September 03, 2003
Escalating Nonviolence
It's been a while since I first heard the phrase "escalate nonviolence" in a speech of Dr. Martin Luther King's as played on the radio. I wrote about it last Christmas, when I absolutely had not been able to get it out of my mind. And periodically, it still surfaces to needle me for a few days, to make me think about what it means.
Well I don't know exactly what Dr. King meant, but I can talk about the effect those two words continue to have on my thoughts. For one thing, there's nothing passive or pacifist about that phrase. It's talking about an action, it's talking about Doing Something. About breaking out of our paralysis, our apathy, our silence, our terrible, desperate fear of speaking up and being unpopular. About getting out of the prisons we build for ourselves in order to do something that matters.
Even more than that, it necessarily implies working with other people. Even Dr. King didn't act alone, march alone, risk arrest alone, or work to challenge people's notions of equality alone. He interacted with his community in a way that after much effort fostered a nonviolent response even to brutality.
Prison Of My Own Making
And who am I that I can do anything? Who am I that I can't? People growing up in even lower middle class US families are some of the most privileged people on earth, even if by US standards it doesn't appear that way. How is it that someone can grow up like that and come out of it so crippled in relation to their community?
By my late teens I was already: not skinny enough, not smart enough, not popular enough, not feminine enough, not athletic enough, not rich enough, not even (thanks to constant churchly reminders) righteous enough, and to top it all off, I hadn't done enough with my life. I was washed up at 17, much too old to be 'discovered', and not far enough along in my academic career to be one of the child prodigies that (according to TV and movies) make the world go 'round.
I believed it, and so it was true. What positive difference could I make for anyone else when I was so busy focusing on all the things I wasn't? What help could I be with a chip on my shoulder big enough to put a tilt in my walk? That person was never going to be able to connect in a real way with anyone.
It took a long time to see that, though. It took a while to find what it was about me that was plenty 'enough.' It took longer to finally realize that when I focused on that, it was amazing how different other people seemed. When I could talk to them from a genuine excitement and curiousity, instead of from fear.
And it took even longer to see that my distorted sense of reality was a part of the problem of violence in my society.
Climate of Anger
Unwilling to ever forgive myself anything, there was no way that other people were getting off the hook. Their mistakes weren't getting overlooked, unless I was afraid of them, too. In that case, the resentment simmered over.
Simmered into an unforgiving politics that figured everyone deserved what they got, and they sure weren't getting any help from me. Built up into a fear of anyone who could take anything away from me, because surely they would be just as unforgiving as I was.
And in that attitude of unhealthy anger and fear, in that brutally unfair assessment of myself, anything I said about being generous or compassionate was a lie. There was only the certainty that I would keep being angry about the wrong things. The inevitability that my decisions would prevent me from being happy and effective.
I probably haven't gotten over all that. But at least I can see myself acting up every now and again. I can hope that it's a good start.
Misery And Its Company
I needed to see the truth about myself before the world started making any kind of sense. Before I could talk about being honest. Before I could work to prevent myself from adding to the misery of other people. From perpetuating the emotional violence of sulleness, lashing out, being disrespectful to people just because I could get away with it, and not because of anything they'd done.
Is it this collective misery that allows so many horrors to pass by unnoticed. How is it, indeed, that people can fail to be moved by raging civil wars, and maimings, and brutality, and oppression, and injustice? How is it that when faced with these so that they can't be ignored, their first response is often to bring more violence into the mix?
Wouldn't this be the natural response of the miserable. Miserable with their lives, with their jobs, with their feelings of insignificance and powerlessness. Miserable over intangibles, hating themselves and others for no good reason they can think of. And the only thing that gets recognized as action and power from that perspective is the ability to inflict still more misery.
Building Community
So it occurs to me that what building community should really mean is any action that reduces the fear and anger of others. Anything that helps them see that they're enough, that helps ease the fear that comes with being alive, that makes them strong enough to stop letting their misdirected anger ruin their lives.
But that would just be my guess.
It's my belief that only a group of people who are working towards being right with themselves and with each other can put those powerful words into practice. Only when you can see the harm in yourself that you can escalate nonviolent action into the forefront of your life and your circle of influence.
And that would still be just a guess, though it sounds to me like a goal worth trying to get to someday.
Posted by natasha at September 3, 2003 05:25 PM | TrackBackVery eloquent and moving, Natasha. To me, finding articles like this is what reading blogs is all about. Although (as you know) we disagree on the cause and solution to violence and anger and hostility and alienation, it seems we're in accord on starting with community -- with a small group of people with whom we find meaning living, working, or pursuing shared interests. It's only at that micro level that we find peace, understanding, honesty, humanity, purpose. The problem in my view is that such communities are constantly buffeted and damaged by larger social structures -- corporations, governments, cities, powerful moneyed elites and angry, power-hungry tyrants who get their jollies by controlling and threatening others to conform to their standards and beliefs. That's why I believe there are too many people on the planet. There just isn't enough room for each of us, once we find our communities, to live peacefully without constant interference from others. We've built these huge damnable social constructs to try to manage the conflicts between ever more crowded communities clashing with each other at every turn, and instead of managing the conflicts they're managing us.
Lots more on this in books I've pimped to death already: Jensen's A Language Older Than Words and Quinn's Story of B.
Anyway, thanks for writing this. This kind of stuff doesn't attract as much attention as political rants etc. but it's important. More, please.
Posted by: Dave Pollard on September 3, 2003 08:11 PMNatasha, this was a really beautiful article.
One thing that I'd like to add to it is that it shouldn't have to be solely up to individuals to work past the feeling of being an outsider and finding out how really remarkable they are. I think most of us have met someone (call them Joe) who was so focused on the other person (call her Ann) that they were meeting and so positive about who that other person was that the person found something new and special about themself. Well, Joe is capable of showing something to Ann that she maybe never knew about herself -- and perhaps can help bring her to a sense of what it means to be really part of a community. I think we would have a healthier world if we all tried to be Joe and spent time helping Ann see what a special and unique person she was -- to see the best part of her.
Posted by: Mary on September 4, 2003 12:48 AMThanks, guys :)
But Dave, I'd reiterate here that there are people who live in crowded places and maintain a sense of community anyway. The big problem is that those of us here in developed nations, feeling like our own little islands of self-sufficiency, have lost the skill. We're not very good at community building, and it's never seemed necessary to us. But just because we at our skill level don't see how it can be done, that doesn't make it impossible.
The fact is, the world doesn't have a smaller population. And considering the most likely ways for that to happen, I don't know that I want it to. We need to start thinking about making do with what we have, and maybe even coming around to being happy with it.
I think it's a great tragedy of humanity that many brilliant minds have thought of fabulous solutions to our problems that would work perfectly if only the world was completely different. But it isn't, so we just need to deal with that, and come up with solutions for problems we actually have. Anything else seems like a shameful waste of talent.
And in response to your book peddling, I again peddle back 'Critical Path' by R. Buckminster Fuller.
Posted by: natasha on September 4, 2003 11:26 AMWell done post. You hit on some key themes here:
1. We're nasty when we're miserable, to paraphrase a line from Leonard Berkowitz'classic "Aggression: Its Causes, Consequences and Control". Being in a chronic negative mood state, being chronically angry, etc. seems to make us more prone to aggressive and violent behavior. Some of it may be physiological: i.e., chronically angry people tend to be in "fight-flight" mode more often, so they're primed. Some of it likely cognitive: a tendency to rehearse negative and violent scenarios leads to such thoughts being chronically accessible (there is some lab evidence for this btw).
2. You may be on to something when observing that misery desensitizes one to the suffering of others. Heck, seeing so much violence and suffering via mass media and possibly in one's own neighborhood eventually makes one more likely to accept such misery as a "fact of life" and to be less prone to take notice of such suffering or to intervene in a positive manner. Again, I think you'll find a rich social science research literature on these very issues.
3. I'm always refreshed to see pacifists assert that pacifism is not being passive, but if anything is very active in its approach to resolving conflicts. A friend and I used to use this slogan on some of our anti-ROTC literature back in the day: "give peace a chance: fight for it." On a superficial level that would seem a contradiction, but on a deeper level there is something rather Gandhian about the slogan. Being peaceful does not mean simply rolling over and playing dead. Rather, to me it means assertiveness, standing up and being counted when the need arises. The weapons in our arsenal differ from those who choose violence: words and any of a number of nonviolent and positive actions.
Anyhoo, I'm rambling at this point. Keep fighting the good fight.
Posted by: James on September 4, 2003 11:27 PMI wholeheartedly agree with your approach, Natasha. Very happy to discover your site via Open Source Politics, to which I also contribute.
Will keep reading you and hope you'll visit me as well. In particular, this is relevant to what you are saying:
http://www.ms.lt/en/natalie/index.html
(Natalie's Bike Ride to Clarity)
All the best.
Posted by: Natalie on September 10, 2003 07:27 PM