Chapter 6

Finishing the Job

Things of fundamental importance to the people are not secured by reason alone … If you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.

—M. K. Gandhi

THE HEALING POWER

The day after the successful conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, people all over the country held their breath, waiting to see how the white citizens of Montgomery would react to desegregation. The first reaction was—nothing. Then some of the KKK and other elements lashed out with some more bombings. Martin Luther King observed: “But the diehards had made their last stand. The disturbances ceased abruptly. Desegregation on the buses proceeded smoothly. In a few weeks transportation was back to normal, and people of both races rode together wherever they pleased. The skies did not fall when integrated buses finally travelled the streets of Montgomery.”⁹⁴

The same thing happened on a larger, national scale when apartheid yielded to nonviolent resistance in South Africa, though in both cases much more remains to be done. Still, if you want really fundamental changes that can last, that do not merely lead to a backlash, nonviolence is the way to get there. Even as it jostles the prevailing paradigm—which on some level it always does—nonviolence can, as Gandhi said, shake the world gently, and more permanently.

Anger and violence also shake the world, of course, but not gently or permanently. As Hannah Arendt noted some time ago, “the practice of violence, like all action in the world, changes the world; but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”⁹⁵ Before the systematic, quantitative studies being done today by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Kurt Schock, Stellan Vinthagen, and many others ( Johan Galtung has been making major contributions for some time now), in 1969 the American Friends Service Committee brought out a booklet called Speak Truth to Power (reprinted in 2011). In it they set side by side two major liberation struggles, India and Algeria. Both efforts “worked,” but at what costs—and with what aftermath. India lost perhaps a few thousand lives in a population at the time of three hundred million, in the freedom struggle proper (heavy losses followed after partition, but these were a result more of British interference than of India’s nonviolent struggle); Algeria lost almost 10 percent of its people; close to nine hundred thousand out of eleven million. Algeria and France were deeply estranged by the violent struggle; England and India parted as friends and have remained so. Today India, while still faced with its problems, is far more democratic than Algeria.

These facts speak loudly—to those of us who see the pattern and have a sense for what nonviolence is and what it can do. But facts are not enough.

EPIPHANY IN HEIDELBERG

When I was a student at Heidelberg, I became good friends with some of my fellow students. Knowing I was American—and possibly even that I was Jewish—they inevitably brought up the subject of the war, then only twenty years behind us. They were if anything more anti-Nazi than I was (this was well before the recent rise of neo-fascism in both our countries), but one day one of my friends, Hans Martin, made the comment that the way the German troops kept on fighting even after Stalingrad, when they knew it was hopeless, should be considered a miracle. I was already temperamentally of a nonviolent persuasion, though I knew precious little about the subject at that time, and not constitutionally averse to finding something admirable about the German army, but that claim didn’t sit well with me. Considering his comment brought me to a realization that was to be pivotal in my own study of nonviolence: the German troops might have been very brave, but there was no miracle about it. The men had committed atrocities in the name of an idea—namely, that they were the Herrenvolk, destined to rule the world. The minute that idea was punctured, their justification would vanish and they would have to face what they had done. This is very hard for anyone to take. No one can stand that kind of guilt, no matter how indoctrinated they are, no matter how intensely they’re conditioned. That primal feeling of guilt at hurting and despising your fellow beings runs very deep. They kept on fighting to prop up the illusion in their own minds that they were doing the right thing.

Today, of course, we have a name for what those men were trying to avoid: moral injury. Twenty or more American service men and women are committing suicide every day.⁹⁶ Many of them cite moral injury, in their own terms, as the source of their depression. The belief system of those German troops, with its extreme, hierarchical model of humanity—which is fundamentally opposed to nature’s actual organizing principle, unity in diversity—may have added to the guilt they were trying to conceal from themselves.

Let’s look closer to home.

On June 1, 2016, Scientific American ran an intriguing blog post, “Has a Bogus Theory of War Kept Obama from Being a Peace President?”⁹⁷ They got it backward. The perceived need to wage war caused President Obama—and millions of others—to buy into a bogus theory. From the article: “Speaking in Hiroshima on May 27, the President says: ‘Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man.’ World War II, he adds, ‘grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes.’ When accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, the President made similar claims. ‘War,’ he said, ‘in one form or another, appeared with the first man.’”

Bogus is almost too weak a word for the claim that the president makes here with all his authority. “For 99 percent of human and prehuman history, as we’ve already seen, we lived as small bands of gatherer-hunters where cooperation was common among groups that … lived together surprisingly well, without a particular propensity for violence.”⁹⁸ In my introductory peace studies course, I once invited a colleague I’d made friends with from the military affairs program. Not surprisingly, he subscribed to the same bogus theory to support his commitment to militarism, coming no doubt from peer pressure and other sources. I asked him if he knew about Marija Gimbutas’s work on the six thousand war-free years of Old Europe.⁹⁹ My students were eager to hear how he would deal with that question. No problem: he changed the subject.

Thomas Kuhn, using a quote from Max Planck, wrote that a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.¹⁰⁰ We cannot wait that long—but fortunately, if the death of veneer theory is any indication, we may not have to. But we do have to figure out why this change isn’t happening fast enough, and these examples show where most of the resistance is coming from.

MOVING THE HEART

After much struggle, sacrifice, and long hours of negotiation, the manager of Harvey’s Department Store in Nashville, Tennessee came in and announced to the activists doing the sit-in that, yes, he was going to desegregate his lunch counters. After a brief huddle, the demonstrators went back to him and said, “No, you can’t do that.” (When I heard this incredible story, I was as surprised as he must have been.) “No,” they explained to him, “if you do that you’ll be ostracized. Your wife won’t be able to stay in her bridge club, you won’t be able to play golf at your club.” But let me tell you the story as Dr. Bernard Lafayette recounted it during an interview with Michael Carrier for Metta’s documentary:

Now here’s this manager of this huge department store, right? And we are students. And we’re telling him that he can’t desegregate his counters. The question is, what we were negotiating for? Okay? … What was our negotiations about?

So we said, “No. What we need you to do, since you’ve decided to desegregate your counters, we need you to go now, back to the Chamber of Commerce, go back to the country club, go back to those same people, okay, who manage the other lunch counters and stuff like that—and persuade them to take the same position you’re taking. We didn’t need one person to desegregate that one lunch counter. We needed them as a group to do that. And he understood what we were saying. And that was one of the things that was an important turning point in terms of the sit-ins.”

And a turning point in the development of nonviolence: when (mostly) black students taught the country that when a nonviolent struggle begins to gain momentum you bargain, with compassion, from a position of strength. With this, even a beggar can prevail over a king, says an ancient Upanishad. But there was more:

So for example, I said to Jim Lawson, “You know, we missed class. We go to jail and all that, let’s just get it all taken care of.” And Jim Lawson said to me one of the most profound lessons in nonviolence. He said, “No, Bernard. We’re only asking for the lunch counters. We are asking for that.”

This is known in nonviolence as “no fresh issue”—in other words, be strategic about your goal, and don’t pile on the demands. When you have a goal, and you seem to be close to achieving it, stick with that initial goal. Otherwise you’re shifting the ground of the interaction from a negotiation to a fight. But then comes the climax. Dr. Lafayette goes on to say, “Look, since we had this boycott going and we had the sit-ins going, why not go ahead and tell them we want all of the restaurants downtown so we wouldn’t have to go through this again.” And Lawson explained,

“No, Bernard, let them do it. Only then will we know that we have succeeded, and we have accomplished our goal.” What was the goal? The goal was not desegregating lunch counters; it was winning the people who had the power to change, winning them over to us. Having them to accept the same concepts and the same changes that we wanted. We made one step. Let them make the next step. It was the most profound lesson I learned. That the goal was not changing the lunch counters or changing segregation. It was changing the hearts of the people who were sustaining and maintaining segregation. That’s when change comes—winning them over. And only love can do that. And that’s the power of nonviolence.

It bears repeating: in a gentle way, as Gandhi said, you can shake the world. It also bears repeating that this “gentle” is not the opposite of firm; it is firm with compassion. Firm in remembering that your opponents are human beings. They consist of body, mind, and spirit, not just their outward behavior—and in the superb timing of a truly nonviolent campaign, all three are honored. Consequently all parties grow spiritually. Professor Sally Goerner pointed out that the coming change, drastic as it must be, must be gentle; we can now add “and only love can do that”—and that’s the power of nonviolence.

WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

“The assimilation of this quantum conception of man into the cultural environment of the 21st century must inevitably produce a shift in values conducive to human survival. The quantum conception gives an enlarged sense of self [from which] must flow lofty values that extend far beyond the confines of narrow personal self interest.”¹⁰¹ Henry Stapp, whom we’ve heard from before, wrote these inspiring words in 1989. We are still waiting for that enlarged sense of self that must flow from the discovery—and we’re running out of time. From 1989 to today might not seem very long in historical time, but we don’t have historical time. As Joanna Macy and Molly Brown point out in Coming Back to Life, the Great Turning—what I call the paradigm shift to a new story—has to happen within a matter of years, and therefore we have to go about it consciously.¹⁰²

The great challenge facing us is the need to overcome an inertia that’s impervious to logic. The inertia of the old story is so powerful because we were not argued into it in the first place—we just grew up in a world steeped in the old story. Something more than money and power is holding us back; something similar, perhaps, to whatever held those German troops on the Eastern front from surrendering to the inevitable. Even when the motives of money and power are absent (as is the case for scientists who aren’t invested in extractive industry), change can be glacial—even while the real glaciers are melting.

In a critical work that appeared in 1980, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant showed that the change in consciousness that installed the old story came about not because science seemed to imply it but the other way around: the science was called in to support the change in consciousness. People were convincing themselves to deaden their sensitivity to nature for the benefit of power and money in the same way the German soldiers had convinced themselves—at the command of superiors, in their case—to harden their hearts to the enormous suffering of fellow humans. You cannot dam rivers, dig mines, blow off mountaintops—in short, have an Industrial Revolution—as long as you think of the earth as a living being and the life in all its creatures as sacred and intertwined. You cannot overcome your revulsion against desecrating that life to get things you don’t really need. Native peoples were and often are still very aware of this:

You ask me to plow the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.

You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.

You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair?¹⁰³

With the Water Protectors at Standing Rock and elsewhere, this spirit has become a political reality to be reckoned with. Indigenous people around the world are pushing back against the reckless exploitation of the earth, not just to protect their livelihood but also to raise consciousness about our unity with nature. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans.¹⁰⁴ And Merchant emphasizes that this was not a conscious process. It arose from the shared desire—I would call it a kind of mass intoxication—to exploit the glittering prospect of getting untold wealth from nature: wealth, power, and knowledge (the latter often to serve the purposes of wealth and power).

In short, the old story of materialism wasn’t arrived at consciously in the first place and is not being sustained by conscious reasoning now (which, in the event, is rapidly eroding, by both advertising and the general demoralization of the times). Clearly we need a power that goes much deeper than mere appeals to conscious reasoning. And Gandhi tells us clearly what it is: we must also “move the heart.”

Violence does not change hearts and minds; it hardens them. Gandhi, being human, was sometimes frustrated to the breaking point when he felt time was running out to free India from the grip of colonial exploitation. He had no lack of followers urging him to take a shortcut and get it over with. But his response was, “I do not believe in short-violent-cuts to success … for experience convinces me that no permanent good can come out of untruth and violence.”¹⁰⁵

Now we have some science to back him up. In the monumental study by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works—the first of its kind—they compared more than two hundred cases of large-scale insurrectionary movements, going back over the last century, and divided them into those that used armed force and those that did not—a bare-minimum criterion of nonviolence. They found that not only were the nonviolent ones about twice as successful (56 percent versus 23 percent) but they took, on average, only one-third as much time (about three years versus about nine). Moreover, bearing out the rest of Gandhi’s position, nonviolent movements led to greater democratic freedoms down the road even when they “failed”—for example, in an effort to change a regime. Because even while failing in that short-term goal, they put nonviolent “subtle energy” into the social field. Nonviolence supports democracy (for example, by elevating the dignity of the human being), just as violence supports authoritarianism.

To say that nonviolence does what cannot be done by mere appeals to reason—not to mention by violence—is not to say that in satyagraha you aim to circumvent the reasoning faculty. That, of course, is what advertising does, but in the process it tends to make us worse rather than better. Nonviolence, properly understood, will never do that. On the contrary, as Gandhi explained in this insight into the core dynamic of nonviolence, or satyagraha: “What Satyagraha does in such cases is not to suppress reason but to free it from inertia and to establish its sovereignty over prejudice, hatred, and other baser passions. In other words, if one may paradoxically put it, it does not enslave, it compels reason to be free.”¹⁰⁶ Or again, “Satyagraha is a method of carrying conviction and of converting by appeal to the sympathetic chord in human beings. It relies upon the ultimate good in every human being.”¹⁰⁷

When satyagraha frees our reason and appeals to our sympathetic chord, its effect goes beyond the occasion at hand, where it’s effective often enough; it can remind us that we have those faculties, which are often forgotten in the heat of conflict. By moving the heart, it awakens the heart. It ennobles and awakens. We would be very much mistaken to regard the “gentleness” of nonviolence as passive.

Let’s say, then, that you feel you need to unseat a dictator—or, for that matter, change a paradigm. Broadly speaking, there are three ways you can do this. You can use violence—the same force the oppressors themselves are using. That sometimes works in the sense that it may get you that primary goal. Or you can withdraw your support and otherwise “stop the machine” by 1,001 obstructive tactics, which, as the Chenoweth and Stephan evidence shows, will work better than outright violence. Or finally, you can try as far as possible to resist the regime without hating the people running it. You can hold yourself ready to risk suffering because your ultimate aim is to move the heart of the opponent if humanly possible. Your final aim now is to persuade rather than coerce. While the world has yet to see this happen on a large scale—though the campaigns of Gandhi and King came pretty close—this will be the most effective way in the long term, because you are raising the human image even as you are resisting the oppression that arises from a low one. You succeed in this even if you don’t end up getting rid of the hated regime, as Chenoweth and Stephan showed.

When Jimmy Carter became president, he pointedly invited Rosa Parks to his inauguration, because, as he perceptively said, she had raised the dignity of the South, which made it possible for a southerner like himself to be president. When you seek to persuade the opposition to adopt your viewpoint voluntarily, you are liberating an important part of their mind; at the same time you are inviting them into community, and throughout you are according them the dignity that is their birthright—and yours—as human beings. You are making an important contribution to the shift to the new story, in which the restoration of human dignity and human community are central.

Let me return to the misstep that took us off the path of meaning and dignity: the Industrial Revolution (or perhaps earlier, with the decline of contemplative practices around the fifteenth century)n. Some years ago, archeologists dredged up an ancient shipwreck off the coast of Greece and found a complex navigation device with brass gears and many items that were not supposed to exist at that time. It was called the Antikythera mechanism, and nothing like it would be seen for a thousand years. Why didn’t the Greeks jump on this breakthrough and start the Industrial Revolution in the second century BCE? Because of what Emerson called the “master idea reigning in the minds of many persons”—which was not “thing oriented” in the modern sense—included an organic vision of the earth as a living being that they called Γαĩα (Gaia). (For example, Homeric expressions like ευρέα νωτα θαλάσσης, “the broad back of the sea,” were likely felt to be more than poetic metaphor.) Another example: after the steam engine was invented, the British built 25,000 miles of railway in twenty years, while the Chinese and Persians built a mere 1,500 miles between them. This was not because the Chinese and Persians lacked inventiveness or the use of iron; what they lacked were the myths and social structures of their Western counterparts.¹⁰⁸ It’s a clear illustration of the power of story applied to the adoption of the industrial approach.

The relatively recent shift from a living earth image to that of an inert object was driven by the desire to believe the earth was ours to exploit—arising, in turn, from the belief that human satisfaction depends on consuming more and more from the outside world, not on discovering the resources within us. Nonviolence draws on the latter resources. It calls them forth from within us and thereby tends to awaken them in our opponents. As we continue to develop nonviolence, then, we are going back to insights that in some cases have been lost—recently, considering the whole sweep of recorded history—reinterpreting them where needed, and carrying them forward to the future.

WHO ARE WE, FINALLY?

Jamal Sabir of the Kurdish Institute of Elections told Carol Rose of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT)—an organization doing protective accompaniment in Iraq—that he intended to use nonviolence in their struggle. Rose, while applauding his decision, warned him that nonviolence can be difficult and slow. Maybe, said Sabir, “but sometimes you are happy in nonviolence because you are not losing your soul (emphasis added).You might lose hope, or get tired, but you are not losing your soul.” In fact, he went on, “in any person there is some humanity. Nonviolence tries to develop that part of a person.”¹⁰⁹ This is no armchair theorist speaking, but a man who has known the acrid taste of violence—and the psychological reward of turning our back on it to face our deeper nature. Anyone can practice nonviolence, because it is a human endowment; in fact, it’s the endowment that makes us fully human. When, in my presentation of the third harmony in the preceding chapter, I claimed “we are nonviolent,” I was drawing on a central fact of human nature to which the testimony of many nonviolence practitioners bears witness—and, unfortunately, so does the converse testimony of those who in fact feel that they “lost their soul” by being violent. Gandhi’s experiments—including his inner experiments in the training of his own mind, including meditation—brought him directly to this insight, which he often articulated:

Non-violence is the law of our being, as violence is of the brute.

Non-violence is the law of the human race and is infinitely greater than and superior to brute force,

Not violence, not untruth, but non-violence and truth are the law of our being.

In the end, he was ready to rest his whole life’s work on that discovery: “If love or non-violence be not the law of our being, the whole of my argument falls to pieces.”¹¹⁰

There are two main reasons, then, why nonviolence is central to the new story: it completes the story, and it’s the right tool for the job.

IT COMPLETES THE STORY

After the news of an emerging paradigm broke in the giddying 1960s, people here and there set to work developing just what the new paradigm should be, but since then the process seems to have bogged down. We ran up against the inertia of an unconscious story, which mere logic rarely can reach. At one point, for example, many of the psychologists who did the early research on the link between violent viewing and violent attitudes and behavior were disheartened to find that nobody paid attention. Policymakers made some noises here and there, but even when they did, the programmers (and consumers) ignored them. But part of the reason is our inherent difficulty in looking within, outward oriented as we are. Now we are up against the age-old question: who are we?

In the end, this is a question we must answer for ourselves, and answer it experientially; that is, the answer must be not only formulated but also realized. However, each culture will inevitably have a working definition, a more or less agreed-on formulation as its framework. And for our culture right now, it seems to me the central fact about ourselves that we need to incorporate is this unfolding discovery of our innate capacity for nonviolence. When we find our capacity to offer satyagraha, we are on track to fully realize who we are. Our new story is fleshed out, ready to be told.

My original enthusiasm for the new story, back in the day, was mainly because I felt then, as I feel now, that nonviolence needed a conceptual framework, and the new story offered one. Now I believe as well that the new story needs nonviolence as much as nonviolence needs the new story. When nonviolence and the new story complete themselves, they complete each other. Nonviolence is not only at home in the new story; nonviolence is the new story. And the way to get us there.

IT’S THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB

In my work I have found myself speaking with or reading about people who have dropped out of extremist cadres, like Arno Michaelis (who authored My Life After Hate and launched the Forgiveness Project). One case that really sticks in my mind concerns Tony, a vehemently antisemitic man who began to have doubts about those feelings and confessed his past to a Jewish person. The latter said, “That’s what you did, but not who you are. I see you.”

One reporter observes, “That simple act of compassion cracked open Tony’s hatred, cementing his new life” and it shows how potent such an act can be when it comes from awareness of anther’s humanity, and awakens it in them. ¹¹¹ The act was, yes, an act of compassion, but it was also a perfect example of the “two hands of nonviolence,” and it shows why nonviolence is the tool to help us migrate to the new story, by moving (opening) the heart.

The practice of nonviolent action is developing rapidly. New groups of previously disenfranchised people have felt empowered to fight nonviolently for their rights—and by implication for all of ours. Think of Standing Rock in 2016—along with other indigenous communities who are struggling for political independence (East Timor, Western Sahara) or against the destruction of their natural environments being carried on by transnational corporations, often with the connivance of their own governments. New institutions have come into being, like unarmed civilian peacekeeping and restorative justice. A new field of research is coming into its own, with the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, among others; and perhaps most important of all, people involved in these struggles are starting to learn from one another across movements that have traditionally operated in isolation. The success of the 2000 Otpor (“resistance”) revolution of Serbia, for example, has been analyzed and made available to movements in Egypt and elsewhere through the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS). In addition, you can see growing sophistication among these movements. For example, among the many people galvanized into action by the disastrous national U.S. election of November 2016, voices are being raised that protest is not enough! In fact, No Is Not Enough is the title of a recent book by Naomi Klein. This realization is opening the door to the importance of CP.

Yet all this growth—eminently useful, gratifying, critically important, in itself—is grounded in an alternative, urgent message about human nature of which activists themselves are not always aware. Nonviolence, as Jamal Sabir found and the anecdote of Tony’s conversion indicates, helps you discover something about yourself. It’s a journey of self-discovery. That’s part of its power.

THE POWER OF COHERENCE

Some years ago there was a student strike at Columbia University that lasted about twenty-four hours. For exactly one minute of those twenty-four hours there was some kind of fracas. The television coverage accorded to the event was just one minute. Guess which one? “Nagler’s law” is a term we’ve coined at Metta, tongue in cheek, for the way that even a small amount of violence vitiates the effect of a nonviolent action. The math is illogical, but then so is the phenomenon itself:

V + NV = V

But it’s not just the coverage; our underlying story conditions us to see disruption as the reality of the world. What’s more, when you send a mixed message to an adversary or anyone who disagrees with you, they’re very likely to pick up on only the part they want to hear—in this case, the violent part. All the more reason for nonviolent actors to find ways, as they are doing, to keep disruptive elements out of their protests and to be ready and willing to articulate the deeper implications of nonviolence and its power to persuade. It’s a bit like the principle of the laser: when light rays are collected into a single focus, they have a concentrated power we wouldn’t have guessed from the light we see. Power to torch through a piece of steel, or make possible highly accurate surgery. Similarly, when your actions match your words—and they both match the principle you’re trying to represent—they can have an unsuspected power. When Gandhi addressed the Round Table Conference on India’s independence in London in 1931 (a direct result of the “failed” salt campaign), he spoke for close to two hours without notes, without prompting from man or machine. According to William Shirer, who was present (the British didn’t allow the proceedings to be recorded), it was one of the most brilliant and persuasive speeches he had ever heard. When Gandhi’s secretary, Mahadev Desai, emerged from the meeting, he was mobbed by reporters who wanted to know, among other things, how Gandhi did it. Desai explained: what Gandhi says, what he thinks, and what he does are one and the same.

Teaching nonviolence at Berkeley, my students would often go out to rallies that were called to protest, say, racism. Time and again I would watch them go out to Sproul Plaza only to come back crestfallen about twenty minutes later. “I care so much about the issue,” they’d tell me, “but I just couldn’t take the anger.” Not just the anger itself, but the jarring incoherence of the atmosphere that it created. When people enter a nonviolent action today very angry—and who can blame them?—when they can’t move past raw anger by shifting it off the practitioners of injustice onto the injustice itself, they can end up hating people for hating people, which is as absurd—and counterproductive—as it sounds. What should we do, then? “We did not give rise to outbursts of anger,” King said. “We expressed anger under discipline for maximum effect (emphasis added).”

Learning how to harness anger is one of the most useful life skills we can acquire. When we learn it, once again we’re not only acting more effectively but also growing spiritually. We’re helping others get out of their alienation, and we’re acting in resonance with the vision of human nature we want to promote. In practice, when we feel an urgent need to do something and won’t let ourselves go into action angry, we can build up a habit of shunting our thinking, from harboring nasty thoughts about wrongdoers to What constructive action can I take about this? These days there’s so much to be angry about—very angry—that we have a lot of raw energy to work with!

A “gentle” change, in Professor Sally Goerner’s sense, can still be a drastic change. It can be deep without unduly ruffling the surface, and without creating a vacuum into which, as we’ve often seen in recent uprisings, regressive forces are poised to rush. It aims for cumulative, enduring change by elevating, even slightly, the consciousness of all parties, whatever it may or may not succeed in doing in the immediate situation. This is what is meant by “moving the heart.” Because nonviolence, when well done, can do this; because it is the coherent means for the desired end; because it’s the only way to create deep, enduring change—for all these reasons, it appears to be the only method that can repair the very narrative of our civilization.

SUBTLE ENERGY

One of the most arresting, intuitively profound observations in King’s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail is that an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Many centuries before him, the Greek historian Thucydides said pretty much the same thing: that those who do not protect justice when they are strong will not have it to protect them when they are weak (my country, please take heed!). Gandhi made frequent references to the way nonviolence (or violence, for that matter) can propagate through the social field. He wrote, for example, before the dangerous effects of radiation were known: “Non-violence is like radium in its action. An infinitesimal quantity of it embedded in a malignant growth, acts continuously, silently and ceaselessly till it has transformed the whole mass of the diseased tissue into a healthy one. Similarly, even a little of true non-violence acts in a silent, subtle, unseen way and leavens the whole society.”¹¹²

One way it does this—and I would say it’s a critical way—is by always enhancing the sense of human dignity. We are taught, are we not, that the United States was born when those “embattled farmers” in Lexington and Beacon Hill levelled their muskets at the advancing redcoats. It may surprise you to learn that before the war party had its way there was a flourishing, creative nonviolent uprising against the crown—and it was winning. “In a cause so dignified,” said leading voices in the colonies, violence would spoil everything. Said Samuel Adams: “I beseech you to implore every Friend in Boston by every thing dear and sacred to Men of Sense and Virtue to avoid Blood and Tumult. They will have time enough to dye. Let them give the other Provinces opportunity to think and resolve … Nothing can ruin us but our violence. Reason teaches this.”¹¹³

I cite this to show not only how history has distorted our foundational narrative, with dire results, but also how dignity was even then a recognized virtue of nonviolence.

Centuries later, when the Philippine people were looking for a word to describe their nonviolent resistance to the Marcos regime in 1983 through 1986, they came up with a gem: alay dangal, to “offer dignity.” When you offer nonviolence, that is exactly what you do. I wish the term had stuck!

Conversely, violence is resorted to when dignity is or is felt to be offended. Dr. James Gilligan, whom we’ve met before, spent over twenty-five years as a forensic psychiatrist studying serious offenders who had killed, often more than once. In the end, what he found was quite simple: “The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence.”¹¹⁴ He goes on (emphasis mine; you will see why shortly):

I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this loss of face no matter how severe the punishment, even if this includes death. For we misunderstand these men, at our peril, if we do not realize they mean it literally that they would rather kill or mutilate others, be killed or mutilated themselves, than live without pride, dignity, and self-respect…. That hunger strikes in prison go on when inmates feel their pride has been irredeemably wounded, and they see refusing to eat as their only way to assert their dignity and autonomy.¹¹⁵

Violence also is a pervasive form of subtle energy, one that drives some to crime, others to war, with humiliation as a keynote either way.

Lydia Wilson is a research fellow at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University and senior research fellow and field director at Artis International, a conflict resolution research consortium. In 2015 she had the rare chance to interview captured ISIS fighters in Kirkuk, Iraq. This is what she found: “They’re drawn to the movement for reasons that have little to do with belief in extremist Islam … rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.”¹¹⁶

For journalist Tom Friedman, what Lydia Wilson discovered about radicalized youth in the Middle East is a general principle: “If I’ve learned only one thing in covering world affairs, it’s this: the single most underappreciated force in international relations is humiliation.”¹¹⁷

The whole school of satyagraha arose, we remember, when Gandhi was thrown off a train in South Africa and somehow managed to not take the insult personally but to dedicate himself to stopping people from offering such insults partly for their own benefit; he knew that dignity is a “field” in which our consciousness is, as it were, bathed. We can’t poison the water when we’re all in the same tub.

In the repertoire of today’s activists we find a technique called “name and shame.” But if your goal is to elevate human dignity, as it must be, this is tricky. It’s one thing to make a person ashamed of something they’ve done—precisely because they’re capable of better—and another to make them ashamed of who they are. That would take us backward even as we’re trying to go forward.

TOUGH LOVE

Conversely, Gandhi discovered the healing power of recognizing the dignity of oneself and others, of rehumanization. He became convinced that human dignity can never be sacrificed; that conviction was tested under extreme circumstances in 1947, the terrible aftermath of partition. Unable to go everywhere that rioting broke out—he had just pulled off the Miracle of Calcutta, stilling the rage and fear of thousands of rioters in that city—he sent Sucheta Kripalani to a village in Noakhali in East Bengal where Hindus had been massacred. The rioters were so violent that even reporters wouldn’t go there. She set to work immediately and soon had the terrified Hindus segregated in a reasonably safe place and found a way to feed them. She felt very good about how she had handled the drastic situation, and eagerly waited for Bapu to come and see her handiwork. To her surprise, which we can easily imagine:

He said I had done wrong.

I said, how?

He said you are turning them into cowards. They have to stay there, and … change the atmosphere there…. change the hearts of the people.

But that was just the beginning; her account continues:

He said, “no you mustn’t give anybody anything free of cost. You must make them work for what they get.” I was flabbergasted. I said, “how am I to give them work? Everything is disrupted here, and the people are suffering, they are starving” … he told one thing which I even today remember. He said, “Sucheta, they have lost everything, these people. Don’t take away their self-respect … put a stone on your chest. Put a stone on your heart. [If a mother comes to you] don’t give her food. Give her some work … any work, so that she gets her food in return for work.”¹¹⁸

CONCLUSION

Every time a nonviolent success happens, it delivers a little shock of recognition that triggers the memory of a lost reality, a higher dignity. When we talk about a new story, we are talking about a framework that will help us seize on those moments of recognition and build on them. How to do this is elusive and will often meet with irrational resistance, so it’s good to remember what we have in our favor.

We don’t need to take a leap into the unknown to come up with an alternative: the story we need is still there, and it’s now being given back to us by our new science and the growing theory and practice of nonviolence. Not that we should, or even could, go back to the past. We want to go back to where we made a wrong turn (which turns out to be not that far) and pick up the trail of progress that was dropped when our immediate ancestors made their detour into material “development” and a material vision of reality.

A 2016 David Brooks column presented a phrase (which I emphasize here) that expresses this balance of perennial wisdom and fresh interpretation. (I find the expression “a ghost in the machine,” the traditional designation in some Western philosophical traditions for the presence of spirit in reality, singularly unevocative, but it’s a start.) Brooks wrote, “That has to be the opening assertion of a new traditionalism—that we’re not primarily physical creatures. There’s a ghost in the machine. We have souls or consciousness or whatever you want to call it. The first step of a new traditionalism would be to put the spiritual and moral implications [for] everyday life front and center.”¹¹⁹ (Incidentally, Brooks is the first mainstream journalist, to my knowledge, to mention the new story.)

Paradigm shifts are changes in consciousness and can therefore happen quickly and mysteriously, as we saw with the sudden death of veneer theory. The unlamented demise of veneer shows that people are wearying of upholding such dismal views. How long can you go on denying that your way of being is destroying everything you yourself hold dear?

No matter how pervasively human beings get conditioned, they have the capacity to reason, and satyagraha is the tool to unlock it. When this appears to happen suddenly, as we’ve seen frequently when people like Arno Michaelis drop out of extremist cadres, it’s because unconscious forces have been at work, and we can create an atmosphere to enhance them. Charles Koch, the “conservative” billionaire who has supported so much of what I would call pure evil in the world, recently teamed up with his political opposite and colleague in wealth, George Soros, to fight “endless war.”

Maybe the only thing more powerful than an idea whose time has come is the one that keeps coming back.