September 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Searching for a Nonviolent Future

Michael Nagler's new book Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future (Berkeley Hills Books) garnered the 2001 American Book Award. Nagler, who was deeply involved in the 1960s' Free Speech Movement, is co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at UCBerkeley. He spoke with Russell Schoch of California Monthly, published by the California Alumni Association, where this interview appeared in Dec. 2001 in a slightly fuller form. A classics scholar, Nagler's analogy for September 11 is not Pearl Harbor, but the Sack of Rome, when another seemingly invincible empire proved vulnerable and thoughtlessly condemned its attackers without trying to understand them.

Russell Schoch: What is nonviolence?

Michael Nagler: Nonviolence, which is grounded in the worth and dignity of every human being, really arises from the struggle within a person to overcome potentially destructive drives like anger and fear. The results of this struggle are what I call the moral architecture for social justice and world peace.

Since the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., it's been estimated that nearly one-third of the world's people have practiced some form of nonviolence for the redress of grievances. This is the concept of "people power." The idea is that the power of an aroused populace is greater than the power of the state, since the state depends on the consent and the cooperation of its citizens. And when citizens rise up, as they notoriously did in the Philippines twice in recent memory, the state is powerless to stop them. But people power is only the tip of the iceberg. The real nonviolence, in my understanding, is person power. That is, the power of the single individual. That power can be multiplied by numbers, on demand; but unless it comes from an individual, an individual's commitment, it's not there. When it is there, once you develop a nonviolent energy, you can use it in any direction.

Look at Gandhi's career. As we know, he was the leader of an insurrectionary movement against an established authority. That's people power--using nonviolence to influence people who have power over you. But he also urged his people, Hindus, to deal fairly with Muslims; that's horizontal. Finally, he wanted it very much to be operated downwards toward the outcast Hindus, whom he renamed the harijans or "children of God." So he was using nonviolence in all three social directions: to those "above," to those in a parallel situation, and to those "below."

You can then talk about nonviolence between husband and wife, between oneself and one's co-workers. The applications are quite limitless.

You show in your book that nonviolence has a history most of us are unaware of.

Yes. In 1909, Ghandhi wrote that what we call "history" is designed not to recognize or document nonviolence. In fact, what history documents are breakdowns in the social system. Gandhi was trying to make nothing more nor less than a breakthrough in the history of consciousness, to show that nonviolent force has kept humanity alive for countless generations.

What's the difference between nonviolence and pacifism?

When you're distant from something and you don't hear about it very much--nonviolence--you tend to equate it with something you know a little about, which is pacifism. There's a bit of overlap between nonviolence and pacifism, but there's a very important difference.

The way we usually define pacifism is negative: "I will not participate in . . ." usually a war. Whereas the real, principled nonviolence position starts from a positive: "How can I make a creative, constructive, long-term impact on the situation I'm in and, ultimately, on the world I'm in?"

What do your three decades of involvement with nonviolence suggest should be our response to September 11?

Ground Zero: Items hanging on the memorial wall, February 23, 2002 © Pat Rabby

In the first place, terrorism cannot be condoned--least of all by those of us who favor nonviolence. But it can be understood. There are reasons we were attacked that day, and may be again. While the actions of the September 11 attackers were deplorable, and while al Qaeda and its fundamentalist supporters are religious extremists, they represent only the extreme edge of a widespread resentment against our nation's policies and attitudes. To understand these things is not weakness; it's wisdom. To think, as the New York Times encourages us to do, that these are irrational fanatics who envy us because we are prosperous and democratic is a dangerous puerility.

Unfortunately, those of us who did not want a military, retaliatory response failed, and our effort was doomed to fail.

Why?

Because bombing is the default response--it's packaged, ready to go. So what I said to my community is: Let's dig in now for the long haul. This is what my class in nonviolence has been working on; this gives my students a very, very vivid sense of relevance, because this could be the most important thing we've ever done. I told my students that what we should be calling for is some sort of modest gesture of recognition of other people's suffering.

For example?

I told them the story of John F. Kennedy's speech at the American University in Washington, in which he cited the suffering of the Soviet people during World War II. He talked about the bravery with which they fought back against Nazism.

That might seem like "so what?" to us, but no American President before or since has ever publicly acknowledged that the Russian people suffered during World War II. Ordinary Soviet citizens were walking around with copies of the speech folded up in their wallets. It was electrifying for them! What I proposed to my students was this: If we had wanted to end the Cold War, we could have done it right then. We had opened a door; all we had to do was walk through it. But, we probably didn't want to end the Cold War; and we probably didn't even know we had opened that door.

What could be said today to ease tensions?

If we could make some sort of gesture of acknowledgment--not to the terrorists, not to al Qaeda, but to the Arab world: "We recognize that we have made some mistakes, and there is a lot of suffering going on, and that we've had a role in this suffering. We're concerned about this; let's work together to redress it." That's all we would have to say, and this would completely change the atmosphere.

"We" being the administration?

Ultimately, yes. This would have to be done at a high level. That human outreach would take the wind out of the sails of the terrorists.

The US government is wrong in thinking that force will deter them. And wrong in thinking that nothing else will. So that's the first point we in the peace community want to make to the American people. The challenge is to acknowledge that suffering has been imposed on the Arab world and to acknowledge that we had a role in imposing it.

But what about our security?

Violence does not bring security; if history teaches anything, it teaches us that. If we succeed in "eliminating" Osama bin Laden, others will take his place. But if we eliminate the grievances that the Third World, and in particular the people of the Mideast, have against us, why should they hate us? Security comes from well-ordered human relationships; it does not come from bomb-sniffing dogs and high-tech spy satellites.

Every time we have pursued violence to further our interests in other countries--supporting Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban--it has rebounded to harm us--what the CIA calls "blowback." If we truly want to be secure, we must understand why we're hated and take steps to correct it.

What steps do you suggest?

There are three areas. In policy, we have to look particularly at our behavior in Israel-Palestine, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, where we have supported the autocracy since 1943. In lifestyle, we cannot go on consuming global resources, particularly oil, at an unsustainable rate. Bike to work! A third area is in our culture. Since commercial television became available in 1946, we have created a culture of violence. We cannot possibly expect to escape violence unless we change that culture. Intuitively, there is a close connection between the cultivation of violent imagery--in movies, in television, on the "news"--and the experience of more and more violence in the real world--a connection which scientific studies have confirmed repeatedly. And that culture of violence has led to a politics of cruelty.

I'm reminded of a friend of mine, a former diplomat under President Carter, who resigned from the diplomatic corps because of what he called the "radical disconnect" between the basic decency of the American people and the frequent cruelty of the policies carried out in their name. Now that this cruelty is coming back to be visited upon us, the American people, it is time for every one of us to start making changes in lifestyle, in cultural participation--entertainment and "news" choices--and in political decisions.

But if we were to do nothing, how would that help?

I'm not talking about doing nothing, and I'm not even saying we shouldn't fight back. I'm saying instead that we should not fight back with the same weapons the attackers used: violence. The choice between violence and doing nothing is a false choice; it shows an extreme poverty of imagination.

How can one reason with terrorists?

The same way you reason with non-terrorists: by respecting their humanity and listening to their complaints; that opens the dialogue. And then you can present and get redress for your own grievances. We have done the exact opposite: stigmatized them as fanatics at best, and "varmints" at worst. This makes understanding impossible.

How does one become nonviolent?

What I've come to believe, as I mentioned earlier, is that nonviolence begins with the struggle of an individual with his or her own negative state and then converting it into its corresponding positive. Let's say something happens and you get angry. You "want" to lash out. If you do, you will be doing violence. And if you swallow the anger and run away, you will also be doing violence.

And you're also reinforcing the other person's anger. But if you struggle with that anger, and treat it not so much as the emotion--anger--but as a raw energy, and you find a way to express it as work, as a creative intervention in the situation, then that is nonviolence.

We sometimes hear that violence is built in, that there's a biological basis for it.

That's an old myth. Behaviorist Frans de Waal--who's not a nonviolence advocate, just a good scientist who knows what he sees--describes a very poignant moment of observing chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo reconciling after a quarrel. He wondered what the literature had to say about this. And of course he found nothing. There were reams and reams about how chimps get into fights, but nothing about how they get out of them. It's just not something that is studied.

Why is violence so accepted today?

Because most people are critically uneducated about the major issues that face humanity in the 21st century. I believe, with Gandhi, King, and others, that the choice between violence and nonviolence is the most important choice facing every person and society today.

Not realizing this, and lacking crucial information about the world, is what makes it possible for very decent people to come up with nothing but "Bomb them!" when they've been hurt. And to fail to respond when they hear that 5000 children--roughly the number who are thought to have died in New York on September 11--are dying in Iraq each month as a result of US-imposed policies.

A friend of mine has a radio talk show in Sonoma. She was talking about Iraq, and a man called in, absolutely furious. "What are you talking about?" he said. "We haven't done anything in Iraq." She pointed out that we bombed their water system, on which they absolutely depend, causing people to boil sewer water to drink, and that 5000 children are dying from preventable diseases every month.

The man asked, "Where are you getting those figures?" She replied, UNICEF. And he said: "Oh my God." He just stopped in his tracks. He had not known this.

Your point is that ignorance . . .

It's a form of ignorance. Lack of information. Now, mind you, it's slightly willed ignorance. By which I mean that when people start to see these facts, they intuit where those facts are going, and this creates cognitive dissonance. And the next thing you know, they shrink back.

What we in the peace movement have to do is very patiently articulate to people that we have been causing suffering and we don't have to. I don't believe in holding up a sign saying "The US is the most violent government in the world!" On the level of facts, this may be true; but it's very counterproductive to say that.

Whereas it can be very productive to give a list of nonviolent alternatives to our current policies, and to present them in a way that people can accept them. That's what I'm asking the peace movement to do: to patiently educate.

Do you believe that nonviolence can improve the human condition?

I absolutely believe that. St. Augustine said, in Book 19 of The City of God, that peace is the deepest aspiration of the human spirit; that peace is a good that does not have to be described in terms of another good. The very name of peace, he said, falls so sweetly on the ear that you do not need to give it any other value.

So I feel, and people of my persuasion feel, that we're actually closer to the core of what human beings are all about. And that very often people want us to help them, even when they're vilifying us as unpatriotic and so forth. And we do stand ready to help.

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