I am not patient. People are starving right now. Animals are suffering right now. The planet is struggling to breathe right now. So, how do we move toward a more just and compassionate world… right now!?
I’ve spent time picketing in the streets, writing members of congress, challenging unjust laws, helping grassroots groups learn and grow. What I’ve learned is that the power of self-understanding and personal responsibility can sometimes provide a quicker and more successful route to social change. Not only is it quicker, it is necessary.
I recently read Gandhi on Non-violence: Selected Text from Gandhi’s ‘Non-violence in Peace and War.’ It was edited with an introduction and chapter summaries by Thomas Merton. The last chapter includes a few references to Gandhi’s self-observed failure — that he didn’t bring lasting Nonviolence to India. Gandhi attributes this to his focusing on Nonviolence as a tactic rather than Nonviolence as a way of life.
Merton puts this poetically in the introduction when he says, “[For Gandhi] the spirit of non-violence sprang from an inner realization of spiritual unity in himself. The whole Gandhian concept of non-violent action and satyagraha is incomprehensible if it is thought to be a means of achieving unity rather than as the fruit of inner unity already achieved” (6, italics original).
While Gandhi felt Nonviolence in his heart, the masses were using Nonviolence mostly as a tactic to achieve independence and to gain power. Gandhi came to see the focus on civil disobedience and political tactics as short-lived. Once political advances were made, people abandoned Nonviolence as a discipline and became the new aggressors — abusing “power over” rather than celebrating “power with” (this is a recurring theme on the nature of power).
Gandhi laments that he should have spent more time and energy on the constructive aspects of Nonviolence (rebuilding a social infrastructure, self-sustaining industries, and meaningful occupations, etc.). He wrote, “In placing civil disobedience before constructive work I was wrong, and I did not profit from the Himalayan blunder that I had committed” (72). He goes on to say, “I have admitted my mistake. I thought our struggle was based on non-violence, whereas in reality it was no more than passive resistance, which essentially is a weapon of the weak. It leads naturally to armed resistance whenever possible” (75).
This is the direction NonviolenceUnited.org has taken with our “A Life Connected” project. We focus on reaching and reminding individuals to live their lives connected to their values, building a social strategy around Nonviolence as a way of life rather than focusing on temporary gains by simply using Nonviolence as a political strategy.
As we’ve said before, Nonviolence can be a way of life and Nonviolence can be a strategy. But for powerful long-lasting change, Nonviolence as a way of life IS the strategy.
5 comments
Comments feed for this article
May 30, 2010 at 6:26 am
Lisa
Thank you for this post! And for your ongoing efforts to spread the message about choosing nonviolence as a way of life. You are appreciated! 🙂
June 7, 2010 at 11:52 am
Connector
thanx for the cross-post and kind words!
🙂 m
October 26, 2010 at 4:15 am
Explaining the Strategy of Nonviolence United and “A Life Connected” | A Life Connected
[…] There are not only two distinct ways of putting Nonviolence into action, the people who study and promote Nonviolence tended to divide themselves into one strategy over the other. (There are of course notable exceptions like Mohandas Ghandi, Cesar Chavez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. who tried to combine the two. And, in fact, Ghandi saw as his great failure his focus on Nonviolence as a tactic rather than as a way of life1). […]
December 22, 2010 at 10:40 am
blackatticus
I've been reading several post that use this quote from Ghandi, the whole admitting he was wrong to use non-violence as a political tactic; but what i'm failing to catch onto is whether or not Ghandi or your organization is saying "hey…life can be mostly non-violent…but on rare occassions…it's necessary" — am I being clear ? I'm basically wondering if that reality can be totally eradicated or was Ghandi admitting that he under estimated the power of voilence?
December 22, 2010 at 11:08 am
mattbear
Hi blackatticus,
Nope, neither Gandhi nor Nonviolence United (nor I) say that "sometimes violence is necessary." I think we are more creative than that and I know that we are much more interconnected than people understand — much of the violence in the world cannot continue without our explicit or implicit support. I think Gandhi is misinterpreted often, but he did not underestimate the imbalanced and misplaced power of violence; he saw it as the failure that it is. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood this when he picked up on Gandhian tactics to work toward a community of reconciliation, where no one has to be "beaten", rather we all move together toward a cooperative society. One of the most often misunderstood and misused quotes of Gandhi is, "It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence." Here people like to point and say, "See, Gandhi said we should be violent." When in fact, this is supporting what I pointed out in the article above — Gandhi wanted us to move to a place where Nonviolence was in our hearts, a way of live, a new society, so that violence would no longer be tolerated or perpetuated.
If you're saying that "hey… life can be mostly Nonviolent… but on rare occasions, it's necessary" is a "reality" (as I think you may have been suggesting), I think that's an overstatement. It is not a "reality" in that people tend to make their own definitions of "necessary" and therefore perpetuate violence whenever it suits their desires. Yes, it is a violent world; no, it doesn't have to be.
Let me know if I can clarify anything. Thanks for connecting!
All one,
🙂 m