Mainstreaming Nonviolence Toolbox: Building a World Where Everyone Matters
This blog by Ken Butigan highlights ideas, books, videos, websites, projects, campaigns, organizations and individuals offering new directions for mainstreaming the power of nonviolent change. Click here for more about mainstreaming nonviolence.
Studies Shed Light on Empathy and Interconnectedness
At Pace e Bene we nurture nonviolent alternatives by organizing trainings, creating resources, and taking action. We do this to respond to particular policies and crises – but, more importantly, we are working for a larger shift to a world of peace, justice and dignity for all.
That’s why a new book called The Empathic Civilization by social thinker Jeremy Rifkin recently caught our attention. His tome boils down to this: While we have been told forever that we’re wired for violence, it is empathy – the ability to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were one’s own – that makes us human. What’s more, this capacity has been expanding as society itself has evolved.
The emerging study of empathy seems to be confirming that mainstreaming nonviolence is not only necessary but possible
Recent findings of brain science and child development have revealed in new ways our deeply embedded capacity for empathy. And over time this ability to empathize has extended from family to tribe, from community to nation, from the human family to the earth itself.
In the midst of the deepening ecological and humanitarian crisis facing our world, Rifkin maintains that it is time to broaden this capacity for connection by nurturing a “global empathic consciousness” and even “an empathic civilization.” Fortunately, he says, we are wired for the task, in spite of our very real history and ongoing experience of violence and injustice.Click here to see an overview of this book published at the Huffington Post. And, if you like, you can read it online by clicking here.
One of the recent scientific discoveries that Rifkin draws on is “mirror neurons” – neurons that fire both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. In this fascinating video, Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran explores this phenomenon — which he calls “Gandhi neurons.”
For yet another recent scientific study, check out Kindness Breeds Kindness, a report on a study that demonstrates how kindness is “infectious,” even under circumstances where one would expect self-interest to rule.
In 1986 UNESCO sponsored the Seville Statement on Violence (which was adapted by the UN General Assembly in 1989). This statement challenged a number of alleged biological findings that have been used to justify violence and war. The emerging study of empathy seems to be confirming those findings – and suggests that “mainstreaming nonviolence” is not only necessary but is possible.
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