April/May 2006

Empty Envelopes for Empty Promises
Steve Bhaerman

Restoring the Public Trust
Bill Moyers

Nonviolence: The Link Between Spiritual Development and Social Change
David Kupfer

One Roof at a Time
Bill McKibben

If Not Now, When?
Jody Woodruff

Recent Research Shows Organic Foods Safer for Children
Stephen Leahy

Shop Smart and Save the Planet
Annie Hoy

What's in Your Pantry
Mary Shaw

Playing the Quantum Field
Brenda Anderson

Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Yogi
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat

Living With the Himalayan Masters
Reviewed by Rachel Bendat

The Oneness Movement
Cate Montana

Book Reviews
John Darling

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Nonviolence: The Link Between
Spiritual Development and Social Change

An Interview with Michael Nagler

By David Kupfer

“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.”

Michael Nagler came to UC Berkeley as a graduate student in comparative literature in 1960, just as the Free Speech Movement was heating up. After earning his Ph.D. in 1966, he joined the faculty. His life took a spiritual turn the following year when he met Sri Eknath Easwaran, a visiting scholar who was teaching meditation and who became Michael’s mentor. I was introduced to Michael’s work twenty five years ago, when I read his 1982 book America without Violence (downloadable at www.mettacenter.org/publications.html). I was so impressed with his knowledge, spiritually based focus, and intensity that I traveled from my home in Davis to Berkeley twice a week over the following year to attend his course on nonviolence. At that time he was the only instructor on the subject in the entire UC system. He is the founder and chairperson of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Berkeley.

Now Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature, Michael continues to teach nonviolence theory and meditation technique at UCB. He is the author of The Search for a Nonviolent Future, America Without Violence, Spontaneity and Tradition, and editor of Gandhi on Islam (www.michaelnagler.com)

David Kupfer: Can you please define the Nonviolent Moment and its uses?

Michael Nagler: This term refers to the climactic confron-tation between the nonviolent actor and the opponent, usually implying a successful outcome. It may take years to maneuver the opponent into the definitive situation, when the opponent’s force is “toe to toe,” so to speak, with your nonviolence. Such a climax was, for example, the Salt Satyagraha of early spring, 1930 in India. After that it was only a matter of time before the British Raj gave back the country.

What is the status of peace and conflict studies in academia nationwide at present?

Growing slowly. It is a difficult time to innovate in financially strapped—and imaginatively bankrupt—institutions of learning in a “civilization” which no longer values learning except for purposes of gain.

What is spiritual activism?

Spiritual activism is a breath of fresh air. That’s why 1300 people showed up last July when Michael Lerner and I put on the first Spiritual Activism Conference here at Berkeley. More and more of us are realizing that a spiritual component is the heart of the progressive movement. It has taken some time for us to realize, naturally enough, that the old Marxist model (of purely political power struggle) is not enough. We need far deeper changes, a 500-year paradigm shift. Western Civilization has gone on far too long with the model—absurd, when you think about it—that the universe consists of matter, period, and we are bodies, period.

We must rediscover our spirituality, our minds and the higher consciousness of which they are a small reflection. The mass media have prolonged the agony, postponed the necessary change, by artificially propping up the old materialist idea. So we must find ways around them, which is not easy. For that matter, we must find our individual way to real, systematic disciplined ways of entree into our spiritual nature. Talking about it is not enough, we must of course live it. Thus grounded we can use that vision, that energy, in innumerable ways to help the shift happen. It is clear that this great change has to take place more consciously than other similar changes of which we have some historical record. If nothing else, the shocking deterioration of the planet as a life-support system demands that; but I also think that the general pressures of human misery demand it. People suffer terribly without a sense of purpose, and as Gandhi said the only purpose that will work for us is to find out who we are, which means discovering that we are (to use the old formulation) body, mind, and spirit—and that as spirit we can realize our interconnectedness. If you will, the unity of life.

What is the Nonviolent Peace Force and how has it been successful?

The mission of the Nonviolent Peace Force is to take the idea of Third Party Nonviolent Intervention (TPNI) to a new level, both in scale and in public awareness. We are now at a pilot stage, with 34 field team members in Sri Lanka. I would say we have been very successful up to this point. There are many small successes—lives saved, children rescued from the fate of being forced to fight as soldiers, negotiations mediated, and now the facilitation of a rapid deployment force within the Sri Lankan Shanti Sena (“Peace Army”). And there is the overall big success of institution and organization building. I think our Director, Mel Duncan, has done an incredible job of building this dream; you can find out more about it at www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org.

What is the status of nonviolent philosophy application in the world today?

It’s improving. Attenborough’s film Gandhi helped, back in the early eighties; the wave of “color revolutions” that subsequently rolled out, and are still rolling out, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere helped. Even the teaching people do in books and courses helps. One could urgently wish it were happening more quickly—because the need is so dire—but it is happening. I think the biggest lever for a more dramatic development right now lies in the area of understanding. Nonviolence simply makes no sense in the prevailing paradigm, which I earlier called, in a word, materialist. NV is actually the link between spiritual development and social change. I think we could reach a tipping point if key people around the world knew what it is and how it works.

What is the best trend or news in the nonviolent movement today?

I think there’s something less tangible that’s gathering—as Arundhati Roy famously said, “you can hear her breathing”—and that is the awareness that globalization has been seized control of by forces of greed and domination and that we, the world’s people, cannot and must not let them get away with it, and that the way to put forward our true world is by nonviolence.

NV, as I understand it of course, is not just a technique; there’s a whole vision that makes that technique of cooperation and persuasion, rather than domination and coercion, real and powerful—indeed, the only way to go. Now in this connection I take heart from the growing awareness of indigenous people around the world, who are trying to break into the global discourse and be public without losing their very distinct ways. And in a backwards way, of course, I take a kind of heart from the very deterioration of “Plan A,” grievous as that is: it’s only when they see that the old ways and old models of who we are were wrong that many people will be motivated to find a new model and new ways. Our job, as I see it, is to live and spell that out: show what “Plan B” is, so that as soon as they realize “A” doesn’t work they have a safe place to hop onto. If we do this job well enough there may not be much need for disruption, or at least violence, in the great change that has to come.

Tell me about the Peace and Conflict Studies Program (PACS) at UC Berkeley.

PACS at Berkeley is one of the 500 or so programs worldwide that teach the analysis of conflict and the theory of developing peace. We are a fairly large program (about sixty undergraduates) and offer a degree—a B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies. But our main importance is probably our location: in the contentious, highly visible, and undeservedly considered liberal campus of UC Berkeley. PACS, one of the first such programs in the nation, was founded on the premise that war and other forms of violence are neither inevitable nor ineradicable, despite their omnipresence in human history.

What is the origin of the word “nonviolence”?

It seems to have been coined early in the twentieth century, and now serves as an inadequate translation of ahimsa in Sanskrit. It’s inadequate because the Sanskrit word actually denotes a positive force that is deployed when all desire to injure has been converted. I define nonviolence as “the creative force unleashed by successful struggle with a negative drive.” I’m talking about what’s called “principled nonviolence,” as opposed to merely “strategic nonviolence,” which is undertaken only provisionally, for a specific end. In my view, principled nonviolence is the only kind that’s going to make a difference in the long run. Notice the crucial importance of the individual in this definition. Corporations don’t struggle with their emotions; only people do.

You say that you believe that anything we do to reduce violence anywhere will do something toward reducing violence everywhere. Why is that?

This follows from my Gandhian understanding of nonviolence as non-physical, spiritual force, residing in consciousness. True nonviolence is, as an Indian theoretical physicist puts it, something not located in space-time.

That’s why, as Gandhi said, it is “all-pervasive in its effects.” An important corollary to this is that nonviolent actors tend to put their faith in the long-term effects of their acts, which may not be very obviously connected to immediate results. By contrast, violent folks focus only on immediate, direct results. That’s one reason that the latter always make things worse in the long run—why, as Noam Chomsky says, our present response to almost all problems is to make them worse.

What would security based on nonviolence look like?

One approach to international security, which I outlined in my book, is called 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 the Nonviolent Peace Force 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 guerrilas 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.

You say that nonviolence is the moral equivalent of war …

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 peaceforce I just mentioned is only one of them.

What are good indicators that a nonviolent approach to conflict resolution is spreading around the world?

There are so many that I’d 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 (2000; Orbis Books). 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

People without any awareness of nonviolence, who have been pushed—or believe they have been pushed—to desperation 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.

To pursue the idea of the “other,” it seems that some people’s security comes from identifying with a group—either religion, tribe, clan, race, or class—united against another. From South Central LA gangs from the same race who kill each other for wearing the wrong colors, to hostilities that persist thousands of years, it seems to be human nature to find security by uniting around what we choose to set us apart from others.

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!

Is it necessary to have a monoculture in order to have peace? 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?

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.

Is it possible to identify ourselves with countries, clans, cultures, and still live peacefully among those who are radically different?

It is totally possible, but you need a sense of depth. Superficiality means that you have no place to put differences—everything’s in only one place, the surface. When you have a sense of the depth of reality, especially of living reality, you can put unity in that depth and assign differences to where they belong (what my teacher called the fascinating surface of life). It is as essential for there to be diversity on the surface as it is that there be unity at the core. They support and, in a mysterious way, imply each other.

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

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 naturally 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 (1999; University of Georgia Press), 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.

Can we live without enemies?

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!

Would people be fighting and killing those they identify as “the other” if everyone had sufficient access to basic needs?

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.”

What are you up to now, personally/professionally?

My students and I are putting together a DVD entitled The Nonviolent Moment, which we plan as the first in a series of films, first of all for educators, then for a wider public, on the essence and applications of nonviolence. We’re also planning—through a group called Educators for Nonviolence (www.efnv.org) which has taken off beyond our expectations—to put on a teachers conference at Berkeley this summer. We would screen The Nonviolent Moment and in other ways discuss and share resources on how to teach nonviolence at the various grade levels, something desperately needed!

I’m also working on a book on the progressive vision—especially the spiritual progressive vision, growing out of our highly successful first conference on spiritual activism. One of the side tracks is a three-page manifesto on the progressive position that I first put forward at the conference. It’s ready to go up on www.mettacenter.org or www.michaelnagler.net.

I’m immensely proud of Peace Power, a wonderful new journal, print and electronic (www.calpeacepower.org) put out by our students in PACS, which is the only student journal dedicated to principled nonviolence, though I’ve had nothing to do with it. It started as a student-initiated course, but now is also a journal going into its third edition, the current topic of which is women and nonviolence.

David Kupfer is a writer, environmental educator, the producer of the soon to be released San Francisco Green Map, and organic farmer. His articles have appeared in The Progressive, Hope, Annals of Earth, Sing Out!, Whole Earth, Earth Island Journal, AdBusters, Yes!, Earth First! Journal, Diva, Backpacker and Talking Leaves.