“Remember our humanity, and forget all the rest.”

Albert Einstein

The decade has not begun with a paean to human wisdom.  Two recent acts of folly in particular share a deep and pernicious connection that bears some pondering, and I am not even referring to the capture of Ted Kennedy’s seat in a Massachusetts.  I am referring to the 5-4 Supreme Court decision on Thursday last week ratifying an absurd and dangerous notion that had been let loose in the public discourse almost by accident nearly a century ago, namely the legal ‘personhood’ of corporations, and secondly to the introduction of full-body scanning for ’security’ that is coming soon to airports near you.

The first decision will unfetter corporate influence over policymakers (all in the name of populism, ironically), an influence that was already operating almost without let or hindrance under the present rules.  The second decision reflects is a serious misunderstanding of security (we can know real security only when we pursue peace and justice, not by walling ourselves in with ever-more-invasive technology), and was apparently arrived at, in unseemly haste, through the kind of corruption that has all too commonly accompanied post-9/11 ’security’ measures: as Randall Amster reports in his Op-Ed News article, “Invasion of the Body Scanners,” former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff  is a vocal and influential proponent of Rapiscan, the firm that stands to make huge profits from the scanners, and has promoting their cause since long before the Christmas bomber set off  the recent panic. The Chertoff Group, his consulting firm, has Rapiscan as one of its clients!

The damage these decisions will do to us, however, goes even deeper; and it may be only when we peel back the covering on that deeper significance that we may really be able to understand  — and overcome — the challenge they represent.  When dissenting Justice John Stevens said that the majority had committed a grave error in treating corporate speech on the same level as that of human beings, he was hinting that they have dealt a blow not just to democracy, but to humanity.  I am an embodied, conscious person endowed with judgment and responsibility.  A corporation is none of these things.  It is an abstraction, a collection of individuals who have surrendered precisely those qualities. It is more than a political mistake to grant corporations the status of persons: it is a spiritual delusion.  And as such, it has dealt a blow to the very basis of freedom and democracy, the inviolable dignity of the human person.

These dehumanizing measures  do not come out of the blue.  They have been a part of our culture for a long time.  The very term ‘human resources’ that is a standard technical term in corporate vocabulary implies that humans are resources for corporations, and not the other way around; while anyone who flies knows that body scanning is only the ultimate militarization and humiliation of airport ‘check points,’ like the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany after they had been suitably prepared by a series of escalating insults.

As the revered religion scholar Huston Smith pointed out at an education conference some years ago, no further progress will be made in our culture until we can formulate a higher, mutually accepted image of the human being.  Seen in this light, we have just been handed two steps backward in that essential progress.  To quote Amster again, body-scanning “is essentially a form of high-tech voyeurism masking as security, and it portends more such incursions into liberty and privacy.” Without liberty and privacy, what are we?

So these decisions, and the wrong momentum behind them, have to be resisted.  But how?  Actually, this is a no-brainer.  We must resist by means that bring back to light the meaning of the person even as they work toward ends with the same purpose.  Those are the means of nonviolence.  They alone allow us to resist the actions of our opponents, even to point out their follies, without diminishing them as persons.  British historian Arnold Toynbee said astutely of Gandhi’s methods: “He made it impossible for us to go on ruling India; but he made it possible for us to leave without rancour and without humiliation.” More: nonviolence is the method that humanizes as it creates change.  It humanizes those offering it, those to whom it is offered, and — to the extent they are alert — the ‘reference publics’ looking on.  I therefore heartily endorse the current proposal to amend the Constitution to do away with this confusion once and for all; but should it fail, or not be sufficient, we must be prepared to carry out more creative, and sterner methods in this humane spirit.

In an important article in the Huffington Post my colleague George Lakoff states that the first principle of democracy is empathy.  Yes, but a more etymological way to define its core principle is, the locus of value and responsibility of the human being, considered in his or her self without reference to social category or status.  A democracy is made up of empowered, responsible individuals, or else it is no more than an empty structure composed of ciphers who have lost their true significance politically and are in danger of losing their very humanity spiritually – a ‘democracy’ in name only (and quite possibly the more dangerous for clothing itself in that sacred name).

And now for the crowning irony.  If I were gay, the people who would deny me the right to marry a same-sex partner because it isn’t ‘natural’ are now telling me that corporations are equal to persons — the grossest denial of nature one can imagine.  They are telling us, for that matter, that life is sacred until you are born — that we must be allowed to live until birth but once we’re out of the womb the death penalty, war, and a flood of cheap handguns can have at us.  I guess if you deny evolution and global warming it’s only a short step to denying your own humanity.  And we know from history where that will take us.  The brilliant political scientist and holocaust escapee Hannah Arendt said very clearly that totalitarianism… “strives not toward despotic rule over men but toward a system in which men are superfluous.” Nonviolent resistance, anyone?

There were many noble thoughts resounding throughout President Obama’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. The knowledge he revealed of some of his great predecessors, particularly Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi, was astounding for someone in his position; but at this point he makes a fatal mistake, and it is essential to recognize that mistake and to correct it. to make sure that it does not happen again. He said, “A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.” In this I make bold to say that he was wrong. In March,1943, Gestapo headquarters in Berlin ordered the arrest and departation of the remaining Jewish men who had been left out of the roundups so far because they were married to ‘Aryan’ wives. But then a totally unexpected thing happened. First one, then another of those wives began to converge on the detention center at 1-2 Rosenstrasse demanding their men be released. By the end of the weekend they were nearly 6,000 strong, and refusing orders to disperse though Gestapo headquarters was only a few blocks away. And the Gestapo caved in. They returned the men. Moreover, as we have learned only recently, in Nazi-occupied capitals all over Europe officials carefully watched the failed experiment and decided to leave their own Jews who similarly had aryan spouses alone. In other words; a primitive, weak, unorganized form of nonviolence carried out spontaneously by untrained people with no organization and no followup “stopped Hitler’s armies” in their most virulent form, saving tens of thousands. On one level, it should come as a surprise that such a sophisticated President, who speaks knowledgeably about King and Gandhi, should come out with the oldest objection in the book, ‘it wouldn’t have worked against the Nazis’ — the most frequently heard cavil, the most knee-jerk reaction that people like me who advocate the ‘sweet reasonableness’ of nonviolence can hear in our sleep.

There are several problems with the logic of this apparently imperishable argument, but it will do for now to simply say that it is patently false: nonviolence did work against the Nazis — when it was tried.

The issue is not just philosophical. In the next breath The President adds, “Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” This is how those who can see no recourse but violence always justify their actions. Was it not Hitler, in Mein Kampf, who said, ‘We Germans have learned to our cost that the British will not listen to anything but force’? We may as well give this mistake it’s proper name: dehumanization. You cannot be violent toward another unless you adopt the fatal mistake of denying his or her humanity; and no peace will be possible as long as we persist in doing that.

“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes,” President Obama said to frame his position; but that is pure speculation. Parallel to that was his projection of the same pessimism backward, to the imagined past: “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history…” No it didn’t. Modern research has shown that there are forms of conflict resolution among our primate ancestors that are more sophisticated than any some groups of Homo sapiens care to use — or acknowledge that they have. And the archeological record says that whole civilizations lived on what is now European soil for thousands of years with hardly a sign of large-scale conflict.

As mentioned, this President displays more awareness of the nonviolent alternative than anyone who has held or could conceivably hold that high office in our lifetime. From what other President could we expect to hear these words in a highly public speech: “As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak — nothing passive, nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.” And yet, as he follows out of this logic he runs into a tragic block. He simply declares, again without evidence, that nonviolence would not have stopped Hitler’s armies and cannot stop a ruthless and determined opponent, although it stopped Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Slobodan MiloÑevi… in 2000 and about a dozen other dictators who were, like these, ruthless enough. He likewise bemoans the fact — and I am not accusing him of insincerity — that when a Darfur or a Rwanda happens we have only two choices, to stand by and do nothing or to use deadly force, because “inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That is why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.” Yet for the last twenty years the practice of unarmed civilian peacekeeping has been steadily growing, saving lives and moderating conflicts all over the world though only individual donors and a few enlightened governments (not including our own) keep them going. One global effort, called the Nonviolent Peaceforce, says plainly that they represent “what you can say yes to when you say no to war;” but the deafening drumbeat of violence and materialism, blaring at us in every medium, dutifuylly repeated in most every history book, is overwhelming, and we do not heed them.

Again and again, the contrast between the President’s sophistication and his failure to apply it startles: “security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine they need to survive.” Yes, this is called “human security” and is a far deeper and more practical promise than the folly of bombing enemies into undying, if helpless enmity. Recently Jeffrey Sachs, along with many other respected writers, has pointed out that development has a far, far better track record at stabilizing societies than any amount of military intervention — again at a fraction of the cost. As Sachs says, even if we spent $200 on every villager (which is more than enough to give them the economic security the President cited) we could help 5,000 of them for the cost of a single U.S. soldier stationed in Afghanistan: “That’s right,” he concludes, “the approximate trade-off is meaningful help for an entire village versus stationing one more US soldier.” But where is the conclusion, that we should withdraw our troops and begin development in Afghanistan?

But my point is a little different. I am talking about our addiction to violence, an addiction that is fed to satiation and beyond every day by our own mass media (the extremely violent new video game, “Modern Warfare,” which features ‘players’ massacring civilians, sold seven million copies in the first few hours), and has blinded us to the point that we cannot see the way out of our quandary even though it is happening, with a rising tempo, here and there across the planet.

Having watched with admiration how calmly the President-to-be delivered his brilliant (albeit often evasive) speeches during his many campaigning months, it was painful for me to see for the first time a numbing strain invade his features. It was painful not just because of the admiration and, yes, affection in which I, for one, still hold President Obama: it was painful because in that agonizing tension between his personal vision and the tired, clichéd party line on which he is forced to walk we see reflected the tragedy of our civilization, where more and more of us can see a better world almost taking shape before our eyes but others of us, not always very many, maintain their death grip on the public discourse. So my point is not to criticize President Obama. Far from it. My point is to condemn the culture that has entrapped him, forcing him to betray his high intelligence. And that I do, not to stand in judgment on that culture or anyone who has fallen into its clutches, but to alert every one of us to the danger it poses — to encourage each of us to learn all we can about nonviolence and personally begin the shift, as Martin Luther King urged, from a ‘thing oriented’ civilization to one based on the infinite potential of the human being.

The election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States opened a door to a much brighter, nonviolent future. We have to pluck up the courage to walk through that door before it closes once again, perhaps for the last time.

Shortly after 9/11 we got a letter from a friend of ours who was in western Pakistan helping Greg Mortenson, of Three Cups of Tea fame, build schools.  People from the village streamed in to express their condolences, and the local mullah came hastily back from a long trip to assure my friend that ‘this is not Islam.’  I remember commenting during a lecture shortly thereafter that the people in that part of the world seem to resemble human beings: if you build schools for them, they like and respect you; if you bomb their schools and homes with drone rockets…well, you take it from there.

I have friends who advocate pulling our combat forces out of the region, period; but while I completely understand their feelings there seem to me to be two things against that policy.  It would send a message that the United States is capable of doing great harm but not capable of doing good, which is not true as I will be outlining in a moment.  Second, if we go about it in the right way we can help repair the damage we’ve been partly responsible for causing and help that country find its way to a stable solution, and if we can, we should.  I am not arguing from guilt here: I follow the moral reasoning laid out by Roger Fisher of the Harvard Negotiation project some years ago (and many others down the years, of course), that the obligation to help others arises not from any prior harm we may have done them but simply because we have the capacity to do so.  We are human beings, after all – do we need special reasons to help others when we have the capacity to do so?

What can we as a nation do, then, to help Afghanistan instead of  following this mad policy of throwing gasoline on the fire?  Fortunately, there are many ways – as long as we know where to look.  There are methods that have worked around the world, though the mainstream media are remarkably slow to notice them and hence they remain off the margins of  public awareness, including the awareness, to all appearances, of policymakers.  The mechanisms I’m about to list (and I’m sure there are others) assume that we completely halt aggressive military action in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and start a steady build-down of military forces there.  Ideally, we would phase military forces out as we phase the following non-military alternatives in that render them unneccesary.  And there are two ground rules, both gained by much practical experience in non-military intervention over the last thirty or so years: 1) Don’t go it alone.  This is not America’s problem, it’s the world’s problem, and the world’s people must be involved in solving it.  Virtually all the successful intervention teams of the type I’m about to mention have been multinational.  2) Don’t do it uninvited.  The term “peace imperialism” has been coined in the field of peace studies for the idea that we can parachute in and bring peace somewhere without local invitation and cooperation.  Afghanistan today is not a unified country.  If the Karzai government is unwilling to issue an invitation to civil-society groups to come and help them elements within Afghan society would most certainly do so.  Here, then, is the scheme:

• Rebuild Afghanistan through micro-lending.  It’s much harder for corrupt warlords, or politicians, to make off with small, dispersed loans than highly concentrated, government-to-government ones.  As Rebecca Griffin, of Peace Action West has recently put it, “Right now in Afghanistan, military officers walk around with pocket money to throw at poorly developed aid projects because we don’t have enough trained civilians to do the work. Contractors are pocketing millions of dollars through fraud and waste. It’s time to stop paying lip service to development while bombing communities.”  Micro-lending is working very well all over the world.
• Offer two kinds of peace-building services: 1) the intervention of trained nonviolent civilian teams such as are in the field today in Sri Lanka, Mindinao, Colombia, Southern Sudan, and a dozen or so other places thanks to organizations like the Nonviolent Peaceforce, Peace Brigades International, the German Civilian Peace Service (Zivile Friedensdienst). 2) Mediation groups, again civil society, like Johan Galtung’s TRANSCEND or the Washington-based Search for Common Ground.  Like everything else I will be listing here, these organizations have inspiring track records of success.
• Offer to send teachers, agricultural experts, carpenters, medical personnel and whatever Afghanis say they need.  There are thousands of volunteers ready to go in all of these fields: only make sure they get some training in cultural sensitivity, and make sure they understand that they are going where no one can guarantee their safety.  By and large, aid workers are much safer than soldiers, but in these violent times they are not safe completely and it will be crucial that the volunteers understand this.

Who will pay for all this?  We will.  A soldier costs a million dollars a year; a highly trained field team member from Nonviolent Peaceforce costs $50,000.  (Not to mention that the unarmed civilian type of intervention actually works).

Advocates of force often throw up their hands and say, ‘we have no choice.’  But we always have a choice.  If we paid poor farmers in Colombia so that they did not have to grow Coca to survive, they doubtless would – but instead we pay twenty times more to eradicate their crops (and cause much additional damage).  The cost for each year that we maintain one soldier in Afghanistan is twenty times greater than the cost of building a school.  And, as mentioned, twenty times greater than the cost of a trained civilian unarmed peacekeeper.

Why don’t we stop paying for death?

The Search for a Nonviolent Future has been published in Arabic! Soon to be distributed in Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon.  We are also working on connections in — yes — Iraq, through our friends in La’Onf, and Palestine.

Also, this Thursday November 19th,  Michael will be giving an interview with host Bettina Grey for the Spiritual Resources webcast series at the Interfaith Center in San Francisco. It will be streamed live at 6pm PST. There is already a discussion thread started on the Spiritual Resources page where you can voice your questions now!

At that site and on YouTube you can watch and hear his recent talk at the University of Rhode Island.

We are so pleased to invite you to stop by our lovely new office on — yes! — 1730 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Berkeley (betw. Francisco and Delaware).  Our phone number and emails remain the same but we have much more room and can have meetings of our own.  The front room will soon serve as a Nonviolence Resource Center for the Community.  We have already held a film screening there (see the attendees, from a recent hope tank) and a visit from two Iraq veterans on a bicycle tour across the U.S.

It gives us great pleasure to note that Rick Stein, owner of Just Carpets in San Rafael, has donated a beautiful new carpet for the main, office room.  We have also received a full set of kitchen ware — and our own copy of the long lost documentary, Mahatma Gandhi, Prophet of the Twentieth Century, which Michael considers the best of its kind.  It had fallen from view for forty years until its recent rediscovery by an Indian researcher.  Help us housewarm! While we get ready for a party for you, here are things that we could still use:

• a microwave
• a small couch
• folding chairs
• the services of a good electrician!
• …and of course, your company.

As Pancho said in the ‘Hope Tank‘ discussion this morning, this is not India’s or U.S.’s, it is humanity’s holiday.  Yet so few of us humans are aware of it.  If we were, we would be well on our way to a nonviolent future.  That is the work of Metta, and many of us around the world: to make humanity aware that it has a brilliant, nearly untapped potential, a cause fully worthy of our life.  Our booklet, Hope or Terror, is available to download on this site as a gift we are giving to the Earth Community; and we are here to work with you and offer you opportunities to work with us in liberating that potential.

Cf. Mirroring People, by Marco Iacoboni.

Like many, I have been taken aback by the coarse violence — and effective organization — of the backlash against President Obama’s proposed healthcare package.  The lying, shouting, and disruption of what might have been reasoned debates bodes ill for the political culture, and hence the political destiny, of this country.  During the neoconservative hysteria that boiled up around the Presidential ‘election’ of 2000, John Updike commented from the UK, “America has entered another of its phases of historical madness; but this is the worst I have seen.”  Until now.

I don’t want to be a part of the shameless name-calling that’s going on — everyone is calling everyone else a Nazi, it seems — but the contrived ‘populist’ character of the disrupters, fed by and feeding into the ‘faux News’ messages that play on their fears with shameless and endlessly repeated lies does, after all, recall the frightening resonance of the brownshirts in the street with the cynical propaganda from above that became the frenzy that swept Germany into World War Two.  I hope I am exaggerating.

Even if the purpose of the present uproar were good — say, a saner immigration policy or a trimmer military — we would have to be appalled by what it’s doing to our political discourse.  This I do not think is exaggeration: a struggle is going on for the soul of America.

It’s hard to predict what the voting outcome will be on the issue itself; but already there are some lessons to learn from this shock — and there may even be a way out.

The first lesson — and it may not be obvious or particularly welcome to some of us — is that the truth is not limited to, or guaranteed by, a given demographic.  Some of the obstreporous people in the town halls are carefully planted “astroturf” and shills of insurance companies — that story is coming out steadily now — but there is no question that ordinary people, or what we idealistically called in my youth “the people,” are among those disrupting those town hall meetings across the nation.  It was community organizing and the skillful use of new technologies that got President Obama elected, but it now looks as though the same political methods and technologies can be used to neutralize his presidency.  As one commentator said recently, we are seeing Saul Alinsky turning into a right-wing fanatic.  So the lesson is, to repeat, that it’s not about whom you organize or how you collect their views; it’s about what are those views.  Gandhi organized a nonviolent revolution (mostly) from below; but long before him William Penn had crafted one from above, from his own governorship.  Likewise, there can be oppressive regimes, or oppressive just-plain-folks.  Everyone has an ego, and everyone has a sense of compassion, has access to reason.  It all depends on which of these principles you rouse, not whom you rouse them from or by what means.

A second lesson is, while this is a particularly shocking manifestation, we have long been living in a culture that pushes reason off the margins of discourse.  Partly this is inevitable in a culture of advertising, for advertising by definition has to suppress reason: it has to make you buy things you don’t need, so it has to rely on impulses, urges, and mob psychology in the sense that most of the desire that’s whipped up by advertising is imitative.  You don’t buy things because they make you happy, really because you or other people will think you’re happy.  If we thought about what we really need we would probably buy a tenth of what we buy now, to the great relief of the planet.  So advertising (and we see more than 3,000 commercial messages a day, on average) has to prevent you from doing that — or any other — thinking.

Now, how do we get out of all this?

As far back as 1954, psychologists Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif conducted a classic study called the Robbers Cave Experiment. They created two separate groups of twelve-year-old boys and had them do competitive sports and other competitive activities at a summer camp in Oklahoma.  Taking the names of “The Rattlers” and “The Eagles,” the groups’ hostility to each other soon reached unsafe proportions, at which point the Sherifs started to place before them what they called “superordinate goals” — tasks that both groups had to carry out together, like haul a “broken down” truck back to camp (the scientists had removed the distributor cap). When the boys worked together in this way it quickly reversed the polarizing effects of the competition. By the end of the experiment both groups insisted on riding back to town in the same bus.

We are not hurting for superordinate goals!  The destruction of the earth’s capacity to sustain life will do nicely. Imagine if we could all pull together to tackle this enormous problem.  We could save life on earth — and find a way to talk civilly to each other about real issues in the process. But I would urge that we also work on a second problem: violence. That ‘superordinate’ problem underlies all the rest; as Vandana Shiva said, ‘if we stop the pollution in people’s minds they will stop the pollution of the environment.’  One powerful way to do this is to get violence out of the media; and while we’re waiting for that to happen, get the media out of you. Just stop watching it.  Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni told me recently that knowing what he knows about the human nervous system he opined that if we could only stop all the violence in the media for one week “it would never come back.”

That may be an exaggeration, but it’s certainly a pointer to the right direction.  If we act civilly toward one another, even those who hold dangerously irrational notions, and stop putting our precious minds at the disposal of big, commercial interests, both the brownshirts and the insurance companies will find themselves with little purchase on our political culture.

Nonviolent Peaceforce, the unarmed professional peace service that is carrying forward the dream of Gandhi’s Shanti Sena (’Peace Army) worldwide, is now recruiting for its interventionary work in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.  To download the application, go to this link.

In the discourse that plays itself out on the nation’s bumper stickers there is a ‘dialogue’ (or at least a face-off) between two messages.  The first, and more familiar, is GOD SAVE AMERICA — not too prominent in West Marin, but we’ve all seen some.  The other is the reaction: GOD SAVE THE WHOLE WORLD — NO EXCEPTIONS.

Behind these two stark messages are two entirely different — and incompatible — worldviews.  I say incompatible because they are not merely rival positions.  The first belongs to the old and (I sincerely hope) dying paradigm of scarcity and competition, the second springs from an emerging paradigm of unity and cooperation. Therefore the ‘bless America (only)’ people do not understand that when we invoke blessings on everyone America is included: yes, America is part of the world.  Nobody is saying, for example, ‘God Bless Iran.’ That would only put us all back in the simplistic, dangerous ‘me against you’ confrontation we’re trying to rise above at last.

‘God bless everyone’ implies that there can be a way we can all benefit — that there can be a world without abrasive confrontation and deadly combat, without — dare we say it — winners and losers. Such a wide difference in vision cannot be resolved, of course, by honking when we pass one another on Highway One. The combative style of our political culture means that, unfortunately, there has been no useful dialogue at all between the two communities — and that is what we must address.

Why am I saying this right now?  Because a number of Americans were offended when President Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.  They are clearly of the ‘God bless America’ persuasion, where not just material goods like oil or water but spiritual forces like respect and compassion are forced into their worldview of scarcity, though as we all experience, the more we respect others the more we rise in respect ourselves (and “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” as Martin Luther King, Jr said from his prison cell in Birmingham in 1963). We should, therefore, appreciate why some individuals were shocked at the President’s gesture — but we should do everything we can to help them be proud of our President for doing such a thing.  Look how far he has already brought us: in 1988 when it came to light that the U.S. Cruiser Vincennes had shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 civilian passengers onboard, including 38 non-Iranians and 66 children, Vice President George H. W. Bush stated, “I don’t care what the facts are.  I will never apologize for the American people.” Did this blind patriotism not lead us into the regime of spying, torture, and needless war that caused us so much grief and the loss of our global position — even our meaning in history?

President Obama, by contrast, is more like the soon-to-be-President Mandela who publically took the hand of his arch-rival, F.W. deKlerk, and said, “I am proud to hold your hand—for us to go forward together. . . . Let us work together to end division.”  And the world applauded (Mandela and de Klerk received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993). The President has made some decisions that make me cringe, and he will make more; but the one thing beyond doubt is that by being the kind of human being he is he has restored dignity to his office — and every one of us in the process.

Also beyond doubt is that we have to help our narrowly patriotic friends out of their old and almost certainly dying paradigm of win/lose, of scarcity and competition.  This will never be done by showing them disrespect (nothing good every comes of showing another person disrespect). As I’ve argued before, we need to reach out to these friends and convince them that we mean them and their America no harm.  On the contrary, we’re trying to create the only conditions that will help us all to thrive.

One of the things we’ve been saying and hearing about us lately is that what we are is as significant as what we do. Not that we’d find it easy to define what we are as a group; but it’s worth a try because the way people are forming new associations today is itself a key part of the revolution, paradigm shift, or whatever it shall be called.  Just as the struggling rebels in the Spanish Civil War congealed into “affinity groups” that live on today in the caracoles of indigenous Mexican movements — and of course the affinity groups of grassroots protests — so also, if less romantically, groups and communities are finding their way into non-standard forms of organizing. And we are one of them.

Michael Nagler and Rev. Heng Sure at a Hope Tank.

Let me share with you just one idea that emerged from a recent hope tank.  It started

when we were reviewing the appalling statistics about soldier and veteran suicides, here and in Israel, with some recent documentaries about ‘basic training’ for military service at the back of our minds.  Like many hope tank ideas, it’s very simple.  Here’s a moral compass: never degrade a human being. For any reason.  You can then go to any institution in the present system and ask yourself, as Gandhi did, is this sound, would it be sound if modified, or must it be tossed aside.  Do you want to defend the country?  Fine, but do not dare to dehumanize prospective soldiers to do it.  Do you want protection from crime?  Prisons?  You can have anything you want, but not if you have to dehumanize people (including yourself) and lock them away. Do you want a sound economy?  No problem, but if you have to lie to people and make them feel empty and insecure, if you have to  distract them from seeing own their inner resources, you are doing irreparable harm for a small good, and that’s not allowed.

This is an idea, of course, not a plan.  Some hope tank ideas roll right out into projects, others just help to fill in the ’story’ of the future toward which humanity is feeling its way. We need both.

The other two ingredients of our life are guests and projects.  Sometimes they’re both: this month we were visited by Prof. Elizabeth Lozano of Loyola University who came to know of us when a friend who has too many books gave her The Search for a Nonviolent Future. Elizabeth is Colombian, and went back there, armed with her social science skills and the nonviolence models in Search to visit and study those islands of courage in the midst of extreme and unrelenting violence — the peace communities.  The talk we had her give here in town, filmed and taped, may end up part of the three-volume book I am coediting for Praeger right now, Peace Movements Worldwide. (OK, that’s not technically a Metta project, but the line is blurry).

As one of our newest and youngest, UC freshman Justine Parkin said recently, “The days I spend time with Metta are always the best of my week.”  Now that Chris and Audrey have stepped up so impressively to the challenge of organizing this summer’s Mentors program (they were mentees in it themselves just last year), I hope there will be many more good days for many such idealistic, capable, visionary and smart young people.  And that we can find ways to make you part of us.

The only difference is, we don’t know what causes cancer.  It’s not that hard to understand why we’re experiencing an upsurge in “senseless violence” (I predicted it, for example, and I’m no expert).  More to the point, it isn’t all that hard to see what we can do about it.

This rash of killings was an uptick on a very general trend. That’s important, because we don’t want to just level out the trend that is already higher than any country calling itself civilized should put up with: we want it drastically lower.  We want the killing to stop.  It’s not particularly easy to face why we’ve been inflicted with all this violence, but we must, because how else will we find a solution.  And in the end, the solution may not be as unpleasant as we think.

As a colleague of mine in Public Health recently declared, “We are increasing violence by every means possible.”  He was talking about the mass media.  The enormously high, and increasing, level of violence in the “entertainment” industry — including the violent emphasis of the nightly news — makes violence seem normal, unavoidable, sexy, and fun — even a source of meaning. The studies documenting this go back for decades, only lapsing for a while in the early eighties when scientists began to realize nobody was listening to them.  They could say, as the U.S. Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior said in 1972, that the “preponderance of evidence” makes it very clear that television was already making young (and other) people more unfeeling and aggressive; they could complain about it in PTA meetings (as I have done) or shout it from the rooftops: neither policymakers nor producers nor us, the end consumers, paid much attention.

Summing up in 1996, psychologist Madeline Levine wrote, “there is a large, consistent, and damning body of evidence that says that watching a lot of violence makes children aggressive and fearful;” and she adds, tragically, “we are losing our awareness of what it means to be human.”  Since then we not only did not reduce violent viewing, we ‘advanced’ from passive television to interactive games that, according to preliminary evidence and common sense, dehumanize people more effectively.

What scientists and the public did not know when this research began (and the public still does not) is the striking evidence now available from non-invasive methods to study brain activation, primarily Magnetic Resonance Imaging.  It has given physical reality to the observation of all psychologists and anyone who knows a child that we’re profoundly imitative creatures.  In a conversation I had about the effects of the mass media recently with UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni he told me that we humans are so “wired for empathy” that, “If we could stop all the violence for a week, it would never come back.” Translating this into practical terms, anyone who could step out of the “exciting” barrage of violent imagery would so reduce his or her artificial provocation to violence that the rest of the problem could, over time, be brought down to very minimal levels.  Enough of us doing this and we’d be on our way to living in a nonviolent culture.

Since government is not likely to intervene (it sounds too much like censorship), and the industry itself shows no sign of waking up to its responsibilities, we are left with one recourse, and fortunately it’s a good one: if we don’t buy, they don’t sell.  You may think, ‘Oh, I’m just one person,’ but that’s the point:  As the writer George Orwell said of a hanging he had to witness back in the bad old colonial days in Burma, “One life less; one world less.”  Never underestimate the damage that’s being done to your mind — or the power of your example once you repair it.

Am I saying that everyone who wants to stop this shameful mayhem should stop watching violent programming, even when it’s disguised as news? I am, and I’ve been saying it all over the country for over two decades.  But I also say something else: let’s have more legitimate satisfactions that take us in the opposite direction.  If virtual violence makes us ‘lose some of the awareness of what it means to be human,’ real human contact is the most effective substitute.  Of course, actual people can be a pain in the neck (present company excepted), but it’s way more fulfilling to talk to your neighbors, have coffee with an old friend or a potential new one, say your piece at a book club, or even have a reasonable argument with someone who disagrees with you than trying to have a passive relationship to some pixels on a flatscreen.

Gandhi had a a famous formula he called the “Seven Social Sins.”  Wealth Without Work was one of them, I remember, and Science Without Humanity.  I think if the Mahatma were physically alive today he would add, Entertainment Without Discretion. So let’s not turn our scientists into Cassandras, doomed to predict the future with nobody believing them.  Let’s act, at least individually and in our families, before we become a civilization without a future.

Forward-looking thinkers who are — for now — on the ‘prophetic’ fringe of mainstream economics have been saying for some time that the shocking fragility of our fiscal system, and our economy generally, is an ‘opportunity’ as well as a ‘crisis.’ In the words of David Korten of the Positive Futures Network, what we should be doing is “not fixing the system, but replacing it.” While they are not against short-term measures or protecting the vulnerable, they are urging us not to go back to sleep after we’ve done that, but to realize that the present system is inherently fragile, unfair, and in the end an obstacle to real human progress. What we need instead is an economy that is locally based, simple, and closer to real human needs; and such a system could be built up from the innumerable experiments in barter, local currencies, and other imaginative ‘innovations’ that are already happening (for the most part, they’re actually based on systems of yesteryear that worked fine until the craze for wealth, driven by the materialistic worldview and materialistic values of the modern age, sent them the way of the electric car).

I have a strange comment to make about this wildly ambitious scheme: it’s not enough.

Our economic system is part of a whole culture. Even if we were to widen our mental horizon to embrace the Gross National Happiness that the kingdom of Bhutan goes by instead of the standard GNP criterion of economic success, we would find that other elements of the standard model, or “story” that we live by these days won’t match the new economy and even though it would be more stable, more realistic, it would not survive unless we can stop not only overconsuming but:

• relying on overwhelming military force in situations that can only be resolved by human understanding — the very thing military force sweeps under the rug.
• incarcerating millions in a failed system of ‘justice’.
• allowing our schools and colleges to lose their compass — and their funding, thus feeding more young people who could otherwise be leading meaningful lives into that criminal justice system.
• letting health care get into the hands of profit-makers (while an unhealthy life styles turn more and more of us into patients) and
• turning up the violence throughout society by powerful (and again, profit-driven) mass media.

All of these unwanted features hang together in an unspoken philosophical framework that runs something like this: we human beings are separate from each other and our environment, which is mainly a collection of ‘resources’ we might as well exploit for our own benefit, and even — why not? — enter into fierce competition with one another, group against group, nation against nation, to do so. Happiness is scarce and if I’m going to get my share, I just might have to take away yours.

We could be doing three things to fix the economy and the rest of the picture: (1) be really clear about the prevailing story that’s gotten us into this mess; (2) articulate the new story, which is no fairy tale but based on more and more scientific evidence, not to mention our own experience in life: we are all deeply interconnected: Our happiness does not come from consumption and never did once we took care of the basics. Our happiness comes from having a purpose in life, and that purpose nearly every time has something to do with being of service to one another. Which is why Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented civilization to a person-oriented civilization.” And (3) systematically redraft the institutions of healthcare, defense, security (and others I may be forgetting) along the lines of this new story.

This may sound like a daunting challenge, but the fact is, every one of these areas has seen inspiring experiments akin to those we’ve been seeing in economics: Nonviolent Peaceforce is putting trained volunteers into conflict zones around the world, often stopping violence where military force would not be workable (or would make things worse); Restorative Justice experiments go forward in prisons and out, by non-governmental groups like the Quaker-based Alternatives to Violence Project and, slowly but surely, government agencies as well, all with great success; experimental schools and free clinics sometimes work much better than the mainstream versions — many of the millions of non-profit, or rather ‘social profit’ organizations listed off by Paul Hawken in his book Blessed Unrest are quietly building the more stable institutions that the new story needs.

There are times when it’s easier in the long run to be more ambitious than less, and this is one of them.