformation provides a forum to explore how to put these principles into practice.
Positive News: This UK-based source is a pioneer of constructive journalism—a new approach in the media, about rigorous and relevant journalism focused on progress, possibility, and solutions. They publish daily online, and Positive News magazine is published quarterly in print.
Other sources of information you may want to explore are:
The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG): These one hundred volumes comprise all the known speeches, letters, and other writings of Gandhi’s career, including the full text of his major writings such as Hind Swaraj: Or Indian Home Rule and the highly recommended Satyagraha in South Africa. These are compiled with many other visual and other Gandhi resources.
The Global Nonviolent Action Database (GNAD): Over one thousand cases, and growing, of nonviolent campaigns from around the world and through history, easily searched or browsed by any of several categories (for example, women’s campaigns). Analyzed according to categories designed by Gene Sharp; world map of the cases. A basic resource, open-sourced via Swarthmore.
Digital Library of Nonviolent Resistance: Created by Nonviolence International and the Rutgers University International Institute for Peace, this online collection includes training manuals and related material, such as reports on training workshops, tools, exercises, preparatory material for campaigns, and legal and direct action handouts. The open access Digital Library includes materials from the 1960s onward, used in a wide variety of struggles, from the antinuclear, peace, and U.S. civil rights movements to Occupy Wall Street, the Arab spring, and Black Lives Matter.
If you would also like to know what books you could read about nonviolence, or which films are relevant to watch, ask for a list from the Third Harmony from the Metta Center, and it’ll be sent to you!
Alternative education
The word education is derived from the Latin words ‘educare’, which means to bring up, to rear or foster, and ‘educere’, which means to draw out or develop. Education could be a tool to spread the new story of course. But also here, it could be both an enabling factor for the new story to consolidate, as well as an effect of social change driven by the new story. In this section we will give some examples of alternative forms of education that have been developed in the last two centuries that we think are aligned with some aspects of the new story.
Education according to Gandhi
In an article by Dr. Ravindra Kumar an Gandhian education, the views that Gandhi expressed in his writings can be summed-up as follows:
The prime aim of education is to make a person self-dependent;
The purpose of education is to make one efficient and skillful; and
The objective of education is to guide and lead a person to the pathway of progress, so that one can achieve a goal in life for oneself on the one hand and contribute to the society, nation and the globe on the other.
Moreover, Kumar writes that education is the basis for the all-round development of man and the process that helps make one's life purposeful. Similarly, peace, a state free from dispute, conflict and war, is an active and dynamic state in which there is a call to go forward. New benefits are expected in a state of peace. He states that “education and peace supplement each other, as both contribute to the development and welfare of each and every human being on this planet.”
Gandhi was also ad advocate of offering education in local languages rather than English:
“The school must be an extension of home. There must be concordance between the impressions which a child gathers at home and at school, if the best results are to be obtained. Education through the medium of a strange tongue breaks the concordance which should exist.”
Gandhi writes (Quoted by Sevagram Ashram, from the selected works of Gandhi, Vol. 5, The Voice of Truth). Towards the end he claims: “Among the many evils of foreign rule, this blighting imposition of a foreign medium upon the youth of the country will be counted by history as one of the greatest.”
Another important aspect of education according to Gandhi was that the child should be made self-supporting through some productive work or craft and gain practical experience. Education should lead to economic independence and self-reliance for livelihood. “The pupils must have initiative. They must cease to be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves and yet be thoroughly obedient and disciplined,” he wrote. He insisted on the development of three H's: Hand, Heart and Head (which reminds of the philosophy of the German pedagogist Rudolf Steiner 1861-1925, implemented by millions of Steiner or Waldorf schools around the globe). About the heart, he also wrote that “All our learning or recitation of the Vedas, correct knowledge of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and what not will avail us nothing if they do not enable us to cultivate absolute purity of heart.” (Young India, 8-9-1927) and noted that the word for “student” in many Indian languages is “brahmachari” which means searcher after God. He believed that students should be educated about various great religions of the world “in a spirit of reverence and broad-minded tolerance”. (Young India, 6-12-'28)
Montessori Education and Democratic Education
Montessori education is the child-focused approach that Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician,developed more than a century now, for educating children. The Montessori Method fosters rigorous, self-motivated growth for children and adolescents in all areas of their development—cognitive, emotional, social, and physical.Children are working independently and in groups, often with specially designed learning materials.
This is how the American Montessori Society describes it:
“Montessori education is student-led and self-paced but guided, assessed, and enriched by knowledgeable and caring teachers, the leadership of their peers, and a nurturing environment.
Within the community of a multi-age classroom—designed to create natural opportunities for independence, citizenship, and accountability—children embrace multi-sensory learning and passionate inquiry. Individual students follow their own curiosity at their own pace, taking the time they need to fully understand each concept and meet individualized learning goals.
Given the freedom and support to question, probe deeply, and make connections, Montessori students grow up to be confident, enthusiastic, and self-directed learners and citizens, accountable to both themselves and their community. They think critically, work collaboratively, and act boldly and with integrity.”
Similar values are central in ‘democratic education’. A Democratic education sees young people not as passive recipients of knowledge, but rather as active co-creators of their own learning, valued participants in a vibrant learning community, and prepares young people to engage with the world around them and become positive and contributing members of society. Democratic education begins with the premise that everyone is unique, so each of us learns in a different way.
The history of democratic education spans from at least the 1600s. While it is associated with a number of individuals, there has been no central figure, establishment, or nation that advocated democratic education. The oldest democratic school that still exists is Summerhill, in Suffolk, England, founded in 1921. In the 1960s, hundreds of "free schools" opened, many based on Summerhill, but were largely renounced by the 1980s. The Sudbury Valley School, founded in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1968, remained and several "Sudbury schools" are modeled after this original. Students have complete responsibility for their own education, and the school is run by a direct democracy in which students and staff are equal ‘citizens’. Students use their time however they wish, and learn as a by-product of ordinary experience rather than through coursework. There is no predetermined educational syllabus, prescriptive curriculum or standardized instruction.
Peace Education
Peace education is the process of acquiring the values, the knowledge and developing the attitudes, skills, and behaviors to live in harmony with oneself, with others, and with the natural environment. In the resolution for a culture of peace, peace education is the main means by which the culture of peace is to be established. It thus includes the other sub-topics of a culture of peace, such as gender inequality (and especially access to education for girls), Human Rights, democracy etc.
Colman McCarthy has been teaching courses on nonviolence and the literature of peace Since 1982, and is currently still doing so (even at the age of more than 80). In 25 years, he has had more than 7,000 students in his classes. In 1985, he founded the Center for Teaching Peace, a nonprofit that helps schools begin or expand academic programs in Peace studies. In an interview in the Washington Post he said: “You need to educate people. That’s why I’m in the schools. Education, from the Latin ‘educere,’ meaning to lead out. To lead people out of their ignorance. Violence is a learned behavior. So is peacemaking. You can teach alternatives to violence.”
Peace education can take place in or outside schools. Peace education can take the form of conflict resolution training, and it often also includes Human Rights education and Democratic or “active citizenship” education. Critical peace education takes a more emancipatory approach, by attempting to create a space where students and teachers become change agents that recognise past and present experiences of inequity.
Reflection & discussion
In this lesson, we explored how the old story is crumbling, the new one is arising, and what are the basic elements of the new story, and what they mean for our humanity. We’ve also explored different forms of education, as an example of how the new story manifested itself in that field.
What part of this lesson stood out for you?
How can you contribute to the new story?
What is the most important part of the new story according to you, that has to be shared more widely?
Homework
If you’re motivated you can do additional research about the new story. In the next lessons you will see different manifestations of the new story in the sectors of the Roadmap. If you’re interested in the science behind the new story you may want to look at: scienceofnonviolence.org for starters.