 Michael Nagler is the author of Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future. |
By Chris Samson
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the massacre at Columbine High School, the escalating conflict between Israel and Palestine, teen suicides, violent crime - all are symptomatic of the troubled times of the modern world.
Is civilization doomed to a future of violence, hate and conflict? Or is there a way everyone can get along? Michael Nagler believes there is hope, but says it will take a revolutionary shift in thinking to solve the problems our civilization is creating.
Nagler is the author of Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future, which was recently awarded the prestigious American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation. Nagler, who lives west of Petaluma, is a widely published scholar in the fields of peace studies and ancient Indian scripture. He is professor emeritus of classical languages at the University of California, Berkeley and founder and chairperson of the U.C. Peace and Conflict Studies program. He is also president of the Marin Experimental Teaching Training and Advising Center.
Is There No Other Way was published in September of 2000 by Berkeley Hills Books. A year later, soon after Sept. 11, sales jumped and the first printing sold out. The second printing is due out late this month. The book draws upon the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi ("the most important person of the 20th century," Nagler says) and other activists to show that the shift to nonviolence begins with the individual, through the revisioning of how one perceives the world. Nagler says changes in the individual can lead to changes in the larger community.
One of the first places to start, he says, is by giving up commercial television and its violent, desensitizing images. The evening news, Nagler says, depicts horrific events in a way that creates human alienation. "The mass media could not have chosen a worse time to make violence appear trivial and incomprehensible," he said.
"I never liked violence," he said. "My parents were smart enough not to get a TV for a long time and when they did we used it very discriminatingly and turned off the sound from commercials. I had a healthy upbringing that left me with a keen aversion to violence."
Nagler began a lifelong interest in the work and thought of Gandhi in the 1960s. "I was a product of the free speech movement and disappointed by its failures. I began to see that nonviolence was the only thing that was going to get us out of this in the long run," he said. Nonviolence has been the focus of his thought and action ever since.
He writes in the book, "There is in human beings a capacity for violence which also is their capacity for nonviolence. It's the job of culture and of individual choices within that culture to turn the potential violence to nonviolence."
He shares a story he heard after he wrote the book. "A native American grandfather tells his grandson, 'I have two wolves inside of me. One of them is a ravenous, violent animal. And the other is a kind, gentle beast.' And the grandson, quite alarmed, says 'Grandpa, which of them is going to win?' And he says, 'The one that I feed.' So this book is about feeding the gentle wolf."
Nonviolence, Nagler says, is based in the dignity and value of human beings and has proven its power against arms and social injustice wherever it has been correctly understood and applied.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Nagler said, "should be regarded as a crime against humanity. The United States should not try to own the crime, because after all there were people from 60 nationalities who perished in the World Trade Tower. Rather, it should have been turned over to international authorities. That might not preclude us from being called in to undertake some military action. But that's very different than saying it's an act of war against us and the only way to respond is an act of war against them even though we don't know exactly who they are.
"The missing step that we are all anguishing over in the peace movement is that people are not stepping back and asking why - why are we being attacked? It's because we have an extremely arrogant, aggressive and damaging policy toward these people.
"A friend of mine quit the diplomatic corps because of the radical disconnect between the basic decency of the American people and the policies being carried out in their name," Nagler said.
"The nonviolent response from Sept. 11 would be to mobilize that basic decency and to craft a set of policies that would bring us into a healthier relationship with the people who are the seedbed of these extremists. For every extremist who walks into a cafe with a suicide bomb there are 100,000 unhappy people who aren't that extreme. There would be a new diplomacy, an outreach to people we have been offending. We would not be cringing, we would not be apologizing, we would just say, 'OK, you have a problem with us, we have a problem with you, let's talk about it as equals.'
"I read in the paper recently that Colin Powell said a wonderful thing about the Israeli situation. He said in effect, no matter how many tanks roll through how many Palestinian villages, there will still be suicide bombers. He's absolutely right. I've been trying to show that to people for a long time. But what struck me about this statement is that he can't turn it around and apply it to our methods for resolving with terrorism. He can see that their violence doesn't work but he can't face the fact that our own violence doesn't work."
Some pundits have said that if the United States had taken a stronger military response to earlier terrorist attacks against American embassies and property, the Sept. 11 attacks wouldn't have happened. Nagler responds, "If the logic of using military force to respond to terrorist acts were true, then Israel would be the most secure nation in the world."
Nagler, who arrived in Berkeley in 1960 as a graduate student, came of age during the heady days of the civil rights and anti-war movements. He tells a story in his book of a friend, David Hartsough, a white man, who was sitting with some civil rights workers at a segregated lunch counter in Virginia in the early '60s. "They weren't being served, they were being harassed by an angry crowd and the tension mounted. Suddenly a man jerked David off the stool, spun him around, held a large Bowie knife to his chest and hissed, 'You got one minute to get out of here, n----- lover, or I'm running this through your heart.'
"David looked into the eyes of the man, who had 'the worst look of hate I had ever seen in my life' and quietly said, 'Well, brother, you do what you feel you have to do and I'm going to try to love you all the same.' There was no reaction at first, then the man's hand started shaking, he dropped the knife and walked out of the lunchroom, wiping a tear from his eye."
"Nonviolence absolutely depends on consciousness," Nagler said. "It was what Gandhi called soul force. The material-based world view and the consciousness-based world view is the key. In the material-based world view we will always suffer some scarcity. But in the consciousness-based world view, most important qualities or attributes are inexhaustible.
"I've been looking for a single phrase that would sum up what I think is the problem with modern civilization," Nagler said, "and I think it's this. In this civilization we have this idea that we are things. And that is horribly wrong. We are not things. We are people. We have consciousness. Proposing that we are objects leads to a very bleak future. That doesn't create a thought climate in which young people can thrive.
Nagler believes every single person could adopt a pattern of living and of responding to problems in his or her own way and "together all these efforts could bring us to a nonviolent future."
For more information about Michael Nagler and his book, Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future, visit www.berkeleyhills.com or www.mettacenter.org.)