Nonviolence: as a spiritual force and a path to social change (Part Two).

The spiritual activism at the heart of today's progressive movement is "a breath of fresh air" in the midst of the materialistic paradigm of the last 500 years. So says Michael Nagler, Chair of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of California at Berkeley, in the first part of this important and thought-provoking interview (LILIPOH, Summer 2007). In this concluding part he discusses the potential contribution of nonviolence to international security, lifesaving methods of nonmilitary interventions, concepts of justice and security, and the trend toward demonization of the "other." (1)

DK: What would security based on nonviolence look like?

MN: One approach to international security, which I outlined in my book, is nonviolent intervention. There is a scheme afoot, which I'm part of, to create and train a standing nonviolent "army" to do various kinds of volunteer, nongovernmental, and nonmilitary intervention in conflicts, including what's called interposition. This is partly based on the great work done by groups such as Peace Brigades International and Christian Peacemaker Teams, to name two. You can find more at our website. The recent actions of international volunteers in Israel and Palestine--some of which have, for the first time, been noticed by the press--are a good example. They have brought food, medical help, critically needed attention, and of course immeasurable moral support to Palestinians trapped in the siege (all of which is a signal contribution, by the way, to our own security because it reduces hatred against us as a people). In extreme cases, for example at the University of Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, and before that in the western Sahara when citizens got in between Polisario guerillas and the army, we know that nonviolent third parties have actually blocked fighting. This is known as nonviolent interposition. In less extreme but still highly important cases, individual volunteers have prevented many deaths and disappearances in Latin America. Peace Brigades International has about forty volunteers doing this and similar work right now in Colombia, in one of the most violent of the world's many conflicts.

DK: You say that nonviolence is the moral equivalent of war?

MN: Nonviolence is an extremely powerful force, which can be harnessed and institutionalized to give people an inspiring goal, bring peace and economic justice everywhere, and utterly do away with the war system. That's its potential. I am not exaggerating. But we cannot leap from our present state to there, nor do we have to. There are many ways to bring about gradual, stepwise changes; the nonviolent peace force I just mentioned is only one of them.

DK: What are some indications that a nonviolent approach to conflict resolution is spreading around the world?

MN: There are so many that I'd like to just refer you to the essay, "The Global Spread of Active Nonviolence," at the end of a book edited by Walter Wink, Peace Is the Way. Of course, my book also has a fair number of examples. (2) When we began the Peace and Conflict Studies at Berkeley in 1983 there were a few dozen such programs. By 2000, according to the latest edition of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development's Peace and World Order Studies Guide, there were about 500 worldwide, more than half of them in North America.

DK: Speaking of on-campus programs, you call for a re-humanization of our education. What would that look like?

MN: It would look very different from what we've got, but let me point to only one thing. We have, over the last thirty years or so, re-conceptualized and reconfigured our universities and colleges from institutions of learning to for-profit corporations. This was a huge step in the wrong direction, the direction of dehumanization--a step that we've taken as a whole society, without a word of discussion. A great step would be simply reversing that, going back from being corporations to being schools. If you think about it, you'll realize how that re-centers attention on the human individual. As Aristotle said, "Every human by nature desires to learn." Whereas, by function, every employee serves to increase profits.

DK: You have distinguished between a restorative form of justice and a retributive form of justice. Can you elaborate?

MN: This is a case where the names are not misleading. In the movement called restorative justice (which alone has any justice to it in my view), you're trying to restore the offender to social health, to reunite him or her with the rest of society. Conceivably, if you were committed to that view, you might even start to look at the reasons so many are taking to a criminal way and do something to change it. I've said that restorative justice is the only one that's really just; it's also the only way that's really secure. Our present system is part and parcel of our violence-based system; there are 'bad' people, so you punish them and you've fixed the problem. That is violent logic. By contrast, restorative justice is one way of institutionalizing nonviolence.

DK: You advocate re-conceptualizing people, such as you did with 'bad' people above. What do you re-conceptualize terrorists into?

MN: People without any awareness of nonviolence, who have been pushed (or believe they have been pushed) to desperation. They are, in the case we're most interested in, the extremist element in entire populations of very angry, often quite desperate people. Of course, as Noam Chomsky points out, the real problem is that in common usage the word 'terrorist' serves the function of the word 'communist' of earlier decades. It really means, in effect, a mythologized, demonized 'other.' In reality, there is no hard and fast line between a 'terrorist' and anyone else, just as you'd be hard pressed to understand any real difference, as an Afghan man said recently, between someone who flies a plane into a building and someone who uses a plane to bomb a building.

DK: To pursue the idea of the "other," it seems to be human nature to find security by uniting around what we choose to set us apart from others.

MN: There are two kinds of security, true and false. True security, as the Buddha said, comes not from defeating enemies but from not having any--from turning enemies into friends. We've chosen the wrong kind, across the board. We will not be able to choose the right kind as long as we cling to this worldview of separateness and materialism. Acting as if, or acting on the faith that, we are really part of one family whose interests are interconnected will help to overcome the opposite worldview and increase our security. It's a win-win move!

DK: Is it necessary to have a monoculture in order to have peace? For instance, some people have said that racism will end only after generations of interracial marriages make us indistinguishable. Do we want to encourage blending of cultures and lack of diversity as a potential means to peace?

MN: Peace and a monoculture are contradictory--mutually exclusive. This is again a very important connection; violence always reduces diversity, while a true appreciation of diversity always draws upon and helps to create nonviolence. Let me quote Martin Luther King: "I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be; and you can never be what you ought to be until I'm what I ought to be." Much can be said on this topic, but I can't improve on that.

DK: Do you know of societies promoting both diversity and harmony that have been successful for long periods?

MN: How about for 10,000 years? There is evidence of many societies, some of them quite extensive, that preserved both diversity and harmony for extremely long periods prior to industrialism, and especially (though the evidence gets fainter here) prior to the Agricultural Revolution. I would caution though that while these social experiments are extremely valuable in showing that a life of harmony and diversity is possible, the ways in which they did it cannot always be directly imitated. My colleague Stu Schlegel recently sent me his book, Wisdom From a Rainforest, which is about one such society, the Teduray of Mindanao. Ashley Montagu has collected documentation of many others, both "indigenous" and "intentional," but again I would caution that we need a fairly articulate grasp of what nonviolence is in order to adapt their methods to modern or society-wide conditions.

DK: Can we live without enemies?

MN: No. Because we have an eternal enemy, which is our ego. The tragic mistake is to identify that enemy with other people. That we can certainly live without!

DK: Would people be fighting and killing those they identify as "the other" if everyone had sufficient access to basic needs? There's a line in a poem by Yeats: "Who quarrels over ha' pennies that plucks the trees for bread?"

MN: Thanks for that line. Well, my guess is that if we could solve the "other" problem the resource problem would almost automatically disappear. And it's probably more than a guess, because Gandhi said, "There's enough in the world for everyone's need. There is not enough for everyone's greed." Greed and otherness are part of the same worldview.

(1.) Resources for the nonviolent movement are www.michaelnagler.com and www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org in addition to the writings mentioned in the interview.

(2.) Nagler is the author of several books, including America Without Violence (Island Press), The Upanishads (Nilgiri Press) and his most recent, Is There No Other Way: The Search for a Nonviolent Future (Berkeley Hills Books), received an American Book Award in 2002.

David Kupfer Interviews Michael Nagler