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The Challenge of Nonviolence in the 21st Century

 

 

By Mr. Robert L Holmes

 

When Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in New Delhi in 1959 at the invitation of Prime Minister Nehru, he said, "To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India, I come as a pilgrim." It is in that same spirit that I stand before you today, honoured to be in a land whose culture and civilization I have long admired. I feel honoured to be associated with a university named after one of India's founding fathers, Jawaharlal Nehru, and honoured to hold a chair named after one of the distinguished sons and leaders of India, Rajiv Gandhi. In addition, it has been a moving experience for me to set foot on the soil that gave birth to the idea of nonViolence, a gift to the world of inestimable worth.

When I told Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, that I was coming to India, it dawned on me that there was certain irony that he, an Indian, was in America promoting nonviolence, while I, an American, was about to go to India to do the same. This led me to reflect on the unexpected ways in which nonviolence has expressed itself, and I remembered a passage from King's biography by Lerone Bennet. Describing King's early acquaintance with the thought of Gandhi, Bennet writes: The Gandhian philosophy. which King considered briefly at this juncture, was far from alien. Gandhi himself was deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau, who had, in turn. been influenced by the Bhagavad-Gita and other sacred texts of the East. By an extraordinary turn of fate, King would later rekindle on American soil a doctrine that had crossed and recrossed the seas in a remarkable cross-pollination of ideas.

So it is in that spirit as well that I have come to facilitate a cross-pollination of ideas on nonviolence; not to preach nonviolence, which, as Gandhi saw, is largely futile and possibly even counter-productive; but rather to listen, learn, and share some of my own thinking in the hope of encouraging serious consideration of nonviolence as humankind's hope of the future.

As we look back on the 20th century in its closing years, we see a century of violence and hatred that has taken a terrible toll of humankind. With the advent of the nuclear age, combined with the refinement of chemical and biological weapons, we confront for the first time the possibility of the destruction of civilization itself; possibly -in the worst case scenarios -of the elimination of human life; not by natural catastrophe, but by human hands, and by objects of human design, created deliberately for the purpose of trying to ensure security by threatening, and, if necessary, inflicting massive death and destruction upon others. If ever the concept of alienation had meaning on the broader scale, it is exemplified by this turning back against humankind of humankind's own efforts, creating unprecedented threats to the very survival.

We have heard all of this before, and have become desensitised to the message. Indeed, the psychological mechanisms by which we adjust to situations that worsen gradually, by small increments, may not serve us well in this area. I have heard that if you place a frog in a pool of water, and heat the water very slowly, the frog adjusts to the increasing temperature until imperceptibly the threshold is passed beyond which it is no longer able to jump out of the pail, which it could have done easily at any earlier stage. We might reflect upon our own accommodation, not only to the threats of the nuclear age, but to humankind's ever increasing capacity for violence through advances in science and technology, and ask whether we are approaching the point of no return.

But the 20th century has also seen the teaching and examples of Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teressa, as well as countless unsung heroes. Last year 23 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, joined by Arun Gandhi and others proposed that the UN General Assembly declare the first decade of the 21st century a Decade for a Culture of Nonviolence for the Children of the World. Among other things, the proposal invites each Member-State to take "necessary steps so that the principles of the nonviolence be taught at every level in their society including the educational institutions, focusing on the practical meaning and benefits of nonviolence in their life," The Indian Ambassador to the UN was urged to introduce the proposal. I would enlarge upon that proposal, to urge that all of us, not just the General Assembly of the UN, dedicate ourselves to embarking upon, not a decade, or a century, but a millennium of nonviolence. Let us see what a thousand years of nonviolence might bring.

As we approach the turn of the century, we are confronted with a choice: whether to continue on the path of violence of the 20th century, and of the countless centuries before, or to take seriously the redirection of human affairs in the ways illuminated by the potential of nonviolence.

Quite remarkably new opportunities have been handed over to us in the closing decade of the 20th century, For that decade has witnessed one of the extraordinary events in the history of civilization, the swift and sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire. Practically overnight the world situation has changed dramatically, We have been freed from the constraints of the Cold War, On effect of this development is that a new world order is in the making. This fact has spawned a proliferating set of analyses of what the emerging new world order is or ought to be. But when we look at those analyses, what we typically find is a shared perspective, largely Western in character that has evolved with the development of the nation-state system after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. And it is governed largely by the 17th century political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, There are three features of this perspective in particular I would call your attention to:

First, states are the central actors and of central concern. It is states whose interest, honour, and survival are the focus, as though they were Olympian gods playing out their affairs in a grand spectacle to which we mortals are subordinate.

Second, the perspective of "realism", in which morality, is subsidiary to national interest or to the exigencies of power politics.

Third, what will be the highest values in promoting and safeguarding national interest: prestige, power and capacity to threaten.

The options that are presumed to be open to us in the 21st century are defined by this perspective. This holds true at international and domestic level. Domestic values are held hostage to the values of power politics.

In so far as any hint of moral consideration enters into these analyses, it is only by way of raising question of fairness and consistency in the relations among states: particularly between the haves and have nots, the nuclear and the nonnuclear.

This later fact should not be surprising, of course. In a prescient observation in the closing days of World War II, as the imminent victors prepared to meet in a conference that eventuated in the adoption of the UN Charter, Gandhi said: "Exploitation and domination of one nation over another can have no place in a world striving to put an end to all wars. It is only in such a world that the militarily weaker nations will be free from the fear of intimidation or exploitation." And that is what we find in today's world. One finds confirmation of it in some of the explanations of the Indian government's recent renewed testing of nuclear devices. Understandably bristling at the self-serving moralizing by the nuclear powers, who would deny to militarily weaker nations the very devices they cling to for security themselves, India's Defence Minister George Fernandes put the issue of fairness clearly in his rhetorical question to President Clinton: "Why is it that you feel yourself so close to China that you can trust China with nuclear weapons, just as you can trust yourselves with nuclear weapons, and you can trust the Russians and the French and the British (not to mention the Israelis), but you can not trust India?"

What must be realized, however, is that these analyses virtually all see the world through lenses crafted in the 20th century, largely after World War II. And so long as we persist in seeing the world through those lenses, there is no room for nonviolence. The options that are defined by the dominant perspective do not include nonviolence. The governing categories of balance of power, nuclear deterrence, national security and national interest (as typically understood in this perspective) do not allow it.

In so far as our thinking continues to be governed by this perspective, it is naive to expect that we can avoid perpetuating the trail of blood it has left through the 3,000 or so years of recorded history.

We easily overlook the mounting historical evidence of the inability of men to assess accurately the outcome of the resort to violence. The Kaiser thought World War I would be over in 6 months. Allied nations thought that same war would end all wars. Hitler thought the invasion of Poland would inaugurate the beginning of his new world order. The French thought force could preserve their colonial interests in Indochina. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson thought that sending so-called 'advisors' to Vietnam would forestall a communist takeover. More recently, Saddam Hussein thought a swift military strike into Kuwait would establish Iraq's dominance of the Persian Gulf region. George Bush thought a massive U.S. led military response would safeguard Western economic interests in the region and win one for democracy as well. All proved illusory. Not only were strategists wrong about the capacity of the U.S. to win the Vietnam War, they were wrong as well about what the consequences of defeat would be. There was no "domino effect", in which communism swept over Asia" establishing Chinese hegemony throughout the region. Vietnam today remains an independent state, its border disputes with China belying the equally mistaken Western view during the Vietnam War that Vietnam was little more than a puppet regime of China. Sad dam Hussein had scarcely time to redraw Iraqi maps to include Kuwait when he was driven out. But on the other hand, the overwhelming military victory of the predominantly U.S. forces in the conflict led to an outcome that to date is so indecisive as to have led Margaret Thatcher to ask who actually won the Persian Gulf War. Not only does Saddam Hussein remain in power, but the military foothold the U.S. has established in the Gulf Region has led to a virtual declaration of terrorist war against the U.S. by Osama Bin Laden, redirecting against the U.S. the very forces the U.S. helped arm and train against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The point is, as Tolstoy saw, that wars tend to unleash forces of such complexity that their outcomes are rarely foreseeable by those who initiate them. This suggests that it is not just the violence of the 20th century but also the repeated misjudgements of world leaders arising from the limitation of human knowledge. If we are to take seriously the creation of a nonviolent world we need a reconceptualization of the way in which we view the world. The problem is as much with perception as with reality.

Perhaps it is useful here to reflect back upon another legacy of the 20th century, space flight. It was just after the turn of the century, in 1903 that the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane. That modest beginning has, in less than 100 years, led with breathtaking speed in historical terms to jetliners and travels to outer space. Suppose that you had lived at the turn of the century but had before 1903 fallen into a deep, preservative sleep, only to awaken in 1998. Suppose then you were taken to an airport and shown a 747 jet airliner and told that it could fly in the air and carry with it hundreds of passengers. You would be incredulous. Yet we now know that through understanding the laws of physics and the principles of engineering, it is possible to construct such an amazing device. But it took understanding, time, effort, determination, and trial and error to make possible what we now regard as commonplace but what a mere 100 years ago was science fiction.

In the same way, I suggest, though nonviolence is, as Gandhi said, ''as old as the hills," our understanding of it is still in its infancy. Just as one must understand the principles of physics to understand how a plane .can fly, so we must understand the principles of nonviolence to understand how it can work. And that understanding can come only through the same kind of effort, time, determination and trial and error that it has taken to make air travel a reality. As air travel was one of the progressive marvels of the 20th century in the scientific and engineering realm, nonviolence could be one of the marvels of the 21st century in the moral realm. But it's up to us to make it so.

To that end, it is important that we begin by no longer demonising those peoples and nations with which we disagree. We are all, more or less, part of the problem. The good and the bad alike among nations and peoples are capable of leaving destruction in their wake when they are governed by fear. Indeed, the problems of the" world probably owe as much -and possibly more -to people with good intentions as to people with bad intentions.

Next, let us begin to conceptualise as nonviolence much of what is already before our eyes. If we do, we will quickly come to see that most people are nonviolent most of the time; indeed, that human relations of the sort we most prize couldn't exist otherwise; nor could they exist if people weren't typically and usually nonviolent. In geopolitical terms, we should begin to conceptualise as nonviolence the extraordinary metamorphosis of the Soviet Union into a set of independent states. The United States had spent billions and billions of dollars preparing to resist the Soviet Union -and if necessary, to annihilate it -through violence. Yet it disappeared even more completely as an abstract entity (as all states are) without a shot being fired. Similarly, the changes that swept Eastern Europe in the past decade - in the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia -were by and large nonviolent revolutions; as was the transformation of South Africa from an oppressive state governed by apartheid to a democracy, and as was the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.

Third, let us end our fixation upon collectivities like the state as 'the entities of greatest importance in the world and elevate to a position of highest importance the persons who make up those collectivities. We can perhaps see this again in the case of the Soviet Union. Although most of its people's losses in WWI were under the Tsarist regime, the Soviet Union fought a civil war shortly after its creation, then sacrificed up to 30 million of its people in the attempt, to realize its vision of social good under Stalin's collectivisation; then lost another estimated 20 million lives in World War II. Yet the Soviet state endured throughout this period. Tens of millions of its people died, but it survived. Then in the 1990s Soviet Republics began seceding from the Union, to the point where, when Russia -the central and dominant Republic of the Soviet Union - seceded under Boris Yeltsin, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Not a single life was lost in that process (though many more were subsequently, in Chechnya); yet the Soviet Union as a nation-state vanished. Who in his right mind would argue that it is better to sacrifice tens of millions of living, breathing human beings - in order to preserve the existence of an abstract entity like the state, than to allow a state to go\6ut of existence if in so doing one preserves the beings whose existence gives the state whatever value it may plausibly be thought to possess. Individual persons are precious; abstract entities are not, however invested they may be with symbolic significance. It must cease to be a decisive claim in support of a policy that it's in some country or the others "national interest", Marx sought to shift the emphasis away from states to classes; Thoreau sought to shift it from the state to the individual, and Gandhi sought to shift it from the state to small communities. States are a relatively recent development in the evolution of civilization. They aren't sacrosanct. And we must be prepared to consider whether different ways of organizing human affairs may be better than the forms they represent.

Fourth, we must recognize, try to understand and seek ways to build upon, the successes that nonviolence has had in the world, not least of all by Gandhi in this country and by King in the United States. Cynics reply, of course, that the British were nice people and America a democracy, and that nonviolence wouldn't have worked against Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. But, of course, nonviolence did work against the Nazi -to be sure, in limited and partial ways - when the school teachers in occupied Norway refused to join the Nazi union, forcing the Quisling government to back down from its demands; and it worked against the Soviet Union when tiny Lithuania, the smallest of the Soviet Republics, became the first of the Republics to declare its independence. Like a tiny dog standing on its hind legs, it defied the Russian Bear and eventually prevailed. But it did so nonviolently. To be sure, the Soviet Union was already liberalizing under Gorbachev, and Lithuania's efforts might have had a different outcome under Stalin. But that's only to say that that success of any effort depends upon the conditions under which it's undertaken. This is true of violent efforts to change the world as well. To the extent they work, it's always because of the conditions existing at the time they were undertaken. Hypothesize radically different conditions, and it's easy to conceptualise a situation in which they wouldn't work.

On the question of whether nonviolence can work, we should, of course, look back to history. Christianity began as a nonviolent religion. Although Jesus did not speak directly on issues of war and nonviolence, his early followers understood his teachings to counsel nonviolence. And Christians for the first several centuries after his death were pacifistic, despite severe persecution by the Romans. It was not until the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, and more particularly, St. Augustine in the 5th century, that Christianity embraced warfare and embarked upon the course it has followed to the present-day.

Finally, we need to reconceptualize the whole idea of security, and to find ways of measuring it other than in terms of capacity to inflict death and destruction upon others. Stripped to its essentials, that's what military power is: the capacity to kill and destroy. And a nation can excel in that capacity even while thousands of its citizens toil in poverty or are deprived of basic human rights. Security becomes a perverse notion if people live under conditions of oppression that are worse than those their military power would protect them from. And it's doubly perverse if a major cause of their oppression is the diversion of society's resources to the maintenance of military.

Of these five points, the first three - putting an end to demonising people, seeing, and calling by name, the examples of nonviolence in the world; and rethinking our attachment to collectivities - are undoubtedly the easiest, at least in principle. They call mostly for revisions in our thinking. The fourth and fifth - finding ways to build upon the successes of nonviolence, and implementing a new conception of security - are more difficult. But they're closely related, and I'd like primarily to discuss the fifth, since it is linked to the conception of power.

The advocates of a strong military are right, I think, to see that security rests upon power. And they are right that such power must be evident to potential aggressors. What I would ask you to consider is that they are mistaken in their conception of what sort of power best provides security. This requires that we rethink the notion of power itself.

Consider military power. Armies are hierarchical, authoritarian institutions. Power resides at the top, with the generals or with government leaders; the individual solider has virtually none. Yet, paradoxically the killing and dying associated with the use of military power is almost exclusively done by those with the least power. Hitler probably never personally killed a single human being (unless as a soldier in WWI). All of the killing at the hands of the German nation, from the battlefield to the extermination camps, was done by others. Whether in a democracy or a dictatorship, military power presupposes - and presupposes absolutely - the obedience of thousands, and sometimes millions of people to the will of a few, sometimes only one. Remove that obedience, and that power vanishes. And if that military power is overcome by another nation's superior military power, then the nation that relied upon that power is a vanquished nation. Its people had placed their security in the hands of the military; they had asked others - one should say they had forced others, since most nations conscript young people for their armies- to do their fighting and killing for them. Once they are defeated, then country is defeated. The very mechanism intended to ensure security - the development of the capacity for organized, institutionalised violence - is, strange though it may seem, disempowering to those who rely upon it. Place all of your hopes in the capacity of others to do your fighting for you, and you're left defenceless if and when they are defeated.

By the same token, if we hypothesize that a country is invaded by another that wants to rule over it , we can readily see that to do so requires the acquiescence and cooperation of the conquered people. (This is true of a large country, not necessarily of a small one conquered by a large country.) Thorough - going and systematic noncooperation can make it virtually impossible where the country is a large one and the occupiers relatively few in number.

Tolstoy, in his "Letter to a Hindu", written in response to C.R. Das, who favoured the violent overthrow of British rule in India, put it thus:

"The reason for the astonishing fact that a majority of working people submit to a handful of idlers who control their labour and their very lives is always and everywhere the same - whether the oppressors and oppressed are of one race or whether, as in India and elsewhere, the oppressors are of a different nation."

"This phenomenon seems particularly strange in India. for there more than two hundred million people, highly gifted' both physically and mentally, find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious morality."

Gandhi, who was greatly influenced by this letter of Tolstoy's, which he read when he was still in South Africa, was to say later that just as it is a sin to be an oppressor, it is a sin to acquiesce in oppression. The message of both Tolstoy and Gandhi in this regard is that there is enormous latent power within a people. That potential power needs to be developed if people are not to acquiesce in their own oppression. They need a sense of empowerment to enjoy true security, and such empowerment isn't possible when relying upon force and violence for defence. To be sure, people imagine that they have power and security when they have a strong military. But they've staked everything upon others, not upon themselves.

The implications of this message are strong. And they go against the grain of much of common thinking, which inveighs against "blaming the victim." But the message here is that the oppressed are often complicit in their own oppression. And it's because the ways of thinking represented by the institutions they've relied upon for their security have disempowered them.

This understanding of the latent power among people provides the basis for the analyses of Gene Sharp, of the Albert Einstein Institute at Harvard. the leading figure in what I call "pragmatic" as opposed to "principled" nonviolence. His argument for nonviolence is not based on moral or pacifistic grounds. But simply on the grounds that it is more effective. As hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of Eastern European countries in acts of spontaneous nonviolence as the Soviet Union collapsed. The power of government after government virtually evaporated. Sharp contends that accordingly the power of collective, nonviolent defence, deliberately and systematically practiced by a trained and disciplined population, is a far better way to defend a country than by military means.

Whether that is true, and if it is true, to what extent it is true, remains to be seen, of course. We have countless examples of countries trying to maintain security through violence. We have no examples of a country deliberately and systematically preparing to defend itself through nonviolence. Such an effort, in a country of any size, would call forth the mobilization of all of the country's resources -particularly human resources -to work out and implement the strategies that would be most promising for that particular country. with its particular population, and in its particular geographical and historical context. Just as violent defence can't hope to succeed without preparation, training. discipline and sacrifice, nonviolent defence couldn't hope to succeed without preparation, training, discipline and sacrifice. As I've already suggested, the best minds in science, economics, psychology, environmentalism, and ethics must be engaged in the project.

Visionary? People aren't willing to put forth the effort and make the sacrifice? They already do put forth such effort and make such sacrifices. But in the service of violent defence. And they do so collectively, by channeling profits to those who design and manufacture weaponry and then placing the primary burden of sacrifice upon young men (and occasionally women), whom they force - upon pain often and/or imprisonment - to do the killing and dying for them. Gandhi put it bluntly. "The coward desires revenge," he said, "but being afraid to die, he looks to others, may be the Government of the day, to do the work of defence for him." This is true of the coward. But, more tellingly, it's also true of the vast majority of people who, I would say, act not so much from cowardice as from inertia. The older, established members of society have customarily placed the burden of defence upon their children, and do so in most nations of the nations of the world today. If the commodification of children for economic gain through child labour is to be deplored, so should the militarization of children to protect that gain.

What are the implications of the quest for security based upon violence in this way? I have already mentioned that disempowerment of the average person is one. But equally importantly, I would argue that the forced conscription of young people into the military is incompatible with a truly free and democratic society. A country like the United States, for example (which, though it doesn't have a military draft at the moment, has the selective service apparatus in place, so that it can be activated at a moment's notice), singles out its young, who have yet had little of their lives to lead, and who have spent most of those lives in childhood, with little or no voice in government, and scarcely an opportunity to understand the complex issues over which nations go to war, to defend the country. Wrapped in the flag, and with millions of dollars to spend on propaganda and slick television commercials, the government -with the complicity of the overwhelming majority of the citizenry - manipulate their young into becoming trained killers. And make no mistake. Military training- whatever else it may be, and whatever other ends it may serve -is, first and foremost, training to be an efficient and obedient killer. Virtually every soldier either prepares to engage in such killing himself or trains to support those who do. As Gwyn Dyer has written recently, "The armed forces of every country can take almost any young male civilian and turn him into a soldier with all the right reflexes and attitudes in only a few weeks. Their recruits usually have no more than twenty years experience of the world. Most of it as children, while the armies have had all of history to practice and perfect their techniques."

Psychologist David Grossman has also argued recently that there's an innate reluctance in persons to kill their fellow human beings, and that this is supported by evidence from combat. He reports that the following the Battle of Gettysburg, one of the major battles of the Civil War in America, 27,574 muskets were found on the battlefield. "Of these," he says, "nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand ) were loaded , twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel," He also cites data suggesting that 80 to 85 percent of American World War II soldiers didn't fire their weapons in combat. "Why then," asks Grossman, "were there so many loaded weapons available on the battlefield (at Gettysburg), and why did at least twelve thousand soldiers misload their weapons in combat?" Answering his own question, Grossman writes:

"Secretly, quietly, at the moment of decision, just like the 80 to 85 percent of World War II soldiers observed by Marshall (S.L.A. Marshall whose data Grossman cites from Marshall's 1987 book, Men Against Fire), these soldiers (at Gettysburg) found themselves to be conscientious objectors who were unable to kill their fellow men."

These aren't the far-fetched claims of a biased pacifist trying to stack the deeks against war. Grossman was a Lt. Colonel in the U.S. Army (and S.L.A. Marshall, whom he cites, was a Brigadier General), and he unequivocally holds that he believes war is justified.

These conclusions are controversial, to be sure, and more research -and particularly cross-cultural research-would be needed to establish convincingly whether they are true, But their truth or falsity bears only upon 'the question of how much of human nature the militaries of the world must overcome to turn young people into trained killers it doesn't alter the fact that this is what military training does.

My point is that nation like the United States has only the form of democracy, not the full content. No country enjoys a fully free and democratic society so long as it treats its most valuable resource imary burden of preserving what they value most in their society. Not that there may not be a role for children in nonviolence as well (as for example, children were a major element -though not a strictly nonviolent one, since much of their activity consisted of throwing stones -in the Palestinian Intifada); that remains to be seen. But if distributive justice is to be a property of a free and democratic society, then it must govern the relative distribution of burdens between adults and young people in the society. Military defence doesn't - and, I would argue, can't - do that under most conditions. Nonviolence can.

What nonviolence can do is to minimize the disastrous consequences of our limitations in knowledge. Gandhi, again, is instructive here. Speaking of Satyagraha, he said that it "excludes the use of violence because man is not capable of knowing the absolute truth and, therefore, not competent to punish". Whatever one's views on the ethics of nonviolence, and whether or not one accepts Gandhi's conclusion, his premise is uncontrovertible. If wisdom, whether in the personal or the social sphere, requires knowing thyself, then our limitations in knowledge must be reckoned with in every undertaking that pits us against others. This must always be the consideration that moderates patriotism and nationalism of any sort.

Because there is, and can be, no consistently justifiable certainty about the consequences of our actions and policies when those consequences involve the actions of others, both independently and in response to our actions, our social and political and security orientation reflects this fact. Nonviolence does this. If you're mistaken in your evaluation of a situation, you're in a position to learn and correct that mistake without the infliction of harm and suffering upon others. If you're mistaken in your predictions of the consequences of the use of force and violence- as, I've argued, world leaders are wrong almost precisely half the time at best -you may have rained death and destruction upon thousands of people as a result, leaving ~ residue of bitterness and resentment, possibly for generations, even if by standard criteria you've been successful.

I have suggested that if we are serious about embarking upon a millennium of nonviolence, we must be prepared to rethink some of our most deeply established ways of thinking about our place in the world. Here I mentioned, in particular, the so-called "realism" our long- established way of judging the interests, and survival of collectivities over that of living. If we are not prepared to do that, then we will be paying a lip service to nonviolence.

Is this worth doing? I am convinced that it is. But I can only invite you to consider for yourselves whether or not this may be true. But 1 would add to what I've said, that as part of a reconceptualization of our ways of thinking about the social and international world, we enlarge our perspective historically as well. If, in contemplating a nonviolent world, we seek some grand scheme that will overnight resolve all of the world's conflicts and enable all peoples to live happily ever after, we shall be deluding ourselves. There is no such scheme, other, perhaps, than in the imaginations of hopeless idealists. A non- violent world will have to be created, and it will take time to do that. There will be disappointments and mistakes as we make our way and as we learn, but we must discipline ourselves to look to the long-term. Those of us in this room cannot overnight change the entire world. But what we do, or fail to do, can play some small part in helping to determine what the world will be like 100, or 500, or a 1,000 years from now. For that world, whatever it is, will be the result of the countless actions over the years and over the centuries, not so much by the Gandhis and the kings of the world -though they're inspirations and have helped point the way -as by ordinary people, doing what they can do, given their particular abilities and talents, in the particular circumstances in which they find themselves. Such efforts may not individually be of easily quantifiable moral effect, but cumulatively they can transform the world. We can, each of us, here and now, help in small ways to create a very different world for our children, and their children in turn, and the countless generations that will follow. And while live urged that we wean ourselves from the. collectivities of nation and state in favour of a respect for individual persons, in the end the course to which this point is one in which our individual interests are ultimately transcended by a regard for the larger realm of beings inclusive of those who follow us. Though I haven't argued this here, I would hope that more expansive regard would include nonhuman human animals and perhaps the environment and natural world itself.

Too much for people to contemplate? Not at all. It may be too much for some people, whose imaginations and intellects ossified long ago those people will eventually die of. But it's not too much for children; they can learn nonviolence, and respect, and compassion, and the humanistic use of science and technology. But it's up to us to reorient our whole conception of education to teach at the earliest levels, and throughout the educational process, the values of respect, caring, and compassion that we now honour only in passing so far as our collective lives are concerned. One of the most hopeful aspects of our present situation is that humankind is continually in a process of renewal. And as it renews itself with each new generation of children, new possibilities come into existence; and it's up to us to see that we make use of those possibilities, and not continue to allow the most important of them to endlessly slip through our fingers.

Nehru said in 1947 that : At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failure. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength."

Among those ideals, perhaps none is higher historically than that of nonviolence and no personal witness more inspiring than that of Gandhi in the 20th century. Of particular relevance to India's current world position, Gandhi stressed that nonviolence is for the strong; that so long as it is embraced out of weakness. It would not long succeed. He cited in particular the work of Badshah Khan in transforming the tribesmen of the Frontier Province -who were fearless and warlike and well- schooled, in the use of violence -into a nonviolent army, and expressed concern that much of the nonviolence among his followers was from weakness. But India that gave birth to the very idea of nonviolence, has also proven -for better or worse, and there is sharp disagreement on this. But India could also, if it chooses, step into a position of moral leadership by leading the way in the 21st century in turning the world towards nonviolence. This it can do from a position of strength. Gandhi observed in 1946 that India 'has become a pattern for all exploited races of the earth' because it has struggled for freedom non-violently. Having been a model for the weak and oppressed of the world, India can become a model for the powerful as well. In so doing, it can translate the Gandhian vision into a reality. Gandhi, when asked in the closing weeks of World War II, whether he would go to the West "to teach them the art of peace." He replied. "I know Europe and America. If I go there I shall be like a stranger. Probably I shall be lionized but that is all. I shall not be able to present to them the science of peace in language they can understand." But then he continued. "but they will understand if I can make good my nonviolence in India. I shall then speak through India."

We can, all of us, individually give voice to Gandhi through our actions. But India is uniquely positioned to do that as a country. No country, certainly none of the nuclear powers, has contributed so much to the fostering of nonviolence, both in theory and in practice. Already the Light of Asia (if I may adapt Edwin Arnold's expression) in its history and culture, India could be the Light of the World in the 21st century by leading the way toward creating a millennium of nonviolence.

 

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Author : Mr. Robert L Holmes , is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rochester (USA). He was visiting Professor of Peace and Disarmament at JNU ( Rajiv Gandhi Chair), New Delhi ( Fall 1999 ) Also Author of " War and Morality"

Article Source : Anuvibha Reporter ( Special Issue : Dec. 2000 )
Ahimsa, Peacemaking, Conflict Prevention and Management Proceedings and Presentations
Fourth International Conference on Peace and Nonviolent Action ( IV ICPNA )
New Delhi : Nov. 10-14, 1999

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