Gandhi and Peace Studies – by David Maxwell

Posted on May 15, 2008 by gandhifriends

This article was first published in issue 96 of The Gandhi Way

What are Peace Studies ? They describe a new academic discipline first introduced in the second half of the 20th century. Peace Studies draw on subjects like anthropology, psychology, political science and ethics, but differ from them in stating a required outcome, Peace. In 1985 the idea of such a discipline drew flak from commentators like Roger Scruton who wrote in The Times newspaper :

“When the tide of drivel has swollen to such proportions that the University of Bradford can offer a first degree in a subject, peace studies, that does not even exist, it is surely time to ask whether there might be a better use of taxpayer’s money”.

Bradford replied:

“For the record there are university departments and research centres in the USA, West Germany, Canada, Holland, Finland, Sweden and many other countries.”

The first thirty years of Bradford’s Department of Peace Studies was a time of remarkable growth. When it opened in 1974 there were 5 staff and 20 students who believed that peace could be studied, violent conflict prevented or resolved, and, in the long run, war as an institution abolished. The first Professsor, Adam Curle, successfully mediated to end the war in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War. His last work before he died was helping the war-traumatised in former Yugoslavia. By 2002, 20 Peace Studies students had grown to 200 a year. Many were postgraduates. The number of PhD students is currently about 100. The external examiners recently gave the Department top grades in everything they assessed.

Students come from all over the world. They go on to jobs with NGOs, as diplomats, journalists, and consultants. Others move to other universities and teach similar courses, sometimes with different names e.g. Conflict Resolution or Transforming Conflict. Andrew Rigby teaches Reconciliation and Forgiveness at Coventry University. Gandhi would have approved of that ! There are frequent attempts to get new courses going, and the number of books on peace studies listed on Google demonstrates the potential – 4,000 books, with 3,500 of them best sellers. However, finding the funding for academics to set up and students to attend new courses requires more money and effort than buying a few popular books. Those tempted to give up, can find inspiration in Gandhi’s life story. Note the decades of strenuous preparation that preceded each major breakthrough.

Why the current explosion of interest in Peace Studies ? Consider this change. When Gandhi was born, wars were fought with footsoldiers and cavalry and no weapon more destructive than a cannon. Remember Tennyson’s poem of that period ? The Charge of the Light Brigade. By the end of Gandhi’s life one atom bomb dropped from one plane could wipe out a whole city. Gandhi, horrified by the atom bomb, wrote that it convinced him even more strongly that the way forward had to be a nonviolent one, not a military one. Gandhi’s greatness lay in a lifetime of actual experiments in nonviolence. He challenged us all in his dictum:

“Be the change you want to see.”

It is no accident that Peace Studies was first introduced as an academic discipline in its own right in 1950 in the Universities of Michigan and Oslo. Both Kenneth Boulding in Michigan and Johan Galtung in Oslo were admirers of Gandhi. After two atom bombs had abruptly ended World War II, far-sighted people could see the danger later so narrowly averted in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Studying International Relations as if war and peace were equally valid ways of conducting diplomacy had begun to seem questionable when large scale nuclear war could destroy life on earth. The new discipline of Peace Studies was about conducting international relations without resorting to war.

In the 50s the Rev Martin Luther King Junior studied Gandhi and took his nonviolent experiment further. His success showed that Gandhi’s method did not depend solely on the charisma of Gandhi himself or the Indian context of nationalism versus imperialism. Successful resistance to segregation by the black churches in the Southern States of the USA still had in common with Gandhi’s satyagrahas three major factors: disciplined nonviolence, religious conviction by those who made major personal sacrifices, and sympathetic support from wider public opinion fed by media reporting. The effect of the Civil Rights Movement was to add an ethnic relations dimension to Peace Studies.

I would like to talk briefly about the current job of one graduate who wrote his PhD at Bradford on Gandhi, Timmon Wallis. After working abroad as a peaceworker he currently trains and assesses peaceworkers for International Alert. Gandhi would have been delighted at the concept of training peace workers. His name for what he called a ‘peace army’ was ‘shanti sena‘. Gandhi insisted that peace requires the same courage and trained discipline as war. Peaceworkers need training in courage and discipline. Gandhi tried in his Ashrams and through his Constructive Work to provide some training so that people could go into nonviolent action fully prepared and supported. Peaceworkers UK currently provides five levels of competence in peace work and assesses responses of students by simulations of real situations.

A current development in the Peace Studies course at Tuft University, USA is that students are being asked to commit themselves to the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath which doctors make. They are required to promise to follow their studies by going into an ethical job and to make ethical choices in their future lives. Gandhi, who made solemn vows at key moments in his life including the vow to resist Indian Registration in Africa, would have approved of that. But reading of Tufts’ requirements does raise the question of how few ethical demands are made by academia generally of students. Gandhi vowed vegetarianism when he studied in London. He persuaded 3,000 to vow nonviolence in 1906. When he read Ruskin’s Unto This Last on a train journey in South Africa, it led to a dramatic personal change in lifestyle. It would be interesting to know whether some military sponsored students currently at Bradford University will complete the course able to feel that peace studies and military strategies can be mixed or tried in turn, or whether there is a whole religious or moral ethic behind peace studies, dependent on trust, dependent on consistency over time. The concept of mixing peace studies and war studies seem as dubious as trying to mix oil and water. Peace Studies ultimately respects life, whereas the bottom line in War Studies would appear to be the death of the less powerful.

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Nonviolence and the Self-Cherishing Mind – by David Edwards and Matthew Bain

Posted on May 2, 2008 by gandhifriends

This article was first published in issue 96 of The Gandhi Way

On 2nd December 2007 Media Lens were presented with the Gandhi International Peace Award by Denis Halliday, former UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq and himself a recipient of the award in 2003.  Here Matthew Bain, a Friend of the Gandhi Foundation, asks David Edwards about the relationship between Media Lens’ work and the Gandhian principle of satyagraha.

Bain: In his struggles against oppression, Gandhi sought to break down the barriers between oppressors and oppressed, seeing them all as victims.  Whereas the oppressed often suffered from physical or economic degradation, the oppressors suffered from moral degradation. Is this theory relevant to Media Lens’ work ?

Edwards: The great Buddhist sage Shantideva said the “ancient enemies” of living beings, the real enemies, are greed, hatred and ignorance.  These are the three causes and effects of the self-cherishing mind.  It is greed, hatred and ignorance that lead people to believe their own suffering and happiness matter more than everyone else’s.  This leads us to put ourselves first and to ignore the consequences for others.  Many of the miseries of the world are rooted in this fundamental willingness to subordinate the interests of others to our own.

It’s tempting to see particular groups of people as the cause of all problems. But actually we’re all afflicted by the “ancient enemies”.  So, for example, people are outraged if someone expresses racist or sexist prejudice – these are rightly seen as sources of immense suffering.  But there is a far more deep-rooted prejudice – the bias whereby we see ourselves as far more important than all other people.  Geshe Lhundub Sopa does a good job of explaining what we know but don’t really recognise in ourselves:

“We think everything should focus upon us – all services and good things should be for me. Then of course we try to gain enjoyment, fame, wealth, and everything else that we feel is necessary for this me.  We become angry if we see that something might prevent us getting those things or if anyone else gets something better.  These feelings make us think, act, and speak in negative ways.  Everyone is subject to this problem: we all act from selfishness.” (Geshe Lhundub Sopa, Steps on the Path to Enlightenment, Volume 3, Wisdom Books, 2008, p.111)

We are almost always massively prejudiced in our own favour. We feel virtuous when we have one or two compassionate impulses, but it’s actually shocking how many of our thoughts are concerned with squeezing just a little more pleasure into our lives.  Not into other people’s lives, into our own.  We want the best for ourselves; we’re the centre of the universe.  The human universe never was heliocentric, it has always been egocentric.  Racial and sexual prejudices are sub-divisions of this ultimate bias.

Shantideva delivered his amazing “J’accuse!” to his own selfish mind as far back as the eighth century (Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, Shambhala Publications, 1997)):

“O my mind, what countless ages
Have you spent in working for yourself?
And what great weariness it was,
While your reward was only misery!

“The truth, therefore, is this:
That you must wholly give yourself and take the other’s place.
The Buddha did not lie in what he said –
You’ll see the benefits that come from it.” (p132)

He added:

“And so it is that if I want contentment,
I should never seek to please myself.
And likewise, if I wish to save myself,
I’ll always be the guardian of others.” (p.134)

Shantideva was here doing nothing less than rejecting his own favouritism towards himself !  And this was not some kind of gesture or stunt – his work, The Way of the Bodhisattva, is a precise, step-by-step guide to actually achieving this result.  When he advises that we “take the other’s place,” he means that we should work for the benefit of others as though it were our own, rather than working for our own benefit.

That this aspiration can emerge in a product of nature “red in tooth and claw” is astonishing.  In my opinion, Shantideva’s words constitute the ultimate revolutionary statement – the complete rejection of self-interest out of concern for the welfare of others.

Shantideva was not advocating this as a matter of righteous, hair-shirted stoicism.  His point is that we need to replace the inevitable misery of the self-cherishing mind, of the “ancient enemies”, with the almost unimagined happiness of the compassionate mind liberated from greed, hatred and ignorance.  Of course the self-cherishing that Shantideva rejected is at the heart of all individual exploitation and of all exploitative systems of power.  It is self-cherishing that causes us to build and participate in these systems.

The claim is that thoughts pretty much obey the laws of Newtonian physics – they build psychological momentum in the absence of an opponent force.  The more we are angry, the stronger our anger becomes. On the other hand, the more we are compassionate, the more anger dissipates.  There is a marvellous quote that sums up the logic of self-restraint in a discussion on training the mind to become more patient: “It is not productive to one’s practice to become impatient with those who are impatient.” (Sopa, op. cit., p.284)

What we’re trying to do is to increase compassion in the world, to decrease self-cherishing.  This is achievable when we perceive greed, hatred and ignorance as the enemy.  When we perceive particular individuals as the enemy, we tend to achieve the opposite result.

Bain: Gandhi named his active method to combat oppression ’satyagraha’, meaning struggle for truth.  Satyagraha looks for the moral levers in the oppressor’s own psychology or mythology, and then discovers a way to pull them.  Gandhi was successful in pulling the levers in the British psychology.  As rulers of India we considered ourselves to be upholders of righteous constitutional rule, so when Gandhi allowed himself to be imprisoned by us he forced us to look in the mirror and see that we were not acting in accordance with our own self-image.  Do you believe that there are elements of satyagraha in Media Lens’ work?

Edwards: In his book, Web Of Deceit, the historian Mark Curtis showed how the mainstream media promote one key concept above all others: “Britain’s basic benevolence.”

(http://www.medialens.org/alerts/03/030603_Basic_Benevolence.ht) This provides an obvious lever for challenging exploitative power – the challenge to live up to the hype.

For example, in 2002, journalists like David Aaronovitch and Johann Hari claimed their real concern was for the welfare of the Iraqi people.  So we investigated how this compassion has manifested itself during the subsequent catastrophic occupation.  We examined to what extent they have drawn attention to the suffering of Iraqi refugees, to the patients dying in hospitals for the lack of the most basic equipment, to the small children dying from a lack of basic sanitation, and so on.

(See: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080110_david_aaronovitch_a.php and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/041029_Siding_with_Iraq.HTM)

The claim of humanitarian intent is a very powerful propaganda weapon for systems of concentrated power, but it does allow dissidents to offer a challenge in that moral arena.  And power is under pressure to provide credible answers, to be seen to live up to its own claims.  The fact is that people in our society do need to be persuaded to support violent interventions on humanitarian grounds.  If these claims are shown to be bogus, then powerful interests have much greater difficulty in waging war – they can’t railroad the population completely; they can’t afford for democracy to be exposed as a total sham.

Government support for the Iraq war went ahead against overwhelming public opposition in several countries in 2003, but at a very high political cost to the likes of Blair, Aznar and Bush.  It’s fair to say that Blair’s career was ruined by his mendacious campaign to manipulate Britain into war – his reputation has been demolished.  It’s hard now to remember just what a source of optimism he was for many people (liberal journalists in particular) before 2003.

Bain: Media Lens can only do so much.  What other ‘moral levers’ are out there, that you would like other people to pull?

Edwards: Especially on the left, I think people need to look to the moral levers in themselves.  It’s so easy to place all our trust in facts and rational argument to win the battle of ideas, to convince everyone of the need for progressive change.  But as discussed, the self-cherishing mind is highly adept at simply deflecting these facts and arguments from awareness.  We should also be seeking to strengthen the capacity for kindness, compassion, love, patience and generosity in ourselves and others.  We need a compassionate revolution, as opposed to a bomb-throwing revolution.  Basically the left needs to start meditating on these subjects.

People often think this means sitting cross-legged on a cushion and emptying the mind of thoughts.  But fully one-half of Buddhist meditation is called ‘analytical meditation’.  This type of meditation involves simply reflecting on these issues exactly as we’ve been doing here.  What are the disadvantages of the self-cherishing mind ?  Have I ever felt self-obsessed, really greedy for pleasure ?  What was the impact of indulging these thoughts on my sense of well-being ?  Where did they lead ?  Have I ever felt coldly indifferent to everyone else who just seemed to be a damned nuisance ?  How did I feel in those moments ?  Have I ever been really generous ?  Have I given something to someone solely out of an intention to make them happy with no thought of reward ?  How did I feel in those situations ?  How did other people react ?

A good place to start in this internal analysis is Matthieu Ricard’s book Happiness (Atlantic Books, 2006).  Geshe Lhundub Sopa gives an idea of how the mind can be trained:

“The way to meditate on love is similar to the manner of meditating on compassion.  Where compassion is wanting sentient beings to be free from misery, love is wanting them to possess happiness, enjoyment, and bliss.  So here we look at sentient beings, beginning with our relatives, and see that they do not even have worldly happiness …  Go back and forth, first thinking that sentient beings lack a specific thing and therefore they suffer this or that type of misery, and then wishing that they have the cause of happiness.  Think this way again and again and you will come to feel like a mother whose dear child is in need of many things.  A mother wants her child to have the things that will make him or her happy; she sincerely desires to help her child obtain these things.” (Sopa, op. cit., p.89)

This kind of repetitive practice gradually moves the momentum of the mind away from ruthless, unrestrained self-cherishing, towards kindness.  We can sensitise our minds to the suffering of others, to compassion.

Many of us think we’re prevented from trying harder to help others because of indifference.  But this couldn’t be more wrong.  The problem is not indifference; it’s our passionate dedication to serving ourselves.  Our problem is not laziness but that we’re working so hard to satisfy our desires, to indulge our egos, to get everything we want.

But the response to the self-cherishing habit is not to somehow just try harder, to whip ourselves into being more committed people.  Our self-cherishing minds will certainly not tolerate this for very long – it’s far too much like hard work.  We might manage for a while but pretty soon we’ll decide all this suffering is deeply unfair – ‘It’s not my fault the world’s full of suffering, and anyway what can one person really achieve ?’ – at which point we’ll likely disappear off to have some fun.

The solution is to challenge the false claims of the self-cherishing mind and to investigate the liberatory potential of the other-cherishing, compassionate, mind.

And there are real surprises here.  The principal one being that focusing primarily on our own happiness guarantees suffering for ourselves and others. Curiously, happiness lies in exactly the opposite direction.

www.medialens.org

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Burma’s Freedom – Violence or Nonviolence?

Posted on July 9, 2007 by gandhifriends

A debate has arisen among members of the GF Committee over the justification of the use of military force in a good cause. Here are some of the email exchanges.

The Editor would like to hear from readers also on this topic which is central to Gandhian thought.

John Rowley:

I take my view from the Buddha, Gandhi, Bhikhu Parekh, and Burmese friends.

The Buddha said that if you knew that there was a man in a boat with others who intended to rob and kill his fellow passengers, then it was justifiable for you to kill him if there was no other way of preventing the crime. Gandhi said, I think, that if your family or your country was violently attacked then it was justifiable to defend both with violence if no other course worked.

Bhikhu Parekh says in his Hansard Society booklet Intervention and Democracy that armed intervention on strictly humanitarian grounds is justifiable if all other means have been exhausted.

My Burmese friends (and The Burma Campaign) totally agree with Bhikhu, and Buddhists ask those who advocate nonviolence in all situations to come in and experience extra-judicial killings, indiscriminate torture, child exploitation, slavery of innocent women, children, the old, the disabled. A single bullet can kill an experienced satyagrahi as easily as a new-born babe – if no one ever hears of either, what is gained when the perpetrator continues to live ? And if the whole world hears, who is to distinguish between either ? And if the whole world hears and does nothing, neither prepared to risk their own lives nor that of those they pay to risk death (soldiers), once again nothing is gained. Sanctions have proved ineffective in Burma as well.

For the time being, I rest my case. I do not think that everything Gandhi said or did was right especially as we are 60 years on since his last breath and thousands of miles away. I would have supported the execution of Saddam Hussain if that could have been achieved without any other person being hurt. As it happened, and only because we are still seduced by this illusion of the nationstate, we have ended up being responsible for the death of over a million people in Iraq simply because we did not take the trouble to try to understand the culture, politics and social interactions of all the people living there or consult them on how best we could help.

David Maxwell:

The strong sense of injustice at the treatment of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Burma by the military junta, and now the harsh treatment of protesting Burmese monks, makes it difficult not to want tough intervention, as a last resort. John knows the Burmese situation so well and feels so strongly, his frustration levels are understandably high.

But where might a violent last resort lead? Would not a definition of satyagraha which includes force as a last resort, devalue it ? Gandhi’s search for truth firmness was looking for a way to be firm without doing violence to others. He was only human and wavered in that search at times, but in his last three years the overwhelming force of the atom bomb steadied him in his conviction that civilisation was impossible without nonviolence. There could be no ifs and buts.

I heard at this year’s Conflict Research Society AGM a story about a leading military man lecturing at Bradford on conflict resolution. He spoke knowledgeably and enthusiastically about negotiation, mediation, restorative justice, etc, but when asked by a student for his personal definition of conflict resolution said it was all these things but ended his definition with these words – “backed up with overwhelming military force”. That was his bottom line, and those he dealt with knew it. The iron fist in the velvet glove? They did not have much choice. Agree or else! 

Gandhi’s line if I understand aright, was that he personally could not be violent whatever the cost, and could not support the violent actions of others, unless you see ambulance work (which may enable soldiers to return to violence, but that is their choice) as violent. There is a world of difference between seeing nonviolence as a tactic to use when you are weaker than others, and those who see nonviolence as a principle to keep to even when other ways are at your disposal.

Graham Davey:

On nonviolence, I think Gandhi was a bit ambivalent and I am still not quite prepared to rule out military action in all circumstances. Gandhi supported recruitment to the Indian Army when Japanese forces threatened to invade India, and the Tanzanian army saved more than a few lives when Idi Amin was deposed in Uganda. Having said that, I think statements from the Gandhi Foundation should not mention military action as a last resort because all to often it is threatened or used long before other methods of conflict resolution have been exhausted.

David Maxwell:

I take your point, Graham, about Gandhi’s uncertainty during the Second World War. His proposals for dealing with Hitler had seemed ineffective too. However, after the dropping of the atomic bomb, his conviction that nonviolence had to be the way came back very strongly. Unpack the implications of “not rule out military action in all circumstances” and what do you get? The need for military force always at the ready, trained and equipped and eager to justify their role. Give them the chance to use that role, they are very reluctant to then modestly fade into the background until ‘needed’ again. The price of dealing with Hitler was the rise of the industrial military complex which now offers to solve the recurring economic crisis of over production by wars causing mass destruction. That raises the new spectre of environmental unsustainability.

Graham Davey:

I agree with all you say, David, but don’t think that the non-pacifist position inevitably involves all the damage and wastage of militarism. I would envisage Britain having only a territorial army for use only under the auspices of the United Nations. Perhaps Switzerland is showing the right direction for European countries.

Antony Copley:

Gandhi began to experience the limitations of satyagraha as he confronted interstate conflict – his advice to Viceroy Linlithgow in 1939 was to let Hitler overrun Britain – he told the Jews to practise nonviolent resistance, and then horror of horrors he had to face Japanese invasion in 1942. His response in the end was the Quit India satyagraha – the Japanese would have no occasion to invade if the British left. Even so, he also let it be known that he would not resist any British presence in defending India if India were free. As Gandhians we have to confront the limitations of nonviolence in such extreme moments.

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What do you think? Please write your comments below . . .

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Nonviolence and Peace – by Manas Roy

Posted on May 2, 2006 by gandhifriends

This article was first published in issue 97 of The Gandhi Way

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi did not claim to be a prophet or even a philosopher.

“There is no such thing as Gandhism,” he warned “and I do not want to leave any sect after me.” There was only one Gandhian, he said, an imperfect one at that: himself.

The real significance of the Indian freedom movement in Gandhi’s eyes was that it was waged nonviolently.  He would have had no interest in it if the Indian National Congress had not adopted satyagraha and subscribed to nonviolence.  He objected to violence not only because an unarmed people had little chance of success in an armed rebellion, but because he considered violence a clumsy weapon which created more problems than it solved, and left a trail of hatred and bitterness in which genuine reconciliation was almost impossible.

This emphasis on nonviolence jarred alike on Gandhi’s British and Indian critics, though for different reasons.  To the former, nonviolence was a camouflage; to the latter, it was sheer sentimentalism.  To the British who tended to see the Indian struggle through the prism of European history, the professions of nonviolence rather than on the remarkably peaceful nature of Gandhi’s campaigns.  To the radical Indian politicians, who had browsed on the history of the French and Russian revolutions or the Italian and Irish nationalist struggles, it was patent that force would only yield to force, and that it was foolish to miss opportunities and sacrifice tactical gains for reasons more relevant to ethics than to politics. Gandhi’s total allegiance to nonviolence created a gulf between him and the educated elite in India which was temporarily bridged only during periods of intense political excitement. Even among his closest colleagues there were few who were prepared to follow his doctrine of nonviolence to its logical conclusion: the adoption of unilateral disarmament in a world armed to the teeth, the scrapping of the police and the armed forces, and the decentralisation of administration to the point where the state would “wither away”.

Nehru, Patel and others on whom fell the task of organising the administration of independent India did not question the superiority of the principle of nonviolence as enunciated by their leader, but they did not consider it practical politics.  The Indian Constituent Assembly included a majority of members owing allegiance to Gandhi or at least holding him in high esteem, but the constitution which emerged from their labours in 1949 was based more on the Western parliamentary system than on the Gandhian model.  The development of the Indian economy during the last four decades cannot be said to have conformed to Gandhi’s conception of “self-reliant village republics”.  On the other hand, it bears the marks of a conscious effort to launch an Indian industrial revolution.  The manner in which Gandhi’s techniques have sometimes been invoked even in the land of his birth in recent years would appear to be a travesty of his principles.  And the world has been in the grip of a series of crises in Korea, the Congo, Vietnam, the Middle East, and South Africa with a never-ending trail of blood and bitterness.  The shadow of a nuclear war with its incalculable hazards continues to hang over humankind.

From this predicament, Gandhi’s ideas and techniques may suggest a way out.  He advocated nonviolence not because it offered an easy way out, but because he considered violence a crude and in the long run, an ineffective weapon.  His rejection of violence stemmed from choice, not from necessity.  Horace Alexander, who knew Gandhi and saw him in action, graphically describes the attitude of the nonviolent resister to his opponent:

“On your side you have all the mighty forces of the modern State, arms, money, a controlled press, and all the rest. On my side, I have nothing but my conviction of right and truth, the unquenchable spirit of man, who is prepared to die for his convictions than submit to your brute force.  I have my comrades in armlessness.  Here we stand; and here if need be, we fall.”

Far from being a craven retreat from difficulty and danger, nonviolent resistance demands courage of a high order, the courage to resist injustice without rancour, to unite the utmost firmness with the utmost gentleness, to invite suffering but not to inflict it, to die but not to kill.  Gandhi did not make the facile division of mankind into “good” and “bad”.   He was convinced that every human being — even the “enemy” – had a kernel of decency: there were only evil acts, no wholly evil men.  His technique of satyagraha was designed not to coerce the opponent, but to set into motion forces which could lead to his conversion.  Relying as it did on persuasion and compromise, Gandhi’s method was not always quick in producing results, but the results were likely to be the more durable for having been brought about peacefully.

“It is my firm conviction”, Gandhi affirmed, “that nothing enduring can be built upon violence”.

The rate of social change through the nonviolent technique was not in fact likely to be much slower than that achieved by violent methods; it was definitely faster than that expected from the normal functioning of institutions which tended to fossilise and preserve the status quo.  Gandhi did not think it possible to bring about radical changes in the structure of society overnight.  Nor did he succumb to the illusion that the road to a new order could be paved merely with pious wishes and fine words.  It was not enough to blame the opponent or bewail the times in which one’s lot was cast. However heavy the odds, it was the satyagrahi’s duty never to feel helpless. The least he could do was to make a beginning with himself.  If he was crusading for a new deal for peasantry, he could go to a village and live there; if he wanted to bring peace to a disturbed district, he could walk through it, entering into the minds and hearts of those who were going through the ordeal.  If an age-old evil like untouchability was to be fought, what could be a more effective symbol of defiance for a reformer than to adopt an untouchable child ?  If the object was to challenge foreign rule, why not act on the assumption that the country was already free, ignore the alien government and build alternative institutions to harness the spontaneous, constructive and cooperative effort of the people ?  If the goal was world peace, why not begin today by acting peacefully towards the immediate neighbour, going more than half way to understand and win him over ?

Though he may have appeared a starry-eyed idealist to so many, Gandhi’s attitude to social and political problems was severely practical.  There was a deep mystical streak in him, but even his mysticism seemed to have little of the ethereal about it.  He did not dream heavenly dreams nor see things unutterable in trance; when “the still small voice” spoke to him, it was often to tell how he could fight a social evil or heal a rift between two warring communities. Far from distracting him from his role in public affairs, Gandhi’s religious quest gave him the stamina to play it more effectively.  To him true religion was not merely the reading of scriptures, the dissection of ancient texts, or even the practice of cloistered virtue: it had to be lived in the challenging context of political and social life.

Gandhi used his nonviolent technique on behalf of his fellow-countrymen in South Africa and India, but he did not conceive it only as a weapon in the armoury of Indian nationalism.  Nonviolence, as Gandhi expounded it, has ceased to be a pious exhortation, and become a necessity. The advice he gave to the unfortunate Abyssinians and Czechs during the twilight years before the Second Word War, may have seemed utopian thirty years ago.  Today, it sounds common sense.  Gandhi would have been the first to deny that his method offered an instant or universal panacea for world peace. His method is capable of almost infinite evolution to suit new situations in a changing world.  It is possible that “applied nonviolence” is at present having the same value to maintain “global peace” for ever. 

The author is a non-teaching employee of Assam University, Silchar, India.  He holds an MA (Philosophy and Religion), NET (Buddhist, Jaina, Gandhian and Peace Studies) and presently doing PhD work on Phenomenology.  He is a guest Faculty of Philosophy in Sri Aurobindo Evening Degree College, Silchar, Assam.

Email: manas_roy72@yahoo.co.in

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Understanding Nonviolence: from Tactical Nonviolence to Satyagraha – by Mark Shepard

Posted on December 8, 2003 by gandhifriends

What exactly do we mean when we say we’re committed to nonviolence? Unfortunately, different people mean different things and are often not even aware of the differences.

The purposes of this piece are to give an idea of the range of meanings possible, to improve our ability to identify the types of commitment we encounter, and to stimulate our thinking on what we mean by nonviolence.

The characteristics of a nonviolent commitment can be classified in two general areas: the definition of nonviolence itself, and the type of commitment given.

Definition of Nonviolence

  1. Scope of the definition. Does the prohibited violence include physical violence only? Or does it also include psychological violence (such as name-calling or isolation)?
  2. Attitude toward the opponent. Is there an attitude of antagonism, in which the opponent is seen as an enemy? Or is there active caring for the opponent, with their welfare considered?
  3. Intent of action. Is it to force the opponent to make changes against their will (coercion)? Or to change the opponent’s mind and win them over to the other side (conversion)? Or something in between those two?

Nature of the Commitment

  1. Extent of the commitment. Does it apply only to certain situations and occasions? Or is nonviolence seen as preferable to violence generally? Or is violence unconditionally renounced in all circumstances?
  2. Motivation. Is the commitment to nonviolence based on expediency—superior force of the opponent, lack of weapons, and so on? Or on practical / humanitarian grounds—saying that relative human costs and results of nonviolent action make it a basically superior method? Or is the commitment based on a moral/ethical/religious principle?

Types of Nonviolent Commitment

Using the parameters above, we can identify two fundamental types of nonviolent commitment, which can be seen as the ends of a spectrum. At one end is what has been called tactical nonviolence. People committed in this way generally prohibit only physical violence, may hold antagonism toward the opponent, and seek to win their goals by coercion. Their commitment is generally limited to individual actions or campaigns and stems from expediency. A good example is a labor strike.

At the other end is Satyagraha (SOT-yah-GRAH-hah), or Gandhian nonviolence. This is characterized by prohibition of both physical and psychological violence, active caring toward the opponent, and the intention to convert. Commitment to nonviolence is unconditional and is based both on principle and on practical/humanitarian considerations.

As a whole, the nonviolence movement in the United States has stood somewhere in between these poles, being a hodge-podge of individuals with varying beliefs, often not fully conscious. This has often led to confusion and dissension when devising and carrying out strategy and tactics. By knowing where everyone stands, such differences can be dealt with and possibly resolved.

What About You?

What does nonviolence mean to you? What is your commitment like?

 

Not copyright © 2003 by Mark Shepard—please reproduce! Mark is the author of Gandhi Today and other books on Gandhi, nonviolence, and small scale alternatives. This is revised from a piece he first wrote in 1978 for the Nonviolence Training Collective of People Against Nuclear Power in San Francisco. For more resources, visit Mark’s Gandhi Page at www.markshep.com/nonviolence.

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