Michael N. Nagler - The Search For A Nonviolent Future

2004 by Michael Nagler

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Book design by Lisa Schulz Elliot/Elysium

Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nagler, Michael N.

The search for a nonviolent future: a promise of peace for ourselves, our families, and our world / Michael N. Nagler. 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Hills Books, 2001, under title: Is there no other way?: the search for a nonviolent future.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-930722-40-8

1. Nonviolence. 2. Violence. 3. Pacifism. 4. Passive resistance.
I. Nagler, Michael N. Is there no other way? II. Title.

HM1281 .N342 2004

303.6/1dc22 0410

I T MAY NOT be the perfect analogy but I cant help feeling that the state of the world today resembles the state of an individual who is terminally ill. Well, you might say, what is new about this? Namely, that the world is terminally ill with violence? We know this too, perhaps. But my imagination has gone wild with the similarities.

The individual is an inveterate smoker. He or she is well aware of the hazards of smoking but he continues nevertheless in the brazen belief that nothing serious is going to happen. He is more or less forced to believe this, because in fact the habit is more than he can control. (I had one friend who became so panicked when a doctor told her she had only a few years to live if she didnt quit that she ran out to have a smoke!) However, when the individual does get lung cancer he rushes to the doctor and pleads for a cure. The doctor suggests a complete recovery might be possible only if drastic changes in lifestyle are sincerely made. Beginning with no more smoking. For the moment the patient swears he will do everything the doctor wants. Just as we recoil right after a war or a particularly heinous act of violencefor a while.

The patient goes home with a new lease on life. Once cured, though, the old habit reasserts itself and he finds himself smoking once more. As we all know, this tragic scenario can end in death.

Do you see the point I am trying to make? The world is terminally ill with violence, and when the disease assumes a virulent form we plead for a remedy; but when we are cured we go back to our old destructive ways. As in the individual, so in societies; cures can only be as effective as ones determination to change bad habits into good.

For centuries the world has been saturated with a Culture of Violence to such an extent that it has seeped down to the very core of our being. Or so it seems. But violence is no more natural than letting your innards be destroyed by constant smoking. If we persist in living, thinking, and being in the Culture of Violence then we will not find the way out of that culture; it is almost as impossible to find a patchwork solution as it would be to stay dry in a swimming pool.

To understand the insidious nature of the Culture of Violence it is important to realize that violence has many facets. There is not only the physical violence of wars, fights, riots, beatings, rapes, murders, etc., but the more destructive passive violence, where we hurt people without using physical force. This is more destructive because it is as unseen as cancer. Passive violence manifests in a thousand different ways, like wasting resources, overconsumption, hate, prejudice, name calling, and hundreds of seemingly innocent acts that hurt people even unconsciously. Passive violence fuels the fire of physical violence, which means if we want to put out the fire of physical violence we have to cut off the fuel supply. How? We must become the change we wish to see in the world, grandfather Gandhi said.

Think again of my analogy, for a moment. You can make someone stop smoking temporarily by scaring him. You can make him stop a bit longer by using a nicotine patch, but that still does not address whatever drove him to smoke in the first place. Finally, you can give him something to live forsome higher purposeso that he finds the will for a permanent cure.

This book, written by my good friend Dr. Michael Nagler, does all three. It makes us feel how repugnant and how unnecessary violence is in all its forms. It tells us many stories that explain how nonviolence works and reports on many organizations and projects that are coming up with creative, constructive alternatives to violence in many formsincluding forms we may have thought were inevitable, or justified. And it inspires us to find our way to the kind of rewarding life that will permanently protect us and our families and our world from this cancer of violence. I hope this inspiring book will be read and used around the world.

A RUN G ANDHI

Founder and President, M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence

S OME THREE MONTHS before the horrific events of September 11, I attended a panel discussion at the J School (School of Journalism) on my campus that the dean, Orville Schell, had arranged in order to open a debate on the new presidents resurrection of star wars, space-based missile defense. The first speaker was a representative from the Lawrence Livermore labs, one of the nations two nuclear weapons facilities, where, of course, there is stake in promoting such projects. But there is also a strong undercurrent of alarm about them among nuclear scientists, some of whom I had had the pleasure of speaking with during the Cold War when a group of us, professors like myself, along with theologians and weapons scientists, participated in a floating roundtable that went on, at one retreat or another, for several years. It was one of the most intellectually satisfying give-and-takes of my career. But this night I was in for a shock.

The speaker, a well-informed scientist with a flair for public speaking, took complete command of his audience. The first question up for discussion was, Would the technology work? Of course it would, he sneered. Technology always works. (Hmm. Has anyone here ever used a computer? I mused.) Then it got worse. We [the United States] have so much money, he went on, we can do pretty much what we want and nobody can stop us. I will spare you the rest. It was, all in all, the most abrasive and vulgar display of arrogance I could remember seeing before a campus audience. He acted, and even looked, like Mussolini, whom I had seen in newsreels that I had had the misfortune to view over and over again in high school, and now he reached the climax of his talk: Welcome, he crowed, to the next American century, and if you dont like it, maybe you should wait another hundred years for the next one.