by Mickey Huff
To seriously believe that you can have a meaningful relationship with a machine epitomizes our civilization’s pathology. It is perhaps the worst possible delusion, for it becomes all too easy to dehumanize persons in a culture that dehumanizes personhood.
FROM THE CULTURAL TO THE POLITICAL
Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) is a remarkable organization that places trained, unarmed field team members in select regions of conflict. It’s now a seven million dollar worldwide organization with teams in five countries. When NP was just getting underway, I had lunch with a colleague, a distinguished political scientist with a special interest in peace, which was not commonplace in that discipline. I explained to Ernie what NP and other nonviolent intervention groups were doing (the field is now known as Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping): such groups had rescued child soldiers; offered “protective accompaniment” to hundreds of threatened human rights workers in Latin America and elsewhere; stood ready to interpose themselves, if necessary, in outbreaks of fighting—all without losing a single member. “Fascinating, Mike,” he said, with genuine interest.
So I said, “Let’s put together a seminar and I can share this with some of your colleagues.”
“No,” he said.
No? Wouldn’t his colleagues want to know about an earthshaking development in their own field? After a few days I got over my shock and pressed Ernie to tell me why he thought they would not, and after thinking for a moment he put very simply: “That’s not their culture.” Two decades on, it still isn’t. Nor is it the culture of policy-makers, funders, or the millions of ordinary men and women who go into military “service” for a variety of personal reasons and one cultural one: in their worldview, there is no alternative to coercive force.
The debate between Democrats and Republicans is not taking place on a level playing field: politically conservative perspectives are premised on the old story, which is still the default notion of reality for a large majority in the industrialized world. For example, in this view, torturing our enemies may be acceptable if their suffering benefits us and hurts only them. However, recent findings in neuro-science suggest that inflicting pain is harmful to both victim and perpetrator alike.41 The prevailing story came into existence, after all, for political reasons: as my colleague Carolyn Merchant has shown in her critical study, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, the rationalism of the “Enlightenment” was seized upon to supplant the image of “sacred Earth”42 and to replace it with the notion of Earth as an inert block of matter—thus making the industrial revolution possible, unleashing much despoliation of the earth, then by mines, and now by poisoning, climate disruption, mountaintop removal, and so on. David Korten, Joanna Macy, and other brilliant visionaries are now in effect trying to reverse that narrative shift, to restore the image of a living or sacred Earth. They are quite correct in pointing out that repressive forces are strongly invested in keeping the prevailing story of a lifeless Earth inhabited by human beings with no agency, who are radically dissociated from one another and the planet and thus fit victims of elite control and exploitation. This is why, when we come down to an “inexplicable” catastrophe like Iraq, Tom Hayden reported one member of Congress declaring, “Republicans can declare victory and leave, but the Democrats can only declare failure and be blamed.”43
THE OPPORTUNITY OF NOW
Despite appearances, we have reached a time of great possibility. On the one hand, the prevailing story is causing untold suffering and, consciously or not, millions of people yearn to discard it: no one takes joy in thinking of themselves as a mechanical thing in a random universe. On the other hand, two parallel and remarkable developments in the twentieth century have made it possible to reunite two great streams of human understanding and belief that have long been at odds in the West: religion and science. “New science”—including the positively oriented social sciences that walked through the door thrown open by the astounding breakthroughs of quantum theory— and the wisdom traditions of human spirituality that have become somewhat more available to the general public, have begun to reveal quite complementary models of reality. While the findings of science and spiritual awareness do not always overlap, the former’s systematic exploration of the outer world, and the latter’s equally systematic exploration of the world within, are telling the same story where they do. When you distinguish, as Rupert Sheldrake has done, between the dogma of science—i.e. the belief, sometimes called scientism, that only things that can be measured and weighed are real—and the scientific method, which relies on hypothesis and testing, these two great inquiring systems are again complementary, because spiritual investigation also relies on hypotheses and testing, though by other means. Gandhi seems to be at home in both realms. When challenged to substantiate his claim that the directive for his spectacularly successful fast against untouchability in 1932 came from “the voice of God,” he said, “I have stated a simple scientific truth, thus to be tested by all who have the will and the patience to acquire the necessary qualifications.”44
The basic tenets of the wisdom tradition, with their powerful teachings of human interconnectedness and the norms that follow, are nowhere in conflict with the discoveries of new science, though each has developed its distinctive idiom. Where physicists have spoken of “nonlocality,” sages have called it the unity of life (or the whole of existence). Where the latter have spoken of the primacy of consciousness (or, in popular terms, “mind over matter”), physicist Amit Goswami has coined the term “downward causality.”45 And when both have spoken of the critical concept of unity in diversity—without which no resolution of social, economic, or other tensions is possible—Gandhi came up with a fundamental guiding principle he called “Heart Unity,”46 the norm that there is no underlying, unresolvable competition in the universe, that differences convert from threats to challenges when we gain a feeling for the other’s welfare. Martin Luther King Jr. was very clear that when that happens we actually need diversity on the surface: “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be; and you cannot be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”47 Add to the fact that science and traditional wisdom converge around a “new” image of humanity the lesser-known fact that nonviolence, which arises from that image, is proving such a successful tool of social change and we have compelling support for the new story, or what we have taken to call in Metta documents the Story of Belonging.
HOW TO TELL THE NEW STORY
Tellers of the new story can build upon it by articulating the details— and they are rich indeed when one studies the subject in any depth— of nonviolence.48 Few people today can be reached by scientific abstractions, much less the tenets of traditional wisdom, but the story is hard to ignore when dictators are deposed and oppressing regimes are brought down by an unfamiliar form of resistance.
Whether they realize it or not, countless people are depressed by the old story, yearning to believe that they really are conscious agents whose choices are endowed with meaning, that they are not condemned to competition and violence. There is powerful motivation to accept the message on which science, spirituality, and nonviolence now converge. And in embracing the new story they would find themselves relinquishing many kinds of injustice to which they might have continued to succumb. When done in the wrong spirit, pointing out others’ misbehaviors often serves only to alienate further, thus perpetuating the depressing plotline of the old story.
The time is right, then, to avoid corporate media and to replace their toxic culture with the affirming study of nonviolence (which, as Gandhi said, is “not the inanity it has been taken for,” but a rich science) as a personal practice, as we suggest in the inner circle of Roadmap, and to familiarize ourselves with the other scientific and wisdom teachings available to us.49
Then, tell our new story: let’s not be shy about explaining where we’re coming from on the innumerable projects encircled by the Roadmap, at a deeper level than usually figures into
political discourse. Waging Nonviolence editor Nathan Schneider gave a great example from the Occupy movement journal Tidal:
The psychology of debt impels us to think at every level about who and what Palestinians owe. But since we refuse to value fellow human beings by their relationship to capital, we should be asking the opposite question. We owe to Palestinians at least what we demand for ourselves: freedom from occupation, freedom from new forms of colonization, freedom to return to, inhabit, and live in a territory which we or our parents and grandparents called home, without annexation, . . . without the destruction of the common resources that nurture and sustain life.50 [Emphasis added.]
Statements like this will increase our effectiveness. They will build to a tipping point the long-awaited and now essential shift of culture toward belonging instead of alienation, toward agency and responsibility instead of an imagined passivity. We’ll be building a future— when we can tell political scientists, policy-makers, journalists, and the general public about a newly discovered nonviolent practice, and they will hear it with joy—because it’s become their culture.
MICHAEL NAGLER, PHD, is professor emeritus of classics and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program; founder and president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence (Metta-Center.org); and author of Our Spiritual Crisis, and The Search for a Nonviolent Future, which received a 2002 American Book Award and has been translated into Arabic, Italian, Korean, Croatian, and several other languages. Other writings of his have appeared in the Wall Street Journal among other venues. Among other awards, he received the Jamnalal Bajaj International Award for Promoting Gandhian Values Outside India in 2007. Michael is a student of Sri Eknath Easwaran, founder of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation (Easwaran.org) and has lived at the Center’s ashram in Marin County since 1970.
Notes
1. Wendell Berry, Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), xi. Quoted in David Korten, “Religion, Science and Spirit: A Sacred Story for Our Time,” YES! Magazine, January 17, 2013, http://cms.yesmagazine.org/happiness/religion-science-and-spirit-a-sacred-story-for-our-time.
2. Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World (New York: Penguin, 2008).
3. More on each of these steps in the Roadmap section of our website, http://www.mettacenter.org.
4. See, for example, Truths Among Us: Conversations on Building a New Culture, ed. Derrick Jensen (Oakland: PM Press, 2011), 14. Also see, George Gerbner, “The Stories We Tell,” World Association for Christian Communication, http://www.waccglobal.org/en/19964-communication-and-conflict/954-The-Stories-We-Tell.html.
5. Lynn Stuart Parramore, “What if Liberals and Progressives Could Learn to Talk to White Southern Men?” AlterNet, November 2, 2012, http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/what-if-liberals-and-progressives-could-learn-talk-white-southern-men.
6. William Johnston, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing (New York, Doubleday, 1973), 129.
7. On The Nature of Things: Thoughts, Actions, And The Fundamentally Mental Character of Nature, 26.
8. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).
9. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1978–1987), 461.
10. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963.
11. See David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate order (London: Ark, 1988).
12. C. E. M. Joad, The Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science (London: George, Allen and Unwin, 1932), 12.
13. “Life and Mind in the Universe,” paper delivered at National Council of Educational Research and Training seminar, New Delhi, February, 1987, quoted in Swami Jitatmananda, Holistic Science and Vedanta (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1991), 74.
14. Sri Eknath Easwaran, Essence of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Guide to Yoga, Meditation, and Indian Philosophy Gita (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2011), 51.
15. Letter reprinted in the New York Times, March 29, 1972.
16. Mahatma Gandhi, Selected Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 52.
17. This was at the Bhaktivedanta Institute’s First Conference on Consciousness within Science, San Francisco, 1998. Since then the science of astrobiology has added a great deal of evidence.
18. See, for example, the works of Frans deWaal, e.g. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Random House, 2009).
19. See Eknath Easwaran, Gandhi the Man: the Story of his Transformation (Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, 1997), 150.
20. See, for example, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University, 2011).
21. “More US Soldiers Committed Suicide than Died in Combat,” Censored 2012: The Top Stories and Media Analysis of 2010–11, ed. Mickey Huff and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 43–54. Cf. also the illuminating concept of Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) coined by psychologist Rachael MacNair.
22. Dan Baum, “Coming Home in the 21st Century,” New Yorker, September 12, 2004.
23. Christian Peacemaker Teams, annual report, October 2010.
24. Richard Deats, “The Global Spread of Active Nonviolence,” in Walter Wink, ed., Peace is the Way (Maryknoll, MD: Orbis, 2000), 163–295. Note how much—including, for example, the Arab Spring—has happened since this publication.
25. See, inter alia, David C. Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (Bloom-field CT, and San Francisco: Kumarian Press and Barrett-Koehler, 2006), and Joanna Macy, “Three Dimensions of the Great Turning,” http://www.joannamacy.net/three-dimensions-of-the-great-turning.html.
26. Vandana Shiva, quoted in Azim M. Khamisa, “From Grief to Gratitude,” Peace Movements Worldwide: History and Vitality of Peace Movements, vol. 2, ed. Marc Pilisuk and Michael N. Na-gler (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 199.
27. I am grateful to Stephanie Van Hook, executive director of the Metta Center, for this insight.
28. Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, Who Am I? The Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi (Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanashramam, 2007), 14.
29. In addition to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index, there is rich new literature on human happiness; for one review, see Stacey Kennely, “Happiness Comes From Respect, Not Riches,” YES! Magazine, August 3, 2012, http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/happiness-comes-from-respect-not-riches. On Bhutan, see Andrew C. Revkin, “A New Measure of Well-Being from a Happy Little Kingdom,” New York Times, October 4, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2Oo5/io/04/science/04happ.html?pagewanted=all&_r=o.
30. Quoted in Steven Glazer, The Heart of Learning (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999), 218.
31. Aitareya Upanishad 3.3. The other three are ayam atma brahma—“This Self (Atman) is Brahman” (Mandukya Upanishad i.2), most famously tat tvam asi—“Thou art That” (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7) and finally aham brahmasmi—“I am Brahman” (Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10).
32. A forthcoming book by physicist Henry Stapp is called Benevolent Universe? Gandhi and King drop the question mark. See Henry P. Stapp, Benevolent Universe? Accessible online, http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/BUFin2.pdf.
33. Barbara Fredrickson, “Your Brain on Love: The Fascinating Biochemical Reactions That Make Sparks Fly,” AlterNet, March 5, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/books/your-brain-love-fascinating-biochemical-reactions-make-sparks-fly.
34. See, e.g., Marc Pilisuk and Michael N. Nagler, “A Final Word,” in Peace Movements Worldwide: History and Vitality of Peace Movements, vol. 2, ed. Marc Pilisuk and Michael N. Nagler (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 370.
35. Chris Hedges, “Don’t Look Away: We Must Confront the Horrific Industrial Violence
the American Military Is Capable of,” AlterNet, March 17, 2013, http://www.alternet.org/world/dont-look-away-we-must-confront-horrific-industrial-violence-american-military-capable.
36. Joe R. Feagin and Hernan Vera, Liberation Sociology (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 2001), 17. “Our humanity is affirmed in struggles to achieve freedom and social justice. Dehumanization marks and defines the oppressor as much as it torments the oppressed. For Freire, the struggle to recover humanity is a struggle of the oppressed ‘to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.’”
37. John Saybrook, “It Came From Hollywood,” New Yorker, December 1, 2003, 54.
