“ALL LIFE IS ONE” (Part One) July 3, 2008
Posted by wmmbb in Peace.trackback
Professor Michael Nagler and others at the Metta Center have a working definition of nonviolence:
Nonviolence is a powerful method to harmonize relationships among people (and all living things) for the establishment of justice and the ultimate well-being of all parties. It draws its power from awareness of the profound truth to which the wisdom traditions of all cultures, science, and common experience bear witness: that all life is one.
The challenging and interesting notion is that all life is one.
Not many people think like that, or that the widespread awareness among many people has been suppressed by the dominant modes of thought. Most of us still live in a Newtonian World in which his expressed assumptions, one way in which Newton demonstrated his greatness, in which the world is seen in terms of solid separate material bodies, and that is all there is, whereas light is all around us unless we are blind or benighted. Energy and consciousness are a challenge to our understanding, and now it turns out to our existence.
Climate change is an expression of this problem, which is not just a question of market economics, institutions or organizations, or legislation but more fundamentally, as Michael Nagler, suggests our culture. History can be seen as the story of culture and cultural change.
Can nonviolence work when confronted with violence? This is the question that confronts the Tibetan resistance to heavy handed reaction of the Chinese Government which includes a willingness to use overt violence, structural and cultural violence against the Tibetan people. The same deck of cards has been used against the Palestinian people by the precursors to the Israeli State, for example the Stern Gang, and by the systematic machinations of the Israeli State. In these cases it is often tempting to use asymmetrical violence in response. Both Islam and Christianity both have just war theories.
Meanwhile in Iraq in particular, and Afghanistan the exercise of unrestrained, brutal, and criminal violence by an occupation military is demonstrating that violence is purely destructive, and as others have observed the irony that its purpose is to secure the hydro-carbon resources that will add to the greenhouse effect.
Sometimes, frogs lay their eggs in the pools we have around the house. We feed them, and the water with time becomes polluted so the tadpoles cannot live. So I change the water. But that does not work. Now the answer, which we found from the newspaper, is to transport them the nearest creek. While this does not guarantee their survival it gives them a chance of life. The moral is as simple as the story. When as I was sweeping up leaves, I came along a frog who croaked, and I seemed to understand what was said.
Nice, thoughtful post.
Gandhi once said (paraphrased, sort of) “The only people who do not realize that Jesus was nonviolent are the Christians.” It would be rather inconvenient to do so now – but there was a time (specifically, before Constantine) when the Christian church prohibited its members from joining the military. Funny to think about now, huh?
JC is nonviolent isn’t he? It occurs to me he actually said “Love your enemies”, and that seems to me to be a pretty nonviolent proposition. The Sermon on the Mount always is overlooked when war looms, as I recall Herman Hesse pointing out at the beginning of the First World War.
I do not really understand how the processes of “accommodation” and “co-option”, as Michael Nagler calls them, work, although I suppose it is the process of politics that we see repeated all the time. The same development seems to occur with Islam and Buddhism. The messages of the great spiritual teachers of humanity, and there messages appear, it seems to me without a detailed understanding of any of them, remarkably congruent. Their essential nonviolence seems to get lost in political development.
The striking thing about Christianity and Islam is that they began, it seems to me as liberation theologies, as bottom-up social movements, which lead to significant success initially among the lower classes and women. When political power is achieved, the world looks different. Violent threats to existence can be seen, and the argument, which seems plausible to most people is that existential violence must be met by appropriate defensive violence – just war theory.
Thank you very much for the comment.
It occurs to me that violence is the real existential threat, more now than ever before in human history. Violence takes many forms, including violence to the life support systems (the biosphere). Why and how did violence become part of the social structure?
This posited structural violence, which might yet be real, is a threat to human dignity and human potentialities. The channels for unanimous violence have already been built? It makes sense of Jesus Christ’s obstructive program of turning the other cheek and walking the extra milestone, as per Walter Wink. But does he, and does the Buddha, and Mohammad have a constructive program?
Further, the idea occurs to me, in this conversation with myself, that we might expect violence embedded in a social structure, when a minority exercises power at the expense of the majority. One method might be to co-opt a section of the society against an easily targeted minority.
The question then becomes how can the hypothesis be tested in such a way as that it might be shown to be wrong. Human beings are an ingenious lot so there is likely to be subtleties in any situation.
tests time mashine
Floonekes:
I am sure that is a very illuminating comment if I understood it. Perhaps you can explain? Feel free to express yourself in a coherent form. Does the time machine you envisage run forward or backward?
By the way, your comment is very much appreciated. Since you are Rumanian, English is not likely to be your first language. As it is my only language, my apologies for any offence.
[...] Part one was similar. I am wondering whether the conclusion was tendentious and simply presented itself to my mind.) [...]