Nonviolence and Human Destiny

By Michael N. Nagler

Nonviolence is the art of being a human being.
— Ali Abu Awwad

On November 15, 2015, Adel Termos was walking through a crowded Beirut market with his 9-year-old daughter when a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing dozens. In the chaos, Termos was horrifed to see that he had an accomplice who was about to do the same. Without stopping to think he tackled him to the ground, detonating the explosive vest; of course, both of them died in the explosion but he saved his little girl and perhaps hundreds more. Commenting on this self-sacrifice, Elie Fares, a Beiruti physician, said:

 
In a way, Adel Termos broke human nature of self-preservation. His heroism transcended his own life to save others. To make that kind of decision in a split second, to decide that you’d rather save hundreds than to go back home to your family, to decide that the collective lives of those around you are more important than your own is something that I think no one will ever understand.[1]
 

And no, no one ever will, as long as we are stuck with the old story of what it means to be a human being. But it’s time we realized that when an Antoinette Tuff risks her life to prevent a deranged young man from massacring students in a Georgia school (“my babies,” she called them) or an Adel Termos sacrifices himself to save others in a Beirut market, they are not “breaking” human nature; on the contrary, they are engaging it. If we have an instinct for self-preservation, we have a corresponding insight for self-sacrifice; the former is quite in evidence today because we live in a paradigm of separateness (the "old story"); the latter will come into its own when we regain a sense of our deep spiritual unity. When that day dawns, not only will we understand what such people are doing, but far fewer will have to make such sacrifices because society will be organized along better and healthier lines.

The mental foundation for this old story of materialism, competition, and violence — in a word, separateness — has actually begun to give way in modern science. In the immemorial wisdom traditions of human civilization, it was never there in the first place. The trick is to bring this awareness into the mass media, into education, and into the prevailing culture of the “advanced” societies of our planet.

It’s not that the facts aren’t staring us in the face. In the U.S., American servicemen are committing suicide at the rates of 20 a day! If you ask them why, they’ll tell you: “I lost my soul in Iraq;” “I no longer like who I am.” They’re not just suffering from PTSD; this arises out of not what’s been done to you, but what you’ve done to others. A colleague of mine, psychologist Rachel MacNair calls it Perpetration Induced Traumatic Stress, which she finds not only in soldiers but in prison guards, especially those who execute, and in many others. Today it’s called simply “moral injury” and the term is slowly gaining currency, although the military establishment, for example, has no way to deal with it.

That’s the negative evidence (or some of it) showing that the old paradigm is invalid and giving way. The positive evidence is far more encouraging when you look to those of us who do the opposite of killing and violence. Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) is one of about 20 organizations worldwide doing what’s called Unarmed Civilian Peacekeeping (UCP). They train those who sign up for this work in nonviolence and send them, with a support network, into some of the most dangerous places in the world (think of Mindañao, South Sudan, Chicago) to “create a space for peace.”

Their courageous and highly successful work has recently come to the attention of the UN. A few years back, Carol Rose of CPT was speaking with Aram Jamal Sabir of the Kurdish Institute of Elections when the latter announced that he was going to take to nonviolence. Rose pointed out that sometimes nonviolence takes longer than violence; it doesn’t yield the hoped-for results right away. (Actually, this isn’t even true, according to the recent study by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan published in Why Civil Resistance Works.) Sabir replied, “Yes, but sometimes you are happy in nonviolence because you are not losing your soul. You might lose hope, or get tired, but you are not losing your soul.” He went on: “Some time during all the wars and violence here I saw that violence didn’t change the situation. In any person there is some humanity. Nonviolence tries to develop that part of a person.” This is no armchair theorist speaking, but a man who has known the acrid taste of violence and learned how it feels to turn away from it and turn toward our deeper nature.

Gandhi experimented with nonviolence longer and more systematically than anyone in modern memory. Significantly, he went even further than Sabir and the others: nonviolence is not only an attribute, he maintained, it is the attribute of human nature. As he famously said, “Nonviolence is the law of the human as violence is of the brute.”

As a matter of fact, since Gandhi’s time we’re not so sure violence is the law even for our animal brethren. No one has done more or better work to reveal this than the ethologist Frans de Waal, who started on this quest when he realized one day at the Arnhem zoo that he had just seen a colony of chimpanzees reconciling after a dust-up. He went back to the library to look up the research on “reconciliation,” and found — you guessed it — nothing. So he devoted the rest of his career to exploring animals’ capacity for empathy (which means that it’s run through the long travail of evolution) and systematically showed that they have many positive attributes and behaviors that we, in our arrogance, had denied them. And he argued for years against what’s called Veneer Theory, the essentially Freudian idea that we are basically cruel and selfish with only a thin veneer of civilization between us and our cruelest behavior. He wrote:

I grew tired of the battle against Veneer. But then a curious thing happened: the theory vaporized. Rather than dying from the slow feverish illness, Veneer theory suffered a massive heart attack. I don't quite understand how and why this happened.[2]

However it happened (and wouldn’t we like to know that mystery), it means there’s hope for us. To be sure, paradigms don’t die easily, and we can’t hope that the rest of the materialist/separate worldview will go the way of Veneer. But go it must.  How to create and install a "new story," featuring a higher image of the human being, is the vital issue of our time.

Michael N. Nagler is Professor emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at UC, Berkeley, where he co-founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, and the founder of the Metta Center for Nonviolence. His book, The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World, was winner of the 2002 American Book Award. His most recent book, The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action, advocates nonviolence as the most effective approach to bringing about social change, not simply the most ethical.

[1] The Washington Post, Nov. 16, 2015.

[2] Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist 41. As he says in his introduction to Fry (op. cit., p. xiii) veneer theory is “massively contradicted” by the evidence from prehistory, paleoanthropology, and his own field.