By Ken Butigan
For the past year I have been learning to play the cello. Although I have loved music my whole life, this has been the first time I’ve tried to make music. The initial steps have been clumsy and frustrating but also occasionally thrilling as my fingers begin to slowly internalize the practice of bringing the haunting resonance of the cello’s voice to life.
Learning to do something well is a challenging and powerful journey of discovery. If we want to speak Tagalog fluently, or drive to the hoop leaving the starting lineup of the Los Angeles Lakers scrambling and breathless, or play the cello in a way that reverberates in the deepest reaches of our soul, we have some serious learning to do. We have to unlearn old habits and slowly acquire new ones. We have to become familiar with the interior dynamics, the inner structure and rhythm, of this process. We have to slow it down long enough to understand both its complexity and unifying simplicity. We have to nurture our deep-seated passion for it — the excitement and hunger it first unleashed in us — even when our enthusiasm for it ebbs and flows. We have to safeguard the delicate dance between the mechanics of technique and the unfathomable and irreducible spirit that lies at the heart of this or any authentic process.
And we have to practice. And practice. And practice.
What eventually comes to seem natural and easy is often the result of a long, slow, patient, and relentlessly persistent process of transformation.
The Practice of Nonviolence
Similarly, those who want to engage in social change well often prepare to do this by learning and internalizing its complicated and challenging and thrilling process. For the past century, this has been fostered by the gradual emergence of nonviolence training as a way of preparing people to participate in nonviolent social movements. Gandhi led training sessions to ready people to face the violence of British troops. During the U.S. Civil Rights movement, Rev. James Lawson and others developed “sophisticated training methods, including extensive use of role-plays to understand the likely actions of opponents and to develop ways to protect people as much as possible,” as Peter Woodrow writes in Protest, Power and Change: An Encyclopedia of Nonviolent Action from ACT-UP to Women’s Suffrage (Garland, 1997). Since then, this in-depth approach to nonviolence preparation has been used to train people in many movements in the United States and around the world.
Woodrow highlights three goals of strategic nonviolence training. First, such training seeks to help nonviolence practitioners develop a nonviolent discipline and learn skills for dealing with violent situations. Second, it seeks to encourage nonviolence practitioners to build unity among themselves. And third, it seeks to help nonviolence practitioners understand the dynamics of nonviolent struggle and develop strategies for waging conflict. These skills and learnings have played an extremely vital role in grounding, mobilizing and sustaining movements for real change throughout the world.
In the wake of the attacks perpetrated on September 11 and the virtually permanent war declared in their wake by President George Bush — envisioned as a 50 year “War on Terrorism” to be waged in as many as 60 countries, and already being carried out in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Colombia, and being envisioned in Iraq — we seek nonviolent alternatives and so turn again to the ways we can prepare to “wage peace” by facilitating and taking part in nonviolence training. For example, this summer the Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation sponsored a nonviolence training and strategy session in Seattle attended by 90 people searching for nonviolent solutions in a world of accelerating war. Across the United States, there is a growing longing to discern new directions in peacemaking while the prospect of war abroad (and diminishment of civil liberties at home) increases. At the same time, there is a deepening desire to engage in training and preparation to put these new approaches into practice. What might this look like?
Long-Term “Nonviolence Re-Training”
Gandhi was a shrewd strategist who experimented with “people power.” By cooperating with unjust and violent structures, we lend them power and legitimacy. Gandhi invited people to withdraw their consent from structures and policies of injustice through deliberate and active noncooperation. Simply put, he reasoned that 175,000 British soldiers were able to manacle 300,000,000 Indians because they allowed this to happen. These chains would break, Gandhi believed, when Indians withdrew their power. Every nonviolent action and project fostered by Gandhi — both civil resistance and what he dubbed the Constructive Program, which created parallel organizations designed to wean people from British institutions and to create a new society — sought to demonstrate this power and inspire people to re-channel it in order to transform their world.
But Gandhi was more than a tactician. He understood that such change must itself be rooted in a deep transformation of the Indian people. “People power” must be rooted in “person power.” Self-rule as a nation would be nurtured by self-rule of the person in which love transforms fear, in which truth transforms arrogance, and in which heart-unity transforms Us vs. Them attitudes and behavior.
Grounded in this spirit, Gandhi called on the Indian people to let go of the “construction of the colonized self” that had been imposed by the British over time. In Hind Swaraj, his 1909 landmark analysis of British imperialism, Gandhi stressed that India would never be free until its people divested themselves of the Western persona — reinforced by the alluring trap of materialism and capitalism — and reclaim their truest selves. He symbolized this divestment in his own life by slowly abandoned his British apparel for the clothing of the Indian poor.
This impulse toward letting go of the “imprisoned self” marked Gandhi’s constructive projects — including the spinning and wearing of kadhi, a traditional, homespun cloth, instead of wearing clothing produced in mills in Lancashire. But this was also an important part of his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. The 1930-31 Salt March and Campaign – defying the British decree that deemed the making of salt, a staple of life in India, illegal — was a way that millions of Indians could participate in a concrete and deeply symbolic way in shaking off their “colonized self” and beginning the slow process of reclaiming their true humanity.
Gandhian nonviolence training, seen from this perspective, is both very specific and very broad. Gandhi conducted training for particular campaigns. At the same time, he sought to unleash a slow, ongoing spiritual formation process in which the colonized self is “re-trained.” He encouraged the de-centering and re-centering of this self punctuated by specific acts of civil disobedience and constructive development situated within a long-term process of inward and outward transformation.
As we stand on the threshold of a war that may be decades long in duration, we need both. We need training for action that is powerful, creative, and deeply nonviolent. And, hand in hand with this, we are called to root this training for nonviolent action in a slow, demanding, profound, and long-term form of Gandhian nonviolence training and retraining for the deep transformation of self and society. This broad and deep training is needed to challenge the construction of the “permanent war self” — a persona which is being created and imposed with each passing day — and to embody a different kind of self: a grounded, compassionate self aware of the woundedness and sacredness of all and willing to take steps to create a more just and loving world.
This Is Not the First Long-Term War
In reflecting on our way to respond to this new climate, it is helpful to think about the fact that the United States government has already prosecuted and endured a 40 year war, a conflict conducted within the living memory of most of us — and to think about the ways people sought to transform its assumptions and consequences.
The Cold War — which spawned innumerable Hot Wars across the globe — was a lethal struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that depended for its economic, political, and military momentum on the consent and complicity of the citizenry. In the United States, this required conscripting the U.S. population to actively support global deployments of troops and an ever-accelerating nuclear arms race. The creation of nuclear weapons had, in one stroke, abolished the pre-atomic world forever. The challenge for nuclear state managers was to construct a new one. This meant training the civilian population to accept that, at any moment, life as we know it could end and that its security paradoxically depended on this colossal threat.
Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima, U.S. government officials created the doctrine for this new nuclear self — Mutual Assured Destruction — and produced endless political and rhetorical justifications for the escalating development, testing, and deployment of weapons of mass destruction that could end life on earth. But nuclear state managers knew that, by themselves, such rationales would not be enough to win the allegiance of the populace in the face of the ongoing prospect of terror that the arms race represented. It was not enough to declare the Cold War. The practices that made such a war real had to follow. These included massive civil defense preparation, weekly air-raid drills in thousands of communities, the building of innumerable fallout shelters, compulsory government loyalty oath programs, encouraging the public to observe aboveground nuclear tests, and the “duck and cover” exercise in schools and other settings.
Critics often doubted that such simulations or precautions would actually prevent death or destruction in the event of a nuclear attack. In The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994), scholar Guy Oakes shows that national government officials knew such practices would never safeguard the population. The real purpose was not to protect the populace but, rather, to inculcate citizen resolve to wage the Cold War by substituting “credible fear” for “irrational terror.”
This made the civil disobedience of Dorothy Day and others — who were arrested in 1955 and in subsequent years for refusing to take part in national civil defense drills — vitally important. Not only did such activities frustrate specific government policies — and eventually spark a national movement that led to the end of such compulsory rituals of submission — they encouraged a growing number of people to challenge the numbing and paralyzing fear that had led to acquiescence in a government plan that promised security but could result in an infinite spiral of violence and destruction. The submission to the “national nuclear training” of the Cold War was challenged increasingly by acts of nonviolent resistance that helped participants de-center and re-center the nuclear self.
In some cases, this transformation involved inculcating in one’s very bones a deep critique of the very lynchpin of nuclearism: Us vs. Them thinking. For example Art Casey, a former defense worker, spent two years in prayerful vigil at the edge of the Nevada Test Site, one of the preeminent locales of the Cold War where 928 nuclear weapons were detonated. Reflecting on his participation in the worldwide effort to support a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, he says, “There was a basic necessity for spiritual preparation, meaning to eliminate the line between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ To internalize the unity of humans and the cosmos. To get that into your head and heart — where it actually influences your behavior. I was astonished when I witnessed people…just being whole human beings.” The four decades of “Cold War training” were little by little challenged and unlearned. There was another kind of learning — a gradual unfolding transformation of the internalized “Cold War self” and a clumsy, frustrating and occasionally thrilling internalization of what it means to be a “whole human being.” These and many other “anti-Cold War” practices offered this slow, patient way of seeing one’s own woundedness and sacredness and the woundedness and sacredness, and fundamental connection with, those with whom they struggled.
From Violence To Wholeness
Not unlike the post-World War II generation, we now face the possibility of a new, long-term war with its prospects of demonization, destruction, and endless military action. As with the Cold War, we are being “trained” by the dominant culture to uncritically support the use of massive military and political violence. And, as with the Cold War, this national project will hinge on official “fear management.” We are again, overtly and covertly, being offered a Faustian bargain: the government will promise security through violence if we provide our unconditional consent.
But, as our history and experience have increasingly revealed, violence does not breed security. Violence does not end violence. War will not end terrorism. As nonviolence scholar Michael Nagler suggests, water, not fire, quenches fire. We are called to what Walter Wink names the “third way” between passivity on the one hand and counter-violence on the other. To open this space will take courageous and persistent public action. It will also call for liberating our truest selves from the “War on Terror self” currently being constructed and promulgated. This means taking the time and space to learn, or deepen, another way of being: to stretch our fingers, hands, minds in another direction, and to do this together. It means “re-training” together over time, including taking action that resists the ongoing, systematic effort to create selves and societies based on permanent war.
There are many ways to undertake this slow process of un-learning and re-learning. At Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, we have developed a process called From Violence To Wholeness to help ourselves and others do this. We open safe space to reflect on our lives and our experiences of violence and transformative nonviolence. We learn from one another, and experiment together with, the integrative power of active and creative person-power, community-power, and people-power. We use ritual, small-group work, role-plays, journaling, and action to help create community and support participation in social movements for change. We embark together on a journey where we make contact with our woundedness and sacredness and begin to become aware of the woundedness and sacredness of our opponents. We come to see the violence of coercive power differences; we come to slowly understand that nonviolence is an active process in transforming domination, inequality, and injustice. Such social and personal de-centering and re-centering is a long process of transformation and gradual revelation.
In weekend workshops, facilitator trainings, or a small group process, From Violence To Wholeness invites people to form, or deepen, communities of long-term, active, creative transformative nonviolence. This process is beginning to be used in many settings. The From Violence To Wholeness curriculum is available to English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. From Violence to Wholeness trainers work in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and there is a growing network of collaborators in Latin America.
Whatever process we choose to use, we are called at this time to learn together the ways of peace. We are called to unlearn old habits of dualistic thinking and to acquire new ones that help us to become “whole human beings.” We have both an opportunity and a challenge to resist the efforts being made to impose the “permanent war” persona. We have the chance to practice loving our enemies. Again and again and again. In these ways the journey of peacemaking — in our lives, in our communities, and in the larger world — may gradually and slowly come to disarm our war-selves and our war-societies and together we may find ways to make resonant, haunting and transforming music.
Published in Fellowship, September 2002.
